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shihalyfie · 3 years

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About the Adventure: reboot, the likely reason why it exists, the question of target demographic, and whether I would recommend it or not

I think this reboot has been kind of a strange outlier in terms of Digimon anime in general, in terms of...well, just about everything. I also feel like everything surrounding it has kind of been giving us mixed signals as to what the intent and purpose behind the anime is -- well, besides “cashing in on the Adventure brand”, but looking at it more closely, that might be a bit of an oversimplification.

I’m writing this post because, having seen the entire series to the end for myself and thinking very hard about it and what it was trying to do, I decided to put down my thoughts. This is not meant to be a review of what I think was good and bad, but rather, something that I hope will be helpful to those who might be on the fence about whether they want to watch it or not, or those who don’t want to watch/finish it but are curious about what happened, or those who are curious as to why this reboot even exists in the first place, or even maybe just those who did watch it but are interested in others’ thoughts about it. I'm personally convinced that -- especially in an ever-changing franchise like Digimon -- how much you like a given work is dependent on what your personal tastes are to the very end, and thus it’s helpful to understand what kind of expectations you should go in with if you want to watch something.

With all of this said and done, if you want to go in and best enjoy this series, I think it is best to consider this anime as a distinct Digimon series of its own. The relationship to Adventure is only surface-level, and by that I mean it’s very obvious it’s doing things its own thing deliberately without worrying too much about what prior series did. Of course, I think everyone will have varying feelings about using the Adventure branding for something that really isn't Adventure at all, but we are really talking about an in-name-only affair, and something that’s unabashedly doing whatever it wants. So in other words, if you’re going in expecting Adventure, or anything that really resembles Adventure, you’re setting yourself up for disappointment. But if you’re able to approach it like yet another distinct Digimon series, and the other aspects of it fit your fancy, you’ll probably be able to enjoy it much better. And, conversely, I think it’s also important to remember that this series seems to have a writing philosophy with a fundamentally different goal from most Digimon series, and since it’s understandable for most long-time Digimon fans to have their tastes built on those prior series, it’s fine and completely understandable that this reboot may not be your cup of tea, for reasons that probably don’t actually have much to do with whether it’s an Adventure reboot or not.

There are no spoilers in the following post. (Although I use some emphatic language for the duration for it, these are mostly just my personal thoughts and how I see the series and the overall situation.)

On what exact relationship to Adventure this series has, and why it’s an “Adventure reboot”

If you ask why they did an Adventure reboot, the easiest answer to come up with is “Adventure milking, because it’s profitable”, but that’s kind of an oversimplification of what the issue is. This is especially when you take into account a key fact that official has been very well aware of since as early as 2006: most kids are too young to have seen Adventure, and therefore have no reason to care about it.

That’s the thing: Adventure milking only works so well on today’s children, and Toei and Bandai know this. This is also the reason that the franchise started going through a bit of a “split” starting in around 2012 (after Xros Wars finished airing), when the video game branch started making more active attempts to appeal to the adults’ fanbase with Re:Digitize and Adventure PSP. (Although they were technically still “kids’ games”, they were very obviously aimed at the adults’ audience as a primary “target”.) The generation that grew up with Adventure and other classic Digimon anime was getting older and older, and targeting that audience would require tailoring products more specifically to them -- ultimately culminating in 2015 and the solidification of “very obviously primarily for adults” media in the form of both games (Cyber Sleuth and Next Order) and anime (tri.). Note that Appmon ended up getting its own 3DS game, but since it was targeted at kids, it seems to have been developed by a completely different pipeline/branch from the aforementioned adults’ games, so even that had a split.

So if we want to talk about full-on nostalgia pandering, that’s already being done in the adults’ branch. In fact, Appmon development specifically said that they felt free to not really care about the adults’ audience because that was tri.’s job. Of course, the hardcore Digimon adults’ fanbase is still keeping an eye on the kids’ shows, and it’s good to not upset them -- and, besides, even if we’re all suffering under the hell of capitalism, people who work in kids’ shows still tend to be very passionate about the content and messages they’re showing the kids, so they still put an effort into making good content that adults can enjoy too. But, nevertheless, adults are still the “periphery demographic”, and a kids’ show is not a success if the kids (who have not seen and do not care about Adventure) are not watching it or buying the toys. Appmon ended up being extremely well-received by the adults’ fanbase, but that all meant nothing since the kids didn’t get into it.

Most kids are not super incredibly discerning about so-called writing quality (it’s not like they don’t at least unconsciously know when something is good, but they’re much less likely to be bothered by little things adults are often bothered by), so there’s a certain degree you have to get their attention if you want things to catch on with them. Critical reception does matter a lot more when we talk about the adults’ audience, but for the kids, the more important part is how much you’ve managed to engage them and how much fun they’re having (especially in regards to the toyline). Moreover, there’s the problem of “momentum”; Digimon’s sister shows of PreCure, Kamen Rider, and Super Sentai have sometimes had really poorly performing shows (critically or financially), but have managed to recover it in successive years to avoid getting cancelled. Digimon never managed to get to that point, with sales nearly dropping to half with Tamers and again with Frontier. So in essence, Savers, Xros Wars, and Appmon were all attempts at figuring out what was needed to just get that “kickstart” again -- but things just never lined up for it to work.

So if kids don’t really care about Adventure, why would they do Adventure nostalgia pandering? The answer is one that official has actually openly stated multiple times: they want to have parents watch it together with their children. Both Seki and Kinoshita said this in regards to watching the reaction to Kizuna, and it was also stated outright as a goal for the reboot, but, believe it or not, there’s reports of this having been stated back as early as Savers (followed by an admission that maybe 2006 was a little too early for people who grew up with Adventure to be old enough to have their own kids). So the little nostalgia references in Savers, Xros Wars, and Appmon aren't really meant to magically turn the series into Adventure as much as they’re supposed to be flags waved at the parents to get them to pay attention, so that they can introduce their kids to Digimon and watch it together with them, until the kids eventually take an interest on their own and they don’t need to rely on that kind of standby as much. (I say “as much” because of course PreCure, Rider, and Sentai all are still very indulgent in their anniversary references, but they’re not nearly as reliant on it to the point of life-and-death.)

This is also why Kizuna’s existence and release date two months prior to the reboot is a huge factor in this. The reason tri. wouldn’t have done it is that it never actually reached a properly “mainstream” audience. It’s a huge reason I keep emphasizing the fact that tri. and Kizuna are two separate things with completely different production and release formats, because tri. being a limited OVA screening released in six parts over three years means that, although it was a moderate financial success that did better than the franchise’s other niche products, in the end, it didn’t actually reach the “extremely casual” audience very well. We, as the “hardcore Internet fanbase”, all know people who watched all six parts, and the difference between tri. and Kizuna’s release formats doesn’t hit us as hard because of international distribution circumstances, but even on our end, if you talk to your casual friends who barely remember anything about Digimon except what they saw on TV twenty years ago, you will almost never find anyone who got past Part 1, maybe 2 at most. (That’s before we even get into the part where a good chunk of them got turned off at the character design stage for being too different.) Sticking with a full six-part series over three years is a commitment, and if you’re not someone with a certain level of loyalty to the franchise, you aren’t as likely to put aside the time for it!

Kizuna, on the other hand, was a full-on theatrical movie with full marketing campaign that was aimed at that extremely casual mainstream audience, including a lot of people who hadn’t even heard of tri. (due to it being too niche) or hadn’t bothered to commit to watching something so long, and thus managed to “hype up” a lot of adults and get them in a Digimon mood. (Critical reception issues aside, this is also presumably a huge reason Kizuna isn’t all that reliant on tri.’s plot; Adventure and 02 both averaged at around 11% of the country watching it when it first aired, but the number of people who even saw tri. much less know what happened in it is significantly lower, so while you can appeal to a lot of people if you’re just targeting the 11%, you'll lock them out if you’re overly reliant on stuff a lot of them will have never seen in the first place.) We’re talking the kind of super-casual who sees a poster for Kizuna, goes “oh I remember Digimon!”, casually buys a ticket for the movie, likes it because it has characters they remember and the story is feelsy, and then two months later an anime that looks like the Digimon they recognize is on Fuji TV, resulting in them convincing their kid to watch it together with them because they’re in a Digimon mood now, even though the actual contents of the anime are substantially different from the original.

So, looking back at the reboot:

There’s a huge, huge, huge implication that the choice to use Adventure branding was at least partially to get Fuji TV to let them have their old timeslot back. Neither Xros Wars nor Appmon were able to be on that old timeslot, presumably because Fuji TV had serious doubts about their profitability (perhaps after seeing Savers not do very well). This isn’t something that hits as hard for us outside Japan who don’t have to feel the impact of this anyway, but it’s kind of a problem if kids don’t even get the opportunity to watch the show in the first place. While there’s been a general trend of moving to video-on-demand to the point TV ratings don’t really have as much impact as they used to, I mean...it sure beats 6:30 in the morning, goodness. (Note that a big reason PreCure, Rider, and Sentai are able to enjoy the comfortable positions they’re in is that they have a very luxurious 8:30-10 AM Sunday block on TV Asahi dedicated to them.)

Since we’re talking about “the casual mainstream”, this means that this kind of ploy only works with something where a casual person passing by can see names and faces and take an interest. This is why it has to be Adventure, not 02 or Tamers or whatnot; 02 may have had roughly similar TV ratings to Adventure and fairly close sales figures back in 2000, but the actual pop culture notability disparity in this day and age is humongous (think about the difference in pop culture awareness between Butter-Fly and Target). 02, Tamers, and all can do enough to carry “adults’ fandom” products and merch sales at DigiFes, and the adults’ branch of the franchise in general, but appealing to the average adult buying toys for the kids is a huge difference, and a big reason that, even if they’re clearly starting to acknowledge more of the non-Adventure series these days, it’s still hard to believe they’re going to go as far as rebooting anything past Adventure -- or, more accurately, hard to believe they’ll be able to get the same impact using names and faces alone.

This advertising with the Adventure brand goes beyond just the anime -- we’re talking about the toyline that has the involved character faces plastered on them, plus all of the ventures surrounding them that Bandai pretty obviously carefully timed to coincide with this. One particularly big factor is the card game, which is doing really, really well right now, to the point it’s even started gaining an audience among people who weren’t originally Digimon fans. Part of it is because the game’s design is actually very good and newcomer-friendly, but also...nearly every set since the beginning came with reboot-themed Tamer Cards, which means that, yes, those cards with the Adventure names and faces were helping lure people into taking an interest in the game. Right now, the game is doing so well and has gained such a good reputation that it probably doesn’t need that crutch anymore to keep going as long as the game remains well-maintained, but I have no doubt the initial “Adventure” branding was what helped it take off, and its success is most likely a huge pillar sustaining the franchise at the current moment.

Speaking of merch and toys, if you look closely, you might notice that Bandai decided to go much, much more aggressively into the toy market with this venture than they ever did with Savers, Xros Wars, or Appmon (Appmon was probably the most aggressive attempt out of said three). They put out a lot more merch and did a lot more collaborative events to engage the parents and children, and, presumably, the reason they were able to do this was because they were able to push into those outlets with the confidence the Adventure brand would let them be accepted (much like with Fuji TV). Like with the card game, the important part was getting their “foot in the door” so that even if it stopped being Adventure after a fashion, they’d still have all of those merchandising outlets -- after all, one of the first hints we ever got of Ghost Game’s existence was a July product listing for its products replacing the reboot’s in a gachapon set, so we actually have evidence of certain product pipelines being opened by the reboot’s precedent. (The word 後番組 literally means “the TV program that comes after”, so it’s pretty obvious this was intended for Ghost Game; in other words, the reboot’s existence helped ensure there be a “reservation” for this kind of product to be made.)

I think one important thing to keep in mind is that Toei and Bandai have as much of a stake in avoiding rehashing for their kids’ franchises as we do. Even if you look at this from a purely capitalistic perspective, because of how fast the “turnover” is for the kids’ audience, sustaining a franchise for a long time off rehashing the same thing over and over is hard, and even moreso when it involves a twenty-year-old anime that said kids don’t even know or remember. Ask around about popular long-running Japanese kids’ franchises and you’ll notice they practically rely on being able to comfortably change things up every so often, like PreCure/Rider/Sentai shuffling every year, or Yu-Gi-Oh! having a rotation of different series and concepts, or the struggles that franchises that don’t do this have to deal with. And, after all, for all people are cynical about Toei continuing to milk Adventure or any of the other older series at every opportunity, as far as the kids’ branch of the franchise goes, this is only capable of lasting to a certain extent; if they tried keeping this up too long, even the adults and kids would get bored, and there is some point it’ll be easier to try and make products directly targeted at the kids’ audience instead of having to rely on the parents to ease them into it.

So it’s completely understandable that the moment they secured a proper audience with the reboot and finished up their first series with this, they decided to take the risk with Ghost Game right after. And considering all that’s happened, this is still a risk -- they’re changing up a lot (even if not as much as Appmon), and there’s a chance that the audience they’ve gathered is going to shoot down again because they’ve changed so much and they no longer have the Adventure branding as a “crutch” to use -- but they’re taking it anyway instead of going for something at least slightly more conventional.

Which means that, yes, there’s a possibility this will all explode in their face, because the Adventure branding is that huge of a card they’re about to lose. But at the very, very least, Ghost Game is coming in with the “momentum” and advantage that Savers, Xros Wars, and Appmon all didn’t have: a brand currently in the stage of recovery, all of the merchandising and collaborative pipelines the reboot and Kizuna opened up, a fairly good timeslot, and a premise somewhat more conventional than Xros Wars and Appmon (I’m saying this as someone who likes both: their marketing definitely did not do them many favors). There are still a lot of risks it’s playing here, and it’s possible it won’t be the end of more Adventure or reboot brand usage to try to keep that momentum up even as we go into Ghost Game, but it’s the first time in a long while we’ve had something to stand on.

Okay, so that’s out of the way. But the end result is that we now have 67 episodes of an Adventure “reboot” that actually doesn’t even resemble Adventure that much at all, which seems to have achieved its goal of flagging down attention so it can finally going back to trying new things. This series exists, we can’t do anything about the fact it exists, the period where its own financial performance actually mattered is coming to an end anyway, and we, as a fanbase of adults hanging out on the Internet keeping up with the franchise as a whole, have to figure out how each of us feels about this. So what of it?

About the contents of the reboot itself

One thing I feel hasn’t been brought up as a potential topic very much (or, at least, not as much as I feel like it probably should be) is that the reboot seems to be actively aimed at a younger target audience than the original Adventure. It hasn’t been stated outright, but we actually have quite a bit of evidence pointing towards this.

Let’s take a moment and discuss what it even means to have a different target audience. When you’re a kid, even one or two years’ difference is a big deal, and while things vary from kid to kid, generally speaking, it helps to have an idea of what your “overall goal” is when targeting a certain age group, since at some point you have to approximate the interests of some thousands of children. Traditionally, Digimon has been aimed at preteens (10-11 year olds); of course, many will testify to having seen the series at a younger age than that, but the "main” intended target demographic was in this arena. (Also, keep in mind that this is an average; a show aimed at 10-11 year olds could be said to be more broadly aimed at 7-13 year olds, whereas one aimed at 7-8 year olds would be more broadly aimed at something like 5-10 year olds.) Let’s talk a bit about what distinguishes children’s shows (especially Japanese kids’ shows) between this “preteen demographic” and things aimed at a much younger audience (which I’ll call “young child demographic”, something like the 7-8 year old arena):

With children who are sufficiently young, it’s much, much more difficult to ensure that a child of that age will be able to consistently watch TV at the same hour every week instead of being subject to more variable schedules, often set by their parents, meaning that it becomes much more difficult to have a series that relies on you having seen almost every episode to know what’s going on. For somewhat older kids, they’re more likely to be able to pick and pursue their own preferences (the usual “got up early every week for this show”). This means that shows targeted at a young child demographic will be more likely to be episodic, or at least not have a complex dramatic narrative that requires following the full story, whereas shows targeted at a preteen audience are more willing to have a dramatic narrative with higher complexity. This does not mean by any shake of the imagination that a narrative is incapable of having any kind of depth or nuance -- the reboot’s timeslot predecessor GeGeGe no Kitaro got glowing reviews all over the board for being an episodic story with tons of depth -- nor that characters can’t slowly develop over the course of the show. But it does raise the bar significantly, especially because it prevents you from making episodes that require you to know what happened in previous ones.

The thing is, the original Adventure and the older Digimon series in general didn’t have to worry about this, and, beyond the fact that their narratives very obviously were not episodic, we actually have concrete evidence of the disparity: Digimon has often been said to be a franchise for “the kids who graduated from (outgrew) a certain other monster series”. Obviously, they’re referring to Pokémon -- which does have the much younger target demographic. That’s why its anime is significantly more episodic and less overall plot-oriented, and Digimon wasn’t entirely meant to be a direct competitor to it; rather, it was hoping to pick up the preteens who’d enjoyed Pokémon at a younger age but were now looking for something more catered to them. This is also why, when Yo-kai Watch came into the game in 2014, that was considered such a huge direct competitor to Pokémon, because it was aiming for that exact same demographic, complete with episodic anime. When Yo-kai Watch moved to its Shadowside branch in 2017, it was specifically because they had concerns about losing audience and wanted to appeal to the kids who had been watching the original series, but since they were preteens now, they adopted a more dramatic and emotionally complex narrative that would appeal to that audience instead. So you can actually see the shift in attempted target demographic in real time.

Adventure through Frontier were aimed at 10-11 year olds, and here’s the interesting part: those series had the protagonists hover around the age of said target audience. We actually have it on record that Frontier had a direct attempt to keep most of the kids as fifth-graders for the sake of appealing to the audience, and so that it would be relatable to them. You can also see this policy of “matching the target audience’s age” in other series at the time; Digimon’s sister series Ojamajo Doremi (also produced by Seki) centered around eight-year-olds. Nor was Seki the only one to do this; stepping outside Toei for a bit, Medabots/Medarot had its protagonist Ikki be ten years old, much like Digimon protagonists, and the narrative was similarly dramatic. The thing is, that’s not how it usually works, and that’s especially not really been how it’s worked for the majority of kids’ series since the mid-2000s. In general, and especially now, it’s usually common to have the protagonists of children’s media be slightly older than the target age group. This has a lot of reasons behind it -- partially because kids are looking to have slightly older characters as a model for what to follow in their immediate future, and partially because “the things you want to teach the kids” are often more realistically reflected if the kids on screen have the right level of independence and capacity for emotional contemplation. Case in point: while everyone agrees the Adventure through Frontier characters are quite relatable, it’s a common criticism that the level of emotional insight sometimes pushes the boundary of what’s actually believable for 10-11 year olds...

...which is presumably why, with the exception of this reboot, every Digimon TV series since, as of this writing, started shifting to middle school students. That doesn’t mean they’re aiming the series at middle school kids now, especially because real-life 13-15 year olds are usually at the stage where they pretend they’ve outgrown kids’ shows (after all, that’s why there’s a whole term for “middle school second year syndrome”), but more that the narrative that they want to tell is best reflected by kids of that age, especially when we’re talking characters meant to represent children from the real world and not near-immortal youkai like Kitaro. In fact, the Appmon staff outright said that Haru was placed in middle school because the story needed that level of independence and emotional sensitivity, which is interesting to consider in light of the fact that Appmon’s emotional drama is basically on par with that of Adventure through Frontier’s. So in other words, the kind of high-level drama endemic to Adventure through Frontier is would actually normally be more on par with what you’d expect for kids of Haru’s age.

But at this point, the franchise is at a point of desperation, and you can see that, as I said earlier, Appmon was blatantly trying to be one of those “have its cake and eat it too” series by having possibly one of the franchise’s most dramatic storylines while also having some of the most unsubtle catchphrases and bright colors it has to offer. Moreover, one thing you might notice if you look closely at Appmon: most of its episodes are self-contained. Only a very small handful of episodes are actively dependent on understanding what happened in prior episodes to understand the conflict going on in the current one -- it’s just very cleverly structured in a way you don’t really notice this as easily. So as you can see, the more desperate the franchise has gotten to get its kids’ audience back, the more it has to be able to grab the younger demographic and not lock them out as much as possible -- which means that it has to do things that the original series didn’t have to worry about at all.

Having seen the reboot myself, I can say that it checks off a lot of what you might expect if you tried to repurpose something based on Adventure (and only vaguely based on it, really) into a more episodic story that doesn’t require you to follow the whole thing, and that it has to break down its story into easy-to-follow bits. In fact, there were times where I actually felt like it gave me the vibes of an educational show that would usually be expected for this demographic, such as repeated use of slogans or fun catchphrases for young kids to join in on. That alone means that even if the “base premise” is similar to the original Adventure, this already necessitates a lot of things that have to be very different, because Adventure really cannot be called episodic no matter how you slice it.

Not only that, even though the target audience consideration has yet to be outright stated, we also have interviews on hand that made it very clear, from the very beginning, what their goals with the reboot were: they wanted the kids to be able to enjoy a story of otherworldly exploration during the pandemic, they wanted cool action sequences, and they wanted to get the adults curious about what might be different from the original. Note that last part: they actively wanted this series to be different from the original, because the differences would engage parents in spotting the differences, and the third episode practically even goes out of its way to lay that message down by taking the kids to a familiar summer camp, only to have it pass without incident and go “ha, you thought, but nope!” Moreover -- this is the key part -- “surprising” people who were coming from the original series was a deliberate goal they had from the very beginning. They’ve stated this outright -- they knew older fans were watching this! They were not remotely shy about stating that they wanted to surprise returning viewers with unexpected things! They even implied that they wanted it to be a fun experience for older watchers to see what was different and what wasn’t -- basically, it’s a new show for their kids who never saw the original Adventure, while the parents are entertained by a very different take on something that seems ostensibly familiar.

