#also he’s meant to be the very earnest but ridiculous character archetype

[miamignonette]

i’ve had this character in mind for a writing project i’d love to fully flesh out someday and lately i’m thinking…what if i turn him into a masc woman instead

[morsking]

And so we have concluded Lostbelt 2! Now that I’ve experienced it for myself, I have a much clearer picture about how I feel about this chapter. As I progressed one thing became very clear to me, and that was that Hazuki Minase likely did NOT have any influence with this chapter, and its weakest points can be attributed to its main writer, Hikaru Sakurai, once we more closely scrutinize her work.

For starters, I would like to apologize to the people who kept trying to tell me Minase had nothing to do with the writing of Losbelt 2. You were correct, I simply acted stubbornly because I was terrified that one of the writers I loathe the most had returned to haunt and corrupt the franchise I hold very dear to me. I insisted on blaming him for any flaws because he was an easy scapegoat and a bogeyman, and while we all agree he is a pervert and a hack who should be fired, it is simply not fair to point fingers at imaginary criminals. A person should always be held accountable only for the misdeeds they have actually committed. Indeed, we may now explore Lostbelt 2 and the integrity of its writing with a more objective perspective, or rather as objective as I can manage to be.

The overall theme of the Lostbelt is “acknowledging one’s emotions as a vehicle for personal growth”. The issue persistent in the setting of Lostbelt Scandinavia was that it was a place where only young humans were allowed to survive. These humans would be oblivious to what real growth and prosperity were really like. They were innocent, and emotionally and intellectually stunted groups of people who only knew to live for the truth of their eventual demise. They lived short, rushed lives where they would stay ignorant of basic human experiences, such as love, grudges, aging, vice, hate, competition, and companionship because they devoted themselves to living how Scathach-Skadi ordered them to. They were unable to think or decide what to do for themselves, and were thus incapable of not just taking the reins to decide their own evolution as we do in Proper Human History, but also of fathoming doing such a thing in the first place.

This is a mirror to Ophelia Phamrsolone. Ophelia was conditioned to only listen to others for purpose and direction. Ophelia doesn’t actually know how to listen to her own feelings or even what those feelings even are because she was never allowed to connect not just with herself but with anyone. Ophelia, like Surtr points out, is still very much a little girl terrified by everything around her because she has no balance, no capacity for finding her center as a healthy and normal human being would. Unbeknownst to herself, all her interactions with others are a plea for help. Her very first interaction with Mash in 2017 was asking her if she’d like to have lunch with her and Pepe because Ophelia is terrified by male strangers and wishes to connect with other women as well. Ophelia’s conversations with Kirschtaria are also her not knowing how to proceed with challenges and therefore appealing to authority both for comfort and advice. Finally, her monologues with the Alien Priestess are Ophelia venting about how she feels, as if she were unaware of what to really think of herself as her helplessness and indecision drown her in a lake of self-loathing. 

These cries for help extend to the way she summons her Servants. Ophelia is noted to be incredibly proficient at evocation. Some might even call her a genius. In fact, she is such a genius she unknowingly managed to contract not just with one, nor two, but three different Servants all at once. The first Servant to answer her summon was Sigurd, the King of Warriors from Nordic mythology. The second Servant was Surtr the King of Giants and Scourge of Ragnarok (titled by yours truly), who hijacked the summoning and took over Sigurd. The third, and most pivotal, was Napoleon Bonaparte, the French Emperor whose Spirit Origin was modified to embody the “ideal Good Fellow who could make dreams come true” rather than the actual historical Napoleon.

What these three Servants have in common is that Ophelia wished for all of them from the darkest depths of her heart. Ophelia desired capable Servants who could give her some form of direction and stability. 

Sigurd, for example, is a hero renown for rescuing Brynhild and giving brand new meaning to her life by showering her with love and devotion. Love and devotion are things that Ophelia not just desires to be shown but actively struggles to adequately express to others because she has never known what it’s like to experience those things. To Ophelia, Sigurd represents “being given that which you have never known and finding fulfillment”. 

