#amphibia's got nothing on this

[stubz]

Oh shit Jeri was depressed. I am an almost 22 year old adult just realizing that the goofy girl in Digimon Tamers was legit depressed. Not only that but the depression was bound to happen. This child was hanging on by her goddamn fingernails until they broke off her flesh.

People of Tumblr let me introduce you to Jeri Katou from Digimon Tamers, my first introduction to depression!

So first things first, her mom is dead. Died when she was like 4. Her dad was shit at comforting her and basically noped out of the mourning period. In fact it turns out she never got over it bc of his shit comforting.

Then her Digimon partner who in magic terms is her familiar and in regular terms her platonic soulmate bestie gets murdered right in front of her. His final words trigger her trauma related to her mom. She spirals. Hard.

Depression hits her like a freight train. During this time a demon digital organism possesses her, replaces her (creates an evil clone of her), and kidnaps her. Literally using her nightmares and depression to fuel itself.

Jeri walked so Darcy could run. Jeri walked so Hunter could sprint. Not much correlation between the latter other than the fact that Clone!Jeri is found out and basically becomes an older Jeri. And I just realized that Jeri and/or the others will get ptsd when seeing how close Clone Jeri was at predicting how she'll look in the future.

[candydos]

happy 2 year anniversary to the end of amphibia :”)

I miss you, silly frog show <3

[syrasenturi]

Memory loss au but it's everybody except Anne slowly forgetting amphibia until they think she just made it all up

[jaekaicx]

friendly reminder that we'll probably never get any answers on the yes or yes prom poster

[detentiontrack]

If I got transported to amphibia I would be fine until I got my period with no access to a menstrual cup, advil, and my heating pad

[miqotepotatoe]

🐸 + 🥷

[lellu]

complete list of dessa songs that have given me amphibia brainrot:

- skeleton key, mineshaft 2 + blush for anne

- the crow, say when + matches to paper dolls for sasha

- call off your ghost, momento mori, dear marie + jumprope for post amphibia sashannarcy

- palace for andrias

- sound the bells for the finale

[kiwibirb1]

Gonna be honest it's great fun watching all these darksonas appear. Like was hilarious watching Daren from afar and nows there's more? This is great. Yall are entertaining as shit

[koifishanonymous]

i cannot express how mad i am at the utter disrespect the industry gives to animation

[tharrb]

Hot take incoming: amphibia was hurt by Disney screwing it over more than the owl house

[partly-cloudyskies]

*Standing over my own WIP like it's a car that won't start*

idk man i think i spent 6 months working on something that just isn't gonna go

[ordinaryschmuck]

I love that The Ghost and Molly McGee's forced cancellation isn't just frustrating to fans of the show but to people in the animation industry as well. They're just as sick as we are about how much studios disrespect animation. They keep looking for the next Spongebob, Simspons, or goodness forbid Family Guy, but instead having faith in the creators and their content, they just...wait. They wait to make a profit and do the bare minimum to market their shows and make them available.

Let's look at Gravity Falls for example. I remember that when Gravity Falls was still airing, you would be able to find out a new episode was coming out based on coming across a commercial by random chance or by the people working the show promoting it online. Add that with the fact that it was on a different channel that required you paying MORE for your cable to get it. It WAS available through Disney Channel, a channel more available at a cheaper price, but the entire of Season Two got moved to the more expensive Disney XD, where Disney shows go to die, because...REASONS. With no warning or announcement. I think I found out about Gravity Falls moving to Disney XD because the trailer played during a commercial break. And that's just the START the show's problems. Mixed in with poor marketing, the show would have a crazy inconsistent schedule, where we'd have four episodes a week, a few months of NOTHING, a few more episodes a week, nothing for a few months, a random episode playing between that nothingness with next to no promotion, and all of that happening to the rest of the show until it finally died a slow death with its series finale where four episodes got stretched out for six months. That...is NOT okay. And it doesn't stop with Gravity Falls.

Steven Universe, OK KO, Ducktales 2017, Amphibia, The Owl House, and now Ghost and Molly McGee are all shows that had similar and sometimes WORSE treatments as Gravity Falls did, where the networks gave next to NO marketing, the creators had to promote their own shows themselves, and the airing schedules were so inconsistent with wildly long hiatuses that only the most dedicated fans were willing to keep watching. General audiences (mainly kids) weren't willing to keep up with shows that had ongoing stories if the episodes stories kept being too spaced apart and never had reruns as frequent as other shows like Teen Titans Go or Big City Greens (Or whatever's constantly on network TV nowadays. I don't know. I mostly watch shit on streaming).