On top of that, the head writer directly cited V-Tamer as an influence -- and if you know anything about V-Tamer, it’s really not that much of a character narrative compared to what we usually know of Digimon anime, and is mostly known for its battle tactics and action sequences (but in manga form). In other words, we have a Digimon anime series that, from day one, was deliberately made to have a writing philosophy and goal that was absolutely not intended to be like Adventure -- or any Digimon TV anime up to this point -- in any way. And that’s a huge shock for us as veterans, who have developed our tastes and expectations based on up to seven series of Digimon that were absolutely not like this at all. But for all it's worth, the circumstances surrounding its production and intent don't seem to quite line up with what the most common accusations against it are:

That it’s a rehash of Adventure: It really isn’t. It’s also blatantly apparent it has no intention of being so. The points that are in common: the character names and rough character designs, some very minimal profile details for said characters, Devimon having any particular foil position to Angemon, the use of Crests to represent personal growth, the premise of being in the Digital World and...that’s it! Once those points are aside, it’s really hard to say that the series resembles Adventure any more than Frontier or Xros Wars resembles Adventure (which are also “trapped in another world” narratives) -- actually, there are times the series resembles those two more than the original Adventure, which many have been quick to point out. The majority of things you can make any kind of comparison to basically drop off by the end of the first quarter or so, and trying to force a correlation is basically just that: you’d have to try forcing the comparison. The plot, writing style, and even the lineup of enemies shown just go in a completely different direction after that. So in the end, the base similarities can be said to be a marketing thing; if I want to criticize this series, I don’t think “lack of creativity” would actually be something I would criticize it for. (Of course, you’re still welcome to not be a huge fan of how they’re still guilty of using Adventure’s name value to market something that is not actually Adventure. We’re all gonna have mixed feelings on that one.)

That they don’t understand or remember Adventure’s appeal: Unlikely. All of the main staff has worked on character-based narratives before, which have been very well-praised while we’re at it. The producer, Sakurada Hiroyuki, was an assistant producer on the original series, and I would like to believe he probably remembers at least a thing or two about what they were doing with the original series...but, also, he’s the producer of Xros Wars, which definitely had its own individuality and style, and, moreover, was more of a character narrative that people generally tend to expect from Digimon anime. (Still a bit unconventional, and it has its own questions of personal taste, but a lot of people have also pointed out that this reboot has a lot in common with Xros Wars in terms of its writing tone and its emphasis on developing Digital World resident Digimon moreso than the human characters.) All signs point to the idea they could make a character narrative like Adventure if they really wanted to. It’s just, they don’t want to do that with this reboot, so they didn’t.

That they misinterpreted or misremembered the Adventure characters: There’s been accusations of said characters being written in a way that implies misinterpretation or lack of understanding of the original characters, but the thing is, while I definitely agree they have nowhere near the depth of the original ones, there are points that seem to be deliberate changes. (At some points, they’re actually opposites of the original, and certain things that operate as some very obscure references -- for instance, Sora complaining about having to sit in seiza -- seem to also be deliberate statements of going in a different direction.) The lack of human character depth or backstory doesn’t seem to be out of negligence, but rather that this story doesn’t want to be a character narrative to begin with -- after all, we’re used to seven series of Digimon that are, but there are many, many kids’ anime, or even stories in general, where the story is more about plot or action than it is completely unpacking all of its characters’ heads. In this case, this reboot does seem to have characters that are taking cues from or are “inspired by” the original, but, after all, it’s an alternate universe and has no obligation to adhere to the original characters’ backgrounds, so it stands to reason that it’d take liberties whenever it wanted. (Again, the head writer outright stated that he based the reboot’s Taichi more on V-Tamer Taichi than the original Adventure anime Taichi. He knows there’s a difference!) Even more intriguingly, the series actually avoids certain things that are common misconceptions or pigeonholes that would normally be done by the mainstream -- for instance, the Crest of Light (infamously one of the more abstract ones in the narrative) is fully consistent with Adventure’s definition of it as “the power of life”, and, if I dare say so myself, Koushirou’s characterization (emphasizing his relationship with “knowledge” and his natural shyness) arguably resembles the original far more than most common fan reductions of his character that overemphasize his computer skills over his personal aptitude. In other words, I think the staff does know what happened in the original Adventure -- they just actively don’t want to do what Adventure did, even if it’s ostensibly a reboot.

That it’s soulless or that there’s no passion in its creation: Well, this is subjective, and in the end I’m not a member of the staff to tell you anything for sure, but there are definitely a lot of things in this anime that don’t seem like they’d be the byproduct of uninspired creation or lack of passion. It’s just that those things are all not the kinds of things that we, as Digimon veterans, have come to develop a taste for and appreciate in Digimon anime. That is to say, there is an incredible amount of thought and detail put into representing Digimon null canon (i.e. representing special attacks and mechanics), the action sequences are shockingly well-animated in ways that put most prior Digimon anime to shame, and the series has practically been making an obvious attempt to show off as many Digimon (creatures) that haven’t traditionally gotten good franchise representation as they can. Or sometimes really obscure “meta fanservice” references that only make sense to the really, really, really, really hardcore longtime Digimon fan (for instance, having an episode centered around Takeru and Opossummon, because Takeru’s voice actress Han Megumi voiced Airu in Xros Wars). If you follow any of the animators on Twitter, they seem to be really actively proud of their work on it, and franchise creators Volcano Ota and Watanabe Kenji seem to be enjoying themselves every week...so basically, we definitely have creators passionate about having fun with this, it’s just that all of it is being channeled here, not the character writing.

So in the end, you can basically see that this series is basically the epitome of desperately pulling out all of the stops to make sure this series lands with the actual target demographic of children, dammit, and gets them into appreciating how cool these fighting monsters are and how cool it would be if they stuck with them even into a series that’s not Adventure. The Adventure branding and names to lure in the parents, the straightforward and easy-to-understand action-oriented narrative so that kids will think everything is awesome and that they’ll like it even when the story changes, and the merchandise and collab events booked everywhere so that they can all be reused for the next series too...because, remember, they failed with that during Savers, Xros Wars, and Appmon (I mean, goodness, you kind of have to admire their persistence, because a ton of other kids’ franchises failing this many times would have given up by now), so it’s a bit unsurprising that they went all the way to get the kids’ attention at the expense of a lot of things that would attract veterans, especially since the veterans already have a well-developed adults’ pipeline to cater to them. This does also mean that this series is more likely to come off as a 67-episode toy commercial than any previous Digimon series, but it’s not even really the toys as much as they’re trying to sell the entire franchise and the actual monsters in the hopes that they’ll stick with it even when the narrative changes.

Nevertheless, here we are. The series is over. Ghost Game -- which, as of this writing, is looking to be much more of a conventional Digimon narrative, complete with older cast, obviously more dramatic atmosphere, and pretty much everything surrounding its PR -- is on its way, presumably thanks to the success of this endeavor. It’s hard to gauge it; we have it on record that they also intend it to be episodic, but remember that this doesn’t necessarily prevent it from having an overall dramatic plot or nuanced drama (especially since the abovementioned Appmon and Kitaro were perfectly capable of pulling off this balance). Nevertheless, it seems to be a lot more of the conventional kind of Digimon narrative we usually expect, so, as for us, adult long-time fans of the Digimon franchise (many of whom don’t have kids anyway), what exactly should we make of this? Well, as far as “supporting the franchise” goes, you’ll get much more progress supporting Ghost Game than the reboot; I highly doubt view counts and merch sales relative to an already-finished series will do nearly as much for the franchise’s health as much as the currently airing series, and, besides, it’d probably do us all a favor to support the endeavor that’s actually new and fresh. So when it comes to a “past” series like this, it’s all just going to come down to a question of personal preference and taste: is this a series you, personally, want to watch, and would you find it entertaining?

For some of you, it’s possible that it just won’t be your cup of tea at all -- and since, like I said, the majority of us here have based our expectations and preferences on up to seven series of Digimon that were not like this, that’s also perfectly fine, and in that case I don’t actually recommend you watch this. Of course, I’ve never thought that it was ever fair to expect a Digimon fan to have seen all of the series released to date; the more series we get, the more inhumane of a demand that’ll become, and I think this franchise becoming successful enough to have so many series that most people won’t have seen it all is a good thing. (It’s actually kind of alarming that the percentage of people who have seen it all is so high, because it means the franchise has failed to get much of an audience beyond comparatively hardcore people who committed to it all the way.) But I think, especially in this case, with a series for which adult fans like us were probably lowest on the priority list due to the sheer amount of desperation going on here, it’s fine to skip it, and if you’re someone who lives by a need for character depth or emotionally riveting narrative, the fact this series is (very unabashedly and unashamedly) mostly comprised of episodic stories and action sequences means you won’t have missed much and probably won’t feel too left out of any conversations going forward. That’s before we even get into the part where it’s still completely understandable to potentially have mixed feelings or resentment about the overuse of the Adventure brand for something like this, especially if Adventure is a particularly important series to you.

But for some of you out there, it might still be something you can enjoy on its own merits. I’ve seen people who were disappointed by the limited degree of Digimon action sequences in the past or the fact that the series has gotten overly fixated on humans, and had an absolute ball with the reboot because it finally got to represent parts of the franchise they felt hadn’t been shown off as well. “Fun” is a perfectly valid reason to enjoy something. It’s also perfectly possible to be someone who can enjoy character narratives like the prior Digimon series but also enjoy something that’s more for being outlandish and fun and has cool Digital World concepts and visuals -- and, like I said, it does not let up on that latter aspect at all, so there’s actually potential for a huge feast in that regard. I think as long as you don’t expect it to be a character narrative like Adventure -- which will only set you up for disappointment, because it’s not (and made very clear since even the earliest episodes and interviews that it had no intention of being one) -- it’s very possible to enjoy it for what it is, and for what it does uniquely.

#digimon #digimon adventure:#digimon adventure reboot #digimon adventure 2020 #digimon adventure psi #shihameta

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therealjordan23 · 3 years

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So, a recent question people have been asking me is whether Scrooge deserves to be called dad.

Fuck no.

Scrooge McDuck doesn't deserve an ounce of title "dad", especially when he's competing against characters like Drake, and more importantly, Donald. These 2 characters have proved to be more of a dad than Scrooge will ever be.

In the beginning of the series, we see Donald already taking on more responsibility as a parent than Della and Scrooge combined. Donald actively believed that their adventuring days have come to an end, as there is a brand new adventure waiting for them, which are Huey, Dewey, and Louie. When he caught wind of Della’s desire to go up into space, while 3 boys were on the way, he told her not to.

Scrooge clearly didn't understand how severe the situation was, he didn't have that parental instinct. He played the, 'fun uncle' role, and it never went beyond that, even though he was the guardian of Donald and Della from a young age, along with HDL. This is what tempted him to build the rocket in the first place.

You can be someone's "biological parent", but it doesn't necessarily mean that you're their "parent". Personally speaking, my dad wasn't around when I was a kid, and I never considered him to be my parent, until he stepped up and actively took on that role. And even in the show, that's Della’s whole arc! In Season 2, Louie doesn't consider her to be his "mom", until she stepped up to become a proper parent. More on this later, though.

Scrooge didn't actively do anything to earn the title, "dad", he truly didn't. And that's the difference between him and Della, she actually put in the effort.

This is why Beakley has earned the title of a parent.

This is why Donald has earned the title of a parent.

This is why Della herself, (even though I have made it clear multiple times that she's not my favourite, sorry Delly) has earned the title of a parent.

This is why Drake has earned the title of a parent.

Frank himself has made it clear several times that Donald is considered to be Huey, Dewey, and Louie's dad, even though he's not their biological father, but that's the point. It's through Donald's actions that we see that, "Okay, he's a dad, he's earned it."

Donald sacrificed so much to become a parent: he sacrificed a lavish life at a mansion so he could get away from the man who effectively took away their mother, he gave up what would've been his prime time to get his life going: if Donald and Della are canonically 36 in the series, and Della has been gone for 10 years by the time the pilot aired, it would mean Donald was at least 26 years old when he took the boys. Please note that it was confirmed that Donald's been living in the manor since he was at least 12-13 (I'm basing this off of seeing him in Last Christmas, I could be wrong).

So we have a fresh 26 year old, who has left his place of comfort and financial stability since he was 12 or 13. He has given up the lifestyle he was used to. And as if that doesn't sound bad on its own, he had 3 kids to raise, because he believes that their mother is dead.

26 shouldn't be when you scramble to find a home, find a job, and on top of that, raise 3 kids! 26 should be a time where you're just starting to figure things out, slowly easing into ideas like marriage, a full time job, and then maybe having kids. (These aren't my personal beliefs, I literally Googled what 26 year olds should be doing, and this came up)

**obviously I don't speak for everyone, there are certain factors that affect these 'common beliefs' at what you should be doing at a certain age**

Anyway. I have barely listed what Donald has done for these boys who haven't even been born yet. Donald has done so much more at the age of 26, than Scrooge has done in his 153 years. So, I can say with full confidence, he has earned the title Dad.

And then there's Scrooge.

It's truly insulting: when you see what truly makes a parent a parent, compared with the 30 seconds of Webby calling Scrooge dad? It completely brushes aside Donald's efforts of being a parent.

He didn't earn it. He never did anything to earn that title. @moonstoneflowers, @l-thefriendlyghost, and @dellyduck said it best: the overprotectiveness we see once it's revealed that he was Webby's 'father'? It's disgusting that he acted like that after he knew that Webby was his 'daughter'. He didn't care about Huey, Dewey, and Louie, or Della and Donald. He only did that because he felt obligated to be Webby's 'dad'.

"When you look at someone through rose-coloured glasses, all the red flags just look like flags."

—Wanda Pierce to BoJack Horseman

This quote totally applies to Scrooge. I mean, his name is literally Scrooge, he's designed to be a generally unlikable character and person. We see traits and toxic behavior that we brushed aside until now: when the show has ended, and we're forced to analyze it.

A great example of this is in Timephoon, where we can actively see where Scrooge and Della finally show their true colours. It's at the end, where the family is reunited, and Louie gives his half-ass apology.

Scrooge is completely okay with the fact that Louie almost destroyed space.

"I'm sure you've learned… something."

—Scrooge McDuck to Louie Duck in Timephoon!

You are the adult in the situation sir. I'm not even counting Launchpad as an adult here, he is a literal manchild. And even though Beakley is just as much to be blamed here, she spent the episode convincing Della to be a little stricter and discipline her kids better. She knew where to cross the line, and the only reason that Beakley agreed to forgive Louie was because she assumed Della wasn't taking it seriously.

"No… not this time."

—Della Duck to Louie Duck in Timephoon

I’ve had my problems with this, but even I can confidentally tell you that this marked the moment where Della Duck earned the title of a parent, while Scrooge was clearly about to forgive Louie for a literal crime he committed, and was really about to let Louie go off scot free.

And I personally find that alarming. If us adults didn't catch these red flags the second we watched the show itself, what about the kids? You know, the actual demographic it's aimed towards?

Another issue that I'm happy @moonstoneflowers brought up was the fact that Frank said Webby had to "earn" her place in the family?

She is a child, sir. She shouldn't have that mindset at the age of 10-12. A person who should have to earn their place in the family is an adult like Della. She went out for a joyride in space, but she actively regretted that decision, and immediately sought out to fix things with her family and kids. She changed for the better.

Scrooge? He makes things so that they revolve around him, and makes it so that he doesn't have to change for anyone. He makes things work in his favour.

The sad part that @dellyduck brought up is that Donald, and let's be real, 99% of his problems exist because of Scrooge, is the one who has to deal with them! He isn't a fucking mop! He isn't here to clean up your shit! This man is the only functional parent, and Scrooge uses that to his advantage by shoving all of his problems onto Donald.

He didn't deserve his ending, goddammit. Scrooge McDuck will never be considered a father. He can be biologically related to Webby, sure, but please don't strip away what truly makes a parent a parent, and apply it to someone who has never made an effort to change to become a proper guardian.

#ducktales #scrooge mcduck #webby vanderquack #timephoon #bentina beakley #della duck #donald duck #drake mallard #frank angones #huey duck #dewey duck #louie duck #the last adventure #spoilers?#it's been a good 3 weeks #i think we're good

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the-dragongirl · 3 years

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Hello tumblr. I have returned from a long period of inactivity, because I must bring the good word to the corner of the Star Wars fandom that used to be my main fannish home: there is a new era of Star Wars canon that was made just for our taste. It is called the High Republic.

WHAT IS THE HIGH REPUBLIC?

The High Republic is an giant multi-media project being carried out by the Lucasfilm story group to create a brand new era of Star Wars canon. It is set a few hundred years before the prequel era (so, a long time after the Old Republic era), in a period of peace and stability within the Republic. It currently includes several English language adult novels, a YA novel, two serialized comics, a manga, some short stories, and some short video blurbs published on facebook and youtube. A TV show for Disney+ has also been announced, but is a few years off. This project is unique in Star Wars, in that all of the different parts are being written together by one writing team, and are coordinated to tell a cohesive story. Also, what has been announced is just the beginning – they have stated that there will be three different sections of the High Republic, and everything we have had announced so far is just part one. As a note: this is an era for which there was NO pre-existing canon in Legends, so it is totally new territory.

OKAY, THAT’S NICE, BUT WHY SHOULD I BOTHER TO CHECK IT OUT?

There are SO many reasons why the High Republic is worth your time to explore. I will try to outline some of them here below the cut (without any significant spoilers).

IT IS A LOVE LETTER TO THE JEDI

This is the era for everyone who loves the Jedi and wants to understand how they got to the point they did in the prequel era. It shows Jedi at their best: saving people, working together, being completely in tune with the Force (in so many beautiful and original ways), demonstrating creativity and flexibility and being rewarded for it, actually thinking through the ethics of things like the mind trick, and DEALING with their emotions rather than repressing them. It shows us how the rigid Jedi culture was saw in the prequels was a corruption of something that was originally healthy and uplifting. Jedi in this era are allowed to be flawed, and to grow, and have a community that supports them in doing so. This is the Jedi culture so many of us created as fix it fic for the prequel era, but made canon.

IT IS AN ERA OF HOPE

There are some serious problems in the High Republic Era. Without spoilers, the era opens with a terrible humanitarian crisis, laid over the Republic equivalent of the New Deal from US history. We see a lot of examples of people doing their best to be good to each other, and working for a more just and kind galaxy. They acknowledge that things are not perfect, but people from many different backgrounds (Jedi, politicians, farmers, pilots, business people) work together to try and make things better. I don’t know about you all, but with the darkness we see in the world today, I NEED some of that optimism in my escapist media. The High Republic provides that.

IT WILL GIVE YOU FEELINGS

The existing material so far is structured to really let you emotionally invest in the characters and their struggles. Unlike with many eras of Star Wars canon, characterization is not sacrificed for the sake of plot (though never fear, there is PLENTY of plot). That means there is huge scope for empathy. I’m not going to lie; I cried within the first three chapters of Light of the Jedi, as did several other people I know. It is POIGNANT in a way that feels truly genuine.

IT IS FUN

The writing team understands that, in the end, Star Wars is space fantasy. If your space fantasy is nothing but serious, gritty grimdark, it becomes pretentious and unbearable. So, for all that there is some heavy content in the High Republic (VERY heavy content – the Nihil should really have their own content warning), it has many moments of levity that keep it from taking itself too seriously. For example, the High Republic made Jedi bodice rippers canon. Also, characters like Geode exist (yes, that rock there is a CHARACTER). The result is something which honors the spirit of Star Wars, and keeps you engaged without being tedious or ridiculously depressing.

THE WRITING TEAM HAS DIVERSE PERSPECTIVES

The main writing team consists of five people: Justina Ireland, Claudia Gray, Charles Soule, Daniel José Older, and Cavan Scott. You will note that includes two people of color, two women, and one out Queer person (in fact, one of the writers is all three of those things). This is a far cry from the white-cis-straight-man-dominated writing teams we have seen in the past. And when they bring in other people to the project, they make a point of looking for perspectives that aren’t represented on their team – for example, the manga is being co-written between Justina Ireland and Japanese writer Shima Shinya, and Ireland has stated in interviews that Shinya is taking the lead on the writing.

IT VALUES MEANINGFUL REPRESENTATION

That diverse writing team means a cast that looks WAY more like the real world than any other era of Star Wars we’ve seen, in terms of representation. There are multiple characters of color, who are both heroes and central to the story. There are at least five canonical queer characters to date (a MLM couple, an Ace character, and two NB character). [EDIT: Thank you @legok9 for letting me know about the NB characters]. Among binary gendered characters, there is a very even balance of men and women. The writing team has also stated that they will be incorporating more representation of disability in the works to come. And the story is so much better for it – representation is included here BECAUSE it makes for more creative, believable, and original storytelling.

IT IS ACCESSIBLE

Because of the multiple formats, and the fact that it doesn’t rely on you knowing any prior lore, the High Republic offers many avenues to engage for people with all kinds of needs. Know nothing about Star Wars canon and feel intimidated about catching up? The canon is all new in this era anyway, so you’re fine. Can’t handle flashing lights? No problem – the little bit of video content that exists is totally free from the strobing effects that caused seizure and sensory issues. Need purely audio content? You can still have a full experience of the High Republic with the gorgeously sound-scaped audiobooks. Don’t have the attention span for books or long movies? Then the comics are your friend.

THERE IS SOMETHING FOR ALL

Between the books aimed towards adults and teens (and their respective audiobooks), the kids books, the comics, the manga, the short stories, AND the eventual TV show on Disney+, there is going to be content in the High Republic that suits most audiences. And that is just what has been announced so far – there is still more to come for phases II and III. This isn’t Star Wars written towards one group or demographic – it is Star Wars for everyone.

DID I MENTION THE FANCY JEDI UNIFORMS?

Because cosplayers and fanartists? This is the era for you. We are getting Jedi in silks with elaborate gold embroidery. Jedi with jewelry other decorative elements. Even the practical field uniforms have tooled and embossed leather. If you want to draw or make Jedi that have some of that that sweet LoTR-esque high fantasy aesthetic, the High Republic has your back. (Not going to lie – I am ALREADY imagining the time travel AUs. Put Obi-Wan in fancy clothes!)

OKAY, YOU’VE SOLD ME. WHERE SHOULD I START?

