#also never thought that i'd only encounter a suicidally depressed monkey king in a cartoon lego show

[monkie-brainriot]

Alright I’m not done thinking bout this actually. 

Macaque did the equivalent of teaching Mk how to backflip before he’d developed the muscles to jump. 

Going right to the advanced stuff is actually really bad for your body and the way you preform. We learn the basics first to build off of the principles that will keep us from injuring ourselves or stretching a muscle that wasn’t ready for it. Rushing can result in life-long injuries you never recover from. This is how it works with any sort of sport or fighting technique. You start with the basics and build up your strength until you can do the full move in a safe way without harming yourself and it takes a lot of practice and requires you to know exactly where your body is at so you don’t risk injuring yourself. Pushing yourself is never the answer unless you know how to do it safely. You never sacrifice speed for technique when weightlifting or you can really injure yourself. 

That’s how Wukong teaches. Only problem is he teaches in the “classic” mentor way of not telling the student why they’re doing a specific something over and over again. The way he teaches in principle is good. He’s building up Mk’s strength, endurance and technique, both mentally and physically before he teaches him the same things but with an actual weapon and flips and adding big huge destruction. It’s getting him to know his own strength before he gets to know the strength of the staff and the powers that he has and building him so he’ll be able to handle said power. 

And as I mentioned in a previous post, he certainly isn’t in a rush to teach Mk which can come off as lazy or like he’s not paying attention, but in reality, he just knows it’s going to take a while. He spent a long time mastering a lot of his stuff. Doing it the right way isn’t going to be the fast way, and he wants to do this the right way without risking the powers he gave him hurting Mk.

Combat training builds you up from where you are. The same punches over and over and over again seem boring and useless and annoying, but it builds up the muscles you need to punch hard and fast in different ways without hurting yourself. If you punch too hard before you’ve built up strength and the right technique can result in you breaking your wrist, hand or your fingers, or even shredding up and breaking the skin of your knuckles. (that’s why we wear hand wraps, for support and protection.) Mk has all that power, but none of that actual bodily strength that he needs in order to use it without hurting himself after he gives up his invincibility, and that’s when SWK really steps into teach him, because now that that is gone, he knows Mk’s gonna need to really know this stuff to stay safe. 

Mk, like a lot of students, doesn’t see the point in this and it’s really exhausting to do the same thing over and over again. To watch the cool flips and epic wall destroying and be told you can’t do that yet. Like, honestly why does it have to take so long? It’s disheartening and frustrating and that’s where he’s at when Macaque steps in. 

I’ll teach you what you WANT to know. Baiting them with what they want is how you get to people. Macaque essentially teaches Mk how to punch with the all the power to break a wall, to make it hurt, but not to keep his thumb outside of the curled fist to prevent it from being broken. He tells him, push yourself as hard as you can and use as much power as you can and that is how you fight. Your first strike should be your last. Which is actually a good motto, ending a fight fast is what you want, just not in the way he’s going about it. (the more truth your lie is the more convincing it can be.) You can’t win a fight every time by hurting yourself. That builds up and isn’t sustainable in the long run. 

So Mk’s doing backflips and smashing things, power channeling through him that his body isn’t ready for. Honestly, it’s possible that if it weren’t for the seal that Macaque had slapped onto him taking his energy and charging itself up, Mk might have been seriously hurt due to an overload of celestial power in his mortal body. 

Macaque’s a manipulator. And a pretty decently skilled one at that. Could be one of the best if he wasn’t so incapable of looking outside his own personal biases. The way he teaches Mk makes exactly what he wants to happen… happen. Honestly thinking about my teaching techniques post, i don’t even know if we can really call this Macaque’s way of teaching because it was all a manipulation to bring about a certain outcome. Drive a wedge between Mk and Wukong to keep the mentor from realizing whats going on, and to keep the student from getting better advice from the mentor. And use that wedge to get Mk to do what he wants. To rely on him and listen to him so he can get that power he’s trying to steal. 

I don’t think Macaque really cares about Mk one way or another at first (at least not as much as he cares about trying to fight Wukong, so not enough to get him to really notice things about Mk aside from “he’s Wukong’s student”,) but he does, I think, get more invested and interested in him when he realizes how much Wukong actually cares about his student, because what better way to get back at Wukong than to take something he cares about from him and make it his? 

I do think it’s interesting however that before realizing how much Wukong cared about him, he didn’t really have the intention to kill Mk. His plan seemed to be just to snatch the powers and then go fight and try to kill (literally impossible to) Wukong. He could have, probably, easily killed Mk when he took his powers. Mk might have Monkey King’s powers but he does not have his immortality. Macaque gloats and has a lot of fun destroying Mk’s self-confidence and digging his claws into his insecurities, but he doesn’t seem to actually have the intention to hurt him ooutside of words until after Wukong doesn’t fully fight him. And even then, as he says, “it’s nothing personal,” he just wants Wukong to fight him and if the thing stopping him is gone than he would fight him. 

Macaque really doesn’t seem to care for anyone in any sort of way outside of how they can serve him to get to Wukong. He’s so obsessed with Monkey King to the point where it actually makes him stupid, because he’s so used to assuming and analyzing things about Sun Wukong it’s like he’s forgotten how to do it with anyone else. In shadowplay he was WAAAYYY off the mark when trying to analyze Mk. To the point where Mk almost isn’t phased by his attempted manipulation because he can see the self-projection loud and clear and knows it’s not him. The moment Macaque is trying to actually have a (personal??) connection, he fails almost completely at it because he probably hasn’t allowed himself to even really stop and chill for a second since setting out on his quest for revenge against Wukong. 

I keep like, going off on tangents in my own analysis posts bGKL;MAEFOEAW so I’ll stop here for now. Just staring right at Macaque wondering what the heck his plan is outside of “kill Wukong” or if he even has one, or even knows how to have one that doesn’t involve the other monkey. For someone who seems to want him gone so bad, he sure doesn’t seem to be able to be a person without him defining part of him. 

“Aren’t’ you sick of living in my shadow?” 

In shadows seems to be the only place Macaque knows where to be.