#i just think fandom can get really bogged down in the negativity aspects and i feel super refreshed when i can talk about this stuff with

[bereft-of-frogs]

just my two cents/unasked for advice: if a fandom is getting so stressful that it’s to the point where it’s no longer fun, all the usual pieces of advice apply - unfollowing people / blocking tags / focusing on what you do enjoy / creating the content you wish to see -

but also, it is so worth it to have someone outside the fandom, or who participates in the fandom in a completely different way, to talk about this stuff with and just enjoy the thing. having someone who doesn’t really participate in the fandom can be so helpful in breaking out of some of the negative spirals fandoms can get into, to offer new perspectives outside of the fandom echo chambers, and honestly just have fun.

an example: it was so much fun every Friday night to finish the new episode of Wandavision, and before coming back online, text with my brother about how much we were enjoying it and how much we love Wanda and Vision, and speculating about fan theories just for the fun of it. And this week, he rewatched Infinity War and Endgame - Endgame being, as you all know, the one MCU entry I actively dislike - but hearing him talk about the things he liked reminded me of various things I did like about it. I go for walks with my friend who’s much more a comics fan and we talk about the podcast she’s been listening to that explains theories. It can just be so refreshing to share this with people who aren’t active participants in the online fandom.

It’s just nice sometimes to be able to take a step back away from all the overthinking and accumulated critiques and just...have fun.

I’m not saying that you like...can’t find enjoyment or fun in the critiques itself. I do love meta and critique and finding people who share my grievances with various creative decisions. But I just observe that...there’s been a lot of stress lately and I wanted to share one thing that has been significantly improving my mood towards fandom. And like I said at the start, all other advice still applies. But if you’re really feeling down about the MCU, or find that the only thing you ever talk or think about is the grievances, I would highly recommend finding someone who unironically enjoys these movies/shows without participating in the fandom, and just letting yourself get lost in some uncomplicated enjoyment. If all you’re doing is talking about how upset you are about things - it might help to take a step back.

I also say that as someone who has several ill-advised salty fandom posts stashed in my drafts loll. I’m not say to entirely give up on the discourse (tm) but I think having a healthy balance between criticizing and having fun is a good way to keep enjoying fandom things and not get bogged down in the negativity.

this has been my 2 cents thank you for your time XD

[raeynbowboi]

