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Frozen 2 is still a sequel that exists

Requested by @valentinerose529

If Disney released the BTS of all their terrible movies and bravely showed how such nonsensical plots came to be, with the best of intentions by the creators, people might have a softer take on disappointments like this. Frozen 2 isn’t a movie I was waiting for (certainly not for six years). I wasn’t a little kid obsessed with Elsa and I got really tired of all the music really quickly.

The only thing about this movie I was excited for was the new music, and based on the BTS, that’s the only thing they were banking on. So, with that in mind, this movie is just so confused with what it wants to be, I can’t even be mad at it for existing. It’s not the cultural juggernaut the original was, it came and went without much pain and hopefully there won’t be a third.

I probably have the same burning question so many other people who don’t like this movie have: You had five years to write this movie, and this is what you did with it?

There's certainly things I have problems with: Kristoff's stupid "Lost in the Woods," rinsing and repeating the "Elsa freaks out and vanishes and Anna must go save her (or nearly die trying)," plot, the botched twist reveal of the rewritten history, the underbaked development with the mom character to the point where Elsa was bawling at the sight of her during "Show Yourself" and I just did not care because the movie didn't do enough to make me care, and the self-depricating references to the hype of the original, making fun of fans' earnest enjoyment of an insanely popular movie, was in poor taste.

—

Unlike Pixar’s bad movies, where the plots beats and story elements are so interconnected that certain pieces can’t really be good in isolation, this movie actually does have really strong individual moments—the songs (“Into the Unknown” is still my favorite), Anna’s depressive spiral in the cave, the concept of the rewritten history, the new character designs, the concept of elemental winter spirits and Elsa being one of them—these are all great in isolation.

Put them together and they’re a hot mess. They wrote, performed, animated, and edited all the songs before settling on a story, and thus had to write their story around these really unrelated songs (quite similar to the first one, actually), and this is the result. It’s not a bad movie in that it’s unwatchable. It’s disappointing, confusing, and a little underwhelming. It’s not awful, because it’s not pretending that it’s amazing. It knows what it is, unlike the first one.

Thus, I don’t have strong opinions about it. I will still rewatch “Into the Unknown” on YouTube and everything with AURORA in it is great. The movie started out very strong, they just should have picked one of those plot threads to go with and make it a streamlined plot instead of mashing all these conflicting beats together.

The elemental spirits, the backstory with their mom that was sorely missing in the original, this uncreatively-named Enchanted Forest, the rewritten history—all of these deserved their own movies. Mashing them together like this leaves all of them underbaked and the story very scatterbrained. Heck, I’m shocked Disney hasn’t created a Frozen TV show to explore all those ideas and slapped it on Disney +. A little six-episode limited series, perhaps even with cheap 2D animation to plop your kids and die-hard Disney Adults down in front of for three hours.

The movie is better than the ride at Epcot, though, I’ll give it that.

#frozen #frozen 2 #disney + #disney

[magnorious]

Young Royals Perfectly Understands Frustrating Teenagers

*Spoiler Alert for the whole series*

This Netflix-produced Swedish teen drama just wrapped up its third and final season. It follows the second-in-line to the Swedish throne, Wilhelm “Willie” navigating a fancy boarding school rife with toxic social hierarchies and a crippling addiction to dangerous traditions, while also discovering his sexuality. Suddenly, his older brother dies and he’s now the crown prince, when no one ever expected him to have this responsibility, including himself. His jerk of a cousin records him and his new secret boyfriend being intimate and so ensues three seasons of drama surrounding the chaos of this poor kid being outed to the whole world, and the damage of publicity on his relationships.

*I watched this with subtitles and cannot comment on the quality of any dub.

This show is incredibly frustrating, because its characters are frustrating—because they’re incredibly believably teenagers who stake their entire futures on a high school fling. Willie and his love interest, Simon, are in a constant struggle over Willie’s great expectations as the new crown prince and Simon, of a lower social class, having a great many demands over how he thinks he should be able to live his life.

The characters have a ton of depth and that goes well beyond the two leads. The villain of the show, August, the evil cousin, is a hot mess who can’t do anything right. One that absolutely expects to peak in high school and sail through adulthood on his family’s legacy. He’s also Willie’s spare if he abdicates the throne, a rather unique twist on the prince trope I haven’t seen very often. Willie doesn’t want to be king, but he hates the idea of August on the throne even more, and, if only to spite his cousin, strays way outside of his comfort zone and ignores his own wants and desires to make sure he becomes king.

Other side characters include the dudebro boys of their school, also all dickish aristocrats, the ladies’ side of the school, and Simon’s sister's relationship with these socialites and her awesome best friend, Felice.

—

*spoiler alert again*

These two characters, Willie and Simon, are terrible for each other. Simon is too young and immature to understand and appreciate the demands of being royalty in a modern setting. He gets upset at Willie for all manner of things—that Simon has to watch what he posts on social media, who he talks to, who he takes pictures with, what statements he makes, and his unrealistic expectations of any politician. Every time he gets upset, I understand that he’s 17, but I’m also scowling at my TV thinking, “What exactly did you expect, dating royalty?”

Willie, on the other hand, bends over backwards for this guy and desperately needs to actually attend his therapy sessions instead of angsting over his doomed-to-fail romance. They’re entertaining, but they are so, so stressful to watch, whether it’s their many arguments or whenever they start making out in a public place where they can be caught.

They break up, get back together, break up, get back together. In the 11th hour of season 3, Simon officially breaks it off and I actually cheered. I figured the finale would end with the sick queen’s funeral and Willie reluctantly accepting his birthright.

That did not happen. Instead, Willie and August have a rushed “all’s forgiven” conversation, he abdicates, and runs after Simon to be free of a responsibility he never wanted. On the one hand, yes, he never wanted to be king, that much was clear from the moment he found out he was the new crown prince, but on the other hand—Willie wasn’t the character who needed to change for this relationship to work.

Simon was.

Simon, who argued with him constantly over the conservative nature of the monarchy, for all the stances Willie wasn’t allowed to take because of his rank. Simon could have ended this season either breaking up with him for good, or committing to the responsibility of loving royalty, and the two could have looked to a future of slew of progressive changes once Willie had the authority to enact change as king.