Surtr, on the other hand, embodies a darker type of direction: the terror stagnation, conformity, monotony, inaction, and eternal suffering. Surtr exercises control over Ophelia by threatening to destroy the world if he is released, prompting Ophelia to flash to her childhood locked away by her abusive parents every dreaded Sunday. Surtr locks Ophelia into a state of helplessness and indecision where she has to carefully consider how she will proceed with dealing with Surtr. Ophelia has decided to lock herself in with him as a way to prevent him from breaking out of both Sigurd’s body and the physical prison inside the Lostbelt’s sun. This is a situation where Ophelia is in a constant state of stress and fear, since as a Crypter the last thing she could ever want to see is the destruction of yet another world by her hands. More personally, the death of the Lostbelt would also mean death for Ophelia, as she has failed her purpose once again and thus would have no worth as a person. However, what Ophelia cannot understand, because Surtr himself does not, is that Surtr’s destructive impulses are how he wants to show love and devotion towards her. Surtr has reasoned that since their worlds abandoned them after they failed to perform their ordained tasks, the only thing left is to annihilate them completely as retribution for their suffering. Surtr does not wish to hurt Ophelia, but because he is a being defined only by his overwhelming desire to burn everything, he cannot help her heal or grow in any way that matters. All he can offer is annihilation. To Ophelia, Surtr represents “self-destruction through a static state of being”.

Finally, there is Napoleon. Napoleon represents a pronounced antithesis to Ophelia’s entire personality. He is an upbeat, improvising, confident man who chooses to not stress over things because what he is seeing is only what lies ahead, not what lies in front of him.He also breaks her defenses by asking something so ridiculous and unexpected as her hand in marriage when they have only just met. Napoleon refuses to give in to any negative outcome regardless of how much the odds are stacked against him, as he demonstrated in Scathach-Skadi’s throne room where he refused to let Sigurd kill his Master despite being restrained by Skadi’s paralyzing rune. He demonstrates this once again when he blows his final shot at Surtr during the final battle, sacrificing his own life to give Chaldea the opportunity to regroup and bombard Surtr to bring him down. He is called the Man of Infinite Possibilities precisely because he faces the unknown head on and finds the best path to walk for his comrades to advance. He does not let fear take over his heart and judgement, he creates a rainbow as a bridge connecting the present to the bright, shining future. He is precisely the hero Ophelia needs, because he embodies “the bravery to grasp your own future and find your own direction”. 

But analyzing these characters further is a post for another time. What I want to get into are the gripes I have with this Lostbelt. 

Now, I could lead you on through a couple more paragraphs before I wham you with what this all means in a much higher metatextual level, but I don’t have the time nor the creativity to do that so I’m just gonna give it to you straight. This square between Ophelia, Sigurd, Surtr, and Napoleon is the storyline that matters most in Lostbelt 2. Scathach-Skadi matters little despite her own parallels with Ophelia and being the Lostbelt King, and the situation with the Lostbelt’s inhabitants matters even less. Why?

Because Lostbelt 2 is Sakurai coming full circle and writing an otome game like Fate/Prototype was meant to be before Fate/stay night became a thing. 

SHOCKER!! SOUND EFFECTS OF SURPRISE!! DRAMATIC KAZOOS GALORE!!

Now, that’s exaggerating a little. Or maybe not that much, actually.

What Sakurai was doing was applying conventional otome game tropes into the setting not just what she’s familiar writing for, but because Lostbelt 2 is inherently an incredibly self-indulgent project. 

There is a classic trademark otome fantasy at play here: the fantasy of multiple men being devoted to a female main character a player can relate to. There is no denying there is a certain appeal to the idea that there are several handsome men all willing to devore their entire lives to a person. Sigurd, Surtr, and Napoleon all embody certain otome game love interest archetypes. Sigurd is the cold, composed, intellectual man who is actually earnest, just, affectionate, and wise. Surtr is the dark-hearted troubled man with fiery disposition struggling with expressing love. Napoleon is the strong, confident, borderline pixie manic dream boy with almost zero brains but plenty of empathy and... *ahem*, physique to make up for his seeming lack of tact and intelligence (he’s a himbo is what I’m saying but that comes as no surprise). The problems arise with Napoleon himself, however. Napoleon hounds Ophelia with marriage proposals she refuses time and time and again. When he proposes to her in front of Chaldea for the first time, the narrative has Mash take Napoleon’s side and urges you to do the same because Sakurai believed the reader would’ve caught on to what’s actually going on between Ophelia and Napoleon. 

