#gonna be honest i have no desire to rewatch much else of dr who right now i really just wanted to see donna again

[lesbiten]

my friend really liked the eleventh hour!!.....she fell asleep during the beast below

[riddlerosehearts]

okay since i was obviously thinking a lot about the emperor's new groove earlier today, i'm just gonna say this even if nobody else cares: i really like malina. from the emperor's new school. and i like... her relationship with kuzco... sort of? and uh, this turned into a bit of an essay, so here's a tl;dr:

in my opinion the emperor's new school had potential to be a good sequel series, especially since it's actually pretty funny at times (mostly thanks to kronk and yzma), but instead it's an incredibly messy and inconsistent show which handles its main character poorly and constantly resets his development. malina on the other hand is a great character, and her dynamic with kuzco is also great sometimes and infuriatingly bad at other times. i like kuzco/malina in spite of all the Bad because their positive moments in the show are really endearing to me and i can see what the writers may have been going for with it. i have multiple headcanon universes where the way they met and the way their relationship started is completely different because the show made me so mad that it gave me an insatiable desire to fix it. i'm aware that this is stupid and silly but this is tumblr, where i can be as stupid and silly as i want. also, kuzco is bi. to me. <3

anyway. essay below the cut.

okay so here's the thing. i understand why people would think kuzco should've been gay and that he shouldn't have had a love interest in the emperor's new school. i have no problem with this at all and i do think it would've been very cool if the show didn't have any romance and malina was just a friend. however i like to headcanon him as bi and i did so even before i rewatched the show in 2021 (for pretty much the first time since it originally ended in 2008) and got invested in it. also, i have a million problems with the show, and malina and kuzco's relationship is at least 400,000 of them because i have such conflicted thoughts about it.

i should also say that just in case you're reading this and not aware, the emperor's new school (2006-2008) is a sequel series to the emperor's new groove which ran for two seasons on disney channel. the premise of it is that kuzco has to graduate from high school to become emperor, and if he fails then yzma, who also works at the school as "principal amzy" in a very thinly veiled disguise, will be next in line for the throne. kronk also masquerades as a high school student and works for yzma again, and in basically every episode they act out various schemes to try to stop him from graduating. kuzco lives with pacha's family instead of in his palace as he's been cut off from his royal funds, and malina is a classmate who serves as his friend and will-they won't-they love interest who finally gets together with him at the end of the show. i actually find the show pretty funny and enjoyable at times, particularly because of kronk and yzma, but i have a lot of issues with it outside of that.

malina herself is not a problem to me. she has a surprising amount of depth and focus in the series and is intelligent, hardworking, ambitious, assertive, and compassionate. she has her own dreams and goals that get to be fleshed out, she's an aspiring journalist/reporter and several episodes are dedicated to this. she's a great friend to kuzco, both because of how caring she is and because she takes absolutely no shit when he's not treating her right. she literally even calls him out for his internal monologue. she's a great character, and i honestly love her.

the problem is: the emperor's new school essentially reverts kuzco back to his personality from the beginning of the emperor's new groove despite being a sequel, and with malina it goes back and forth between him mistreating her and objectifying her and being called out for it, and their relationship showing positive development where kuzco treats her well and seems to have genuinely learned from past mistakes. we'll see him be honest with her about his worries, own up to his mistakes and admit when she's in the right, encourage her to let loose and have fun when she's being too serious for her own good, give her a thoughtful gift that shows that he listens to her and cares about her. in one episode she almost kisses him while under the effect of a love potion and he panics and stops her, saying it isn't right because she's not in control of her actions, and later when she asks him why he did that he says he wants her to like him for himself and not because of a potion. also to his credit is the fact that said love potion was unknowingly/unwillingly given to him by yzma and made any girl who looked at him fall in love with him, and while he did take advantage of this to go on a date with malina, in the end he knew exactly why letting her kiss him would've been wrong and didn't let it get that far.

