#also one of the reasons i think catra fell flat bc

[raayllum]

i think a lot of what keeps a character sympathetic * honestly, is just letting them have good intentions and even better, a genuine lack of awareness. even if they're lying to themselves, and we know they're lying to themselves, they have to earnestly believe that they're not. they have to truly believe that what they're doing is right, even if we know it isn't, and that it's not self motivated, even when it often is.

take, for example, viren, claudia, and rayla. they both make massive mistakes (basically everything viren and claudia have ever done / rayla leaving callum the way they did) and most of those mistakes were self motivated. claudia bought her father's gaslighting because she wanted to believe in a world where her family could stay together, and then overruled viren's reservations about his ressurection when she brought him back; viren does many terrible things in arc 1, but is genuinely motivated by what he believes is ultimately better, long term, for the world at large even over his family, or that he knows better for his family in general, and having that lie stripped away is so much what s5 is about. for rayla, she's so selfless it rounds back into being selfish, where she had the security of knowing callum was safe while he worried over her for two years, leading to her deeply wounding him even when that was the last thing she wanted (and deeply hurting herself). they all thought they were genuinely doing the right thing, often putting themselves on the chopping block for their choices (claudia and rayla in particular) even as it just made everything worse.

but even when we see them being selfish, we know they're still genuinely motivated by their love for other people, and it's coming out in very misguided ways, we can still have sympathy, we can still understand. and that to me is great character writing

* obviously sympathy isn't the most important to feel towards a character, but it can certainly be helpful in having an audience be interested in, at the very least, understanding them even if we don't like them

[theskyexists]

season 4 nitpicks

im gonna be real with you guys - adora’s and catra’s story is a masterpiece. it’s wonderful, it’s incredible, it works.

and the first three seasons are entertaining and funny and really damn cool. season 5 as a whole is also a masterpiece - and delivers on basically everything that previous seasons set up

but season four you guys

thinking about it some more, i feel like i have very legit reasons to simply dislike it. it just.... doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do. it still puts the characters in the right places of course - but it does so in frankly, contrived ways.

the problem with it is that it doesn’t take itself seriously - it doesn’t take what it’s got itself into seriously.

Catra gets to scream and cry and break down and lash out and go into meltdown over everything she was denied and all the ways her life sucks and all the ways she ruins everything. that’s good.

but like. goddamn. the heart of season 4 should have been Queen Angella’s death.

like. and they watered that down to almost NOTHING. if you’re going to take Glimmer’s mom from her (after losing her dad as a little kid) - then you have to DEAL with it. seriously. in a serious way

even the end of season 3 felt like an extremely ridiculous take on a child losing their mother. like - she gets 4 seconds of crying. then season 4 starts on a JOKE about suddenly carrying all her mother’s responsibilities - when that’s one of the most tragic fucking things that’s happened in the entire SHOW.

season 4 just meanders on and on with Glimmer being kept from her friends for no reason (Queen responsibilities to a non-existent court disappear the moment they become irrelevant to the narrative). and Glimmer gets drawn in by Shadow Weaver a little bit and this is painted as a very a bad thing very unconvincingly. LIKE

look. Shadow Weaver should have been a really, really big player in Season 4. She’s the twisted mother figure - the manipulator - the shadow version of Angella. Now that Angella is gone, Glimmer is vulnerable, and she’s especially vulnerable to a mother figure - they could have really pushed the mirroring there with Catra and Adora - but she doesn’t get a specific dynamic with Shadow Weaver (like Adora or Catra) that defines their relationship and so it remains just - kind of irrelevant 

of course, in s4 there’s a conflict about Adora being concerned about Shadow Weaver’s influence and Glimmer is upset that everything has gone to shit and also that her friends are doing things without her and now they don’t seem to trust her any more and it’s this constant annoying undercurrent to all their interactions.

But what SHOULD have happened is that Shadow Weaver smelled power - and she used Angella’s death to get it. And she explicitly leans on Glimmer’s loss to manipulate her. That is what SHOULD have happened. We’re reminded of how she ruined Adora’s life - and Adora is too. especially because the uncomfy truce between Glimmer and Shadow Weaver is a thread throughout the whole show! and it was born out of literal torture - plus they’re opposites. young & old, daughter & mother figure, inexperienced with rule & experienced with rule, light & dark, born powerful & born having to scrape for power. and they have compelling similarities; their rage and their magic. Why did Shadow Weaver have to teach Glimmer her first spells when Castaspella is her aunt?? wouldn’t it have been interesting for Shadow Weaver to use her previous relationship with Micah to prey on his daughter? this might be a silly indicator but i think the lack of fandom interest in their relationship speaks for how its huge potential fell flat

Glimmer should have explicitly had Shadow Weaver planting discord in her heart and the Best Friend Squad. I know Double Trouble took that role in the narrative and I love that character like everyone does. but....it weakened the story imo

Also Glimmer should have been looking to kill Catra. Like, actually targeting her, instead of leaving her to die. Catra is directly responsible for Angella’s ...loss.  As Glimmer alienates Adora and Bow by GENUINELY going over the line (instead of getting scolded for using a truth spell that actually helped the Rebellion out like multiple times, or idk, turning up to lead her own fucking missions lol). this then develops in perfect step with how Catra alienates the last of her friends and connections. complementary trauma (guilt and rage)

this would have definitely upped the punch on Glimmer about to make good on killing Catra - and then backing down when she realises that she’s ACTUALLY become like Catra - driven purely by loss and rage and hatred- the flipside of love. both of them utterly alone

this would also have uh....made Bow’s anger at her in s5 a little more like - like it was fine now because she definitely made a big mistake with horrible consequences. But it was an emotional mistake. not a moral one. and Bow and Adora fucked up there a bit too. relationship-wise - not Horde Prime’s found us because of me-wise. and it was Glimmer refusing to adhere to the show’s genre conventions - which EXPLICITLY paints lack of strategy (military) as a virtue. and maybe that’s - maybe that’s just the show - and it’s a good thing. But now it really seemed extremely dumb of Glimmer to know Light Hope was not to be trusted and to then to ask NO questions  about how to use the Heart after it was activated or set conditions for her cooperation. like - couldn’t they have embedded that and transformed it from sheer dumbness into ruthlessness ? like it was THERE, a desperation to protect what she loves - but it was all muted.

They also definitely did not push Adora’s ‘i need to protect her because i promised Angella’ schtick enough. especially as this could have got really interesting if Glimmer had misused this (taking on Shadow Weaver aspects) FOR REAL. not some kind of ‘im pissed bc u used me as a decoy when this was absolutely the superior strategic decision and i should know that bc i was trained to think like that and anyway i CHOSE to go martyr myself and you just used taht choice’ bullshit from Adora. im saying, like, making ADORA break HER moral code in order to get results. this would put Adora in a very interesting position as well as a hero and with her unhealthy self-sacrificial tendencies

they could have really upped the drama if they had leaned into the darkness of loss and grief - like they did in s5. but they didn’t.