#okay so what? perhaps they’re rewriting it? perhaps they’re reducing his importance? why does it matter so much that THAT be his arc

[slicedblackolives]

insane how much people are tied to a fictional teenager’s misogyny. no one cared when they cast a white actor or whatever else many changes they make but the second Netflix says they’re making sokka less of a piece of shite it’s an insult to the story because you’re just so fucking attached to the “redemption” of misogynistic men and boys by women and girls !!!

[roomofshitposts]

Thoughts & Opinions on episode 122?

episode 122 came into my house, took all of my bread, and desiccated my crops ,,, what the fuck, like 50 separate things happened and all of them reveal some new shitshow that’s been happening behind the scenes

i’m gonna go over some of the bigger points & my theories around them under the cut 

don appeared in the medieval times

okay so there’s two possible ways to see this event: don appeared in tori’s era before he was imprisoned by the shadows, or he manifested there somehow after he was trapped in the ROS.

-> if this happened before his imprisonment, then i think don had started travelling around time to help others with his abilities after attempting to save his family from the anomalies, and gradually grew more corrupt as he tested the limits of his powers, or started losing his mind as things he did in the past started having butterfly-effect style impacts on the future that he had to try and fix over and over. 

this could possibly mean that don started a paradox where he himself introduced anomalies to the world by meddling in the past, which amplified the number of anomalies in the present and ultimately looped back to giving him his abilities and killing his family in his original time, though it does still leave a blank as to what exactly started this real-world cycle of anomalies in the first place (who pulled that ‘thread in the fabric of time and space’ don mentioned? how does he even know what happened?). 

anyways, don’s interference grew to a point where it had become dangerous to the fabric of reality, so the shadows imprisoned him in a realm beyond time and space, the room of swords, to contain his abilities (perhaps reducing his ability to rewrite reality to be limited to changing one day’s events) or maybe punish him, with the knowledge that by trying to help others, he’d doomed them to becoming anomalies and being imprisoned themselves.

things that point to don being in tori’s era before he got yoinked to space jail: in the flashback where he tries to save his family, he has a mustache (bigger than his current one), and he could have grown that out into a beard as he travelled. he looks pretty damn evil in tori’s memory so maybe at this point he’s pretty much lost it, and he has a full beard, similar to how it looked when he was first shown in the room of swords during the season 1 finale, so maybe this is just about when the shadows took notice and imprisoned him. 

-> if this happened after his imprisonment, unlike the above where we can probably assume he started jumping around time soon after he tried to save his family (if he succeeded maybe he felt that he could help others too, if he failed maybe the guilt drove him to try and save others from the same fate), it’s harder to pinpoint when he might’ve manifested into tori’s time. 

if we go off of the theory that the ros exists in cycles, repeating its objective with the same (or new) voyagers each time, and the constants are don, the black box holder(gyrus) and the shadows, it’s likely that don somehow got out of the room of swords in an earlier cycle. he used his powers to manipulate reality in tori’s time, and this resulted in her gaining her own abilities as an anomaly, sending her to the room of swords.

maybe don was trapped in the ros for trying to rewrite reality to save his family and was imprisoned by the shadows. thinking this was unfair, he tried to escape, but failed. he then realized that maybe he couldn’t break out, but somehow (i can’t guess what method he managed to use ghfdsjfj), he could still affect the outside world. he started out by wanting to help people and protect them from the anomalies that happened in their era, but this resulted in the people he helped becoming anomalies and they would get trapped in the room of swords as well, both because of their abilities and to remind don to Stop Doing That. this eventually resulted with don slowly losing his mind and morals, hence why he began as such a warm, friendly person, but later showed himself to be so determined to escape the room of swords that he’s willing to kill nephthys and poison hinju.

things that point to don being in tori’s time after he got yoinked to space jail: his harmonica. in the episodes that show events taking place before the main timeline, and most notably in the flashback where don explains how his family died, he’s always shown using a guitar to channel his powers. he’s only started using the harmonica to try and kill nephthys, and only in recent episodes, in the present timeline. maybe the harmonica is an item he found that can channel less power than the guitar, which makes it weaker but much more discreet so that other ‘meta’ beings (shadows and maybe gyrus) don’t notice him slipping out of the ros or using it to switch boss swords with fakes, murder people, etc, and he keeps the harmonica secret and only uses it when he’s doing shady shit.

