#ooc is serious buisness

[kobolds-top-hat]

[yi-dashi]

//Here’s a thought before I go to bed

  I like to think that Master Doran had a thing for extendable weaponry, culminating in Wukong’s staff as we see it now. But he less valued the artifice for its combat value, and more as a utility around the Wuju schools.

  Generally disinterested in actual Wuju teaching, if he ever saw a student acting out and someone told him to go deal with it... well of course you just pull out your giant bendy cane and smack em at distance. Don’t have to touch snotty kids, don’t have to get involved personally, easy to skulk off when other Masters ask you what the hell you are doing because you are like 20 feet away and they can’t alpha strike at you from that distance.

  It’s a win win win for him.

[kehideni]

Why i don’t like Star vs Season 4 so far:

To get this s**t out of the way, yes i am a Starco shipper. My reasonings have NOTHING to do with shipper stuff though.

Now that that’s out of the way let me just commence with a f***in huge a** rant.

TLDR first because rant, explanation and reasonings will be under readmore.

So Tl:dr.: Marco is pretty much Marco from Season 1. And while i really love that his relationship with Star is back to Season 1 lightheartedness, i really REALLY hate that his character also seems to slowly but surely regress.

Now to the rant part

 Now i want to uphold my right to change my mind because english is my secondary language, hungarian being my mother language and to top that off  where i saw the episode the audio is the most crappy at  the most crucial parts, and i MAY have misunderstood or worse missed dialog between characters.

However from what i precieved so far from this- what...  6 episodes, is that Marco is regressing to the neurotic comic relief character, that in serious moments is the voice of reason, or you know Star’s angel figure of the shoulder demon-angel picture.

 Marco in Season 1 was Star’s voice of reason, for him being from Earth he knew more, but i also credit it to Marco being a HUMAN. 

Human meaning: You know, that creature that is the apex predator of a whole f***in planet SIMPLY because of their superior intellect.

While Star is from a society based on magic that’s FULL of senseless shenanigans, you expect her to be instinctual, feral, random, which she WAS.

Marco is from a society based on science. Everything has a reason, every problem has a correct way to approach it. Intellect, sophisticated, calculated, predictable, which he WAS.

The great thing about their partnership is that they gave a little bit of their society to each other, those bits that each respectively yearned for or atleast needed.

Star gained understanding, Marco gained something unexplainable by science, something new in his life, DIVERSITY from the norm.

Understandably, season 1 had them and them only in focus, in which case someone has to carry the story on their back(and that must be Star, she is the title figure after all) and someone has to carry the comic relief buisness(Marco and his neurotic illstarredness[yes that was a pun]).

More shortly: The stress and de-stress factors that’s mandatory for a show like Star vs.

It’s BRILLIANT for a starter Season, but you know there is something with characters that i like to call the “Snapping point”.

I use that phrase in the context of character vs episode or character vs tv show(or whatever else medium your character appears in, this appears in mangas a whole lot too)

To explain what a Snapping point is i must first introduce you to the Snapping characters. And then the different style of snapping point/snapping characters, but let’s come up with examples first.

(Interestingly enough in most shows/comics/mangas/whatever my favourite characters end up being snapping characters)

Examples.:

Beast Boy - Teen Titans 2003

Katara - Avatar the last airbender

Raphael - TMNT2012

Chopper - One Piece

Charmander - OG Pokemon series

Lucy - Fairy Tail

Now, the snapping characters most usually are from the main cast but they are not THE main characters of their show. They are important, but mostly to fill a role.

Let’s take the first two of the list as examples. Coincidentally they are two different type of snapping characters, so explaining each mirroring the other will help me explain it even in more debth.

Katara as a main character has a set characteristic, in which way the show itself interacts with her. 

Katara is a mothering figure and the show treats her as such, so much so that in one episode it’s even a conflict starter. Her motherly behavior is a very important, very magnified point in her character. However there is one episode in the whole series where she as a character goes againts this point and you as a viewer almost forget that she is the group’s mother-figure.

