#but she deliberately flattens herself to a caricature

[kiyomitakada]

it's abouttttttttt how misa defines herself as someone who is in love with light and how the narrative goes out of its way to superficially agree with her (htr describes her as "the second kira who loves light" like it's her defining personality trait other than the mass murder) but also she definitely does not love him. she has like two panels max "justifying" why she likes light and both of them are the most weak "he's cute and perfect" justifications i've ever seen. misa amane i love you i love that there is a hole where your heart should be after your parents' deaths ripped it out of you. you can try to refill it all you like but you're never getting it back

[antianakin]

I used to love Ahsoka as a character and I thought she was a really interesting foil/parallel to Anakin but at some point I started to disconnect with her character and be all ‘huh that doesn’t seem right’ and for ages I couldn’t figure out why/what it was specifically that was bothering me that wasn’t just *gestures at post-Wrong Jedi!Ahsoka as a whole*

From airing of tcw s7 onwards and also a little before that in some (but admittedly not all) parts of rebels she just doesn’t act like a Jedi.

Like we’re clearly supposed to think that she does and she uses the Force to do things and she uses lightsabre combat and sometimes she even listens to what the Force is telling her(!) but she doesn’t act the way a Jedi would or should most of the time. She doesn’t use or express their teachings or philosophies or act in any way according to them even when she says she does* or the narrative implicitly claims that’s what she’s doing

(*when she’s around Kanan this gets a bit less notable bc she does act more Jedi-like around him and I can’t figure out whether that’s deliberate or accidental or what it’s supposed to say or mean about them both if it’s intentional)

Before that she was fun and also flawed and I think if they’d kept those roots while either showing how she’d manage to overcome/learn from those flaws or that she hadn’t managed to move past them at all but was still trying her best then she would have stayed interesting! But instead her character gets flattened and her flaws get narratively erased (while still being very much there just not acknowledged in any way and/or presented as though they’re not flaws at all) in favour as propping her up as The Best Jedi TM and making her feel like a caricature of an ideal rather than a real character.

Like I am mid-Ahsoka show right now and she doesn’t even feel like the same character! Everything that made her interesting is just gone and the narrative constantly implies that she’s right even when she very clearly is not???

Writers challenge! Accept that characters have flaws and should have flaws to make them interesting and help drive the plot rather than making them perfect bc they’re your favourite!

Yeah, I don't even mind Ahsoka growing OUT of her earlier flaws (which are primarily the same ones that Anakin was given, like impatience and overconfidence/arrogance) and into different ones that reflect her new experiences and maturity. But it also would've been great to see how those flaws she started with, the impatience/impulsivity and the overconfidence/arrogance sort-of grew WITH her.

Like the way the Wrong Jedi arc shows her refusing to trust the Council LONG before she has any reason to do so and going off on her own to try to prove her own innocence which just makes her look more guilty and pushes the Council into more of a corner while also trusting ONLY the person who ended up framing her in the first place. The way that her more childish impatience and overconfidence has sort-of grown into the more dangerous impulsiveness and arrogance in the Wrong Jedi would've been so so interesting to look at if anyone writing it had been willing to acknowledge that she was in the wrong.

And you could keep going with that in later arcs and have her still be sort-of mistrustful of authority (especially Jedi authority), inclined to believe in her own superiority of opinion, and impulsive in her judgments. That's generally what we see in season 7, especially regarding her behavior towards characters like Mace and Obi-Wan. She believes she's right ALL THE TIME and this would be FINE if the narrative actually supported the idea that she WASN'T. Ahsoka can think she's right, but the audience should understand that she isn't. That's how her flaws got portrayed in earlier seasons of TCW and why I tend to prefer them to later ones. And this would've been a great place to follow up on her comment about not trusting HERSELF. Maybe Ahsoka has sort-of wandered away from mindfulness since she left the Order and so instead of continuing to look at the mistakes she made that caused the Order to mistrust her, she just starts blaming the Jedi for everything. And when she starts making accusations at Obi-Wan, have him point out that not only is she not being fair, but she's not being HONEST, with herself or anyone else. Because truly, it's not the Jedi she doesn't trust. It's not the Council playing politics that she's afraid of. It's her own flawed judgment leading her to her own destruction.

