#or thematically incoherent for that matter

[jacketpotatoo]

thinking of writing a review of hotd s2 but *looks at the flame war that is the hotd fandom* i think i might be stoned to death by both sides.

[samsbrowncarhartt]

The reason early spn is so thematically incoherent is bc its simultaneously trying to be a gothic horror, which shows the corruption/darkness at the heart of the American family and explores the tragedy in the fact that, no matter how hard you try, you can never escape your family/destiny/blood

But its also a post-9/11 network TV cop show that AFFIRMS the American nuclear family and associated values (patriarchy, vigilante justice, us/them mentalities) as righteous and good

So it naturally gets a bit confusing

[mswyrr]

“I don’t write about adolescence. I write about war. For adolescents.”

--Suzanne Collins

This is the key to the whole Hunger Games series. The books are about war and she's trying to be honest about that, inasmuch as you can be for the target age range. I think she's done a beautiful job.

That's why Katniss and Peeta's happy ending is realistic to traumatized former child soldiers. It ends with Katniss literally giving us a psychological coping strategy she uses to manage her mental illness! Like many irl former soldiers and people with trauma and mental illness, that is just part of her day. Like taking a walk or cooking breakfast. It just is part of being alive. And her aliveness isn't inferior because of it, nor is the happiness she makes with the family she chose to have.

They claim life and a future, but they do it with damage that will never go away. Being damaged doesn't mean you can't live a good life. So much of the series is about the healing of nature, of allowing nature to be and grow -- and allowing yourself to be part of nature. But nature isn't perfection -- it can be messy and painful, but it is life. When Katniss chooses her "dandelion in the spring," she chooses the meadow where love was betrayed and lost before, she chooses the pain of being alive. *Life is pain* as well as joy--it can hurt so much people don't want to be alive anymore in order to escape that, whether literally wanting to die or wanting the kind of metaphorical death/numbing of feelings that tempts her, Haymitch, and teen Coriolanus in different ways--and she chooses it.

It takes courage and endurance and it's worth it.

They're not meant to be a wish fulfillment fantasy, none of the three romances in this series are*, they're meant to be a love story that says something about what it means to be broken and then heal -- and how healing is a lifelong process and you will never be the same again. But that doesn't make you *lesser* or unworthy or incapable of a good life.

These are sincere, grounded components of a depiction of trauma and mental illness. And they disgust people who are used to dishonest depictions of these things. People who believe love and happiness are only for wholesome, abled, pure people. People who think it's disquieting for two disabled people to have kids. Like, fandom is very good at dressing up their feelings in seemingly progressive language, but the implied eugenics of that has always been very blatant.

I see people concern trolling on that topic and I just feel disgusted, honestly. Where are all the books where disabled people, especially mentally ill ones, are raising kids in the "happy ending"? How often are kids irl taken away from parents due to ableist discrimination? And it's somehow "not feminist" for Katniss to choose to have kids???? What an utterly empty, vapid, cruel and ableist feminism that would be.

These being stories about war is why teen Coriolanus being evil from the beginning is narratively and thematically incoherent. This is a kid who grew up traumatized by war and then is conscripted into the Games--the adults of the Capitol playing out war over and over again, esp Gaul to control and retraumatize people--and then into the Peacekeepers, in a sequence (in book but especially the film) that references conscription into the Vietnam War. The empty rotten husk of a human being he becomes identified as "A victor" of the Games (film), turned on Lucy Gray thinking she was a "victor" trying to kill him (book), and spends decades obsessed with justifying himself that he is the "#1 Peacekeeper."

With Haymitch, we have a story of sheer, long-term endurance. He gets lost and lives with the horror of his own coerced complicity. He breaks, he becomes a raging alcoholic. And yet there's a little spark inside that never dies. And that matters. That, too, is a kind of victory. Survivors don't have to be pretty and simple and mask/be masked by the writer into acting like they're abled and "normal" and untainted to be worthy and for their lives to matter.

These are all psychologically plausible directions that young people forced into war can break. Albeit with the magic realism and big romantic themes representing the choice between embracing life (even if you get lost for a long time -- even if it takes you decades, like Haymitch) and (as Coriolanus did) trying to kill your heart because it hurts too much and costs too much to live.

Is Collins just trying to warn us that fascism is bad? What use would that be, exactly? There are hundreds of excellent history and political science books on those topics and wonderful classes. I've worked on classes on that topic!! Art can and should reach beyond that kind of academic literalism. And she does. With Katniss, Coriolanus, Haymitch, and Peeta she gives some really beautiful, insightful examples of how people deal with trauma/mental illness and what it means to survive. There is no easy fix to things like this, so simple didacticism would always be a lie. She doesn't lie to her audience, even though she's writing books for adolescents.

*There's nothing wrong with wish fulfillment fantasies. But not all YA stories have to have those goals. And all love stories don't have to be wish fulfillment fantasies! That's so insulting to it as a type of story. It *can* be that. It can also be about character, theme, plot. (Or both at once, depending). It's up to the artist. Love stories are one of the areas where some of the most highly respected women writers in history have made their art -- and people insult and degrade it by saying it's bad if it's not written as a great ideal template for living or wish fulfillment fantasy. As I've said elsewhere, judging women's art like that is like saying a woman's painting of fruit has to be tasty and edible because *women must always make you food* even when what they're trying to make is art.

[boomerangguy]

Flameo Hottake

After browsing some insightful analyses (A, B, C) on Ashes of the Academy, I’m starting to wonder if the ATLA writers — from Bryke to Hicks — are incapable of executing a transformative character arc (i.e. turning a Good Guy into a Bad Guy or a Bad Guy into a Good Guy with minimal reliance on off-screen explanations).

Sure, Zuko got a “redemption” when he switched sides at the end of the series…but in terms of behavior/traits, he acts the same way in Book 3 as he does in Book 1 — just fighting as a Good Guy. He’s still short-tempered, rude, and resorts to violence as a matter of impulse. If you watch Sozin’s Comet and then restart the series with The Boy in the Iceberg, you won’t say, “Wow! Zuko sure came a long way! He’s completely unrecognizable!” Because other than the ponytail, he’s very much recognizable. Same guy, really.

Anyway, back to Ashes of the Academy. Ursa’s dialogue at the start of the comic frames the (ostensible) conflict: the Academy changed Azula for the worse, and it could very well do the same to Kiyi. Except…we aren’t shown any of that. There is no flashback corruption arc for young Azula, and Kiyi doesn’t start to slide in that direction either. Apparently, Azula is a Bad Guy — always has been. And Kiyi is a Good Guy — always will be. It’s like they’ve been…flattened.

That’s a problem which other franchises might be able to tolerate better, but given Avatar’s thematic emphasis on the ability of anyone to change, the writers seem awfully determined to cram every major character into either a Good Guy Bucket or a Bad Guy Bucket then ignore established canon and previous characterization to justify why they always belonged in that bucket.

