#jarktos

My part of a trade with @alienaliart

Evil boyfriends 🎩🎀✨

I ain't telling what they thinking of

tabaluga toxic yaoi redraw

Before you start reading, please, don’t take this post to heart, that’s just my opinion and I’m sorry in advance if this sounds harsh - I have nothing against the ship in general, I’m genuinely happy if it gives you a lot of joy making content about and just have fun with it.

So, I’d like to talk about one – if not only – of the main ships in ”Tabaluga“ fandom, jarktos (James x Arktos). Before deciding to dive in the cartoon again as a tribute to one of my favorite childhood cartoons one day, I, if my memory serves me well, happened to stumble upon the fanarts where these two were portrayed as a love couple and I liked them drawings, because the concept looked catchy to me - and it still does, actually! But as I decided to rewatch the first season, I changed my mind about it and found the idea of the ship… let’s say, much deeper and tragic.

I would like to start with the stuff happening to James - it was shown plenty of times in the series how faithful he was to Arktos. I would say, James’ as faithful as a dog in general regardless of how much he gets literally abused by Arktos in the show, both physically and mentally. James’ a scapegoat besides Vultur, but unlike him the penguin dares not to prove his point of view and defend himself. James’ terrified of Arktos, but he can’t escape him - though he had a chance when his fellow penguins decided to leave their home for a better life in one of the episodes, but he stayed still instead and proved his faith to the snowman once again - and the reason is that James can’t even imagine his life being different. Lemme explain:

Once James gets rescued by Tabaluga and stays in Greenland for a while after he failed his mission again. First of all, it was a surprise to him that the dragon boy saved the penguin who was supposed to be an enemy of his, and secondly, James admitted that he found it strange, because he had never had a friend before - and such a confession echoed deep inside me. It was clear to me that James would probably had spent his childhood and youth within the ice palace serving Arktos. Some typical for children activities such as playing toys James tried to do being a grownup penguin, but I suggest you to keep this moment in mind, because I’ll touch it upon a bit later. It seemed to me that James kept “forgiving” Arktos and tolerating his aggression because he had some kind of Stockholm syndrome due to being raised as a servant and knowing no different life besides being by Arktos’ side and making his wills come true any time he commands to. That’s why I wouldn’t call James’ rather positive attitude towards Arktos as love for him, and if he did love him, then his feelings would probably used against him.

I need to clear up that I’m not here to blame Arktos for his acts and just call him a moron, because it’s not that simple in case of his too and now I’ll try to explain why do I think so. I think we all can agree that Arktos’ quite complicated himself as a “person” and it gets difficult to analyse him too, because as it was pointed out by @mariatrojan “thanks” to plot holes of the series we can’t come up with the snowman’s past. According to the lyrics of the song “Schlüssel zur Macht“ written by Peter Maffay, one of the creators of original stories about Tabaluga, Arktos’ originally supposed to be “as so old as the world”, but then the producers decided to change such an information about him starting with the first season. And it’s no less difficult to analyse the given stuff as well, because the information about possible past of Arktos changes in the second season again and it’s implied that he’s kind of the same ages as Tyrion, Tabaluga’s father. Odd, isn’t it? 🤡

Still, regardless of the given variety of Arktos’ origins, his story is quite tragic too, because if Arktos lost his parents at early age, he probably wouldn’t have happy childhood either, but he had to face all the consequences of being a leader of Eiswelt. And his hatred for everything green can be explained by his trauma of loss - let’s say that if his mother didn’t die in Greenland, he wouldn’t be orphaned this early. This would explain why Arktos invited James to play with him when he spotted the penguin having fun with his toy and then told him about his childhood dream of becoming an architect. It was also shown lots of times that Arktos had a drive for art in general. To me it’s implied that he had no interest in politics and similar stuff, but he had no choice and the intention of invading Greenland became his credo. Same’s about the version of Arktos being a supreme being - according to “Schlüssel zur Macht“ again, it was stated that Arktos has “black like the night” nature, which indicates that his duty is to kill everything living by his powers. Therefore let’s ask ourselves how such an iced creature like Arktos is even capable of loving someone? Judging by the given scenarios I would assume that both trauma and immortality would affect his mental state and even drive him insane at some point, if we try to overthink his rather childish behavioural traits we may observe in the series.