overanalyzing media is my therapy

I'll keep this short and list out what I'm gonna post in this blog:

catra's "redemption" and what's wrong with it

concerns surrounding catradora

racist and ableist undertones in the show

bad writing and inconsistencies within the show

wasted potential of the show

memes about any of the above topics

reasons why c//a is abusive and romanticized by the narrative:

part 1

part 2

proof that catra and adora are adoptive sisters:

this is a safe place for queer people, disabled and neurodivergent people, poc and abuse victims. if you're a catra apologist or someone who thinks c//a is healthy, this is your cue to ignore this blog (unless you are willing to change your mind, in which case, congrats. you have more braincells than 90% of the fandom).

that's it for now!

Joei wonder:a artificial human made in a tub escaping before he was destroyed for being a "mistake",a kind engeric playful childish guy in his mid 20s that somtimes comes of as strange by others,he likes fallowhis best friendsto the end of the world on crazyadventuresmosly to make sure their not hurt,he wears a mask always and doesn't like it when someone ask about his past avoiding them until he apologized to them or vise versa, he worried somtimes if he is truly human or not just a test gone wrong,he as no skinn needing to always be covered head to toe and isn't 3 meters tall often scaring people by accident

he sounds cool! his backstory is pretty interesting, i'm always a sucker for science experiments and body horror stuff (not sure if you're intending to go that route with this character).

i don't even know where the tomboy/butch thing came from other than Gooseworx once mentioning that fans should draw Pomni in more masc outfits. nothing else about her particularly struck me as masc, but ig that's probably because she's stuck in the body of a cartoon jester.

Ian (who we initially didn’t know was secretly sleeping with Nikki) and Sarah (who seemed to just have a basic friendship with Nikki) were both well aware that Nikki “hated” her father. When Bear tells them the lie about Nikki’s dad being sick and dying, both Ian and Sarah are quick to remark that Nikki does not get along with him and are confused as to why she’d care. Whereas Bear just accepted the lie and did not think much about it until Ian revealed the truth to him (and he still said that lie to Sarah later when she asked why Nikki was acting strange).

It makes me wonder if at some point Nikki did tell Bear about her strained or nonexistent relationship with her dad and he either forgot or didn’t care. This isn’t me trying to paint Bear as a cartoon villain, just more of a fake friend who only pays attention to what Nikki says or does when it can affect him because he’s so obsessed with her on the surface that he misses details about her personal life that the rest of the friend circle was aware of.

yeah, i've noticed this too! in hindsight, it's obvious from the very first scene where he practices confessing to Nikki. all he mentions are the times that she has helped him and never anything about her. Bear doesn't really care about Nikki, he cares about what she does for him.

he also doesn't understand her passion for writing and doesn't realize the difference between a romance and a love story. this is a clear indicator that Bear just doesn't try to understand Nikki or her perspective. plus he uses AI, which would definitely go against Nikki's values as a creative.

and like you said, he doesn't seem to remember the fact that Nikki is not on good terms with her dad, and we see Nikki say that Bear is the only one she can talk to freely about things. it must have been a gut punch to Nikki to realize that Bear never paid any attention to her or the things she cared about, but just wanted to sleep with her.

so it's really frustrating that so many stories fail to explore this at all when there's so much potential for it.

a while back, i had made a post about how Hunter from TOH accepted his identity as a clone waaay too quickly, even though it should have theoretically destroyed his entire worldview. the only thing he seemed to be worried about was a. getting caught by Belos and b. being judged by his friends.

i would have liked to see him grapple with this new reality a lot more. what does it mean to be an artificially engineered copy of someone else? how much of your personality is really you? will you ever be a real person or are you doomed to forever be the equivalent of a really good AI, made in the image of someone else?

of course, TOH was strapped for time but i still think they could have slipped a few of these existential questions in there, instead of just making Hunter scared that his friends will find out.

and now, the same thing has happened with TADC. already i'm not a fan of the whole creative AI revelation because it makes no sense, but it's even worse that none of these people are absolutely reeling from the realization that they're not real people.

they're just sad for a minute and then just move on?? how??? if i realized that i was nothing but a copy of someone's brain and the real me was out in the real world, living their life, i would be ripping my hair out. i would have abstracted almost immediately.

while halfway into TADC, i made a post about Kamen Rider Kabuto and how one of the characters turns out to be the very monster they were fighting, monsters that absorbed the identity and memories of the people they killed.

i don't remember exactly how the realization scene goes but it was definitely a lot more effective and completely broke 13 y.o me's brain.

and that's what this trope is supposed to do. it makes you question what was real, it makes you go back and search for hints that this character wasn't who they thought they were. it makes you lay awake at night, thinking about how this character's reality was so thoroughly destroyed.

i mean she wasn't as obnoxious as after she started hanging out with Jax, but she was still a pretty boring character to me before that. she was pretty generic as far as main characters go, and we knew nothing about her.

she wasn't an enabler but she was still super mediocre imo. the hints of personality that we did see from her (like her telling Gummigoo that she didn't want anyone to feel worthless) was still not a super rare character trait and was basically expected of main characters.