#ratld meta

I refuse to post about this movie without acknowledging the cultural significance of the first SEA disney princess and I will continue to do so until people on this website start remembering that this movie is about culture and trust and overall a WHOLE lot more than just the sapphics (as great as they are.) Yes I’m going to copy paste this exact paragraph at the top of every RatLD post I make from now on.

Anyway.

I would say that Raya and the Last Dragon is, at a very fundamental level, about its characters and their dynamics. A lot of time, a story’s greatest strength will be plot, or worldbuilding, or character. And it can make or break a story. Of all these elements, character is probably the strongest. A book can be interesting if it has strong characters and a weak plot -- but 90% of readers won’t stick around to watch weak characters, no matter how strong the plot or world is.

And GOD, RatLD’s characters are just wonderful.

Raya’s beautiful character arc from untrusting and world-weary, to taking a chance on Naamari. Letting Raya be flawed and world-weary, having her anger overwhelm her, but still having her make the right choice in the end. Then Naamari, who’s development is just wonderful: she goes from choosing Fang and herself to choosing the world and others. She stays with Raya and the others while she reassembles the gem instead of getting herself out. And viewers, as they learn more about her, go from seeing her as a bad guy to seeing her someone just who’s been trying to do the right thing for her people. Sisu has this fascinating and fun mix of naivety and wisdom. And Boun, Noi, and Tong are all just SO DAMN LOVABLE.

That’s not even MENTIONING the wonderful relationships and dynamics in the crew. Raya and Sisu, Raya and Naamari, and Sisu and Naamari are all very plot-important, but there’s also this wonderful brother-sister dynamic between Raya and Boun, the adorable Tong and Noi dynamic, and just. It goes. On. And. On. And I LOVED it.

The theme of trust was central to the movie. Trust is ABOUT the relationships between the characters. You can’t even have trust or distrust without two characters and a relationship of some kind between them. And the more complex the characters and the relationship, the more interesting the theme gets!

In RatLD, the characters stand out far more than the plot, and that’s not even a problem for me (most of the time I’d have an issue with that.) Because it doesn’t need to be about the central plot; in this movie, it’s just a way to push the characters to develop. It’s just. God.