#yeag......

i still don't think there's any reason why po can't be both oogway's successor and the dragon warrior even after watching the movie.

and here's the big fish to fry: the pacing. i know i've previously said that kfp3's pacing was rushed but kfp4 felt like it was speedrunning its own plot. by the time they got to the juniper palace i was baffled because the duo barely had a moment in the city and they were suddenly going to face the main villain?

a lot of it was left up to exposition about the characters' deal at you to try and make up for it. which made the big character twist suffer. and i do like the character twist! in theory,

so: basically zhen was initially founded/raised by thieves and criminals (and considered han her "old mentor"), and then was later raised by the chameleon after zhen showed a similar ruthlessness in her after trying to steal from her.

the underground criminals were mostly sidelined as a joke but the additional pacing issues doesn't really give you time to dwell on zhen and han's whole deal. and then suddenly you get an expository flashback later on, but there's not a lot of an emotional gutpunch to any of these reveals due to said pacing issues and han is relegated to being part of the crime comedy squad. he can do devastated dad figure! let him lean into waymond eeaao!

now for the rest of my thoughts on other minor stuff:

insert obligatory annoyance about the five being relegated to being non-speaking cameos in the credits. frankly i'm neutral about it in the grand scheme of the movie (there's bigger fish to fry as seen above), but they made me pay attention to that fact by doing that little lampshading joke in the beginning so i got a little irrationally ticked off by that line. you know i'm kind of glad they were off doing something else for this one.

li and ping were fun in this movie, don't get me wrong. but also they contributed to the weird pacing in this movie because instead of dealing with the main plot, we have to watch their sideplot of catching up to the main plot?

the staff mechanics of 'you can only use its powers if someone willingly gives you the staff'. also strange, but not in a way i can articulate. like, i guess it ties back to kfp3 and how oogway describes qi manipulation as 'giving/taking'?

chameleon's motivations re: being rejected to train in kung fu in every training hall because she was so small and feeble is... strange to me, seeing as mantis exists. who is an objectively smaller creature. maybe there's a level of her being an unreliable narrator (like how shen views that his parents never loved him), but that's not how they play that out so it just feels like a weird plot hole if you think about it too much.

surprisingly not as annoyed about po not being recognized. listen, china is a big place and news does not travel fast, i figure. i already had similar headcanons, but applied to oogway so this isn't as large of a leap of logic for me.

toki pona is intentionally an extremely vague/context reliant language so for all four legged land mammals/meat from one, u say soweli AKA