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pinkest-nekomata · 1 month ago

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A Spellbound brain dump

Sometimes a piece of media is so close to being great and then bungles it at the end in such a strange way that it leaves my brain... itchy. Idk. Like Wednesday, or the Acolyte. Unlike those two, where the analysis seemed worthwhile, my latest brain itch is courtesy of Spellbound, an obviously mid movie for children that is unlikely to be of much consequence. So it doesn't really seem worth analyzing, but given the ambitions this movie had to tell a "real story", maybe it's fair.

So, uh, if you watched Spellbound and care, you might find this interesting. Otherwise, I just need to get it out of my system.

Spellbound is one of those movies where you learn something at the end that changes the meaning of the rest of the plot.

As you watch it, it starts as a relatively straightforward premise: Princess's parents have been turned into literal monsters. It's been a year. They're trying to hide this from the kingdom and it's getting harder. Oracles from the forest finally arrive and inform the princess that she needs to bring her parents to the forest. Via magic, she does so. Then they go on a journey to cure the parents.

This is where things take a turn. Finally, they find the pool of light, but it turns out the parents can only be cured if they admit that they want a divorce. And, in fact, they were only cursed in the first place because they were fighting. This leaves the princess distraught, and the parents are pulled out of their self-centered thoughts to be reminded that they need to assure their child that they still love her. The family returns to the kingdom, the parents separate, and everyone lives happily ever after.

Now, I want to be clear that I am supportive of divorce, and I think a well-executed divorce can be much less damaging to children overall than parents in a dysfunctional relationship refusing to split up ever "for the kids". It is because I am supportive of this that I don't like how the story handled divorce. Notably, I'm also very wary of media that teaches kids is their responsibility to parent their parents. I'm sure this movie doesn't mean to send that message but... it's there.

So with the full context, the events behind this movie are: King and Queen go to the forest of darkness for Reasons (tm) and bicker so much the darkness turns them into monsters. They wreak havoc in their child's life for a full year. The movie is very clear that the princess feels ignored, like they don't even notice she's there, and so in retrospect this is clearly meant to reflect how a child with divorcing parents feels. She takes it upon herself to manage them, tend to them, and believe in them even when the other adults in her life give up on them and her. She then leads them on a magical journey, and is responsible for quelling their bickering to get them that far. Her reward for all this is to be explicitly told her parents are splitting up anyway, and her emotional stress summons the darkness again, threatening to devour her. Her parents telling her they love her no matter what saves her from the darkness, she accepts that life has to change, and that's pretty much it.

I'm at least very glad that the parents admitting wrongdoing was a key part of the plot, and that's why it's clear that the creators don't intend for "parent your parents" to be the final message, and despite the messy symbolism, I don't think most kids would absorb the problematic conclusion. But still, it leaves the brain itch. Much like Inside Out 2, there's a conflict between the genre and the point the movie's trying to make. In Inside Out, Riley's problems have to be resolved internally to give the Feelings something to do--though ultimately (light spoilers) the source of Riley's problem is an adult (the hockey coach) being too strict and cruel to children. Yes that's a common experience, but the movie ends up indicating that kids should be able to figure that out by themselves, vs. leaning on parents for support or recognizing that adults don't always behave appropriately. The movie seems to uphold the idea that strict coaches are good for kids, which I strongly disagree with.

Connecting that back to Spellbound, there's a fundamental mismatch between the genre and the story the movie's trying to tell. A fantasy adventure gives full agency to the main character, in this case a 15 year old girl. But when the main life-changing event is her parents getting divorced, the message starts to get muddied. The movie misses an opportunity to point out how the advisors have let the princess down as well--these are problems adults should have been attending to. It should have been another adult working tirelessly to cure the king and queen. The behavior of the advisors is actually quite grim through this lens--they gleefully inform the girl that her parents are effectively dead, and that it's her job to lead the kingdom now, with absolutely no comparison for her grief.

If it's a silly movie about a silly adventure, such things matter less--but since the creators made this movie very explicitly about parental separation, these other details bear greater weight in the story.

I think comparing to Brave is very illuminating--that's also a story about a child whose parent is cursed to become a "monster", but it succeeds at showing how the adventure ultimately brings mother and daughter closer together and heals the relationship. Merida is eager for an adventure out of her own genuine desire, and appropriately conflicted about being made responsible for her mother. And critical for the genre, the family bonds are restored, and the family is closer than before.