I strongly recommend everyone looking to get into the High Republic (who is old enough to be on Tumblr) start with Light of the Jedi by Charles Soule. I alternated between the physical book and the audio book, and found it delightful in both formats. After that, you have a lot of options. You can read or listen to the audio book of the YA novel A Test of Courage by Justina Ireland. You can check out the currently running Star Wars: The High Republic comic from Marvel, or the Star Wars: The High Republic Adventures comic from IDW. Or you can skip straight to Into the Dark by Claudia Gray. Honestly, there is no wrong order to try out most of the High Republic.

IN CONLUSION

The High Republic is Star Wars written for people who DON’T want Star Wars to be a good ‘ol boys club for salty white dudes who don’t want to see anything but more of Luke Skywalker. It offers broad representation, and optimistic narrative, and whole bunch of awesome Jedi content. If you are someone who fell in love with Jedi in the prequel era, the High Republic will give you more of what you loved. And if you are totally new to Star Wars? The High Republic is here for you too.

So, go check it. And then go write fic for it (please, there are only, like, 14 fics on AO3, I am dying).

#star wars #the high republic #jedi #long post #recs #book recs #representation #seriously I cannot recommend this highly enough #everything about the high republic is so very tailored to what I love about star wars in general and Jedi specifically #also...sorry I had been absent here #I swear I still love you all #I just have limited interaction spoons these days and spend most of them on costuming stuff

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glitterytidalwavedragon · 3 years

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Expanding into my other Fandoms (I’m gonna have to take a stance) Read the whole thing please.

One of my oldest and most beloved anime is Inuyasha. As of late I have been binged watching the hell out of it as I am getting my BFF into different anime shows. We are really close to entering the Yashahime part of the series, and she asked if I planned to write fanfiction involving the one character which made me even watch the show as a 10-year-old.

Sesshomaru

The first episode I ever watched involved this aloof, entitled dog fighting his brother over the sword in their father’s grave. Specifically, it was part 3 of that whole episode series were Kagome pulled out the sword. I at the time had 3 dogs of German Sheppard/wolf hybrid, they were MASSIVE dogs, fell in love with the big white fluff that was Sesshomaru’s demon form. I use to sneak staying up and watch the show faithfully to see the goodest boy as it was only on at 11pm EST on adult swim. Which meant it was bad and I was breaking the rules, I felt like a rebel.

Now I hesitated answering that question. She has no idea of what is in Yashahime, she is being careful not to spoil it so I told her I didn’t know. Recently, to find out what the feel is for Sesshomaru content, I looked into the tag on tumblr…

OH MY GOD.

Sesshomaru’s tag is FLOODED with hate. Like every four post, there is hate, distain, and attacking happening. As someone who watches Yashahime, I quickly knew why.

Sessrin.

Even now I sigh. And I sigh HARD. I am not for, nor am I against the Sessrin train. Same for the Sesskagu train. I think both sides need to look at things on a logical prospective. I plan to do just that. I know I will get hate from the either side and maybe some support as well. But if I am going to do anything in this fandom (as I like doing ships and reader inserts) it will come up.

So, like my Kaiba post, and my Sebastian Heel post, I will use my research skills as well as my COLLEGE DEGREE WHICH HAS BOTH ART AND MEDIEVAL HISTORY labelled on it to explain why this progression in the story is normal to anti-Sessrin fans and why this isn’t a crime by story standards nor should we look at it as a crime.

AS WELL

Explain to Sessrin fans why it is so weird for non-shippers to see it play out and why so much hate formed.

As I let out another sigh, we shall begin. Let’s start at an historical prospective. (Links at the bottom).

PLEASE READ THE WHOLE THING! I’LL BE ABLE TO TELL!

I will start with the information I can access right away.

While finding charts on the life-span of common folk in 1590’s Feudal Japan is rather difficult, Ancient.edu states that the average lifespan was about 50. To put this in perspective, the average lifespan of Europeans at the time was somewhere between 40-45 with the latter being rare. Since most of us reading are not from Japanese descent, I will through Europe in this first.

If we look at the same time frame of 1590, we are looking at most of Western Europe had now entered the age of Renaissance. According to sources from Learning Resources in association with the National Gallery of Art, marriage was not what TV drama’s from HBO or Hulu depicted. By today standards they would be a crime, as the average age for marriage of an adult female was age 14…

The reasoning behind the young marriage age had multiple factors. First being, females were considered an adult once they were menstruating. Birthing also proved to be fatal, and since the lifespan was at best 40 and 45 if they were lucky, there was really no room to wait. Also Europe at the time had became hugely focused on making sure blood lines were legitimate, meaning to ensure the girl was a virgin, the moment she was able to reproduced she was married off. Those they married were not young teenagers either. Most marriages, a man would be in their thirties, and had probably multiple wives as women died more than men when not counting the battle field.

To make matters worse for the Renaissance Lady, these marriages would leave many young males unable to marry and if their husband died in battle, well, unfortunately they were not seen as desirable. This was due to the idea of a ‘free woman’. Should the girl not have a father, brother or uncle to return to as they too died, a widow had her freedom. But that freedom came at a cost. She would be assumed to have slept around, and in many writings, such as the Canterbury Tales, where Geoffrey Chaucer writes about a Window on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land survived her five husbands and the men in her family. In short, she was made to be a slut and to be looked down upon as no man controlled her.

The point of talking about Europe is because that is something most of us Non-Asian or Japanese people consume and like to paint in large romantic brush strokes of knights and magic. Honestly, reading G.R.R.Martin Song of Ice and Fire, he uses this model as we see the Queen of Dragons, Danny start off at age thirteen shortly after she had her first menstruation.

Now let’s look at Feudal Japan.

As stated before, the lifespan was around 50 years. In some populations, this was even shorter. Nagaoka, Hirata, Yokota and Matsu’ura’s on demographic data at the Yuigahama-minami area in Kamakura, Japan and found both male and female remains that suggested life expectancy to have ended around age 24-25. This was largely due to living conditions and public health. In areas like these, it would make the most sense to marry and repopulate quickly as the expectancy of life was half the national average at the time.

To my frustration, I could not find a clear marriage age for Japanese women at the time of the edo period. HOWEVER, where there is a will there is a way. I took a look at famous Lords or Daimyo’s of the time. The average age of marriage of their wives was between 12-14. Much younger than I expected, but it made sense considering this is a time where war ran the show and marriage was strictly about political gain. One of these Daimyo’s was Masamune Date, who was also 13, but then as he got older took concubines who became considerably younger than him as he became older. The goal was to have as many children as possible for hires and for political marriages to gain power.

Now lets look at Inuyasha the MANGA

Lets get the manga timeline proper here. The whole adventure took place in 11 months, a month shy of Kagome’s 16th birthday. Doing a few estimations, Rin would have travelled with Sesshomaru about 8-9 of those months. But before we get into the relationship, lets look at something the ANIME made a huge mistake with in the beginning and tried to fix as the story went on.

For some reason I could only fine gifs for the Early appearances of Sesshomaru so bear with me.

Early appearances in the manga

^ He was so fickle and a trickster then...

Now early apperances in the anime.

Later appearance in the manga

Laster appearance in the anime

Notice the issue here?

Sesshomaru was CONSIDERABLY younger looking in the start of the manga. In the anime, he started off looking like an fully adult male. But as the anime went on, they tried to make Sesshomaru look younger with subtle changes to his jaw line, eye size, and his height. Yeah, his height had changed. They made him shorter.

While in the manga, we see this young-teen looking demon, slowly mature over 11 months to look like he is in his later teens and by series end, closer to being in his late teens or twenty. Yes, art changes over time, but the anime went a reverse route. I can only guess they spoke to the author of Inuyasha about her ships, as they did Drama CDs, and realized the mistake that was made in making him more mature than he was.

You can’t tell me he doesn’t look closer to his manga self in the final act, because he does.

Since we are on the topic of the anime, lets be clear. The anime timeline and manga timeline are very different. The story in the anime (in the English) suggests that OVER a year has past since Kagome started her journey. They try to fix this in the final act, but it was still so muddled as previous seasons are to be taken as cannon. This could have been due to an translation error in the early production when the anime no longer had anymore manga material to reference. But whatever the case, for English viewers the time the group spent together felt much longer.

So now we come to the heart of the issue.

Because of the mistakes of the anime, a lot of anti-sessrin see the relationship as father daughter. I’ll be honest, watching the anime and solely the anime as a teenager and as an adult (as the manga was on hold for a very long time due to author’s health. I was in college when it finished.), I too thought it was just a father-daughter relationship and Jaken the nanny who got punched all the time. In fact, the English took hard liberties with Kagura, as the English dubs often do with characters, and made it very clear her feelings for the demon lord and Sesshomaru very much recognized them (though he never responded). Even in her death scene, it felt as if he was saying good bye to a friend more than love interest. But who really knows, as there are things that point otherwise. When another demon mock’s Kagura’s death, Sesshomaru gets super pissy.

The manga did also play with this fact when it came out in English, idk if the wording or message is different in the Japanese. Translation errors happen a lot even in todays releases, look at Kuroshitsuji. So of course most anti-sessrin’s did not see this coming in Yashahime when Rin was named mother. In fact it felt like a betrayal as we were sure Sesshomaru had no romantic feelings.

Then there was the Kohaku/Rin mashup that was hinted left and right. The English anime, with its overly dramatic and blunt emotions made it appear one way. That in the end the two kids would probably be married. Then the anime as a whole made Sesshomaru older than intended. I can see why and understand how this became a problem.

On the other side of that coin.

If you followed the dub, seen ‘Swords of an Honorable Ruler’ and read the manga… Sesshomaru was not fatherly to Rin at all. In fact, Jaken picked up all of that leg work. Rin worried for Kohaku, but clearly loved Lord Sesshomaru. Sesshomaru cared about Kagura but he almost CRIED when he lost Rin.

We have to remember that Sesshomaru and Rin’s relationship must have been very hard for the demon. While we never see his mental process expect for a few rare times, we have to remember he hated humans. In the movie, he blamed a human for the early death of his father, Sesshomaru killed without mercy. It made sense that he wouldn’t be fatherly to Rin as her just being there should have caused countless inner conflicts. Hell, he even says his father’s weakness was humans, and look who picked up that trait.

Sesshomaru was designed to, someday, walk in his father’s footsteps. So sess/rin, not a surprise. Also when you see it in a historical perspective, Rin having kids around age 15-16, makes sense. In fact you could argue he waited too long for the time period.

We also need to look more at the manga when concerned with Yashahime. 8-9 months is all Rin travelled with him and he was like hold up, and left her at the village because he KNEW she needed to come to her own conclusion. That no matter what she picked he would live with and protect her. Unconditional love on his end. She cannon wise spent YEARS living with humans and MONTHS with Sesshomaru. Again, by manga standards of cannon.

Now I can already hear the screaming about age and what not. Some sources say Sesshomaru is over 900, by the rule of thumb, if we look at anime and movie releases, we have Sesshomaru being over 500 with no define age and Inuyasha around 270 years old being more pinpointed due to the movie. Just by going by ANIME CANNON. Kagome and Inuyasha, you have a 15 year old with a 270 year old man. If you say being pinned to the tree doesn’t count, then you have 220.

Also, here is something very interesting. In the episode where Inuyasha meets the unmother, he tells her, thinking it was his mom, she died when he was very small and we have flash backs later in the series of him being small running from demons. Demons clearly age much slower than humans, even half-demons. Inuyasha can be 270 but mentally and physically be 15, the same logic works for Sesshomaru, who in the manga is not much older than Inuyasha.

In the manga, there wasn’t any grooming, in the anime, there was a ton of mess-ups but no grooming.

Would this fly in todays world? HELL NO! NO, its gross, she’s a kid. Stop.

I know any fanfic I write will lean heavily on the side of father/daughter because that is what I grew up seeing on the screen. I can’t think of Rin as an adult because years of seeing her as a cheerful little girl. It’s like seeing G.O.T Arya about to have sex for the first time in season 8… I remember when she was a kid on the show. It was way to weird and I had to look away until it ended. But that’s my 2021 mentality.

But Inuyasha is not taking place in 2021. Feudal Japan is a whole other era with its own beliefs, morals and way of life. Those who understand this have nothing wrong with them. They just understand history.

Also, just to bang some nails in…

Anyone remember Bleach? Remember the MOST accepted couple was Ichigo and Rukia…. Rukia who was hundreds of years old and Ichigo who was 15… or Ichigo’s mom who was a teenager and his dad also hundreds of years old.

Most of this also boils down to Sesshomaru being a dude. As in reverse roles in animes its accepted and they don’t have the same historical context. Inuyasha is based off of historical context of Feudal Japan.

We need to stop spreading hate. We can’t accept some forms of literature because its European fantasy but bash other fantasy based literature for doing the same thing.

Sure, its weird for those who were use to seeing the father/daughter dynamic. Yes, there are extreme sessrin fans who post really questionable illegal content when they decide to leave Rin as an 8-year-old…

But this wasn’t ever meant to be perverted. The story was meant to make sense on a logical and historical base.

I hope everyone takes the time to read this. I love Inuyasha, I love Sesshomaru. I am just sick of seeing so many people fighting over what should be the revival of a beloved series. While yes, there is still room for sess/rin not being a thing, until it is stated otherwise, why hate each other? This fandom will only lose people by doing this. Calling people names or accusing them of illegal endorsement can hurt someone these days over social media.

Tumblr allows you to block tags. You don’t have to read anything or watch anything you don’t like. We gain nothing from attacking each other but can lose so much by doing so. Fanart, really good fan fiction, friends, ideas, sharing fond memories. Both sides have the right to feel as they feel, but no right in hurting each other.

A fandom is meant to bring people together. Not start a war…

Thank you.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/ajpa.20402

http://www.italianrenaissanceresources.com/units/unit-2/essays/husbands-and-wives/#:~:text=Marriage%20not%20only%20reflected%20order,to%20ensure%20the%20bride's%20virginity.

https://www.ancient.eu/Canterbury_Tales/

https://www.ancient.eu/article/1424/daily-life-in-medieval-japan/#:~:text=Just%20as%20Japanese%20people%20today,in%20Western%20Europe%2C%20for%20example.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_Masamune

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megohime

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tuiyla · 4 years

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She-Ra’s like, really good, people

It’s been over a week since She-Ra season 5 came out and I binged it and this is not going to be coherent but I just want to rant about it a bit before writing some more structured metas. I deffo wanna write about Catradora and how I think SPoP is the true spiritual successor to the Avatar.

But first, let me just scream about how good this show is. I already started rewatching it, pretty much straight after finishing it, and I don’t rewatch tv shows often. The exception is Avatar (seen it like 15 times) and sitcoms. But She-Ra is so layered that I felt like I needed to watch it again just to appreciate the dynamics even more.

I already enjoyed the first season but it kept getting better and better. I’m not in love with the art style and it’s definitely for a younger demographic overall than my other favourite animated shows, but like any good kids’ show it balances tone well. It doesn’t talk down to its target demographic but also includes more traditionally mature themes in a digestible and entertaining way. Not all the jokes landed for me but as the series went on I learned to appreciate the tone and the type of humour She-Ra goes for.

It’s funny to me because this is definitely the type of show I would have rejected as a kid, with all the princesses I would have deemed it “too girly” and therefore not for me because screw gender roles. There’s a degree of internalized sexism to that, for sure, a rejection of the feminine because it’s always been seen as less somehow. But there’s also a truth that, at least in my childhood of the late 90s and early 00s, children’s media targeted at girls often had a poor quality to it, at least when compared to “boys’ stuff”.

She-Ra is not only a clever, heartfelt, complex story, it also transcends that binary of having to be either for girls or boys. I know most of modern animation rejects that as well, but She-Ra embraces so many traditionally feminine qualities while also going beyond gender roles and even the gender binary. This show is so queer, man, and I love it. It’s especially impressive when you consider the source material that was literally just the girly version of He-Man. I have no beef with 80s She-Ra, haven’t seen much of it, but this is such an upgrade.

That being said, I would have loved to watch She-Ra as a kid. I’m so incredibly envious of kids, aged around 10, who get to watch this show as they’re growing up. But I am so, so, so happy for them and for the future of animation that shows like She-Ra can be made now, that they’re being made. I’m going to go into spoilers soon, but just before that: She-Ra’s a perfectly enjoyable show in many aspects. I think the worldbuilding’s pretty cool, the story feels coherent and planned out, it’s lighthearted and so genuine. That’s the word that I ultimately choose to describe the series: genuine.

I feel like so much of TV aims to be dark and gritty nowadays, animation included, and though that’s slowly turning to dark comedy or a balance between fun and serious, it’s still the norm. At some point in the last decade, creators became terrified of being judged as cheesy. Even something like the MCU bathes in bathos to avoid being cheesy. But She-Ra proves that creators shouldn’t be afraid of being genuine, of basing characters and storylines on the simple power of love. Like, it’s such a cliché trope but I think that’s mostly because it has become stale.

Noelle Stevenson has talked about the importance of love in her story and I’m so grateful for that. Through, She-Ra, she’s truly proven how powerful love can be in a story and how it doesn’t have to be cheesy. It’s just so unabashedly genuine. The power of love and friendship literally saves the day several times but it’s always so genuine and more importantly it always makes sense that it doesn’t get boring. If the foundation wasn’t there, then I’d say “well this is just super cheesy”. But the show makes a point of building relationships and making them the focal point of the story.

Alright, so, spoilers because I need to talk about character arcs and THAT KISS and just everything. I really need to write more in depth about Adora and Catra and their relationship but for now I feel like it’s so important to appreciate how they’re developed. Everything from their shared childhood to their trauma with Shadow Weaver and the finding their way back to each other, it’s just *chef’s kiss*. It’s so well-written and believable. Ngl, I do have some minor issues with Catra’s redemption arc. Let’s just say that on a scale from Kylo Ren to Zuko, she’s definitely closer to Zuko. I also appreciate Shadow Weaver’s death scene and how it allows them to move on. I didn’t see that one as Death as Redemption and it shouldn’t be. Again and again the show made it clear that she was abuse towards both girls and nothing will negate that.

From what I can tell, the fandom really latched onto Catra, even when it wasn’t clear whether she’d get a redemption arc. I think that’s important, because unlike some characters in animation, Catra’s actions were almost always framed appropriately. There was always an understanding as to where she’s coming from, how she’s acting from a place of hurt, and yet her actions weren’t justified. They weren’t suddenly all okay just because she’s hurt, too. I especially loved in the season 3 finale when Adora was allowed to finally say no, to say that Catra’s actions were not her fault. That season as a whole was beautiful, like, episode three when Adora’s struggling so much and Catra has the opportunity for a better life but she still fails to choose her own happiness because she’s too bitter over SW and Adora? It’s poetic cinema. I love that angst, so well done.

It would be so easy to misfire in Catra’s storyline and either a) write off all the awful things she does because she’s just “misunderstood” or b) irredeemably stuck in her abusive environment with no hope of escape. They balanced quite well there and managed to handle such a complex character with delicacy. I’m quite happy with how Catra was portrayed because on the one hand, she’s painfully relatable to me and I assume to many others. The audience can see their own mistakes reflected in her character because we’ve all been too stubborn, done things out of spite, refused to acknowledge that we were wrong because we were hurting so much. At the same time, I always felt like the show gave me enough space to judge Catra’s actions and acknowledge that she was in the wrong. I honestly think I would have been a better adjusted teenager is if saw this show just before my angsty years, lol.

I’m going to write more about Adora at some other point but I love how vulnerable she’s allowed to be. Protagonists never used to be my favourite characters because they all seemed the same, with two major categories: the stereotypical male hero who can do no wrong or the angsty boi who can be shitty and the text still frames him as awesome. It’s only recently with series like The Legend of Korra and She-Ra that I go “damn, protagonists can be like that, huh.” Adora is a dumb jock who tries so hard and she deserves all the hugs in the world.

Also, Catradora? Breathtaking, amazing, groundbreaking. No doubt She-Ra needed shows like Adventure Time, LoK, Steven Universe and the likes to pave the way but still, it went there. I saw people be anxious about whether they were gonna be queerbaited, but I always, idk, knew? Trusted? That She-Ra would follow through. I didn’t wait six years for Bubbline to happen for Catradora to not get their big damn kiss. The series has been so effortlessly queer from the get-go that it just made sense that they were always heading there. I did see a gif of the kiss before watching s5 and ngl, that spoiler kind of bummed me out in a way that I wanted to be surprised. But even before I saw that I wasn’t worried. And the context of their journey in season 5? That cannot be spoiled by a simple gif. You have to experience that to fully appreciate it and that is the marker of good storytelling.

I understand that, though this should be the norm by now, Noelle Stevenson still had to be smart about how she approached the execs and she wasn’t sure this could happen. I cannot tell you how happy I am about what she said regarding how Catradora was so integral to the story that the execs couldn’t not allow it. That’s so brilliant, and it feels so natural in the story. Queer love saves the day and it’s not ambiguous, it cannot be censored because you lose a part of the story without it. You did it, Noelle, you funky little lesbian, what an icon. I can’t wait to see more stuff from her.

In other news, I appreciated other characters as well, like how all the princesses got to be different and awesome in their own unique way. Season 5 was great for so many characters, Mermista got so much to work with and Spinnerella and Netossa got so much more characterization than in previous seasons. Glimmer continued to be the third most important character in the story and I’m happy about all the relationships that also got to be canon. Good characters and dynamics all around, no wonder since the show is built on that.

Such a satisfying conclusion and one that makes you feel like this is just part one of a much bigger story. Such genuine, heartfelt moments, well-developed characters, complex themes explored in a respectful and digestible way, and such an unapologetically fun show. Melissa Fumero as a side character? Yes please. Catra’s new haircut? Heck yeah! She-Ra’s new design? Oh my.

I’m not even like, super into She-Ra, and I usually don’t write so much about things I only watch casually. But this show is so good and important that I had to rant. And I will write more about it eventually, but for now I needed to get all of this out. I’d give it a better structure but if I really get into I might never end up posting it so for now here, have this ramble of love. She-Ra, of all shows, deserves that.