The handling of Mai’s past, especially her friendship with Azula, may be the best example of this. In ATLA Book 2, Mai is an antagonistic villain. She’s not nice. She does not have noble motives. She is clearly a Bad Guy, albeit a cool one. So writing her in AotA as if she was truly a Good Guy all along, just pretending to be friends with Azula to please her father — an explanation which makes no sense in broader narrative context or given that Azula is an insightful ‘people person’ who would’ve sniffed that out sooner or later — is utterly incoherent. (Oh, and Mai was never into the Fire Nation imperialism thing either, making her about one in a million lmao.) She belongs in the Good Guy Bucket now…so she was always a Good Guy? She never aligned herself with the Bad Guys because she, too, was once a Bad Guy? That seems to be how they’re operating.

The same is true for Azula, just inversed. How did the Academy make her worse? ‘Worse’ implies that she was better before she attended, so are we shown that moral regression anywhere in the comic? Or was she always an irrationally cruel psychopath, a la The Bad Seed? At this point, we’ve seen too much of her humanity and vulnerability for them to sell us on that — even as recently as the Spirit Temple comic — but AotA pushes her in The Bad Seed direction again, contradicting itself (Ursa’s dialogue) and, more egregiously, Azula’s characterization in the original series. I’m starting to hear Oprah’s voice in my head: “You get a retcon! And you get a retcon! And you get a retcon!”

Who’s next? Well…I think we can guess…

As the ATLA story creeps and bounds (first in the comics, soon with the Adult Gaang Movie) towards the LOK timeline, they’re going to have to confront a bigger problem: How did Zuko, the teenage usurper of his father/sister’s widely popular regime, manage to completely reorient the ideologically imperialistic Fire Nation? That’s kind of a big deal. It’s the major overall conflict throughout many of the comics, and he’s (understandably) not seeming to make much progress. But just from a writing perspective, if they can’t show a couple of small children being twisted by a bad school system, how could they possibly pull off the moral redemption of an entire nation?

All this to say…

…prepare yourself for the whole Fire Nation to get retconned into the Good Guy Bucket. They were always good people! They didn’t want imperialism! They weren’t warlike! It was all Ozai and Sozin! Azulon? Who’s Azulon?

Seriously, though, it’s coming — unless they manage to get some competent writers who know how to effectively move a character from A to B.

[probablyasocialecologist]

Harris stretched her coalition into incoherence. Inhumanly—as well as fruitlessly—she attempted to score points from the right on immigration, accusing Trump of insufficient dedication to building the wall. Her cack-handed performances of sympathy with Palestinians accompanied an evident commitment to follow Benjamin Netanyahu into a regional war. The Harris campaign featured a grab bag of policies, some good, some bad, but sharing no clear thematic unity or vision. She almost always offered evasive answers to challenging questions. And she adopted a generally aristocratic rather than demotic manner, which placed the candidate and her elite friends and allies at the center rather than the people they sought to represent. In these ways, Harris repeated not only Hillary Clinton’s errors but many of the same ones that she herself had made in her ill-starred 2019 presidential campaign, which opportunistically tacked left rather than right, but with equal insincerity and incoherence. Who remembers that campaign’s biggest moment, when she attacked Biden for his opposition to busing and what it would have implied for a younger version of herself, only to reveal when questioned that she also opposed busing? Or when she endorsed Medicare for All, raising her hand in a debate for the idea of private insurance abolition, only to later claim she hadn’t understood the question? Voters, then as now, found her vacuous and unintelligible, a politician of pure artifice seemingly without ideological depths she could draw from and externalize. She often gave the sense of a student caught without having done her homework, trying to work out what she was supposed to say rather than expressing any underlying, decided position. Even abortion rights, her strongest issue, felt at times like a rhetorical prop, given her own and her party’s inaction in the years prior to Dobbs. How many times before had Democrats promised to institutionalize and expand the protections of Roe, only to drop the matter after November?

[...]

The Democrats, in other words, comprehensively failed to set the terms of ideological debate in any respect. Their defensiveness and hypocrisy served only to give encouragement to Trump while demobilizing their own voters, whom they will no doubt now blame—as though millions of disaggregated, disorganized individuals can constitute a culpable agent in the same way a political party’s leadership can. But the party’s leaders are to blame, not that many in the center have cared or even seemed willing to reflect on a decade of catastrophe. Has anyone who complained that the 2020 George Floyd rebellion would cost Democrats votes due to the extremism of its associated demands reckoned with the empirical finding that the opposite proved true? That the narrow victory of Biden in 2020 was likely attributable to noisy protests that liberals wished would be quieter and calmer? Has anyone acknowledged the unique popularity of Sanders with Latinx voters, a once-core constituency that the Democrats are now on the verge of losing outright? The pathologies of the Democrats, though, are in a sense not the result of errors. It is the structural role and composition of the party that produces its duplicitous and incoherent orientation. It is the mainstream party of globalized neoliberal capitalism, and at the same time, by tradition anyway, the party of the working class. As the organized power of the latter has been washed away, the commitment has become somewhat more aspirational: Harris notably cleaned up with the richest income bracket of voters. The only issues on which Harris hinted of a break with Biden concerned more favorable treatment of the billionaires who surrounded her, and her closest advisers included figures like David Plouffe, former senior vice president of Uber, and Harris’s brother-in-law Tony West, formerly the chief legal officer of Uber, who successfully urged her to drop Biden-era populism and cultivate relations with corporate allies.

8 November 2024

[lunamond]

It finally hit me today why I find SJM’s use of sexual violence so off: because she’s doing what a lot male authors do, where her first thought as to what could traumatize a female character is sexual.

I have thought about it a lot, and I can’t find a compelling reason for Nesta to have been potentially assault by Thomas. SJM in general has a strange distaste for humans in her fantasy—a topic for another day—but I really don’t see what it does for Nesta’s development. It doesn’t change her, really. All it does is, I guess, give her more similarities to Emerie and Gwyn? But why is THAT something they have to share.

Of the female characters, most of them have some kind of sexual trauma, and medieval times were bad for everyone but the average person had never been, y’know, that monstrous. Why did Rhysand have to sexually assault abs drug Feyre? All it did in the end was serve to set up their “romance” by having it be consensual the next time, which, to put a kind word to it, is in poor taste.

Thoughts?

Definitely agree on how Feyre‘s abuse is handled. No matter what came after, Sjm shot herself in the foot with the Feysand romance the moment she wrote the SA in book 1.

With specifically Nesta, the use of SA is almost acceptable. Which honestly makes it feel worse to me than how those male authors write sexual violence .