Spellbound tries to convince you through airy, triumphant music that the family is happier than before, but the image of each parent living on polar opposite sides of the city from each other is... kind of grim. It continues to center the parents' dislike of each other, which is odd for a happily ever after. I think there are many, many lived experiences of co-parenting that provide a much better example of prioritizing your child's true needs. Why can't they simply have separate rooms at the castle?

So the movie is unconvincing in its restoration of relationship, meaning it fails to fulfill its genre. A romantic story where the couple breaks up at the end isn't in the genre of Romance, it's in the genre of Love Story. Likewise, this movie fails to fulfill the genre conventions of a hero's journey/adventure story.

In fact, there's a bit of a sad theme through the whole movie where the parents' behavior upends and dictates the details of the princess's life and... she just kind of has to smile and deal with it. All the way through to the "happily ever after". There's some attention paid to that, with her flippantly saying "I have no dark feelings" (which attract the sentient darkness) and then we see two instances of those dark feelings developing, but I have a big issues with the idea of a child's anguish at their parents' selfish behavior being framed as "dark feelings". The "darkness" metaphor is clumsily used--is it an evil force? Is it a personification of anger/hate? If so, why is it attracted to justified grief and anguish? Ultimately, the darkness coming for the princess spurs the parents to act in her defense, so that's good, but the symbolism is still really muddy.

The ending feels very rushed--because it is. The movie treats this reveal as a twist, and though I saw it coming, that has a lot more to do with my meta-experience with these types of narratives, not the movie successfully foreshadowing its own conclusion. From everything we see of the princess and her memories, the family was totally happy before the monster curse. The movie avoids showing the parents bickering for long, which is probably good for a movie meant for young kids, but it also makes the ending bewildering. All we've seen is mild conflicts that would be easily overcome with, like, some light couples therapy. So the parents end up coming off as incredibly flippant and selfish when they deduce that they have to separate. The move has to tell us the stakes, it can't show the stakes, because the stakes of divorce are distressing for children. Perhaps it could have worked if the movie spent longer developing the conflict, but as it stands, it's just this awkward "twist" at the end.

I can see it providing some comfort to a child whose parents are separated, since a little representation can go a very long way. But at the same time, it feels like it trivializes that experience. Parents separating is complex and layered and distressing to a child, even when it's in their best interest. If a movie wants to explore this topic, I think a premise more like Inside Out is a much better choice. You can then explore the complex layered emotions, and validate them specifically, recognizing how hard it is for the kid before ultimately assuring them.

As it stands, the movie seems to imply that as long as your parents say they still love you, then your problems are solved, and you should go back to smiling as your parents divorce. This is really a shame, since the move is so close to providing a really cathartic example of the anguish of wondering if your parents still love you, but then it trips over itself. The song the princess sings when she learns her parents will be separating, "What about me", paints her as menacing and selfish. The tone is more angry than sad, and the emotion most often depicted as "dark"/bad/evil is anger. Her parents still jump to her aid, but she's depicted as being the one to summon the darkness to herself--the source of her own near-death experience.

The princess has clearly been doing a lot of emotional repression, claiming she doesn't have "dark feelings", and ultimately the movie paints this as... a good thing? basically? It's only when she lets slip and gets angry that the darkness comes for her. The movie doesn't do nearly enough to affirm her anger as justified, nor is it clear in showing how her repression interacts with the darkness. Whenever she's pretending to be fine... she's fine. I think there was a huge missed opportunity to have the "darkness" come for her repressed feelings, and illustrate just how much grief and anger she's hiding. Instead, the advisors are kind of flippant about her being a moody teenager, and... the plot kind of supports that.

I think part of why this movie bothered me so much is that so much of my experience has been pretending everything's fine, and having to parent my parents. So to see a movie depict that and be like "yeah it's mostly fine" is pretty deeply frustrating.

Hopefully most people aren't reading into it so much and just stop at the statement of "even if your parents are separating they love you" and "if your parents are splitting up it's not your fault and it's not your job to get them back together because you actually can't". But it's still really frustrating when a story's own symbolic layers contradict the message it's trying to send. And kids pick up on those layers more than we realize, sometimes.

I really wanted to love Spellbound, because the visuals are really charming. I love Nathan Lane, so hearing him as one of the oracles was a treat. The fluffy gryphons, the antelope and kingdom design, the cultural representation of the main cast, it was all really nice to see. So that definitely made it more disappointing when the story's central message was... very confused.

