Tbh I never read that far in DOTC but I heard so much about star flower from fandom that now hearing about it directly from you I feel so cheated. I was promised a femme fatale.. tho in hindsight considering how much these writers hate women I probably shouldn't have gotten my hopes up
I WISH we got a femme fatale. It would have been incredibly cathartic for her to make herself alluring to Clear Sky, turning his worst traits against him and getting both power and revenge. For Thunder to bond to her over it, reaching the conclusion in the end that they both had terrible parents that they need to reject.
but, knowing the Erins, they would have just had Clear Sky kill her violently and gratuitously for ever tricking him. Like how he gouged Willow Tail's eyes out. So... I guess we were doomed either way.
Anyway im cooking
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ik it’s probably a classic case of extrapolating way too much but... the way raph’s character design lines up w his whole arc and role and struggles...
like the fact that he is so so so much bigger than the others. raph is big, raph is strong, raph is steady and sturdy and he can literally pick up his entire family and carry them all at once.
and like, when raph is so big and so strong and such a reliable thing. when raph is the protector, the one calling the shots on missions, the mother hen, the first point of authority. when raph is there, overprotective, when raph (for all that his brothers poke at him not being good under pressure) always always ALWAYS comes through at the end of the day when things are serious, ALWAYS gives it everything he’s got.
his design and his learned role/behaviors in this family are just the perfect storm of why it took up to the season finale to drive home the issue.
so much of the series carries the default energy of “raph will handle it.”
raph will hold up the ceiling above you. raph will throw himself over you and take a hit and get back up and keep fighting. raph has a power that makes him even bigger and draws more attention and makes him able to carry MORE. raph will be the substitute parent. raph will be put into the mentor role through leo’s leadership arc.
and raph is big. he’s built to carry heavy loads. raph is strong. raph is bold and loud and always ready to try to push on. even if he doesn’t know what to do or what he’s doing, he won’t give up and we’ll all pull together and things will turn out okay.
(his room is full of teddy bears. he dipped out on a mission to try to take a picture of a pigeon carrying a slice of pizza. he’s terrified of being alone.
he’s just as much of a kid as his brothers are. he’s just as new and inexperienced with the things happening to them as his brothers are. but for him, for some reason, there’s like this double standard where that becomes a huge glaring flaw.)
idk this got very sloppy and uncoordinated. i’m very in my feelings about raph right now though.
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I remember when I was reading DOTC when I was around 10, and ever since Misty died I had been waiting for the moment where Birch and Alder learned about her murder, how everyone in their lives has kept it a secret. And then it just didn't happen.
I also remember obsessively re-reading the part where Quiet Rain blows up at Clear Sky.
Birch and Alder are two characters that are just so...
I WANT to say they were forgotten about, but that word doesn't feel right for how they're constantly showing up on the screen. Clear Sky occasionally feels guilty about how he murdered their mother, but for the vast majority of the time, that's described in passive voice. So you're not reminded of just HOW cruel he was, and still very much is.
It's like they're not allowed to be characters.
Like, how does Alder feel about Clear Sky, who seemed to be acting as an adoptive father until he beat her as a child? How did Birch respond later, when Clear Sky was so busy thrashing his sister that he was threatened by a dog? How do they feel about the man who took their mother away from them?
They keep getting cited as "Good Examples Of Non-Campborn Cats," dodging around the fact they were stolen and raised by Petal. Like a lot of the other "adoptions" in the series, she quietly stops mattering to them. But even this fact... like, they're being OTHERED when they were functionally raised SkyClan.
How do they feel about THAT? That their earliest memory is SkyClan, and yet, they'll never be considered truly, fully "clanborn."
Their whole life taken from them, by Clear Sky's cruelty, their formative years spent in his violent shadow, and the narrative is just not interested in that.
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@coolmiddlename I had too many thoughts to contain to replies lolol -- first of which being PLEASE keep drawing your Entraptas in abundance for as long as you like, because they're delightful ❤
Second of which being, it sounds exactly the same to me -- and I always keep coming back to wanting these people to process whatever feelings are behind not being able to get over it! If Catra getting a happy ending with Adora let you down, made you mad, made you feel unseen or unheard, hurt you, even triggered you, you deserve to honor that reaction. Show yourself kindness, talk it out with people you trust, make posts about it in your own corners of the internet if you have to. Whatever it takes to honor the fact that you had the reaction you did. And then do what you can to leave it behind and find something that actually speaks to you the way you need it to. Because this show is over, it's done, and it didn't do what you wanted it to do, and it never will -- and there is an entire, still not-insignificant, still active community of people for whom it did do what they wanted it to and then some, and that community will continue to exist as long as there are new people arriving and sharing their experiences. Continually coming back to that community hoping to hear something more in line with your experience is only going to hurt you more. You won't hear it. Totally frankly, those of us who are still here and still celebrating have heard you out time and time again and still haven't changed our minds. Our experience was different, more positively resonant. It's ok for that to hurt, but you need to accept it.
