#but I very much am queer and if you're trying to tell me toh isn't good rep you're bullshitting me

[aromanticannibal]

I saw someone complain about how apparently raine was created only to be eda's love interest and op was like hoho ofc the only nb character is a love interest with no character development and like.

I'm sorry I am physically unable to see this as a problem. raine is good representation, like they just are. not ever queer character needs to be incredibly important to the plot to be good rep? also it's not like raine is a side character that was thrown in in the back for cheap rep, they have an important role for eda's developpment and theyre literally the head of the rebellion against belos (aside from eda who rebels against everything). and THEY'RE NOT THE ONLY NON BINARY CHARACTER EITHER?? masha I think is their name is nb too (and they are a very very side character but we already have raine it's not like they're the only nb character again) and the collector uses he/they pronouns im pretty sure. good lord.

I want to bang my head against a wall. how do you Live.

it reminds me of when I saw someone saying TOH is shit queer representation and racist (??? somehow) because it doesn't do enough? bro? the main character is a neurodivergent OPENLY bisexual black latina girl. what do you want MORE. she's in a relationship with her lesbian girlfriend, the world girlfriend was said, trey kiss and hold hand. They put so much diversity in this show it got fucking canceled.

[borkthemork]

To be honest, the 3A discourse rubs me off the wrong way because it kind of feels like cartoon fandoms are pretty shallow sometimes?

Note how many people keep dismissing the Plantars, even though they were always main characters and their relationship with Anne was the main focus and heart of the show in the first place (literally marketed by Disney that way too), in favor of Sasha and Marcy and for what seems like because they just want to ship them all together.

Reminds me of The Ghost and Molly McGee where Molly and Scratch's relationship is the centerpiece of that show but most of fanart and fanfics are just about shipping Molly with the other girl characters.

We might be opening a pretty big nest of worms with this one, Anon, but knowing my current thoughts, I will say that I was curious of the phenomenon regarding Season 3A.

I'd been observing the fandom for a while — and don't get me wrong even if I've been here from the start it's not like my opinion is the most correct in how people feel about the topic — however, I do see four things that are being put into play over Season 3A discourse. And right now, I honestly would like to talk about it.

However, because of the nature of discourse (being that it's stressful and also prone to having people argue if the discussion isn't handled carefully), I will put all my thoughts under a Read More.

To note, though, I am not going to invalidate people with whatever I will say under the Read More, but I am going to dissect why collisions are happening in the fandom in-general. Because in understanding where these concerns are coming from, then we can have a better picture as to why arguments are starting in the first place.

Anyway, let's begin.

[Word Count: 2,100~]

So the issue from what I'm seeing could be from four things: (1) Forgetting that the show is episodic with an overall story, (2) The weekly to binging pacing, (3) The wait for specific answers, and (4) Forgetting that, in some essence, Marcy and Sasha aren’t the main characters of Anne's story.

(1) Episodic - The Comparisons to TOH

Okay, so back in the hiatus before Season 3A, there was a mass migration of The Owl House fans to Amphibia. If one ever navigated Twitter, Tiktok, or the sort you'd see that a lot of fans are also fans of The Owl House, and during the Season 2A hiatus, watching Amphibia helped pass the time.

I also noticed that the way people advertised Amphibia was through different specific viewpoints. The first is that they advertise Amphibia as an epic story show and only an epic story show. Second, they promise that there is a lot of queer subtext in the narrative that is not only implicit but explicit in text. Thirdly, they don't mark the Plantars as the main characters, but rather focus on the trio since they're the most fleshed-out of the bunch.

Now, I will discuss the second to third points later, what I will focus on though is the expectation that Amphibia is fully intended to be serialized and only serialized.

Amphibia isn't a serialized show.

It's a bit of a bonk to the head, but Amphibia really isn't. What you're currently seeing is a show that has similar pacing and sitcom feel to Gravity Falls, Steven Universe, and a bit of The Ghost and Molly McGee:

They will tell their stories as time goes on, but the heart of each is about characterization.

