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rangespacer · 1 year ago

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i've been picking away at this meta for days now, wondering why i couldn't seem to write, and i think it boils down to me blowing it way out of proportion in my mind. i don't usually participate in events, so i was making it out to be this whole Thing that had to be polished and coherent, when that's not how i operate and is also frankly not in the spirit of blosc. and so, instead, for @warpolomewdarkmatter 's blosctober, i present my stream-of-consciousness rambling.

on sadness, and grieving something that's still alive, and having to pick up the pieces of your life and reevaluate who you are. on having your foundations rocked in your thirties, and still being able to find something new. on infinite potential, and how things might come back around, with a bit of patience and understanding, though never in the same way. on sitting with loss. on new beginnings.

i'll open this by saying that blosc is a piece of media for children. sometimes it teaches kids about right and wrong but mostly it's for entertainment. like the ratio isn't even in education's favour it's majority whacky shit, and must a cartoon be educational all the time to be fun? i didn't think so, and i still don't. blosc also spawns from a franchise that used to be well known for being something that both children and adults can enjoy, with parts of the content specifically geared towards adults. while i don't think the themes i read into blosc now were ever intended to be there, i'm enjoying returning to it as an adult and seeing how i can apply what i've learned in the last two decades to it, and what it gives me in return. my general approach to media is that as long as it makes sense with what's presented in the piece, you're good. even if it contradicts someone else's reading. even if it contradicts your own! and right now, meeting it halfway from where i'm at, i'm thinking about how life goes on after a change that feels like it should be the end of the world, and coming to terms with the fact that you're going to have to keep grieving and growing for the rest of your life and it will feel fresh, every time, but will also bring joy.

what i was trying to get at in my meta, in far too many words, is how the series is bookended (maybe not perfectly, depending on how you order the episodes, but generally) by buzz losing warp, and by the two of them reaching, at the very least, a cordial acceptance of the way things are. i read more into that, i'm sure a lot of people on here do, but i'm going to keep my language neutral because i really want to dig at what the show is presenting us, factually. that said buzz and warps' romance is real to me, so sorry for the divorce and congrats on maybe getting remarried. regardless of how you read it, this is indisputable: blosc opens ( or is prequeled -- prequeled? preceded? prequeled, i'll mint that ) by establishing what buzz's life has been for the past two decades, then tearing it apart. he has, to the best of our knowledge, been partnered with warp since they were in the academy. we see how well they work together, communicating without words, enjoying each other's presence, relying wholly on one another.

this is key to me, because the show will go on to establish buzz as being fully capable of working independently, especially in episodes like lone ranger, haunted moon, and shiv katall. and i do think he's always been like this. it was the writer's intention that buzz be the most static, the most 'perfect', the ideal towards which everybody else was striving ( or the thing to destroy, and i have so, so much to say about how buzz represents star command to a detrimental degree to both himself and the alliance, but that's another post ); simultaneously, they go out of their way to show that buzz is not perfect. he has flaws, he's egotistical, prideful, at times even unreliable in some very specific, very interesting ways that we'll get back to. but i say all this because i often think about what it must have been like for buzz to have lived twenty years with warp, what deficits warp was covering, how intimately they must have known one another, and how his presence could have been taken for granted. this is some extrapolation on my part, though we do see them to continue to work well together over the course of the series, and one of zurg's goals with 'agent z' was to have someone who knew buzz well enough to defeat him. given that zurg has known buzz for at least as long as warp has ( i think of their teamwork in war and peace and war and their intuitive understanding of one another in stress test and the main event ), that's saying something. my point is, twenty years represents the majority of my life. unless you believe buzz is over forty ( he could be! but i don't think so ), it's the majority of his life. and when you meet someone young, especially in a learning environment, you grow around them like a vine. there are grooves in buzz's personality in the shape of warp. sorry that was two steps over the homosexual line and i don't know how to gracefully extract myself from this paragraph. two trucks having sex. okay moving on.

what i'm driving at is that i believe there are ways buzz, perfect ranger, recipient of the order of galactic merit first class, representative of star command at 99% efficiency when riding solo, came to rely on warp that even he didn't know. it just happened. twenty years. teenagers to well-established adults. you'd know them like you knew your right hand ( you'd blow your right arm off to extricate yourself from them ). and then warp was gone. and while the violence of that loss is not negligible when considering buzz's response, understand that it would have been violence unto buzz either way, because that was a part of him. consider the sudden feeling of vulnerability, on top of the grief. you were one half of a whole, so you, by definition, are lesser now. you'll never be as good as you were with them. you wonder how much of your partnership was just them, or the thing that was greater than the sum of your combined parts. that's two out of three on it not having been just you, which is what you're left with.