Animation Analysis: Centaurworld

When I first saw the trailers, I initially wrote off Centaurworld as a mindless, stupid kid’s show. You know the sort. The kind that talks down to its audience and treats them like they’re braindead morons. Like Teen Titans Go. The entertainment equivalent of dangling keys in front of your baby to distract them. But I’m surprised to find I enjoyed... aspects of it. Wammawink and Horse had a great foil dynamic and their duets were often really compelling character explorations. I also found myself laughing at Glendale and her kleptomania bit a lot. Glendale was easily the funniest character by a wide margin, followed by Wammawink and Horse. The final villain of the Nowhere King and his backstory was also quite engaging. He felt like a tragic mix of Beast and the Little Mermaid, loving his Beauty from afar, and changing to be with her. I found all of these elements to work and be compelling. The music was also really good, having an almost disney-level quality in some of them. The show was also clearly written as a musical, as like a normal musical, there would often be reprised versions, or repetition of instrumentals from one song in another, which makes it less of a show with songs, and more of an animated musical where the music strings together quite nicely. However, there were other aspects that bogged the show down as a whole. I won’t knock the tone, since that’s going to be more subjective, but if you asked me what the actual theme of the story was, the only one I can really point to is Horse changing and having to learn to love and accept who she’s become, and also kinda sorta reads like an allegory for being trans or coming out as gay? You’re noticeably different, but hope not to lose the people you knew before you made that switch. Other than that, the only other theme I really came away with was maybe the juxtaposition of cutesy silly cartoons next to dramatic serious ones, trying to prove that even a silly cutesy cartoon can get dark and complex. But this is sort of where the show falls flat a bit to me, at least. It may have these ideas or themes like togetherness or acceptance, but doesn’t really explore these ideas thoroughly enough to make it clear that’s the moral we’re supposed to take away from the story. Yes, connections and family is certainly important, but why they’re important is never explored. Not in any way that doesn’t come off as comedic. The scene where Durpleton meets Chet certainly does a decent job at demonstrating found family, but it’s immediately undercut by the comedy of Wammawink arriving on a helicopter and Zulius appearing out of nowhere. That’s my other issue with the show. The characters are rather static. Aside from Horse and maybe Wammawink, nobody really changes by the end of the story. Durpleton has an arc about becoming a father, but it comes off more like Stabby developed Stockholm Syndrome, especially because his sudden change into a weird chibi baby form is never explained. Glendale is still a Klepto, Wammawink is still an overbearing hyperprotective guardian, Zulius is completely disregarded as a joke because we never see his backstory and he just... makes up with Sublime effortlessly, to the point where it basically becomes a non-issue. The only character I felt shows some growth is Ched, expect it’s not so much that he grows, as much as we learn his origins. And once we learn his origins, he keeps acting like an obnoxious tool, which fails to redeem his shitty personality. He’s not a Tsundere, he’s just an obnoxious bully who negs Horse at every opportunity. Some of the ending is also slightly contrived. The purple-haired lady (I think she has a name but I swear they NEVER say it in the show, they just call her ‘my lady’ or ‘princess’.) just knows to stab her husband, even though we’re not really sure how much she knows about who he is. We sure did have time for a dumb fandom/con plotline but not time to flesh out and actually explore her relationship with the general. Because we literally never see any part of their actual marriage. If you’re just looking at the flashbacks in sequential order, we see her marry the general, her lead the elk out of the dungeon through the sewers, and then the three of them together in the rift. That is literally all we see of that phase of her life. There is no indication of how she felt, or how she came to learn what was going on. We don’t get to see that change of mind, that ‘aha’ moment, which causes the Last Lullaby to feel weak. It lacks the weight it should have because we barely know who she is as a character. She’s in 4 episodes, and most of her screen time she just kind of... exists. We don’t really know how she feels or what she wants. And that’s sort of where Centaurworld falls flat. It spends so much time being whacky and colorful it forgets to really develop its characters. Which is why I have to sadly put Zulius into the box of bad queer representation. He’s just a joke character. He’s comedic relief. He’s just a bad gay stereotype with no deeper nuance or deeper character. He’s a surface-level cliché, and that’s so disappointing for a show that seems to want to present itself as progressive and open-minded. But being a gay stereotype is 99.9% of his character. Season 2 is also rather aimless until the finale movie. There’s this subplot of Horse needing a win, and to feel like her decision to stay was the right choice, but the main plot surrounding this subplot are kind of boring. The Horse thing is great and makes terrific sense for her character, but the episodes that facilitate this arc are rather uninteresting. Glendale helps a bunch of arctic centaurs with their anxiety, but I can’t really say this feels like any sort of conclusion to an arc. There was never this fixation on Glendale being hyper fragile to the point that she broke under any kind of pressure and would never be the type to lead or inspire others. She had running gags of anxiety and nervous break downs, but they don’t feel resolved by this episode. It just sort of comes off as a weird joke that Glendale has actually managed to turn a bad situation around to her benefit. At the end of the day, Centaurworld was... interesting. I’d be willing to give it a B- if only because there are plenty of shows more boring, soulless, and lacking any form of identity than this one. But character arcs stall out, and some side characters who feel like they should be explored end up sidelined. I would have bumped the show up to a B if it had committed to the major character death. But no, stupid kid show logic dictates we must treat a death scene with the utmost seriousness and then immediately undercut it by going “just kidding”. It’s to the point now when a character acts like they’re dying, I’m just looking at my watch wondering how long they’re going to milk this before playing an Uno Reverse on the whole thing. Centaurworld is honestly a mixed bag. It has good music and the main character is interesting, as well as the villain. But it’s also kinda rushed, and filled with side characters who are either stagnant or underdeveloped, leaving it as a decent and memorable show, but held back by lack of depth and focus on further details. I’m satisfied with giving it a B-. It’s above average. But, I doubt I’ll rewatch it more than once or twice in the future. Kinda like She-Ra. It was fine, but I’m probably not going to go out of my way to rewatch it again and again now that I know how it ends. Would I recommend it to others? Maybe, but they’d have to be people that I know would appreciate the show’s tone and aesthetic.

[massive-mythopoetic-mashup]

An update and a dilemma regarding the great work:

So it’s been two months since I did any RWBY writing of note. This is mostly due to a great deal of difficulty in my personal life, but I’ve kept that out of this blog because I really want people to know what they’re getting when they follow this: allusions and references in RWBY. Also, with the way my life is, if I did talk about it here it would completely overwhelm everything else with nonstop sob stories. So I think that’s going to stay that way.

