#and accidentally made luz feel ashamed of such a big part of her and accidentally guilted luz into abandoning that

[kraviolis]

i keep seeing ppl in the notes on my camila post being all like "dont drag greg universe he was a great dad" which yeah, he was! i'd never argue against that. he did so good with what he had, but i would not say that greg was ever as involved in steven's life as much as he should have been.

the mr. universe episode in SU:F is proof of this. greg had helicopter parents that micromanaged him, so greg did what anyone would: he raised steven in the exact opposite way. is that a bad thing? depends on how you look at it. let me explain my perception:

steven grew up with so much freedom. he was allowed to eat what he wanted, dress himself how he wanted, go where he wanted, and do what he wanted. greg gave steven everything he never had growing up, but in doing so he deprived steven of everything he did have as a kid.

the reason steven clings to tightly to routines, schedules, specific diets & mealtimes, work, academics, etc. is because he did not have access to these things as a child. do you know how important routine is for a growing child? steven didn't even have a specific bedtime as a child. that shit absolutely fucks with your entire circadian rhythm later in life.

to be fair, i believe greg did the right thing with keeping steven out of public school. he wouldn't have thrived in that environment at all and it wouldve done more harm than good and greg did a great job making sure that steven wasnt too emotionally or socially stunted from this choice.

but everything else... the no doctor appts, no dentists, no bedtime, no mealtimes, no private bedroom, no supervision for like 80% of the time-- like, greg didn't even homeschool steven beyond third grade, probably.

greg was a good man for getting over his anxiety around magic/gem stuff enough to allow steven be so heavily involved in it. he recognized that steven needed to integrate with gem stuff to have that connection to his mother. i will never argue that greg should've sheltered steven more. he raised a good fucking kid. and without steven's involvement, the earth would've literally been destroyed.

but here's the problem. greg was more worried about being like his parents than he was of the effects this shit would have on steven's life. he made steven feel like he had to choose between two worlds. like he wasn't allowed to be both gem and human because greg would flinch and look away from steven's powers.

i do not blame him. he's only human and hindsight is a bitch. but we cannot deny that greg did in fact neglect steven by not being more involved with steven's life as a gem.

was greg a bad father? no. not at all. he made mistakes. all parents do. but greg often and actively refused to be involved in such a major part of steven's life. even if we factor in that the crystal gems themselves made him feel unwelcome, it still doesn't ever excuse it.

[mdhwrites]

Five Reasons Why The Owl House Isn't Inclusive

Someone on Twitter asked me to elaborate on the concept of TOH not being inclusive beyond LGBTQIA+ labels, which I'm still happy it has, and I accidentally just made a five part list of them that helped bring together a lot of the points I've tackled not only recently but also in the past so... Why not? Let's actually make a kind of master post for this. These are five reasons why The Owl House isn't inclusive.

The demons

I don't entirely have an order for this, this isn't a top five thing, but we'll start with probably the thing that's the easiest to never even think about: It's treatment of the demons of the Isles of the DEMON REALM.

Every demon in the show is either a gag, a villain... Or the ones who get to have nuance or be good are the ones who pass the most for being 'human', much like how the witches are just humans with pointy ears. The first point is pretty obvious. A lot of random demons show up just to be made fun of for looking strange and then move on.

The villain accusation though is because like 90% of one off villains in this show, with no nuance or real personality and are obviously evil just because they're evil are demons. They also aren't allowed to be amongst the good guys for the most part. In the main cast, the only demon is Hooty who... Boy his treatment is AWFUL. It actually says TERRIBLE things about Luz that she treats him just as poorly as everyone else, especially when someone else manages to befriend him... Which the show uses as signaling to treat Lilith as lesser than the rest because now she's comic relief.

Finally the passing part. This is actually big for the fact that it's actually kind of racist in general. The only demons who are allowed actual nuance are the ones who look the most like witches or humans. Boscha and Steve are both theoretically demons as far as we know and they get kind of redemption arcs but much lesser ones than any more human character and both start as villains. Then there's Vee who is the only unequivocally 'good' demon and her whole thing is that she can pass for a witch or human. In fact, she's better at being human than LUZ is.

So point one and we've already got a weird undercurrent of an entire race being lesser than the conventional ones or... that'd be it if not for

1.5: Take a lot of what I said about demons and apply it to the guys of TOH because they're also treated like shit by the writers. They are either villains or jokes when they first appear and the only exceptions are either still pretty questionable for fitting one those roles... Or dead. You know, like Manny. I think Dell is literally the only ALIVE male character who isn't a joke or villain at one point.

2. Everyone's really fucking pretty. Like... period. Every character in the main cast is ready for the runway. The only main character who really comes close to being transgressive in their looks is Willow and like... Overwatch came out 7 years ago with Mei and that she wasn't a daring design choice then and Willow wasn't four years later. They're the definition of 'more to love'.