blosc loves to be genre fiction, does not matter what genre, and it dabbles in noir more than once, and more broadly police fiction -- buddy cops without the humour. it gives maltese falcon. rush hour. eddie valiant at the bar. he was your partner and you're supposed to do something about it. hector kills patroclus and it's achilles' undoing. buzz has made-to-order cop backstory, and what holds this trope together in every incarnation, to me, is the depth of feeling. you cannot shrug this off and shed a single tear. you have to get pathetic with it. cry, lose your job, lose your other friends, spiral into alcoholism and debt; the loss of the partner precipitates absolute upheaval in the survivor's life.

how could a replacement compare? even if they could do everything your partner could do on paper, they don't know you. they'll never know you like that, not even if you spend twenty years together, because the person you are now is not the person you were when you first met your original partner twenty years before. this isn't inference at this point, it's not even analysis, this is textual to the film. again, genre. none of this is new. but damn if it's not done well. but what i think the movie misses, because it's busy making its actual point and not the point i want it to make, is the chance to more directly address the death of buzz's sense of self. if you have spent your adult developmental years shaped by someone, if you owe a great percentage of who you are to them, and then they're ripped away, what's left? it's barbie and ken. it's buzz and warp. in the same way there is no 'just warp', there is no 'just buzz'. it doesn't matter that buzz is the one casting the shadow that rangers like ty live in. there can only be comparison with multiple individuals. the inverse is true: for buzz to be great, someone has to be less great ( let's not say 'bad', zurg has that covered, or 'incompetent', because no ranger is, not even the rookies ). i don't think buzz ever viewed warp as lesser. that doesn't even seem to be an issue on their radar, ever, not like it is with buzz and ty. but my point is buzz's partnership with warp made him shine. what was the deciding factor in that splendour? would buzz shine alone? ( yes. ) would buzz ever shine as brightly without warp? well...

so you've lost your spouse partner. you're at least in your thirties and the routine of your life for as long as you have been an adult is gone. blown to bits. cosmic dust. you launched an empty casket into space and the pictures you picked for the memorial show you as secondary to your spouse friend. it centers them and their achievements entirely. the love you felt was all-encompassing. and now you want to be alone, to grieve, to come to terms with what happened, and to get a sense of where you stand in an unfamiliar galaxy. it's a shame, then, that life goes on. there are patrols to do and taxes to file and hyper death rays to address, and the universe cannot sit and wait for you to do things like process the greatest upheaval of your adult life. you're out of your partnered era and into... what?

you were a student and then you were someone's equal, so maybe now you should be someone's teacher! that's reasonable. that's a natural progression. there's a rookie ripe for you! she's young but she's the best in her class, smart as a whip, and she has a lot in common with you ( she always knows best! she's two times too clever for the rules she enforces ), so why not take her? no, you're still grieving. no partners. what about this guy? he's wanted to be a ranger for forever, he has passion, he's been studying up, and he idolises you! would that work? no. no partners! okay, fine, a robot, then, if you can't handle a person. the robot is just like you, the robot will idolise you, will you take this? and because the robot cannot die, sure, okay. and you open the door a crack to being a teacher. and when you and the three newbies are the only people left in the universe, no, for real, you step up, you take control, and you see what they have to offer and you appreciate it.

SIMULTANEOUSLY. you discover that the partner you've been trying to find time to grieve is not actually dead. and we veer back into hard analysis territory here, because that's another emotional undercurrent that i wish had been delved into more. i mean, there are layers to that shit. the initial grief of having to bury someone you loved. the guilt of feeling that it was your fault, that they died so you could live, in part because there is an insane person who is obsessed with you ( again, meta for another day ). and now they're alive, and the circumstances of that revelation do not soothe the grief, they transform it. there's the immediate, the obvious: the pain that comes with any betrayal, especially that of your best friend leaving you for your worst enemy. the confusion over being left to deal with all of that initial grief -- how could they do that to you, didn't they know how much it would hurt? that's rhetorical, they know you better than anybody else, they knew exactly how much it would hurt, and they did it anyways. and they seem to be happy about it. now there's anger, and disbelief, and on top of it all you still feel lost. but you still have a job to do, so you fight, and you win. you save the day. you positive-mental-attitude the universe back to normalcy despite the emotional turmoil because it needs to get done and for all your flaws you have a heart of pure gold.

