#but alas I'm waiting on the return of my store-bought dopamine from the war

[paradife-loft]

I feel a bit ridiculous about this, but despite the fact that the framing device plot for SuperS (i.e. Pegasus and Chibiusa and the whole ~beautiful dream~..... thing.....) is by far my least favorite (...hence why I stopped watching partway through said season), the other half of what's going on there, which is to say the thematic underpinnings of the Circus/Nehelenia/Amazoness Quartet stuff, is so good and makes me absolutely unhinged thinking about it

like it's all about. the seductiveness of reveling in an immature self-centered set of priorities. but also how those priorities emerge out of fear about what you might have to give up if you start taking others into consideration. and how a lack of support from others around you, a lack of anyone to help inspire you to care about anything else, is part of what narrows your concerns down, and feeds those fears, in the first place.

others wanting things from you but not supporting you, turns you inward to only relying on the indulgence of your surface-level desires to feel anything positive at all. and so then anything threatening that is an intolerable obstacle, because it's threatening the very shaky sole foundation you have for yourself - and how dare others demand anything of you? fuck all of them, they should serve what you want, and all that matters is being able to preserve your ability to get/do/have those things you want. having responsibilities toward others, much less wanting to have responsibilities toward others, is a ridiculous, cheap trap to fall into if you're not one of the lucky ones who gets to stay young and beautiful and carefree forever.

and ultimately. the self-sabotaging nihilism of it all. the way the Quartet thinks Ami is nuts for being excited to grow up and become a doctor to help people, because not only is helping people dumb, but she's also willingly giving up being able to avoid consequences for screwing off or being a dick* by virtue of ~only being a kid. the way they've come to rely on their Amazon Stones as (supposedly) the source of their magic power, and the thing keeping them young and beautiful and able to goof off and do hedonism all day, when they're actually siphoning their powers and feeding them to Nehelenia and the rest of the circus. the way Nehelenia accepts being sealed away in her loneliness in the dark once again because it's better, she thinks, than having to face a future where she loses her beauty and gets old - the codependency between her loneliness and her obsession with being perfectly beautiful to make up for it, and how feeding one only strengthens the other until she's trapped in needing both to function.

they're such internally and externally destructive disasters, and each facet of that is inseparable from the other, and I love them so much, they're subletting my head rent-free right now ;___;

*it's interesting to me, actually, that this is one season where we distinctly don't have the "find me our arc macguffin quickly or I'll kill you and send in your next replacement!" dynamic going on with the themed henchmen of the week - notable particularly as I'm halfway through Stars where that's very much present - and I feel like that choice reinforces the frozen-in-time, abdication-of-responsibility theme in a way that's pretty neat