That said, my journey to understanding RWBY has been intensely personal and an emotional marathon, and that aspect of my life I do want to be able to share here at times- I just want to be able to contextualize it postively and keep it related to RWBY. So, there will be some mentions of my personal life, but it’s going to be very limited in scope, and I will continue to strive to present objective analysis of RWBY and clearly distinguish between what I believe are trustworthy facts and my own personal opinion. For those times when I get too excited and over gush, I apologize.

Getting back to the point: not writing about RWBY for so long has been distressing. First of all, it calls into doubt my ability to complete a full description of the G.U.N. theory. But secondly, I’m starting to think that it’s just bad for my mental health. I have a problem with polarity: I tend to take in massive amounts of information, but express only a tiny fraction of that. RWBY is not just not an exception to this but an extreme example of it; in doing research I have read and watched and listened to many, many things, and all of that is banging around in my head wanting to get out. Keeping it inside for so long causes it to fester and rot, like a dream deferred. I’ve been thinking of writing about RWBY as something I can get back to when things are better, but now I’m starting to think that writing about RWBY is more a step on the journey to make things better. So I’m going to be making an effort to get back into things, and produce a steady if possibly slow stream of writing. Keep in mind that ‘writing’ does not necessarily mean ‘posting’.

This raises an ongoing problem I have yet to resolve. I really, really need feedback on what I’m writing for motivation. But I’ve come to believe that the G.U.N. theory must be presented formally, in large interconnected chunks, in order to be both comprehensible and compelling. Ideally, I’ve wanted to have the entire absurdly massive theory written out before beginning to post it, because I’ve consistently underestimated the amount of time necessary to write about each piece I’ve tackled, and this has lead to several false starts on what I have expected to be a series of posts close together on related material as I got bogged down in the middle. I really, really don’t want this to keep happening, as I find it extremely discouraging to miss my own self-imposed deadlines, and I think spacing out posts irregularly causes readers to lose the thread connecting them. But it’s also clear that it’s completely unrealistic for me to expect to be able to maintain motivation to write so much material in a vacuum before sharing it with the fandom.

I’ve found one partial solution to a part of this problem: I’ve begun focusing on outlining the description of the theory as a whole rather than letting myself tackle sections completely independently. The individual pieces of writing I’ve produced so far, while acceptable on their own, have ended up disjointed and lacking a clear connection as a whole, and it makes understanding the G.U.N. theory very difficult and dependent on someone having the determination to dig up and then muddle through a large disorganized heap of posts that aren’t even collected together on a single internet service. However, I think that by first constructing a detailed roadmap for the entire theory description, and then constantly keeping that outline in mind, it should be possible to work on pieces covering individual subtopics within the theory while still being able to maintain a clear relation between them and the rest of the theory and developing a single through-line for the entire document that will make it pleasant to read and accessible to the general fandom.

This comes, finally, to my dilemma. This is premature, but I feel that emotionally I need to resolve it now in order to be able to work without distraction: the scheduling of posts. Setting a regular schedule or any kind of firm deadlines has proven to be inadvisable, so this essentially comes down to, “How big a chunk of this should I aim to have before posting it?” One thing that I lament is my hesitance to do informal research and discussion over Tumblr, as I think many people would enjoy it and find it enlightening, but I fear small fragments would just confuse and even possibly upset people out of context, and I have a great deal of anxiety over some rough incomplete description of some of the theory’s more impactful elements becoming widely propagated prematurely. These fears have kept this blog much quieter than it could be, and made me appear deceptively inactive at times. My thoughts on individually posting even thoroughly planned out and proofread pieces of the full description of the theory are similar, but I’m aware I have a tendency to be irrationally worried about these things. So, finally, I’d like to ask a question of those of you who have been following me for some time, and have been already exposed to major portions of the theory:

Do you feel that breaking up the theory into posts spaced out potentially multiple weeks apart, with each post focusing on a single major alluded to work, will negatively impact the theory’s presentation? Keep in mind that this means I would very likely have to separately address Dorothy Gale, Achilles, Cinderella, Darth Vader, and St. Catherine each in their own post, in that sequence, with the main wham coming in the Cinderella post. (The Jinni of the Lamp would likely be tucked into the Darth Vader post.) Would it muffle the impact of the theory for people to have to wait between these sections? Would readers encountering part of the theory be willing to follow links at the head of each post directing them back to the beginning of the series and then work their way back through the posts in the recommended reading order? This issue is very important to me, and it would mean a lot to me if those of you familiar with the G.U.N. theory could weigh in with your opinions based on your own experiences with it. Also, if you’ve actually read all of this, then thank you so much for your time and for having the patience to slog through my complaining.