The issue here is that Sakurai’s clues up to that point had been far too hidden for the player to make a proper connection, and it’s not until AFTER the proposal that the player discovers Napoleon is predisposed to fall in love with whoever summons him because that’s what Ophelia wanted out of an ideal Servant. Because of the poor execution in presenting all these factors that completely recontextualize the relationship between Napoleon and Ophelia, when Sakurai has Napoleon say “You did not reject me therefore you DID agree,” we jump to the conclusion that Napoleon is engaging in extremely reprehensible behavior and ideology reminiscent of dangerous and abusive men IRL rather than take it as harmless flirtation from a well-meaning oaf of a man as he tries to break the shell of his beloved. Sakurai invokes a very dangerous trope that does more to excuse misogynistic behavior when done incorrectly rather than successfully appear as a romantic gesture of attempting to liberate a loved one from the clutches of isolation and victimhood.

On a larger scale, the application of these tropes is where Lostbelt 2 starts to suffer, and that’s where Sakurai’s writing further begins to resemble Minase’s. Sakurai spent so much time building these interpersonal dynamics that she spent the least amount of effort actually building upon the situation of the Lostbelt and Scathach-Skadi’s character and motivations for keeping the Scandinavia the way it is. 

Upon scrutiny, it’s not very difficult to pick apart the setting and make a mark out of the glaring logistical inconsistencies of maintaining a population of only 10,000 humans for a span of 3,000 years by having them reproduce at 15 years old at the latest to execute them at 25. Anyone with a passing understanding of biology would know that forcing children to carry babies to term can lead to terrible health and psychological complications that would certainly end up in a lot more miscarriages, stillbirths, and failed attempts at impregnation than actual successful births. The problem here then is rather evident. Sakurai wanted to use the fact that all these children are young, innocent, naive, gullible, and ignorant to draw a connection to Ophelia’s own psychological and emotional circumstance. However, she realized that because she was writing a setting that obligated her to work around a 3000-year gap between Ragnarok and the present day. She needed something that would compromise the need for a realistic system that would ensure the reproductive viability of a human population through such a long period of time and the thematic vehicle of childhood and repression of growth as a way to connect Ophelia to her environment. This compromise ended up working for the absolute worse because she chose the worst possible system she was aware was the worst possible system she could’ve come up with and therefore decided to forsake that part of the plot without going through the implications of it and leaving the specifics to the reader’s imagination so they could sort it out in her stead.

This unwillingness to properly explore the problematic implications of Scathach-Skadi’s system not only deprived the player of a possible engaging storyline where child endangerment, a common theme in the Nasuverse, is explored and criticized through a different angle, but also actively hurts Scathach-Skadi’s connection to the player because we never get the opportunity to debate with her about her ideology and the state of the Lostbelt. We never hold her accountable for enforcing such a brutally predatory and dehumanizing system that targets children, instead Sakurai opts to build her up as a flawed, self-absorbed mother figure desperately trying to combat the extinction of the remnant of her world who also never really learned how to deal with the revelation there is an entire life she did not get to have in this universe that we MUST sympathize because she occasionally sees through the characters and acts kind towards them until the time comes for us to fight her in earnest as a matter of principle completely divorced from the question of how she’s managed her Lostbelt. The fact Scathach-Skadi’s model of sustainability does not work is made obvious by the fact it takes place in a Lostbelt, what we are trying to get at here is that it does not work from a writing standpoint because of all the different holes you can poke on it before you’ve punched through the paper screen entirely and revealed the superfluousness of it all. 

There is nothing inherently bad about self-indulgent storylines. If I’m being honest, if Sakurai wanted to use Ophelia and Musashi as self-inserts to fantasize about romancing the different kinds of characters she finds attractive, more power to her. But the problem surrounding Lostbelt 2, which is the same problem that plagued Septem and Fate/Extella, is a veritable lack of restraint from her part as a professional writer in charge of a multi-billion dollar mobile game. What the writing room over at Type-Moon has to realize is that they are no longer a small doujin writing circle that can get away with whatever they want because they operate under obscurity. They are visible to the entire world and will be held accountable and criticized as professionals by consumers and their peers in the industry. A little bit of self-fulfillment in a published work never hurt anyone, you can cater to yourself most of all with your professional work (I mean, just look at She-Ra), but you must be sure that in your pursuit of indulgence your work does not suffer for it and ends up alienating and disappointing your fanbase and giving them the wrong impression of what you stand for. 

Anyway we’re popping the biggest bottles when GudaMoth becomes canon this December. 

[svynakee]

Promare thoughts/impressions

Watched Promare. Overall, enjoyed it very much and it was everything I expected it to be (extremely TRIGGER, basically). A visual feast that definitely satisfied my shonen action hunger. In summary though, I really wish it’d been a 12 ep anime.

Spoilers ahead.

