rough painting/sketch?? thing from my characters + environments class! we did a quick prompt for villains based on fears (the one i ended up getting was megalophobia/the fear of things that are Too Big)

weather and severe storms (and tornadoes specifically) have been a special interest of mine since childhood and it just so happened that many of the images you get when searching that fear were tornadoes so 100% used this as an excuse to draw a tornado... person? thing? sure yea. 

 this is real messy and i dont plan on revisiting this anytime soon but it works for what i needed it for!

Wandersong, Centaurworld and Consequences

This post is based on the song preview for Centaurworld season 2 released on youtube by Netflix Futures, and also the ending of the game Wandersong, so consider this your spoilerwarning.

In the game Wandersong, you play as a bard who wants to save the world. To do so, you need to collect several pieces of a Worldsong. It's told to you from the beginning that the world song isn't as simple as just the right musical notes, it's about the whole planet being in harmony. Through game design, in order to get a song piece, you generally need to help people in some way- reunite families, fix a toxic workplace, stop a brewing war. At the end of the game, you actually don't get the last song piece, but because you made the world more unified, everyone you've helped sings a new world into being. It is impossible to get a bad ending on a first playthrough. However, in a second playthrough, one already knows the songs and can sing them at the right ritual locations without doing the quests. So one doesn't help people or get the character/relationship development. In such a playthrough, the game just ends after you fail to get the last piece, because the world ended- it was in disharmony and you didn't fix it, even if you technically did the magic rituals. Based on what's been revealed so far in Season 2, I think Horse essentially inadvertently gave herself a Bad Ending. Consider the lyrics Waterbaby sings when describing the quest to get the key pieces: Those war tactics you know, they got no utility And the key to unlock the gateway that joins both our worlds Is to be a unifier A bridge who’d connect those rejecting what needs to be done Every piece is scattered, its magic unfurled And we can stop this war When you open the door, open the gateway Open your heart and your mind And that is the Key Convince each one of what needs to be done And each shard that they guard will be yours Waterbaby wants Horse to end the war. But she's not talking about key pieces. She's talking about being a unifier, a bridge, connecting other people, opening heart and mind, convincing and communing. Horse got the physical key, but she often didn't convince people of her cause. She broke the tree shaman, stole the sash. And from Horse's and audiences perspective, this is entirely reasonable at the time! She's on an important quest, all these other things are silly, or people are outright rude, mean or unfair (Horse did win the sash first before stealing it). But now, in season 2, the consequences are being reaped. The tree shamans don't want to help her with the war, neither to the cattaurs. (Why the merfolk don't is a mystery to me). Horse got the physical parts of the key without doing any of the unifying, so she got what she needed to open the rift but not stop the war. If she had found ways to convince and work with the centaurs she met along the way, she'd have both by the time the gate opened. And this is just a bigger version of the lesson Horse learns through season 1! In the Taurnado episode, Horse is so caught up in being Brave and Cool that she doesn't appreciate she's put others in danger and that they're risking themselves to help her. Horse learns this lesson- of not sacrificing others for her personal needs and goals- but she only applies it to the herd, not the background characters of the rest of the world. (Again, totally expected from a meta perspective- every story has ignorable NPCs). But I find it interesting. A very cool Into the Woods style 'consequences of act 1 in act 2, you can't just Act Like a Protagonist and expect everything to work out for you'. Looking forward to hopefully seeing this developed through season 2.

Hey, more detailed review of Centaurworld Season 2 under the cut, including spoilers

So just for some background, I was possibly the perfect person at the perfect time for season 1 of Centaurworld.  Just a few months ago I had gone through a very bad breakup and was still mostly broken and moved back in with my family as I aimlessly flipped through Netflix and landed on Centaurworld,  and thought “Eh, this’ll be a thing.”

And then immediately, right from episode 1, Centaurworld became the most important piece of media in my life.  I had never had a favorite TV show before (until recently I haven’t really had any favorite anythings) but Centaurworld immediately became #1.  I saw the relationship between Rider and Horse and I envied their devotion.  I felt like all my life I’d been searching for someone who would show me the same devotion I showed them, and even when I thought I’d found that person I was proven wrong.