And there's SO MUCH you could do with that moving forward into Rebels, to showcase Ahsoka's continuing struggle with trusting her own judgment and how she's grown since Order 66 and into her place as a rebel where she HAS to trust herself more, but she still doesn't entirely trust herself to be a JEDI. Perhaps her uncertainty over Anakin's fate has a part to play in that. Instead, they just made her a spy despite the fact that a LACK OF SUBTLETY was one of her major personality traits in TCW and never once was she shown doing any kind of real spy work and we don't really see her doing any in Rebels either aside from a few conversations with Hera. We have no idea how she ended up growing into that role or WHY she took on that particular role rather than something that would've fit her existing skillset better. Ahsoka's position within the Rebellion is one of the places I think they really faltered with her because it could've been utilized to genuinely help her character move forward and develop her more as a Jedi survivor. Instead, she's just kinda... there and her entire narrative tends to revolve around Anakin, a problem that persists and actually got worse with the Ahsoka show.

I don't truly mind that Ahsoka is perhaps not acting much like a Jedi, at least not all the time, because that could be a really easy way to give her a journey BACK to being more like a Jedi. Much like the Kenobi show had Obi-Wan acting very out of character and unlike a Jedi in order to have him go on a journey to reclaim that identity and become the wise Master we all know and remember, they could've done something similar with Ahsoka. Let the narrative embrace that she's not acting like a Jedi as an intentional choice so that she can move forward from there and BECOME a Jedi again. This is also an arc that Kanan himself is sort-of going on, so it would've been pretty easy to parallel them a little in Rebels if they'd been willing to represent Ahsoka as anything other than a literal angel come to earth.

The problem with the Ahsoka show is that it DOES give her flaws, but the flaws it chooses to give her are the opposite of what they should be. (This paragraph might get a bit spoilery, so if you're trying to avoid spoilers until you finish the whole show, just skip this paragraph.) Instead of showing Ahsoka as impatient/impulsive and somewhat arrogant, they show Ahsoka being too UNFEELING. Ahsoka's primary flaw in the Ahsoka show is that she's too detached because her feelings regarding Anakin's fall have apparently caused her to pull away from connecting to anybody on a deeper level or something. And they choose to show this by having her literally recite Jedi philosophy of non-attachment and have Sabine push back against it. So now it's not just that Ahsoka is too unfeeling but that she's too much like the Prequels Jedi, the BAD Jedi who FAILED. And only once she lets go of those Jedi philosophies holding her back (and instead explicitly chooses to emulate ANAKIN, the dude who let himself be consumed by selfishness and greed and betrayed everybody and threw an entire galaxy into tyranny) is she able to move forward in her relationships. Instead of recognizing that Sabine is impulsive and arrogant and letting that shine a light on Ahsoka's own flaws so that they can BOTH work on them more, it just chooses to justify Sabine's impulsivity and arrogance instead and Ahsoka needs to accept Sabine as she is and support her completely no matter what horrifically selfish bullshit she does. Moral of the story, never hold your loved ones accountable for anything they do wrong!

Long story short, I think Ahsoka was 100% at her best in her bratty teenager phase in early TCW when the narrative actually was willing to admit she HAD flaws that she had to work through and her character has been completely flattened ever since they decided to pretend she no longer has any flaws and is just always right about everything (except for when she's acting TOO MUCH like the wrong kind of Jedi).

[coraniaid]

top five buffy characters?

In order (today, anyway):

Buffy

Willow

Faith

Giles

Anya

Can't really put my thoughts on Buffy Summers better than I did last year. As I said then, she's one of my favorite fictional characters in any medium. I just think she's neat.

