#I'm trying to do backgrounds and everything okay I deserve to be lazy on this part

[somegrumpynerd]

I had such big ambitions about this comic being all coloured and shaded and fancy but now that I've coloured exactly one page I am rethinking that shading thing

[instantpansies]

alright final thoughts i am sleepy and want to go to bed

it's tacky but not in the fun way the first (and imo the rest of the franchise as well) is tacky. none of the silliness lands.

filmography and lighting is too fancy for this. everything feels out of place.

the themes of "love" were really weirdly forced in, like i get what they were going for and i don't even disagree but i had to do some mental gymnastics to make it a meaningful theme.

the songs, and i cannot stress this enough, suck. descendants songs have never been incredible, but some extremely lazy/nothing lyrics combined with overproduced beats and heavily autotuned/pitch corrected singers makes it all so hard to listen to. i didn't hate two of the probably seven?? songs here, but i would not put any of them on a playlist.

i can't help but compare the songs here to, say, the first few songs in descendants 1. rotten to the core is so silly and ridiculous! but it also sets the scene and intros our charas and world perfectly and concisely! it also feels genuine. the people in 1 are having so much fun with it. here it's just....idk. empty. maybe i'm reading too much into it.

the time travel plotline was both the main focus and also never explained even remotely. i have no idea how the logic of this works. and i, as a stupid nerd who thinks about descendants more than i should, deserve to know how the logic works!!!!

the costumes are.....not........as bad......as they could be?? i mean, they're bad. but they're not so atrocious and asymmetrical as they have been historically. i don't hate them tbh.

both bridget and ella's and red and chloe's relationships are quite queercoded. enjoy. also the parallels were fun, it would've been nice to, i dunno, see more exploration of those themes? but noooo, we just don't see bridget and ella after they give advice to our heroes and conveniently disappear from the plot!

none of the humor lands, it's just. not funny. and it's not trying to be. idk, when you make a descendants movie and forget that it's a fundamentally funny premise, it loses something essential. so the movie was really nice looking but. lifeless.

i also think the gratuitous cgi added to that feeling, not a single scene went by without some dramatic special effect added. made everything plastic. idk. ugh.

anyways, i thought the movie was okay. i liked some of the fun relationships. the vks were attractive. but overall, this was pretty underwhelming. the sparkle just wasn't really there for me. the ending was absurdly rushed and disappointingly lazy. descendants: rise of red is a film hallmarked by a desperate clinging on to the spirit of a franchise that belongs in the past, that cannot be effectively expanded upon with the modern dcom style or sensibility. while i find it interesting to see what disney's done with the world, their attempt to adapt descendants to what is essentially a second generation falls so so flat. i will only be watching again if i fall back into my descendants obsession and decide i have to, but this is not a film i'd watch casually. not the worst i've watched by any means, but it doesn't have the cheesy campiness of the rest of the franchise, and that's what i love so much about descendants. so i was disappointed.

2.5 out of 10. wouldn't really recommend. would watch at a friend's house as background noise if i was feeling a little gay.

alright so i'm gonna watch descendants rise of red. few things:

‼️ if you'd like to avoid spoilers, please go ahead and block the tag "toast watches descendants" rn. i will not be tagging every post in this chain with fandom tags, only the first and last as usual. ‼️

okay so. what am i expecting from this film? descendants is one of my guilty pleasures honestly, i love dcoms because of how profoundly silly and bad they are and descendants does not disappoint. it's fun, it's corny, it's sometimes maddening. i love it.

i'm going into this completely blind. i was barely aware they were making a fourth movie until i saw someone mention it was out, like a week ago. i haven't read any articles or seen any trailers, we're rawdogging this film.

first of all, i'm a bit worried at how they're gonna handle cameron boyce's character. you know. especially bc this looks like it's about time travel? which is another thing i'm worried about. time travel plots can be great when done right, but that is very rare. i don't expect descendants to do it right, and i think it's going to be irritating and not very fun as a premise. i'm hoping the rest of it will make up for my general dislike of time travel plots, but idk that it will.

imo, the descendants franchise has gotten gradually worse as time goes on. don't get me wrong, i still like all of it (yes, including royal wedding.......) but i do think the overall quality and adherence to a balanced world has significantly decreased.

i'm hoping we get some more very camp villains. descendants has never failed to deliver on this front. the costume designs are always eye-bleedingly awful in the best way, and the villains are so silly and contrived that i can't help but love them. i hope that happens here.

as for the title i have no idea what that means lmao. red? the red queen? snow white...something? red riding hood? idk dude! we'll find out together. take my hand.