August won’t enact shit. August who, upon telling his friends that he’s the new second-in-line, realizes acutely how miserable he’s about to be for the long rest of his life. I half expected this guy to not survive to the end of the season with how self-destructive he is.

It feels like they had a different direction planned for the finale and someone somewhere cut it down. That, or Netflix's "3 season" rule made no exceptions and they had to rush to the finish line.

—

Overall, they’re frustrating, but they’re also incredibly well-written teenagers. The constant pop/club music over actual score got annoying but it’s an exposure to artists I never listen to. The acting is fantastic across the board, as well, along with the editing and cinematography. The actual plot, up to the finale, was engaging and well thought out, with these two heirs duking it out in a cold war with the entire school caught in the middle.

Maybe I just don’t understand Swedish teenagers. I certainly can’t speak to if this at all reflects the reality of Swedish culture and living under a monarchy. It’s a shame that, in my opinion, it didn’t quite stick the landing with the messages it wanted to send, but the show’s a solid, if stressful watch, and a short one at that.

#review #netflix #young royals

[magnorious]

The Reveal that Changed Percy Jackson

*Spoiler Alert*

I’m talking about the Nico vs Cupid scene in book 8, House of Hades. I picked this scene, even though there were a great many in the original series that defined Percy Jackson as a story far more meaningful than just “cool tweenage demigods with magic and superpowers who fight evil”.

When this book came out, Nico vs Cupid was almost all anyone talked about. Why? Because Nico came out. Nico, an explicitly gay character in a book published by Disney, in a rather high profile series. Nico, the little angsty brat displaced from the timeline, comes out of nowhere with a world-shattering reveal.

House of Hades is already the darkest book in the series and, I think, the most polished and successful with this tone and how it feels so complete. While Percy and Annabeth are in Tartarus, the constant clever and horrific callbacks to quests from prior books quite literally come back to haunt them. The others trying to carry on without them, the ridiculously high personal stakes, the drama, the storytelling, it spares no expense in this book.

The Nico vs Cupid scene was something else, though, and all these years later… I’m not so sure it was done for the better.

—

Independent of the Big Reveal, this scene does a lot of things we’d never seen before in this series, namely this: Cupid is scary, and no one expected him to be.

Percy Jackson, though it does have its serious moments, is the series where the god of wine wears leopard print shirts and the god of the seas has a fishing chair for a throne. These characters quip and joke even when they’re trying to be intimidating and Percy’s personality, snarky and sassy and very rarely shooting straight, undercuts a lot of the attempts at looking competent and threatening (and we love him for it).

They’ve fought gods and monsters and demigods and characters have died really tragic deaths, but for the most part, these serious moments all come when we expect them to.

This scene comes out of nowhere and for anyone who hasn’t read the book in a while, here’s the context: Percy and Annabeth are in Tartarus and Nico is kind of the de-facto leader in their absence, knowing the most about Tartarus of the remaining crew. He and Jason are sent on a side quest to go retrieve the Staff of Diocletian from Cupid and Nico is not at all happy about this venture, but we don’t know why beyond that he’s Nico and he’s never happy.

Right out of the gate, Cupid is not at all who we expect him to be and this fight scene, absent of Percy, is suddenly very serious. Cupid doesn’t quip, he doesn’t show himself, and he fights dirty. The god of love, not the god of war or anything we expect to be violent and dangerous.

He’s whispering in characters’ heads, throwing them around like ragdolls, and taunting Nico ceaselessly all in Jason’s POV. Cupid gets some seriously badass lines, too.

“I’ve been to Tartarus and back,” Nico snarled. “You don’t scare me.” I scare you very, very much. Face me. Be honest.

Love is no game! It is no flowery softness! It is hard work—a quest that never ends. It demands everything from you—especially the truth. Only then does it yield rewards.

“Oh, I wouldn’t say Love always makes you happy.” [Cupid's] voice sounded smaller, much more human. “Sometimes it makes you incredibly sad. But at least you’ve faced it now. That’s the only way to conquer me.”

In all this, unfortunately in Jason POV, we’re primed only once by a previous god finally acknowledging that gays exist in this universe. This universe, based on Greek Mythology, famous for its not-straightness. Even then, audiences have spent 7 and a half books accepting that there won’t be any gays. No one is expecting this from Nico.

So when it comes, when Nico reveals he has a crush on Percy… the fandom lost our minds.

—

And I’m not so sure that’s a good thing, looking back. On the one hand, obligatory “we need representation,” but on the other, there was this one reviewer who knew what was up long before anyone else did.

She’d said something along the lines of raising damning concerns that Nico’s entire character arc was now defined by his homosexuality, that this scene frames all his anger, all his hate, all his rage and depression, about this one aspect of his character, and diminishes him because of it.

All these years later, I’m disappointed to say I agree with her.

This book series’ only major canonical gay (so far) is forced out of the closet with a proverbial gun to his head

Now, Nico likely never would have come out without that gun, but the way it happened, especially in front of Jason who he’s not friends with, showing Jason his memories because it’s not Nico’s POV and Jason has to see somehow because Nico sure won’t detail those scenes himself is... not good?

Jason handles it well, as well as he can given that this is Nico, and Cupid is an explicit villain so him forcing Nico out is in-character and not my problem. The narrative forcing Nico out is the problem—that this is a big reveal both to Jason and the audience is the problem.

The book isn’t new and with respect to when it was written and who wrote it, it’s not a terrible scene or terrible representation. But it’s not just forcing Nico out of the closet, either.

All of Nico’s character development is retroactively pinned on his sexuality

I get it. Nico’s… 14? 14 and from an era where being who he is was a death sentence, with zero education on the matter. Internalized homophobia is a thing (though Nico doesn’t actually seem to hate himself for being gay, he hates himself for crushing on Percy. Nor does he hate other gays or the concept).

Nico, though, is the one demigod who can summon any ghost he could dream up to teach him to hate himself a little less. He could have summoned the ghost of Freddie Mercury and what a dazzling mentorship that would have been.