Now, this comes down to the fact that Disney TV is a very episodic-centric kind of broadcasting, and the many shows you see in the wake of Gravity Falls — like Svtfoe, TOH, and Amphibia — will push for that serious storytelling sometime after their season one as a result of trying to get its show off the air.

With The Owl House, Dana was pretty vocal on Disney forcing the episodic storytelling on her with Season One, however, what we currently know with Matt can be seen here.

There are confirmations that despite the episodic storytelling, Matt was pretty much enthralled with telling it through such a medium anyway due to the outlines he had, and also the prior research he had with Gravity Falls and Steven Universe.

So to the ones who had been advertised a serialized story, Seasons 1 and 2A become unappealing. They expected a story that would have the same appeals as what people had told them, but instead got a funky frog show of Anne reevaluating her toxic assumptions with some crucial plot points interspersed within.

And when they skip the seasons they don't prefer, they get frustrated when the built expectation of Season Three being serialized doesn't come to fruition. The episodic pacing is still there, and it's really funny because if you look at the way the episodes are lined up, not only is Season 3A a lot faster than Seasons 1 and 2 on plot progression but faster than Season 2B in full. And Season 2B has been known to be a pretty packed midseason, mind you!

The mix of serialization and episodic has been the medium for most of Amphibia, and one could critique the show, of course (it's not perfect like any other medium out there), but trying to critique a show for not being serialized does have the repercussions of not understanding the intentions of the source material.

It's like asking a serialized show from an episodic show like Cowboy Bebop, rather than the intended serialized show that is right next to it. And if Season 3B does still continue to increase its storytelling heavily, there will continue to be a lot of laughs and jokes to accompany the progression.

In its heart, Amphibia keeps its tone consistent (*looks at Olivia and Yunan* Most of the time) and will continue to do so when we get to the finale.

(2) Weekly Binge - The Contrasting Watch Experiences

Now, Matt Braly's interview talked about how Amphibia wasn't supposed to be binged fully but "enjoyed over time", and that begs the question.

What does Matt Braly mean when he says that?

Well, with a story like Amphibia, I could basically call the show episodic with an overall story. And that story is going to be scattered and progressed throughout the coming episodes that are shown and revealed.

This format has been put into place, and what occurs is that you get a different experience in watching the narrative when you only watch one episode, compared to how it effects the mass storyline if one puts it into retrospect.

So to people wanting plot, Amphibia's plot progression could be excruciating if done in a weekly format.

But to plot-focused people watching Amphibia in a binge format? The plot progression and importance of specific episodes amps up pretty well over time.

The reason why I'm saying this is because I had noticed a difference in views regarding the audience, especially if we divvy the audience into "Has binged the series up to the current episode" and "Went through the weekly episodes and the hiatus", and it's pretty surprising how different the viewpoints are.

To the people who had binged up to Escape to Amphibia, the pacing was on par as Season 2B.

The pacing of different details, characterization, and the wanting to get to specific plot points was the same as Season 2B, and the audience isn't really frustrated much on getting answers compared to the ones who had waited months and weeks to have specific questions revealed.

This also means there's more appreciation to episodes that were once harkened as filler (such as "Wally and Anne", "Hop-Popular", and "Bessie and Microangelo") due to the awaiting of specific plot points being fulfilled and also some payoff being found in the current revealed story.

Now, look at the Season Three line-up, and list the different stories that had been told in these ten episodes.

The plot points are there, some of the payoffs had been shown, and as a person who has watched the episodes weekly and then binged the whole of Season 3A, I honestly felt a lot more satisfaction and amazement at how fast the season was going compared to the former.

It is, as Matt says, a story that becomes more satisfying in a bigger picture.

However, with that said...

(3) Wait For It - The "Oh Man I Want Answers" Phenomenon

Now, the valid complaints I'd seen throughout this debacle comes through with the wanting for answers.