No, it’s not the blood bending episode, and also not the episode where she teaches the old man that women can be just as good students as men.

Both of those episode show us her strenght, and she gets angry yes, but you don’t forget her motherly characteristic because for the majority of those episodes she still acts like our dear, established mom character. An angry mom.

The episode where she snaps her role, where you might even say she is OOC(when she is indeed NOT ooc, it’s just we get a glance at how she looks like when one of her core traits is pushed WAY out of her mind) is the episode where she and Zuko go and find her mother’s murderer.

Ask yourself: when was Katara the scariest? Bloodbending is scary, but you still see her being true to herself and mourn her innocence, you see her cry, you don’t forget what she is like, you more like pity her, mourn with her.

But don’t tell me that when you first saw her STOP THE RAIN AROUND HER you didn’t s**t your pants, because you did. It was completely in character but you didn’t expect her to do so, because you were thinking of Katara as the kind character it’s just that she’s mad. Yes she was mad, but you still expected her to be toned down, quiet and loving and kind like she usually is. She SNAPS the expectation, the norm episodes usually put her in and pushes further because the show(from her perspective: life) just pushed her over that specific “border”.

Now Beast Boy is in a completely different position as a character, and has a different “border” that he was pushed over, but still he is a snapping character.

He had serious moments in previous seasons and episodes, but we can all agree that he is the comic relief of the bunch. Your usual underdog, gets pushed around, loser, weak (eventhough he got GODLIKE POWERS  FFS)

It even gets noted by Raven and Cyborg and sometimes even Robin that he seems to lose a lot of times. In the episode “Every dog has his day” his core personality is what causing the conflict even.

You expected him in the Terra themed episodes to behave the way he did eventhough he was far from being a comic relief in those episodes. He didn’t really break out of his role. He is still the one that gets beaten up, still the one making mistakes (although Terra made bigger ones so the real focus is on those) NONE of the Terra episodes is his snapping point.

My favourite episode of the whole show is The Beast Within, is where he reaches it.

The show puts BB in the loser position it usually does, but it is as if he gets self concious, he just SNAPS and breaks the “same old” frame, and for a whole episode he behaves OOC, which- again -isn’t OOC at all, it’s just what he looks like when he finally has enough.

Usually, Beast Boy doesn’t do too much in fights, the heavy lifting is done by Starfire and Cyborg, the style is Robin, the magic is Raven, Beast Boy is mostly a hole-filler. If none of the 4 can handle something, you can bet your behind that it will be BB who takes over(i’m looking at you Season 5)

The episode starts the same way, BB gets his butt kicked, but then he just... he just snaps. There really isn’t much of a catalyst, Adonis trashtalks and that’s it..., he isn’t the first to trashtalk and certainly not the last. The point is that Beast Boy DESTROYS Adonis in the start of the episode and even at the end, and beats up his own teammates meanwhile too, for good measure. I remember seeing this on TV the first time and i WAS scared of BB. I always knew he had monsterish powers but i not only got shocked because he breaked out of the norm, he VALIDATED my suspicion, that he is MUCH more than a joke. It’s almost like he deliberatelly lets the show kick him around because he just doesn’t care.

Now, both of these just happen to be aggressive show of the “Snapping point” but there are milder examples.

Like Lucy’s Snapping point (Fairy Tail) is when she saves Loki the Lion celestial spirit.

The Snapping point is not a show of power, but a break from their magnified characteristics to show that they are more. Most usually it’s shown with a powershow, that’s true, but Lucy for example up to that point was a damsel in distress stereotype with tweaks here and there. In saving Loki through stubborn spiritdoor opening she broke from that magnified characteristic of hers and showed that she is capable of much more.

Notably main characters don’t have snapping points, because as they are in the focus the majority of the show, they are shown in much more detail, much more smaller steps just how much they are capable of.

Aang shows the Avatar state in the very first episode.(The avatar state being a quite literal break from his normal characteristics, since he is technically being possessed by his previous lives)

Robin almost never loses a battle, he constantly shows just how much he is capable of.