Her initial SA by Tomas and the allegorical SA through the Cauldron could both have been defensible to me. I would even argue that both work well together. Tomas happens completely off page, and the Cauldron gives the reader/character a concrete event to explore this topic while still having level of separation through its symbolic nature. Combine that with her friendship with Gwyn and Emerie, who both experienced various forms of gendered violence, and it's a pretty decent recipe for a story about a woman healing from the trauma of SA.

But, where Sjm then completely loses me again is by adding unnecessary gratuitous SA via the Kelpie and the completely unacknowledged sexual exploitation by Cassian and the IC.

It just leads to a complete thematic incoherence in Aosf, ruining what could have been a pretty solid story about finding healing, love, and acceptance. Instead, Nesta is caged and beaten into submission by her family and love interest, all while the narrative presents this to the reader as sth to cheer for. It retroactively makes the Tomas and Cauldron SA seem gratuitous and unnecessary as well.

However, as frustrating as the writing of SA for the female characters is, it's infinitly worse for the male characters. So many of them have experienced some form of SA, Rhysand, Lucien, Tamlin, and even in her other series Crescent City, I'm pretty sure Hunt has as well. All of the perpetrators, of course, are powerful, scheming, promiscuous women. And none of their resulting traumas are explored in any meaningful way.

Tamlin‘s is completely ignored. Neither his trauma of being preyed on as a child nor whatever Amarantha potentially did to him utm gets any mention at all.

Rhys' trauma is only referenced insofar that it gives him enough sympathy for both the reader and Feyre to forget about his own wrongdoings. Otherwise, his trauma has almost zero effect on his relationship with the IC, his romance with Feyre nor his rulership over the NC.

And Lucien‘s trauma is only used to further prove how bad Tamlin and the SC are, how trustworthy Rhys is, and mark Ianthe as completely irredeemable. Lucien himself gets no focus afterwards, other than having to grovel to Feyre for his perceived moral failings.

[animentality]

Can I just bitch about Baldur's Gate 3 for a second-

JK, I'm not fucking asking.

So Ketheric Thorm...got an entire fucking act basically DEDICATED TO HIM.

The Shadow Cursed Lands suck because of him. Everything in that zone is fucked because of his nonsense. Every enemy you fight is either related to the shadows or the Absolute plot, which, as far as you know at that point, is tied directly back to him, and him alone.

And every fucking person you meet, rounds him out in some way.

Thisobald, Gerringothe, Malus, these are all unique looking and fun bosses. And they all round out Ketheric Thorm, showing us his fucked up family, and how terrible their impact has been.

Balthazar, Z'rell, even Aylin and Isobel- all thematically and narratively tied to our Shar/Myrkul worshipping bitch.

Even Halsin and Thaniel, Minthara and Shadowheart...all of them have ties to Ketheric.

And that's great and all. That's probably why I, unlike many others, actually enjoy Act 2 a fair bit.

But then. We get to the dreaded Act 3.

Which is a bloated, disorganized, incoherent mess.

But worse than that is... Gortash and Orin are our next big bads, yeah? And they have a kind of fun intro, that makes you think ooh, the next big bads...

And then.

And then what happens?

You can kill Gortash immediately, pretty much at the beginning of Act 3. No build up. You can just do that. Sure, you can do the Steel Watch or the Ironhand Throne quests...but tell me.

Could you just go up to Ketheric Thorm and kill him at Moonrise? The answer is no. Even if you skip a lot of content, you still have to go through a million other tasks before you can face him, AND the big boss battle at the end is entirely him and Myrkul. It's EARNED.

But Gortash? Well, fuck, he's fucking dead before you can even face the final big boss.

And Orin? Sure, you have to collect a bag of hands to get into the Temple...but so what? That's maybe two or three quests, but you can circumvent them. Besides, as soon as you kill her, she vanishes from the narrative and doesn't matter. She's a somewhat easy boss battle, but the actual build up isn't intricately tied into the narrative of Act 3...because there is no inherent narrative to Ac 3.

Act 2 was about an insane man's descent into villainy after losing the people he loved most.

It was tragic, but at least thematically consistent.

The fuck is happening in Act 3?

Gortash is committing war crimes because he's tyrannical, and Orin is murdering indiscriminately and just for funsies.

at least Ketheric's entire thing is about defying the gods, using them for his own gains, and similarly, being used by them.

But Orin? She has one sympathetic scene, and then she dies immediately after.

Gortash you can just kill and then he doesn't matter, or you can side with him, and then he just dies, and doesn't matter.

It's utterly baffling and mildly infuriating.

I know Act 3 was hit with the cut content rush and all, but I feel like you could've spent your time actually bothering to build them up the way you built up Ketheric. You could've given us political quests or world building quests with Gortash, especially given how manipulative he is, or given us more madness and shadows and underground labyrinths and spooky monsters with fucking Orin.

Instead of garbage quests like the Wavemother, Mystic Carrion, Stop the Presses, and Lady Jannath's Torture House, you could've given Karlach a quest related to fixing her heart, which would've tied into Gortash's plots, or given Gale more to do than simply go to Sorcerous Sundries, or tied Cazador to some kind of patriars plot, or had Wyll's father do more than be kidnapped and then later saved.

You could've given Halsin literally any fucking quest, instead of bringing in Jaheira or Minsc. But most importantly.

I just don't get it. Gortash runs Baldur's Gate. You could've easily tied him to a lot more quests, and made him far more threatening or hard to take down. You could've also made Orin feel like an actual threat, and not just a mild nuisance.

It's just kind of...it irks me.

Not just as a Gortash stan, but as a writer, because it's so odd, to have 3 perfectly decent villains...and only flesh out one.

The other two might as well be optional mini bosses.

[bitchqueenofthebitchsquad]

Another problem I had with season 2 is the weird way that hextech is treated. The hexcore is treated like it's semi sentient and malicious, no explanation for why that is, but even regular degular Hextech is treated as uniquely capable of great evil. We're given a whole episode that waxes poetic about how much better everyone would be if hextech was never invented but no explanation for why that is.

As others have pointed out, the problems between Piltover and Zaun are the problems inherent to all stratified societies, particularly ones that appear to be in the midst of an industrial revolution. The under city predates Hextech by a long shot. So why are we being shown this episode about how much better everything would be sans these tools? It just has a luddite vibe to it. I think some people mistakenly identify technology as the reason oppression exists. While some tech can exacerbate oppression, the same technology can often do the opposite. I think season 1 was still a little clumsy in places, but it did a better job of pointing out that the technology is a neutral thing. It's the system that allows greedy and ultra powerful but unqualified weirdos to make all the decisions that's a problem.

I feel like the writers who left over the pandemy took their talent with them when they bounced. I can't know this but I get the sense that the remaining writers did little to no research but were enamored with portrayals of class conflict they'd seen in other media. Not to bring up simulacra but, you know, that's what it was giving. It was derivative.

