#since arin mirrors harumi it makes sense that sora mirrors lloyd. cuz they also have similar issues(shitty parents they dont get along with

[theplatypusblue]

Ooooooh okay!! Sorry it took a while cuz I had to figure out how to say everything I wanted to say and also I got busy but here you go!!!

I haven't watched any of the new leaks so I'm not entirely sure if there's any contradicting information there, but so far Arin has been shown to be pretty optimistic + hopeful about the whole losing-his-parents-in-the-merge thing. With that, I feel like there's some potential for him to lose that optimism as time goes on. Thing is, if that does end up happening, I don't think Lloyd would be very helpful.

Cuz Lloyd's whole deal with his parents was like... bad! And so he's perfectly fine with finding a new family or whatever. He doesn't lose anything by doing that. Arin's situation is totally different; he loved his parents and wants to find them again. He doesn't want something "new," he wants what he had before. In the event that Arin's parents can't come back for whatever reason, the solutions that worked for Lloyd might not work for Arin (at least not in the same way, I guess)

Like, Lloyd says that Arin found a new family at the end of season 1, but I don't really know if Arin is totally receptive to that?? I'm definitely getting into the really nitty-gritty details here, but I feel like it's... kinda difficult to tell how he feels about that whole "we're your new family now" thing. When Lloyd first brings it up, he doesn't really say anything in response. He's shocked at first:

(^^ arin drops his shuriken here, its hard see in the screenshot)

But then he kinda smiles and stuff so maybe it's a little ambiguous?? idk man. Like I said, it's nitty-gritty details

Basically, I think there's room to say Arin might not be totally into the whole thing. Like, we're not definitively on the found-family train here. Which might sound kinda bad since everybody in the fandom seems to like found family a lot but like!! I just have my doubts idk!!! Everything is super vague at this point in the series, this is just my own interpretation of things.

All of this to say: Lloyd probably doesn't understand Arin very well. He doesn’t have the same kind of issues, and I could definitely picture that being kind of an obstacle. You know who would understand him a little better? Harumi. Cuz she was in the exact same kind of situation, where she lost her parents to a disaster that the ninja failed to prevent.

And after she loses her parents, she gets to live this “ideal life” as a princess, which is ~what every young girl dreams of~. But let’s be real here: the emperor and empress could’ve given her every shiny new toy their immense wealth could buy, but that wouldn’t have “fixed” her or made her happy. That’s literally just…. not what she wanted. She wanted her parents back, which is something impossible to get. In situations like that, the best you can really hope for is to move on eventually—which harumi just couldn’t do y’know? Sometimes it’s hard.

That’s the other big-ish similarity I see with Arin. Cuz that’s his dream!! Living with the ninja!!! That’s something every kid in ninjago has probably thought about at some point. And I think it would be soooo neat he ended up rejecting it somehow, in the same way Harumi rejected being princess.

And for better or worse, I think Harumi’s redemption in crystallized leaves the door open for her to play like, a mentor role for Arin if things don’t work out with his parents. She’s made some pretty serious mistakes in her life and that means she could like. Impart some wisdom or whatever. She has direct experience with the stuff Arin’s been through, so she can understand how it feels on a deeper level. Like, how are you supposed to deal with losing something you love like that? How are you supposed to just “get over it”? I think that’s something Harumi could help with answering.

I think abt these guys sometimes 😗 ....

(i dont have a post-merge design for harumi yet lol)