i rant a lot

Just finished reading the Hunger games trilogy.

they make me start frothing at the mouth and punching drywall thanks for asking <3

YES. Oh boy where to start.

When the teaser first dropped, I - and a lot of other people - saw "Dana Terrace, vocally very upset with Disney for their treatment of The Owl House, is making something new and adult about an evil corporatized themepark!" and connected the dots with a short straight line. This was a reasonable guess, and now that the pilot is out it's clear that "disney has become a cancerous hypercapitalistic growth on the face of our society" is indeed baked into the substrate of the show, but so is a bunch of much more interesting stuff that I'm very excited to see explored.

It's too early to guess what all is going to be done with the show, and the biggest black box right now is Guinevere herself. We've seen very little of her character, all either chronologically disjointed or marred by the android's extreme state of disrepair. But from what we have seen, she seems to have a very compelling narrative already baked in: what happens when a character created to think, act, and be a perfect fairytale protagonist is faced with the soulless corporate exploitation of her IP and thus her entire existence? Guinevere is not a walkaround face actor at a disney park - not a whole independent human person who clocks in for a job to put on a show and then leaves at the end of the day. She's an artificial lifeform, an android created with some sort of pyro-style Disney Vision Filter over her perception of reality so she sees everything as sunshine and rainbows and beautiful aesthetically-coherent wonder. She doesn't work in the show, she lives in the show. She works in the planet-spanning themepark that floats over the crushing cyberpunk dystopia trash planet, but she experiences the fantasy she was built to be part of - at least until it becomes so unbearable that the pain breaks in through the rules set on her reality.

(This is also paralleled by Frankie, who explicitly hallucinates at several points in the episode - all hallucinations that mirror Guin's own perception filter, including seeing her little animal friends and Guin herself in her Perfect Princess form and not the fucked-up automaton version. Frankie lives in the real world, but she can catch glimpses of the wondrous world of fantasy that Guin is built to exist in and embody. Is this childlike wonder retained into adulthood? Some sci-fi bullshit? A garden-variety form of mild psychosis? All of the above?? Time will tell!)

Guin is theoretically a perfect park employee - she's got the look, she's got the personality, zero human needs or outside life commitments, endlessly kind and patient and great with the kids who adore her. But she's built to be a fictional character, to bridge the gap between harsh reality and comfortable fantasy for the benefit of people who live 100% of their life in harsh reality and need an occasional escape. And as we see from the pilot, that limited, liminal existence of hers is an agonizing prison for a being that is simultaneously clearly sentient and designed to be the perfect flawless princess. How can she express unpretty emotions, selfish sensations like agony or a desire or freedom? The artists that created her didn't build her to do any of that. Wrinkles might make her less appealing. Every time she fails to conform to the character limitations they tried to instill into her and does something inconvenient like screaming or running, they express frustration and have her dragged back to be "fixed." She's not supposed to do that. Proper princesses don't do that. She has to be pretty and nice 24/7 or the parkgoing experience will be ruined.

Disney in specific (and our overall cultural more broadly) has some very strong aesthetic morality baked in. Certain appearances and actions are quietly implied to be unacceptable for our admirable heroes. Beauty Equals Goodness is very strongly baked in, while many less traditionally beautiful traits are limited only to background character or full-blown antagonists - missing or flawed teeth, facial scars, blemished skin, larger noses, heavier builds, etc etc etc. Is there anything morally substandard about these traits? No! Of course not! Who would be so ridiculous as to say that having iffy teeth makes you evil? But something doesn't need to be said to be learned and internalized, and if there is a trait that you never see on the characters you're supposed to love, you will almost certainly internalize that this trait must be in some way unlovable. Disney animators have gone on record saying the hardest part about animating the princesses is keeping them beautiful in every single frame. What a horrifying prison to have your existence be built into: to be handcrafted such that you had to always be flawless, with "flaws" as defined by someone who clearly couldn't care less about you. What if your creator treated your every dissatisfied facial expression as a terrible inconvenience that you needed to be disassembled to fix?