but then, in between all of this and in little to no consistent or coherent order, we have kuzco constantly calling her a "hottie hot hottie" even though she clearly doesn't like it, trying to come up with a plan to get rid of yzma and one of the plans is just "put malina in a swimsuit", getting malina and kronk in trouble and not caring, not wanting to dance with her because he can't handle the fact that she has a single pimple, barely being able to accept no for an answer, and just being way too much of an asshole while also constantly flirting with her--and malina is always patient and understanding, but i don't recall a single moment in the show where she hurt kuzco's feelings and he was the one who had to be patient and show that he'd stick with her no matter what. and she did have flaws! she could be bossy and reckless and a bit hypocritical, and things could've been done with this to make their relationship more equal and show more growth on kuzco's part. also... a few episodes after the one where he explicitly laid out why he didn't want to use a love potion to make malina like him, there was another episode where he intentionally used a machine of yzma's to split every part of her personality into a separate person so he could date "smoochy malina", who was obsessively in love with him and who he ended up breaking up with because her obsession was too much and she wasn't herself anymore. this is one of many examples in the show of kuzco having to learn the same or a similar lesson multiple times.

it's all just... very frustrating because they have so many moments that are, to me at least, genuinely cute and show potential for a good dynamic, especially in season 2. i feel like malina's whole personality is, in theory, a great match for kuzco's in an "opposites attract" sort of way. and i believe she likes him because she can see the good in him and is able to relax and have fun with him, and that that is what the writers were going for. that's what we see on the occassion that their relationship is written decently. but because any and all development was constantly being reset, it made it too frequently seem like she just felt obligated to give him a chance because he constantly flirted with her. and also because at one point, when malina's friend yatta asks why she would have a crush on someone as selfish and smug as kuzco, she spends the rest of the episode trying to come up with a reason and what does she end up saying? "sometimes people don't understand their own feelings, they just feel them". ugh. there are several episodes where the plot boils down to "malina stresses out too much/is too uptight and kuzco helps her relax/lighten up" but instead of using that, she has to essentially say she doesn't know why she likes him, she just does?

all this to say, i guess, that i really really wish kuzco and malina's relationship had been written consistently well because when it was, it was good and had potential. unfortunately, more often than not, it was badly written largely because kuzco was badly written and never allowed to properly grow as a person all throughout the show.

and what i did with all of these conflicted feelings while i was revisiting the show back in september 2021 was, i took my frustration toward the majority of the emperor's new school and my enjoyment of certain elements of it, and i wrote down a ton of headcanons on how i would've fixed it. i already think the very premise of the show is nonsense (literally why would kuzco suddenly need to go back to high school?? why does he act like he learned nothing?? they even go back and forth on whether he's actually still the emperor or not), and there are several elements of it that undeniably break continuity with the movie. so i have an AU in my mind where literally none of that happens but kuzco and malina still meet a few months after the movie and, because malina doesn't believe that kuzco has actually changed, they keep encountering each other and having a petty rivalry for weeks before coming to an understanding and becoming friends.

i also have an AU where the entirety of the emperor's new school is, in fact, an in-universe show--which is somewhat supported by all the show's meta jokes and the fact that there's literally an episode where kuzco gets fanmail for the show. and in this AU, everyone is playing themselves in a heavily fictionalized version of kuzco's life. kuzco and malina are good friends who thought it would be hilarious if she played the role of his love interest who he had a ridiculously over the top obnoxious crush on, but then, oops, guess who developed an actual crush on her while filming!

and, even still, i have a bit of a fix-it AU where the show did happen because despite the premise being kind of nonsensical, i could've accepted it as long as it meaningfully expanded on kuzco's character development from the end of the emperor's new groove. if i were writing this show it would've been about how kuzco is trying his best to be kinder, to pass classes he never had to worry about before, to still keep up with royal duties, and be around people his own age and have something resembling a normal life for the first time, while also dealing with emotional distress and hidden insecurities and fears that stem from having had his entire worldview completely shattered by the events of the movie. his relationship with malina still could've had its ups and downs and when things went wrong because of his mistakes, he could've truly learned from that and made up for it. a tv series about kuzco going to high school really could've been so much better, been something that kids could've learned good lessons from and that might not have been mostly forgotten today.

obviously i know that none of my headcanons and AUs change the fact that the show is a mess and kuzco and malina's actual canon dynamic is a mess. and although i wish malina as a character wasn't so forgotten and the better aspects of the emperor's new school (which don't relate only to her--the series also contains a lot of sweet found family moments between pacha's family and kuzco!) also weren't so forgotten, i understand why they are. and maybe that's for the best. i feel like i lost so many brain cells watching this show and yet my remaining brain cells insist on spending way too much time thinking about it anyway.