The people of the animation industry is catching onto all of these tricks, and they're getting sick of it. They're getting sick of inconsistent schedules. They're getting sick of trying to bend over backwards in every possible way to make the show they wanted. By either making serialized content as episodic as possible so the network could air it more or by condensing their stories as much as they can, already expecting that forced cancellation to happen sooner than later. And in some cases, they don't even get the luxury of being told their show is ending. Did you know that Inside Job and Paranormal Park both had seasons that were already in development before Netflix pulled the plug shortly after releasing new episodes of their shows? Did you know that The Ghost and Molly McGee was already working on a Season Three before Disney shut that down so they had to force out a series finale that would still be good despite the cancellation? Because it's true. It's ALWAYS true. Creators want to make MORE, but the studios won't let them because they didn't profit off of it. Except they WOULD HAVE if they treated it better.

I want kids to grow up with characters that stick around through their childhood, just like I did with mine. I want kids to have their own Ed, Edd n Eddy, Codename: Kids Next Door, Phineas and Ferb, or Kim Possible. I want kids to watch shows that last more than two-three seasons, stick around for years, and leave an impact as if they have all the time in the world because to them, it feels like they do. I want kids to have a show that ends on a high note because the creators wanted it and not because the networks demanded it. But the unfortunate thing is that it doesn't seem possible nowadays. Because if a mostly episodic show like The Ghost and Molly McGee fails, despite being charming and inoffensive and something most kids will love, the what hope IS left.

[smelt-starverse]

On the Amphibia Timeskip Designs

Hi! I know I normally don't do analysis posts like these, but I got into an interesting conversation (read: infodumped hard to a couple of unsuspecting friends) about the subject on Discord earlier and I felt like it might be enjoyed by you all. Anyways, to begin...

I think the best place to start is Marcy. The thing that jumps out to me about her new design the most to me is her color scheme.

Across the board, everything is brighter and more saturated. Her dark blue coat has been swapped for a bright blue jacket, her dull green skirt has been traded for some vibrant green pants, her shirt has gone from a light gray to an off-white, and her debatably brown boots have been replaced with light brown, almost orange shoes.

Through the entire series, her hair is neat, properly combed (when not messed up by water or helmet-hair, anyways), and it's got this layer of gloss to it. It's a pretty innocuous set of details...

...but I think the picture comes together better when we compare it to her hair in the finale. It's less neat, it's messy in places, but it's not greasy anymore. It's not constrained at all, it's healthy and doing its own thing. And I think, in a way, that applies to her outfit as a whole. Throughout the "present" of Amphibia, Marcy is nearly always wearing a uniform of some kind; her school uniform, the Newtopian Night Guard uniform, the Core's greaves, it's always a look forced on her. In the finale, though, she finally gets to make her own decision on what to wear. It's casual, but it's her, emphasized by the personal touches like the pins on her jacket and the figures on her bag that expand out from little expressions of freedom on her original design. She's even got ear piercings, something typically associated with rebellion and freedom. She's finally allowed to be her own person. Not anybody else's, just... herself.

My thoughts on Sasha and Anne are a bit less in-depth, but there's definitely interesting stuff to mention regardless.

It might not seem like Sasha's changed much visually during the timeskip. Her hair is cut pretty much the same way, she still has a pink accessory on her head, she's still wearing a skirt and a jacket (like she did over her school uniform), and... I think that's intentional. It's a subtle sign that most of Sasha's growth wasn't off-screen during a ten-year time jump...

...it was during Season 3. With every redesign she got from her Barrel's Warhammer redesign onwards, her design got softer. Less spikes, more rounded edges, less rigidity. She even undid her ponytail, not holding her hair back anymore. Her reds got less area on her design, until on the timeskip look they were pretty much replaced entirely with a simple purple skirt. All that aggressiveness is gone, replaced with a comparatively soft design...

...and with the addition of a blue shirt to her color palette. It comes off as a little random, but considering her new profession as a therapist, I think a light and soft color palette featuring hues that are easy on the eyes is an important part of that. It's subtle, but I think it helps a lot.

And finally... Anne.

I find Anne's timeskip design to be the most difficult to talk about in this context, because it's mostly just a regular uniform. The green polo, beige shorts, white undershirt, and lanyard are just what she has to wear to work, and I find it a little difficult to find meaning from it... but that doesn't mean there's nothing there.

Let's get the obvious one out of the way. The leaf scrunchy is a cute way to call back to Anne's hair leaves, a pretty defining aspect of her original design dating all the way back to the first episode of the show that followed her all through her journey in Amphibia. It's a fun little way to reminisce on her past... but it's not the only part of her outfit dedicated to reminiscing.