#she-ra #spop #she-ra and the princesses of power #catradora #spop spoilers #my thoughts #that's pretty much it for now

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kikithegeek · 3 years

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An Amateur Review of Ridley Pearson’s Super Sons

Please be aware: This will contain some spoilers for the Super Sons graphic novels written by Ridley Pearson. If you do not wish to be spoiled on plot or character development, please stop reading this and come back once you’ve read through the books yourselves. Otherwise, enjoy this amateur review.

INTRODUCTION

As someone who grew up reading comics from Marvel, DC, IDW, and Archie, it was always fun when legacy characters were introduced or focused on. Characters that were students or the children of characters that my parents grew up with always felt nice to me, and even relatable when they were introduced or shown to be growing up in a similar or the same time period as my friends and I. Taking this into account, it’s no wonder that by the time I was in high school, some of my favorite comics involved Damian Wayne/Robin and Jonathan Kent/Superboy. Yes, I was definitely older than them by the time their series came in, but some of the problems they faced, even the small ones, seemed familiar to my own. Problems such as Jon’s reluctance of moving away from Hamilton County to Metropolis where he’d be leaving behind people he’s known for years into what is essentially a foreign environment for him, or both characters having to live up to the examples their parents have set; something I’m sure many of us can relate to as children are always compared to their parents or successful family members. The growing friendship between them was always a highlight no matter what type of adventure they were on.

In 2019, Ridley Pearson and Ile Gonzalez released the first book in their 3-part series starring Jon and Damian in a sort of rebooted universe. Fan feedback at the time was mixed, with some fans unhappy and others just happy they were getting more content featuring their favorite duo. Personally, I wasn’t paying attention all that much; I was in the middle of college and my focus had drifted away from comic books that year to focus on my studies, but with the recent pandemic and more time to read I’ve fallen back into the rabbit hole of super heroes and villains. I remember there being an outcry against the books when the previews began to be released, but after they did release and finished their run, I didn’t hear anything. No one really actively talked about what the books were about and most of what I heard seemed to come from people who read a handful of pages, if at all, and then never finished it. So, I decided to put my two cents in and read them. I’ll be looking at them as someone who has been a fan of their main-like counterparts for years, and as someone who also acknowledges that this isn’t canon to it and is an alternate universe (or alternate Earth in the cases of the DC comics multiverse), if anything to look at it from a neutral perspective.

It should be noted that this isn’t the first time I’ve read through Ridley Pearson’s work. In middle school and even through high school, I couldn’t get enough of Kingdom Keepers and Peter and the Starcatcher, even getting tickets to see the touring cast of the latter’s theater adaptation when they came to my state. I’ve read a few interviews on his work with the Super Sons before going into the books themselves, and he doesn’t neglect to say that this series isn’t connected to the normal DC canon (whatever that is these days; any comic book reader knows that reboots, especially for DC in the last decade, usually happen quite a bit). Okay, that’s probably a given, and it makes things easier considering the main target demographic are kids aged 10-14. There’s a lot of content to go over when it comes to everything connected to Damian and Jon, even more so for Batman and Superman, so this makes it less difficult for kids who don’t have much experience with DC outside of the occasional tv show and movie to get into it.

But what about the story itself?

THE STORY

(The majority of the story spoilers are beyond this point since I summarize the books. This is your last spoiler warning.)

The story itself takes place in an alternate future. America is called Coleumbria and the global climate crisis has gotten to the point where it’s a race to find a way to stop the rising temperatures and constant flooding. While Batman and Superman spearhead the projects set to stabilize and then reverse the Earth’s temperature, their sons are moved from Metropolis to a city called Wyndemer with other refugees looking to find somewhere safe from the floods. This causes tensions in the city to heighten as refugees, called “flood runners”, are harassed by locals. Without going too in-depth into the books (otherwise, we’d be here all day), I’m going to summarize them. Certain characters and events might be omitted, but hey, at least it gives you a reason to read them even if I tell you what they’re about.

The first book introduces us to this crisis and shows us how this world’s Jon (who still goes by Superboy in this) and Damian (who is going by Batkid) meet. While there’s some animosity between them at first, with Jon having a not-too-hidden bias against Bruce Wayne, the two eventually start to work together when they realize their individual investigations are connected. Jon and his classmate, Tilly, have been looking into a mysterious illness that’s hospitalized Jon’s mother among many others, and Damian has been investigating sabotages against Wayne Tech dams. They also meet a girl named Candace who is trying to uncover a mystery that’s plagued her since her mom’s passing. After finding clues at a food company called Sage Foods, the group is attacked and manages to escape after Jon is told their attackers were sent by a woman named Arvyc. After finding out that Candace and Damian had set Jon up earlier in the book to be attacked by a few gang members, the group have a short fight before they go to the train station to stop Arvyc’s gang.

The second book opens with the boys helping Candace make it to a boat while escaping a group of girls called The Four Fingers. While they didn’t have as much of a presence in the previous book, had been shown as adversaries of Candace’s. Continuing into their investigations into the virus, Jon and Tilly learn that it was man-made as Candace’s visions lead her toward Coleumbria’s capital. The Four Fingers, meanwhile, are adamant about finding Candace, so they’ve taken to stalking her friends, until they realize they’re “dead ends”, so they choose to follow their own leads. It is revealed that The Four Fingers and Candace all have powers that connects them to certain species of animals; with Candace, she has a connection to birds and she states her grandmother was the same. Tilly comes up with her own vigilante persona, Puppet Girl, and stays behind in Wyndemer as Damian and Jon leave to go to Cinapolis to find the virus’s source. However, the boys get captured and Tilly decides she needs to help them. Candace in the meantime has found an anointing oil her mother had left clues for her to find, which is the key to the throne of Landis, the country she and The Four Fingers come from. It ends with the Super Sons and Tilly saving Candace and helping her get on a boat back to Landis while Arvyc escapes from prison.

The third and final book opens with Jon, Damian, and Tilly trying to track Arvyc down and it’s obvious that they’ve been at this for some time now, but they soon become the hunted. Candace makes it back to Landis and finds one of the rebels her mom had led before she was arrested. As Candace continues on her journey, Jon, Damian, and Tilly are sent by Batman to a LexCorp lab to retrieve a virus sample, only to find it isn’t there. They decide to go to Landis since The Four Fingers were heading there with the virus (and Candace had gone with intentions to stop them), but Tilly needs to stay behind again. The boys and Candace continue their respective journeys through Landis, however a man who’s been pulling the strings from the shadows for the last two books, Sir Reale, has decided to send Arvyc after them along with Talia. Talia and Arvyc attack the boys who manage to outsmart them for the moment, and are reunited with Candace who has been tracking the virus with two warriors named Kizuka and Archer. Tilly, back in Coleumbia, is sent out to retrieve Damian and Jon by Bruce’s assistant, Patience. After meeting up with Tilly, the group find a lab where The Four Fingers have been preparing vials of the virus in order to release it via bombs, and a battle ensues where they learn that sunlight can kill the virus and that Talia is Damian’s mother. Learning that they couldn’t stop all of the shipments, the group gathers the people of the local town to help them in storming the factory. They succeed in killing the remaining virus, save for a vial to be used to create a cure. With Superman’s mission a success and Batman working on a cure, the book ends with Candace being crowned the new Empress of Landis, Jon’s mother waking up, and Batman making Damian Robin.

MY THOUGHTS ON THE STORY

All in all, the story was okay. Personally, I felt like it was rushed in some places, such as how we’re brought from one character or scene to the next with little to no transition or breathing space. The endings were also kind of abrupt, which I feel really brought down the ending for the final book. We don’t really linger on whether or not Superman’s efforts to reverse global worming worked or have a moment where Jon and his dad are able to reunite with Lois. I was also disappointed to see they didn’t go anywhere with the whole “Talia is revealed to be Damian’s mother he had never met before and barely knew anything about” sub plot they had going in book three. People who know me know that the League of Assassins and any character associated with them are among my favorite villains in the Batman mythos, and to see it be brought in only for it to not have anything done with it was disappointing. Heck, you could have taken Talia out of it and the story would have been the same minus Damian being momentarily shaken before getting back to business. At the very least, an ending scene where Bruce confirms she’s his mother would have been nice enough closure for it. This might have been due to there being a page limit (each book was roughly 151 pages long) which lead to things being cut out, but it’s still disappointing nonetheless, especially since I did find myself enjoying parts that had pacing problems.

Pacing and unresolved plotlines aside, some of the things I did enjoy though involved Candace’s story arc. She’s one of the characters made for this series, and watching her figure out her past and come into her own with her powers was really enjoyable. I also felt like small snippets of character interactions between the boys, Candace, and Tilly were really well written. They actually felt like kids.

THE CHARACTERS

Since there are a lot of characters in this series, I’m only going to focus on the four main characters since we’re with them the entire time.

Jonathan Kent is probably the one out of him and Damian who’s the closest to his original counterpart, and I don’t just mean in looks. While he doesn’t have as many powers as he’s come to have in the main DC canon, he does have some of the powers he has early on in his appearances, such as super speed, super hearing, x-ray vision, super strength, and being able to jump high/far. He’s a bit older here though, 12 instead of 10 making him closer to Damian’s age and allowing him to go to the same school as him and Tilly. He holds his dad’s lessons close and seems to be apprehensive about seriously hurting people, mainly in the beginning. Being older though, he’s a bit more mature than his counterpart was before he was aged up, and I feel that this version of Jon is a good blend between the two.

Damian Wayne on the other hand was given the most changes in terms of backstory and how he acts, which goes hand-in-hand. In the original continuity, he was raised by Talia and the League of Assassins, making him spoiled and a literal killer in the body of a child. Here, he was raised by Bruce (how or why, I don’t know. Talia wasn’t brought up until book 3 so I can only assume she gave him to Bruce as a baby and they agreed to never tell him for whatever reason) and Bruce refuses to let him be Robin, leaving Damian to become Batkid (which is a good reference to past incarnations of Batman’s son in older Elseworlds stories). He’s still arrogant and looks for a fight more than he should, but it doesn’t seem like he wants to kill. Beat up a guy who is already out of the fight, yes, but not kill. One thing people who’ve read the books will notice is I’ve been calling him Damian. Well, that’s out of habit; in this series he is pretty adamant about everyone calling him Ian. Why? Again, I don’t know, and part of me is bothered by it because we never find out why he hates his name. I can only assume Pearson had things planned that would explain this a bit more but had to cut them out due to page constraints.

Tilly is one of the characters made for this series, taking the name Puppet Girl as her secret idenity. She’s Jon’s friend and classmate, and is a computer expert, allowing for her to help the team from home until they need her to fly one of Bruce’s machines to them. She hangs around Jon a lot due to going to the same school and because both of them are interning for the Daily Planet. In all honesty, she reminds me of Kathy from before it’s revealed she has powers and is actually an alien since she acts as Jon’s best friend who isn’t Damian, as well as a girl who Jon might have a crush on or vice versa. The blond hair and the purple-pink outfit scheme doesn’t help.

Candace is our final main character and the second character made for this series. We meet her in the books before we meet Jon and Damian, and her story plays a huge role in the overall plot. Candace has been following a string of clues her mother left her shortly before her death, and we learn as the comic goes on that she’s meant to be the next Empress of her home country, Landis, but was forced to flee to Coleumbria when her family was usurped by a general. Over time, she unlocks her power to communicate and control birds, and later to control the weather. I found myself enjoying her story just as much, if not more than the plots that surrounded the title characters, which helps since her story is intertwined with theirs. If I had to compare her to an existing character in the DC canon, I’d say Wonder Woman due to her super human abilities and her being royalty.

THE ART

The art is also good, definitely better than what I can do. However, a complaint I do have is that the characters feel stiff and rigid. It might be the art style, but something felt off at times, mainly with the posing. Again, it’s still better than what I can do, but I feel like it could have been better. I did like how the backgrounds were vibrant and you could tell where the characters were just from a look, and the art is more detailed in general compared to other young reader graphic novels DC has been putting out. Art is pretty subjective, so I’m not going to go into this too much and a lot of these are my own opinions.

The art has come into debate as well, though not for the reasons I mentioned above. When previews for the first book started to be released, a lot of people were critical toward Candace and Damian, particularly toward their skin color. In the preview images, Candace was shown to have a blue-ish-gray tint (you can probably see why this didn’t go over well) and Damian was shown to be paler than Jon (Damian is shown in the original DC canon to be half Arabic and even though he was sometimes shown to have pale skin like Bruce’s, he was also shown to have a tanner complexion due to his mother’s side. Most fan interpretations as a result more often than not have him with tanned skin). After fan outcry, this was fixed with Candace getting a more natural skin tone and Damian’s being brought down to a darker shade than Jon’s. With Damian’s it’s more apparent in the second and third books since in the first one I did notices there were a few panels where his skin tone would be lighter than in others which makes me wonder if it was a last-minute recolor for the first book’s release.

FINAL THOUGHTS

All in all, I’d say it’s okay. It’s not great, it’s not bad; just okay. I honestly think that if Pearson and Gonzalez hadn’t been given a page limit then it could have been better since the pacing wouldn’t be as big of an issue and they would have been able to get through all of the mini arcs they had set up. They obviously wanted to tell a bigger story but were only given so much room to work with.

It’s obviously not for everyone, and it’s definitely not the Super Sons people like me have grown up with, but that’s okay. Some of the kids I used to babysit who fall into the range of “I’ve never really read DC comics and only ever saw a cartoon episode on TV” read these books too and they liked it. Same thing for the few kids who did have prior experience with the Super Sons. What dragged them in was the climate crisis and (for the ones who read them after the world went into a lockdown) the fact the characters were trying to find a cure for a virus that was similar to the flu. Yeah, and these were written way before 2020, so that’s actually an achievement on Pearson’s part.

You don’t have to like them; heck, I didn’t really have any interest in them because of the backlash from people like me until my friends started asking me to make this review. But maybe give them a chance. Find a kid in your family or friend group and see if they’d be interested, maybe you can read it together once the craziness of the last year’s calmed down.

#super sons #robin #batkid #superboy #damian wayne #jon kent #ridley pearson #ile gonzalez #review #book review #amateur review

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sage-nebula · 4 years

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With the news of the sequel and Netflix broadcasting to me that they had put up the first two seasons of InuYasha, I decided to rewatch it (or at least the two seasons that Netflix has) for the hell of it. I’m watching it in English, both for nostalgia and because when I want to have it on in the background as I go to sleep or play Animal Crossing (and thus don’t want to have to pay enough attention to read subtitles), and while I don’t think I’m going to seek out the rest after I run through what Netflix has, I have to say that it’s mostly an enjoyable ride. That said, though I’m not finished yet (I’ve just started what Netflix calls season two; last episodes I watched introduced Rin and Kouga), I do have some Opinions™. I live tweeted a bit on Twitter when I first started watching, but I’ll summarize here as well:

— While I think the English dub is pretty good as far as English dubs go (and there’s one scene in particular that I think was definitely improved in the English dub), there are times when I wonder if it’s an awkward translation that makes the scene so hilarious or if the dialogue was really that bad in the original Japanese as well. The first notable instance comes in either the first or second episode; it’s when Madame Centipede (what kind of name, I ask you—) has Kagome pinned up against Inuyasha when he’s still pinned to the tree, and she (Madame Centipede) mentions that she heard that a half-demon was after the Sacred Jewel and that it must have been Inuyasha. Kagome then thinks to herself, “Half-demon? What is he . . .” And it’s like, don’t get me wrong, Kagome is smart. She’s adept at using her wits to get herself out of situations more often than not and is good at thinking on her feet. So I’m not pointing out this ridiculous dialogue to make fun of her intelligence, but rather to make fun of the writing, because—sis, the centipede demon literally just said what Inuyasha is. You literally just said what Inuyasha is. What do you think he is, if not a half-demon? There are plenty more instances like that sprinkled throughout the show as well, and it always makes for a good laugh and some eyeroll-laden commentary. (That no one but my dog hears, of course, but hey.)

— When I was a teenager watching InuYasha for the first time, I thought nothing of the fact that Kagome, also a teenager, was allowed to travel back to the feudal era for days or weeks at a time to fight demons with absolutely no qualms given by her family. Now, as a thirty-year-old adult, I am appalled. Like, her grandpa giving the OK on this I can believe, because he’s a super devout believer of all the tales and legends of the shrine, and plus he gets free medicine out of faking Kagome’s injuries and illnesses to get her out of school. But her mom? What is with Kagome’s mom? Why is she so okay with this? Why was she okay with Inuyasha bursting into her house to kidnap her daughter just because he had cute dog ears? Why is she okay with her barely fifteen-year-old daughter jumping down a well to go fight monsters, without ever knowing if she will come back alive? You would think she would put up a little resistance at least, but she doesn’t! She just cheerfully helps Kagome pack her backpack and then fixes up a bike for her to use in the modern day as well. You could argue that this is a typical thing in anime, that the Pokémon parents do it all the time, but in Pokémon it’s established lore that parents send their kids off into the wild at age ten to go battle and collect monsters. InuYasha is supposed to take place (at least in part) in modern day Japan, and Kagome’s mother just does not give even 1/300th of a fuck that her teenage daughter travels back to the warring states era and risks her life on the daily with no way of knowing if she’ll ever come back again. This, from the same woman who apparently won’t let Souta travel on the metro by himself (granted he’s 10, but like, traveling on the metro is significantly less dangerous than going to do battle with demons in the feudal era so the point stands). Again, I get that this was meant to be an adventure for the target demographic to imprint themselves onto, and so I’m not so upset at Kagome for wanting to leap into battle, but more appalled at her mother for cheerfully allowing this with no stress given (i.e. this is a Mrs Higurashi callout post). I haven’t watched Doctor Who in ages, but man, as an adult myself now, it makes me appreciate Jackie Tyler a hell of a lot more.

(Putting the rest under a cut as it’s getting a bit long.)

— I was never deeply involved in the InuYasha fandom, but I do remember looking up stuff about it online Back in the Day (circa 2003) and I remember seeing a lot of hate for Kagome. Forum posts and fanfics that depicted her as being useless, as being weak, as being stupid, as being abusive to Inuyasha via the “sit” command. And honestly, while it’s entirely possible that the “sit” thing gets flanderized at some point in the anime (and perhaps the manga as well, though I haven’t read that), there’s really no basis for any of the rest of it. Even from the very start of the anime, it’s clear that Kagome is smart, competent, and capable. She knows how to hold her own. She knows exactly what to say to manipulate the Thunder Brothers into taking her to Inuyasha, thus saving herself from being devoured. She comes up with the idea to tie the crow demon’s foot to her arrow to make sure she hit it (which, yes, resulted in the Sacred Jewel shattering, but nonetheless she quickly figured out a way to get around her lack of archery skill). She was the one who figured out where the hair demon’s true skull was, the one to sneak up to try to get at it, the one to use an arrow to shatter it, and there are so, so many more examples like this. Even before she can sense jewel shards and becomes adept at archery, Kagome proves over and over again that she’s smart and capable of taking care of herself. And at least from what I’ve seen so far, she doesn’t really abuse the “sit” command—and even if she did overuse it, it still wouldn’t count as her “abusing” Inuyasha, because she doesn’t really have any power over him. Yeah, she can make him faceplant, but he could also snap her neck with one hand if he wanted, or else up and leave her completely. (And that, of course, is setting aside the fact that she doesn’t want to control, manipulate, or hurt him in the first place.) Kagome got a lot of undeserved, unwarranted flack, and the worst part is that it was all from the ship wars.

— But of course, she wasn’t the only one . . . there’s also the matter of Kikyo. Kikyo also got a lot of hate, if memory serves, from people who wanted Inuyasha to end up with Kagome (or else projected themselves onto Kagome and thus hated Kikyo for “getting in the way”), which in my opinion is rather silly since it’s pretty obvious from the jump that the endgame was always going to be Inuyasha/Kagome. Setting aside the fact that Kagome is the main character (because while the show might be called InuYasha, the story is really Kagome’s, kind of like how the game series is called The Legend of Zelda but you always play as Link instead), Kikyo’s . . . well . . . dead. Even after she’s “resurrected,” she’s still undead. Like it’s pretty clear that if she was still alive the story would be different, but she’s not. She’s dead, and the title character is not going to marry a zombie when her very alive reincarnation (that he also loves) is right there. So Inuyasha/Kagome shippers getting angry over Kikyo’s mere existence is just absurdly silly, because she was never a “threat.” She was just a tragedy.

With that said, I’ve noticed in the episodes I’ve watched that Kikyo’s characterization seems . . . inconsistent. Like there are moments where she acts far more antagonistically than she was even three seconds ago in an earlier scene, or that it would make sense for her to. I’ve done a bit of reading, and it seems that the anime prolonged her antagonistic behavior, likely to fuel the love triangle relationship melodrama (which I’ll get to in a second). This saddens me, because honestly Kikyo is one of my favorite characters. Her story is a tragedy not only because of how she was deceived and murdered at such a young age, but also because of how she was robbed of ever getting to live a normal life simply because of the power she was born with. She has a line in the most recent Kikyo episode I watched about how she is now “free to hate, free to love,” and that really stuck with me. Because due to the responsibility she bore with guarding the Sacred Jewel, she wasn’t even truly free to have real emotions. At the very least, she was never free to feel anything negative. She wasn’t free to want anything for herself, to have dreams, to feel frustration, anger, or true sadness. Her falling in love with Inuyasha weakened her protection for the Sacred Jewel. Even a usually positive emotion like love is something that was denied to her. Even when she was alive, Kikyo was not allowed to live. It’s only in undeath that she finally gets a taste of freedom, freedom that she knows cannot last, freedom that she has to borrow from the souls of the recently departed. Her story is heartbreaking and her character is fascinating, and I think she deserves so, so much more than what petty shipping drama granted her by the fandom and show alike.

