#if anything i wrote contradicts the ec. no it doesnt

[aledethanlast]

Thinking about Robin Cross' mom cause like. Your little birdie goes missing and she comes back and it's a miracle but...that's not your little girl anymore. Your Robin was never this afraid of the world outside her bedroom door. Wasn't this suspicious of everyone outside her window. Didn't cry herself to sleep from guilt you couldn't (didn't even want to) imagine. Didn't shrink away from every pitying stare, didn't believe the whispers that called her a broken, guilty thing.

It takes years for a therapist to convince your Robin that she can fly again. It takes just as long for you to accept that the miracle you wanted is not the miracle you wanted.

It takes years of trying until another miracle happens, and you notice the way your daughter's eyes track the ball on the tv in the lounge when she's still in the kitchen and you go, Hey, worth a shot, right? so you ask her if she wants to play exy.

And the weirdest goddamn thing happens. Which is to say, Robin flies out of her seat, back hitting the wall like its trying to marry the plaster, like it always does when she's scared, the way her therapist says is her trying to assert to herself that from at least one angle, danger cannot come for her.

But then your husband and brother in law scream from the lounge as a goal is scored, and it's such a surprise that you don't turn to them fast enough to miss the way Robin's eyes do the same, and suddenly that wall slam doesn't actually seem like a no.

Six months later, you watch your daughter on her first game in a real field. She's absolutely terrible, far too shy to be proactive in her role, and you are so close to strangling the dad two rows over who says that aloud because you lost your daughter six years ago, and today you just got her back. (Also, god knows the rest of her team isn't much better, so maybe judge your own son first, jackass.)

Robin grows up and it's not perfect, its not the miracle you wanted, but damn if it ain't a good miracle anyway. She says she's happy and you choose to believe her. The therapist says if you give it time it'll all work out and you choose to believe that too. You just hope time means before graduation because, as it stands, you're not sure what'll happen when high school ends.

And then a stranger stranger to you walks into your home, and Robin invites him in, and he says I will give you as much time as you dare ask me for. And you ask, why. Why would you do this for her. And the man smiles, in a way that seems to surprise him as much as it does you, and he explains that actually, for once, it's not him. It's another kid everyone else declared broken who decided she's worth the effort.

This is when you realize miracles are bullshit. It's just people putting in the work. And if there is some unblemished, untraumatized Robin Cross out there soaring like she'd always imagined, well, happy travels. But tomorrow, she and her little birdie are getting in the car and driving seven hours down to Palmetto.

[mdhwrites]

It really does feel like the writers just kind of dont care about the world. When i first saw it, i was really interested in just how wild it was, a whole world based of hieronymous bosch? Cool.

But then they just contradict themselves, dont do anything with it or it just doesnt make sense? for example:

-In the first season the world is presented as this brutal, hostile place, where walking down the street can get you killed. Characters dont know what hugging or shaking hands is. The schools are brutal, teachers being downright vile at points. In season 2 they have a whole school dedicated to darwinian logic. But... later the teachers are suddenly nice, the world feels less hostile and they have therapists? what? in a place where you get thrown in prison for writing fanfiction?

-Some jokes are made that are 'haha get it cuz not human' but they make no sense. They have bard magic, walking guitars and bands, but when they have to look after luz, they suddenly think nightmare noises are a banger? Or how willow makes a '40s cartoon' joke, gus has a pb&j samwich, etc.

-Potion magic makes no sense. How is it a coven when you can do it WITHOUT magic. what happens when you get branded? do you just lose all magic? is it a pity coven for bad witches?

I feel on its own these things are nitpicky, but when they pile up it just feels like they were only thinking about making the place LOOK cool while having zero substance.

So you're correct that a lot of these are either nitpicks or just really lazy jokes on the part of the writers. In fact, the lazy, fish out of water jokes came back in S3 and make Amity just look like falling in love literally drained her brain out of her ears. However, that doesn't make them invalid, especially in a show with little worldbuilding. They pile up into making the whole thing feel like a construct.

Luckily, you don't have to go to nitpicks to point out that the writers didn't give a shit. Dana herself is one of the worst writers as far the worldbuilding goes. After all, she wrote Reaching Out.

She was the one who treated being a Wild Witch like choosing not to go to college.

She also co-wrote The First Day where, you know, they don't even acknowledge that multi-tracking is explicitly illegal in this society so why would an EC funded school EVER allow that?

There's SO MANY of these sorts of things peppered throughout the series that makes the ONE part of the world building we ever get, that is anything close to making this world actually unique besides implications, a straight up lie. It'd be like if Avatar made being able to multi-bend something you chose seven episodes in and suddenly slaughtered the entire point of the Avatar being special. It doesn't though because WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT!?

And there's no way to call this a nitpick. It's the hard basis for one of the main cast, even though Eda's status as a criminal is ALL OVER THE PLACE in S1, especially for people giving a shit about it. It's effectively the core of the villain's plot and the society they created. Any crack in the coven system becomes a crack in your main plot... And when it was first introduced, rather than nine, their were hundred, a fact that persisted into S2 when a character VOICED BY DANA talked about joining the Cute Cat Coven. You know, a coven theoretically not affected by the draining spell.

It's even important thematically. It is the oppression that Luz is supposed to fighting against. The way that self expression and being true to you is repressed is through the coven system and the laws surrounding it. Those need to actually function for those themes to feel like they have weight or they fall apart. It's part of why TOH struggles with thematic consistency because self expression doesn't feel like a core part of it when no one gives a fuck what you do. When there is no actual pressure to conform and hide yourself. At least, not for a story like this.

It's probably the biggest reason why when I hear people exclaim that TOH has great worldbuilding I just have to look at them funny. After all, none of this is even new or actually unique *gestures at Dystopian Fiction in general and D&D wizards school of magic* and it's told like shit. And for a story like this, your fantasy epic about sticking it to the man by showing how special you are, it NEEDED to be told better. It needed to have point.

But it never did and it just makes the writers look either like they didn't care or are just incompetent, let alone when the show director themselves is shooting their core concepts in the head.

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