So to me, season 1 was beautiful, inspiring, and just about perfect.  In the two days after I first discovered it, I watched the whole thing twice.  The Taurnado song was the most masterful musical piece in any show of its kind, the music rivaled Broadway at times, I would sing Rider’s Lullabye to calm myself down when I could feel my heart breaking.  Season 1 felt like it had a perfect vision of what the writers wanted to do.

Season 2 did not do that.  There are a number of reasons for this, the most forgivable being that maybe making a show like this two seasons just changed the structure and the way I received it into an awkward situation?  Like in season 1, when they’d reprise a song it was a beautiful operatic callback, but in a second season when you’d reprise, despite the fact it thematically calls for it, it just feels like “Oh... we don’t have any new ideas?”

Now for my actual criticisms.  

Tone.  Season 2 was... weird.  Wack.  And I get that the world of Centaurworld is supposed to be kind of weird compared to Horse’s anime war world, but there was always balance in season 1.  Very little in season 1 was outright nonsense, but that’s almost entirely what we see in season 2.  Malangela and the entire Horsetaur kingdom?  Nuts.  The Birdtaurs’ stillborn texting baby birds?  What the fuck?  In episode 5 they start playing a game with scrunchies, but 90% of the words they say are literal gibberish which had never been used in season 1.  Whenever they came up with something weird before they gave it an actual name like gigglecakes, or the tinkle tinkle bye bye zone, and you could actually decipher what they were talking about.  I still don’t know what a sfuh or whatever is, and you know what, I don’t think the writers do either.  On the subject of language, they randomly introduced expletives to this kids show?  Suddenly everyone is saying “flonking” or “what the flonk.”  Which is A, also gibberish, and B, detracting from opportunities for better writing.  I don’t normally criticize shows for cursing if it belongs there (I was once in a play called What We’re Up Against, it was awful, felt like the writer had challenged herself to see if she could write “fuck” more than any other words combined) but it does not belong in Centaurworld.  Same goes for their new catchphrase, “nuts to this,” which was constantly used in places where literally anything, even silence, would have been funnier.

Meta.  Why is there meta in this show?  Nothing about the tone of season 1 led me to think Centaurworld warranted a whole episode about fandom wherein the writers seem to portray their own audience as clueless idiots for some reason.  The BIrdtaurs literally lift us out of our engagement in the show and say “No, we’re gonna talk about this now, fuck your suspension of disbelief and fuck your immersion in our world.”  Also sort of in the meta category, they gave Horse the literal magic power to jump into people’s backstories (and mostly forgot about her magic tail, like do we just not care about that anymore?) rather than find some narratively appropriate way to reveal that information.  On the one hand, maybe that is narratively appropriate for the setting, but on the other hand it doesn’t really match any of the rest of Centaurworld’s brand of magic?  Joking tails, handsome for 8 seconds, shapely mane, talking farts, shooting tiny versions of ourselves from our hooves... oh also, I can look into your past and know everything about your life.

Music.  Season 1 was full of iconic songs, beautiful melodies, and outright masterpieces.  Rider’s Lullabye, Welcome to Centaurworld, Hello Rainbow Road, Fragile Things, Taurnado, What If I Forget Your Face, The Nowhere King, Who Is She, I’ve Been Searching For You.  I still listen to all of these, they’re in my regular Spotify rotation, because they’re all recognizable and really good songs.  Even the goofier songs in season 1 like Making Friendships and Spells for Days were very well written.  But in season 2, they set the tone right away with the Recruitment Song and right into the Power of Privilege, and on like that for most of the show, which is that a lot of these songs are just like listening to run-on sentences.  Just a lot of a haphazardly structured mess of music.  If I had to pick a favorite song, I’d say Breathe In a Bag (obviously I’m very biased towards Glendale content) but that’s mostly because it’s the only song I remember anything about.  In season 1, songs were in-canon events, it was part of their weird charm that in this world people sing songs to make points sometimes.  But in season 2, people- including regular humans- would just slip in and out of singing almost at random.  I’m looking at the list of songs in the finale, and like there’s six parts of the Elk-Taur suite, probably because he’d just randomly sing like two sentences in between vingettes.  I don’t remember any of them.

Plot.  I will say, I enjoyed most of what happened in Horse and Rider’s world, and I think maybe more of the show should have been devoted to that, but in summary:  Only episodes 5 and 8 needed to exist.  Everything else is just killing time until the finale.  Let me explain.

