#and it started off rocky but we made a list of all the changes/improvements i've made since around this time last year and holy fuck

[harrylights]

gonna get sappy here for a hot sec (quelle surprise)

[magic-and-moonlit-wings]

Hi, I've decided to have Bagheera, albeit reluctantly, to sabotage Mowgli near the end of the race, and she gets angry at him and runs off, upset, with Bagheera heartbroken and regretful for want he just did. That, and it feels more emotionally resonant, as well as sad. Also, how do you feel about Troll!Jim and what would you do to rewrite Jim's choice, Merlin, as well as season 3 as a whole? Finally, are there any films you hate, but everyone loves? - The Sapphire One.

It sounds like that plot arc is coming together well for you.

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I wouldn’t go so far as to say I hated the movie, but despite it’s popularity I did not care for Rocky Horror Picture Show. It felt like the plot lost coherency about twenty minutes in. That may be intentional and part of the appeal for the target audience?

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Okay, take a bathroom break, get some water and a snack, and make yourself comfortable. This could take a while.

Making Jim a troll was a frustrating narrative decision for many reasons.

One, as many before me have pointed out, it undermined the ongoing theme of how Jim not being a troll means he has connections, abilities, and thought processes that previous Trollhunters didn’t, which gives him a strategic advantage because Bular, Angor, and Gunmar were all used to fighting troll Trollhunters.

Two, making Jim strong enough to beat Gunmar in single combat went against the show’s ongoing narrative about the importance of teamwork. I was expecting Gunmar’s defeat to be a team effort, probably culminating in Gunmar trying to attack one of the Trollhunting team in front of him while Jim struck from behind and/or above (aided by a shadow portal or the Warhammer’s flight ability) to land the killing blow.

Three, characters are supposed to develop over the course of a show if it doesn’t have a floating timeline with an implied reset button between episodes. Jim ends the series in much the same position as he began it, having been freshly altered by Merlin into what the wizard has decided the world needs.

His friends and family on the other side of the bathroom door begging Jim not to go into the potion also strongly mirrors them begging him not to go through Killahead Bridge alone in the Season 1 finale - I think somebody spliced together those scenes and overlayed angsty music, actually, but I don’t recall who or have a link to the video - which means he made basically the same mistake again after supposedly learning better.

Four, there are practical concerns when shapeshifting. Jim has no experience physically being a troll.

The heightened senses of sight, hearing, and smell could cause over-stimulation.

The reduced sense of touch (“I didn’t feel a thing!” Jim declares after getting knocked across the yard and through a fence by AAARRRGGHH) could cause dissociation.

Jim’s new height and the new length and weight of his limbs could cause clumsiness, and not being used to his faster reflexes could result in over-compensating for any movement and exaggerate the clumsiness.

Radically shapeshifting right before a massive battle and having maybe a day to train in his new form could just as easily have reverted Jim back to a beginner’s skill level. (Also the loss of a finger on his dominant hand could affect dexterity.)

Five, Merlin treated Jim terribly when manipulating him into using the potion. I read a fic where Merlin strongly urges Jim to become half-troll without beating him unconscious and tying him to a chair first, and Jim does go through with it, and it’s still upsetting but it feels so much more like Jim made the decision instead of a child being browbeaten by an authority figure until they give in. (Chapter 5 of Forget your perfect offering, by Hagar - that wasn’t why it’s point five, I’m listing these in the order I think of them, but it’s a fun coincidence.)

Six, as I have commented on before, Jim transforms one episode before the finale. That kind of last-second power-up feels like a cop-out where the writers couldn’t actually figure out how to let the protagonists win and so had to shove in some deus ex machina to make it work.

The audience got 49 episodes of human!Jim, cheering him on and wanting to see his victory, and then 3 episodes of troll!Jim, seen under circumstances which mostly emphasized how different he was from human!Jim (in order to show how much he sacrificed), and so it basically felt like a new character showed up and was given the grand finale that the former protagonist was supposed to get. If Jim had transformed midway through the season, it would have been less jarring.

Seven, which ties strongly into point six; radical alterations to the visual design of a character in a predominantly visual medium such as a cartoon create the impression of introducing a new character if we don’t have time to see parallels between the new and old version. There is a physical resemblance between Jim’s troll and human forms, sure, but …

Jim also starts acting differently post-transformation. He’s more confident (playfully kissing Claire during their sparring match) and gets angry more easily (which, to be fair, might be circumstantial). This could be natural character evolution, but it’s a pretty steep jump, emphasizing the impression of troll!Jim and human!Jim as separate characters.