DON STOLE A FUCKING BABY???? HELLO????? WHAT THE GENUINE FUCK????

i’m going to elaborate on this point later but like what the absolute shit happened there

gyrus is possibly queen amelia’s son (or at least, her descendant)

so like. hi this entire plot point drove the discord nuts

first off, like,,,, gyrus is descended from (presumably) european royalty? i know that toon stated that gyrus was of korean descent and he’s shown to be able to speak in korean but i mean it’s also possible that the foreign king that queen amelia married, was from east asia, and their marriage was entirely out of necessity to lift the curse on her kingdom. the king dipped tf out after the ceremony to rule his own lands. 

don took the baby (assuming the baby is gyrus) to gyrus’ era, and this displacement amplified a chain of anomalies that began to deteriorate reality, leading to the world don describes as gyrus’ in episode 109 (’catastrophic anomalies are commonplace’ ‘whole worlds destroyed without warning’). in addition, don notes in the same episode that gyrus had ‘kind relatives that [took him] in and [gave him] a life of comfort’, which means that either his parents died on his home planet, or he’d never known his parents-- which would be the case if he was a baby don sTOLE FROM ANOTHER ERA.

alternatively, the baby isn’t gyrus, but rather they were gyrus’ ancestor, who don brought to a time before gyrus’ era. that displacement started creating disastrous anomalies. gyrus’ parents died on his home planet and his relatives took him in, as per don’s words. gyrus leaves home to become an astronaut and joins captain iro’s crew. bing bang boom

don’s bottle of shadow juice

what the hell even is this. people on the discord have theorized that this is the origin of gyrus’ inner shadow or his black box, but. how did don. get a shadow. in a bottle. as far as i know, he’s unable to influence shadows directly so he can’t sing ‘get in the bottle or else with this shoe i will throttle [you]’, but also the shadows are his jailors, why would a) don help them by giving them a host or b) the shadows help him by complying. do they both think they’re being slick and using the other gfhdjgfdhgh

and if it’s the black box, how did don bottle it. why didn’t he just take it. what is going on. 

either way this might be another paradox situation where don found out the origin of gyrus’ shadow abilities/black box/event horizon breaking point and realized he had to take part in getting events to line up so this could happen. so he essentially manipulated reality to ensure that he could get a powerful ally that would hold the black box and defend it from the shadows, and who would be the second constant to appear in the ros (and first voyager), so don could try again and again to gain his trust and get a pawn for his plan against the shadows.

trouble in paradise the black box

ok rip to black box gyrus i really liked him as a character and as a design and he was fun to shitpost about but there’s no goddamn way he’s going to survive this season. he’s been weakened from losing memories and control over the black box, and i’m pretty sure the shadow dragged him off to kill him. plus kodya being yanked back to the black box and the shadows of the people lost during the incident being released means that black box gyrus has either died or lost the command room/a significant amount of control.

and even if it wasn’t for the fact that the situation is pretty much spelling out black box gyrus is doomed, his plot relevance is also wearing out. it’s the same ‘pupil must outgrow their mentor so the mentor dies’ that happened with kodya but this time black box gyrus genuinely has no more purpose to serve after this arc. 

like,,, kodya has plot threads (like nephthys and his own backstory) that exist outside of gyrus. black box gyrus does not exist separately from gyrus. anything he can offer to his reset self, can be found in the black box’s memories once he’s done training him, and they’ve unlocked all the beacon memories. just about the last thing bb!gyrus needs to do is reconcile with kodya and relinquish the black box to gyrus, and then all his story points are technically over. that doesn’t mean i don’t want him to stick around, he’s a well-written character and i am bonkers for his stupid emo outfit, but i don’t know why toon would keep him around after setting up all of the shadow-taking-control-of-the-black-box business and bringing current gyrus to this point in the story.