As storytellers, one of the things that is exchanged during storytelling is a series of promises that need to be answered by the end of the story’s conclusion. It’s a two-way street between creator and audience, where the audience needs to do the active work to understand the intention and interpretations of the creation, but the creator needs to make sure to fulfill the expectations that they created.

With episodic shows, this idea could still be applied due to the fact that shows like Amphibia do promise a story and a fulfillment of a story’s premises.

If you get a plot where it talks about trust and community being important and then removes a character from the trust and community — declaring it as the fulfilled conclusion — then either that story is a very pessimistic take about community or basically botched the entire set-up that the creator intended.

Some examples of this could be found with How I Met Your Mother, and Star Vs the Forces of Evil.

So to many watching Season Three, there comes the question of “Where is Marcy?”, “When will we see Sasha?”, and “When will we see the consequences of all the girls leaving?” and those are pretty valid questions to ask and be frustrated that there’s no current answer yet.

I can’t really change people’s minds on being impatient over when a story shall tackle their own questions, especially since it’s all an execution and pacing thing that has to be evaluated, but what I can say is that I’m going to be patient on this front.

Because based on what we know about Amphibia — where they talk about a story becoming more appreciated when the full story becomes fully on display — I can’t critique anything until the story finishes. I want to see how everything connects and twists back to the main story by the end of the day, and it’s understandable to why people would rather not commit to waiting long periods of time when it could’ve been said earlier.

However, as the audience I do trust Matt in telling me that there is more to be seen, and I will change my judgement when all the story pieces are put into place.

With everything else out of the way, let’s begin with a hypothetical situation.

(4) Narrative Focus - The Mishaps in Fandom Focus

Think of all the fandoms you’d been involved with in some way, shape, or form. Before you ever got into it, have you ever been surprised over how the fanon portrays the importance of specific characters, only to be bamboozled when the canon is a lot different?

This can vary. Examples could be found with people’s expectations of Arcane’s episode five sex scene to be raunchy and straight-up porn rather than the reality’s artistic execution, or how with Sherlock, there was a fanon character that got so popular within the fandom that people completely forgot the show’s interpretation of that character even existed.

For Amphibia, not only was there a continuous expectation and emphasis to focus on the idea that the show was serialized, but that the way they handled fanon made it sound like as if the girls were explicitly confirmed to be queer in the text, and the Plantars are kind of just there.

Now, this is the nature of fandoms. After all, the trio is one of the most well-developed out of the show, and to focus on the interesting dynamics of those characters specifically is valid. Like me, I do it all the time.

However, since fandom is one of the main ways to advertise the show through word-of-mouth, that does mean the fanon interpretation is going to be the way people are going to hear about it before they actively interact with the source material itself.

And when a person has this idea that the show is serialized, has Marcy and Sasha as the main characters (despite the fact their interactions/appearances can basically label them as major or deuteragonist characters at best), and harbors explicit text that confirms them to be queer, there will be a dissonance to what the new audience will find when they experience the show on their own.

They are going to be put-off by specific aspects of the show. They are going to be put-off with the fact that Sasha won’t be revealed until a lot later in the story — or that the frogs are the main focus, or that Anne is the main character, that certain ships don’t exist as explicit text — and ultimately have to curate their own thoughts and opinions differing to what the fanon majority says.

That’s a good thing, but it can lead to some frustration, especially within hiatuses, when a built narrative within their mind becomes dashed or not expected within reality.

That’s kind of why you have people ragging on Steven Universe not being a show focused on space opera political intrigue, when in reality Steven Universe’s setting is just a background to the metaphors of identity, love, and discovery that Steven is going through in the main show.

And that’s also why you get shows like Victorious and Miraculous Ladybug being negatively panned, but also with thriving fandoms that basically rewrote everything from the show and turned it into something that they actively like.

Sometimes fandom expectations and fanon clash with canon. This can be a good and/or bad thing based on fandom environment, and it’s just something we have to expect whenever we get invested with a show. Sometimes you want something that the story didn’t give you or hasn’t give you yet, so you create it. Sometimes you want specific AUs or ideas to have been explored rather than what you’ve gotten.