Getting back to the hexcore, I liked the aesthetic of it, particularly how it transformed Viktors body but thematically I think it was incoherent, especially when put in the context of the rest of the show. Again I like spooky purple energy with evil vibes, very witchy, but how does it help progress the narrative? It seemed to me that it was a totally derivative element. Because sometimes magic is portrayed as spooky and seductive they decided to have this cool object that was spooky and seductive. Maybe someone in the writers room was going somewhere with this but if they were I don't think the execution was successful. It doesn't have anything to do with the stronger themes of the show, it distracts from them, and then becomes a problem because they spent so much time foreshadowing it so there's no way to gracefully retcon it.

It's made even more awkward when Viktor uses his new spooky powers to help disabled people who have nowhere else to turn. Before Jayce shoots Viktor in the chest we don't actually see Viktor doing anything malicious with his magic. He's essentially just set up a rehab and is quietly minding his business. The empire and state come to him and give him grief so wouldn't the reasonable conclusion be that actually Hextech is just a tool no matter how purple and swirly it is and that militaries and cops get in the way of positive social change because they seek to abuse and control technology used to help people? But then the show goes on to make Viktor the ultimate villain and it's very hard to parse what the message is other than to avoid the very specific scenarios that happened in the show.

It's almost like they forgot the show was for an audience, forgot about the themes, and just started advertising for the next league project, forgetting to finish what they were actually making. I also think they fell victim to too big of an ending, not everything has to be world ending or contain multiverses. Idk very sloppy but, even though he's essentially an entirely new character, I loved blonde highlights Viktor.

Edit: not "no explanation" it's the blood that made it evil but again this is tropey and leaning towards derivative again. We wouldn't assume that a technology that interacts with blood is bad/evil if we hadn't all already seen a million other works that do this and have built the negative associations for us.

[awanderingtortoise]

a very messy 1.5k word dodgerfox essay but like was i onto something

I just remembered this character psychology/thematic analysis and relationship dynamic breakdown I made (word vomited) at like 3 in the morning after finishing s1. Thought I would put it here and see if people agree with my... interpretation? coherent incoherency?

PS forgive the lack of grammatical format pls

------------------------------------------------------

In the following text i will be attempting to describe what makes this ship so compelling so i may have a clearer idea of how to write fiction about this. To describe a relationship, of course, one must first see the state of the characters before they meet eachother. So let us begin with a certain Jack Dawkins.

Jack is, to say the very least, complicated. A less than ideal start to life as a child early indoctrinated into Fagin’s family of London theft, he is abandoned in prison by the closest thing he has to a father. He has no real idea of love, really truly selfless love. He makes his way into the navy as a young surgeon. He faces the realities now not only of poverty and injustice, but of war; physical pain, mortality, suffering even of those fighting on a national cause.

In a sense, both these environments have taught him to surrender, that one cannot so much as change the world they live in but simply adapt to it. He adapts by thieving. He adapts by becoming an empathetic, compassionate, and incredibly competent surgeon. But this is a matter of survival, as it must be. Social class and the cards dealt to you by life are not something disregarded by this story as a whole.

Even when he is landed a job in the australian colony as a surgeon, this mindset is reflected in his seeming contentedness with a medical system he knows he could improve. He has learned to give up his value as a person, and his values, for the sake of survival, which is absolutely necessary. Hence his giving in to the professor and sneed, hence his cynicism. There is a hope trapped inside of him he has lost the sound of even to himself.

This idea of living in ‘reality’ and being thrust by the circumstances of life has made him quick with his hands, with his mind, a very hands on learner.

Belle Fox, where jack is a man made of survival, is a woman made of vision, something shaped by her intelligence and privilege. As the daughter of a prominent politician she is educated, aware of her status, and fully uses it to her advantage. Shes not a bad person, and for that reason this appears somewhat acceptable, but it is still very clear she does this to get what she wants. And what belle wants, as an educated woman, with a clear view of the injustice towards women in the society of her day, as a girl who did not fit into that almost livestock view of women in that day, is to be a surgeon. To utilize her gifts, to put a vision that she has of the world into it.

Her view of the world is marked by a constant ‘this isnt how it should be’ and the birthright power she has to change it, as opposed to jacks ‘but this is how it is’. Her cleaning of the hospital, her introduction of medical advances, this results in good effects but is still very much ‘for her’, its not at its core born out of an empathy for the suffering around her but a desire to mold the world into the way she sees it should be.

In part, this may be why she empathizes with gaines’ analogy of a corrupted body (‘ive read hobbes’)-- they are both beset with a vision of the world, they understand thinking in the light of a big picture.

Belle, as a woman, has no access to the practicum and therefore her knowledge is theory theory theory. But by god does she know her theory. As women werent truly allowed to act, she is a hypothetical thinker, a big picture thinker, an idealist, determined to shape the world into the way she sees it, admittedly a very correct and educated way to see it. However, the development of her empathy is necessary to complete her character, in the same way Jack must develop her sense of vision and get that idea that he can fight for himself, he has value, he can and actually must, change the world.

They are similar and yet opposite; both highly intelligent, medically inclined, headstrong, sharp witted, disappointed with the state of the world. But where belle is theoretical jack is practical. Where she is privileged he is paid in barely pocket change. Where he is acutely aware of the governments generalized sweeps’ individual effects on lives, on people, hence his tender bedside manner, belle is the opposite. She sees only the discrepancy between what she knows to be right and what the world is and has the status to brashly order about her desires into the reality, a power jack has never possessed. Where she is a changemaker because of wealth, he has become complacent because of poverty. Where he stays behind the line to save himself, belle oversteps again and again because there is no real harm for her. Where jacks disappointment with the world melts into survival instinct and cynicism, belle’s turns into headstrong determination and resolve.

That is why the sparks fly, they are what the other lacks, and this is typically a very difficult type of relationship to maintain but if they both grow as people it can be incredibly beautiful and fulfilling. That is the core of their relationship, they challenge eachother, make eachother grow and learn.

In the same way their moral flaws are both born of their circumstance: as jack admits, the worst parts of him love the thrill of crime. That was his home, how he grew up. And belle, clearly, is not very good at seeing things from other’s points of view. ‘Theivery is thievery’ ‘your family are the biggest thieves [here]’. She has principles but is still learning to shift her worldview when it comes to sociopolitical issues not regarding gender, to see that the unruly poor’ are such BECAUSE of the oppression of her class. As fagin says, ‘no choice but to bite.’

Their love also deals in opposites. Jacks love literally saves belles life, while it lands him himself in jail and almost on the noose. Belles apprenticeship with him gives her love and knowledge, it gives him love but costs him nearly everything else. Jack is experienced with women and belle is limited to diagrams of ‘congress’, opposing the very jacklike hands on way. Belle is sheltered and all she knows of love and sex is theoretical, detached from the actual experience. It is by no fault of either of theirs but that is the way life has made them, a constant theme of the show. Even as belle seems to rebel she is still at the mercy of her upbringing; her ‘fancy skirts’ for instance, her manner, her statement that he must marry her. And she is not apologetic about any of it, something both admirable and a problem because its reflective of her unchecked privilege and lack of empathy.