And to be clear, it's just sort of a low-quality plot in general. There are a lot of false starts, and creative decisions that seem geared towards filling time. The musical numbers are forgettable, and there's a few moments where the writing is weirdly cliche and lazy. And maybe that's all for the best--by being a generally "meh" movie, the more problematic elements of the story won't have as much reach.

But I'm still going to complain about them because I need to get this out of my system. (And, as a writer, analyzing what other media gets right/wrong helps me strengthen my own craft.)

The most striking thing to me is that this is a movie of false starts. Our first scene is of the princess flying through the sky on a fluffy gryphon with her friends, a la How to Train your Dragon. But then she doesn't ride a gryphon again or see her friends again until the very end of the movie.

Then, we have one of the more successful musical numbers of the movie, where the princess explains her current life to us (her parents are literally monsters). I don't personally like the way she talks to the camera, but that's a subjective creative choice. Interestingly, during this song, she talks about she'd rather have her parents be human and nagging or criticizing her instead of being actual monsters. This is a bit of a red flag to me--yes it's relatable and how a lot of kids feel, but it's also the basis of a lot of emotional abuse from parents to their children. The child who feels comforted that their parent is angry with them instead of absent is NOT having a good or healthy childhood. This is also a failed opportunity for foreshadowing--if she had said "well I was mad they were nagging me but now I'm sad they just ignore me" we know her life wasn't perfect. Instead, she sings about "the way things were before" in an idyllic way. The reason I was able to clock that the story was ultimately going to reveal that the parents weren't happy was "we can't go back to the way things were before" is such a common framing with grief/loss stories.

Then the advisors get a whole song about how they're going to fix all their own problems--coronate the princess and send the king and queen "to the country". The resemblance to "oh our old dog now lives on a farm in the country" is played for laughs, and as the advisors insist to the princess that the king and queen aren't "in there" anymore, there's absolutely no recognition given to this means that HER PARENTS ARE DEAD??? Like no compassion just "Hey kid, admit your parents are dead and rule the kingdom now! thanks!"

If the movie did more with the parentification/forced maturation of the princess it would be one thing, but it picks up that thread and then quickly drops it, because the princess refuses to believe her parents are gone (OBVIOUSLY).

Presumably, the point of that musical number is to create new urgency around the fact that the king and queen are monsters. But the story already created all the urgency it needed by showing how destructive they are in the previous song, and how hard it is to hide them.

The coronation detail actually ends up being entirely pointless. Because in basically the next scene, the parents escape anyway, creating the actual urgency that the story needed. You could cut straight from the parents rampaging around to them finally escaping and revealing the truth to the kingdom, and the overall pacing would be much better.

And on the flip side, other plot mechanisms don't really get enough flesh on them, leading to things feeling very mechanical. The princess sent for the Oracle of the Sun and Moon ages ago, they finally show up, then they flee, but they've left behind a magical item. The magical item is what allows the princess to get to the forest with the queen and king once they escape. It's all a lot of back and forth that ends up feeling odd for the genre, because it takes so long for the actual adventure to start. There's a lot of arbitrary decisions that seem to serve certain jokes or musical numbers but don't really come together into a cohesive story.

Speaking of jokes, the movie bungles its own punchlines on more than one occasion. The magical item is voice-activated as a little nod to voice-activated universal remotes replacing many separate remotes, but then the writers so clearly didn't want to actually deal with writing logical prompts for the voice activated part. The princess gives a vague command, it has a comedic result, so she's like "guess I have to be more specific" before giving another equally vague command that works this time. After that, the voice control gets passed to her rodent friend, so that the writers don't have to explain what prompts cause certain things to happen.

Once they reach the dark forest, the oracles of the sun and moon immediately know what the solution needs to be. I guess they've had some time to think on it, but it's odd that they go from so frazzled about it in the throne room to having a whole song ready to go about what needs to be done.

It's also the most generic convention imaginable. "This is the dark forest. Follow the light. Watch out, the darkness will chase you." This is another missed opportunity at foreshadowing--here would be a great place for the oracles to conclude that the curse is from the darkness itself, and to theorize as to how the parents picked it up. But they gloss over that entirely.

The trials that follow are relatively entertaining, and there's some real creativity in the rules of the forest. There's a part where sounds gain physical presence and power, and can be damaging when they're spoken with anger--I actually really like that as a symbol of the harm that rash words can cause, but when the princess's frustrated efforts to calm her parents down are painted as just as "violent", the symbolism really starts to break down.

