Ā umbrella academy is fun, but i feel like it...
@yeahcoolduck āa pattern Americans donāt whine inā you are SO RIGHT! i think what iām reacting to positively is that out of all of them, klaus is the most obviously fucked up? everyone else is playing it like they had a ādistant fatherā and a tough childhood and he/his character is like actively damaged by being part of a team of kid supers who KILLED PEOPLE GRUESOMELY??? like weāre not just dealing with silent dinners here, but the plot/characterizations are not there.
The KILLED PEOPLE GRUESOMELY thing, holy shit!Ā Thatās another aspect of the wonky world-building, where everyone responds to things as though theyāre all working at Macyās, but meanwhile, not only do people casually travel to and from the moon, twelve year old children can extrajudicially execute culprits of non-capital crimes in full view of the public and be celebrated for it.Ā Ā
So yeah, as you have it, Klaus is the only one reacting as though there was something fundamentally fucked up that fucked him up about the Umbrella Academy, while the rest of them are likeĀ āwell, Dad was an odd one for sure, but hey, whose parents didnāt fuck them up at least a little bit, amirite?Ā overall Iād rate our childhood 7/10.ā
It doesnāt bother me that the characters are barely critical of Dad, but that the story itself seems barely critical, except in the case of Klaus.Ā We donāt see the rest of the characters dealing with particularly harsh fallout of having been raised the way they were.Ā They mention it sometimes.Ā Frequently, even.Ā But sayingĀ āDad fucked us upā and actually being fucked up are two totally different things.
But then I feel I have to somehow address the central issue of Vanya, whose issues from their upbringing are supposedly central to the story. Yet, her issue for most of it was that she wasnāt allowed to commit acts of gross violence.Ā Again: Iām okay with the character feeling this way, but itās that the story itself seems to think that that, in and of itself, is the problem: that her father alienated her and made her feel like she wasnāt special.Ā Meanwhile it only pays lip service to the concept that the ways in which the others were considered special was deranged.
To sum up the story, itās Vanya feeling alienated andĀ āunspecialā that causes the apocalypse, and not Reginaldās ongoing legacy of insane violence, of which the world of UA is utterly uncritical.