#some people will see Everyone as a an unredeemable bigot who deserves to die

[faxine]

I think I JUST realized that I am really bothered by posts wishing that horrible bigots would die. Even when I hate those bigots too, of course. But those types of posts set me off because I feel like I am contributing to someone being killed or their death in general. Does anyone else (with OCD) understand this? Because I think people take that as being complicit or accepting of the bigots' actions in some way. For the most part, I don't blame people for their posts, I think people are justified in their anger and hatred towards people who are violently bigoted. I just hope people can be understanding of people who cannot participate in that type of thing.

#actually ocd #plus i think #some people will see Everyone as a an unredeemable bigot who deserves to die #and i i guess i very much disagree with where the line should be drawn... #tessell talks

[sweetdreamspootypie]

Kipo season 3 finale spoilers

The story and overall ending were great

but... that ending showed disappointing trope use.

Long ramble about redemption vs atonement arcs under the cut

Overall the ending and story was great.

But since I’ve seen so much discussion of it on tumblr, I’m really aware of and disappointed in the fact that the writers went with the Christian cultural “redemption arc” narrative that in order for a bad person to be redeemed, they have to sacrifice themselves for others.

It’s the Christian narrative of “oh this person was a Truly Bad Person and there is no way to change that, so to prove that he did Truly Change he has to die to make up for his sins and then he can be dead and you’re allowed to remember him fondly because he died Pure and Redeemed.

It couples with the fact that they also did the “the bad guy was Truly Evil because we all know that people are either fundamentally Good or fundamentally Evil. And given that the bad guy is Truly Evil, the only way to tie up the story is for them to Die For Their Sins.” Except it’s a children’s show about ethics so they decided to not kill the bad guy..... just send them to living hell. Because that’s better apparently. The ethical choice for people who want to be Not As Bad as the Bad Guy.

And that’s all just disappointing because the whole show was about the fact that people aren’t black and white, either friend or foe.

The show was ABOUT putting the effort in to make connections with adversaries to bring conflict to an end. It was ABOUT the fact that it’s not black and white and you have to accept and work with the fact that everyone is in a grey area in order to move forward.

And yet they didn’t have the creativity or courage to round the story off in any way except the Christian Disney “he died to save the princess, and the evil witch fell to her death as a result of a misstep during the big fight but wasn’t killed directly by the Good Guys because that would tarnish their Purity.”

So onto my specific thoughts about Hugo.

I’m going with the definition of redemption as proving you are a fundamentally good person, usually achieved by dying for the cause, 

and atonement is proving you are working on being a better person, by being in a similar position as before, and making a better choice.

(spoiler: imo atonement arcs are better generally, and much more appropriate for the narrative of Kipo)

So with that in mind,

Hugo’s atonement moment was... well ongoing. Because trying to change your ways and live like a better person is an ongoing thing.

But on the boat, at the end, he mind-controlled whatshername, then she got knocked out before he could action it. That was him continuing to go with his old approach, yeah he was now fighting for Kipo, but he was still using his old mindset. Use fear, use force, win because you overpowered others. Then Wolf stopped him and they had their moment, and decided to do it Kipo’s way. Yeah it was Wolf and Greta’s (ah! her name was Greta. Probably.) words, but he was receptive and accepted the principle that his was of force wasn’t the right way forward. The moved forward together in parallel, both giving up the last bits of their old thinking together, and decided to go forward and act like the people they wanted to be, that Kipo showed them how to be. They had already accepted the premise of “bring people together” - they had accepted that goal, but that was the moment they accepted that they needed to change themselves.

(same as how the Atonement Moment for everyone else is when they chose to protect the Mutes from the fireworks - they showed through their actions that they genuinely believed in the project, they weren’t just putting up with co-existence because it was a necessity)

If Wolf didn’t need to die, Hugo didn’t either. There is nothing wrong with having to continue to face the hard task of working to make amends, and facing the reality that not everyone has to forgive you.

(side note - the fact that the coming together to move forward thing also centered forgiveness is also iffy. They didn’t have to forgive the losses they had suffered so recently, they just needed to accept and make peace with the losses in order to move forward. Subtly different thing. Maybe that would be too nuanced to try and cover in the cartoon but still.)

With Emelia...

I’ve said above, that the “don’t kill her, just let her fall to her doom and leave her there” is a Disney style cop out.

But I’m also not entirely against her being marked as unredeemable. She proved that she wasn’t on an atonement path either, at least in that moment - she had the opportunity to not try and kill Kipo but didn’t take it.

And there is an argument to be made that that is perfectly ok from a narrative point of view.

I remember seeing criticisms of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic because that show’s core message is that is you befriend people they will get better and you can work through it and heal together when you have support, so it is good to try and support people trying to get better, even if it’s hard initially because they hurt you. That is a good message, but is incomplete as a message, because obviously sometimes if you tell kids to just make friends with their bullies, they just end up with more exposure to the bullying. And that is fair criticism (but doesn’t mean the whole show is bad).

So with Kipo, I think that’s a nice parallel to MLP:FiM - make friends, bridge divides, put aside old grievances, collaborate for a future... but sometimes the hateful agitators won’t get better, and the reality is you need to deal with them somehow and minimize the damage they can do.

I liked that they showed that Emelia’s brother grew up with the same pressures as Emelia, but given the opportunity chose not to pursue the bigoted route, whereas Emelia did chose it. It showed that it was all a choice she was making, and what influences she was making them under, as opposed to a magic “Fundamentally Evil Person Who Hates People because she’s Evil”

That was a good choice.

But yeah. Acknowledging that some people just won’t come around from their old ways is one thing.

But why

- say let’s save her from the thing she tried to do to everyone else because “we’re not like her” and “nobody deserves that”

- but then still focus on her deserving “punishment” rather than just trying to prevent her from causing further social harm. Hugo got imprisonment and the time and opportunity for reform and his crime was pretty equal to Emelia’s. Again, very Christian narrative - redemption needs death, evil needs punishment in the eternal psychological torture building.

- and then because it’s “just” the good guys leave her in the Eternal Psychological Torture building. And that is supposed to not reflect badly on them because they aren’t the ones who pushed her in? It could have been a perfectly valid choice, because there was high risk to any rescue party attempted, and when you’re rebuilding a society, you can’t afford that risk. And the fate that she fell into was just a part of the risks of the environment and accepted as a fact of life risk. But choosing not to rescue someone from torture because you literally can’t do it, and shrugging and saying it’s right that someone be tortured, even a bad person isn’t. 

In real life maybe that’s different, sometimes you do laugh when a genocidal dictator gets a poetic demise, but this was a children’s show about the ethics of conflict resolution. So, uh, they probably should have come up with something more careful to say than “yeah mostly people need to be met where they are and we all need to forgive old hurts if we want to move forward... but sometimes some people just deserve to be punished and we won’t be conflicted about that inconsistency at all”

All that said

It was a great show

I don’t mind the ending overall - because the issues I have all stick out as “trope usages because they don’t know how else to wrap it up” and thus are easy for me personally to separate from the story’s merits as a whole

#long post #kipo and the age of wonderbeasts #kipo spoilers #my posts #redemption arcs #culturally Christian #darn Jewish tumblr making me aware of these redemption vs atonement things #I love it though - I love the new window to the world