SHADOW CIB I’M SHAKIGN AND CRUING

y’all i know this is irrelevant and i’m just going 👁👁 because it’s cib but it’s CIB and i’m hoping this means that she’ll become a more recurring background character, in shadow form or in flashbacks, since she seems to be really important to ragan and she’s the second voyager. and maybe there’ll be a way to save people from shadow death without gyrus losing all his limbs. god i hope

[sweet-star-cookie]

Ideas for a Rewrite of Pixar’s Onward

So I finally watched Onward, unfortunately not in theatres because of [REDACTED] but what can you do? Gotta be honest, it didn’t wow me. :/ The world seemed flat and boring, and a lot of the tropes and story beats felt really played out and done before, even within other Pixar movies. That said, fantasy themed worlds and the potential creativity therein is a topic that is super close to my heart, and even when the trailer dropped for this movie I wasn’t super impressed with what it had to offer. From the setup of the plot itself, I’ll admit that I was skeptical of it from the outset, perhaps a bit more than usual.

I have my issues with the world building of this film from a visual design standpoint as well, but I’ll save that for another time. For now I want to discuss how I would approach rewriting this film to make it an overall stronger product in terms of story and character development. Obviously there will be spoilers for the actual plot of the movie in addition to my thoughts, so fair warning there.

Okay so when it comes to building a new world for your characters, regardless of its themes or genre, it is important to establish how much of that world pertains to the story you want to tell. As in, are you telling a story about the world itself via your characters, or are you telling a story about the characters with this world as a backdrop? It might seem like a small distinction, but a world’s rules (or lack thereof) can easily divert an audience’s focus within a story. I believe the current version of Onward is an example of the latter, but with a few complications of the former that muddles the direction of the plot a bit. The sense of scope for this film seems to go half-and-half instead, but we’ll get to that later. At the beginning of the movie, we are told about how the world of Onward followed more closely with what we would call a fantasy world; wizards, mythical creatures, knights, a magical staff, the works. But in a pretty rapid-fire scene, we are shown how modern technologies began to usurp the use of magic, thus leading to the modern day fantasy world that is the setting for the rest of the film. Despite how quickly this plays out as a sort of prologue for the movie, I do believe this is a fine set up for a movie like this...

If the movie was about the world.

But as we know, it’s about Ian and Barley’s quest to bring their father back, and almost exclusively focuses on their family. This too is a perfectly good setup, but the movie somehow ends up with both, and it leads to a lot more questions than answers as a result. The prologue setup generates a lot of questions about the world itself, such as the use and discovery of magic, that do have an effect later on in the story, but the implementation of magic itself does not have clearly defined rules about who can use it and why. Modern day law enforcement seems to govern this world, yet any use of magic does not seem to have any bearing on that. Magic clearly still exists in this world, but the audience does not know when or how it appears. Where does magic come from? What is the scarcity of it? Can you get arrested for using magic? Do people who use or own magical items get special treatment? Are magical items more valuable and therefore need to be regulated? How common are they? All creatures in this world appear to be inherently magical, or at least possess abilities from their magic-based ancestors, but seem to have “forgotten” those abilities over time. Both the pixies and the manticore have wings, but it seems that only the pixies need magic to use them. Why? Historical landmarks like the one Barley tries to protect in the film are viewed as passive history, no longer holding much significance. And even the manticore’s map is reduced to a placemat at a children’s restaurant, so the preservation of this history does not appear to be a priority for this society. Moreover, these questions also directly correlate to the main protagonists, namely, why can Ian wield magic and Barley cannot? If Wilden (the dad) could or used to wield magic, could Laurel (the mom) do it too? Are their different kinds of magic? Is there a hierarchy to how powerful one’s magic can be? Ian becomes better at using his father’s staff over time in the film, but how he is able to do so via the staff or Barley’s instruction is pretty unclear. Now, all of these are questions are actually ones that wouldn’t need to be answered necessarily, but only if the film reeled itself in a bit and its scope was a lot clearer. Many other fantasy or alternate world stories have a much smaller scope that doesn’t need to ask these questions of the audience when it doesn’t pertain to the story they’re telling. An excess of world building does not matter if it has no bearing on the current story being told. A good example is in Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, where the establishment of toons existing in the real world is the entire crux of the story, but how toons became a part of the real world is not explained, and doesn’t need to be for the direction of the plot and characters. You are introduced to the world with only the information you need, and you are taken through the story with that specific set of information. The progression of the plot does not rely on answering the question of why toons exist in this world, so it does not address it. Onward could have achieved this too, if the film didn’t explicitly ask these unanswered questions within its own plot. If the film focused solely on the Lightfoot family without the prologue, all of these questions about the world wouldn’t need to be answered. This is not a “magic was usurped by technology” story. This is a “how do I get my Dad back?” story. Which honestly begs the question:

Why does this have a fantasy setting?

With how much this film goes half-and-half on the relevance of the world to its characters, the more it seems like a coat of fantasy paint slapped on top of a story that could be told with real humans, or any other kind of creature for that matter. The fact that these characters are elves, pixies, trolls, etc. is inconsequential to the storytelling. Magic aside, if you replaced all of the fantasy races and locations with real-life equivalents, what would change about the story or its progression? In fact, if you removed the idea of magic entirely and replaced it with a series of non-magical challenges that Ian faces on his quest, you would have the same movie, just without the fantasy filter. All of the locations in the movie are not inherently fantastical, the school, the gas station, the tavern, even the vehicles and animals in the film, all have really obvious real-world equivalents, which diminishes the fantasy theme even further. Nothing separates them from these parallels. Even the main magic system is an equivalent to DnD and other tabletop roleplaying games in this world, and isn’t viewed as anything more despite becoming a prominent source of power for the protagonists. Again, having the world take a backseat to the characters is not inherently a bad thing, but if you’re going to take the time to establish how this world began and changed over time, then that has to be relevant to the story at hand in some way, otherwise you’re just establishing something that ultimately doesn’t go anywhere. So how would I fix this? Well, at this point I feel like you’d have to pick one of the two halves that this story tries to weave together: either open up the world and the relevance of magic within it, or focus exclusively on the Lightfoot family and their relationships. If it were me, I’d pick the latter, because to me the best parts of the film were the parts that focused on the family, especially the relationship between Ian and Barley. The world of Onward really isn’t that interesting as it stands, so putting more focus on that without a complete overhaul probably isn’t a good idea.

To start, I would keep the part about Ian wanting to learn more about his Dad, as well as Barley’s memories and misgivings about not saying goodbye to him. This, like most Pixar movies, is the strongest part and serves as the emotional core of the film. Both of them have their individual reasons for wanting to see their father again, and those motivations can move and change over the course of the narrative. But, have Ian tie his own identity to finding his father, as if his father is the one person who can tell him who he needs to be. A missing piece of him that only his father can fill, and this desire becomes more and more desperate as the film progresses and they run closer to that 24 hour time frame. Those earlier scenes about others who knew and admired his father could help corroborate these feelings, where Ian wishes to carry on the legacy of his father. Perhaps Barley could have similar feelings, as if being called a “screw up” throughout his life made him question the legacy of his father and his relationship with him. A “I don’t know who I am + believe in yourself” message has been done to death, but the execution could still make the ending of this film that much stronger. When the climax happens and Ian is unable to see his father before the sunset, THAT is when you want him to have the Act 3 Pixar realization about the overall message of the film, and how he had a father figure through Barley the whole time. Maybe there’s a point where Barley is hanging onto Ian in the rubble and time is running out, and he tells Barley to go see their father while he still has the chance. Have the internal realization be that Ian doesn’t need to see his father to know who he is anymore, as the journey he went on throughout the movie already gave him that answer, thus allowing him to let go and let Barley get his closure instead. Some of these points do exist in the current version of the film, but I feel that this slight reframe could strengthen it enough so that it is a common theme throughout the movie.

