Cartoons Are My Life And Creeps Are My Strife

Is it any good? I haven’t heard a word about it, which is odd considering how involved I am with the animation community.

I’ve watched the first three episodes and it’s fine? They introduced the plot wayyyy to early but also introduced the solution in the same breath. In fact, in the first 15 minutes we are told the objective, the outcome and the romantic element.

It’s been pretty amusing and I’ve chuckled a bit, it’s not up to the same hilarity standards as SVTFOE or Chaos Theory but it’s got some really good jokes in there.

Speaking on the Darius,Brooklynn and Kenji drama.

Now when I first started this show back during Camp Cretaceous I was fond of dinostar, i thought it was a given that they would end up together, I mean its a tale as old as time; main guy ends up with main girl (excluding the lesbians). However, as the show went on and the probability of dinostar becoming cannon withered I ended up having a growing respect for the Camp Cretaceous team. For me at least, and for the general audience I would say, they subverted expectations. However small of an act it was, making dinostar not cannon was monumental in children's story telling not pushing an ideology that men and women can't be platonic friends.

Darius being one of the only one's without even a hint of a romantic subplot was also incredibly refreshing as too often storytelling gets bogged down by romance plot that are so badly written it makes me want to cry as to why it took precedent. It was also so comforting to finally have a character in western children's media that could be feasibly headcannoned as arospec without having people use their romantic interests as an argument against.

The introduction to Darius's feelings towards Brooklynn I thought was well handled and very mature, the writing team knocked it outta the park with how they made the characters mature with the way they handled emotions and tension, Darius's confession to Kenji felt so real. I swear I've seen/experienced one to one scenarios in my own adult life. It is despite this the confession felt like I watched the first cannonball blow through the hull of this story.

As most of you know the fandom was far from pleased with the pairing of Brooklynn and Kenji in the first series so I am grateful that they show not only allowed us to experience a glimpse into how wholesome their relationship was and how they genuinely DID work together only to have had them break up. It made it feel less like a retcon and more like a realistic path for a teenage to young adult romance to follow. Another thing that was important about their relationship was that Kenji was the one to end it.

Too often in this series Kenji has been dismissed as "the dumb one" by not only his friends but his own family. It occurs to a point where Kenji would have likely ended up agreeing with everyone else as to avoid being laughed at for having his own opinions. To have Kenji take matters into his own hands and put his own wellbeing first, to have him be the one to end things, makes me genuinely love and appreciate how these characters have matured and changed with time.

Now, back to Dinostar. I wouldn't have minded Darius and Brooklynn having a romance this series if there wasn't a previous relationship. Having a found family trope is one of my favourite things, but a trap that media falls into way too often is creating an incestious friend group dynamic. The reason why these sort of friend groups don't work out in highschool (which is where you will most commonly come across this dynamic) is because of the incurring jealousy. Jealousy breeds contempt. Having the original pairs maybe swing apart and then back together wouldn't cause as much as a rift as different friends falling for each other and causing strain on past and present couples.

There’s a lot to criticise about Hazbin Hotel, and maybe I’ll get into that at some point but right now I want to draw light to some of the positive qualities.

Over the years we’ve been seeing a decline of 2-D animated media and a rise in 3-D rendered media. Of course this isn’t to diminish the quality of some of these 3-D shows, I am a fan of many (such as Camp Cretaceous). However in adult media especially, high quality 2-D animation is becoming more of a scarcity as large corporations would rather do anything than fairly pay animators.