The way the scene is framed makes it look like all of Nico’s rage comes from this one relationship, when it comes from so much more. He’s a son of Hades, a god no one trusts or likes and is synonymous with death, evil, and deceit. His sister, his last living relative, died on a quest as just a teenager. He has no friends at camp, powers that scare people, and is almost a century removed from everything and everyone he knew in his old life.

And he went and left camp *only* because of his crush on Percy? Not for any other reason?

When he does get his crush on Will, that only makes it worse. Nico did have friends, even if he didn’t believe it. He did have Percy and he’d earned the respect of his fellow campers after the Battle of Manhattan. He back-slid in HOH for this reveal, as if a romance is the only thing that could make him happy.

Cupid’s message is the narrative’s message: The only way to conquer love is to face it [in combat]

With a gun to his head, in front of a veritable stranger, instead of in, I don’t know, therapy with Apollo? There couldn’t have been any other way to fit this reveal in? He couldn’t have made his own group therapy session with other ghosts? Persephone or Demeter never sat this boy down for The Talk with a literal captive audience?

And that it’s a “reveal” at all, in incredibly dramatic fashion, a plot twist for shock value. The book couldn’t drop hints in Nico POV? Couldn’t casually state it anywhere at any time in the previous 3 books? Couldn’t treat it at all like this is normal and not a life-or-death situation?

I just feel bad for the kid. Nico can’t be the only demigod who has a guilty, unrequited crush. Cupid is forcing this out of him because that crush happens to be on another boy.

It’s in Jason’s POV

This world shattering, deeply personal reveal, and the character who’s having it isn’t even the narrator. Jason is a fine character and I know why it’s him out of everyone who could have gone with Nico, but this should have been solely Nico’s moment, not Jason’s commentary about Nico’s moment, being a non-consenting voyeur into Nico’s very personal memories about Percy.

Even if it’s not Jason’s POV to retain the surprise, it certainly starts to feel like Jason’s POV to retain the surprise. Jason can still be present, but even then—Cupid needed Nico to face Cupid, not Cupid and Jason.

—

It sucks because the scene as a whole, removed from the context, is incredible. The choreography, the pacing, the intensity of the battle, Cupid as a villain and Nico and Jason’s desperation to just stay alive.

Its impact on the series can’t be ignored. Blood of Olympus is no one’s favorite. It’s a terrible last book and not all that great as a book, period, but the ending?

Among other travesties, Nico confronts Percy, tells him he had a crush on him, and then *immediately* starts pining after Will. Percy doesn’t get the chance to talk to him, stunned at this reveal. They never have a heartfelt conversation about it, what this means for their friendship, how Percy never noticed or how this makes him feel, if he’s at all guilty for potentially leading Nico on and being a bad friend.

We get none of that. Nico just finds a pretty blond boy after, what, four years pining after Percy? One awful confrontation with Cupid and a few lines of dialogue traded with Jason and all his angst and moodiness is cured off-screen.

Can’t Nico go five minutes where he figures out who he is before he’s trading one crush for another? Can he not define himself independently of who he likes for just a couple chapters? He tells Jason after the Cupid fight that he’s over it, but… c’mon, he’s absolutely lying there, or he wouldn’t have been so hurt and upset and hesitant to reveal himself.

I love that he’s popular now, I love that he does have a healthy relationship (one that eclipsed the whole fandom for better or for worse), but the way he went about becoming popular still leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Nico did walk so the rest of the series' extended universe could run. We did get Solangelo, we got Apollo being Apollo, we got a world based off Greek Mythology that stops straight-washing history. It's just a shame that he had to be forced out the way he did, and that his whole character is now defined by his relationship with Will.

#percy jackon and the olympians #percy jackson #pjo #nico di angelo #solangelo #house of hades #blood of olympus #retrospective

[magnorious]

Cars 2 is Still Uniquely, Tragically Bad

Of course I had to watch the sequel. See this review of the amazing Cars for my inspiration to watch a movie 13* years old that is legendary for how bad it is.

And 13* years later, my opinion has not improved. Cars 2 is so bad, though, that it’s tragically bad. It doesn’t make me angry, it doesn’t leave me frustrated, it leaves me like an exhausted parent compelled to take their bratty child’s abused toys away until the kid learns to play nicely.

It’s so, so obvious what movie this wanted to be, and that was a perfect and logical direction to take this universe: Lightning won what I assume was the American racing championship, and, as you do, now he gets to compete on the world stage. Now, he’s competing against foreign models with unique traits and attributes that he’s not used to, racing not in a standard oval, but on the streets and all the twists and obstacles that come with it.

His villain is this new slick, Italian racer that everybody loves, who’s really good at what he does, and a jerk but not a dick (and there is a distinction, trust me) and Lightning’s secret weapon is his dirt-track roots.

I sat down to watch this movie only to watch Lightning’s races, because I remember really liking those sequences as a kid. Unlike Cars, this is not my feel-good, watch-anytime movie. I’ve seen Cars 2 maybe three times since it came out?

I think I watched all of 30 interrupted minutes of this mess, and maybe 10 minutes of that was racing.

Why?

The nonsense spy thriller plot that took over this movie like a cancer. I’m not mad at the characters for their dumb decisions, I’m not even mad at the writers, this movie got so mutilated by the producers and the Powers that Be that I’m embarrassed for the characters for having to exist in this story.

It’s not even that the spy stuff is bad, though it is contrived with the exact same plot that makes no sense in Incredibles 2: Villain wants to paint a non-existent problem in a bad light to remain in power, by creating a fake hero persona to build up the thing they hate, only to sabotage it to make their thing look better.

The spy elements, and seeing how they fit into a car-dominated world, was actually really fun. The opening sequence with Finn and all his gadgets, seeing the world expand to include boats and ships and oil rigs was very entertaining…. visually. 

It just should not have been in this movie. Finn and Not-Sally were clearly written for a different movie and somebody decided neither Other Spy Movie, nor Cars 2 deserved their own releases, so they mashed them together in the worst way possible.

