#especially as kim da-eun becomes more soft and lovable

[purplerakath]

Cobra Kai and Accidentally Going too hard on the Iron Dragons

So the Iron Dragons are kind of... a problem. The showrunners and writers had an idea for them, but the execution went a little too hard at it, and we kinda need to deal with it.

Cut for spoilers and also talk about SA and how writers don't understand SA when the victim is a man and the abuser is attractive and female. (But I'll keep that to the end, and warn before I get into it if you wanna read about Axel and Wolf first.)

Dr. Frankenstein's Axel

So Axel is the most sympathetic of the three, he's big and powerful but also a victim (of Sensei Wolf) and generally just weird. Not intended to be harmful, but that how big and powerful he is isn't the end of who he is.

And yet they botched the landing.

See, if he was big and powerful and used what Sensei Wolf taught him to try to 'protect' Sam that'd put him in the tragic monster camp. That he cares for the only person to give him kindness, but shows it through the tools he has at hand: violence.

However he's covetous of her when she isn't in actual threat. So it reads more possessive and sinister than the writers probably meant. Having him menacingly stare at Miguel. Which is probably an emotional beat they didn't mean to hit.

Of the two botched landing, this is botched less, but in the same direction. They know what they wanted, but didn't land the nuance well.

Sidebar: Axel's physicality, as in how large and imposing he is, how good he is at violence, is a part of the tragedy. He was shaped generally scary and honed to match that impression. When he didn't need to be.

Sensei Abusive Jerkface

So Sensei Wolf is meant to be evil, and he's meant to be evil in direct mirror to Johnny. This works. He's in the grown-ups world so he's allowed to be more out and out evil because he's why the kids aren't alright. (Kreese, Kim, and Terry are also more overtly evil than say Tory, Kenny, or even someone like Kyler.)

Sam seeing him be abusive to Axel in the same ep that Johnny is getting all uppity and Cobra Kai-y with the kids (because Daniel is kidnapped) is meant to draw this comparison.

This one they did not botch the landing. He's bad and he's the level of bad you expect.

Zara (without the SA)

So Zara is meant to be selfish and two-faced, she's a girl's villain. She flaunts herself and is egotistical, but she has the skills to back it up. She acts nice in public but cuts with words the moment she doesn't have 'her' audience. She's in the same vein as Yasmine from S1 but actually will kick your teeth in.

And her sleeping with Robbie is meant to be her undercutting Tory off the mats mostly for fun, and because she can. And if a pissed off 'thinks Tory has already cheated on him' sober Robby slept with her, it'd be tacky and Robby would feel bad and it'd make Robby and Tory awkward for the rest of the season (which is the intent).

The issue is a Robby who has believed Cobra Kai lies sleeping with Zara sober would come off as an asshole, and the show decided to hedge that bet. Having him be drunk to make him more likely to go along with it makes sense, there can't possibly be anything else going on here, right?

The intended girl is loathsome, she's meant to be about as endearing as S1 Yasmine (compare to say S1 Moon who is far more endearing, or S3 Yasmine who has a soul). She's intended to be very satisfying to see get her comeuppance. But they made her worse than intended due to a stupid social standard.

Conclusion

Conclusion before the Zara SA stuff for people who don't wanna read that.

The intentions behind each character, abusive jackass teacher, abused well meaning large boy, and self-obsessed bitch (not super fond of the language but that's essentially the point the writers were trying to hit here) are good antagonists for the season. We don't need Axel to be villainous in the same way Kwon is, because we have (well, had) Kwon for that.

But they missed the mark by yards (Axel) and miles (Zara) on the execution. Making them far worse than intended. The same mistake, but on massively different scales.

And now Zara (with the SA)

So the problem is that they (the writers) did not realize if they swapped the genders around how BAD this looks. Because there is a fundamental disconnect in society as a whole that consent laws DO MATTER. Consent laws matter when the girl is hot and the boy fundamentally cannot say yes. This is the third show I've run into that hit this plot point, and this is the third show to miss the mark.

Even The Fosters, which had a male character who was too drunk to consent sleep with a female character sober enough to know better, focused less on the 'he's too drunk to consent' part. The show was more focused on the 'she is around a decade older than him, he is a minor, and she's a manipulative abuser playing everyone in her orbit like fiddles. She is also dating his dad.' So while the show did say 'sleeping with fully smashed boy bad' it didn't focus on that being the whole of it.

The other example, Degrassi, had a protagonist do this shit. Then it plays out as 'he's a cheating cad' when he had dumped her, and only slept with her because 'he was both blackout drunk and had lingering head trauma' which made him pliable. The writers did not see the line they were crossing due to a fundamental social idea that 'all boys are down for sex even if they can't say yes.'

They wanted to absolve Robby of his responsibility. So he would be well and truly without weight in making 'this mistake' (the writer's thoughts). Which in turn means a setting where he could not consent, and so the writers accidentally wrote a rape plot. They didn't mean to, they didn't mean to have Zara be THAT evil.

But here we are. The only advantage Cobra Kai has is we're not suppose to like Zara. We're not even suppose to like her as much as S3 Tory. Who is a messy complicated thing to root for, who does very bad things but she's been through it.

So... congrats, Zara is the worst teenager on the show. Don't attempt to redeem her ever.