Admittedly, I'm normally fine with things just having pretty people. Yokotaro is based for giving an android a big ass because he likes pretty women. I don't think people should feel ashamed for that. It's just a problem when a lot of your contemporary competitors, or even old school competitors like Recess back in the NINETIES, who aren't even trying to preach inclusivity, have better body representation than the show that does.

And yes, that does tie back into the demon thing too as you might notice that all the demons who are accepted by the main cast or given more nuance are the ones who look the most conventionally attractive. Good job show.

3. Nothing here is actually transgressive.

So now we're getting away from looks and the like and actually getting into how well the show sells its theming and representation of those society rejects. The embodiment of this should be Luz if the show wishes to say that it accepts those with weird interests or behave oddly. The only problem is that Luz doesn't. At all. When she is, the things she's transgressive about are things like the safety of others and common human decency.

Luz never really defines herself by her interests after all. Azura exists sure but it gets like... A handful of forced references in S1 and then maybe a couple in S2, often not even by Luz eventually but Amity, which is literally what happens in S3 as she abandons the series effectively. This isn't technically bad. She has a healthy relationship to it for the most part. She doesn't hyperfixate or try to interject it into every part of her life. She's just a nerd... Which wasn't even a brave thing back when I was in High School a decade ago.

Straight up: I was a part of JROTC, the American school fast track into the military and people the first guy I ever heard squeal about how the Avengers were gonna happen, he swears, was a really dude in that ecosystem. He was more of a nerd than any of the drama kids I eventually hung out with and no one cared.

And Luz is less extreme than THAT. The only time she actually is is during her character introduction where she, you know, releases spiders on a classroom and also snakes that attack people. Or how about those fireworks? What was her plan with those? Set them off inside and kill burn down the whole building in the BEST CASE scenario? Because if she's been bullied so much, why would she expect her class to come outside for that? Regardless of the fact that you'd get expelled just for bringing that much gunpowder into school, let alone the other reasons she should have been expelled.

The worst part of all of this though is Lilith. Lilith actually hyperfixates. She cares a LOT about her interests and gets giddy about them... And it's almost always framed as mocking. Everything to do with her interest in history is almost always setup for a joke of some sort or to make her look smaller. She is also more genuinely interested in learning and excited about the Isles and its potential than Luz commonly but when she becomes that character, she isn't taken seriously anymore. She's a joke, just like her best friend Hooty.

So now we've rejected nerds. Can we really go deeper? Well, how about the oppressed themselves?

4: The oppressed are inconvenient to the show so they don't show up.

Because the Isles is meant to be bigotry free except for Belos (an ENTIRELY different topic that has bunches of problems of it own) the only people actually oppressed in the show, who are ever actually forced to conform and mind that conforming, are wild witches. But not only is their plight poorly shown but it's also inconsistent.

Eda is our ONLY representation of it and the show ever struggles to decide how genuinely illegal her presence is. She's allowed to just stroll into an Emperor's Coven funded school and enroll her student there. All it takes for her to be free for a day is burning some posters. But also on the other side, she is literally threatened with death ONLY for the crime of being a wild witch and not the rest of her rap sheet.

And why shouldn't it be? Systemic oppression isn't actually that bad by what the show depicts. Dana herself wrote Reaching Out where the coven system is treated like not going to college instead of a crime so severe as to have the death penalty. She also was one of two writers for The First Day where they treat the coven system as just tradition and not like multi-tracking is going to get these kids literally killed, if Bump himself isn't removed by Belos for enabling people to break the law in an episode where he SPECIFICALLY NEEDS GOVERNMENT FUNDING.

And as the coven system is the only form of oppression, no one has to actually deal with the social and sometimes legal pressures that makes one hide who they are. It can't say anything about those actually struggling because it's inconvenient. You can't just have Luz be accepted by all if her dream makes her illegal to most. You can't have her easily fall in love because that relationship is illegal. You can't have members of the government who have done literal witch hunts just turn around and be good guys because they are active participants in bigotry.

So the oppressed, the people actually other'd by the story that's being told, are pushed out of frame for the sake of the escapist fantasy of Luz getting to runaway to a magical world and save it. They exist solely to claim there IS a reason to fight but actually showing their struggle is one step too far apparently.

5. It leans into extremely harmful stereotypes of people with mental disorders and disabilities. Content warning for those topics until the BUT at the end.

This is the last one because not only do I think it's actually the most dangerous but it's also the most personal as someone who is literally disabled due to their depression. Who had to be really careful when writing about characters in crises not to peddle the same narratives most stories do. Extremely hazardous, painful narratives.

Hunter and Eda are both disabled by the logic of the world they live in. Both are incapable of magic in a world that expects it from them and it causes real difficulty in their lives, forcing them to require equipment and/or meds to aid them in dealing with the struggles these cause, doubly so for Eda because of the curse. It actually is good representation... Until you start thinking about and people start getting 'cured'.