So in season 2, most of what Horse is doing in Centaurworld is trying to recruit centaurs to fight, but they’re mostly refusing because fighting is scary, nevermind the fact that the war has been in Centaurworld before, like during their lifetimes, so presumably this isn’t new to them?  So recruiting people takes the place of collecting the key pieces, except that the key actually did something at the end of season 1.  Even once they’ve gathered an army, there’s no real reason to have it, most of the finale has the minotaur army frozen in place, and by the time they can move again the human army has arrived, so narratively it would have been just as easy to say that the human army was all they needed, even if it would have been a losing battle because the only people who really need to be defeated are the Nowhere King and the General, so a certain dramatic element could have been introduced when the General stabs Rider thus firmly marking him as the enemy, and then the Woman just has to show up and stab the General and the Nowhere King dies.

So the Trashtaurs were pointless, they don’t do anything.  The whole point of the Birdtaurs was that there weren’t any flying minotaurs so they’d be an advantage, but oh, no wait, look, flying minotaurs, so fuck that I guess.  The moletaurs can burrow between worlds apparently?  In which case, why haven’t they always been doing that?  In fact, why did they ever even need the portals or the keys?  If underground centaurs can cross worlds and get people across no problem, then there’s no reason for any of the events in episode 8, and by extension the whole show, to happen.

Even the stuff in the human world was pointless.  Waterbaby and Rider find out that the Nowhere King is fusing animals with his minotaurs to mutate them.  This knowledge changes nothing.  They don’t manage to steal the key and stop him from doing so, and having this knowledge neither grants them an advantage nor breeds fear in them.  It was just a cool thing the writers wanted to show us, mostly because they couldn’t think of any actual way to advance the plot or develop any characters.

It felt weird also that the General trapped the Nowhere King in a dungeon for 10 years... and that was separate from the Nowhere King also being trapped in the In Between for several decades?  Like those two events maybe could have just been narratively merged into one?  There was probably some way to instead have the General deliberately trap the Nowhere King in the In Between, so when the Woman shows up at the end of season 1 and he says “She’s come to set me free” it would have had the extra meaning of him mistakenly thinking “She’s chosen me over him.”

And then... Rider’s moment of weakness.  “You’re just a horse.”  This might have more to do with my personal bias about how I specifically reacted to the show.  I don’t blame the writers for saying that’s how she’d react in that situation, obviously this man she’s devoted her whole life to she would trust more than this random out-of-nowhere information that her horse somehow magically got from going inside the Nowhere King.  I do blame the writers for putting her in that situation in the first place.  I felt like the whole point of the show was Horse and Rider’s absolute devotion to each other, that nothing in any world could come between them, and then it became just so easy to betray each other.  My heart broke, not because I was immersed in the show but because I personally had been let down again.

And then they have this big traumatic death scene with Rider, except not really.  Like they did some fucked up shit that they definitely shouldn’t have done, then they realized they shouldn’t have done it but rather than take it out of the show, they just went “Um.... aaaaand she’s not actually dead!”  (also they introduced a whole conflict with the Becky Apples jealousy plotline, and Wammawink’s inferiority issues, neither of which actually got resolved?)

Oh, and the Nowhere King’s backstory turned out to be the plot of Soma?  Did you guys every play Soma?  It was this whole game about how you can upload your brain into a robot or to a computer to live forever, and that robot thinks it’s you, but you’re also still you in your body that’s doomed to die.  I had a great many theories about what happened, but Soma was nowhere on my list, and it kinda feels like a weird concept to have as the focus of this show.  I thought maybe the Nowhere King and the Woman were like Horse and Rider, except their dedication wasn’t as strong and the Woman left him, or he thought she left him, and in his anger and bitterness he started down the path to being the Nowhere King, maybe uncovering some more vile side of Centaurworld, but nope.  He just Shou Tuckered some guys cuz he was lonely.

All this to say, season 2 felt rushed, and it felt like a whole new team wrote it.  No part of it ever captured the magic that made season 1 special, and it kind of just seemed like they should have made a single 14-or-15-episode season.  I am very sad to say all this, but still, the writers should absolutely be proud of season 1.  Especially Taurnado, I cannot stress enough how awesome that song is.  Season 1 will still always be my favorite thing in the world.  And Glendale will always be my little klepto babychild.