This intensity is what makes it risky in the long term and so soooo beautiful on the screen. Even the marriage idea reflects this. Belle believes jack misjudges her family when he says they could never marry, believing her mother will give in to her as she supported jack as a surgeon. She is wrong, of course.

Its not so much that she isnt used to getting what she wants, but this again idea that the world isnt as it should be. Jack’s realism is formed by hard hard experience. However, they have the common ground of both never having truly known love romantically, though belle knows familial love. This is one over Jack, who had fagin’s very selfish life for a motto. Though he has one over her when it comes to experience. He doesn’t truly know how to say at first what love is because he has never known it. Can i just say hetty is wonderful helping him realize he loves belle?? what a saint with no hard feelings over those two.

And yet. Because of all this, they bring out the best in eachother. And when they are away they fall back to the worst of themselves, belle bossy and ridiculous and despairing, jack angry and complacent and criminal. It is only for her that he fights and rages, it is only under his hands that she allows herself vulnerability. Actually no, they both learn vulnerability with eachother. He never knew love before her. But even with them she is taking mostly he is giving, mostly. All. In all? It's just great writing, but devastating characterization; how limited they are by their upbringing and status. What a show.

[rawliverandgoronspice]

hey! do you have any thoughts on demise as a looser/more fluid/symbolic/metaphorical figure in the context of the story of the series- like thoughts on what he represents, and stuff like what his curse could mean thematically rather than the more essentialistic absolutistic "literal satan" interpretation that most of the (at least western) audience seems to take?

i know he may be somewhat contentious as a choice introduced by the writers especially considering from an outside perspective what he kind of did to the majority of fandom analysis and discourse, but i've been thinking about how it's quite possible the writers had a more paganistic approach to what it means to be a deity and how demise doesn't even really have a NAME so much as he is supposed to be some sort of manifestation/personification of the concept of demise, and maybe also of hatred, and also i don't know, like, what the point of that hatred is or why there has to be demise/what implications there could be of this worldbuilding

hope that was coherent enough to make sense of anything i just said but yeah i was just curious if you do!

Heyy sorry never replied, replying now!! Thanks for the ask!

Yeah it's exactly how I'm taking Demise, and I think what you mention connects more to what little I know and understand of shintoism.

In French, Demise has an absurdly long name and is basically called "The Avatar of the Void", which I think is... interesting? It makes me extremely curious as to how Demise is called in original japanese --because to me, "Void" is about the absence of things more than their destruction. It's about the absence, not the inevitability of things crumbling down that comes with Demise. I don't know which of these concepts are the closest to the original vision (if it's Void rather than Demise I think it recontextualizes everything we thought we know about this world and characters, but in my opinion it feels too incoherent with the rest of the world, so my guess is that it was a poorly thought-out translation --but I might be wrong!), but to me it's all in the title: Demise. The curse is that every golden era must end with a reckoning.

I think the curse is extremely compelling in that mythological sense, the way Demeter and Persephone's tale is about the joy and pain of passing seasons; it's the given cause for this world's fate as it is condemned to rise and die continuously; and that their eternal, bright future will always be opposed. To be honest, I'm not even sure it's a *bad* thing. Conflict is not only inevitable, it needs to rise to the surface instead of being suppressed to ensure things do not remain stagnant and shortcomings are being acknowledged and addressed --which is also partially why the suggestion of TotK's golden forever after really doesn't sit right with me, especially since nothing was learned and nothing truly changed in the course of its runtime.

I think the curse sucks when people think it means that Ganondorf is a generic evil demon man without motive of his own. It especially grinds my nerves since I somehow never hear this argument being made for *any* other villain in the franchise. I know they look alike the most (and TotK didn't help matters here), but I never *ever* saw people arguing that Vaati doesn't have motive, for example. Or Majora. Or Zant. Or even literal nothing characters like Bellum, who by all means looks more like a primal demonic evil acting on instinct than anyone else. Somehow, we get to assume they have internal motives that, while obviously wicked and self-serving, are their own! But somehow, Ganondorf, the actual main antagonist of his series with the most amount of games hinting at his backstory and internal moral code, gets flattened as an evil puppet with no internal life whatsoever. It's genuinely bizarre.

Anyway sorry sorry! Thanks again for the ask!

[oddygaul]

The Wild Robot

The Wild Robot feels like it’s calling back to the golden era of Pixar animation, with its big cast of forest animals and heartwarming story about finding one’s place in the world, but it lacks the thematic cohesion and verisimilitude that really made those movies stick. The animation is pretty slick, and the A plot lands its emotional beats, there’s just not much to it beyond that. Unlike heavy hitters such as WALL-E or The Incredibles, where the themes of the story are seamlessly baked right into the premise, world, & character designs, The Wild Robot feels like its pieces never quite fit together, and its setting and premise ask a lot of questions that it doesn’t have answers for. 

An interesting tack that sets the movie apart initially is how straightforward and realistic it is about the food chain, despite its cast of cute animal characters*. Within 15 minutes, we’ve seen a decapitated crow’s head, watched a multitude of prey animals be killed for food, and heard jokes about child death from baby possums. This focus continues as Roz teams up with Fink and assumes responsibility for Brightbill – like it or not, she must come to terms with the fact that everything eats to live. “Where are you from that things don’t eat other?”, Fink asks Roz incredulously.

Partway through, though, the animals broker a truce of nonviolence. While this truce is initially established to survive a brutal winter storm, it seems to then carry on indefinitely; the animals will trade quips afterwards about eating each other, but then follow up earnestly that they really won’t, since they’ve learned their lesson from Roz about friendship and treating each other kindly. So then… what are they going to eat?? What are they living off of? Have the animals started subsistence farming just off-screen? “It’s a kid’s movie”, “It’s not that deep”, I hear you say, but it’s wild to establish the brutal reality of predator-prey relationships as a core theme of the movie only to brush it off later as if Needing to Eat is merely a bad habit the animals have kicked.

*Despite the movie’s aggressively star-studded voice cast, the actual designs of the animals feel quite generic and off-brand, like I’m watching a direct-to-DVD sequel. I’m happy Matt Berry is continuing his fucking renaissance, though.

The context of the ROZZUM robots and their human creators is similarly incoherent. Look, we don’t need much background for the found family story to work: a robot is somewhere it’s not supposed to be, now it must grapple against its built-in protocols to fit in and build a new life, great, perfect. We don’t need any more than that, and its origin could’ve remained an only-hinted-at mystery. Instead, though, The Wild Robot decides to take us on a slapdash tour of the human society, fails to provide us with any insight about them, and raises even more questions about the whole situation.