There's also a broader conversation to be had here about how women are often expected to perform beauty 24/7 up to a level of standard that is at best inconvenient and at worst immensely physically taxing, and how a perceived woman existing unattractively in public is often regarded as some sort of intentional personal slight against the eyeballs of everyone who observes her, and how a broad framing of entirely natural and harmless bodily characteristics like hair, skin blemishes, scars, stretch marks, cellulite, etc etc are popularly framed as Disgusting and Unfit For Public Display instead of just A Totally Normal And Harmless Way A Body Can Look And Also Nobody Else's Goddamn Business, but in short, this is clearly a massively important part of the substrate of Guinevere's character concept, and how much of a prison it is for her to have to be beautiful and perfectly kind and patient at all times, and perhaps how wonderful it is for her to now be grotesque, unpolished, unpretty and free. By the end of the pilot all three of our heroines are absolutely beat to shit, and that feels like it's in very direct conversation with the prison of Disney-Mandated Beautiful Perfection.

The way we see Guin treated by Olivia plays into all this as well. We know even less about Olivia than Guin, but she's clearly the type to mutilate her toys as a form of play. That's all well and good when the toy is a nonsentient hunk of plastic, as anyone who's given a barbie an ill-advised haircut can attest, but Guinevere is alive enough to feel pain. Olivia treats her like a toy she has full ownership over, and on a corporate level, she does. But Guin, while clearly not human inside or out, is a thinking, feeling being who does not want to live the way they're using her.

It's too early to say where they'll go with her, but to me it feels very important that Guin is not, as far as we can tell, a Dangerous Evil Malfunctioning Robot. Guin is terrifying right now for sure, but she seems to still be exclusively kind to our heroes - to want to help, to be protective and gentle with them. She can do that without conforming to the incredibly restrictive aesthetic morality that her creators tried to bake into her. She does not have to look like a perfect disney princess in order to be good.

As she is now - horrifying to look at, incapable of performing the social graces she's been programmed to do - her knights are still huge fans.

There's other character stuff I'll be fascinated to see explored, but I don't want to speculate too far in the direction of where the arcs might go. Instead I wanted to highlight how effective the visual storytelling was already just in the pilot - how clearly and effectively it utilized the medium of animation to speak volumes about where our protagonists are at. The way the show builds tension in the lifeless littered environments; the little pieces of park product placement literally everywhere, even in the tiny house our heroes rent, showing how inescapable and joyless this corporatized IP has become. The slightly too long silence as we slowly zoom in on Orville Park's motionless form before he suddenly turns to cheerfully welcome us to the park. The DARK SOULS BOSS.

And everything we learn about the characters is show indirectly as well, with hardly any telling to break it up. Andi is jaded, cynical, overworking herself to the point of illness and exhaustion, and secretly suffering from the "blue lung" thing we know almost nothing about except that it's the park's fault and it sucks. It's also clear that she isn't always open or honest with Frankie, especially about her own vulnerabilities - everything from her insecurity over Frankie's casual mechanical brilliance to the pain of her own broken arm. And while Frankie is a wide-eyed idealist who still holds onto the wonder and joy she felt in her one and only visit to the park and her sole encounter with Guinevere, she's also much more practical than Andi and will simply take action instead of waiting for permission or dithering about consequences. All of this is communicated through visual cues and body language, not dialogue. We don't know where these characters will go from here, but we already know so clearly who they are right now.

1. Writing a story about a girl who wants something. Plot driven by a woman’s (non-vilified) desire. Truly dreadful execution but still a good idea, sort of a literary incarnation of the “he a little confused but he got the spirit” meme.

2. The fact that when Bella becomes a vampire she can still breathe but “there’s no relief tied to the action” which I remember verbatim because it fucking slapped. The idea of human physical sensations being partially defined by our mortality and the sensations still exist after you become undead but your experience of them is fundamentally different because you no longer need any of it? Extremely cool. The closest Meyer came to taking an interesting stance on vampires being dead.

3. Werewolves are immortal but they can literally stop whenever they want. That shit’s hilarious. Curse of immortality who.