#because outside of the huntlow ship stuff willow shows up a lot less

[pandoratheprocrasticreator]

i think what would make the huntlow ship a lot more palatable for me is if they arent portrayed with such an imbalance of physical power. i know fandom flanderizes any popular ship/characters to a single dynamic/trait but i will still grump about it.

the dynamic between hunter and willow is most often willow being the physically stronger and more powerful of the two and hunter being her simp, usually either being fearful of her power (in a funny way bc “hes a guy”) or otherwise portrayed as weak and kind of pathetic.

(and socially he is kind of pathetic i guess, although we as a fandom are sleeping on hunters pathological need to be seen as cool and intimidating in favor of framing him as a helpless lost puppy.)

(i’ve grumped about the implications of hunter, an abuse victim, joking about his romantic partner being able to beat him up, and how his support of willow, especially in fanworks, seems to be an extension of his blind trust in authority figures. but im sure there are good fanworks that address this and portrays their dynamic as more healthy.)

my beef is that the portrayal of hunter being weaker than willow in terms of strength/combat abilities is just. not true. willow has powerful magic and yeah she yoinked hunter with her vines that one time but hunter has been trained since childhood to fight. he’s visibly more built than every other kid his age and even some of the adults. he beat up kikimora TWICE.

(i count the offscreen minecart chase in eclipse lake as one of their fights) (also in that fight he was fighting kikimora AND that EC captain AND two scouts AND a few abomatons) (also i dislike the scaling down of power of the coven heads in fandom too these ppl have been fighting with magic for decades kikimora is not a weak toddler she is a powerful witch)

hunter has shown in every episode he appeared in that hes highly skilled in combat. they had to injure him, exhaust him, and give him a new staff and a mental breakdown in eclipse lake for his fight with amity to be fair.

willow, in comparison, just grows vines everywhere because she’s never had to fight. this is very evident in the hexside fight in labyrinth runners, where hunter’s the only student doing any physical fighting while the other kids haphazardly throw spells around. hunter saying willow wouldn’t be afraid of him isn’t him saying that she would beat him in a fair fight. hes pointing out her general proactive attitude.

yes, willow can tie people up with vines but only if she has a timing advantage. hunter and willow wouldn’t fight because they’re friends. but in a theoretical fair fight between them, she would have to catch hunter off guard and completely restrain and disarm him before he can make a move. (the hunter vs amity fight shows that even when she tied him up hunter could still teleport out if he had his staff. also i think he PUNCHED that abomination bubble open???)

the point is that hunter is a child soldier and willow is not. he is much more skilled in combat than she is, and his hand to hand and staff-based combat obviously can compensate for magic uses considering he’s survived this long in the EC. (the magic duels in scout training, anyone?)

also, even if willow is stronger than hunter in terms of muscle (which i sincerely doubt bc of all the child soldier training but idk some people just naturally have more muscle than others) like her friends, willow isn’t the type of resort to fighting unless absolutely necessary. shes ride or die for her friends but she usually tries to “ride” until they get cornered and HAVE to “die.” just because hunter’s first instinct for everything is “flight” doesn’t mean willow’s first instinct has to be “fight.”

the portrayal of willow as everyones cutesy therapist who solves all her friends problems with violence is an unfortunate mischaracterization. the portrayal of hunter as a helpless, depressed, and traumatized child in need for everyone to take care of him all the time is also an unfortunate mischaracterization. these portrayals are only vaguely based in canon and i suggest fans rewatch the show during the hiatus to remember their other character traits.

for every charming fanwork with willow lifting hunter like a dumbell for her workout i want another charming fanwork with hunter lifting willow like a dumbell for HIS workout. the huntlow ship is BOTH strong enough to lift each other like dumbells and if i saw that more i might even stop calling them “the huntlow ship” and maybe indulge the thought that they might end up canon.

anyway all of this is to say. if in season 3 they deal with a minor villain like that museum guy and he still doesn’t back off after willow and the rest of the hexsquad gives him an emotional shounen protag speech. and also after hunter tries to get everyone to run away but it doesnt work bc the museum guy traps them or he falls face first into a puddle. what if willow beats the shit out of him. and after shes done she hands the reins to hunter and he beats the shit out of him. and somewhere during all that gus gives one of them a metal chair like that one MoringMark comic would that be the shit or what

#toh #the owl house #shut up pandora #hunter toh #hunter wittebane #willow park #huntlow #still not down with the huntlow ship because of reasons ive grumped about before #but this is more of a fandom mischaracterization #even outside of the huntlow ship stuff hunter still gets really woobiefied #and i think it would be more interesting to show him depressed and traumatized but still retaining that snark and badassery #and uh #fandoms gonna have implicit racist and sexist bias #because outside of the huntlow ship stuff willow shows up a lot less #i think fans are appreciating her more but its still very little compared to hunter #to be fair they are very different archetypes and people always love an angsty white boy #but yeah outside of huntlow i dont really see as much focus on willow doing a violence #its mostly her getting into dumbassery with her friends which is pretty nice and i want to see more of it #but yeah rule of thumb violence is never willows first answer its her third or fourth #she will not start a fight but she is willing to finish one #violence is hunters third answer i think if he wasnt explicitly told to do a violence #his first two answers are grovelling and running away to fall facefirst into a puddle #in that order

[pandoratheprocrasticreator]

4 and 19 for the salty ask game

you didn't specify a fandom but im pretty sure you followed me for owl house stuff so i will assume you meant the owl house fandom.