That, and making Mater so dominant in this script that Lightning is relegated to, again, 10 minutes of his own movie being about him.

I liked some of the other elements. I liked the scraps of the other racers. I liked the existence of the lemons clashing with high-performance machines. I liked the visuals and Francesco, and of course I liked Lightning’s races, but the sum of these parts just don’t add up. 

Whenever those racing scenes got good, they were kneecapped when the movie cut away to Mater’s shenanigans like the movie was ashamed to show us something decent.

In including the Other Spy Movie in this script, there’s no room for other important details like: Giving the other racers any personality or backstory or rivalry and friendships, giving Lightning legitimate concerns about his ability to win on all these new tracks and what his journey is supposed to mean here, building up any actual threat from Francesco and, since he’s not written like a dick, just a jerk, some nuance to his character and *why* he dislikes Lightning so much (American arrogance, maybe? He was almost there already).

But most damningly, this movie has no soul. Yes, people complain about all the nonsensical earth-based details they included without a thought spared for how none of it makes sense, things that were so minor in the background of the first movie that they were just a passing curiosity which are now right in your face.

Those nonsensical details wouldn’t be so glaringly bad if this movie had anything else to balance it out, and it doesn’t. It tries—it has the plot about carbon emissions and the dangers of fossil fuels, but that’s the message of the *plot*, what’s the message of the *story*?

The plot in Cars said this: A rookie racer’s arrogance and self-centeredness gets him marooned in a podunk town for a reality check, and to gain the first real friends who don’t just see him as a shiny celebrity in his whole life.

The story in Cars said this: A kid who lives his life in the fast lane and thinks he can fill all the loneliness in his life with trophies and paparazzi attention gets marooned in a podunk town to discover who he really is, what he really wants, and who really matters to him, and the tragedy of the sport he loves and all who compete in it.

Plot and Story are two different things.

So, what does the story of Cars 2 have to say? Something-something the real friends are the dents we made along the way?

I understand that they didn’t want to re-cast Doc and as a mentor, it’s almost written into his archetype to die regardless of real-world circumstances, but having an entire movie of these two on equal ground and with equal respect, working together to solve a problem neither are experts in? That’s a movie I want to watch.

Assuming that Doc also never raced any European circuits. He’d spend the whole movie building Lightning up, meeting other grand old mentors and legendary racers of a bygone era coaching their protegés. Lightning would, in turn, make new friends, and new enemies, with those foreign cars and their unique perspectives, because the first movie was sorely lacking in giving any of the background racers personality.

The soul of the movie could have been about not losing yourself chasing ambition, knowing when to call it quits before it gets too dangerous, knowing that “winning” doesn’t always mean first place (harkening back to the original), and that “losing” amongst legends doesn’t make you a loser.

And, why not, keep the lemon plot, just rework it to cut out all the spy stuff. Lemons, cars that were engineered to constantly break down would have been an interesting contrast to dynamic speed machines that had real potential. Maybe make Lightning meet a bitter not-fan who, by the powers that be, will never be a racer (oh, wait, that’s Cars 3).

—

People make fun of how ridiculous the plot of this movie is, and it is ridiculous, but it had so much potential and what they did to it, this Frankenstein’s Monster that we got, is just tragic. They redeemed themselves a little with Cars 3, but you can’t erase the impact this sequel had on the franchise, Pixar, and American animated movies. It changed things, irrevocably, and not really for the better.

*year edited because I can't do simple arithmetic and blog at the same time

#pixar cars #cars 2 #cars 2 (2011) #review #retrospective

[magnorious]

Eowyn and the "Strong Female Character" debate

In the ongoing argument about Strong Female Characters (SFCs), the usual poster-women of “characters no one ever complains about” are the strong badass women from classic movies, like Elen Ripley, Sarah Connor, Princess Leia, and Trinity. Modern SFCs no one hates include Wonder Woman, every female character in Last Airbender, a handful of Marvel women like Gamora, Nebula, Agent Hill, Black Widow, and *some* of the heroines from teen dystopian fiction like Katniss Everdeen.

The attention paid to the women of Lord of the Rings goes, “Galadriel is a badass in her own right and the movies could have had more women, but the women we do have are great.”

And, yes, I agree, but I want to look at Eowyn in particular and answer this question: Would Eowyn, written exactly the same, in the exact same story, be criticized by today’s audiences? We’re looking at movie-Eowyn, not book Eowyn, for familiarity’s sake.

Eowyn looks a lot like the terrible so-called “strong female characters” modern audiences hate from modern movies. She’s strong, she’s skilled, she’s smart, she’s capable, and her whole story is about overcoming the stigma against women warriors and joining the battle in the end, and killing the great evil Witch King that “no man can kill” by virtue of having a uterus. She’s also one of… I think five named women in the cast, Arwen, Galadriel, Eowyn, Freida (little villager girl), and Rosie (the hobbit bartender).

She checks so many boxes, she’d have to fail in a movie written today, wouldn’t she?

I love Galadriel and Arwen and I love the argument around them—that SFCs don’t need to act like men to be considered strong. They don’t need to be physical warriors, they can champion their femininity and that in itself makes them strong. Their wisdom and compassion and wits, not just their muscles.

Eowyn, though, is a warrior through and through. She literally goes “I am no man,” as she stabs the Witch King, a line specifically and implicitly subverted by Wonder Woman in her debut solo film during the No-Man’s Land scene when it’s softballed to her with the line “It’s No-Man’s Land, that means no man can cross it.”

Surely, a 2024 Eowyn would be ripped apart…. Right?

—

Getting this out of the way first: Every character is written with depth and nuance, including the women, and, thus, no character feels like an agenda with a face taped to it. So already Eowyn has a leg up on so many other terrible releases lately. But let’s take it piece by piece here.

Eowyn is one of three prominent women in the cast

Yes, no arguing that. Why? “Because it’s fantasy and the author is sexist-” no. This is an author who lived through the World Wars, from a time period without women soldiers. Young men and boys being ripped away from home to never see their sisters, daughters, wives, aunts, mothers, best friends ever again is what he lived through and what this story is saturated with.