and that should put a cap on that situation! but... it doesn't. because the story doesn't end there. there's a whole series to get through. so what we've seen is the death of the old status quo and the establishment of the new. zurg is still there, buzz is still the pride of star command, but now he's got three kids and warp is on the other side.

i'm struggling to put to words the feeling that that evokes in me. i think it's relatable to anyone who's lost a best friend, not to death, but to time. they're gone, but they're still there. close enough to touch, but you can't. and you know them, but they're a stranger to you. you know the way they speak ( just like they know the way you speak - 'to infinity... and beyond : /' ), how they move, how they think. you know them, but there's a new side to them, one you don't recognise. and it's sickening, in a way, because it shouldn't be there. i had this whole multi-paragraph passage planned in the original version of this post, about The Gaze as a concept, and ego( -death ) and perception and all that fun philosophical nonsense. but i am not a philosopher, and we don't have time for all that, so i'll boil it down to what's relevant. we cannot ever fully know another person because we are hamstrung by our own limited point of view. there is no way to completely bridge the gap between the totality of what somebody else is, and what we perceive them to be. and i don't even mean this in a chiding, reductive way, this isn't something we do out of malice. the fact of the matter is, we cannot live inside another person's brain the way we live inside our own. the best we can do is acknowledge that they are as nuanced as we are, and that we'll never grasp all of them because we just can't. again, such is existing via comparison, such is being individual organisms.

buzz knew warp really, really, really well, but even if warp hadn't been lying, the warp in buzz's head and the warp that exists in reality are two very different things. it's not buzz's fault, it's not even a matter of fault, it just is. buzz could only ever take all that data gathered via observation and make predictions about what warp would do next. twenty years offered up a lot of data, but the issue is, warp is a person. people can change. people can act unpredictably. people can even act willingly against their own nature. as we cannot control other people's actions, there's nothing we can do about this, and that can be maddening. when a loved one suddenly acts 'unlike themselves', the sudden shift can have a dizzying effect. you think, 'where am i,' and 'who are they,' and try to reorient yourself. but anyone can act any way, anytime. i think of one bad day, or the breaking point. you would, if you were hungry enough. you would, if you were tired enough. we are flexible creatures. what was in warp was in warp for a long time, but it didn't fully show until he let it. and buzz's feeling of vertigo is completely understandable.

and then buzz tries to cope. he swings wildly between being angry with warp, missing warp, and deluding himself into thinking that this is just a phase, that the 'old warp', the 'real' warp, will come back. think of how he exhausts the list of evil clones and mind control before even approaching considering that warp just, y'know, did that. and even past that, he thinks warp is going to come back. he wants it sooo bad. up until their very last episode together ( ancient evil ) he wants it, and booster gets to spell that out for xr and the audience. but... this is wrong. i did not go into all of the above to crank my own hog, i wanted to make a point: buzz is seething sick because his image of warp does not line up with the reality of warp, and that's a major shortcoming that he's going to have to buck by the end of their mutual arc. because, morality and the idea of objective good aside, warp is not brainwashed, and he isn't being coerced. this is a choice he made with a clear head and time to consider the pros and cons. he says as much repeatedly, and buzz does not want to hear it. he's understandable! he's relatable! but he's also unfair here. he loves warp very much -- i'll even argue that he loves parts of warp that warp himself doesn't want to acknowledge -- but this is who warp is, and as long as buzz keeps rejecting that, they aren't going to be able to move past the break.

and buzz isn't the only one fucking up. oh, warp wants so badly to put star command behind him. he wants it to have been a front. he wants to be Thee Bad Boy, and sure, he's good at being bad, but on the scale of evil motivation in this show where zurg and nos-4-a2 and evilyear exist, warp's really boils down to, 'i want as much money as possible as quickly as possible so i can enjoy myself as soon as possible.' and is he willing to do fucked up shit to accomplish that? oh, yes. but post-movie, he never does anything quite as bad as the unimind. his goal isn't to cause pain, he's just willing to do that to get what he wants. splitting hairs? yeah, maybe, but there is a substantial difference between a sadist and someone without many qualms. and here's the thing. as much as buzz's perception of warp is a construct, it isn't a baseless one. buzz is insane! and we love him for it! but his understanding of who warp is is based off of observation, he's not pulling the veneer of nobility out of his ass. warp did the job for twenty years. and he dealt with zurg behind the scenes, sold weapons, sold information, but he also earned the order of galactic merit second class and the bronze cluster. he had buzz, who worked with him on a daily basis, convinced that he was not just good, but dedicated to the galactic alliance. there were positive, tangible results of his actions as a space ranger, and by my count, harm and help do not cancel each other out barring specific circumstances. you cannot unrescue that cat from that tree. you cannot unhelp that old lady across the street. 'you can't take it back, your actions have consequences' applies to the good as well as the bad, and isn't that a blessed relief.