Big fan of Willow, too, although a little bit less so than I was when I first watched the show as a teenager. As well as the slight derailing of her arc with the whole magic-addiction stuff in Season 6 and the show struggling to find anything for her to do in Season 7, I think on reflection, despite the whole "occasionally I'm callous and strange" line, the Buffy writers sometimes don't actually realize when they've made Willow do something interesting and a little fucked-up. They're just a bit too sympathetic to her. So we never get the pay-off those moments deserved, and maybe we were never going to, because -- like Willow herself -- the writers simply don't think Willow did anything wrong.

Faith is the other character who is an easy fit into my top three. (Yes, not shocking, I know.) It seems a bit silly to claim that a character who appears in less than one full season's worth of episodes is one of my favorite characters, but ... I guess I'm a bit silly. She's a main character in my heart (and in my fanfiction), even if the show writers never quite realized it.

A bit below those three, but above anyone else, is Rupert Giles. I think Giles is a fascinating character, but -- more than almost anyone else in the fandom -- he tends to get flattened into this role of "Buffy's good dad" which simply doesn't reflect his role in the narrative at all. (I think it's telling that the fandom's big take-away from Helpless is "Giles has a father's love for Buffy, which we know for a fact because an evil British man said it", combined with a general indifference about ... the objectively awful things we literally just saw him do.) But canon!Giles is (mostly) much better than the fandom caricature. He kind of sucks. I like him.

That fifth spot is the tricky one and the one that's most liable to change. I don't think there's any character in the show who is consistently as sympathetic and interesting and multi-layered as those other four. Tara is nice and has a surprisingly deep relationship with Buffy, but doesn't really get much in the way of an arc. Dawn only appears in three seasons (and the writers seem to just run out of ideas for things for her to do in the third of them). While I will defend the importance of Joyce to Buffy forever -- I think Buffy's relationship with her mother is one of the key things that makes her who she is, and I think the show would be far less interesting without Joyce Summers in -- Joyce herself isn't ever given enough to do and basically doesn't exist outside of her relationship with Buffy. Xander is kind of like Giles in some ways - a deliberately flawed image of (a certain kind of) masculinity who cares about Buffy enormously but isn't always able to act accordingly because of his own self-loathing and because he has a slightly idealized image of her in his mind -- but he's also a little less interesting and a lot more irritating (and, like Willow, sometimes the writers just don't seem to realize when he's in the wrong). I think most of the Xander detractors on this site are misreading the text, but I don't really want to be a Xander defender either.

There are a whole host of other minor characters I wish the show had done more with or cared about at all: Amy, Jenny, Drusilla, Oz, Kendra, Robin are some names that come to mind. But the truth is that, as they appear on screen, I just can't pretend they were ever more than cyphers. (Even if Oz appeared in far more episodes than Faith ever did; at least Faith had some sort of agency and was central to most of the episodes she appeared in.)

So, who's left?

I think Anya is badly underused in the show throughout her time on it (she's just almost never taken seriously at all, either by the writing or the characters), her backstory has all the consistency of wet papier-mâché and to be honest I don't like Selfless quite as much as most people either. But, well, at least she's reliably funny, and there's definitely the idea of an intriguing character in there. Her death makes me furious too, more so than any other character on the show. So, almost by process of elimation, there she is.

[aanok]

100%. The description of their conflict in S3 got completely flattened by the YOU STOLE MY MOM hammer, to the point that Cass got reduced to a caricature of herself as a cheap villain twirling her mustache from her tower of evil.

I understand the obvious symbolic role Gothel plays as a stand-in for all the love, success and actualization Cass desperately needs and feels Rapunzel stole from under her feet but as a literal item it makes very little sense. The best you can say for it is that she latches onto the fake hope that if only she’d been allowed the chance for longer, she may have managed to get Gothel to actually love her. Confound the accursed Rapunzel!

But if this is the only thing you leave in the narrative without acknowledging everything else anymore you’re cutting out 90% of the character’s motives.

(this last offense is particularly foul because Once a Handmaiden and Plus Est En Vous all of a sudden rub in your face that the writers did remember everything they set up in the first two seasons, they just decided to throw it out the window for most of S3 because lmao black spandex suit)

The Gothel reveal as such is fun and opened some very interesting scenarios, but it was played terribly once it was allowed to completely dominate everything else. What is very good about it is that it establishes Cassandra’s understanding of love as a mercenary act and her view of self worth as a function of her accomplishments only. This is absolute golden characterization but it didn’t necessitate Gothel specifically as just any generically abusive parent (or other scenarios entirely but let’s run with the premise).