Could there have been scenes of prominent women nurses, or lady elves at the Council of Elrond or any member of the Fellowship? Yeah, sure, but it’s not at all a lack of women because Tolkien discounted women warriors. This cast is hefty enough, these movies are long enough, and they’re based on a book that’s almost 100 years old.

Eowyn is objectified by male characters and trapped in a love triangle

Yeah… the love triangle bit was weak. However! Eowyn was never bitter over Arwen and didn’t know she existed until Aragorn tells her basically, “yeah, I love her, but I’m guaranteed to never see her again,” so… can you blame Eowyn for holding out hope? It doesn’t at all define her character either, and she likes Aragorn not because he’s Protagonist Boy but because he’s a high-ranking, noble man who doesn’t bat an eye at her desire to join the war effort. She then gets Faramir, so, win-win.

Grima objectifies her, but Eomer, her brother, Aragorn, and Theoden, her uncle, all defend her. Eomer gets banished under punishment of death for standing up for his sister (among other things). She’s not the butt of jokes or slights or innuendos. No soldiers look at her with lust and desire. No one degrades her or belittles her or mocks her for being a woman. Nowhere do the writers get to satisfy their own sexism by writing in gratuitous insults and slurs against her.

Eowyn is repeatedly told to run from the fight and hide with the other women

Theoden has no living siblings and his only son dies off-screen. Eomer is (I think) older, but he’s busy being a general. Eowyn is Theoden’s best chance at an heir to the throne and he can’t let her get killed on the battlefield. Eowyn being told to hide is strategic, not sexist. Not only that, she may be competent enough with a sword, but she can’t have trained as well as the battle-tested soldiers to not be at risk in a nasty battle.

Also, at the rate men are getting killed on the battlefield, sending too many of your women off to war risks so much collateral damage.

Even putting strategy aside, Theoden loves his niece, loves her strong and pure and good soul, and doesn’t want to see it destroyed in the fog of war. All he wants is to see her smile again, so he can give her a world and a future worth smiling for. War is the “realm of men” not because they’re male, but because it’s a horrible, terrible, violent, depressing, scary place to find oneself in, and he’s trying desperately to protect her from it. Eomer tells her this explicitly in a deleted scene, that they’re only trying to spare her some horrific trauma.

When Eowyn does finally see real battle up close, she’s rightfully horrified and terrified and out of her depth during the battle for Minas Tirith. She’s not riding into war all smug and overconfident, and she’s not magically a better fighter or rider than the rest of the cavalry.

Eowyn constantly complains about being looked down on for not being a man

She’s not allowed to be a soldier, yes, but women of Rohan aren’t treated as lesser by the men. She’s not being teased or mocked, her station as the crown princess is uncontested, being relegated to the caves with the women isn’t seen as a time-out, but a necessity to make sure all the vulnerable non-combatants don’t get murdered and the entire kingdom of Rohan doesn’t get exterminated in one night.

She herself isn’t putting other women down for not wanting to fight, or putting men down to make herself look better. No one is telling her she can’t be a soldier because she’s weak and womanly. If she was Denethor’s kid, he’d be singing her praises right next to Boromir (within the context of movie Denethor, at least). She wants to fight, not because she hates her own femininity, but because “women of this country learned long ago that those without swords can still die upon them”.

Eowyn single-handedly kills the Witch King because Woman

Actually, Merry stabs him in the leg to distract him first, giving Eowyn a few seconds to breathe and surprise him. The legend goes that “no man can kill the Witch King,” but it’s not meant to be the fault of men and instead the arrogance of the Ring Wraiths. These nigh-immortal spirits are so cocky and overconfident they don’t even register women on the list of potential threats, to their own doom. The legend also didn’t specify no Elves, Dwarves, or Hobbits, since “Man” is a race, not just a gender.

The Witch King is the Witch King because he was seduced by a shiny ring and a lust for power by Sauron. The “power of womanhood” isn’t the point, it’s the overinflated ego of the Witch King that is his downfall.

So Eowyn’s “I am No Man” is as much a “yay feminism” as it is a dig at his arrogance. It’s the fulfillment of this line by Galadriel: “Even the smallest person can change the course of the future.” Frodo is small in stature and worldly presence, and Eowyn is small in prowess and authority.

*headcanon that Sauron also hates the Nazgul and wrote in that little clause for the Witch King so he could get the last laugh on these snot-nosed, so-called “kings of men”.

—

So would Eowyn be panned by today’s audiences? No, I don’t think so. Another well-written woman who wants to learn swordplay and join the men’s war, and kills an unkillable witch king is Arya Stark. That “victory” went over like a box of rocks and no one hates Arya for it.

You can write women warriors in a no-women-allowed fantasy land. You can write them championing feminism without cramming an agenda down your audience’s throat, or insulting the audience for presumed bigotry. You can write women who kill the Witch King through a prophetic loophole. You can write them in a love-triangle and give them all the “women empowerment” speeches you want.

She is still feminine. She’s still nurturing, still has her wardrobe of pretty dresses, still sings at her cousin’s funeral and pines after men she absolutely deserves. She’s also a terrible cook and independent and not afraid to put creepy men in their places. She has flaws, she’s humble, she’s shown having fear. She’s not built up by stepping on her male counterparts, and her big moment isn’t detracted by Merry going “Wow! A woman! Who’da thunk it?”

#lord of the rings #eowyn #strong female characters #female characters #feminism #retrospective

[magnorious]

Pixar’s Cars is still way better than people give it credit for

Am I writing an essay on a kids movie that fell out of relevance after the last sequel seven years ago? Yes. Is it my favorite background animated movie to put on whenever I’m working? Yes.

It goes without saying that Pixar’s catalog is still topped by movies like Incredibles, Toy Story 2, Up, Inside Out, Finding Nemo, Ratatouille, etc. Cars sat at the bottom of Pixar’s “best of” list until its sequel came out and people realized how bad Pixar movies could actually be.