4. Do you have a NoTP in your fandom? Are they a popular OTP?*

lmao if youve followed me for any time at all you would know i fucking hate the huntlow ship. huntlow ship my beloathed <3< <3< <3< :333 at least how 90% of the fandom portrays them. ppl will see a white angsty boy and immediately find the one shippable girl and file down all her character and make her his emotional support decoration.

to be clear, huntlow in the actual show is fine. i don't think them getting together would add anything to their character arcs, and since the show is running on a tight schedule i think they should have just cut that subplot out. i think there are ways to make them interesting but the show doesn't have any time to do that. there's barely anything substantial about the ship in canon anyway so i think it's fine. it's ignorable if you dislike it and its enough to extrapolate into a funny post canon ship if you do. my opinion on huntlow in the show is like my opinion on gustholomule. it's fun to consider but it's obviously not important to the story i actually care about.

but the shippers??? hoooo the shippers. first of all while i don't like to think about most fandom stuff from the stance of representation it's really important that owl house is like. THE gay cartoon rn. the creator had to fight tooth and nail and write around a bunch of stuff to get queer couples on air and make the fandom more receptive to it outside of a fetishistic thing or a "cute background couple that everyone acknowledges is canon but no one actually explores" thing. and then the moment a blond boy looks at a girl everyone explodes. im not calling ppl bigoted for shipping it bc i dont know the exact reasons every single huntlow shipper likes the ship but the fact that they also try to use rep to justify it? even though 90% of them didn't give a shit about the non white boy half of the ship before the ship became a thing? not a great look for the average huntlow fan lmao.

also the mischaracterization of both characters, especially willow, is super annoying. it shouldn't be a hot take but characterizing willow to be a brute that tries to beat up everyone who looks at her wrong? and indicating that hunter, a survivor of child abuse, is attracted to her because of this? uhhhhh don't like that! its one thing to portray this and explore why its bad but that sure isn't what 90% of the shippers do! youre allowed to depict any dynamic you want but im allowed to say that depiction sucks shit! same with making willow to be either a 50s housewife or a manic pixie dream girl she isn't any of that? literally just make a self insert to ship hunter with if you want his ya love interest ass so bad.

anyway ive complained more about the huntlow ship and its place in fandom here, here, here, here, here, and here, among others. a lot of my points are in the tags lmao. that isn't to say all huntlow shippers are annoying some of them make genuinely good content thats in character for both of them! but the shipping community is. bad. and i already didn't care for the ship anyway so they haven't made my opinion better. it was a mistake for the show to put hunter's conventionally attractive angsty ass into a shippable position lmao.

19. What is the one thing you hate most about your fandom?

I think part of this phenomenon is because the fandom skews younger since at the end of the day toh is a disney show rated for kids. but there's a phenomenon ive seen with a lot of young skewing fandoms where fans assume just because the thing they like is diverse, that automatically exempts them from being bigoted or even having implicite biases. like "i cant be racist my friend is black!" but it's with fandoms so they have even less of a leg to stand on. ive been guilty of that too in the past and im trying to examine my biases both in fandom and more importantly in real life.

the fandom has a serious favouritism towards the white and/or male characters. just look at the disparity of opinions on the blight parents, even before clouds on the horizon. or even better, before s2 when all we had on them was just a background shot in lilith's flashback. people were already portraying odalia as a catty evil woman and alador as his uwu tortured husband whos scared of her, before we even knew their names.

same goes for other female villains compared to the male ones. all the villains are different so there isn't a one to one comparison but generally, the reactions to villains like darius (right after his first appearance in edas requiem) and graye were a lot more nuanced. most people who talked about them were trying to write meta about them or finding them sexy or thinking about a redemption arc.

and compared to female villains like terra or kikimora? i am serious about this they were objectively more compelling villains than darius or graye in their debut, if you discount kiki's minor appearances in s1 and just look at hunting palismen, her first episode as a major villain. and yet most people talking about terra and kiki after the fact were just calling them bitches or other more sexist stuff i won't say. and being mad at them for...doing bad things to the protagonists? bc they're villains? i get the lack of thirsting but no serious meta? ive grumped about it here. also i wasn't in the fandom during the week between agony of a witch and young blood old souls where everyone wanted lilith's head on a stick but from what ive heard? yyyyeah i don't think they were just mad at her for being a villain.

same thing with the white characters people always give so much more focus on the white characters compared to the poc. luz had a bunch of angst like amity in season 1 but 99% of lumity content focused entirely on amity angst. the hyperfocus on hunter is something to note too. i get that fans love angsty characters. i do too. but him being a white boy definitely didn't hurt his popularity lmao.

its a problem in the show too so not all the blame falls on fans. the show focuses on majority white characters as well. even though the show is very racially diverse, luz's most important relationships except her mom are eda, amity, and hunter, and gus and willow are pushed to the side. same thing with their portrayal of some female characters i love what they did with terra and kiki but their portrayal of odalia...oof. i've grumped about that here.

but yeah if you point this out a lot of fans get uncomfortable or even angry at you for accusing them of, in their eyes, being a Bad Person who likes Bad Things and have Bad Thoughts. so they argue back that there's no definitive proof that any biases are happening on a personal basis. and yeah i can't prove beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law that you're actually secretly racist or sexist but if you just look at general trends in the fandom? the bias is there. it's not a problem of individual people it's a problem of fandom culture.

anyway i don't want to say fans who do this are bad people because judging by the ages of some fans toh might be baby's first fandom for some of these kids. they haven't had enough life experience to really examine their biases or even determine their principles. it would be mean to condemn kids for having biases, especially since i also did that at their age and i'm still trying to deconstruct my biases now. these kids need to learn about nuance in media and also that fandom is not activism, but it's not my job to teach them this. this is annoying but it's a reasonable price for being in fandom. especially a fandom for a show targeted at kids.

#ask pandora #shut up pandora #toh #the owl house #triple--a-threat #tackling all the hard questions today are we #thanks for the ask!