[enchantedbyhiddles]

I'm from the US, never been to Germany, but from what I've heard of it, y'all are at the top of the list when it comes to being regretful about the Holocaust (appropriately so) and doing your best to take no backsliding about it. Of course the Jews weren't the only victims of it; black people were also very much targeted. So even if Germany is very homogenous, I would've expected there to be more care shown about racism by how much awareness is paid to past atrocities. I'm kinda shocked.

I think with you being from the US, as weird as it sounds, here the understanding about racism is totally different from yours.

One thing that everyone from the USA needs to understand is that you have to go by a totally different mindset. While you think that talking about differences helps being anti-racist, the official stance here is different. It is more about “we are all people, lets focus on that”. Talking about races is absolutely racist here. During the holocaust we saw the most atrocious crimes, murder and genocide, because people were divided into groups by their ethnicity and how they looked. So you’ll find nothing like that in Germany today. There are no official papers, where you can check your ethnicity or anything. The only thing that gets noted is your nationality. And that is a slippery slope, because you aquire German citizenship by blood-relation, not by being born here. There are nationalities that are non-German, but aren’t discriminated, while others are. Even though from the US-POV they are all white. (*There is something like “immigration background” what is often cited to say “Germans from foreign origin”, but this includes everyone, who has a parent with a non-German passport or being born outside of Germany and is not the same.)

Actually because of the holocaust and because people are really indoctrinated to be aware of the atrocious antisemitism, we developed the arrogance that we aren’t racist. “I heard about the holocaust for years in school. I know everything about it, so people shouldn’t try to educate me on that.”; ”Our constitution states right in the first few articles that we don’t discriminate. It is a written law, so it must be true.” Similarly “Antisemitism lead to people being killed, so something like the N-word or Z-word is comparably not bad at all, so people are too sensible and should shut up”. I hope you understand, what kind of thinking many people here developed? We are in the beginning and very much talking basics here. There are a growing number of people who “get it” and understand racism, systematic racism, micro-aggressions (like not always and not perfectly, but they are aware that such things exist and try to work on that), but there is still the majority for whom you have to really spell it out.

Black people weren’t actively targeted as a group in Nazi-Germany, because there were so few. Like while they were seen as “inferior” and faced incredible racism, it depended very much on the individual case, how they were treated. There are now much more black people (especially in former West Germany), because of immigration, but also to a certain degree because of US-soldiers. Black/mixed-race Germans of a certain age were for part of their lives seen as children of an occupational power. Black people from the US often face more discrimination than black people from Africa, because of that.

I know many US-Americans can’t imagine such a world, but as I grew up in former Eastern Germany, I saw the first black person where I lived, when I was 18. Most of the families have lived there for a few hundred years. They simply can’t imagine that people move to different places. You’ll always be an outsider in such a place, even if you are a white German. For people that have a different ethnical background such an area is the worst racist nightmare imaginable. Even those that are open-minded and positive towards a non-German, will throw around racist remarks by the douzen in minutes. And there will be no one to correct them.

While in the USA racism is often very much seen as black vs white, here in Germany it is most often that we all look very similar. If there was a group of 100 Germans and all look white and you make an antisemitic or antizigianist joke, you wouldn’t know that there is a Jew and a Sinti in that group. This stereotyping and racism is much more sinister. There are many, many minorities and the younger people with influence from the internet and other societies (like the USA), develop a different kind of conscience of what they find acceptable and what not. I mean, e.g. for the Roma, they are German nationals and lived here for centuries and German is their mother language. When they talk about themselves many will use the Z-word, because that’s the one they know. That doesn’t make it okay for German ethnicity Germans to use it. There’s an ongoing emancipation.

The biggest problem is faced by the Sinti and Roma. Like they’ve been here for 700 years, they are German, they have typical German names, and for all the time they faced horrible antizigianism. If you are from a different area, you wouldn’t know that this particular family is Sinti, yet in their area people know that they are and discriminate against them. There are still so many prejudices and they are seen as “lazy, only living from wellfare, too many children”. From a huge part of society.