But you know what? I love Cars. Is the story as deep and moving and profound as some of the others? No. But it was made with love and after what feels like the past 8 years of resounding “meh” coming from Hollywood and some of the most shameless cash grabs pretending they’re not, Cars remains my feel-good movie. It doesn’t have that classic Pixar “cry your eyes out” moment, no dead parents, no chosen ones, decently low stakes. It’s a good time, anytime.

Why I’m writing this now, though, is because of this: I knew already that the King and Chick were based off real racers, and Lightning’s “McQueen” is another homage, but I looked up if Doc was also based on a famous racer during my last rewatch and found this on Wikipedia:

Doc’s car model, the Hudson Hornet, was manufactured from 1951-1953 for its original run. In 1954, its manufacturer merged with another company and the Hornet was heavily remodeled to boost sales, only the popularity of the car never recovered. It stayed in production until ‘57. It was used in racing and that’s where Doc’s paint job in the finale draws inspiration.

But do you remember what his backstory is? 3 back-to-back Piston Cups from ‘51-’53, a crash in ‘54 that saw him rebuilt, and obsolescence upon his return.

People complain that they “didn’t need to be cars” in this movie. They’re not like the toys in Toy Story where the plot and message depends on them not being human. They’re not like the fish in Finding Nemo. They could have just been humans who drive race cars and it raises more questions than it answers.

You are wrong, Sir.

Doc’s backstory is why they had to be cars. They aren’t human because the story depends on them being machines – as Cars 3 explores more deeply. A human endurance runner can train to be the fastest, running against other humans with the same chances at success (ignoring steroids and socioeconomic opportunity). Humans aren’t running foot races against mutants or aliens where, no matter what we do, we will lose by nature of what we are.

Cars do. A car model is beholden to its manufacturing and all the complications that come with it. Cars are objects that, like toys, have obsolescence built into them. There is no “outdated” way to run a foot race.

So yes, Doc has a Tragic Backstory(tm) but it’s not just that he was some great master at the top of his game once that faded from glory like any human who got too old. He’s a car, and no matter how good he was, how many Piston Cups he won, the powers that be that made newer models with better mileage and efficiency and mechanics were always going to dethrone him.

The movie isn’t about him, though, it’s about another rookie. A rookie who lives life in the fast lane and thinks his time in the spotlight is never going to end when Doc can look at him and know exactly how wrong he is. Lightning is a race car too and, regardless of the existence of Cars 3, Lightning will also inevitably become obsolete no matter what he does to fight it.

I doubt the writers were going for this when they wrote it but that they’re machines is also a criticism of how we treat celebrities. Lightning is an entertaining story until the next shiny starlet emerges and, through no fault of his own, he’s kicked to the curb for the “new”. And that new will be cast aside for the next new and so on and so forth and the only winner is the greedy producer making money off their cash cow until they drain it dry.

Yes, the movie is about appreciating life and the things that you do have and “the friends we made along the way” but that they’re machines matters. Had they all been human, the movie would have lost half its message, and half the tragedy. If they were human driving cars, Doc wasn’t written with a disability so he could have, in theory, hopped back behind the wheel of a new car and still won against younger drivers. He’s not human, he’s a car, and he isn’t built to go as fast as newer models.

Age affects everyone, but a world made by machines that pits machines against other machines in an endurance test is inherently rigged when the machinery being tested can always improve.

It is unfortunate that both Doc and the King go out in wrecks (even though the poetry is nice) and the story doesn’t explore the existential obsolescence of being a machine designed to only do so well and be improved upon – even Lightning still has to wreck out of his big race in Cars 3 before he starts losing to the newer models.

But maybe having a Cars movie that does explore the existential obsolescence of a machine might have gone over kids’ heads. Or, maybe not? They pulled off some very mature themes in Incredibles with marriage problems and presumed infidelity that kids probably didn’t understand but still knew was not good for the characters.

Not to mention all the other wonderful details in this movie: The car-pun cities on all the license plates, the tire tracks in the sky and car-shaped natural phenomena, all the creative sponsoring brands on the racers.

How the “Life is a Highway” montage hits you over and over again with a straight road that cuts through the winding nature (the snaking river, the mountains sliced open to make room), industry that stops for nothing and scars everything in its path.

If you haven’t watched this movie in a while, do yourself a favor and find time to do so.

#disney pixar #pixar #pixar cars #cars

[magnorious]

Review: The Last Airbender Episodes 4&5

Why was Netlfix so hell-bent on adapting this show instead of making something new in the ATLA universe? Make a Kyoshi spin-off! Everyone would have been hyped to watch Kyoshi crush skulls between her thighs. Make some other avatar we’ve never heard of with complete freedom to do whatever you want with their story. The 100-year war can’t be the only conflict in the history of this world and the gap between Wan and… I believe Kuruk is the earliest-named Avatar in canon after him, is massive.

It would have been free from all the “the cartoon did this better” nitpicks and legit complaints.

If they wanted to Game of Thrones-ify it, they should have taken notes on how to deliver exposition. Opening the pilot spoiling the best reveals of season 1 would be like opening GoT with Jaime Lannister stabbing the Mad King with full context for why he did it, instead of waiting for that reveal when he’s confessing to Brienne.

“The Storm” was perfect, and you soiled it!

—

Season 1 of the original is the weakest in terms of consistency. This season has both “The Storm” and “The Great Divide”. It didn’t have the biggest budget and didn’t have the intense overarching story of 2 or 3 with the struggle over the Earth Kingdom and the climax with the Fire Nation.

So skipping and rushing a few episodes like “The Great Divide” or even “Bato of the Water Tribe” and just sifting out all the important beats wouldn’t have made too many complain. I didn’t have a huge problem with shoving 3 episodes worth of content into one menagerie because it still worked, even if it didn’t stick the landing.

But it just keeps going. If they hadn’t cut away to the Fire Nation scenes, maybe they could have reworked all this Omashu plot into one episode. I’m bored. I’d rather be annoyed, than be bored. Boredom is the cardinal sin of entertainment. They take forever in the Spirit World too with all these unnecessary flashbacks for Sokka and Katara.

Still don’t like Iroh. “It seems we are always getting on or off boats, perhaps that is our lot in life, Prince Zuko.” Wow. Sagely wisdom. I want that on a t-shirt. Totally.