— On that note, though . . . I have to say that I personally feel like the romance is the worst aspect of the show. Like again, I’m sure a lot of this has to do with the fact that I am now thirty and thus have long since dried up my well of tolerance for teenagers acting like teenagers when it comes to love triangles, but the constant wangst over the romance from the various characters is just so annoying. Kagome’s worst fear being Inuyasha and Kikyo being in love (and not, you know, people she loves dying?) to fuel the romance drama, Inuyasha having a spazz attack any time someone so much as mentions romance within fifty feet of Kagome, Kikyo being hyper concerned over whether or not Inuyasha and Kagome are dating instead of the myriad of other things going on with her . . . god, spare me. It weighs down the narrative by taking up screentime that could be filled with more interesting things (more on that in a minute) and, in my opinion, does a disservice to the characters, particularly the ladies. Like, Inuyasha being shrill and annoying is nothing new. It doesn’t really drag his character down when he’s always like that. (Not to say that I hate Inuyasha, because I don’t, but he is shrill and annoying all the same. It’s just how he is.) But while I like Kagome 90% of the time, I find myself wanting to claw my face off with how annoying she is whenever she goes into one of her “oh noes Inuyasha loves Kikyo and not me :’(” wangst fests. Likewise, I love Kikyo, but her being petty jealous over Kagome and Inuyasha possibly loving her (and moving on with her since she’s, you know, not dead), and especially that being used to amp up her antagonism and make her into more of a villain, saps away the interest she otherwise brings to scenes. Kikyo’s not interesting because she’s a member of a love triangle, she’s interesting because she’s a person who has only gained a chance to live through death and cursed rebirth. Kagome’s not a likable character because she wangsts over a boy who she likes, but because she’s a smart, capable, compassionate girl who can manage living in two eras of time at once. And while female characters are of course encouraged to have flaws and be as well-rounded as their male counterparts, saddling them with this petty romantic drama doesn’t count as a believable or well-written flaw, especially since you know the romance isn’t meant to be seen that way since it’s a core facet of the show. It’s just irritating.

On top of that, there is so much to like about InuYasha’s worldbuilding that it frustrates me that so much of the story is overshadowed by the romantic nonsense. One of the more recent episodes I watched is the one where they learn how the Sacred Jewel was made. The story about Midoriko and how she ripped the Sacred Jewel from her own chest during a fight with a demon was frigging fantastic. Not only is it cool that InuYasha has so many powerful women in its story, both past and present (which isn’t too surprising since it was written by a woman, but you know), but the original and immersive worldbuilding is really something to be admired. The fantasy version of feudal Japan that was created for the show has so many interesting elements, none of which feel out of place because they all build upon each other. There is a lot to like about InuYasha, and so it’s frustrating to me personally that the annoyingly written romance bullshit overshadows it. And building on that . . .

— I know I just said a couple paragraphs ago that it was obvious that Inuyasha/Kagome would be endgame from the jump, and I still stand by that. And on the surface, I don’t really have any problem with it aside from the issues I have with the romances in this show as a whole (such as how their love for each other started so early it felt like it came out of nowhere, but whatever). But I still do have an issue with Kagome deciding to live in the feudal era full time because . . . a.) then why did you bother trying to keep up with school, and b.) girl they don’t have indoor plumbing. They don’t have modern medicine, or showers, or convenient food, or the internet, or anything else. Girl what are you doing, deciding to live in warring states Japan full time for a boy, you are what, sixteen at the end of the series? Eighteen? GIRL. I know it’s meant to be ~a feudal fairy tale~ but it’s like . . . the idea of being stuck back in feudal/medieval times horrifies me. Like sis, if he says he loves you that much, make him prove it and live in the modern day full time. He can use a hat to hide his dog ears. He’s done it before. Honestly, Kagome, just:

And “choices” here includes the choice to go romping around feudal Japan fighting demons in nothing but your middle school uniform instead of something more practical, like lightweight armor (Sango could help you!) or at least a pair of pants. HONESTLY, KAGOME—

— On a more lighthearted note, I do enjoy most of the OST, though I have to say that I’ve been laughing at Naraku’s theme music for at least the last ten years and I don’t foresee that stopping any time soon because it is just the worst. Like every time Naraku’s theme music starts up I just imagine him in his bamboo costume, hunched over a tiny piano (like the one Schroeder has in Peanuts), just banging on the keys. Like it completely ruins any tension that Naraku should be instilling. That said, he does have some pretty good snark at times (at least in the English dub), but between his theme music and the fact that you just know it’s always going to be a fucking puppet when he shows up, it definitely takes the edge off his appearances.

— Actually, back to the “I’m fine with Inuyasha/Kagome but I’m not fine with her being stuck in the feudal era forever” bit, a fanart I saw earlier tonight made me realize that I think it would have been better if Kagome had met Inuyasha’s reincarnation in her own era, and they ended up together. Like, okay, hear me out—

The entire reason why Inuyasha didn’t reincarnate before Kagome was pulled into the well the first time is because he never died. He thinks of himself as having been killed by Kikyo, but he wasn’t; he was just pinned to a tree and put into immortal sleep. But once Kagome goes back to the feudal era and frees him, she changes that. She essentially altered history, which in return would alter her own era, even if in only small ways. (Small ways which should undoubtedly pile up the more she does back in the feudal era, but nonetheless.) Provided Inuyasha isn’t given the immortality of a full demon or put into an immortal sleep at any other point in his future, then he should eventually die, long before Kagome’s time period rolls around. Thus, it would make perfect sense if his soul reincarnated as well. Imagine if, during one of her visits back to her own time, she happens to run into a teenage boy who looks startlingly like Inuyasha does in his human form. Of course, he goes by a different name, but he attends her school (when he feels like it) and she sees him around town, and somehow everyone acts as though he’s always been there . . . because to them, he has. Because Kagome altered time, and with it the memories of all those in Tokyo who would have reason to know him, except her since she was the one who inadvertently made the alteration. There is someone with Inuyasha’s reincarnated soul in her time period, and she feels herself drawn to him just as Inuyasha was drawn to her.

It could even be taken a step further, that perhaps at some point Inuyasha’s reincarnation follows her to the well for some reason or another, trips and falls with her, and goes back to the feudal era himself. The negative consequence of this would be that even more romance nonsense would ensue (perhaps with Inuyasha’s reincarnation traveling with Kikyo for a time? Which would be a shoe on the other foot for Inuyasha), but also it would give time for Kagome and Inuyasha’s reincarnation to get to know one another and grow closer, so that perhaps at the end of the series it would make sense for them to be together in the modern era—for everyone to be in their own time periods, but for the two souls that keep falling in love with each other no matter the era to finally get a happy ending this time.

I don’t know. It’s just a thought.

Anyway, that’s about all I’ve got for the moment anyway. It’s a fun little blast from the past but I doubt I’ll continue beyond what Netflix has, especially since I don’t want to have to sit through a billion episodes of repetitive filler, haha. But yeah, the characters are all pretty good most of the time, neither Kagome nor Kikyo deserve the hate they get, the romance melodrama is annoying, the worldbuilding and lore is really interesting, Naraku’s theme is narm as hell, and Kagome’s mother deserves a callout post so she can maybe learn to care about her daughter at least a little. And that’s that on that.

#inuyasha

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popculturebuffet · 4 years

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Top 10 Regular Show Episodes

Close Enough is Close! 2 more days and a show i’ve waited without hyperbole years for will finally land offically. While i’ve seen three episodes preelease, one because of a french film festival the other two because HBO made an oopsie, and it’s more than likely i’ll be seeing those episodes again thursday, it dosen’t make it any less special, as with an offical release comes the fandom finally becoming a thing and the ablility to watch the episodes over and over again.. on computer till HBO gets it’s shit together but still. IT’s a great time. And my hype for the show made me revisit it’s big brother: Regular Show. Created by what would happen if you condesned california into a person, JG Quintel, Regular Show, as you all damn well know but I like doing anyway so as rigby would say, STOP TALKING, was about two slackers and best bros: Laidback hipster and hurricane when it came to talking to women, Mordecai and Rigby a high strung, idiotic, impulsive, and frequently angry racoon who worked, when they absolutley had to, at a park. Joining them at the park were their coworkers and later closest friends: Benson, their constnatly angry boss who constnatly belts out empty threats to fire them and has a rather sad personal life, Skips, a centuries old yeti whose literally seen it all and despenses advice for the duo and is voiced by everyone’s faviorite grandpa/jedi/murder clown Mark Hamill, Muscle Man, a grotesque blob of a man who likes “My mom” jokes and breaking things, Hi Five Ghost, Muscle Man’s sidekick who got like.. one episode focusing on him alone over 8 seasons moving on, and Pops, an odd but unfailingly sweet and kind vicotrian era gentleman whose also basically immortal and is Bensons’ boss in name only. The Park Crew spend their days working, or in our main duo’s case trying to get out of work to do anything else, while dealing with every day issues that would quickly ballon into insanity. Getting pops a birthday present of Fuzzy Dice from a local pizza place ended up with the crew having to fight a bunch of anamatonic animals that were stashing diamonds in there. Trying to get concert tickets involved getting caffine from the nipples of a giant sentient coffee bean in order to stay awake long enough to do the extra work. And Mordecai trying to delete an embrarassing message off his crush Margret’s voice mail lead to him and rigby getting hauled in front of a bunch of a message guardians, one of which is a sentient smoke signal that wanted to burn them while the other replied with “we’ree not going to burn them when have we ever burned anybody”... I love and miss those guys. Oh and it’s resolved by having to playt he embarassing song he sang while said message beings groove to it then ask him to colaberate with them on their album. THis show was on all the drugs and I am all the hear for it. I could go all day obviously but this section is long enough as is, let’s move on.

Regular Show came at JUST the right time for Cartoon Netowork: Similar to how the 80s doom patrol comic started off really bland and cookie cutter and not at all doom patrol and then grant morrison came in, had hte previous writer kill almost everything, then rebuilt it from scratch with crazy, CN had few shows left and was coming off a really terrible attempt at competeing with NIck and Disney Channel’s live action dommance with a bunch of dude broy reality shows and other ill conceved ideas. The network had a few shows, Total Drama, The Clone Wars which got better and I need to watch those better seasons at some point, but they weren’t enough to make the network thrive again. SO enter adventure time and regular show: BOth were creative, funny , a bit rough around the ages, and kind of nuts, but both were massive hits: The shows hit almost every demographics sweet spots: Kids like the bright colors, fun designs, and insanity, teens loved the edgy bits of the humor and also the insanity and 20 somethings and older both found refrences they got and loved, and well.. insanity. I mean being fucking nuts but also wonderful is kind of the watchword for most animation nowadays. While in the past in my own head i’ve played down Regular Show’s part in things, after all it came second and had a rough patch I told myself.. but I was wrong. Both shows had a lot of the same elements; insane stuff, great voice acting and good humor especially as they evolved.. but both also evolved in largely the same way and that way helped change animation for the next decade: Both, despite being comeidies, regular show keeping to it a bit more than adventure time did as they evolved, had the characters grow, something a lot of animated comedies didn’t do as much ast the time, even the good ones. THey had season long arcs, things that are now standard features in most cartoons for good reason were MADE standard by these shows. It’s just regular show’s legacy got diluted by shows that TRIED to copy it but both failed to see that it grew past season one or that it’s being okay for kids but really based in adult life and problems meant copycats like fanboy and chum chum, sanjay and craig and breadwinners, all thankfully long dead, eventually sputtered out and died. That and Nick is REALLY shitty at maintaing shows or treating creators with anything resembling respect. Somehow Teen Titans Go is still alive despite having similar failings but you can’t win everything. It didn’t help gravity falls came along right after and proceded to be even more influentail than both of these shows. Hmmm I just realized I haven’t done any gravity falls reviews here.. I gotta get on that. But while the show got eclipsed in quality and popularity I do still think it holds up for the most part as funny, charming and with , for the most part, good character arcs, it’s just that a bit of incosntientcy, some abrubtly done actions and a REALLY fucking terrible arc in season 6 dull the show a bit in comparison to what came after, but I do realize now it’s still worht watching, remembering and laughing at. It may of not been the greatest, but damn it was good. So with my nostaliga for the show popping up, my faith in it restored, and it’s sucessor showing up in a few days, I decided to do a little something for the ocassion. I WAS going to do a full on review, but had troulbe finding an episode as some of my faviorites are part of a larger arc that was hurt by a later arc, and the show ping ponged between slice of life and utter insanity enought hat it was hard to peg down to jus tone or two episodes. So while I WILL review the show eventually, it has both good and bad episodes needing it, I decided instead to dig out something I hadn’t done in far too long: a top whatver lists! Now while I do get these things are clickbaity, because they are, I.. honestly just love making them. Even if i’ts not for any specific purpose I just love ranking, the stress, even if I normally hate stress given my anxiety, of trying to narrow them down, and the satisfaction of taking a ton of episodes and melting htem down into the best of them. And with a show as long and varied as regular show, If igured this was the best way to show it off before I dived into it eventually. I’ll obviously be doing more top, and bottom lists in the future, but for now this seemd like a godo place to get back to it. As Now a few more things before we finally get started. Yes I know i’ve gone on for a few years now but i’m almost done. This list is obviously, my opinon. If you disagree fine, and feel free to comment or shoot me an ask about it but I stand by my list and what I choose. I had to boil down over 60 episodes I picked to possibly be on the list and even after it was down to 40 cuts were really difficult, .. Also just as a quick note there are no episodes from seasons 1, 6, 7 and 8, and that’s not on purpose, as the last two seasons are really good, it just fell out that way and i’m sorry about it. So with that out of the way grabs some sodas and wings, get out your maxi gloves, and bring out your best sentient earworms wearing sunglassses, after the cut I count down the top 10 Regular Show episodes. OOOOOOOOO!

10. I Like You, Hi (Season 5, Episode 26) As you’ll be able to tell by the rest of this list Season 5 is my faviorite, and it’s where I feel the series hit it’s peak before next season lead to it’s valley. It’s got a ton of great episodes, as this list will attest, some great character development, and was still really damn funny. But what put it over the top for me was the Mordecai and CJ arc. At the end of the last season as you probably know the show wrote out Margret, having her finally get into college like she’d wanted since she got an actual character back in “Camping Be Cool” instead of just being “that hot girl mordecai really likes but is too scared to persue”, and another fantastic episode we’ll be getting to, Mordecai was in position to move on. Re-Enter CJ. CJ was introduced earlier in the season 3 ep “Yes Dude Yes” which itself is really good, where Mordecai thought margret was engaged and with Rigby’s encouragment, ended up meeting CJ, stands for Cloudy Jay if your curious, a sentient cloud voiced by the wonderful LInda Cardenelli, aka wendy from gravity falls and currently co star of the equally wonderful show Dead to Me. Seriously go check it out on netflix, it’s really good. It naturally went pearshaped since Margret wasn’t engaged, he tried going out with both, she turned into a thunderstorm out of rage... as you do.. it’s like the season 6 plot but less infurating and more understandable. But the two remeet, and had a kiss on new years while not knowing it’s the other person under am ask.. and then CJ ran and both thought the other was upset: MOrdecai for him being MOrdecai, and CJ for running out on him and agreed to be friends. That didn’t last, though it did give us another classic on this list, as while exes can be friends and all, the two still had something between them. Thus came this one. And it was a hard one as it barely inched out the finale of their relationship arc, Real Date, which had the ceo of a dating company try to break them up and be really damny funny but it’s ulitmatley this one being just as hilarious while being a great character piece that gets it the rub. As the episode opens Mordecai and CJ have been spending a LOT of time together and i’ts clear there’s a spark there.. but Mordecai insists it’s platonic. And yes there is a bad habit of animation being unable to accept females and males who are into the oppistie sex can’t be friends without being attracted to each other. It’s being cleared up more lately, but as Star Vs showed it still happens sometimes. But it works here: The two STARTED with dating, made out on new years, and are attracted to each other it’s just clear both were in denial about it. It’s not saying “well they have chemstiry so fuck their partners’ like star vs or “if you loved someone once those feelings will return and destroy yoru current relationship” like next season.... season 6′s arc is a tirefire burn it. But the issue is forced when, while texting about an extreme baking show together while CJ’s at her job at a sports bar, it autocrrects from Yuji, the show’s host, to you hi, sending the title message “I like you, hi”. Mordecai, being even less adept with his feelings and anxiety towards women than me and trust me that’s saying something, spirals and we do get the episodes best scene, narrowly beating out it’s climax, where Mordecai summons a war council.. aka the rest of the main cast minus benson but plus Thomas, the intern who I wish stuck around longer even after he turned out to be a russian spy because they ran out of ideas for him, voiced by Roger Craig Smith and distractingly using his future sonic voice.

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I just.. love everything about the scnee. From the term pulling a mordecai, to Rigby joining in, deservedly as he’s had front row seats for a lot of this bollocks, to everyone’s suggestions especially Muscle Man’s half assed one that somehow, but unsuprisngly, works for him and Starla. Naturally Mordecai comes up with what Rigby HIMSELF admits is a Rigby level half assed scheme to get an actual photo with Yuji rather than just admit the truth. Yuji himself is an utter delight, having had his star not rise as fast as he’d like thanks to autocorrect and being entirely on board, and when it backfires as MOrdecai ends up autocorrected and sends the message thrice and gets sucked into the phone again, admits i’ts “pretty extreme’. I love the guy and i’m prety sure he showed up again, to my delight.

In the phone Mordecai meets some old friends, the message guardians who I mentioned in the “insane shit this show has done” bit earlier: old forms of messaging who police texting, all voiced by Rich Fulcher of the Mighty Boosh and Snuffbox Fame.

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I love Rich and wish these guys could show up in close enough. Maybe they can, I don’t know how rights issues with turner properties work when it comes to two diffrent audiences entirely. Anyways what really makes the episode, besides the great callbacks in this scene, is when confronted with everything going on, Mordecai.. tries to run into the void, with Rigby, The Message Recorder and the Smoke Signal all encouraging him to come back. “There’s nothing out there for you, literally it’s just a blank void”. With the leading tape recorder pointing out from their text history not only how great CJ is but how much he seems to like her with Mordecai finally coming back and admitting the obvious: He does like her.. he’s just scared of beefing it again. Which he does but that’s not the point. Rigby, who as part of his character development helps Mordecai quite a bit with this stuff by being a neutral party, though he also likes CJ better than Margret which is a mood even though I don’t care which one you ship mordecai with frankly, you do you, I have my prefrences. And with that Mordecai finally texts her and asks her out, with her accepting via winky face.. with an added text to clarify it for his neuotic ass.. which is also a mood as my neuortic ass could use that a lot. Overall just a wonderful , hilarious and good bit of character growth.. that season 6 throws in the oven, but that’s a long rant for another day. On it’s own, “I LIke you, hi” is a good character piece for mordecai whlie still being really damn funny.

9. Thanksgiving Special (Season 5, Episode 15)

Regular Show was really damn great at holliday specials. Their terror tales from the park every halloween were always a nice treat and a good replacement for Simpsons “Treehouse of Horror” which still exists, it’s just no one cares at this point, and their christmas and new years episodes are both really damn good, the first Christmas Episode being in contention for this list even. But to me the best of the best was easily Season 5′s thanksgiving episode.

The premise is simple: Mordecai and Rigby accidnetly destroy thanksgiving dinner, which the park crew is having for everyone and their famllies and, refusing to take Benson trying to dismiss their attempts to help fix their mistake, end up joining a songwriting contest to try and win a Turducken.. a natural one that’s born every 1000 Years because this is regular show. To do this they have to beat a parody of everyone’s least faviorite president Donald Trump, Rich Buckner. The fact that trump was basically the main villian of a holliday special a year before he became president is not lost on me and is one of the most accurate depections of the man i’ve ever seen. The fact Rich steals the prize despite our boys winning from his blimp with a grappling hook is peak trump. The fact Trump has’nt stolen more things with a grappling hook in real life is only because his hands are too small to use one.

Getting past our president for my own sanity, the episode also has really great subplots: Muscle Man and Fives go to a sports bar to get sides and end up pissing off a former football player and getting into a touchdown dance comppetition, sadly not set to the super bowl shuffle, while Benson, Pops and Skips go to get a turkey and end up fighting over it with men dressed up like a piligrim, a first thanksgiving era native american and a turkey, to which they don’t even really give an explination for.. granted most explinatoins on this show are insane but even by regular show standards, this gets none. And I love it for it. While as you can tell the episode is really damn funny, what really sells it is the emotional core: For once while they do fear for their jobs a bit Mordecai and Rigby’s main motivation in this messup is genuine guilt and wanting to fix their mistake, and they work hard at it, even giving a genuine and awesome heartfelt song that notches itself up with other thanksgiving classics “That thankstiginv themed soul sketch on snl” and adam sandler’s turkey song also from snl. Not a high bar but it’s really good regardless

The episodes’ real strength though is it’s emotional core: For once instead of saving their own asses or understadnably wanting to get one over on the cranky and in the worse written episodes obnoxiously overbearing benson, they simply feel terrible about possibly runing the meal for their arriving parents and everyone elses parents and families and their friends and work to right the wrong. It’s not the first time they worked to do something genuinely good with no benefit to themselves, but it’s probably the best and Benson’s I forgive you, while hilarious is also really sweet. And speaking of sweet

It ends on a really sweet and touching note, as Mordecai and Rigby, after escaping a blimp via a wish on a golden wishbone because of course, make it home to find the various weirdos the park crew met have brought them thanksgiving, and their parents will be there and we get a nice touching ending as the main duo get a well earned toast from Benson. Just an out and out amazing thanksgiving special and a good reminder of what the holiday means.

