thechangeling4

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Your dose of motivation for today!

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REAL!!!! THE W.I.T.C.H. lore goes insane and the worldbuilding was so good! Not to put everyone in boxes or anything, but compared to winx, i think w.i.t.c.h was for the girls that were genuinely like... Concocting potions and shit with mud and leaves from the garden

My thought is that Winx is for girls who played pretend with zero rules and W.I.T.C.H. is more for older girls who read all the -ology books and ALWAYS had deep lore when playing pretend

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some underrated cornelia x caleb moments from season 1

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A note on "Miraculous treads on very much explored territory and still fails epically".

Thomas Astruc used to work (as a crew member, not a leader, but still) on W. I. T. C. H.

Which is:

A magical girl show with team dynamics

A show that mixes episodic and serialized format

A show where two the male romantic interests have a massive role (Caleb is a main character on par with the six girls, and Matt has an epic character arc)

A show with a strong mystery element

A show with manipulative villains (sometimes with schemes reaolved within an episode! And sometimes longer), villains that turn out to be family members, sympathetic villains, loathsome villains... Great, complex villains, almost all of them

A mean girl quasi-redemption arc

A show that does all of the aforementioned elements very well. Also, better diversity despite being 10 years older.

Yet when I watch ML, I see no inspiration (despite many common motifs), no lessons learned, no indication that the lead writer ever got anything from the experience working on that show. Unless the lesson was "W. I. T. C. H. got cancelled after two seasons, so everything about the show was wrong and we should do ML differently".

(Mind you, WITCH got more plot in two seasons than ML did in five, and still wrapped up the story fairly well)

Sorry for the rant. I kinda know that the explanation for "why is ML not like that" is "ML is forced to be an episodic show against its will", but also.

ML is trying very hard to pretend that it's More Than an Episodic Show and Not Only for Kids, and really doesn't measure up with shows with seemingly similar premises.

(Post that inspired this ask)

Before we get into it, if anyone likes fun theme songs and missed the American opening to W.I.T.C.H.'s first season then I have a treat for you!!!

Top tier opening song! Other countries were robbed!

Anyway, I agree with everything you said and this ask got me curious about the writing staff. I started doing some digging and a lot of them appear to have worked on other shows that would fall with the same genres as Miraculous. Many of those shows were even episodic formula shows that reserved the serialized elements for season finals and specials (looking at you Code Lyoko!) That doesn't shock me, but it does just add to my curiosity as to what the heck is going on with Miraculous.

These aren't new comers to the industry in over their heads, they're established professionals! Why are they struggling so hard to tell a good story while working with an incredibly simple premise? Why are aren't they embracing the show's limits and making it the best it can be in its chosen category? I'd love to know the full story, but alas, I likely never will. My best guess is that commercial success has got to their heads and so they're convinced that any criticism they see can't possibly be valid. At least, that's what the head writer's twitter feed seems to suggest every time I see screen caps from it...

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Loved the episode "I is for Illusion", but hated that girls just left Caleb and Blunk in sand. So, this is the "right" ending in my headcanon :)

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W.I.T.C.H. Issue 76 - Earth © Disney

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Day 4: The guardians. aka my beloved witches 💕 ~

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himerish spotted

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Oh my.. I never imagined I would be posting about both Mesopotamia and W.I.T.C.H., the two main foci of my research, in one post

Keep it under the category: absurdly accurate mythological parallels to W.I.T.C.H. i really did not see coming???

I just bumped into a short Sumerian myth (rather a fragment) called usually Ninurta and the Turtle - see the link if you wish to read it, it is really short

Ninurta is a heroic type of god, getting rid of monsters and saving the world, most famously the bird-ish creature Anzu, who steals "the tablet of destinies" from the gods - on which the destiny of the world is written and which gives their holder the power to rule it

The ending of the more famous (and later) version is a bit distorted, but it may be that Ninurta is thinking of keeping the tablets after his success, while they are supposed to be held by a higher deity (Enlil, in this version)

In the Sumerian turtle fragment, the tablet has fallen into "Abzu" after the fight, a freshwater underground ocean, a sphere of the god Enki (akkadian parallel is Ea), also one of the highest deities - and Ninurta goes there, because he actually wants to get the tablets and rule the cosmos, but Enki creates a big turtle of clay (it is just so cool) that stops him from doing that (by biting his foot hehe) and drags him into a pit that it dug

Honestly, this short story is just so great on its own, mostly because of the turtle

But. Geeky thing. I am just thinking. A warrior. Who steps over his rights and wants to. Rule the cosmos. And goes into a body of fresh water. And meets a turtle. Who, and now the parallels are bit more complicated to phrase, but who stops him from ruling the cosmos pridefully and makes him remember who he is, you could say... you people see my point? Hm??