*Side note: Couldn’t you keep any of the original episode titles? Name the premier “Boy in the Iceberg,” episode 2 “Warriors of Kyoshi”, episode 3 “Jet”, episode 4 “The King of Omashu”, episode 5 “The Winter Solstice”.

Aang’s conversation with Iroh in the crystal cave prison cells looks and feels like they stole it from “Crossroads of Destiny”, except that Aang is way more vitriolic than he should be. He gets indignant, but he never gets so judgemental.

When I said in my last review that these characters aren’t cartoonish enough — Bumi is supposed to be over 100 years old, as old as Aang. His actor looks 60. Costume is pretty, though and coding the kingdom of Omashu as Indian and the rest of the Earth Kingdom as Chinese implies they were their own kingdom for a very long time and got annexed so, kudos.

Bumi’s voice attempts to fill the cartoonish void but because everything else is so grounded, it’s just awkward. He got turned into a royal jerk, not just a crazy old man like he used to be. Also not letting the “Bumi” reveal happen, that even one of Aang’s ties to his old life is still kicking, is disappointing. This isn’t Bumi. Not to mention that Bumi, in season 1, would never let this happen to his city, or his prisoners of war. Manufactured drama is manufactured and we all noticed.

~Secret Tunnel! Secret Tunnel! Through the mountains! Secret Secret Secret Secret Tunnel! Yeah. ~

I am actually shocked they kept the hippies. Very well brought to life.

I didn’t mind episode 3 playing fast and loose with the episode order and content, but butchering the “Cave of Two Lovers” is a crying shame (and dragging it out of season 2, no less). The story of the two lovers (read by Katara, not the hippie whose name escapes me) was reflected in Katara and Aang’s journey through the caves. Romance has never been Avatar’s strong suit, but the episode was still entertaining. Now it reads like Katara and Sokka are the lovers, which is a *choice*, but no, they just bicker.

Iroh’s side plot with the Earth Kingdom soldiers, with this unnamed dude we don’t care about, certainly fills the more adult tone they insist on going for, it just doesn’t need to be here. Once again, the original got away with implication flawlessly, instead of preaching the horrors of war explicitly.

I can’t remember exactly, but Lu Ten was danced around as a topic until Iroh’s mini-sode in “Tales of Ba Sing Se”. We could see that he wasn’t all smiles, we knew the wacky uncle was a bit of a mask, but that episode showed you exactly who Iroh is when no one saw it coming. All this filler is just a whole lot of unnecessary scenes and dialogue hammering home a backstory done way better with far less.

And, that episode was in season 2. Once again, the writers can’t hold out on a mystery for anything.

*Side side note: For shame slipping a piano into the score! For shame! Get that Western percussion out of here. Maybe GoT is just on my mind thanks to that rumor, but the theme music for the Southern Water Tribe sounds a lot like the Winterfell theme in the beginning. Hell and gone from any asiatic influences.

“It wasn’t the crystals that guided Oma and Shu,” no, actually, it was. You just didn’t want to animate the wolfbats so you turned the gentle giant badger-moles into snarling beasts.

Oh, there’s Zuko’s sympathetic side in that flashback about Lu Ten. Nicely done, no notes. That’s the Iroh I want the entire season. I hear that Leaves from the Vine in the background.

—

Episode 5 opens with some ham-fisted exposition and wow, that was impressively bland. 

I… spoke too soon about omitting Bonzu Pipinpadaloxicopolis. My mistake. And I spoke too soon about enjoying Azula and Ozai. They’re both still great, they just don’t need to be here yet.

Because they have to make up scenes for these characters, they still say a whole lot of words without saying much at all – except that Ozai now randomly actually respects his son and chastises his daughter for mocking Zuko. That’s new. Ozai is all about “self-serving flattery and coy whispers.” Dude named himself the Phoenix King and invented a rank above Fire Lord for his own vanity. He would be a loser if he wasn’t so powerful.

Okay, the show got me. I actually laughed out loud when Zuko tried to bribe the Earth Kingdom tavern keeper and it didn’t work.

Nice to see they paid as much attention to the “Great Divide” as the Ember Island Players, but for shame about “The Waterbending Scroll.” That was a decent episode. They also skipped most of “The Fortune Teller” and carved out June and *man* is that some rushed CGI on Nyla.

Wan Shi Tong?! *checks notes* 20 episodes early?! His VA is great. Gravely goodness.

Iroh accidentally reads the script notes when he says “Zhao is already making his moves and we have yet to draw our tiles”. These two are aimless, leadless, and hitting plot points like potholes.

Regarding Aang dragging Sokka and Katara into the Spirit World with him, as far as I know only avatars and Iroh can enter the Spirit World. They don’t need to be part of these scenes. When I said the writers did their homework in the pilot, they must’ve read the SparkNotes for “The Winter Solstice”, and instead filled it with stolen flashbacks from season 3.

I take it back. I take back wanting to skip “Bato of the Water Tribe”. Hakoda never got the chance to do Sokka’s ceremony, that’s why it was Bato’s job, that’s why Sokka was left behind and so much older than the rest of the kids in the village, because he wasn’t a man yet. Are all these supposed to steal from “The Swamp”? They aren’t from season 1.

Koh looks great. That’s the best part of this whole over-long sequence. Koh. Even seeing Gyatso again doesn’t feel earned when this scene doesn’t need to exist. It’s not like Katara and Sokka are learning new information, nor are they the bridge between the worlds. Aang doesn’t quite feel like the “last airbender” if he can chat with Gyatso’s ghost whenever he wants, he’s supposed to be utterly alone, 100 years divorced from everything he’s ever known.

Gyatso’s speech is nice, if I extract it from its context.

—

This show is missing artistry. Some beautiful establishing shots and cinematography, scenes I can freeze-frame and stare at and turn into wallpaper – not to mention that once again, it’s too damn dark to see anything in night scenes.

Once again, the VFX is very obvious and distracting. I know the artists aren’t to blame, but, gee, had the whole thing been a cartoon, there wouldn’t be a need for realistic CGI.