8. Trucker Hall of Fame (Season 3, Episode 37)

Moving on from Season 5 for a second, Season 3 was where the show really started to hit it’s stride to me. While Season 2 was a nice increase in quality from the sometimes choppy and heavy on “everyone is an asshole” comedy season 1, Season 3 was where the increased focus on the rest of the cast outside of our main duo balloned and what seeds of character were planted in season 2 beautifully bloomed. And this episode is one of the best examples of that. This one focuses on Muscle Man, who earlier on was basically the main duo’s rival alongside his buddy high five ghost, and kind of a dick. While “Kind of a dick” never left any discription of Mitch Sorenstein, this and previous episode muscle woman showed there was more to the goblin man than we thought. It’s also one of regular show’s few early mostly serious episodes and unlike the benson ones, again this list was tough don’t come at me with a machete, and realy showed why muscle man is the human tire fire he is. The episode introduces, and quickly kills off, muscle dad, mitch’s dad who gave him a love of pranks and was a truck driver who died as he live: mistaking a fake bear for a real one during a prank. Muscle Man being not the most stable person on a GOOD day, spirals, as seen above, and Benson tasks mordecai and rigby, since Fives isn’t good with death ironically and isn’t holding up much better, and as a much later episode shows the two became besties in high school so he probably knew muscle dad for a good ten years so he’s probably not in a great place either, nice stuff, to go with him to put his dad’s ashes in the trucker hall of fame. What follows is a sweet and damn sad episode. While Mitch’s frequent breakkdowns can be hilarous their also really sad and having lost my grandpa since this episode aired, I can relate to being fine one minute and a total shrieking wreck the next over the smallest thing. But it also shows that Mitch genuinely thinks of our main duo as his friends, and that beneath his testorrone positned exterior he’s a decent guy, being genuinely greatful. Of course being regular show the 3 end up squaring off with some truckers, while Mitch also grappels with the revelation his dad wasn’t one but a forklift opperator who faked being a trucker for his son’s benifit and dleft a tender note in his picture, figuring correctly his son would break it open when he found out... oh and because this show is still nuts his ghost ends up saving them at the end which is really sweet , as mitch decides trucker or no his ashes deserve to be there. Also his ghost shows up again at thanksgiving so apparently he can just come back once in a while, which is nice but dosen’t demnish the bittersweet feeling of this ep. And as I said the show has a good grasp on continuity as this ep marked a turning point for our main duo and muscle man: while the’yve bonded before after this, aside from mitch’s habit of christmas pranks and his faking his death, they really don’t nearly get as annoyed by him ever again. i’ts a sweet touching ride tha’ts uncharacristic of the show’s usual chaos but really works.

7. A Bunch of Full Grown Geese (Season 4, Episode 19) After a few episodes that were more sentimental on this list, it’s good to get back to some good old regular show madness for this one, which was also the series 100th in production order and is a worthy milestone episode. Season 4 was really good building on the good will from Season 3 and FINALLY having payoff to the margret and mordecai thing, more on that in a bit. Not as much to say as seasons 3 or 5, but it was still spectacular. The sequel to another ep, fittingly given it’s #100, full grown geese has our duo tasked with removing a bunch of obnoxious geese, with Benson in dick mode refusing to give the two more help, though it does lead to one of the show’s best scenes when he gives his usual your fried threat.. and fitting a milestone episode, Rigby calls him on never going through with it and the threat being as empty as my dreams. Benson responds by going nuts and angrishing them out of his office.. really funny. But yeah with the geese attacking them and , in their first attacking, poor pops, and no way to combat them, the two turn to the baby ducks, a bunch of baby ducks from the episode titled that who show up to help.. and this being the 100th episode of an already grant morrison level nuts show, it turns out the geese seek to conquer earth, voiced by david warner of course and have laser eyes.. and can combine. And the ducks do so again, mecha style, and add in our heroes and a bunch of call backs in one of the series best and most batshit sequences> The ending is also throughly satisfying as while our heroes win, Benson chews them out for tearing up the park in the process.. only for the ducks mom to call him out for not only yelling at the ducks, who are just kids, but at mordecai and rigby after they just saved the park from being a smoldering crater and not just trashed and he backs off. Just a fun episode where the crew just went nuts and the results speak for themselves.

6. This is My Jam (Season 2, Episode 13)

Now this one I couldn’t NOT include. This is one of the series best even after it’s immense growth, and a beloved classic for a reason. And like the above it’s a good classic case of regular show hyjinks while also being relatable this time: Rigby gets a brainless but catchy pop song from the 90′s stuck in his head and despite growing to hate it, and Mordecai hating it because this episode establishes him as a hipster, and seemingly exercises it.. only for it to manifest as a GIANT CASETTE WEARING SUNGLASSES THAT PLAYS THE SONG JUST BY EXISTING AND DANCES CONSTANTLY. it’s utterly glorious and used to great effect, also annoying benson because he’s constnatly annoyed. To beat it the main duo get the rest of the park’s help at Skips suggestion to form a band and craft an even BIGGER earworm to cast it out. Oh and there’s a great scene where Pops is forced to awkwardly dance with the incarnation of the 90′s “But I won’t use my best moves”. The climax also has one of Benson’s best moments as, after he’s irritated all episode, he comes in hot, with both the cast and audience expecting him to chew out mordecai and rigby.. only he’s mad because they forgot drums are key to an earworm and saves the day with his drumwork. It’s a great subversion and one of the first times Benson was more than just the angry but understandable, at times, dickhead boss. Just an utter standout and one of the show’s most memorable episodes for a reason. Also the line “you can’t touch music but music can touch you’ is great.

5. Meteor Moves ( Season 4, Episode 28)

This one was a long time coming and to me is a great example of writers taking their own shortcomings and making something awesome out of them. I prefer that: instead of just retconning away bad writing use it as a tool.. I try to do that myself when possible. See early in the show as you all probably know, Mordecai’s crush on Margret was just a plot device: he had a crush on the cute waitress at the coffee shop so they used it to get him to do things. A gratioutis shot of her in bike shorts got him to bet all computer rights for life that sort of thing. The show.. wasn’t great with female characters till season 3 and even as it grew, as season 6 and just.. forgetting to give CJ a proper ending as a character shows, still grappled with it. It took writer Kat Morris saying “no no stop go to jail” to them wanting ot make CJ a difficult woman type, whatever horrifying thing that is. I don’t want to know, let’s move on. The point is it wasn’t till season 3 that Margret and her best friends, and Rigby’s future wife, Eileen got fleshed out a bit: Eileen got smarter and turned out to be good at wilderness stuff while Margret was chill, nice, if annoyed by the chaos around mordecai, and funloving, while also having a clear goal in stark contrast to her future boyfriend: going to college. Even after coming back it was botha fter finsihing college and to start a career. It wasn’t incredibly deep, but it made me not be ehhh to her mere existance like before. The show also started developing her and Mordecai’s relationship seriously with the two bonding and the previously shown Butt Dial showing for the first time, after previously having a terrible taste in men and then just not noticing his crush, that she was receptive to how mordecai felt. And the two had several moments and two dates even, it just.. never went anywhere for some reason.

And this was INFURATING to me: See back then shows had a tendency to just pop in love intrests SOLEY for plot fuel like margret with no intention of following through with things either through rejection or a relationsihp upgrade and by then I was sick of it. The whole spike and rarity thing in MLP (which to be clear I wanted her to just reject him but nope, even after I stopped watching she never did. ), Isabella and Phineas. I was fed up so I went from being “eh” about it to annoyed supremely.. but the thing is the writers realized this.. and course corrected. The first step was picking up Margret, where Mordecai agrees to pick her up to get her to the airport for a college interview and we get a nice deconstruction of things as Margret is anticpatiing things going wrong, and wrongly blames Mordecai for it.. I mean it is his fault sometimes but half the time weird shit just follows him. However she’s won over by him working past it, getting her there in time and kisses him. That blew me away and made me think well it’s finally here.. and it was.. ALMOST. However the creators wisely, if frustratingly to past me, took one more episode to iron it out: Metor Moves has the two growing closer, and semi-going out, but Rigby pops mordecai’s bubble pointing out he never actually made a boyfriend girlfriend move and her move could’ve gone either way. So Mordecai , after seasons of being wishy washy and awkward, finally decides to go for it as he, rigby, eileen and margret go to a metor shower. Being Regular Show it dosen’t go as planned as his attempted kiss is blocked by the guardians of the friend zone.. which is a real, phantom zone esque place here and that’s just fantastic. And it’s also clearly mocking the hell out of the concept, which is dumb. if you want to ask someone out just do it, I learned that the hard way. And if you really are friends, if she says no then you’ll accept it and keep a friend anyway as I have. But it’s clearly parodying it and Mordecai get sreplayed all the times he ALMOST made a move but didn’t but refuses to accept this clusterfuck, realizes he was a screwup when it came to this.. and kisses her.. and this time the two enter a relationship> Granted it barely lasted but still, it was nice while it did and this ep is just great for it. While not the funniest, it’s up this high because it took somethign the show did wrong.. and turned it on it’s head and into a character flaw and had mordecai grow past it, with a genuinely romantic moment on top as well as an utterly funny and batshit concept. It also had some Rigleen, as by this point rigby stopped being a hateful wastebasket to her and warmed up to her, and I regret there’s no reigleen episodes on this list. Their the shows best couple and utterly adorable. Just wanted to mention that at least once this list.

4. Laundry Woes (Season 5, Episode 1) From the begining to the end. While sadly Morderet didn’t last too long in canon, which blows, it did give us some great episodes while it lasted, as with the above entry and their breakup in Steak Me Amedeus. As mentioned before Margret left for college, which while abrupt feeling did pave the way for great stories: The Mordejay arc mentioned above and that will pop up again very soon, This was one of them: the ep while lacking on laughs is a good emotional rollercoaster and starts with an amazing montage that catches us up from the end of season 4: Mordecai is miserable, as you’d expect and wallowing in it with Benson, of all people, letting him. And given Benson seems to have a heart attack any time Mordecai and Rigby aren’t working, that’s huge. But eventually his friends refuse to let it go on and in a really touching montage help him through it, taking him out places, giving him good times and eventually.. the fog starts to lift and he starts to enjoy himself and by the end.. he’s himself again. It’s one of the series best sequences, told with no dialouge and showing just how far the rest of the cast had come: Benson actually wants to comfort mordecai but is encouraged not to at first, underfstandably as it probably woudlnt’ help, and a crew that were once, aside from Pops who much like Krillin is everyone’s friend, just coworkers who barely tolerated each other, and are now close as family and help their own in need. But Grief isn’t a straight line and just as Mordecai’s recovering he’s sent spiraling when he finds Margret’s sweater and uses ita s a flimsy excuse to go return it. It’s here I also get to talk about Rigby, who grew from an impatient idiot who hated Mordecai’s romantic endevors and actively sabtoaged them at times, to an understandting wing man who, while understandably frustrated with his best friend’s own idiocy with women, turned out to know more and be the wise council he needed, triggering both is relationships and only bailing out during the season 6 clusterfuck and even then was there to comfort him after it was all over and go to his aid to pull him out of another misery hole. And here he gives Mordecai the hard truth: He shoudln’t do this, it’s just going to tear both him and margret up again and he just put himself back together. He’s not going to let his best friend do this to himself. And while there is a supernatural elment, the sweater comes to life and tries to get Mordecai to force margret back with him and give up college, likely voicing his darkest wants that he hates himself for wanting, but it feels more like a manfiestation of Mordecai’s own issues than the usual madness. Like “Trucker hall of Fame”, a rare senntence, it’s a less funny packed more grounded episode. And in the end it’s mordecai himself, after rejecting the ghost sweater and seeing his ex truly happy , that gets him to NOT talk to her and just.. let it go. IT’s a good emotional episode and SHOULD HAVE BEEN the end of their relationship... but i’ve ranted about the cheating storyarc enough here, moving right along.

3. Portable Toilet (Season 5, Episode 16) Back to the Mordejay arc. And yes this arc is my faviorite and while I didn’t make it clear at the time I really shipped the two, even before it became canon. I had nothing against morderet, these two simply had more chemistry and these episodes built CJ up as more of a character than Margret was at the time. It’s why that later arc sucks so much to me: it destroys a perfectly good relationship and story arc for dumb reasons and never really did enough with it to justify doing so. I’ll get to it some day, or if someone comissions it soone rthan some day, but as you can tell i’m still sore over it and great eps like this are part of the reason why. It’s the same reason i’m sore on how Tom was handled on star vs. But as you can also tell as bitter and lemon scented as I am.. these eps are still objectivley great and thus took up a third of the list basically. Case in point Portable Toilet, which zooms back a bit to when neither would admit they were into each other but were now friends at least. Also Eileen was CJ”s friend now because plot convience. I mean they worked, and it bothers me a lot that the creators claim cj washed her hands of her even though she’s not the one who made out with margret... which come to think of it adding her to rigleen.. not a bad idea. I mean Rigby didn’t really like margret true, but they did almost go out before mordecai killed him and then reset time because Mordecai’s always kinda sucked. I’ll file that away for later. But my new OTP aside, I did like the two bonding and what not. Anyways with their outside park friend/RIgby’s future girlfriend now friends with Mordeai’s future girlfriend the four have apparently been hanging out which, while i’ve bemoaned off screen stuff at times, works here and regular show uses it better than most shows. While Rigby can clearly see Mordecai and CJ are into each other Mordecai is as we covered in denial and while that dosen’t really progress here, it does lead to one of teh shows finest hours. When talking would you rathers, CJ semi-flirtly dares Mordecai to eat his lunch sandwitch in a portable toilet, which he agrees to and drags a reluctant rigby along for. This being regular show, it goes south fast as the two get stuck, with Rigby’s clautrophiba kicking in leading to an amazing exchange Mordecai; Dude that makes no sense! Rigby: You’s makes no sense! While our dynamic duo try to get mordecai and rigby out the two are carted away and repalced with a new portable toilet, a deluxe one. Also we get another great bit when our dynamic duo find Muscle man, in a robe with choclate’s claming “Eileen, other girl, this isn’t weird” before screaming “This isn’t weird”. Turns out old portable toilets are taken to be blown up by the miltary and we get one of the shows best one off characters in the general, who not only explains it as “toilets being about the same size as the enmy” but when told he should call the president says “the preseident is not my father i’ll blow up as many toilets as I want.”. Spectacular. So now it’s a scramble for one twosome to rescue the other, Rigby lets out a cathartic “THANK YOUUU MORDECAI” over the flirty toilet dare, and the day is saved> This one is another pure comedy one, even if it ties into a plot I really like, and i’ts gold for obvious reasons and manages to take blowing up porta poties, a premise that dosen’t seem that funny, and make it utter comedic gold. Speaking of pure comic episodes that are utterly insane...

2. Cool Bikes (Season 3, Episode 7)

This one feels like regular show boiled down to it’s core: semi-relabtale hyjinks dovetalling into pure madness. And the premise sounds like a shit post i’d make: Mordecai and Rigby want benson to admit their cool and get into progressively weird outfits and tricks to their bycycles to do so, eventually becoming so cool their put on trial by the council of cool , ending up having to make a runner when Benson finally breaks down and admits it. The premise is utterly stupid in the best way possible, with the conflict being the kind of petty bullshit we all get into from time to time with our aquantinces: not wanting to admit something and loose the argument withthings escalating. And in regular show terms it escalate sperfectly into the entire unvierse being threatned adn our heros being on trial for their lives. There’s not much to say here, it’s just pure comedic gold with a premise that just works. It also has good moments for Benson with his finally admitting they are cool and saving the duo’s lives whne he realized he just gave them a death sentence. Utter fun. And now we come to the finale, my faviorite episode...

1. Dodge This (Season 5, Episode 15)

Yup this arc again. But this one has more than my ship going for it, and it’s why it soared to the top: It takes the excellent character work of other episodes and weaves it with excellent comedy to create an utter delight and the episode I remember most fondly and most often. It’s just great. The second part of the Mordeijay arc, not counting yes dude yes, the episode is half that and half sports movie: The Park Guys have been taking part in dodgeball as a team bulding thing and it shows how far Benson’s come as he not only praises mordecai, and launches the mordecai and benson ship in the process, but gives his team full wings and his full support, a far cry from his usual self. It’s also the first big instance of him getting hammered on wings and it’s glorious to see drunk flirty benson. Benson is also genuinely congratulatory to the team’s ace mordecai, and most of them realy for b eing valuable and hopes to win this year. IN their way are two things: The magical elements, aka the floating baby heads that gave skips his immortality, his friend with sparkly eyes who works for them and death himself whose a recurring character and fucking great and who were their bowling rivals too. The other is CJ is back, and Benson in another good moment actually talks mordecai through it and his nerves over it assuring him. So we get a great sports piece as our heroes work through various callbacks and even beat the magical elements iwth Rigby’s hilarious and rediculous rignado manuver, which is as dumb as it sounds and winged a guy hilaroiusly before with Benson scolding him like a toddler. Of course it ends up with Mordecai and CJ against each other, both incredibly awkard over things as mentioned before, and both ending up in a stalmate that magical dodgeball guardians have to resolve because, let’s do this one last time. IT’S REGULAR SHOW. We do get a good moment though as the two work through their awkwardness: both thinking the other is rightfully mad: Mordecai for his two timer date with her and Margret and CJ for running out without talking to mordecai after they had a moment on new years. The both work past it, the park strikers loose,benson likely gets hammered again off screen.. it’s a good one and I have no shame in putting it at number one. It’s got heart, really great jokes, and some good charcter stuff, not to the level of other episodes on this list, but it wasn’t a full episode of that like those were and still works to move the plot forward and is still a classic. Just a fun, breezy, well done epsidoe fully rooted in the cast’s characters and getting laughs out of that.. mostly benson. And with that this giangantic list comes to a close> I hope you enjoyed it, if you liked it follow me for more. I’ll be doing close enough coverage every week, as well as amphibia and owl house among other reviews. Until we meet again, later days.

#regular show #mordecai #rigby #cj #eileen #margret #muscle man #benson dunwoody #high five ghost #pops mallerd #skips #death #yuji #rich fulcher #close enough #top 10 lists #cartoon network

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aawesomepenguin · 5 years

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[SPOILERS FOR THE SONIC MOVIE]

Ok, with the new trailer approaching, I thought that it would be good if I made a master post containing everything that we know for sure are happening in the Sonic Movie, thanks to an AMA done back in March.

The AMA was then proven to be true when the Sonic Movie trailer debuted in Cinemacon a month later, matching with a lot of what he said. Then Toywiz accidentally leaked that they were going to do some Sonic Movie toys, and one of them matched again with that AMA. It is legit.

So, needless to say, I’m going to literally spoil the entire movie. From beggining to the end. You’ve been warned.

Direct citations are in “”.

-The Movie is basically going to be a “Sonic; Origins”, it’s going to give backstory to Sonic and Robotnik, it’ll talk about how the two of them met, and how they became mortal enemies.

-Only the Robotnik name is used. No mention of the “Eggman” name.

-He gave the movie a 7/10 grade.

-If he had to compare this movie to a previous one, it would be the 2014 TMNT movie: “Id say it is more TMNT with reference to story and action balance. It's a solid mix between engaging action which continues to develop the bromance between sonic and Tom.”

- The movie is indeed, focused for the younger demographic, but there is some bonus for the long time fans: “ Its definitely being targeted towards youth demo. It seems their goal is to intro sonic to the next Gen of fans. More so with access to their parents wallets for spin off merch and happy meal toys. I enjoyed it similar to seeing transformers. Don't expect the green mile storytelling but turn your brain off and just enjoy for what it is. The cast does a great job”

-About Sonic himself in the movie:

*In order to survive, he keeps stealing stuff and living in the shadows of the Green Hills town. He usually steals food from super markets to eat, and also he steals a LOT of sneakers. He ends up being treated as an urban legend, called as the “Blue devil” by the locals, until he is discovered.

*Sonic isn’t from Earth, he comes from another dimension that is inhabited by other animals like him. Sonic’s past will be explored.

*It’s revealed that he was raised by an owl when he was a baby. Everything seems to point that she is a regular owl, not an anthro one. She eventually ends up dying for some unknown reasons, which will be a “tearjerker” scene.

*”Rings are how sonic got to earth. He can throw one and imagine a place and it will take him. He is fast from his first steps.”

*About Sonic’s ‘eletricity’ powers, he does it only when he focuses or is extremely emotional. His charged run is why he gets detected and why the power on the entire Pacific Northwest goes down and that’s how Robotnik comes into the film.

*But Sonic will need to learn how to control his powers though.

-About references to the old games, he said that: “It’s a good balance between giving the old fans something but introducing him to kids. I went in not knowing it was gonna be screened or any expectations. Cheesy but enjoyed it from start to finish. Jim Carrey kills the role.”

-About the movie’s plot:

* Sonic ends up being far away from his home planet and grows up on Earth. Ends up alone after some time and grew up staying hidden. Loneliness gets to him which leads to him making a massive energy disturbance, knocking out the power on the entire Pacific Northwest.

The government, scared by the blackout, decides to bring in Robotnik to find out why the energy disturbance happened. Hijinks ensue and a good story is told. Tom and sonic become best friends.

-About the action:

“ Action scenes were great in story telling and execution wise. Effects weren't complete so a lot of it was still early cgi and the hidden actors playing sonic. At one point he was just a blue doll on the counter lol”

-The movie is aiming for a PG Rating.

-About Robotnik:

“He's just a psycho super smart doc that works for the gov initially. They give him the power and he goes full Eggman lol. He's super obnoxiously smart too. Makes tons of comments in the film about how superior his brain is lol. Really fun role for Jim Carrey.”

“He doesn’t rock the signature look until tail end of movie. Has the typical long coat and all dark evil scientist look. Short mustache as well initially”

Robotnik trying to catch Sonic eventually makes him go more and more insane and obsessed with the hedgehog. With him eventually getting the “Eggman” look.

-”Lots of humor and fun for all ages. Kids ate the comedy up. Sonic dances right after an short battle and kids about died laughing in the theater.”

-The Chaos Emeralds are NOT present in this movie.

-There is a post credit scene:

“Robotnik is defeated and ends up on a foreign planet [possibly Sonic’s World] that Sonic was supposed to escape to in the event of being found on Earth. He is now hefty and rocking the full blown stache”

- “Sonic and Tom end up helping each other solve their personal conflicts. They balanced Sonic and Tom pretty well and they are a good duo.”

- There’s a scene in San Francisco that is a direct homage to City Escape.

-The only characters from the games that show up are Robotnik and Sonic.

- The movie has one car chase scene. Sonic does the floss to celebrate (that dance that is used in Fortnite) and “the kids ate it up”. About product placement, there is two, one with the Olive Garden restaurant and Puma. Tom also gets a gift card as an apology at the end from the gov guy who initially brings Robotnik into the picture.