The movie is set in a world beset by climate disaster, with human society driven out of cities and onto a man-made island. Some light criticism is initially directed at the ROZZUM units, with their single-minded need to call a task completed and slap a sticker on it, no matter how careless or slipshod of a job they do. It seems that this is meant as a point of comparison to the island’s animals, who eventually form a tightly-knit community that helps each other in more meaningful ways; a genuine fostering of community, compared to the commodification and automation of labor represented by the ROZZUMs.

The problem is, we aren’t shown any downsides to this approach when we finally see the human side of the story: the few humans we see are placid and content, and appear to be comfortably thriving on their agrarian island utopia. I think it’s a little fucked up when I see legions of intelligent robots forced to perform hard labor in their stead, but the movie doesn’t really portray it as a bad thing. This seemingly idyllic society also makes the events of the climax baffling, in which their robotic kill-squid rides in on a hovercraft filled with laser gun-wielding deathbots to recapture Roz. Why do these nefarious killbots exist*? Did the humans really build be-lasered deathbots in order to drive off migrating geese? Why is it so important to them that they recapture this defective robot? These things all feel like they exist solely to drive the plot forward, rather than serve a purpose in the movie’s world or nail home its themes.

*And again, I get it – kid’s movie. But The Wild Robot presents its world fairly seriously, in a way that begs these questions. The Mitchells vs. The Machines has crazy deathbots out of nowhere, too, but that movie is firmly tongue-in-cheek from the first frame. And it still manages to justify its deathbots more than this does.

The ending is similarly hollow. It kind of tries to have its cake and eat it too, seemingly wanting to avoid killing the friendly robot protagonist, a la The Iron Giant or Big Hero 6, while still having room for a sad moment as Roz leaves the island*. Weirdly, though, this ending is almost darker, because while Roz survives, she essentially ships herself off to live the rest of her life in indentured robot servitude, forever shackled by the memories of her found family and what her life could have been. The movie sure portrays it as a happy ending, though.

*With Roz’s “please rate your service on a scale of 1 to 10” fully ripping off Baymax’s “Are you satisfied with your care?” stinger, by the way

—

Maybe this reads as overly negative – I enjoyed the experience of watching The Wild Robot well enough. It has a lot of heart, it's funny, and it's gorgeous at times; there's a lot of really striking colorwork I was particularly impressed by. I just don’t know that I’d be eager to return to it, as it doesn’t feel like it has the legs to really hold up on repeat viewings.

[theaudientvoid]

I've spoken before about how I don't put much stock in a lot of fandom theories. I think that a lot of them take precisely the wrong perspective on storytelling. The correct perspective to take is to realize that fictional stories are fictional; that everything that happens in them happens because somewhere a writer decided to have it happen in order to further the story that they are trying to tell. The correct approach to theorizing is to ask the question "what is the writer trying to do with this story, and how does this theory fit into that?" Most people don't really do this, though. Instead, they latch on to minor details which they interpret as license to engage in wild speculation, utterly divorced from any though as to how it all fits in to the writers narrative objectives.

Anyway, I just head an ASOIAF theory that I think is dumb as fuck. So, the theory goes that the "reason" the Others (or Whitewalkers, if we're being vulgar) are returning after thousands of years is because in the past, people in Westeros used to sacrifice babies to them to keep them appeased, but then they mostly stopped, and so now the Others are returning to, I dunno, steals the world's babies? It's kind of vague.

The theory's proponents have various things in the books that the will cite as "evidence", but remember, fictional story being written by a writer. So, in the spirit of that, let's ask ourselves what Martin is trying to do with the Others? What's the point of even including them in the story?

So, like, the main recurring theme of the ASOIAF book is that universe is a cold, uncaring void, that you and everyone you love will inevitably die, but before that happens we can still fight to create our own meaning, for ourselves. A song of ice and fire, if you would.

On literally the third page of A Game of Thrones, there's a bit with a team of Night's Watch rangers north of the Wall, and one of the rangers gives a monologue about what it feels like to freeze to death. The cold has a way of working its way inside of you, and once that happens, you just stop fighting and let it take you. "The real enemy is the cold", he concludes.

Anyway, right after this, they run into the Others and die.

So, from that perspective, it's pretty clear how the Others fit into Martins thematic agenda. They're avatars the unfeeling coldness of the universe, which we all have to fight to keep out of ourselves. And so, this whole theory seeking to answer why the Others have returned is thematically incoherent. The Others don't need a reason to return anymore than Winter does. You might as well ask "why is winter coming?" It doesn't matter. What matters is what are you going to do when it arrives.

[aingeal98]

Can you list down the orpheus and euridyce moments? :o and whether it's doksoo/ joongdok/ yoohankim related

OK so to preface I'm sure people out there have done much more coherent analysis than me who just finished the novel last week but I'm gonna throw together some of my thoughts anyways:

The whole final third of the novel is the Orpheus/Eurydice Moment to me. Either the build up, the event, or the aftermath. And they're ALL yoohankim related like it's the three of them or it's nothing. Everything from reincarnation island onwards feels like it's foreshadowing the ending, in big obvious ways but also in small subtler ways. Also given the amount of greek mythology present in the story I'm sure it's deliberate lol.

The story of Orpheus/Eurydice at it's simplest is a man who loves a woman so much he'll go to the Underworld and try to get her back. And he almost does, he just has to walk back to the surface without looking back to make sure she's following. But of course he looks back. Because he loves her. He needs to see her, he loves her too much to risk never seeing her again. Even if it dooms them. He already lost her once, and his grief won't allow him to move forward so easily.

When yoohan get off the train with Dokja, they look back. When I read it I was like holyyyy shit they're both Orpheus and seeing the official art confirmed it for me.

(Couldn't find the image without the text but anyways)

Dokja is their Eurydice. If they didn't look back, if they accepted 49% Dokja and kept moving forward... Well who knows for sure what would have happened but we do know that we wouldn't have gotten 49 Dokja swept up into 51 and then torn down until just a tiny version of himself remains, alive but comatose. We wouldn't have gotten the Dokkaebi King telling Han Sooyoung "You should have been content with 49% Kim Dokja."

But of course they would have never been content. The same way Orpheus could have never made it to the surface without looking back. They had to. Just like they have to keep trying, no matter what.

The thematic parallel to Orpheus for me is how they cannot let go of their grief. They love Dokja too much to settle for anything less than him being there with them in full. Orpheus was terrified on his way back up, convinced the Gods could be tricking him because he couldn't hear Eurydice's footsteps. What if she was just a shade? A shadow of the woman he originally loved?

