#a ramble on regarding turning ones trauma into preventative optimism

[talvn]

i think a very important thing to recognize about the person penelope is, both for yourself, and for your muse to experience  ---  is that penelope never has, and never will, see herself as a person who solely leans on a gradient of good or bad, but as a person who can exist at all points.

trauma is not something that exists in penelope’s mindset. to visualize trauma is to value the thought of morality, and morality does not exist in being a created asset of the court of owls. the only morality is being living and being dead  -  those two things aren’t inherently traumatic, they can be good, they can be bad, they can exist,    but they aren’t traumatic  -  so penny has only ever known a baseline morality for all of existence. she’s killed, she’s lived, both have been depicted as beneficial, both have been depicted as detrimental, and thus she is capable of everything.

penny believes death can be a measure of everything, good, bad, minute, dramatic, and she believes life can be the very same thing.  they mean all the same  ---  but the only thing, the thing she has to learn, is her own personal morality, because it hinges greatly on a savior figure  ;  a healing from a trauma that she cannot name but clearly exists. this is why, her seeming naivety, isn’t naivety  -  but a perspective on her own trauma.    she doesn’t tolerate the pain, death, and cruelty,   but she understands how one may reach that point  -  because she can reach it. because she is fully capable of doing so, because if she too could she would as well.  but she hasn’t  -  because, as she learns, is that she cannot imagine a world where one would become a person who would see a corpse and would simply blink,  so she will take every measure to ensure those who want that don’t persist.   because if a world exists where the death of a life means nothing more than a sigh,  then they would be just like her.

#talvn #( CHARACTER MUSING. ) #this is sorta just #a big perspective on penelope that was in my brain #and i needed to release #a ramble on regarding turning ones trauma into preventative optimism #penny is very very traumatized. #incredibly so. #her entire 16 years of existence are all a traumatic event #so it's become a neutral state #but she's come to learn #over years that it. it isn't a normal view #but she'll never be able to see anything but #but she can make it so it isn't what anyone else ever has to see

[blankd]

Thoughts on Raya

While writing a review for Raya I lost the copy of the draft, I took this as a sign to shift to a "rewrite" treatment.

After writing out 3-4k words on trying to clean up the expensive mess of 8 writers, it made me realize my own misguided effort of trying to "fix" something that had a fundamentally weak core.

Hopefully my third attempt (this rambling) will be the charm.  Rather than focus on any individual scenes, I will look at three aspects of its storytelling and why I feel they fall short.

Spoilers for the whole movie.

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How the Fantastical Detracts from the Human

Raya's use of magic is one that ends up doing more harm than good to its goals.

The dragons exist as majestic in the abstract, but in the case of Sisu, a punchline in practice.  At the end of the movie when they return we are expected to be in awe of their spectacle, but I doubt anyone would be able to explain what their full return actually signifies.

The Druun themselves are a magical plague that exists less as metaphor and more a supernatural inconvenience for the characters and convenience for the writers.

The Druun do not kill, they merely 'remove' by turning their victims to stone, but because they are magical, this can be reversed.  In the end, the Druun provide a toothless scapegoat that distracts from, instead of highlighting, the meat of the human conflict.

For all the 'harm' that the Druun do, it is only by human hands that a dragon (or any life, really) is snuffed out. (Even though the end of the movie backpedals this consequence as well.)

What do the Druun meaningfully add that human interaction did not already bring?

By having the Druun exist, it removes accountability and responsibility from the humans to change.  The Druun are a faceless and mindless enemy for everyone to unite against and even in that regard, they fail to do that.

Despite being born from human strife (as Sisu claims), human unity does not counteract or even hinder the Druun, only the magic of a dragon or water, can do that.

What ultimately 'defeats' the Druun and returns human and dragon from stone is not reconciliation between humans or any attempts to make amends for past wrongs, it is the arbitrary magic and judgment of an object.

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The Regressive Trap of the Past

Throughout the course of the movie, the past foretells and provides a mold for the future.

Raya's father speaks glowingly of a unified Kumandra with no thought or examination of how it fractured in the first place or how the Drunn (and human conflict) predate the gem.

All of Raya's team, including Raya herself, desire to see their families returned from stone, for the Druun to return to being a myth, and of course, for the dragons to return.

All of this hinges on restoring a gem whose existence sparked the conflict in the first place.  As the ending/writing will reveal to us, human unity cannot defeat the Druun, only the dragon magic of the gem can.

(As an aside, that most of the gem fragments are collected through force with no impact on the gem's magic itself is an admittance of how trust is not a thing grown or nurtured but somehow taken.  The one instance where force isn't used by Raya to gain a gem shard, she is betrayed and Sisu is killed.)

The entirety of the movie is fixated on a return to grace rather than questioning if the damage runs deeper than the problems of the present.  No one never considers or proposes a better future to strive for, merely a return to a mythical beforetime in spite of hints of how that recollection may not be itself truthful. (Such as Sisu being less than impressive.)

The movie starts with a world with humans and dragons, it ends with a world of humans and dragons.  What might be different this time that will prevent the Druun from returning or the nations from fracturing once more?

There is no answer because the question is never asked.

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The Flimsy Use of 'Trust'

Any goodwill earned through Raya's personal arc of trusting others is simultaneously undercut by what can only be a cynic's most bitter idea of optimism.  Sisu's idea of faith is childish, her lack of common sense is a burden on others with no virtue. And yet the movie's insists Sisu and her magic rock are the arbiters of what trust is and the key to a happily ever after.

The gem itself is a flawed thing, an abstract of not just magic, but trust.  And yet that tiny rule is already broken by the start of the movie's events, the nations are already fractured and the gem remains intact and powerful, absolving the gem of being the metaphor or symbol it could have been.

Despite the movie tackling such a complex topic, it has no willingness to explore the trauma of being betrayed or how someone has to take initiative to repent for their wrongs.

Healing is complicated and the movie is not interested in what that entails.  Trust is dealt with in absolutes instead of the different colors it is.  Trust can be as strong as iron or brittle as glass, with its different levels being right for some situations and wrong in others.

This doesn’t even get to touching on how betrayal can leave scars that never heal or result in bridges forever burned, sometimes for the better of everyone involved.

But the movie never so much as even glances in that messy direction, it can't even pay lip service to the idea that perhaps aggressors should apologize to their victims.  More credit is given to Namaari feeling bad rather than having her do good to earn anyone's forgiveness, much less their trust.

When the gem is mended, so is all the broken trust.  Fang’s chief feared the consequences of having broken the world and yet they never manifest.

The lost time, the lost homes, it's all magically washed away in a rain to begin anew.  The victims must believe the better of the people who have wronged them because in this world we don't want the Druun to come back, now do we?

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In closing, the artists of Raya tried really hard, shame that the writers couldn’t get their shit together.

#raya and the last dragon #let me ramble to you #text post