That little blue flower band on her wrist is also easy to miss, but pretty obvious what it's referencing once you notice it.

It's most obviously a callback to the blue flower crown from earlier in the same episode, but Anne's almost always been associated with blue and flowers, with even her energy aura in her Calamity form taking the shape of blue flower petals.

But those are just simple callbacks. I think the two things that tell us the most about Anne's growth and who she is now... are these.

For her entire exodus in Amphibia, Anne's had one ragged shoe to keep her company. She wasn't ready for an adventure in the swamp. Now, she has proper rain boots, something designed to actually withstand the kind of work she does now. She's fully become comfortable with where she is and who she wants to be. And, of course, there's that little bandage on her leg. Perhaps it's a sign that she's still going out there, undergoing little adventures, taking risks and getting into trouble. Maybe it's a sign that that spirit we come to know so well over the course of the show is still alive and well... or maybe it's where she takes her estrogen shots

[sometimes-they-come-back-237]

Even though the show is over, I wanted to share my story of how I got into DuckTales 2017.

So, I’ve always enjoyed anything Disney but as I got older I kind of started shying away from it and became a lot more interested in the horror/slasher genre. So when I heard there was a DuckTales reboot coming out, at first I was like okay, cool. But I didn’t watch it.

Then one day I was scrolling through YouTube and suddenly DuckTales content was filling my feed and I’m just like, why? Lol. I haven’t been watching anything Disney related so why does this keep popping up? The videos consisted of the episode, The Spear of Selene.

After a few days of seeing nothing but that in my feed, I finally decided to watch the pilot, and I thought, “Wow, this show is actually pretty damn good!”, and I ultimately fell in LOVE with the show, especially the ending with Dewey finding that portrait of Della, which intrigued me. Ever since I was little, I would watch specials with the triplets and not even think about their parents so when they brought up Della, I was hooked.

Plus by the time I binged the first season, season two hadn’t premiered yet and I thought that was perfect. I caught up just in time to get hyped for season two.

I’m so happy I got to experience this show when I did and got to be a part of the hype and the fandom in its prime. It’s become one of my favorite series ever. It’s the reason I gave shows like Amphibia and Owl House a chance.

If anyone else wants to share, I’d LOVE to read your stories about how you got into the show!

[flower-boi16]

TOH and Amphibia Vs Helluva Boss: How To and How NOT To Make A Sympathetic Character

Anybody who watches Helluva Boss would know that Viv doesn't exactly know how to write sympathetic characters with Stolas. I talked about this before but the reason why most people can sympathize with Stolas is because there's nothing about him you can even sympathize with, he has NO sympathetic qualities except for having a mean wife ig, but that doesn't excuse him of his actions.

The thing is, making a character sympathetic is not a bad thing in itself, it's actually a pretty easy way to get the audience to like and root for a character in your story, especially your main character. But the problem comes when the character isn't sympathetic despite the story wanting you to sympathize with them, and well, Stolas is that character. A common issue with Stolas is that he's constantly absolved of his mistakes and treated as if he did nothing wrong, and that's a bad thing because well, the audience can't sympathize with a character that's a bad person who is always coddled and excused of his mistakes.

The thing is though, while unlikeable characters are hard to sympathize with, there are ways to keep your character sympathetic while also acknowledging when they fuck up. Just take a look at Marcy Wu from Amphibia for instance; Marcy is a character you can sympathize for since she's afraid of being alone, and she clung onto her friends and was upset that she was going to be separated from them, fearing that she would end up being alone and their friendship being torn apart, so she intentionally got them stuck on Amphibia so they wouldn't have to leave.

Marcy's motivation is something you can sympathize for but you can also acknowledge that what she did was fucked up, and despite still portraying her as sympathetic, the show doesn't try to absolve her of her mistakes and excuse them, the narrative fully acknowledges that Marcy still made a selfish mistake and doesn't excuse her actions, regardless of her sympathetic motivations for doing so.

Then there's another character from Amphibia's sister show, Hunter. I got a comment on this post saying that "Woobified UwU soft boy Belos is Hunter", which is what got me to make this comparison in the first place because...Hunter, like Marcy, is not woobified. Woobification is when a character that was previously portrayed as an asshole with little sympathetic qualities is suddenly portrayed as an UwU soft boy that we are supposed to sympathize for when the audience can't.

Hunter does not fit this because not only is he actually deserving of sympathy by the narrative but is also, like Marcy, not absolved of his mistakes. I'd take a look at Any Sport In A Storm, where Hunter kidnaps the emerald entrails to force them to join the EC. The episode does a lot to show how Hunter is indoctrinated and he thinks that he is doing the right thing and that the EC is good, he thinks he was doing his friends a favor and they will thank him later, which shows that Hunter is not a bad person, he's just brainwashed.