LIKES

Visuals: Loved the stylisation. The vivid, pastel flames and the polygonal ice made a nice contrast and it looks so different not only from other anime films but also from other animations by the same studio? Brilliant.

TRIGGER being themselves: Illogical story with a grand scope, bombastic action hero, easily distinguishable character designs.

Hiroyuki Sawano: His music is just what you’d expect from someone of his calibre. Absolutely floored; also, quite a range in the soundtrack! I remember especially when Galo starts talking about the Japanese firefighters the music shifts to something more traditional.

Galo not being racist: Well, not being prejudiced. While its pretty par for the course to have a protagonist learn to overcome his prejudices in this sort of story, the fact that a person in the rescue ops doesn’t, you know, hate the victims who cause the disasters he’s meant to respond to is very logical.

Kiss follow-up: The no-homo fake out. Not gonna lie, they had me in the first half when Galo recoiled and seemed disgusted. But it would’ve made no sense because like he said, it was a medical procedure he’s been trained to do. Putting his mouth on anyone, regardless of gender, should not have grossed him out. And it didn’t! Being unhappy that he ‘started a fire’ makes more sense because his entire job (passion) is about stopping Burnish. There’s a real lack of hetero-signalling here actually. Promare’s not afraid to let its viewers decide how Galo swings.

Female gaze: Yeah sure there’s that shot where Aina’s butt is on display but the camera sure seems magnetised towards Lio’s crotch.

Lio’s refreshing morosexuality: Once they start working together in earnest, Lio is quick to just indulge in Galo’s quirks. He trusts the guy easily but not to the point that he stops calling him out for stupidity. Very movies end with me knowing that characters from opposing sides have a strong friendship ahead of them. Promare is one. I might talk more about Lio’s match with Galo more elsewhere, but for now, I do like how he isn’t shutting Galo down/constantly arguing which is what you usually see when a serious character has to work with a boisterous one.

DISLIKES

So most of my dislikes come from the fact that it’s a movie. There’s no way they could’ve done otherwise in a 1:51 timeframe, but knowing what the studio’s capable of, I can’t help but wish I saw their full potential.

Character development: Nobody really grew. Not every story needs it and not every character needs to change, but the lack of flaws addressed hurt Galo and Lio’s memorability I think. I kept expecting Galo’s impulsiveness to bite him in the ass. Didn’t see it much except for his confrontation with Kray. I even thought the ‘don’t pose and focus’ thing might come back, notably during the Lio de Galon fight when Kray keeps justifying his robot’s weaponry as terraforming equipment. Galo and Lio are just the type to shut him up and point out ‘If it’s being used to hurt people, it’s a weapon! If you hurt others, you’re a villain! Nothing can justify that!’ since it fits thematically into that fight as well.

Streamlined plot: TRIGGER has been shown to have a good grasp of story pacing. It can feed you one bit of ridiculousness at a time until they bring out something awesome but extremely stupid, knowing that they’ve tempered you enough it’ll just be epic. In this timeframe, that just didn’t happen. Not enough foreshadowing, too many crazy concepts introduced too late, and there was more than one Deus Ex Machina if you know what I mean. Instead of a proper build up that ended on a strong final note, it felt like a brief but sudden blaze that flickers out to leave darkness.

Less dynamic camera: Made it hard to follow the action sometimes. In a way it’s like the plot; too much momentum and not enough time to process it. A good spectacle is worth nothing if there’s no chance to digest it.

Flat supporting cast: Again, this is because TRIGGER’s animes have been strong in this aspect. The movie timeframe means limited screen time, but Mad Max Fury Road had only ten more minutes and managed to set up its supporting cast well. In Promare, they’re mostly reduced to archetypes. What are their relationships? Motivations? They feel more like talking props, like the NPCs you have milling about the map shouting flavour text. There might be more in the supplementary material but for the movie itself, I didn’t like most of the characters not named Lio or Galo. In fact-

Don’t like Galo: Or rather, don’t find him compelling. Unlike Ryuko or Simon, I don’t think he could carry a series. He lacks depth and drive beyond ‘I am a firefighter’. Sure, he’s stupid and loud, but those are personality traits, not a personality. Being nice, determined, having a love of pizza…these all feel so generic and TRIGGER is capable of so much more. Galo feels like an alright lead in a movie where a lot is happening, so he doesn’t have to carry anything in terms of emotion or drive, but he’d be boring in a full-length series. Or even a movie trilogy.

