#not necessarily a yearning post but i’m gonna put the yearning tags. because i yearn for trust

[f4gwithf4ngs]

i cant wait for the day that i feel safe with someone romantically.

the day that i trust someone enough romantically that i can confide in them when i’m not feeling well. that i can trust they’ll take my hands and tell me everything’s alright. that i can trust that when they say they’re okay, they mean it. that i can trust when something *is* bothering them, they’ll tell me.

trust is scary. trusting is hard. i’ll be able to do it again someday. but i cant do it today.

[ngame989]

I'd like to follow on spiritpelt's recent ask please :). I think that a large part of the "Jackie problem" is due to how much we all overhyped her, which shows how the writers are really good at holding our expectations every second. That also has the scary thought that they're also good at making us perceive things as interesting when in-universe reality they're flats and serves important yet underwhelming roles compared to what we expect. Toffee, mysterious, vile, insidious, cunning and (1/3)

knows exactly how things will go without any outside aid, was just the catalyst and Stage 2’s Boss for Star’s growth, and wanted just his finger, petty revenge and act out of spite. We’re also guilty for thinking Marco’s cape had weight, but Marco had to go back for his own good and not be a jerk, and now we only need to say goodbye for the cape for good. The list goes on. The thing is: they could make ANYTHING look compelling when it isn’t in the long run. Next thing they could have Starco be only because of the blood moon and every reason for their bond and even their friendship are moot, have the blood moon as evil or comes with an OFF switch (Anti-Starcos’ wildest dreams). But then again, these bridges were cut off thankfully, and we only have to enjoy things while they last, even really good things. (parts 2 and 3)

So my disclaimer for this post: I’m fully aware that hindsight is 20/20 and that I don’t have a crystal ball into the future, but I think there’s still some clear patterns we can observe from these incidents you mention (and others) that can guide predictions with some reasonable degree of confidence. (Throwing this in the tags for once because I actually think it’s important)

You’re right about all those things not having the roles we expected, but here’s the thing about that - Jackie and Toffee and the cape all did have weight! It’s a fandom meme to say Jackie is worthless because she isn’t, sure she wasn’t a main character and didn’t get all kinds of complex personal issues and development, but she was an important figure in Marco’s life for a while and helped him mature. The issue isn’t that those things all “fell flat” objectively necessarily, but that expectations overreached beyond the bounds of what the show provided. And that’s not to say “oh it’s super easy anyone could’ve seen how they’d be used, you’re just dumb” (well, OK, anyone could’ve seen that Jackie specifically wasn’t gonna be a main character let’s be real here), it’s absolutely true that the show doesn’t reveal everything right away.

But you can still take away some important information here - Toffee did do everything the show hyped him up for. We knew he hated magic, we knew he hated the Butterflies, and we knew he was a ruthless and cunning schemer. He executed a long-con scheme that involved destroying magic and defeating the Butterflies, and there you go! Everything he was built up for accomplished. Perhaps his backstory was the most underwhelming part of him, but again, all the hype was people reading into it and making up their own possibilities for what it could be. None of this is to say you can’t personally feel disappointed by any of it (I even have at times myself), but the point I’m trying to make is that the show executed on the buildup it delivered. It didn’t introduce something with Toffee as critical and then drop it in any way. Same with Jackie, and the cape is way more minor compared to those two but the same applies even there! It was pretty critical as a symbol for Marco’s attachment to his newfound life (specifically via Mewni, and even more specifically via Star). Hell, I was one of the people speculating all about the cape, and yeah sure Marco didn’t become a badass cape-wielding knight in 3A, but I think the whole thing was executed fairly well as a device for Marco’s arc.