He could never settle for that. They could never settle for that either. Only unlike Orpheus, who's solution was to die and see Eurydice again, these two go a little bit more bonkers with their grief filled reunion attempts. World line crossing, time travel, reality crossing, screaming and fighting your other Orpheus half because they're not playing along and pretending to heal from their grief, brainwashing authors from alternate universes into writing Dokja's story so they can bring him back...

I'm kind of curious what Orpheus in Orv's reaction would be to seeing those two repeat his story. Like is he happy or is he like wow those two do NOT know how to quit they're kind of embarrassing me right now.

But yeah if I'm yelling incoherently about yhk being Orpheus and Eurydice, this is the basics of what I'm talking about. Thanks for the ask!

[jade-kyo]

sorry if this dumb, but I genuinely don't understand. What is wrong with the direction Noragami is taking ?

Not dumb at all and I’m very willing to break it down- this got pretty long and I just kinda typed it all out as I thought of it so I hope it’s not too incoherent and rambling but yeah. I have a lot of feelings, most of which are not good. If anyone else has any further points on why this is Not Great™️ feel free to add on.

First off there are so many issues with Hiyori being a shinki. God’s greatest secret? How is she supposed to interact with anyone except the gods and the very few shinki who know the secret and survived. It’s waaaay too risky to reveal it to her and just hope that she survives it. if she interacts with any other shinki it runs the risk of them becoming curious about their own lives and names because they knew her while she was alive and know her living name.

And then thematically it just makes no sense. The entire point of the hospital arc was to show us she needs to live! She’s only sixteen. She has her whole life ahead of her and her throwing it away to be on the far shore is a complete spit in the face to everything this manga has said beforehand. It’s also a spit in the face to Yukine’s arc who spent all this time grieving the life he never got to live because he died so young. Now our main character, who desperately wanted to live, to return to her family, to live her dream of becoming a doctor, is gonna have all that taken from her? When the whole fucking point was how much the shinki wanted to live? It turns the entire story, which up until now was about hope and overcoming the past, into a tragedy. A full on tragedy with basically no hope or silver lining or anything.

Not a single character (except trashdad) wanted this for Hiyori. They all warned her about it. They all desperately wanted her to live her full happy life on the near shore because death is a tragedy. Yes shinki like Yukine, Kazuma, and Nana may come to accept it and find their peace with it and find a life they can love on the far shore but that doesn’t negate the tragedy of death. That they were all taken too soon. That Yukine never got to see his sister again or even grow up, that Kazuma never got to get married or run his family’s business, Nana couldn’t protect her home or grow up or save her father. Their lives were stolen from them.

Death is always a tragedy. It’s unfair and cruel. No matter how one may come to terms with it. That’s been the whole fucking point of the manga since day one.

“When someone dies you can never see them again” it’s right there in Sakura’s quote.

There’s literally no way to spin this into even a bittersweet ending much less a happy ending. Not without going against literally everything this manga has stood for up until now. So the only other option is to go full blown everything is cruel and unfair and there is no hope and Yato really does just bring calamity to everyone he loves and trashdad was right all along. There is no light at the end of the tunnel, no silver lining. Just- NOTHING! Seriously this fucks over Yato’s entire character. It literally proves Father right. Everyone Yato loves dies. He really does just spread calamity to all.

You really expect them to be happy together when every time Yato looks at “Shiro” he’ll have to remember how he failed to save Hiyori, failed to protect her, how this innocent little girl who had her entire life ahead of her was murdered by his father simply because they loved each other? Because he couldn’t cut ties with her, couldn’t let her go. Like it’s horrible. Just absolutely horrible. There’s no hope here.

Because death is a tragedy no matter what.

[virginreprise]

dearest VR, have you watched the film paris, texas? i have many jumbled incoherent thoughts about how its exploration of landscapes (specifically the american west) as metaphysical spaces, its prominent age gap relationship and other thematic elements intersect with the same sorts of things i like best in joel and arthur fics (skewing toward the DDLG ones hehe). and the same sorts of things that speak to me in lana's art, too. the film is not smut obv lol but i see strong connections between it and the fics i like best (and stories in general). it is a bit more gut-wrenching than i like the fics i read for escapism to be, like one of the truest depictions of ptsd, domestic violence, substance abuse, and 'the inability to go back' and the age gap is kinda just a fact of the mater. BUT i think you said once you are not necessarily a happily ever after person and i kind of love when age gap fics are not. typing this on my phone, it makes no sense, just thoughts... but wanted to say them after i saw your americana post from the other day on my dash :))

okay nonnie, i wanted to watch the film before i replied, just so i could you give you a comprehensive reply that wasn't just me pretending to agree with what you were saying and promising to watch a movie that would've probably stayed in my to watch list for a long time. soooooo, i watched it last night and it has been stuck in my mind ever since.

its exactly my type of film, so much so that i put in my top four on letterboxd. the shots of the landscape were breathtaking every time, no matter the length, the sympathy that i felt for travis was constant throughout the film and then squandered towards the end with the revelation and that fucking brilliant last conversation between him and jane. the cinematography was impeccable, the acting from the kid was brilliant which is unusual because i don't usually like kids in movies because (no offence) the acting always sucks. however, this time round it felt like they'd just told hunter carson to talk about his special interests and they'll just film him doing so with harry dean stanton nodding along and listening as a dad normally would.

it was just so personable and i don't wanna seem like I'm droning on because half the people reading this probably won't have a fucking clue what we're talking about, but it was so visceral in every way that a film should be. my melancholic nature was definitely stimulated and the age gap was unexpected but also extremely poignant and necessary. i just feel like its so realistic for such extreme age gaps to not have a happy ending, you know?? especially in an american wasteland where two people come together out of comfort that then transforms into obsession and possessiveness that ultimately stunts a healthy growth of the relationship. its something that i want to explore in this next fic i have planned called 'An American Trilogy,' (yes i named it after the elvis song), which is hopefully gonna be a three part fic that spans three months of summer starting in alabama, through north mississippi to memphis (for reasons i think you can gather from the fic title) through arkansas and into texas where...inevitability occurs.

i'm undecided whether i want to write it for joel or arthur because i feel like i've got a good few joel fics now and nothing to show for arthur who has always been my original man. if it were to be arthur then i'd have to transform the setting into a late 1800's southern america and there's a whole load of history that goes alongside it. unless people wouldn't mind a modern au - personally that's not what i like in an arthur fic tho. the historical setting is kinda part of him. let me know what yall think though!!

[mdhwrites]

Do Themes Make a Story Good? Featuring TOH and Amphibia

I've tried talking about this subject a few times and never found a good angle for it. Last night, a thought wormed into my brain about the fact that I make a lot of posts defending the thematic strengths of Amphibia, how those themes help justify some of its writing choices and even talk about concepts and the like that people claim are not in the show that are actually represented. Contrasted with my blogs on The Owl House where I usually talk about its themes to highlight poor execution on them or how I disagree with them existing, a fear hit me.