Don’t like Lio?: While I don’t agree that every conflict has two equal sides, I dislike how squeaky-clean Lio is. He feels more like the shonen protagonist than Galo sometimes. He’s caring, skilled, honourable, intelligent, determined. His flaws? If you shoot him then try to commit genocide he’ll knock on your door and ask to fight you. It’s unclear if there’s any casualties during his rampage, which makes sense because we know his flames can be harmless (by his choice) and he was specifically threatening to destroy Kray’s city unless Kray listened. On the other side you have Vulcan and Kray. He could’ve afforded a bit more ruthlessness and still come out clearly heroic. It would have given him more intensity to better contrast Galo.

WHAT I WANTED

In summary? Promare as an anime instead of a film. I’d give up smooth fights and shiny CGI any day for stronger writing and characters with impact.

Longer timeframe in-universe: The plot essentially takes place over a week, which limits how much development characters and relationships can undergo. Lio feels too ready to trust Galo. Galo can’t process Kray’s betrayal. The sisters’ story is just kind of shoved on you like unwanted vegetables spooned out by a health-conscious mother. Dr. Exposition suddenly comes in and starts tying up loose ends so abruptly I had to check my phone to see if the movie was almost over. The short timeframe means Promare feels like a marathon-length sprint.

More moral ambiguity: The Mad Burnish are still righteous and try to minimise damage. However, their plans don’t always work. They leave escape routes but fail to account for impaired mobility. Young Burnish lose control while they’re on the run, endangering ordinary humans. Lio is forced to make tough choices. He becomes more jaded, which leads up to the betrayal where he can truly break and begin rampaging. I’m not saying he needed a full Satsuki Kiryuuin thing, but damn do I miss her sheer badass aura. Lio lacks that dangerous feeling. You know he’s apologising inside if he steps on you.  

Galo’s popularity: Galo is shown to have great PR and love playing the crowd. Kray has good PR. The Burnish have bad PR. Instead of Prometh looping a vid with his hacking powers, Galo could’ve convinced the city of Kray’s evil the traditional way: a big speech about humanity and believing in yourself (and not Kray because Kray is evil).

Promare: Lio tells us the fire is alive. Interesting. Prometh says the fire is actually aliens from a parallel dimension whose prime directive is to burn also they feel pain if the Burnish are hurt. My reaction is like Galo’s: I sleep. The entire concept of the promare…I just don’t like it. Maybe I don’t like how they al disappear at the end and fix the Burnish.

In my ideal Promare, the things I love TRIGGER for would all be present. Strong supporting cast. Multifaceted characters. Build up that just gets more ridiculous and epic at a steady pace. Good fights but also quieter breather moments. More jokes.

More Promare, basically.

[virovac]

Kyle  Letter draft 3

I only have Noelle’s fanmail address I think, how 

Anyway. Looking for further feedback.

I would like to register a concern with the presentation of the Kyle character. I know its too late to change the majority writing, but if it could stop you guys from doing a poor taste epilogue gag or something, I want to take the chance.

First of all I'd like to thank you for making this show.

I've always wanted to be a writer, but I've had trouble with dialogue.

But for some rreason , this show has been so inspiring and I've written a tremendous amount of fanfiction in the past two years than I have in my life. 

This show is wonderful in many ways and has improved my self-confidence. I am glad it exists.

Which makes what I'm discussing all the more painful

I am speaking on this partly because Kyle's issues with memory and following directions match up perfectly with my own experiences with trauma.  I found myself having difficulty being useful to my family without constant supervision, constantly dissasociating and it was one of the worst feelings in the world.

I know many people oddly expect Kyle to be He-Man or join the main cast.  I think the issue is more than just many are culturally conditioned to assume a white guy is important.

A large part of it is because they expected a show by LGBT+ creators to have more to say about bullying than including it for cheap laughs and 90s style subversion humor such as that "touching scene" with Bow that felt like out of the 90s shows mocking the concept of compassion to the enemy espoused by shows like Classic She-Ra.

Kyle does not come off as "hero from a comedy parody who missed the call", he comes off as a serious abuse victim. Or the odd quiet kid in your class you regret not treating better years later. His reactions and what happens to him, outside of fight scenes (which are hilarious), aren't slapstick and come across very real.

If he is intended to mock a protagonist archetype, then I am afraid the archetype its mocking is the "hero in an abusive home" like Harry Potter.

Everywhere else in the show addressing the topics of isolation and abuse are treated seriously. And the show otherwise treats concepts like compassion with earnest. The show has generally been earnest and sincere.