If you want another, much more controversial example of something fan expectations overblew unreasonably, I’ll tack on a heaping helping of self-awareness and say Star’s romantic feelings for Marco in Season 2. Yes, absolutely the growing feelings she had for Marco were very important, but the nature of them as romantic wasn’t some fundamental, unshakable pillar of the show by itself. Considering how much she tried to repress them and beat them down and how they caused her nothing but pain, it was honestly (once again, in hindsight, I know) foolish to assume anything along the lines of the statement “Star has strong romantic yearning for Marco” never, ever being able to change for any reason, even temporarily. But the depth of the overall connection they shared that had been built up as part of her feelings in S2 remained and only grew more during S3.

So my point in all of this is that there are absolutely things contained within the show itself that are factually present arcs and factually present buildups, and the show should be trusted to deliver on those and not drop them. And it’s something really fucking difficult to gauge what those things are and what things are just speculation, yeah, which is why I’m being measured here. The Blood Moon? I have no idea! It’s quite possible that particular aspect isn’t executed in a way I find satisfying as payoff, but I can at least trust that it will be addressed in a manner that covers the bases that it’s set up (so basically, something with Marco’s cheekmarks, at least). And when it comes to Star and Marco’s relationship, the show has never, not a single time, actually dropped its importance to the show, and Star and Marco themselves have only grown closer. The handful of times they put distance between each other were done with a concrete purpose, and that purpose was to lead to a moment where they became closer than ever. Do I think there could be another thing like that, a Storm the Castle 2.0 where they actually have a major rift in their relationship that needs mending? Absolutely, but things will overall keep marching the direction they always have been.

(EDIT: Also, it's worth noting that of course similar principles apply to Tom, too. He's certainly had a sizable amount of development, and the nature of his relationships with Star and Marco and more important how he himself views those relationships get much deeper, so it would absolutely be a failure on the show's part to drop him as hard as they did Jackie, hence why it's not a worry - he's on the poster after all! But nothing about this implies in ANY way that Tom is equal with Marco now to either the show's own hierarchy or to Star's life, and any takes on it as such are the same overblown reaching that I mentioned at the beginning.)

So right now I can say with utmost confidence that Star and Marco have already committed themselves to each other, that they aren’t going to abandon each others’ company for any significant length of time (maybe Marco goes to Earth for an episode for Marco Jr. or something, idk). That itself was a HUGE theme of Season 3, and the time apart they spent in 3B because Marco was keeping his distance was directly addressed in Booth Buddies and rectified heavily in Divide/Conquer (with the results continuing to show in Season 4 Episode 1, as Marco is adventuring with Star and chatting with her and overall being back to his usual self, happy to be her best friend, and Star contemplating the Beach Day picture that seems to represent the best in their relationship to her). And Booth Buddies tackled the additional topic that the very essence of their relationship is more than friendship, and both of them know it now (”OK Marco we need a picture that represents what our relationship means to us” “OK cool let’s do it” whoops they kissed I wonder what that means). 

Once again maintaining as balanced of a viewpoint as I can, they have simply hit the point of no return where they know their relationship is more than friendship and have committed themselves to it anyway, and drawing the connections for what that implies about the near and far future is practically easier than a Connect-the-Dots book. I don’t know what exactly the future will hold, and I’m making it a point to not extrapolate or read into things that aren’t simply right there. I don’t have to unreasonably extrapolate how Star or Marco will act after the confession (like we did after Season 2) because we saw it in action already. I don’t have to unreasonably extrapolate how Tom will react, because we’ve seen snippets of it already. I don’t have to unreasonably extrapolate that the show will continue developing their relationship into something stronger throughout Season 4, because come on now that’s what the show does all the time. We had a big turning point, and had the luxury of seeing the direction everyone is going after that turning point, so there’s some actual concrete information we can use there. So if you want to point fingers at things the show might do in unexpected ways that might let individual expectations down, point them at the specific symbols themselves if you want (like the Blood Moon), or at things we haven’t yet seen with our own eyes in the show (like, idk, the exact way Star and Marco will start their official romantic relationship). But pointing them at the very nature of Star and Marco’s relationship is the falsest of false equivalencies, and we've been slapped in the face with the information we need to at LEAST know the basics of the next steps and where we're headed.