There's also a sand sea, where the sand becomes quicksand when covered in shadow. It's visually beautiful and emotionally compelling, especially when clouds of darkness roll in, and there's adorable baby gryphons involved. Elements like that visual storytelling are what really made me want for the story to work--and made me frustrated when such a strong visual metaphor was so mis-used.

It's a subjective creative decisions, but I also didn't really care for the way the parents slowly regain the ability to speak. It just doesn't work as well as Brave to show the relationship healing, and the main point of it is that when they parents reach the final light, they're lucid enough to realize they need a divorce. It also means they're very childish and simple in the middle, which does lead to some amusing moments, but ultimately really exacerbates the feeling that the princess is needing to parent her parents.

Likewise, there were just some odd creative choices. Like when the sounds have physical power, the positive is that the parents do realize that the cycle of violent words is their own fault. So, to speak a "comforting" word, the first word they say is... "girl". It gets repeated, and it fits the idea that they're recognizing that their daughter exists again, but... it only works in that meta sense. It's really weird in the actual story. "Sorry" would have worked much better, and reflected their actual emotional state better, not to mention emphasizes early on that it's parents' responsibility to apologize and repair. Instead, the child-like first word prompts the princess to be even more parental towards them.

I've gotten this far without even mentioning that the male advisor body-swaps with the rodent sidekick on the way to the dark forest because it's rather baffling and pointless. It adds a second lucid voice to the adventuring party, but that leads more to uninspired jokes than anything that feels important. He does get a long musical number about finally enjoying being a rodent, but because his character development is so inconsequential to the story, it still doesn't feel necessary. It also serves to quickly bypass the story's third trial (a maze), and given that it only has three, it ends up feeling like it really only has two (the embodied sounds and the quicksand). And in the end, the princess ends up having to parent him as well.

Legit the most amusing part of the bodyswap is that the advisor's human body starts acting like a chipmunk and nobody seems to notice that there's anything wrong with him, with the other advisor making a quip about his incompetence. But that's also kind of dark? Like these adults that were supposed to be taking care of the princess are so self-absorbed nobody notices when one of them starts acting like a LITERAL CHIPMUNK?

At a meta level, the purpose of putting the advisor into the adventuring party is to allow for the kingdom's forces to more effectively pursue the princess, king, and queen. (They don't believe the parents can be saved, so they want to exile them.) On the one hand, they want to save the princess, but on the other hand they effectively want to murder her parents so it's also pretty dark? The advisor ends up leaving a trail for the kingdom to follow, which itself is only necessary because the story can't decide how dangerous the dark forest actually is. All you have to do is give the army some fantasy creature with super-smell powers and the body swap is totally pointless.

From there we launch pretty quickly into the final climax, which has some charming moments but also some inexplicably lazy writing?

When the princess, king and queen finally reach the pool of light that's supposed to fix the king and queen, the princess jumps right in and starts frolicking. The king and queen soon see that the light retracts from them, which is what prompts them to realize that they'll stay monsters until they commit to getting a divorce. (This is an absolutely bizarre sentence, right? it's not just me?)

This leads to one of the more baffling lines in the movie. "Come on in! The light's fine!" Given the target audience is children, I don't think they're going to have the cultural touchpoint of "come on in, the water's fine". (Does gen Z even have that? What is it even from?) And then if you do have the touchpoint, it's not funny or charming, it's just... lazy. Like, what? You couldn't think of anything else to say? Even just don't make it a joke and be very literal--"Hey, why aren't you coming in? It feels nice!"--so that at least it's more comprehensible to children?

Then the parents finally announce that they're separating, the princess is understandably distraught, a giant darkness cloud swirls around her (which is bizarrely lo-fi. In movie where every hair is individually animated, the darkness tornado is just a shiny black squiggle. Another subjective creative decision, but it makes the darkness more laughable than menacing). The parents team up (after being briefly and pointlessly captured by the army) to pour the "light" onto the distraught princess, communicating their love for her and calming her down.

But again, being told once that your parents love you doesn't exactly solve the feelings of parental abandonment. Her parents need to show through action that they're still prioritizing her, which the movie does not give them any time to do. (Yeah, teaming up to pour the light on her kinda counts, but there's also a giant swirling darkness tornado so you can't exactly argue they aren't being driven by panic and guilt.) False promises can be one of the most stressful things for a child to experience (whether their parent are separating or not) that solving the conflict with promises (not actions) feels irresponsible.