Later in the episode though, Hunter realizes that what he did was wrong thanks to Steve and he goes out of his way to fix his mistake. Hunter is still a sympathetic character to the audience, but the show doesn't absolve him of this mistake, it acknowledges what Hunter did was wrong and it makes him go out of his way to fix his mistake.

Hunter and Marcy are characters that the audience can sympathize for, but the viewers and the show itself can acknowledge that these characters made mistakes and the shows don't try to coddle or excuse it, while still keeping them sympathetic and likable without woobifying them.

My point here is this; you CAN have Stolas be a little bit sympathetic, but you first need to give him more sympathetic attributes AND also not absolve him of any mistakes he makes, the narrative should acknowledge Stolas's fuck ups and make him fix them, while being able to keep him sympathetic. Though I would rather have the show not try to make Stolas sympathetic at all buuuuut hey if Viv wants to make Stolas sympathetic she could have done it better.

[anthurak]

So I recently saw some discussion on Luz being a ‘Chosen One’-type character. And it really got me thinking about how Luz is, if not an outright subversion, certainly a very interesting exploration and twist on the ‘Chosen One’ trope.

See, Luz technically fits most of the criteria for being a Chosen One, namely being ‘chosen’ by a greater/higher power (the Titan) and gifted great power (glyphs) which she winds up using to defeat the big bad (Belos). However, when we look at the context, execution and subtle nuances of Luz’s relationship with the Titan, we see a lot of differences from what we would expect from a more ‘typical’ Chosen One.

Consider for a moment when most Chosen-Ones are actually ‘chosen’. Usually it’s from the moment they’re born, or in some cases even long BEFORE even that. Alternatively it’s at the very start of the story as part of whatever inciting incident kicks off the protagonist’s role in the plot. Basically, a protagonist being a ‘Chosen One’ is almost always closely tied up in whatever is bringing them into the story in the first place.

But that’s NOT what happened with Luz. She’s not some ‘destined savior’ who was singled out by the Titan when she was born, or even when she first entered the Boiling Isles. No, the first time Luz became known to the Titan (barring time-travel chicanery*) was almost certainly when she began to befriend their son.

I mean, think about this: it’s not until episode FOUR that Luz actually becomes ‘chosen’ by the Titan when they show her the first glyph.

On top of that, there is nothing ‘destined’ about the Titan showing Luz the glyphs. I mean I think it’s pretty clear that the first time they showed Luz the light glyph they were simply trying to help Luz and King to pacify Eda. And after that, they kept showing Luz more glyphs… simply because they wanted to.

The Titan didn’t show Luz the glyphs as part of some grand, thought-out plan for her to defeat Belos and bring peace to the Boiling Isles. Luz didn’t pass some ‘secret test of character’ to become ‘chosen’ by the Titan. She was simply kind and befriended King, and so the Titan decided to just… help her out. First by showing her the first couple glyphs and then showing her more because, well… they LIKE Luz.

The Titan may fill the role of some greater, higher power of the series, but when we finally meet them, they aren’t really presented as one. The Titan is characterized as being quite grounded and down to earth. For all of the incredible power and influence they have over the series, the Titan isn’t presented as some ‘godly’ figure, but simply as ‘King’s Dad’. And not even in some ‘all-knowing, omnipotent entity taking on a form the protagonist can comprehend’ way either (see Amphibia’s finale), but instead simply as a person who wanted to do the right thing, made some major mistakes, and now in large part just wants their son and his new family to be safe and happy.

Again, it all frames the Titan reaching out to Luz to show her the glyphs not as part of some grand plan to defeat Belos or some other ‘destined purpose’, but as the Titan simply wanting to help Luz.

Contrary to what I think a lot of people think, I would call Luz’s story fundamentally distinct from the typical ‘Chosen One’ narrative. Despite the surface-level similarities her story might have, there is nothing ‘destined’, ‘predetermined’ or ‘chosen’ about Luz’s story. She really did stumble through Eda’s portal door chasing Owlbert by pure chance. And it wasn’t some hidden, secret, inborn ‘quality’ about Luz that led to her receiving knowledge from the Titan, or even pure, random happenstance either. Luz simply befriended the Titan’s son and slowly grew into his adoptive older sister.

Just as Luz’s friendliness, kind heart and love for the Boiling Isles and its people endeared her to Eda, King, Amity and so many others, it also endeared her to the very Titan themself.

*If anyone is going to bring up the time-travel point, I would like to remind everyone that is the ‘Stable Time Loop’ trope. NOT ‘The Chosen One’ trope.