The subplot with the mother and Officer Colt is a strange one, further complicated by the inclusion of Corey the manticore as a secondary character, but I think it could have rounded out the story even more with a bit of work. If there really needed to be a stepparent role for this movie, I feel like Corey could have filled that role while also providing the map for Ian and Barley’s quest (I know getting a Disney Gay is like pulling teeth at this point but hear me out). There is a fairly decent amount of time spent in the movie regarding Laurel’s role in protecting her sons, especially when she recruits Corey into finding them. And with the scene at the tavern, Corey already has a decent idea of what the boys are like, which could make for good chances to bond with Laurel. There’s a good line in the movie that I feel really goes under-utilized, where Corey describes the boys’s assertiveness at the tavern. Laurel assumes she’s talking about Barley, but she’s really talking about Ian, and this surprises her. This is a really good way of showing that another’s perception of one’s character is not the whole picture. With the climax reframed to better focus on Ian’s sense of identity, this could have been an excellent line as a lead up to that climax, and for thematic coherence overall. Ian struggles with his identity while relying on others to make it for him, and that extends to his own mother’s perception of him, which changes as the story progresses. Despite that, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of conflict between Laurel and her sons, even when discussing their late father. They’re sad, yes, but ultimately they’re dealing with it okay. They love each other, and despite their differences they have a good sense of solidarity. There doesn’t have to be conflict in that way in every story like this, but her quest to rescue them could have been a good way to bridge that, bringing in a one-two punch of parental resolution at the end. 

With this you could cut Officer Colt’s character entirely, in fact I don’t know why both him and Corey are in the film when they seem to fight for the same purpose in the story. His inclusion doesn’t seem to create a rift in any of their relationships outside of mild disdain when he’s first introduced. I genuinely did not know that Colt was officially in the Lightfoot family until the word “stepdad” was used over halfway through the movie. Otherwise I just assumed he was someone who was involved with the family via arresting Barley and had at least a mild romantic interest in his mother. And given the relevance of Wilden and the strength of their prior relationship, that doesn’t paint him in a very positive light at the start. But if you really wanted to keep him, there needed to be a scene that truly solidified that he cared for Ian and Barley. There is very little to suggest what kind of relationship the brothers have with him, other than Colt’s disapproval of Barley’s delinquency, but by the end of the film they’re suddenly on good terms, as if some resolution was made. He doesn’t seem to do much more other than pursue them like a cop would a criminal, and even when Laurel is worried for them, his search still seems to be nothing more than a part of his job, like it was at the start. 

Perhaps he could save them from something while they’re on the quest, like when Barley sacrifices his van to make the rocks fall. Maybe it goes wrong and the rocks falling still puts the brothers in danger, forcing Colt to abandon the other officers to save them. The brothers may be surprised at this, but it would have come from a genuine desire to protect them on Colt’s part. If you really wanted to establish even a bit of a connection with the brothers, he could’ve accompanied them on part of the quest, doing things that only he could do to help them, and perhaps having a chance to hash out their relationship with him along the way. I realize that Colt having difficulties connecting with the brothers is a common stepdad trope, but if he was to have any relevance at all, he needed a reason to be there. Ironically, Corey ends up having more interactions with the boys at the tavern than Colt does for the entire film. Overall I feel like there was a lot of missed potential with Onward, and while the emotional core was there like it always is in Pixar movies, I feel like it got skewed a bit along the way, thus diminishing the final emotional punch at the end. There are some genuinely great parts of this movie, especially Ian’s final character resolution with Barley, but the whole is not greater than the sum of those parts, and that saddens me greatly. I’m not sure how much of this was Disney mandated versus Pixar implemented, but I hope they can get their groove back eventually.