Then her parents turn back into humans, build new houses on polar opposite ends of the city, leaving the princess with three homes--her old home, the king's mini castle, and the queen's mini castle. Separating is one thing, but needing to be physically as far apart as possible is played for laughs, but is actually rather dark. It's part of the lingering feeling that the whole situation is being trivialized.

As you'd expect, anti-divorce moralists went off in the movies reviews, and I kind of think that's Spellbound's own fault. Despite the undoubtedly noble intentions behind normalizing the experience of parental separation, the movie can't exactly justify that it hasn't trivialized the experience either.

Spellbound almost understands that it needs to give the princess her childhood back--the final scene of the movie is a big surprise party with all her friends for her 16th birthday, making up for the non-party she had for her 15th as a result of her parents' curse. (This is also not really well-explained, but presumably letting the princess have a party without her parents showing up would have given too much away.)

So, Spellbound is mostly bad/mediocre in mostly mundane, unimportant ways. The songwriting is forgettable, the plot is a clumsy concoction of thin tropes, the humor doesn't entirely land--but that's hardly new for kids' movies. Sure, it's billed as having talent from Shrek and Toy Story, but even so, a "meh" kids movie is not usually worth writing so many words about. (God I don't even want to check the word count of this.)

Normally, the elements that shine would do just that--a cute character, a compelling visual--and you'd leave feeling happy those things were there, and not entirely disappointed.

But I think what has given me the brain itch after Spellbound is that the adults in it behave in really awful ways. The advisors that are supposed to be helping support the princess are actually incredibly selfish and cruel to her, flippantly suggesting she accept her parents are dead, and overly eager to put the entire weight of the kingdom on a fifteen year old's shoulders. It would be one thing if the male advisor had a change of heart after seeing how sad the princess truly is, but he doesn't, really. He does say "wow I guess I was wrong" but in no way does this cause him to step up and be a responsible adult in the situation.

Likewise, because of the constraints of the type of story this is (i.e. not depicting traumatic parental fights on-screen) the parents come off as incredibly selfish too. "Hey, kid, thanks for helping rescue us, but I'm remembering how I cannot tolerate being in your other parent's presence for literally five seconds so we are going to chose now, an incredibly vulnerable and inconvenient time, to announce to you that we're getting a divorce. But hey, we said we loved you! So it's all good now!" Within the movie's own logic, there's no reason the parents couldn't have agreed with each other to get a divorce, returned to their human form, reconciled with their daughter first, then weeks/months later sat down with her to discuss changes that need to happen. And, indeed, in a real-life scenario, that is what the parents should be doing. Those are the actions that communicate love to your child--seeing to their actual stability first, and then confronting the more difficult parts from a secure place.

There's a reason most kid stories have goofy villains and plot points that exist purely for comedy reasons. It's fun, it's entertaining, good wins, and you don't need to analyze it too closely. That's not to say that children can't follow emotionally complex stories--I think that both She Ra and Centaurworld are excellent examples of stories that explore complex themes like grief and loss in ways that are accessible to even young children. Notably, these stories are extremely well considered and precise in their messaging.

There's a reason you have to be careful when mixing goofy kids' movie logic with complex, painful stories--when done poorly, as in Spellbound, the movie ends up making a lot of points it doesn't mean to, and getting in the way of its own (well intentioned) message.

To me, the most disappointing failure of Spellbound is painting the princess's emotional repression and Fine Actually. It would be very easy for a viewer to conclude that everything would have been fine if the princess had just continued to repress her "dark" emotions, and to interpret her "letting the darkness in" as a personal failing that causes her to need more support from her already stressed parents. So while we may forgive her lapse in will power, and we appreciate her parents' helping her, she Should Have Known All Along (tm) that they loved her, and a Good Child (tm) would have kept soldiering on without letting such dark feelings get to her at all. A younger me absolutely would have taken this message away, and that's probably why I reacted so strongly to the story as an adult.

On the one hand, children who already have secure attachments to their parents probably won't internalize any of those negative messages. On the other hand, the movie's clumsy message can serve to reinforce abusive/neglectful family dynamics. "See, they said they loved you once. Things are better off when they're separate. You can't complain anymore--if mom and dad are happier, you need to be happy too."

If it had just stayed surface-level and fluffy, it would have been a fine movie. But it's frustrating to see that in an effort to normalize a common childhood experience, it strays into the territory of normalizing some disturbing and rather dark behavior from adults.

And I think that leads me to my ultimately conclusion with stories that deal with dysfunctional parental/adult dynamics--not only Spellbound, but also stories I've loved, like Turning Red or Inside Out 2.

