#thinking posts

Raya has the gem fragment so she's pretty safe from the Druun, bonus points that she travels by boat on water for most of the film.

Nammari doesn't have any of that. The Fang gem piece is with Virana. Yet Namaari still risks going out and braving the Druun with nothing but riding her Serlot. Every outing she makes could be the last. She tracks Raya through Tails and Spine which is an incredible distance from Fang while also probably dodging Druun. Wonder why the Fang royal army is so small? Casualties along the way maybe? If Namaari never comes back it's because she's stone or dead (I'm pretty sure the other tribes have a 'kill on sight' rule for Fang).

I know it was emphasized how much Namaari tries to do right by Fang, but damn she was willing to die for Fang long before the climax.

While I find Virana and Namaari interesting characters for being so objectively pragmatic it hurts my moral compass sometimes, I feel like it's kinda sad. It feels like Namaari was raised to be a general or leader rather than a daughter and it shows. It's definitely a foil to Raya's character who lived a pretty idyllic childhood by comparison.

Some people have been talking about how Namaari ‘gaslighted’ Raya in the final part of the movie when she said ‘You’re as much to blame for killing Sisu as I am’ and I am inclined to say no, that is not gaslighting.

Gaslighting is the intention to manipulate the victim into questioning their own sanity. It happens over time and not just in a single moment. I guess there’s multiple ways to interpret the scene, but I don’t think Namaari had any malicious intent in that moment and was too emotional to be that calculating. She was just very, upset and just lashed out. You can call it trying to avoid responsibility or shifting the blame, but that’s not gaslighting.

Here’s a real world example of gaslighting, courtesy of me: I am deathly allergic to treenuts, but growing up my mother told me that I wasn’t actually allergic and that I was ‘psychologically’ causing the allergy symptoms to appear because a doc told me I was allergic to peanuts as a kid. She continued to reinforce this concept every time I had an allergic reaction to the point where I started to question whether or not I was really allergic or if I was making it up. I was questioning my sanity and I really could not distinguish whether or not my perception of reality was even real.