While we’re on the topic of writing fouls played against Cass, I want to point fingers at another capital offender, though you’ll likely disagree on this one.

Zhan Tiri absolutely nullifies Cassandra’s agency and takes the punch away from both her betrayal and her actions throughout S3 in general.

I don’t want some external influence to bring Cassandra to take action, I want her to make the conscious, deliberate choice to be a selfish bastard. I want her ego to finally explode after having been compressed so hard by two decades of putting everybody else before herself (not something exclusive to her relationship with Punzie, see Great Expotations). I want her to finally snap after seeing all results of her immense efforts being overtaken with a dance and a song by a magical princess blessed with supernatural powers just by right of birth.

Once again, it’s clear the ghost girl is supposed to be an allegory for Cass’ own intrusive thoughts and worst impulses and you can make the argument she’s only bringing out the worst of what is already there in her mind.

But that’s not at all how it’s framed in the literal narrative we see with our eyes. Cass is completely prone to Zhan Tiri, never questions her till the last five seconds and reverts to being an affection-starved puddle of insecurities the very instant the puppeteer’s strings are cut.

Why would you want to make her a passive victim when you’ve built up so much to make her into a real tragic hero? It’s such a waste.

i have a lot of half formed thoughts about how the series plays with rapunzel’s guilt complex + people unfairly blaming her for things that are emphatically not her fault, vs cassandra whose numerous legitimate grievances against rapunzel (lack of professional boundaries, lack of respect for cass’s personal boundaries, complete disregard for cass’s advice and feelings, maiming cass in the great tree [that was an accident but rapunzel made Two conscious decisions that led directly to it happening, she chose to stay in the tree, she chose to use an incantation she knew was uncontrollable and dangerous, it is in fact her fault that cass was injured that night]) are all swept under the rug in favor of cass being angry about the one thing that isn’t rapunzel’s fault (gothel leaving cass)

like it feels like there’s something here or like a punch was pulled but i can’t... quite articulate it; raps spends two seasons learning not to blame herself for every little thing people accuse herself but then is never forced to truly examine her genuine culpability in hurting cass because it all just gets masked by the gothel nonsense. and i’m just like. why? why make this writing choice when it does so much to undercut not only cassandra’s character development but rapunzel’s too?

and like cass being gothel’s daughter was the plan from the beginning but that in and of itself isn’t the problem; the problem is how it was ultimately written in such a way that it devoured everything else that was broken in the cass-raps friendship with the result that none of that got resolved or even really mentioned again

[oatmealcrisp-freak]

#im going through drafts this was good. i like her a lot . okay#misa amane#death note#it's so fucking fascinating to me the whole definition of her self thing#like when L and rem go 'oh you like light' shes like CONGRATULATIONS#YOU HAVE PERCEIVED THE ENTIRE EXTENT OF MY CHARACTER#she actually HAS personality traits other than being in love with light! shes impulsive! she has 0 regard for human life inc. her own!#she's extremely good at improv and acting! she's competitive! she's petty as fuck!#but she deliberately flattens herself to a caricature#and in the second arc that comes back to bite her because she loses all her memories#and all thats left is a shell of whoever she was trying to be#and she's not HAPPY! because she never WAS happy!#but now she doesn't even remember why she wanted to be this way in the first place!#MISAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

OP dont you dare hide these

it's abouttttttttt how misa defines herself as someone who is in love with light and how the narrative goes out of its way to superficially agree with her (htr describes her as "the second kira who loves light" like it's her defining personality trait other than the mass murder) but also she definitely does not love him. she has like two panels max "justifying" why she likes light and both of them are the most weak "he's cute and perfect" justifications i've ever seen. misa amane i love you i love that there is a hole where your heart should be after your parents' deaths ripped it out of you. you can try to refill it all you like but you're never getting it back