Eda's is definitely more of a mental health disability with how much it's connected to emotions, stress, etc. like that than her physically being incapable of doing more. She suffers from not having enough spoons on any given day to do things with some being worse than others. Again, face value, this looks kind of nice.

Here's the insidious part: When she isn't medicated, when she isn't able to hold back her symptoms... she's literally a monster. Anytime she shows her pain, she is actively dangerous to those around her. Full stop. And there is no way to stop this except her murder. She will ALWAYS be a threat for the rest of her life, even after making peace with her diagnosis. After all, in the final episode she literally has to warn someone to get away because she's going to lose control. Worse yet, part of her getting a reprieve from it is to ruin another life. Lilith is made disabled because Eda's illness is so out of control that only through other people's sacrifices can she find help.

If none of this raises red flags, GOOD FOR YOU! You haven't ever had to be told you might lose your apartment just because they don't want to one day find you having done something terrible because they assume that will eventually happen, SOMETHING THAT HAS ACTUALLY HAPPENED TO ME. You've never been told to hide and lie about your condition, to pass as just a normal person, so you could get a job or just so you didn't appear wrong to others. So you don't seem like a ticking time bomb that will explode.

Hunter is a mixed bag comparatively. He's better because his disability, not having magic, isn't inherently dangerous. He's not going to kill anyone someday because of it. The problem is that he is still mostly framed as lesser because of his lack of magic and that he is helpless due to it minus one time he gets to show off his skills while without his staff... To no avail. Otherwise, everytime he doesn't have a staff, he is completely at the mercy of anyone around him. His heart to hear with Willow is even about feeling like less of a person due to it and how they've both struggled with the problem, which, you know, feels disingenuous when at the end the plant goddess forces him through the ground against his will because she has her own magic and is one of the strongest witches on the Isles. It's like telling someone missing an arm that yeah, when you were young you broke your arm too but you got better while the other person is still MISSING AN ARM.

And then he is cured... By the death of his best friend. At which point, he is whole, a complete person with his own magic... at the cost of a life. You know, just like how Eda only got the curse to back off by hurting someone she cared about too.

What the fuck?

And finally, for a bit more mental health rep: Luz. People like to claim that Luz is suffering from trauma, depression, anxiety, etc. in the second half of show and especially S3. The problem with this is that after S2A, Luz is just categorically is a worse person. This culminates in what most consider to be her lowest point, Thanks to Them when she has a speech in class that potentially hints at suicidal ideation. However, in the episode she decides that instead of taking responsibility and trying to fix her mistakes like she used to, she is going to just stay home and let an entire world die. Yes, she frames it as self sacrifice and having learned from her mistakes... but it's not. It's self preservation if anything.

Anyone on the Isles should be presumed dead or something akin to it with what she experienced during King's Tide. Anyone who goes back is going to fight a GOD to try to reclaim it. To have to beat someone who is leagues more powerful than any entity they've even fathomed before. Her friends have been trying to get home and planning for this all with the expectation that Luz would be by their side. But despite the fact that she explicitly blames herself for the situation, she's staying. There's no talk about how this means dooming her found family, how it means breaking up with Amity or anything like that. Her focus is entirely on herself and the mistake she made. They can all go rot while she gets to stay home with her mom.

This doesn't even go into Luz's lower empathy or her CONSTANT LYING that was more prevalent in the second half of the show. It all says one clear thing though in this context: Because she is damaged due to trauma and depression, she is a generally worse person. She cares less about others than a functional person would, as she was a better person before all of this, and loses her morality as she is willing to let people die instead of fix her mistakes.

All of this just makes it bluntly better if Luz isn't actually depressed during this time period and more is just being a bad person because things have gotten tough. Otherwise this feeds into a LOT of bad stereotypes for those who are mentally ill.

BUT.

I do not think any of this is done with malice. Any of the five points. It's just careless. I pointed out the narrative problems for properly including a couple of them and I could easily tell you why others regurgitate issues without blinking for many of the others. It's easy to make these sorts of mistakes if you're not thinking about it. If you're just taking tropes you like instead of trying to craft towards a genuinely coherent theme. It's made worse when you know you're in a landscape that is hungry for representation so being praised for it won't be hard so you don't need to fully commit.

As I said earlier though, this is kind of a problem for a show that wants to be about inclusivity. Who's main themes, at best, are about self actualization and self acceptance. About being who you are and finding the spaces that allow you to do that. And yet... So many are left to the wayside. Abandoned because the show has a very narrow definition of a 'correct' identity and if you don't fill those definitions, it will leave you behind.

If you want a show that actually accepts everyone, that allows for all parts of identity, I've seen only one season of Craig of the Creek and it is EXCEPTIONAL at it. All are welcome in the creek. No exceptions. If someone is alone, it's because of circumstance or self selection and even they are given chances to be a part of the community.

I wish TOH had believed in something even close to similar.

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