-Yes, Sonic will floss in the movie.

- Tika Sumpter plays the character Annie Wachowski. She is a vet that is very gentle with Sonic. It’s thanks to her that Sonic felt that he could trust the Wachowskis.

- In order to retrieve Sonic’s lost rings, Sonic and Tom embark on a roadtrip to San Francisco, using Tom’s Tacoma.

The Tacoma’s roof is ripped out due to the automated car that Robotnik sent to attack them. This leads to a conflit between Sonic and Tom.

-About how Sonic and Tom meet:

“Tom has racoon problems in his trash. When he sees Sonic face to face for the first time. He tranqs him and puts him in a cage.”

Robotnik shows up and they escape and Tom begrudgingly agrees to help. His main concern is moving to SF to prove to himself that he can handle real cop crime and not Montana small world problems. You see it early on for character development.

-The movie’s runtime is around 90 minutes.

- “There were stakes and it balanced between a family adventure and action movie.”

-About the final battle:

" Yeah there's a good scene between doc and the good guys" It’ll be about Sonic and Robotnik running across the entire world using the Power Rings, they’ll end up in different places from Earth, such as Egypt and Paris.

-About Robotnik’s lackey:

Agent Stone is Robotnik’s right hand. He is very funny and a big Robotnik fanboy. He’s super happy to be working with him.

- “Tom was really enjoyable. Fun and backwoods kind of smart. He wants to prove to himself that he can make it as a big city cop”

- The film will begin showing Sonic as a baby. He’ll be saved by an owl, that’ll be sort of like his mom owl. His mom owl dies, and then Sonic will realize that he is on his own on Earth, and alone.

-There’s a scene where Sonic and Tom stop by a bar localized in the American highway path between San Francisco and Green Hills. It’s full of buff bikers, with tatoos and everything. Sonic accidentaly creates a fight in the bar.

-Robotnik has as a part of his arsenal drones, tanks, automated cars, and realistic robots.

-Sonic ends up becoming a sensation in Green Hills, and the locals begin to appreciate him, and begin to defend him.

-How the final battle ends:

The fight across the world between Sonic and Robotnik ends up back in Montana via the rings. The locals from Green Hills help by getting Robotnik’s attention. Sonic then super electro charges a spin dash, and knocks Robotnik into a ring which sends him to another planet [possibly Sonic’s World] and they technically win for now.

-The final battle begins, I believe, at this part:

And that’s preety much it. If you want to see the AMA for yourself, click here.

#Sonic Movie #Sonic the Hedgehog #Sonic Movie Spoilers #Sonic #Tom Wachowski #Annie Wachowski #Dr. Eggman #Dr. Ivo Robotnik #Dr. Robotnik #Agent Stone

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thejakeformerlyknownasprince · 5 years

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Hell is For Children: Animorphs as Children’s Lit

[Guest post from Cates!]

So a couple of months ago Bug asked me to write a post about why Animorphs is Middle Grade/Children’s Fiction, not Young Adult. Since she asked, I’ve read several wonderful posts from other people questioning or explaining what the difference is between Middle Grade and Young Adult, where Animorphs fits, and why it matters. Here’s my two cents as a children’s literature scholar.

To start, Animorphs’ 20,000-30,000 word count per book is a big hint it’s not YA fiction. Obviously, a book with a low word count is not automatically a children’s book, and a book with a high word count is not automatically a book for adults. But if Animorphs was aimed at teens, Applegate would likely have been expected to make the books longer. While there are a lot of great YA novels that are as short as or shorter than your average Animorphs book (check out BookRiot’s list of 100 YA novels under 250 pages,) most YA series, and especially fantasy or scifi YA series, are expected to top 100,000 words. (The three books in the Diviners series by Libba Bray have a total wordcount of 520,000 words; Laini Taylor’s Daughter of Smoke and Bone trilogy tops 400,000 words, for example.)

Animorphs’ word count isn’t enough on its own to exclude the series from YA classification, but Animorphs’ short word count also fits the trend of children’s—not YA—series fiction in the 1990s. In order to understand this trend, and why it produced books specifically for children, not teens, we need to jump back in time to WWII. Because so many American men were drafted into the military, women took over jobs that had been almost exclusively done by men, like mechanics, sales, electricians, etc. When WWII ended, thousands of men returned home, but women didn’t leave the workforce. Realizing they had an excess of young men and not enough jobs, the US government created the GI Bill, allowing soldiers to attend college for free or at a steeply reduced cost, thus stemming the influx of workers and giving the economy and industry room to grow.

At the same time, families were having children (and those children were surviving) at an unprecedented rate. Thanks to the GI Bill, college was no longer something reserved for wealthy white men, but something available to the middle and even lower class. A college education offered social and economic mobility, and the Baby Boomers, children of the GI Bill recipients, became the first generation to grow up with the idea that college was something that could and should be pursued by all.

Then, the Baby Boomers began having children in the late 1970s through early 1990s, meaning a large chunk of those children (including Bug and I) were in elementary school in mid 1990s to early 2000s. Thanks to their parents, a higher percentage of American adults than ever before had attended college. Thanks to advancements in women’s medicine, psychology, sociology, and education, among other fields, people understood as never before the importance of instilling a love of reading in children at a young age. The huge middle class was willing to invest lots of time and money in their children’s educations, because at this point not having a college education was seen as a barrier to success.

I’m sure you can see where this is going. (Kidding).

Children’s publishing exploded in the 1990s because children—or, more accurately, their parents—were seen as a huge, untapped market. Previously, children’s publishing didn’t receive as much money or attention because, the logic went, children did not have money and therefore couldn’t buy books. But then the publishing industry realized that there were literally millions of parents willing to spend money on their children’s education, and publishers like Scholastic, Dutton, Dial, Penguin, Random House, and others rushed to take advantage of this new customer demographic.

Of the ten books featured on this Scholastic bookfair poster from 2000, seven are series fiction.

Serialized fiction—ie, stories that took place over the course of several books about the same characters and/or in the same setting—was the perfect way for publishing houses to capitalize on this new market. And hoo boy was it successful. From 1993 to 1995, Goosebumps books were being sold at a rate of approximately 4 million books a month. That means roughly 130,000 books were sold every day.

Here’s a few names to bring you back: Bailey School Kids, The Magic Treehouse, Babysitter’s Club, Junie B. Jones, Encyclopedia Brown, Cam Jansen, Horrible Harry, Secrets of Droon, The Magic Attic Club, A Series of Unfortunate Events, Bunnicula, The Boxcar Children, The American Girls, Amelia’s Notebook, Dear America, Wayside School, Choose Your Own Adventure…we could keep going for days. All of those series have two things in common: one, they were either published between 1985 and 2005 and/or experienced a huge resurgence in the 90s, and two, they’re all middle grade novels. Some are aimed at younger children, like Junie B. Jones and The Magic Treehouse, and some are aimed at older children, like the Dear America series and A Series of Unfortunate Events.

The point is, Animorphs is so clearly a product of its time (and not just because of the Hansen Brothers references,) it slots perfectly into the trend of series fiction for children. If you want to claim Animorphs is YA, you also need to claim all of the series I just listed above.

Now, let’s talk about the main argument I see in favor Animorphs being YA: the dark content.

This is my personal wheelhouse. I’m planning on someday doing my PhD dissertation on trauma, violence, war, and trauma recovery in Middle Grade—not YA—fiction. I always find it funny when people use descriptors like cute, sweet, innocent, silly, light, and simple to describe children’s books. While there are certainly plenty of children’s books that are one or more of those things, there are also dozens that are the polar opposite—dark, complex, serious, violent, and deep. I once read a review of The Golden Compass which said “it’s not like other children’s books with a clear cut good guy and bad guy and a simple message.” I don’t know how many children’s books the author of the article had read, but I’m guessing not a lot. Let’s just do a blunt reality check with a few of my favorites—including some picture books which are typically for an even younger audience than Middle Grade. Spoilers for all of the books I’m about to mention.

Baseball Saved Us by Ken Mochizuki This book follows a little boy who is sent to a Japanese interment camp during WWII. He and his family deal with abuse, starvation, and sickness. Suggested reading age*? Kindergarten and up.

*(For this and all subsequent books I used reviews from Kirkus, the Horn Book, and School Library Journal to determine suggested reading age.)

Check out this picture of Shorty playing baseball while an armed soldier watches him from a guard tower. Isn’t it cute, sweet, and innocent?

Pink and Say by Patricia Polacco Pink and Say are 15-year-old boys serving as Union Soldiers during the Civil War. Confederate Soldiers kill Pink’s mother, Pink and Say become POWs, and Pink is hanged because he is African American. Suggested reading age? First grade and up.

Fox by Margaret Wild This book starts grim and just gets grimmer. Dog and Magpie have been burned in a wildfire. Dog loses an eye, Magpie a wing. Magpie rides on Dog’s head—she is his eyes, he is her wings. Fox comes and convinces Magpie to leave Dog and come with him. There are definite sexual undertones. The book ends with the possibility that Dog and Magpie will be reunited, but no certainty. Suggested reading age? Six and up.

[The text says “He stops, scarcely panting./ There is silence between them/ Neither moves, neither speaks./ Then Fox shakes Magpie off his back/ as he would a flea,/ and pads away./ He turns and looks at Magpie, and he says,/ ‘Now you and Dog will know what it is like/ to be truly alone.’/ Then he is gone./ In the stillness, Magpie hears a faraway scream./ She cannot tell if it is a scream of triumph/ or despair.”]

Tell me this isn’t a total punch in the gut.

The Rabbits by Shaun Tan The introduction of rabbits to Australia is used as an allegory for European colonization and the casual destruction of the Aboriginals’ lives and cultures. Suggested reading age? Six and up.

The Scarlet Stockings Spy by Trinka Hakes Noble A girl spies on the British during the Revolutionary War while her brother fights. He’s killed and there’s actually a description of her finding the “bloodstained hole” in his coat where the bullet struck him. How cute and silly! Suggested reading age? Second grade and up.

Meet Addy: An American Girl by Connie Rose Porter I think this works as a nice comparison to Animorphs because it’s another long-running, popular series aimed at kids just starting to read chapter books. Among other incidents, there’s a graphic description of Addy watching her brother get whipped by an overseer and a passage where another overseer forces Addy to eat worms. I actually give American Girls a lot of points for not shying away from the uglier parts of history. They don’t always get it right (*cough* Kaya *cough*) but those books are more complex than I think most people realize. Suggested reading age? Second grade and up.

My Teacher Flunked the Planet by Bruce Coville From the sight of a child starving to death to homeless children freezing in the streets, Coville certainly doesn’t avoid the darker side of human nature. Pretty sure most adults only noticed the funny green alien on the cover. Suggested reading age? Fourth grade and up.

“That was the day we crept, invisible, into a prison where men and women were being tortured for disagreeing with their government. What had already been done to those people was so ugly I cannot bring myself to describe it, even though the memory of it remains like a scar burned into my brain with a hot iron.

“Even worse was the moment when it was about to start again. When I saw what the uniformed man was going to do to the woman strapped to the table, I pressed myself against the wall and closed my eyes. But even with my hands clamped over my ears I couldn’t shut out her scream.”

Inside Out and Back Again by Thanhha Lai The Vietnam War, migrants drowning in the ocean, refugee camps, racism…this book is a bit like Animorphs in that it’s got a surprisingly dry sense of humor even as awful events take place. Suggested reading age? Fourth grade and up.

The Great Gilly Hopkins by Katherine Patterson A pretty harsh look at the realities of America’s foster care system as told by a girl who could give Rachel Berenson a run for her money. It’s not afraid to show that parents aren’t automatically good people. Suggested reading age? Third grade and up.

Stepping on the Cracks and Wait Til Helen Comes by Mary Downing Hahn If WWII, bullying, dead siblings, draft dodging, and parental abuse are too light and fluffy for you, you can always read about a child consumed with survivor’s guilt because she started the fire that killed her mother. Suggested reading age? Fifth grade and up.

“‘How do you think Jimmy would feel if he knew his own sister was helping a deserter while he lay dying in Belgium?’

‘It wasn’t like that!’ I said, stung by the unfairness of her question. ‘Stuart was sick, he needed me! I wish Jimmy had been down there in the woods, too! Then he’d be alive, not dead!’

Mother slapped me then, hard as she could, right in the face. ‘Never say anything like that again!’ she cried. ‘Never!’”

I could go on (and on and on and on) about trauma narratives for children, but suffice to say while I think Animorphs is probably the most brilliant one I’ve ever read, it’s far from the only one. Kids’ books can be dark, which is good, because if we only tell stories about white, able-bodied children living in big houses with two loving parents then we’re excluding the majority of real children’s lived experiences from our narratives.

There’s one more point I’d like to address: without sounding overly accusatory, I think a lot of the compulsion to consider Animorphs YA instead of children’s fiction is born of the adult bias against children. I’ve mentioned this before on the podcast, but Children’s Literature scholar Maria Nikolajeva created the term aetonormativity to describe society’s tendency to value the adult over the child. Like I discussed above, we have this idea that children’s books are somehow sweet and innocent, while YA fiction is darker and grittier because it addresses so-called ‘adult’ topics like sex, drugs, suicide, violence, and death.

As I hope I’ve established above, just because a book addresses these topics that doesn’t automatically mean it’s for teens. Books about heavy subjects can, are, and should be written for children. I think most of us are fans of Animorphs because it’s a series that sticks with us long after we close the neon-cloud covers. It’s a series that strongly disputes the notion of a clear right and wrong, and doesn’t shy away from the atrocities of war. And it was written for children. It was sold to children. It was read by children.

Some of us adults are just cool enough to read children’s books that treat child readers with the respect they deserve.

— Cates

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hellzyeahthewebwieldingavenger · 4 years

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Spider-Man 1994 and Me

I have no idea how I first discovered Spider-Man the Animated Series. I know it wasn’t the first Spider-Man THING I ever encountered. That was some other Spidey show but I’ve checked them all and have no idea which one it was. But as a kid I didn’t know there was more than one show. I didn’t even know Spider-Man was more than a cartoon!

So I conflated the then current 1994 cartoon with whatever show I’d seen and by extension with Spider-Man as a whole.

To me back then Spider-Man WAS that show. The idea of comics, movies, video games and everything else never occurred to me and when I did discover them in my mind they weren’t the ‘real’ Spider-Man.

The ‘real’ Spider-Man was this show.

Thing is I never knew when it was on. I just knew it was on Fox Kids the cable channel. And my family didn’t have cable. So I spent a long time hoping and praying every weekend that maybe my folks would take me to one of our family friends or relatives who did, and that they would have Fox Kids in their package and that Spider-Man would be on when I was there.

Everyone in my family and at school I was hungry to see that show, and so they got me a VHS collecting 3 episodes for my birthday. They also taped one and a half episodes from a Saturday morning show that aired the cartoon before I had to go to Greek school.

As a result of what I can only describe as playing those tapes on loop I can practically quote ‘Night of the Lizard’, ‘The Sting of the Scorpion’, ‘The Menace of Mysterio’, ‘Make a Wish’ and ‘Attack of the Octobot’.

Whilst the latter two episodes are not well regarded, and I sympathise as to why (they’re basically a subpar adaptation of ‘The Kid Who Collects Spider-Man’), when I was the target demographic they really spoke to me.

And not in a ‘kids don’t know taste’ kinda way. The plot concerned Spider-Man visiting the bedroom of a kid who was a huge Spider-Man fan, hanging out with them, confiding his secrets to them, going on an adventure with them and ultimately that kid restoring both Spider-Man’s memory of himself and resolve to BE a hero.

Can you spell ‘wish fulfilment’?

During one fateful trip to a family friend’s house (who always had the best stuff) I caught the two episodes which are probably the lasting legacy of the whole show, ‘The Alien Costume’ Parts 1-2.

For all young and impressionable viewers I think these episodes left an indelible mark on them, along with the follow up episode.

Try if you will to imagine yourself NOT knowing Spider-Man wears any other kind of costume besides his red and blue one. Then imagine the idea of Spider-Man...as the bad guy. Not just the bad guy...but scary. Then imagine he’s made bad, and made scary because his clothes are literally making him that way and forcing themselves on him, even when he doesn’t want them to. Then imagine seeing an even badder, even scarier Spider-Man, but you don’t get a good look at him. you just know he’s ‘out there’.

Now imagine you are like 6 years old seeing all that.

For me and new Spider-Man fans like me, our experience with the black costume and Venom was about as close to what the original readers of the 1980s went through as possible.

What helped make these episodes so impressionable was the fact that my mind was filling in the blanks for what the ‘evil Spider-Man’ might look like.

Then a while later, by complete chance at an entirely different friend’s house, she showed me a video that had the fabled third part of the story and so, like every 90s kid, I became entranced by Venom!

And you know what, he was everything my childhood imagination had dreamed up and more. This wasn’t just a scary looking guy, with a scary attitude; this was a guy who was literally stalking our hero. As a kid you might’ve felt a certain comfort from Spider-Man. He was older than you, he was the hero and he was powerful. You either wanted to be him, or wanted to befriend him. But in this episode, suddenly he was as scared and as vulnerable as you were.

Following those three episodes I spent a lot of time alternating between fear and fascination for Venom and the black costume, and I longed to see those episodes again somehow, even when I eventually did get to see the show more regularly.

That happened when my family had to move in with my grandparents for 2 years, although I also caught the debut of Black Cat before that. Since Felicia was in whatever Spidey cartoon I first saw waaaaaaaaaay back I sort of knew the character and liked her.

Anyway, back to my grandparents, during that time they got cable and eventually Fox Kids. So finally one of my childhood dreams was fulfilled and one day I taped a marathon of Spider-Man episodes beginning with the last half of the second part of the epic Spidey/X-Men crossover and ending during the first half of the first half of the also epic Spidey/Daredevil crossover!

Again, I rewatched this almost religiously and since I didn’t quite understand the magic of the remote, I wound up sitting through the ads too and thus I’m still compelled to invest in the Chelsea Building Society and the 1997 Christmas catalogue.

Not long after I rented a VHS from Blockbuster (remember those?) containing the Alien Costume/Venom episodes and soon committed those to memory too.

Finally in now being able to watch the show regularly almost everyday I wound up seeing every other episode too, and seeing them like 5 times or something.

The first of these episodes I really remember was the incredibly dumb ‘Partners’ wherein I was happy to see Felicia and Scorpion again, and got introduced to the Vulture for the first time. Also I got introduced to Silvermane but he was less than dignified in the episode. If you’ve seen it you will know what I mean.

Among the most impressionable were the Carnage centric episodes and Secret Wars stuff. But I still fondly remember one morning seeing Spider Wars part 1.

Mind = blown.

Aunt May is dead. Green Goblin and Hobgoblin are together. New York is wrecked. Everyone hates Spider-Man, even Robbie! And this is all because of...Spider-Man!?

Another Spider-Man!

Another Spider-Man combined...with Carnage!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

It helped that, though I didn’t realize he was a different character, I’d recently gotten a toy featuring the Spider-Ben costume and so when Spider-Carnage in an incredibly similar costume showed up, suddenly what I’d regarded as a dumb alternate costume action figure became startlingly relevant.

And the hits kept coming.

There’re even MORE Spider-Mans?

Spider-Man with Doc Ock’s arms!

Man-Spider!

And who is this blonde Scarlet Spider dude?

Ben Reilly and this whole storyline wound up being more important to me than I realized as around this time the Clone Saga was being reprinted, thus I was picking up my first Spider-Man comics off the back of recognizing both the Scarlet Spider and Spider-Ben costumes.

The next night I saw the final episode.

Of course I didn’t know it was the end. I thought for sure there was more coming and if I obediently watched enough of the reruns someday I’d see the fabled (and totally imaginary) next episode where Spidey finally reunites with Mary Jane.

However else I felt about the episode at the time, the story bears the distinction of introducing me to Stan Lee himself as he made his greatest ever cameo in the episode.

At the time it was confusing and surreal. The idea of anyone actually CREATING Spider-Man, or fiction in general, was a foreign concept to me. It grew more surreal as via osmosis I gradually began seeing this ‘Stanley guy’ in other places...except he was REAL, not a cartoon!

After being frustrated by the lack of follow up, and being bored by having seen the show so many times over, I began to...not exactly grow out of the show but began to sour on it a bit.

And upon entering the comics, realizing the show was actually based on THEM and regarding every deviation from them as ‘wrong’, I began to actually hate the show.

For the next 10 years or so I longed for another Spider-Man show, a better and more accurate one.

I went back and forth between disliking and lightly enjoying the show until about 2012.

I might not have many kind things to say about the Marc Webb Spidey movies. But after several years of distancing myself from Spider-Man and pretty much comics in general, the hype for the movie got me back in the mood and slowly but surely I disappeared back into the rabbit hole and this time got in deeper than ever before. Part of that was rewatching the show in it’s entirety from start to finish.

Initially I noticed the flaws, but then that last episode hit me. And over time, I fell in love with the show and see the worth it had beyond it’s flaws.

Quite apart from introducing Spider-Man and his world to me, it ‘educated’ me on the character in ways that actively helped me navigate the comics when I eventually did start to read them.

And looking back, there’d never been a more spiritually faithful take on Spider-Man ever before that show. It wasn’t a cartoon show using a comic book character, it was a comic book cartoon show!

So on this day, I thank you Spider-Man 1994. I wouldn’t have loved this character without you!

#Spider-Man #spider-man the animated series #Spider-Man 1994 #spider-man tas

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mysterious-prophetess · 4 years

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Why Sonic the Hedgehog and Detective Pikachu worked and why Warcraft didn’t

I bought Sonic on digital because I did actually enjoy the film. It was the second to last film I saw in theaters. The last being the well meaning but clumsily executed Onward. It got me to thinking as to why this film based on a game series worked and why others didn’t. Video game adaptations have a reputation for being terrible or just plain cheesy at best. See the infamous 90′s Super Mario Brothers film for the really bad end of things versus the 1997 Mortal Kombat. For the most part they deserve their reputation as other films based on games tended to fall on the cheesy but fun end of things, where the Mortal Kombat films ended up, and the really bad end where that abomination of Satan Mario film ended up.