Do I consider Amphibia's themes more valid because I like the show more?

The extremely short and reductive version of this is "to some extent yes." That doesn't get into WHY for this though. After all, one's enjoyment of a piece shouldn't matter for a theme. Not all themes are fun or pleasant and so expecting a comfortable experience with them isn't fair. It limits the sort of storytelling you're capable of.

The problem is that this extends to ALL media. What commonly determines if a piece is genuinely good or not is if it was engaging, not if it was fun or enjoyable. A horror fan and an action fan might both call their movies a blast but the sort of engagement they had is vastly different. One is loving the use of scares, tension, etc. like that while the other may have just enjoyed a popcorn flick with explosions, big set pieces and silly violence but neither opinion is bad because they were both properly engaged by the points of the movie.

Themes are interesting because we often talk about them as engaging but I think this is actually putting the cart before the horse. We pick up on these themes because the work itself is engaging. After all, a textbook on mental health can have a theme of dealing with trauma but we don't frame it that way because, you know... It's a textbook. It's dry. Conversely, an author might tell you that their work was about something but if it was incoherent garbage, then who cares what it had to say because you didn't like it in the first place to dig into every piece of symbolism that supposedly has something to say about the theme the author claims.

So what does this have to do with Amphibia and The Owl House? Well, their ways of dealing with theme are kind of fascinating and indicative of how they are built as shows and play into why I find one's themes great while the other is lacking. I'll try to illustrate with two metaphors: Amphibia's theming is like putting away pennies for a fundraiser to make a park for the community. Everyone pitches in but they pitch in in small ways and no one is able to just dumb a giant wad of cash in. They're small drops that build and build until one day you go to put a penny in and are pleasantly surprised to find that hey, you guys are making some real progress! You might not make the goal you had but this is impressive as is! Next week it's a little higher and higher until the jar is gone, only for the organizer to come out to cheer about how they made it and finally revealing the park, but the sum of it all is so much more than you could have expected from mere pennies, especially in all the small details! However, even if you only glance at it, it still looks complete, fun and satisfying.

The Owl House's theming is much more like a college essay that ends up getting a C. It starts with a really strong thesis to their paper and has a compelling starting argument that implies a lot of knowledge. However, they have fifty pages to fill and the student realizes by page ten, they're running short. So they first start pulling in elements that don't conflict immediately but are still a little strange to include. Then it includes a couple strange tangents and personal anecdotes that don't seem to make a lot of sense and are losing the thread faster and faster. By the end, the tricks to achieve word count are starting to become blatant, especially as they spend so much time repeating the same things as if they were new information or something unique but it's actually well worn. All of it is useless to their argument and even actively harming it, let alone when paired with all the rest. Structurally it works and it finished with enough words but it comes back with the thesis statement circled multiple times and the question "Wasn't this the point?" under it, all in red.

These two approaches have knock on effects though. Amphibia doesn't ask anything of the viewer but to buy in slightly. In return, you are invited to just enjoy the characters and its world. It doesn't have anything to prove and doesn't need to be loud in its messaging and so the story is allowed to function simply on a basic level and be enjoyable on its own. It can tell a simple story with a clear moral because it knows that the moral is playing a part to the larger whole and doesn't care about if everyone knows how grand its scope because the goal of enriching everyone will be reached no matter what. This is how you get an entire season dedicated to Anne's character development that only bothers to actually say that was the goal at the end of the season when the option to be selfish once more and cut off community, to reject change and go back to what is comfortable, comes in the form of Sasha. And heck, that is actually one of the most overt times Amphibia brings attention to its storytelling/theming but only AFTER earning it.

The Owl House meanwhile has something to prove but neither the knowledge or focus to do so but it's stated it so now it has to earn it. As such, anything that crosses its desk that is even tangentially related to its themes gets pushed in so that it can claim to be thoroughly exploring the topic, even if previous examples or the like actively conflict with the new example. As an example, I've seen people really praise The First Day for tackling how the traditional school system doesn't accommodate people or work for all learning types. With TOH's early statement of "Us weirdos gotta stick together!" and all that implies, this is actually a great topic for it to tackle. However, because its being grafted onto this thesis, the supporting evidence hasn't been properly built up and so you have people claiming they should be allowed to do school differently... By literally breaking the law in a way that is met with the DEATH PENALTY. It's technically on topic but it's sloppy and loses all of its bite because you're left more confused than properly satisfied.

This causes a weird issue where you can engage with Amphibia only on the surface level, never take in its themes, and still get a deep enjoyment from it because the basic storytelling makes sense, follows its own internal logic and has satisfying payoffs because of every penny contributed to making the whole thing works. You don't need more than Anne's relationships with others to be able to cheer in joy at the "They're not Amphibia's greatest treasure" moment because those relationships are engaging on their own. Because of this engagement and satisfaction though, you're more incentivized to want to actually take a closer look at what the whole picture was and to enjoy the minor details, even if you didn't have to, like how the whole show always pushed seeing selfish things that could oppress others as worthless when compared to the selfless and communal which is part of the thematic punch of the greatest treasure moment.

Meanwhile, The Owl House paradoxically is hard to enjoy as a basic story due to all the concessions to theme while the choices of the story also actively make the theming worse, making only the absolute most surface level read the one that can be satisfying because only then can it desperately claiming that everything had a point actually be believed. Otherwise, the broken seams that are barely keeping the whole thing together start to show itself until it entirely unravels at the end because it cannot tie them all back together. The epitomy of this is how Luz becomes a chosen one, breaking some early theming, due to a power up she only gets after the THIRD time that she theoretically resolves the same inner conflict in THREE EPISODES, muddling any of the thematic payoffs for any of the three times the themes were meant to climax. The best the show can hope for is that the teacher will accept their excuses for why it's so incoherent, despite the fact that even as early as S1B (When The First Day I referenced earlier was) the flaws in the show's ability to actually meet the assignment were clear.

This is why I personally argue that you can have a good story without themes but you can't have good themes without a good story. If the work doesn't support them then the themes will more often than not get in the way and audiences won't care they were there in the first place. Admittedly, this might be due to my own writing method where I usually stumble my way into a theme that stems from simply trying to make the base concept the best way I can. After all, almost every story will have a theme of some sort but if you go in with the goal of making a statement, well...

You better know what you're talking about and how to present it or you'll become more repetitive and rambly than this blog.

======+++++======

I have a public Discord for any and all who want to join!

I also have an Amazon page for all of my original works in various forms of character focused romances from cute, teenage romance to erotica series of my past. I have an Ao3 for my fanfiction projects as well if that catches your fancy instead. If you want to hang out with me, I stream from time to time and love to chat with chat.

A Twitter you can follow too

And a Kofi if you like what I do and want to help out with the fact that disability doesn’t pay much.