Kyle's situation being played entirely for laughs stands out starkly, and comes off as a tremendous double standard to other characters. Reinforcing the toxic idea that female victims are to be sympathised with, but not male victims. In an otherwise very progressive show, this is upholding a character as deserving abuse for being "weak" or "not tough".

The issue isn't that its happening, the issue is how its being framed

As I stated above. Kyle's issues with forgetting things and following directions match my own experience with trauma.

“Experiencing traumatic events directly impairs the ability to learn, both immediately after the event and over time.”

He lives in the Fright Zone, under Shadow Weaver

So the humor also comes off at laughing at the expense of someone disabled from repeated trauma.

And if he's meant to be " just like that" ,well that's a different set of problems.

As someone who needed learning accommodations, I can't help but feel portraying a character as just naturally "a loser" reinforces ableist sentiments.

And, relating it to stress-caused worse when the jokes are about someone in an abusive environment.Having an abuse victim be a natural screwup encourages blaming the victim and ignoring how stress affects memory and learning ability.

I have actually seen fans, mostly on younger side, saying that people like Kyle should just kill themselves or better never to have been born, so I think this is a valid concern.

A second issue is 

The very way Kyle's two biggest scenes were done seem also like they would be very alienating to real life bullying or abuse victims.

While from a Watsonian perspective Bow has no reason to owe anything to a kidnapper, kids are going to see someone in a bad situation reaching out for sympathy, and just being used and (literally) tossed aside.

Bow even talks like someone unable to comprehend an abusive living environment. "How can you get in trouble for just talking" making it all the more unnerving.

And far worse, and the reason I started this letter: the starvation joke in S3E5.

Not only did it make no sense, even for the dream world (how would Kyle only have bars of  the one flavor Adora likesr? This should have been something that should have been off to Adora);  starving someone is a real life abuse tactic on par with what Shadow Weaver does.

When the food he’s forced to give up gets ruined and he’s blamed for it he just…shuts down. Its like watching one of those youtube videos that recently got shut down where parents encourage their children to abuse eachother for.  Its as realistic as the abuse Catra goes through, but its played for laughs.

And Adora does nothing , and doesn't react to someone being forced to go hungry for a whole week. Which for the active lifestyle of the Horde, could be life threatening.

And starving someone in the Horde makes no sense . You can't fast in wartime, soldiers need protein.

So Reiteraing my main point: what I'm trying to say is: some people process trauma like Kyle does. And seeing the narrative treat the trauma symptoms other characters show sympathetically, while how Kyle's are treated with mockery and ridicule within and outside the show and used to justify more abuse…from personal experience as someone struggling with traume: it hurts.

I don't think Kyle needed to be a main character,I like his role of being a side character or “Steve” as they say in the Transformers fandom: adding a human face to the “incompetent faceless goons”. Reminding us they are broken people who have been taken in and spat out.

But I think its important he be allowed to get better and heal and not be shown as still a "loser" in the end of the show. 

 Or if you can't change a minor scene at this point:  A special lesson comic written to take place after the show, some public statements and apologies, advertisement for organizations helping people in positions similar to Kyle...those would go along way.

Or Netflix could maybe just edit out that line about it being stolen from him, that would be a godsend. (And honestly, I have not seen a single person with a positive opinion towards that line.)

People with stress caused learning disabilities can improve in a better environment and I feel that needs to be shown.

I think the problem of how this happened is that tropes for “loser” , “nerd”, and “comedic everyman” all intersect and exchange with eachother. And how much the “loser” and “nerd” are are often tied into ableism or hostility towards neuroatypical traits. 

I ask you please, please be more mindufl in future projects!

On a final, more personal note that "ration scene" also made the Repkyle teasing in the show somewhat...triggering when I rewatch. All I can see now is an abuser during one of their "nicer moments". (That's how abusers often keep their victims around)

Is actually giving me a sinking uncomfortable feeling after seeing Rogelio abusing Kyle by starvation and Adora acting as if that was normal in the dreamworld.

I was ambivalent and now, on some days,seein Repkyle content actually causes me occasional physical pain.  Like my throat or stomach hurts

I miss when it was a cute fun ship, but now you guys are shipteasing him with someone you've shown as willing to abuse him. In a dream world, but Adora acts as if nothing was wrong and its not one of the signs something is off.

Unless Netflix were to go back to and edit out that line, well...its gonna be a stain on the entire show in my opinion.