For Amphibia, the show is about Anne’s story as a focus, and the fandom responded by asking questions about other characters. One may critique Anne’s story whatever they want, but that’s how the cookie crumbles.

Sometimes fandoms act like this, you can’t really stop it full-force, and to Amphibia the only thing I can advise is finding the people in your groups that seem to understand that same thing. You can argue and discuss the validity of specific plot points, executions, and the disappointments/successes the story currently, but overall, the story is still going to continue until it is finished.

And different thoughts/opinions will be curated as time goes on.

[dimonds456]

I posted 11,498 times in 2021

92 posts created (1%)

11406 posts reblogged (99%)

For every post I created, I reblogged 124.0 posts.

I added 17,359 tags in 2021

#reblog - 11136 posts

#su - 1611 posts

#undertale - 1032 posts

#steven universe - 923 posts

#deltarune - 659 posts

#suf - 637 posts

#<3 - 371 posts

#yes - 348 posts

#steven universe future - 345 posts

#important - 297 posts

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My Top Posts in 2021

#5

So, I was playing Deltarune, and I noticed two things that I haven’t seen anyone else talking about. The first is that, during the intro when we’re about to go into school, Kris’ eye shade is normal. But, as soon as they take Toriel’s hand...

...The eye shade becomes deeper. 

I didn’t get a screenshot of this in my own playthough, since it was too late by the time I noticed, but when you first find a save file in the Darkner world, Kris’ name is already there.

See the full post

157 notes • Posted 2021-03-25 23:21:11 GMT

#4

195 notes • Posted 2021-10-03 04:47:19 GMT

#3

Something that I love about online is that you can have any username. Anything. YT6gydjks? That's your username. And someone will find you, become your friend, and make a cute nickname out of it.

YT6gydjks? Your name is now "Gyd", pronounced "Gid" Or maybe 6 or maybe YouTube as a joke if you're into that

So my name is misspelled on purpose, and my friends all call me "dims" and it is the cutest fucking thing ever and I am crying at 2:30 in the morning over it

252 notes • Posted 2021-10-19 06:34:08 GMT

#2

I love TOH. So much. But whereas before it was just a comfort show I could look forward to, now it means so much more to me.

The Hooty episode is the one that just came out, for context.

After watching that episode, my brother- who is almost 10 years old- came out to me as potentially bi, saying he's had crushes on both boys and girls before.

I don't think he EVER would have done that without this show. Without the amazing queer rep we have. He is very much a "boy's boy", and our household isn't huge on queer rep. My parents say I can be with whoever as long as they treat me right, but you can see the biases and distrust there, too, but hey, at least they're trying. But, they only told me that after I started dating a girl (I am afab, for context).

They never would have told my brother it was okay for him to date another guy. They wouldn't have ever even brought the topic up.

I grew up not knowing queers existed. I played Undertale back in 2015, and even as a 12-year-old, I never realized that Alphine was... wrong? I thought two girls dating was cool and cute, but I never even considered it before. I only realized how big that was when I hit around 15 years old- when I started to question myself.

My brother won't go through that. He is watching SU. He's watching TOH. This has been normal for his whole life because of my obsession with Undertale. He knows it's okay.

Thank you, Dana Terrace. You have given so many kids such a blessing with TOH. My brother is going to grow up more open and accepting that he would have otherwise- he doesn't have to unlearn a lot of biases I have, because I and the media we now consume are telling him it's okay. And he cannot be the only kid out there with a story like this.

Props to everyone fighting for this stuff. My brother, and so many other kids, and going to feel more accepting and and accepted than ever before. I can't thank y'all enough. <3

569 notes • Posted 2021-07-31 21:00:28 GMT

#1

I have had a revelation about Queen.

!!DELTARUNE CHAPTER 2 SPOILERS!!

You know how Queen has a weird obsession with bananas? Twice in the game, she tells you to get the bananas.

See the full post

845 notes • Posted 2021-10-07 19:30:52 GMT

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