and our actions make up who we are. so as much as warp wants to pretend that he has always been bad to the bone, we know that that isn't true. and buzz knows that that isn't true. so buzz has one half of the picture and refuses to see the other, and the same for warp on the opposite side. and their progression throughout the series, especially from tag team to ancient evil, is, to me, them slowly coming to terms with what they have become -- and more importantly, growing to understand one another better and in ways that their partnership in star command could not have allowed. yes, buzz has lost his routine, and some comfort with it, but he has gained a truer, fuller understanding of who warp is, and that in and of itself is rewarding. buzz didn't not know warp, but he also didn't have all the facts; there was a lie at the core of their relationship, and they couldn't be completely honest with one another so long as warp was a ranger, because warp just doesn't want to be part of star command. ( and good for him! good for him! ) if warp had stayed for buzz's sake, he would have been betraying himself, and even if they'd been happy, i think they're better off with everything out in the open. i think their relationship is stronger and more genuine for it.

buzz spends the series struggling with his rookies ( and maybe i'll make a different post, because this one is already too long, about buzz as a teacher and how that's a learning experience for him too ), but, eventually, he gets it down -- or he's on the road to getting it down. he isn't the buzz he was with warp, he's a different buzz, but not a worse buzz. not lesser. can buzz shine as brightly without warp? yes! differently. it will never be the same, but that doesn't mean it won't be good. and in the end, in ancient evil, when buzz literally gets 'old warp' and it's horrible and nearly kills him and their victory is reliant on letting warp be his sneaky self to steal the youth back from natron, they come back together. and it's good. it's real good.

man. i don't know. the older you get the more you will grieve experiences. we were too young to know, before. we learn how to deal with death, and then we learn how to deal with not-death, with the loss of someone who's still around, but they're not a part of your life anymore. maybe a relationship will change and you will grieve the empty space where someone used to be. and maybe they'll come back into your life and create a different space for themselves, and you will simultaneously mourn the old and celebrate the new. you'll make room to feel both at once and accept the contradiction. it's a feeling i've had as i've gotten older, nostalgic grief, and i'm starting to come to terms with the fact that i will keep feeling it, and keep changing. that i will grow accustomed to something and it might last twenty years but it won't last forever. that i will be uprooted at some point and that it will be painful and that i will survive it. i watched blosc when i was a child and i came back to it and i'm glad i can still get something from it. i'm glad the children's show has an adult protagonist who's going through some sort of quarter- / mid-life crisis. i'm glad it told the gayest love story of our time for no reason. i'm glad this tag is still active. i'm glad this post is over.

#blosc #blosctober #✩ no sign of intelligent life anywhere! ( ooc )#⭑ ready the mega head cannon! ( headcanons & blosc )#|| um. meow meow meow. meow meow meow meow.#|| so that's almost 4k words.#|| blosc buzz truly gives single mother runaway husband raising his three kids.#|| divorce. remarriage. blosc gives and gives.

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s7arcr0sser · 1 year ago

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I have to get this off my chest because I've seen these two get misunderstood a lot already, and with the little attention the pairing is given, maybe it's time to contribute some. If you're willing to read this please just keep an open mind, i understand that Buzz and Ozma aren't the fandom's favorite pairing especially because of the appeal some other non canon ships have (even i see it - i don't blame anyone for it) but it really makes me sad when bias influences people's ability to enjoy things outside of their main interest.

***i should also emphasize that this is just how i interpret it - the beauty of art is that it's subjective***

It always tics me off whenever someone says that Buzz is arrogant or anything of the type. The creators of the show describe his character as "...his biggest flaw is that he believes in his own legend." He's confident. He's overconfident even, which isn't without reason considering he has nearly 100% success rate. It's easy to confuse the two but the difference is in that, he does not belittle anyone and doesn't feel threatened by someone being as good as him or even better. There are times when he has joked at other people's expense (notably - Opposites attract, Speed trap and Plasma monster) but here's the catch - he always learns and by the end makes up for it. It's because he's not the stoic emotionless type of hero, he has personality and sometimes says things he doesn't fully think through. His whole team, Buzz included, loves throwing jabs at each other all the time, their goal never is to genuinely offend.

