#gosh tho there is a parallel women's-centric narrative version of this story...

[variousqueerthings]

so i watched cobra kai

and i started writing a whole post about the good, the bad, and the "idk is this too personal an approach to the show?" and then got to a point and realised "nah, life is actually too short" so what im doing instead is just a little bit of what i feel upon its having ended, in a positive light:

i watched the karate kid movies because of this show and those movies and characters mean an awful awful lot to me. daniel larusso moving and having trouble fitting in and finding someone like miyagi who takes him under his wing, well... kid-me would've liked that to have happened. we all deserve someone like mr miyagi. and likewise mr miyagi was found by daniel (in fact, arguably, daniel is the one who initiates their relationship in multiple ways). it's never too late to face the things that have hurt you in whatever way that means. the past is not forever. good things can arrive at any point in our lives (sometimes in the shape of a mouthy italian kid)

cobra kai now is the place where i first became more embedded in a fandom. so far in my life ive never been as closely involved in a fandom as for cobra kai on such a long timeframe -- it may not seem long compared to some things, and i myself have other works that started far earlier and will probably last for a much longer time, but this show felt like being a part of a community and it takes a lot for me to feel close like that. i wrote a whole darn screenplay with a person i met because i started watching cobra kai. i made, i believe, some permanent fandom friends whom i am also watching other things with and simply sharing pieces of our lives with one another. i ran an event for four years (first year on my own, don't.... don't do that.... even though it was fun..... don't....) and i became way more confident in my fic writing. i was just more present and there is nothing so far that has compared, and even if something one day does, cobra kai fandom will always be the benchmark

as for the show itself, i enjoyed the themes it presented (including the ones id argue it had no idea what to do with). i enjoyed the characters, and i especially came to enjoy the new characters whom i initially wasn't watching for at all. they had something interesting to poke at, and they carried the legacy of the OG characters really well and im excited for them to have great careers. xolo mariduena, i cannot help but mention as a standout. feels like ive watched him grow up, it's proud picture-taking vibes all around

want to give a special shout-out to the woman/girls of this story, who i think have an awful lot of depth that has yet to be properly mined into and drawn out in transformative works. from sam -- who on the one hand remained throughout the clearest inheritor of daniel's major themes and came out of the story as someone who would have made miyagi proud (and certainly made me go "that's my girl!"), but who never got to explore the themes of (enforced) femininity and the boxes she was consistently (on a meta level) never given the opportunity to break out of -- to characters like carmen, who has so much past and character, but was ultimately pushed in her entirety into "you made me better and you'll be a great mother" as her sole purpose within the main story, to kim da-eun who was a standout of the latter seasons (in my top three reasons not to write them off) and whose story in no way feels finished, to zara, a villain who was never quite given the chance to be perceived as villainous as she really was (that narrative with robby was... yikes... but it could've been a really interesting exploration and it still can!) or on the flipside/additionally given more depth like her co-fighter axel was -- aisha (my sweet aisha), devon, tory, moon and yasmin (who personally became more interesting to me once we got to have more female characters on the show to contrast their presence, but who read to me like meta-level beards who deserve to be explored as doing... more), rosa diaz, amanda, cousin vanessa, laura lawrence, shannon, -- the kumiko, ali, jessica, and lucille cameos... im sure there's someone ive forgotten, but these were all very fun characters who all deserved a little-to-a-lot-more than what they were offered in the show. but im glad to have spent time with them. certainly they've made me think a lot more about the powers of lesbianism to straighten out (as it were) a narrative

im pleased i got to spend more time with kreese and silver. two of my favourite villains of all time. thank you for bringing TIG out of retirement like that. thank you for sexy old man kove. thank you for the toxic yaoi. these writers may not have known what they had, but we sure fuckn did!

i hope, more than anything else, that ralph macchio and billy zabka enjoyed this sojourn down memory lane. while it's harder for me to talk about their characters without a little bit of bitterness, because ultimately their original story was the one i felt got mangled in some of the choices of this show, they also got some really beautiful moments in there and im especially happy to have had their characters in the end of s6 getting to voice the baggage that they were carrying all these years. both ralph and billy did an amazing job in those scenes

and i'll leave it there, i think. im glad i watched it. i dont know if i'll find my way back to some of the energy that existed before, but whether it becomes something i don't really interact with again, or if i circle back around to some of the unfinished fics one day, was glad that i got into it to begin with, because of all the above reasons