They are the forgotten victims. Even after WWII, when everyone regretted the Holocaust, they were still persecuted, because they deserved it. They were “Asoziale”. They weren’t even acknowledged until the 70s or 80s. In school you learn about them being victims of the Nazis, but never in an explicit way. Like they are just part of the list with homosexuals, “disabled”, criminals, and “Asoziale”. (see the problem in that list?) So if it comes to Z* the idea that it is racist, is very much non-existent. 

And this doesn’t even start on the racism that is faced by the many immigrants and their children. For US-Americans lot of that wouldn’t even be considered racism, because it is against Italians and Greeks, now people from Eastern Europe. Compared to the discrimination against Turks and people from the middle East and Northern Africa. From a German POV though, the discrimination they face is very much from the same origin. Those people were invited, because Germany needed workers. There is a great sentence by Max Frisch about that “We called for workforce, but people came.”

[judesstfrancis]

ok but now i'm really intrigued about the parallels you draw between Martin and Jude (only if you feel like talking abt it of course!)

I don’t have a very coherent answer for this, unfortunately, one day I’m gonna get off my ass and like. actually hunt down different lines from each source and Compare them pero I’m too lazy for that rn so.

the basis of this is that while I was listening to tma the first time I was also rereading a little life and my brain went “these two characters are The Same,” and in fact I think that’s what made me latch onto martin so quickly as a character, bc I saw him as a direct parallel of jude. they just give me the same vibes! both friend shaped and doing their best and I’d like to protect them even tho I know they’re both ultimately doomed

but also:

there’s a lot to be drawn I think from character background and especially how that relates to their motives later on. they both clearly have trauma, one’s more explicitly stated than the other’s, but those traumas lead them ultimately in the same direction - where they have no limits when it comes to what they might have to do to protect themselves and those around them, even when the cost of protecting those around them comes largely at a detriment to their own well-being. they both have personal boundaries, of course--jude won’t bother with jb for a large part of the novel bc of the way he directly disrespects jude, however unintentional, and martin knows what bothers him enough to say No I Cannot Do This For You, It Isn’t Good For Me--but in large part, their common thing is that, while they want to keep themselves secure and safe, this is often ignored or its importance is de-elevated in favor of putting in the energy to make sure the people they care about have that same security and safety. they both give away parts of themselves to the point of self-isolation with the idea that self-isolation is what it takes to make sure their friends are taken care of--the idea that they are, ultimately, a bother, and it doesn’t really matter what happens to them so long as they do what they can to make sure everyone around them is okay. they need to be useful, more than anything, bc they were never shown that they can be appreciated and cared for without having to be useful.

a large motivator for both of them also, I think--and I know this directly contrasts with what I already said but like I said this isn’t the pretty, well-organized post I could make--is that they never want to feel that insecurity and trauma that they felt before. jude works to become the best lawyer he can so that he can make sure that he has enough money that what happened to him in his past can never happen to him again. and he doesn’t care how he gets there! he doesn’t have time to care about people he doesn’t know, because the same care wasn’t afforded to him and so he’s going to do whatever he has to. martin lies on his resume, fabricates a new background, hides everything about himself and creates something else so that he can dig himself out of the whole he’s found. so that he never has to want for anything again, can keep himself secure, first and foremost. a large part of it is, of course, having to take care of his mother, but look--given the situation I think we can probably all agree that having financial security is about a Lot More than just wanting your mother to be comfortable and cared for, like there are obviously some complicated emotions there but in this position we have to assume that after having to give up everything at such a young age to care for someone who doesn’t really afford you the same attention, having this amount of financial security is significantly more about being free.

it’s a complicated thing, I think. they want to have that security and they don’t want to feel lost or alone again, but in trying to give that same security and love to their friends/to the people in their lives that matter the most, they take away a little bit of their own security. they end up feeling lost and alone regardless, even if that isn’t true anymore. they kind of remove themselves from their interpersonal relationships, in a way, bc they give so much of themselves away in order to afford that security to their loved ones but don’t allow any of that to be given back to them. they don’t think they deserve it, bc it’s their job to give it, and isn’t it asking a little much to want it back in return? so they end up in something of a deficit. u know what I mean? (again, they both very obviously have boundaries and hard lines that they aren’t willing to cross, or aren’t willing to let anyone else cross, I’m just saying like In General.)

idk what the tl;dr of this all is bc this is genuinely how much it took to translate all my thoughts into real words, pero.....martin and jude same character amen