There's a sense that the writers have unresolved parental/authority trauma. They unwittingly infuse their stories with many elements of their trauma, and see these as "relatable details" when actually they reveal the elements of unhealthy dynamics that linger. For example, there is always a strong drive to show that the parents meant well the whole time, no matter how cruel their behavior. "Your parent might have caused you deep harm, but they still love you, an reconciling with them should be your goal" is the message that comes across. Sometimes, this is true. But more often, when the child is experiencing that much anguish, it's a sign that the parent does not have the capacity to reconcile. The parent's willingness and ability to reconcile is ultimately a fantasy in the story, and may serve to reinforce abusive dynamics with children hanging on waiting for their parents to change.

I'm biased, of course--my own parents have proved over and over again that they do not have the capacity to change. Stories of parental reconciliation kept me working hard and pouring energy into the relationship, ultimately resulting in repeated harm. And this experience is not as uncommon as we'd like to believe. Children, as a developmental rule, desperately want to maintain relationship with their parents as a source of safety.

There's a certain line between "relatable family difficulties" and "signs a relationship cannot be reconciled." I think this line is well illustrated by the mother/son relationship in the movie Wish Dragon (which I love). Though there is surface-level conflict between them, her actions always communicate love (she feeds him even after getting angry at him), and she is the first to seek reconciliation when the conflict has gone too far. She is self-aware enough to confess her own struggles, and make clear to her son that it's not his fault.

Contrast this to Turning Red, where as much as I enjoyed the movie and its normalization of puberty/big emotions, I think there is still a little too much leash given to an emotionally abusive mother and emotionally passive father. It's striking to see what is really a quite abusive dynamic depicted as "just how families are", and you can feel the pain of those unresolved traumas clearly in the writing (at least in my opinion). ((Also to be clear, I am reacting to what is depicted on-screen based on my personal experience and research into attachment theory and trauma, doing my best to take the story at face-value. I really, really don't mean to be commenting on East Asian diaspora family dynamics in general, or implying that they're all abusive.))

Works like Centaurworld and She Ra seem to understand the arc of trauma healing from a much more resolved place--they're able to articulate the complexity of the sympathetic ways that trauma arises, vs the ultimate responsibility adults have for how they act. Notably, these stories focus on peer dynamics, since exploring parental dynamics in this way is (clearly) very fraught.

Every story dances this line of "this specific story about these specific characters" vs "something universal you can take with you into life experiences like this". You can say, "well, Spellbound is about this specific family and this worked for them, and that's all their is to it" but again, the fairy tale genre demands that stories have universal elements to them. There's a strong sense of the story communicating "how things should be".

That's what makes stories with abusive/neglectful parents particularly complex. Culturally, parental reconciliation is The Way Things Should Be. Many, many parents (especially boomers) believe that they are entitled to reconciliation no matter how reprehensible their behavior. Likewise, Spellbound accidentally insists that children being easily reassured that their parents still love them, no matter how neglectful the parents' pattern of actions, is The Way Things Should Be. There are no lasting consequences to the parents' selfishness and awful timing, and emotional repression is shown to be Useful Actually.

Because even just taking the story at face value, when the princess's parents start fighting, if she hadn't believe that she could keep them together and restore their humanity, they would have died. Permanent monster transformation where they don't recognize her equals death for all intents and purposes. So even though her hope to return things to the way they were is ultimately proven to be futile, it's literally the only reason her parents are still alive.

Spellbound seems to know what it wants to say, but it really does not seem to be able to organize its myriad disparate, derivative parts into being able to actually say that thing. And like, I'm not going to claim I've never accidentally implied something I didn't mean in my stories. But I am also one person (I edit my own works) so there is always a point at which I'm going to be so close to it that I miss things. But for a full feature film, with multiple writers, a director, story board artists, a whole publicity team, it's definitely disappointing to see something this clumsy.

And it makes me sad, because I liked the setting so much. Seeing fantasy worlds through a more diverse cultural lens is something that gets me really, really excited. And the oracles of the sun and moon were so gay! It was adorable! So it's always a let-down when the other parts of the story just... don't work.

On a broader level, I think I find it particularly disappointing when neglect and irresponsibility from adults is normalized alongside parentification and forced maturation of children. It's not a fun time. Just let me enjoy the fluffy gryphons without getting cPTSD triggered, please. 🙃

#Spellbound movie #Spellbound #media analysis #actually audhd #complex ptsd #emotionally immature parents

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