That leads to my next point. He always means well. Again, he never belittles ON PURPOSE. It's more or less confirmed he's introverted - before Team Lightyear, he worked alone and still loves spending time on his own. That means he likely spent most of his time around Warp and not much of anyone else, his communication skills aren't great because he focuses on his job too much and hasn't spent much time developing them. Sometimes he misses social cues and misunderstands situations or how people feel. He wasn't a jerk to Ty on purpose, everyone is constantly outdoing each other in praising his achievements so he had no idea it annoys Ty to pieces. The moment Buzz found out how he truthly feels he did everything he could to make up for it.

It's a recurring theme that Buzz isn't crazy about wildlife, it's not just his interactions with Ozma but the whole episode Dirty work is about that very topic. He's stubborn and because that's so far removed from his usual line of work he tries everything he can to use his old methods rather than to try something newer. Little by little he gives into it once he starts to allow himself to understand.

That character only cares about their working field, is willing to completely disregard anything that's outside of it, no matter how that may seem unethical to everyone else, and because they haven't gotten enough perspective from the other side they don't see why that's wrong, but is slowly learning throughout the show and could have gotten more development if the show continued.

I'm talking about Ozma this time. See how that can apply to both of them? Ozma is just as wrong as Buzz and they both can get across as irrational, but they actually are trying to protect what they believe in. Buzz doesn't care about nature and Ozma doesn't care about people - directly opposing fields, they are fighting for what the other would sacrifice. That's why their clash is so interesting, they have EVERYTHING in common, with just one difference that's so detrimental that it completely overwhelms their relationship.

Just like how Buzz is misunderstood to be arrogant, Ozma is misunderstood to be cold. She so isn't in the slightest. She treats the ugliest, most dangerous and scariest beast with utmost care and admiration, she gets excited at the sight of a rare specimen even if it could bite her head off in a second, and would risk her safety just to study or help it.

It's people where her enthusiasm dissolves, she is presented as introverted as well which is why sometimes she says things that don't come across all that great. Sure, sometimes she doesn't care because she's not interested in socializing, but she sometimes just doesn't know (example - the bloody water and floating guts comment in Beasts for Karn).

I gotta admit, it also confuses me how Buzz could come off as misogynistic towards Ozma - dammit that guy went in and memorized the most boring stuff in the universe (in his opinion) just to go in and try to impress her. He respects her work greatly - it's just in a field he's never cared for until now. Ozma could've been a male character and it would've been the same thing, because it's not Ozma herself that Buzz doesn't understand, but it's her cause.

He frankly just doesn't know how to act towards people he's interested in or that are interested in him. That's why he gives her unwanted validation - he's just genuinely impressed with her, which is why he's interested in the first place, but has no idea how to express it. He doesn't think any less of her.

Ozma was willing to team up with Zurg to protect the millennial bugs, Buzz was willing to kill Karnian beasts to get back on track with his mission. Both are just as bad, we gotta admit that. But throughout the three episodes we see them together, we see them learn to make more and more compromises for each other. They learn to see the other's perspective, and in their last chronological episode Return to Karn, they barely have fights at all (sure, there's a bit of banter, but it's nowhere near as agressive as it was before). I would kill to see how it would have progressed further.

She just reminds him of himself too much. Remember Good Ol' Buzz? He could barely stand himself because of how stubborn, abrupt and close minded he can be. It's the same thing with Ozma! She has the same traits, and so does he, and it turns into a screaming match until it turns into something else. Because that's just how they are.

So how the hell could this ever work for them? Simple - they are the only ones that could understand each other. With any other partner it would be "you chose your career over me!". If Buzz wasn't an awkward mess he could pull anyone he wants - he wants Ozma because she doesn't care who he is. Because she's brilliant, assertive, a badass and fearless. Because he has to prove himself and it doesn't come easy for him. If she doesn't care for his reputation, why is she interested? For the same reasons - he's just an awesome and determined person. He doesn't give up and believes in everything that is good, to the point of naivete. Because if anyone can give you hope in humanity's goodness, it's him.

And as much as I want to add the darker layer that Ozma might also be subconsciously reminding Buzz of Zurg but from a safe distance, that's a bit too much of a biased interpretation, and we might not be ready for that talk yet.

If you've read all of this, you're crazy, and thank you for coming to my ted talk

#it's one day late cause i wasn't planning on writing all of this #but i felt inspired #who knows if anyone reads this stuff but it's fun just typing it all out #blosctober #buzz lightyear #ozma furbanna #buzz lightyear of star command #character analysis #(i dont know what ship name to use but i'll just use whatever so that all shippy posts on my blog are organized)#lightbanna

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