And Natsu.... let’s not even go there. It’s like bringing up Son Goku. He is almost always on screen, roaring and getting more and more powerful as he goes, JUST because he’s the main character. You know he will never lose there is no border for them to be pushed over.(And as such they are boring characters to me. Well atleast combat-wise, i like them both as characters it’s just they don’t have “THE” big moment, they are constantly in it. If you are constantly in it, it’s like you’re never there.)

But back to Marco.

All throughout Season 1 and 2 and majority of Season 3 he was fine.

The things happening to him may not have been easy to watch as a fan, but they had valid reasons for happening. He had very small snapping points which i was happy for, but then it’s as if they were forgotten by Season 4.

You see the point of this whole “Snapping” buisness is demonstration, for the viewer to keep in mind.

After The Southern Raiders, the viewer never forgot how much controll Katara had, and what brute strenght. So in the fight againts Azula you were completely prepared for pure badassness. You KNEW s**ts about to go down when you saw Katara’s eyes drawn similarly as when she was about to make a pintcushion out of the dude who’s name i mysteriously just forgot... a few minutes ago i knew it... i’m getting sidetracked.

After The Beast Within you knew that Beast Boy knows exactly how to use his powers effectively, it’s more like you were aware now that he is constantly holding back. So when you saw him beat demon after demon up in the Season 4 finale, even his own evil self, EVEN STARFIRE’S EVIL SELF, you knew that he always had it in him, he’s just the pure character he is.

After you saw Lucy go to such lenght as to almost deplete her own magic to save Loki(which back then meant death but Mashima mysteriously forgot about that just like how i forgot that dude’s name that Katara scarred for life) you were not surprised that she all alone freed her WHOLE GD GUILD from that demon prison that absorbed living beings into it’s walls. (Including Natsu who we all know is OP AF) You knew she totally would no spare herself all her effort.

But Marco? Firstly, in the Season opening episodes, he had the role of comic relief again, which in itself wouldn’t be a problem IF RIVER WASN’T THERE FOR THAT VERY SAME ROLE ALREADY.

Secondly, he had MINOR snapping points which were forgotten already by crew and by fans... His dimension-adventures could have been such a massive snapping point but it ISN’T. He didn’t change AT ALL. He doesn’t have anything to show for it AT ALL. (Justanawesomedragoncicle) And that’s why i still stand by my fellow Starco shippers saying it’s not pedophilic because he quite literally has nothing to show for that 30+ years now. NOTHING.NADA.WE LEARNED NOTHING MORE OF HIM. HE IS SO VERY MUCH THE SAME, which is why we all say that this dimension-adventure stuff was for nothing but s**ts and giggles. Marco wouldn’t be any less if these episodes wouldn’t exist. He’s certainly nothing more with them. In the Season 3 finale he did show off his skills but just like that they were forgotten. *Poof*

SO FAR the show treats Marco with amnesia.

Everyone else is treated properly. I couldn’t be more proud of Tom from the last episode, really. Star-... *sigh* she seems to have taken a step back too but with all the bs going on around her and her family i can’t blame her. There is such a thing as “too much” storylines on one shoulder, which is so fken clear she can’t handle all at once, so i don’t really mind her not addressing the kiss nor her feelings.

But come OOONN, MARCO! My boy... shooting the same joke twice, pushing them even...

FFS you are a HUMAN from EARTH!! That Earth full of apex megaminds, and you don’t need to be a rocket scientist to see if the swimming trunks are too big or too small! And ffs if it stops circulation, use your common sense boi- TAKE IT OFF.

And i get that it was a joke, but that one joke was pushed ALL THROUGHOUT THE EPISODE. It was not funny...it was cringeworthy.

Rn i feel he is nothing more but a joke.  If he didn’t appear in most of those episodes it wouldn’t have changed a thing.

Yes there were times where he WAS the voice of common sense, but it was outweighted with sheer stupidity which was not funny nor de-stressing. 

The jokes with him were taking me out of the story, not allevitating Star’s serious buisness.