In thinking about these things last night, I had more of a relapse than I bargained for; I ended up back at the last comment I left on the one video I absolutely can't go back to anymore. I didn't read all of the person's reply to it (for which I'm proud of myself, and I think I otherwise triaged that relapse well), but I did absorb enough to see that they started off hoping I never had a partner because I would probably abuse them (an incredibly auspicious start)... but also that eventually, they were completely ripping themselves open to make their point. There was a lot of this person's deeply-felt pain about their ex... something, I didn't look closely enough, being weaponized against me. And I think that's probably more representative of the extreme end of the spectrum than of the average anti-fan, but it's something I've seen over and over again. "I had a friend/a partner/someone in my life just like Catra, and they hurt me/people I care about, and I don't want to see other people hurt like I was/they were." And I see a lot of support in the anti-fandom for rhetoric like this.
And as much as I can't be a safe space for people who have that reaction -- and I want to make that clear right now in case it's not already, I can't give anyone that space because it hurts me to do so -- I've never thought it was completely invalid. Fiction brings up all kinds of reactions in people, intentionally or not, and it colors our experiences. Catra's story in particular has a lot of potential for highlighting competing needs and missing one mark or the other by going down the path it goes down. I've always said this; I always will. That's why my default response here ends up in the realm of honoring your own feelings. To out myself as someone who preordered The Fault in Our Stars way back in the day, I've always loved the way John Green put it: "[Pain] demands to be felt." I think that's incredibly succinct and incredibly true. But trying to turn that pain-filled reaction into this years-long effort to tarnish the show's reputation, cast everyone who likes Catra and Adora's relationship as unrepentant abusers, cast Nate Stevenson himself as an apologist for relationship abuse and even go so far as to denigrate his wife in the process... it just generates more hurt all around. There's no actual catharsis from dragging other people down into your pain.
(The unbearable irony of the fact that I'm saying this in the context of talking about people who hate Catra, the poster child for what it looks like when you try to solve your problems by digging your heels into your pain and externalizing it. Hoo boy.)
And if that deeply-felt pain going unrecognized is not the reason you're still here, and you're here just because it's fun to be a hater or something... it's way more fun to be a lover. Like, exponentially. It's way more fulfilling to find community with people over things you love.
(And if you're here because you sincerely believe the show is dangerous abuse apologism... might I direct you to my "bad media analysis" tag 💀💀)
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Some people: Kaeya’s bio father is an abusive monster who abandoned his son in order to achieve his own selfish goals. He is an evil man who deserves everything awful that might happen to him.
Other people: Kaeya’s bio father did the right thing and leaving Kaeya in Mondstadt was the only way to give him a halfway-decent life. He is a better father than he is given credit for and should not be as hated as he is.
Me: Kaeya’s bio father is integral to the general ‘war is hell and bad choices can reverberate across time’ thing that Genshin seems to be going for. He made unethical choices, but mostly because the ONLY OPTIONS HE HAD WERE UNETHICAL. If our understanding of the Alberich’s role in Khaenri’ah is accurate, General Alberich (my name for him until stated otherwise) was suddenly in charge of a hopeless and dead kingdom which begged to be saved. Assuming that there was a reason Kaeya specifically was chosen for this mission, General Alberich was forced into a position where he needed to choose between the lives/future of every Khaenri’an vs the life and future of his young son. Abandoning either is an awful thing to do and a horrible decision, but the bad decisions of Celestia and Rhinedottir have led to a scenario where General Alberich can only make bad decisions. In the end, he chose to prioritize his people and made his young son into a spy. We do not know the process for this, but knowing how much Hoyoverse loves to torment people (especially Khaenri’ans) we can assume that this process was horrific for Kaeya and could definitely be considered abuse. General Alberich is effectively making his son into a child soldier for a war that the majority of people never wanted or asked for, and one Kaeya was likely far too young to understand. At least, until he was forced to grow up far too quickly in order to fulfill his duty. General Alberich likely loathed everything about what was happening and even in his last moments with his son he asks for forgiveness. He knows that what he is doing is wrong, but to turn back now is to both abandon his subjects and make everything that happened to Kaeya in order to turn him into a child spy be for nothing. So yeah, General Alberich is a terrible person who made horrible choices. But war and the bad actions of others have created a situation where he has nothing BUT horrible choices and where being a terrible person is the only thing he can be. And that’s without considering how the curse/abyssal corruption could impact the scenario.
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