Hm???????????

I am not saying witch writers have read this story but...

DIDN'T THEY?????

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Another thing we were robbed of: Cedric in possession of his shapeshifting powers but in a casual setting.

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theplasticreckless_ @ Instagram

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W.I.T.C.H. CENSORED! UNFORGIVABLE!!

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Noah Berlatsky at Everything Is Horrible:

Israel, with the backing of the US, is currently working itself up to a horrific regional war with Iran. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who began the bombing, claims that the war is necessary to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons, even though the best intel suggests that Iran is not going to have nuclear weapons anytime soon. (Or, to put it another way, Israel is lying because it wants an excuse for war.) In addition to the false warnings about an imminent nuclear Iran, Israel has also argued that war is good in itself because it will liberate Iran’s people. Last week, for example, Netanyahu called for (another) Iranian revolution. “The time has come for the Iranian people to unite around its flag and its historic legacy, by standing up for your freedom from the evil and oppressive regime.” Right wing US commenter Erick Erickson echoed those sentiments on twitter: “We should be helping the Iranian people overthrow their government. The majority of Iranians want to be with the West.” Netanyahu isn’t wrong about the regime in Iran; it is evil and oppressive. Women who defy the “morality police” by refusing to wear headscarves have been imprisoned, tortured, and literally whipped. The people of Iran deserve better; a new, democratic government in Iran would be a blessing. In the words of Donald Trump, “The future of Iran belongs to its people.” But you know where else a new, democratic government would be a blessing? In Israel. And for that matter in the US. Israel’s genocide against Gaza had killed around 41,000 people as of October. Since then, Israel has instituted an embargo on food and humanitarian aid; all 2 million people in Gaza are starving. Palestinians journalists are especially under assault; at least 185, and probably many more, have been murdered as they attempt to report on the genocide.

Meanwhile, Palestinian citizens in Israel who protest the mass murder of their community have been arrested and jailed; they’ve also been stigmatized and suspended from schools and jobs. And of course Palestinians in Gaza have no voice or vote in the apartheid “democracy” which controls their food, their water, and their lives. The US has also targeted Palestinians and those who speak out for Palestine; Turkish grad student Rümeysa Öztürk was unconstitutionally detained by ICE for writing a pro Palestinian op-ed. The Trump administration is also currently roughing up opposition leaders, and using the military to intimidate domestic political opposition. His administration’s shuttering of foreign aid could lead to 25 million deaths; it has already killed hundreds of thousands.

[...] The Iranian rulers are bad people. But unfortunately, Israel’s rulers are also bad people, and the fascist dipshit Americans elected to rule the US is an unbelievably bad person. The Iranians have no reason to believe that US/Israel liberators would treat them with justice or would install a democracy even if they could. The Iranian people are not as supportive of Palestine as other countries in the region for a range of reasons; nonetheless, a truly democratic Iran would certainly include at least some voices speaking against the genocide and against Israel. Which is a reason to doubt that Netanyahu or Trump have any interest at all in a truly democratic Iran. The majority of Iranians want to be free. But the west, as represented by Israel and the US, and contra Erick Erickson, isn’t especially free, and is becoming less so every minute. The Israeli government is a vicious and genocidal apartheid regime; the US government is doing everything it can to silence dissent and create a fascist state. The idea that Netanyahu and Trump are fighting for, or would attempt to install, a democratic Iran would be amusing if it weren’t being used as an excuse for a wholesale slaughter of Iranian people.

Noah Berlatsky brings the heat in his column on the Israel/Iran war and how Iran, Israel, and the US are all differing shades of bad.

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All from @mattxiv on Instagram.

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