what do you mean gg that game was fucking terrible

the TLDR is this: i like mira's struggle with her family in concept (fork found in kitchen etc etc) but dear god they fumbled the bag so bad. also there was like a week plus long gap between the first two paragraphs and the rest of this LOL

so like apparently there is mira discourse. this is not surprising to me, because the fact alone that bakugan crafted a situation (ep 19 to be specific) where i can actually blame the 16 year old girl is insane.

this is partially because mira's motivation to reconnect with her brother just feels... fairly weak? there's ways to make this work but only if the motive is strong enough for mira to not only betray her friends but also her morals (given the lives and freedom of countless living beings are on the line). it is also not helped by the fact that we never do find out why keith became spectra, which is frankly absurd to me.

but like, the concept is like, i get it, right? family vs friends is a potentially pretty interesting theme to go into and it provides an opportunity for mira to grow closer to the rest of the gang when she gets back. the other problem with this moment is that never happens. she does not get the chance to redo this choice, she is not made to make a final decision between her family and her friends (and morals as i mentioned before). because spectra is a ffffffucking good guy now

brief tangent here but i do not like this decision for reasons that extend beyond mira. spectra has not meaningfully learned anything and even if he did, later episodes will show that this is not enough. volt, lync, and even hydron all go through more meaningful change than "damn i lost" and die at the end of it. and this is to say, i like those! those were some really good stories! so why the FUCK does spectra get to go free? did the writers just forget about his own abuses of bakugan?

but back to mira, spectra's redemption gives her what she wants in a story where she should not be getting an uncomplicated answer. clay's death tries to remedy this but it's frankly too little too late and i already talked about my thoughts on him and mira in this post.

overall mira's arc should have been about learning to move past her brother and fight for what she believes in. it should have been about accepting that sometimes you need to cut someone out of your life even if you care about them. i think mira's focus on her brother all the time could have worked if the point was that she needs to stop doing that. but it was not, and the writers were just on absolutely insane levels of misogyny.