For me, the fact that the Shadow Staff couldn’t recognize him after the transformation even though Claire still feels an emotional bond with Jim is the most damning evidence that the writers essentially killed the human Trollhunter off to replace him with a troll one.

Eight, connecting with point four, I wouldn’t have expected the writers to tackle this in any case even if the characters acknowledged the possibility, but there was a possibility of regression. What if the potion turned Jim into a sixteen-year-old troll instead of an adolescent one? There would functionally be no Trollhunter for years until Jim grew up again or died, since the Amulet is linked to one bearer until death.

Nine, what if the Amulet had considered Jim ‘dead’ and called a new Trollhunter? Was that why Jim had to bring it with him while transforming, so it would still be able to recognize him? Perhaps worse, what if it didn’t consider Jim dead and so didn’t call a new Trollhunter, but still didn’t acknowledge troll!Jim as the Trollhunter?

I guess points four, eight and nine are basically the same point - there were a lot of ways it could have gone wrong which the characters weren’t given time to consider.

Compromised immune system because Jim has no prior exposure to troll diseases in a form where he could actually catch them; the chance of Jim ‘bridging the gap’ and letting trolls and humans get each other sick; Jim not knowing he’s vulnerable to sunlight and not happening to be in the shade when the sun came up; the interspecies half-and-half organs not being compatible with themselves and Jim dying of organ failure within hours of transforming; Jim and the Amulet having to ‘relearn’ each other like he’s a newly-called Trollhunter again …

Ten, we never get to see Jim out of armour after he transforms, creating the impression he can’t take it off. (Supposedly he can and he’s just stressed, but still.) Even in his two-second cameo in the second season of 3Below, he’s wearing the Eclipse armour. 

Why is he still wearing Eclipse? Gunmar is dead. Jim doesn’t need the Triumbric stones anymore. As far as character alteration in animation goes, palette swaps are like the cheapest one. There is no reason for him not to revert to Daylight … unless he can’t, because the armour won’t shut down, or the Amulet won’t let him summon the other version.

I suppose he could just be saying “for the doom of Gunmar” out of habit, or because he doesn’t want to say “for the glory of Merlin” anymore.

All that said, now that troll!Jim has been established, I do not think the writers should change him back to human!Jim unless he gets the ability to switch back and forth between both forms.

Undoing Jim’s transformation permanently and entirely would feel like the writers shrugged and said, “we’ve written ourselves into a corner and aren’t sure how to get out of it so we’re just bypassing the whole issue.”

Just like killing off the entire Janus Order (as far as we know) by the end of Season 2, so that, when the Familiars were rescued in Season 3 and any Changelings who weren’t in troll form already would all be forced back into troll form at once, the show didn’t have to either explore the repercussions of Changelings being exposed to the world, or explain how they somehow avoided being exposed to the world despite having no forewarning to hide from humans in that moment.

Or having Jim know Angor’s backstory, despite never learning it, even though he would presumably have had feelings and reactions regarding that knowledge.

Or newly-weaponless Claire, whose politician mother would be able to quickly alert the city about any supernatural threats, being the one to go with injured Jim to protect the trolls en route to New Jersey and find the hypothetical Heartstone out there, while Toby, who still has his Warhammer and has canonically been described as having an ‘almost troll-like’ knowledge of minerals, stayed behind in Arcadia, so that Toby could be in the main cast of 3Below Season 2, even though Claire and Eli were seen at play rehearsals together in Trollhunters Season 1 and so it would’ve made just as much sense for Eli to go to Claire about extraterrestrial presence in Arcadia if she had been the one to stay, and we could’ve had a fun scene of Claire asking for a serrator to replace her destroyed staff.

If I were to rewrite Jim’s choice, with full creative freedom, he would not have gone through with using the potion. If I were contractually obligated to have him choose to transform, he would have consulted his teammates on the issue before going through with it, and they would have agreed that the potential improvement of their odds against Gunmar was worth the risk if Jim was willing to take it (basically “I don’t like it but I won’t stop you”) - possibly Jim and Merlin would keep from the rest of the team the detail about the transformation being permanent.

I’m going to wait and see what Tales of Arcadia ultimately does with Merlin’s character before determining how I would rewrite him. If he’s going to be a villain, he’s fine as is, though I might adjust some of the other characters’ reactions to him. If he’s supposed to be a hero, he needs tweaking.

[The things I’ve said before about how I’d rewrite Season 3] remain true.