With the last two years of movies we’ve gotten two live action/digital hybrid video game based films that were actually considered good all across the board. Detective Pikachu and Sonic the Hedgehog. We already know about the near miss Sonic had but I have to admit even with nightmare fuel design, the characters were enjoyable even if the plot was basic due to the target demographic being kids. We nostalgic adults were a secondary aspect. So why did these two films aimed at children work but the more “serious” fantasy style film for Warcraft fall flat on its face is what I want to get at with this post.

It’s not a lack of human characters on screen as Warcraft did have those (and I even grew attached to the mage apprentice guy since I play mages in WoW when I play WoW). Nor was it a lack of familiarity with their world. Sonic the Hedgehog might have had that going for it but Detective Pikachu didn’t and it still worked. It’s not even having less to world build with as, once again, Detective Pikachu takes place in the Pokemon world which has (over the years) built up its own lore and legends with each new region. I believe it comes down to the execution, characterizations, and choices in what story to tell.

I’ll start with the characterizations. With the Warcraft movie, I liked the main orc guy--Durotan--far more than any of the human characters with the exception of the mage apprentice. Notice how I actually remembered his name versus I cannot recall any of the humans? The main human they had us following? I was bored by him. The almost human looking half-orc woman was also boring to me as was any and all of the supporting cast.

In contrast, with Sonic the Hedgehog we had human characters like Tom, his wife Maddie, and the Deputy as well as the Crazy man who was the only who knew Sonic was real at first. With Detective Pikachu, Tim and the titular Pikachu play well off one another and Lucy also was a fun character and all them had personalities that were distinct and memorable. Whereas the main human man-Lothar maybe?-had the gruff father thing going on but I can’t remember much else about him. I can’t remember his goals, his reason for being in the plot other than “really good at being a knight.” Whereas Durotan? I know he was there because his world was dying and he was trying to find a path for a better life and whenever he thought his people were going astray, he tried to do something about it, even if it ended up costing him his life. One half of the story was not nearly as engaging as the other.

I’m not going to pretend the characters or dialogue in either Detective Pikachu or Sonic the Hedgehog were perfect, however they were memorable and distinct.

On the next topic, the story they chose to tell. In the case of Sonic the Hedgehog, the story they chose was one of finding where one belongs, family and something to stand up for. A tried and true plot--even a formulaic one at that. Yet, it worked. Detective Pikachu, on the other hand, lucked out in being adapted from a story driven adventure game in the first place. Yet, the mystery at the core of its plot was easily adapted for a different medium and centered on grief as well as finding oneself/one’s place in the world. Then there was Warcraft and their very ambitious choice to adapt the backstory that was used to set up the original rts games. I can guess that, with how successful Lord of the Rings had been--as well as The Hobbit films and Game of Thrones, they figured that making a film like it would be a good idea. The problem is, this backstory was far too much for a movie to get through satisfactorily. Hence why the sides were uneven in their abilities to be engaging. This film was a franchise baiting one, hoping to spawn sequels and because of that it was so top heavy that it failed in being interesting enough for the stories that would follow.

e.g. how Thrall rose to prominence amongst the Orc Horde.

Both of these categories lead into the final of the three. Execution. In execution, Sonic the Hedgehog and Detective Pikachu were able to keep their stories and worlds more streamlined partly because their target demographic being children likely necessitated this and partly because by keeping their stories simpler they also had to keep their worlds and world building simple to match. Thus thanks to characters who were memorable and simpler stories, they were able to nail their execution to make wildly entertaining films that all ages can watch. Warcraft in its ambition was unable execute all the things it had to accomplish to make a movie that would work as an adaptation of a game and as a film in its own right. In going so big, the execution ended up haphazard. Thus we were given human characters who really not all that well fleshed out, a rushed plot that felt incomplete while also overly complicated. It also didn’t take into account the biggest part of the Warcraft series was the fact that World of Warcraft is an MMORPG. Which means all but the hardest or hardcore fans would have had more attachment to their own experiences playing WoW than the backstories to the various races or of either faction. e.g. I never paid too much attention to stories whenever I would play on either side as a human, night elf, blood elf, drainai, death knight, etc. Didn’t matter to me. Not really. My own experiences dominated my play time in dealing with the quests (fucking morlocks), game system, and other players. Therefore, Warcraft had to overcome the fact that games are ultimately shaped by player experiences--a concept called half-real by Jesper Juul a major figure in video game studies. Not that the Sonic the Hedgehog movie or Detective Pikachu film didn’t have to also overcome this issue when it comes to video game adaptations, their choices in what stories they chose to tell helped mitigate this issue. They managed to alter things enough for adaptation purposes as well as making it accessible for all audiences and that’s where Warcraft fell flat.

They were trying by going with the origin story of the Horde vs Alliance Faction War to set up the world but, it was still very much inaccessible because of the other things they prioritized in this adaptation. Lord of the Rings touches on the first conflict with Sauron, but it doesn’t prioritize it. Imagine if Peter Jackson had attempted to adapt The Silmarillion before he would then do The Hobbit and then and only then have gone on to do The Lord of the Rings. I can tell you that we’d have never made it past The Silmarillion because it’s that dense and full of back story. The Hobbit (which should have been two films at best) would have been ok to start with but comparatively speaking The Silmarillion is more on par to what this story Warcraft was trying to tell.

Basically, what I’m getting at is Warcraft could have worked as a film franchise, but this particular story was not the one to tell first. This is because it was too dense, too complex, and not accessible. Origin stories can work, see Sonic the Hedgehog, but it’s something that cannot be bogged down by trying to do everything. In trying to make a world for future films, they failed to make a film that felt like it had much more than its world. You can even have non-Earth worlds, see the way Detective Pikachu handled the Pokemon World. Therefore, it failed in characterizations for half their cast, in choosing and accessible story, and thus lead to a bad execution over all.

By following K.I.S.S (keep it simple stupid), Sonic the Hedgehog and Detective Pikachu, were able to pull off their executions as both entertaining films and accessible films and work as adaptations; Warcraft in not doing that, in attempting to be like The Lord of the Rings or Game of Thrones (despite having only one film vs a trilogy or a series) failed.

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evanwhosjusthere · 4 years

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Wishful Thinking: The Nintendo Cinematic Universe Part 1

The Nintendo Cinematic Universe. This an idea/joke/meme that has been thrown around ever since Nintendo in 2016 announced their plan to make movies based off their IP’s again. They have recently joined forces with Illumination Entertainment to create the upcoming Mario movie. Since then I've been thinking about how Nintendo could truly capitalize on this idea. With video game adaptations slightly getting better and better each year (with stuff like Castlevania, Detective Pikachu, Sonic Boom TV Show, etc.), I think this idea while somewhat far fetched could still be somewhat possible. Let’s talk about my crazy idea for a Nintendo Cinematic Universe.

The Main Idea:

Take a look at this diagram:

Very similar to the MCU we will split up the films into phases. The theme of Phase 1 is “Recognizable”. If Nintendo is gonna jump start this universe, they need to bring out the big guns. Their most recognizable IP’s.

Super Mario Bros.

The first confirmed movie, the Super Mario Bros. Movie has become shrouded in mystery in terms of what the plot could be. Could it follow the tried and true of the mainline games? Or could it break expectations and take inspiration from the spin-offs like the RPG’s? With a tentative release date of 2022 we will have to wait. There are currently rumors that the story could be based of the Super Mario Adventures comics. With Shigeru Miyamoto and Chris Meledandri producing, the film could be a potential hit. But again certain parts of this movie’s creative side are still unknown.

The Legend of Zelda

I’m pretty certain after the Mario movie is successful, a Zelda movie is around the corner. Though a Zelda movie done by the Illumination team would be well.... odd. Since Illumination isn’t currently known for fantasy storylines or anything with a serious tone, really. But Universal Pictures also owns Dreamworks. Which I think could do good for the Zelda IP. In turns of the target demo for a Zelda movie I think it could appeal towards pre-teens to teenagers compared to the Mario movie which would appeal to all ages but more specifically kids. The plot? Well the tried and true Zelda formula. Though I would like it if Zelda could have more of a prominent role like she does in Spirit Tracks and Breath Of The Wild.

Super Mario Bros. 2

Let’s say if the Zelda movie isn’t as successful as both Nintendo and Universal hoped. Well, another Mario movie! You have to follow up the first installment of the NCU. The plot? Uhhhh.... go NUTS! If I were to write this movie it focus on Mario, Peach, Luigi, and Toad going on some sort of adventure. Basically up the ante from the previous film. And when I say Super Mario Bros. 2, I mean the sequel to the first movie not the video game.

Metroid

This is the big one. People have been clamoring for a Metroid movie for decades at this point. There was one in development in the early to mid-2000s but nothing came of it. When you get down to it, Metroid’s themes and setting are ripe for a film adaptation. The plot could tackle Samus’s origin and her journey to become the galaxy’s most feared bounty hunter. Or the story could take place when Samus is already well established in her career, but we get flashbacks to her past. A Metroid film could go in many directions. And with Nintendo confirming in 2016 that these adaptations are primarily going to be animated, it wouldn’t be shackled to the potential limitations of live-action. A Metroid film in terms of demographic would primarily be aimed at a teenager to adult audience. Quite risky for an animated film of this type. Will an animated Metroid film make a profit?

Donkey Kong Country

Ok, this would be interesting to see. Rounding out phase 1 of the NCU would be the leader of the bunch and the first member of the DK crew, Donkey Kong. Now DK as a character would be interesting to see carry a leading role in a movie. Let alone have a speaking part. But I think the misadventures of the DK crew would be fun enough to see as a standalone film. Think Puss and Boots or Hobbs and Shaw. DK and the gang going up against the Kremlins and King K. Rool would be a rip-snorting time. Plus, who wouldn’t want to hear the songs of the DKC trilogy performed by an live orchestra?

Honorable Mention/Phanpy in the room

Where’s Pokemon?

This is an interesting question. Since currently Game Freak is in bed with Legendary Pictures to produce live-action Pokemon movies in the future after the success of Detective Pikachu. I highly doubt Game Freak would let two kinds western Pokemon movies run at the same time. What i’m saying is would Game Freak allow Illumination or Dreamworks to work on CG Pokemon movies when Legendary is making their own live-action movies? I honestly wouldn’t know. But hey, Sony and Marvel are completely okay with there being two types of Spider-Man universes going on at the same time. Who’s to say Game Freak/Nintendo wouldn’t do the same?

In Conclusion:

The primary goal of the first phase of the NCU is to make Nintendo a well known name in the film space very similar to what Marvel did with it’s phase 1. If phase 1 is a success, what lies in store for phase 2? Stay tuned to find out!

*This is all fun speculation and theory. A majority of what I have written here hasn’t been confirmed to happen or is going to happen. This is just fun wishful thinking.

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platsy · 4 years

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Frozen 2 has entered my top 5 worst movies list after one watch.

This is going to be a long one, so buckle up.

I don’t think I’ve seen a movie that’s made me more passionately angry than Frozen 2 has. It entered my top five worst films I’ve ever seen immediately after my first viewing. There’s a lot of reasons, but I’ll break down the aspects and concepts that I found particularly problematic, which is character, plot structure, themes, and corporate greed.

I’m going to break down each character in order of annoyance.

Olaf

Olaf is absolutely the worst part of this movie. Olaf offers nothing of thematic importance besides being the classic comic relief character that Disney will always shoehorn into their films. They did it in The Hunchback of Notre Dame with the gargoyles, they did it Moana with the chicken, and they’ve done it in countless other films.

They try to tell me that Olaf has aged since Frozen and try to show this by having his dialogue be purple prose philosophy and by saying (keyword is saying) that he’s grown up, but they undercut all this by having him sing a song about how he’s not old enough to understand why strange things are happening around him. Also, Olaf has several instances where his immaturity is in full swing. There’s several jokes that are very obviously targeted at five-year-olds that he spouts throughout the movie. The line where he says, “I don’t even know a Samantha” and then he giggles for a while is the first instance that comes to mind. There’s also the problem that at any time in the movie, Olaf can grab the camera, focus it on him, and he can do whatever he wants to. He gets a musical number, he recaps the entirety of Frozen 1, gets a fake out death scene to emotionally manipulate the audience into thinking there are stakes (and oh boy, will we get to that.)

So they establish that Olaf is more mature now, but they take that away from him as soon as the writers realize that they still have to make a movie for toddlers. He’s learned nothing and hasn’t grown since the first movie. Got it. However, the problem gets worse as you go along. And that’s a point I’ll get to later on.

But since I want to be constructive, I will also offer my two cents on how to fix the movie. Since the main idea behind the film’s production was to grow up with the audience, have Olaf actually grow up. Keep the philosophical musings and have him be one to ask questions. Question why things in the world are the way they are. He is actually a toddler, technically speaking. And when he asks questions, have him be the vehicle to have questions regarding the plot and themes directed to the audience. “Should the actions of your grandpa be reflected on you?” “Is it really worth it to abandon your family so you can pursue something out of your grasp?” “Does a kingdom built on slaughter and violence need to be torn down so we can repent for the sins they’ve committed?”

This way, the movie can actually be grown up, which I know is super important to the filmmakers.

Christoff

Why was Christoff in this movie? He made no impact on anything, he was entirely used for a plotline that stretched out for the entire movie. Olaf might have been insufferable to watch, but the handling of Christoff has tied Olaf in terms of pure agony that I sat through. Basic writing tip. If a problem can be easily solved by simple communication, then the plotline doesn’t need to be there. There’s an entire song dedicated to his mourning over the fact that he can’t propose to Anna. It adds nothing to the themes of the movie, it gets really annoying immediately, and doesn’t showcase Christoff’s positive qualities at all.

Why do sequels have to break up the love interests? Why are there so few stories that develop the chemistry of a couple after they’ve gotten together? It always revolves around the hero trying to win back the girl. Why do people always have to go back to this plotline?

I’m going to diverge from the movie slightly to go into a semi-related topic. Divorce rates are rising and so many things are being blamed for it. I’m not saying that movies where they don’t go into the relationship of characters are the ultimate cause, but as a firm believer that art is a tool used to help people understand life and to make sense of things, I think movies can help people in small ways learn to grow with their spouse. How about a movie sequel in which a newly wedded couple must now operate through life together instead of individually? Whatever the obstacle, whether it be working together as one, making sacrifices to better gel with your loved one, helping your loved one through personal flaws or tragedy, or an evil space-lord is destroying the world and the two of you need to stop him by flying a plane into the spaceship, there are plenty of avenues to explore.

But I digress.

If it were me writing the script, have Christoff and Anna spend more time together outside of Christoff’s attempts to propose. As a matter of fact, we start the movie with knowledge that Christoff has already proposed. Anna has said yes, and now they’re all giddy and excited to get hitched. I’ll admit that there’s a bit of ret-conning in here, but we realize that Christoff isn’t exactly squeaky clean. He had some shady dealings with bandits and was responsible for ruining lives and stealing from people. But he had a change of heart and helped a lot of people. He’s a better person. But when they go into the enchanted forest, Christoff meets a corrupt knight who Christoff had previously been very involved with in stealing from a lot of people. We can’t have this be PG-13, there’s a demographic of kids who are going to see this movie as well. But once Anna finds this out, she starts to doubt the marriage. Christoff struggles with whether or not he deserves to be forgiven or not, and Anna wonders if their relationship should continue. They’re forced to be together, so no going off and figuring things out on their own for most of the movie. They do have some alone time to think about it, turn it into a duet of duality, and then Anna realizes that just as Arendelle needed to be burned away and rebuilt, Christoff has adopted that philosophy and truly grown as a person. She can forgive him. This fits in with the theme of the movie, that being historical revisionism and sins of the father. Or in this case, Grandfather’s sin. Or more rather, does somebody or a group of people deserve to be forgiven despite the things they’ve done in the past.

Elsa

This movie is a really big fan of keeping their characters the exact same. Elsa is still needlessly isolated from everybody. Even though she’s now closer with her sister and has a couple new friends, she’s always dragging herself away from them. She makes Anna stay behind and watch Olaf pretend die just so she can take on self-imposed challenges for... nothing really. Just because she wants to be a strong, independent woman.

Remember when Elsa realized that connection to loved ones was the thing that she really needed to help control her powers? Frozen 2 sure doesn’t remember. I know the first movie was six years ago, but it’s not hard to find a copy and watch it again. I does hold up pretty well and would have survived fine without a sequel. But again, we’ll get to that.

Another problem I have is that Elsa’s ultimate decision to leave the kingdom to Anna and go off on her own adventures came out of nowhere. I don’t think I ever got that vibe that she didn’t want to be queen anymore. It never seemed like a concern for her, or even a big problem in the movie. Elsa was more concerned about some voice calling after her. I’m still not confident that we got an answer for what that was. But whatever. Also, the plot about Arendelle and the forest people being at odds with each other felt pointless and didn’t add anything substantial to the plot. The main reason this movie existed was to get answers for why things are the way they are and to bring new ideas to the franchise. But none of that matters to the movie. It’s brought up for nothing and goes out like a fart.

I’ll give Elsa the same treatment I gave the other two. Her problems mimic the themes. Instead of the grandfather being responsible for the fighting going on between the two kingdoms, it’s actually Elsa’s mother. She hated Arendelle for having things that she never had and she believed Arendelle was responsible for her parent’s murder. Which, it was. Arendelle saw the forest dwelling people as monsters and attempted to destroy all of them. So Elsa’s mother decided to start the fighting between both factions, but had a change of heart when she met Elsa’s father. She got amnesia and didn’t remember that she started the war. She married Elsa’s father and she forgot she had powers at all.

It’s revealed that neither faction is as squeaky clean on the surface. I’ll fully admit to stealing what Pocahontas had going on, but it’s a poignant message that doesn’t get as much attention as it should. Both factions have good points and bad points, but they’re both responsible for doing awful things. And when they are frozen (heh) in the forest, it makes us think of grudges. When you hold onto them, they stay there for a long time. You’re left in the same place, unable to let go of your pride and take a step back and recognize the wrong that you’ve done.

Elsa is also struggling with her past, wondering if she can be forgiven for almost sending the kingdom into a devastating winter. I mean, she seems to get away with it scot free and becomes the queen of Arendelle. We should at least acknowledge it. Not everybody is down for her rule, and she finds ruling a people that don’t trust her very taxing. But since she’s so deep into it, she can’t exactly abandon everything.

As Elsa attempts to be a better ruler, she does a lot of research into the past and learning about the kingdom. She even learns about the river and some more mystical things. She finds that the two factions have never gotten along, and she’s saddened about it and hopes to unite the two factions. But pretty soon, the voice calls after her and she is called onto an adventure to learn the truth about the kingdom. Not her powers. We don’t need an answer for that. It’s just something that she inherited from her mom. There’s no deeper reason. It’s a kids movie, we don’t need to have these big reasons that somebody gets their powers. Says the guy who’s trying to put historical revisionism and forgiveness topics into a kid’s movie, but Inside Out managed to condense complex psychological functions into an understandable and easily digestible format for everybody to understand, then you can simplify this for the kiddies. I digress. Elsa realizes that the only way to fix all the problems is to destroy both faction’s kingdoms and build them up from the ground up. The two kingdoms unite together, and Elsa let’s Anna rule Arendelle while she rules the kingdom with magical powers.

Anna

Make Anna less of an idiot, give her more to do than be oblivious to Christoff, have her stop telling Elsa that she’s there for her over and over again, and I’m good. I have less about her than everybody else. What do you want from me, this is getting to over 2,000 words.

PLOT

But that’s just the characters. The plot is fundamentally broken. We were supposed to be told how Elsa got her powers, where her parents were going when they died on the boat, but none of that happened. We got vague answers and nothing explicit. We got just enough information to justify more Frozen sequels for the foreseeable future.

Why was destroying Arendelle pulled out of the movie’s butt? How did that come into play except to copy Thor Ragnarok? I think it’s a good idea, but it felt like it wasn’t properly built up.

Elsa comes out of being frozen learning... nothing, I don’t think. She sees the past and present and learns that her grandfather killed a man. Man, that revealed so much that I care about...

SELF-INDULGENCE

I told my little sister that my prediction for Frozen 2 was that it was going to rely heavily on callbacks to Frozen 1. She told me that I would be surprised at how my expectations were going to be flipped on their head. And I’m proud to say that my expectations were exactly right and that my little sister is wrong.

Every character is a tool for bathing in Frozen 1’s success. Everybody points out how cool and fun Frozen 1 was, to the point where I start to think that nobody in this movie wants to be in this movie. You have to acknowledge events from previous films, but if you spend more time making callbacks to previous movies, why are you bothering making a sequel? Olaf literally recaps all of Frozen 1 for no reason just to remind us of what happened. But that’s basically pointless for both audience members and the characters who have to listen to Olaf talk. We’ve all seen the movie enough times to have the movie ingrained in our mind forever. I remember the movie backwards and forwards and I wish I had my memory erased.

Are you so insecure of your movie that you have to remind people of something that was better so you can feel good about your efforts? The screenwriter, Jennifer Lee, is a one-hit wonder, can’t recapture any kind of magic that the first movie had. I applaud her efforts to tell a new story, but she just couldn’t do it.

CORPORATE GREED

Let’s face it, the real reason Frozen 2 was made was for merchandising. It’s a tale as old as time. Marvel movies keep getting made because people keep watching and buying the merchandise. The difference between the two is that Marvel is a lot more well thought out and smart. Frozen 1 is the highest grossing animated movie of all time. It would be stupid not to capitalize on it and make more money from it. From a business perspective, it’s a smart move. I just wish the movie was better.

TL;DR: Frozen 2 is deeply flawed, its characters haven’t grown at all and are even worse than when they started. The movie could have been better with some more apropos theming and better characters, but the fact that the writer is one-hit wonder makes me think that she can’t move forward from her past victory.

#frozen #frozen2 #idina menzel #movie critique #kirsten bell #disney #disney olaf

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