Slamming all these episodes together like this makes them messy. The plot isn’t a meandering adventure filled with side-quests anymore. It’s not written like a show where you tune in once a week for a good time. It’s written like a bingeable Netflix property, and released all at once like one. They could have at least staggered the release to two episodes at a time.

I don't think I'm actually going to finish it. At least not now. I don't want to give Netflix the view thinking I watched beacuse I was invested. I wish it were as bad as the original movie, if only so I could make fun of it.

#review #avatar #last airbender #avatar the last airbender #netflix #iroh deserved better #atla

[magnorious]

Review: The Last Airbender Episodes 2 & 3

I still need to watch this show in a pitch-black room to see anything on screen during night scenes. Did you not learn from Game of Thrones?

Jet’s here! He shouldn’t be, but he is! Teo’s here! He shouldn’t be, but he is! And they’re both fantastic. Azula, Ozai, Mai, and Ty Lee are here! Wait a second….

—

Something I didn’t touch too much on the last episode that I’m going to now: This crippling addiction Hollywood has to ~reimagining~ beloved cartoons in live action consistently has the same flaw: It’s so *boring*. 

On the one hand, yes, I love the live action costumes. I love all the detail that can now be added since it doesn’t take tediously intricate details drawn frame by frame. However, cartoons, especially anime-inspired cartoons, take full advantage of the medium and frequently don’t draw *realistic* humans, they emphasize the features that matter like caricature.

ALTA not only uses caricature but the slapstick, rubbery physics of a cartoon world to hand-wave away the consequences of elemental fisticuffs. The expressions the characters make, their peak character designs, the exactness of every frame, even the less-detailed background shots of little gummy people with undefined details, these define the show.

So while the casting has been great so far, Gyatso, Iroh, Bumi, Zuko, Sokka, Gran Gran, through no fault of their own or the fault of the medium, lack the cartoonishness of the original characters. The cartoonishness that makes this show so beloved so the live action scenes feel… lesser. 

Also, because it’s anime-inspired, the fight scenes storyboarded and drawn in anime are incredibly dynamic. The way the camera sits and follows the action is beholden to no real-world physics because it’s all drawn and anime is particularly good at making spectacular, intense fight scenes. This show’s fight scenes, while well-choreographed, aren’t filmed like a live-action anime, and that also makes it feel lesser.

—

I can’t be the only one disappointed that every episode doesn’t begin with Katara’s narration, can I? They went through the trouble of CGI-ing the whole thing, so why not?

I was holding out hope that they’d still find the avatar statue room, because it was so well-animated and hauntingly beautiful with the buildup and all the eyes glowing. They kept tiny versions of the statues, it just lacked the oomph.

Or the foamy-mouth guy and all the kids enamored with Aang on Kyoshi Island, and Aang reveling in the praise and attention. That dude has become his own meme. He’s hilarious.

Still not satisfied with Iroh’s voice (not the actor’s fault), or Zuko’s, for that matter. He doesn’t quite hit the “I’m an angsty 16 year old stuck with an uncle whom I do not respect or take seriously in any way and refuse to admit that I care about” vibe. Zhao also doesn’t sound intimidating (though he tries and his physical acting is great). When casting all these roles, I wish they would have paid as much attention to the voices of the live-action actors, as much as their faces. There’s zero grit in anyone’s voices, even Gran Gran’s. Zhao sounds his best when his voice lowers as he narrates his letter to Ozai.

Humor-wise, this show sits in a weird spot where it’s trying to be funny only with one-liners (like Marvel) and zero situational humor. Sokka is the best attempt the show makes at being funny and sometimes it lands, I just wish there was more of it. It’s like this show is afraid to lose its “gritty” badge if any scene dares to be legitimately funny.

I do like the nod to the cartoon’s title sequence with Aang air-scootering into that statue. That’s the situational humor I’m talking about.

—

Kyoshi island (and their costumes) was good, lacking humor and giant koi notwithstanding. Kyoshi herself making an appearance giving Aang some sagely wisdom 50-odd episodes early is a treat, even if he’s suddenly excellent at handling the Spirit World with zero effort. They didn’t turn the Kyoshi warriors into insufferable girlbosses, remaining incredibly competent warriors that happen to be women.

In attempt to make it more adult, they’re starting to fudge some backstories and motivations, like Aang now having too much power to the point where the other kids were afraid of him, and the Sokka/Suki romance being far less subtle, and a lot more physical. It’s less sweet and more “wow, these teenagers are horny”. Katara did not witness Kya getting burned alive, her mother would never have let that happen. She’d left the tent to find her dad, and by the time she came back, Kya was already gone. It was tragic already, why make it worse?

**Side note, Momo is a lemure, not a monkey, please don’t give him generic monkey noises. They already gave you plenty of sound design for Momo, just use it.

Aang fumbling around in the Spirit World at the worst possible moment is so true to form, it would be hilarious if it wasn’t so serious. Him ending that trip by manifesting into Kyoshi totally kneecaps the moment during the Winter Solstice where he becomes Roku, even if it looked cool.

The Ozai reveal, though. Why? Just why? Did Daniel Dae Kim have X amount of minutes contractually obligated? Ozai wasn’t revealed for two entire seasons, not his face. They waited and waited and waited, leaving him silhouetted by flames and shadows, only drawing him from behind or from the neck down. This was a *reveal* because we didn’t know what to expect. Would he be as ugly as his soul? Handsome? Pretty? Scarred himself, like his son?

Oh. Azula’s here, too.

The writers of this show and Percy Jackson went to the same school of “Mystery be damned, let’s shoot our load right f’ing now!”

Also, Mr. Kim should have been Zhao, not Ozai. He would have made a fantastic Zhao.

—

The more Ozai is on screen, even if his scenes are good, misses the whole point of why he was barely a character. I’m trying not to use “the cartoon did X better” too much, but the cartoon did it better and here’s why:

Ozai is basically a non-character. Who *he* is doesn’t matter, he’s a bad guy doing bad things because he’s an evil narcissist. His actions and his orders are felt across the globe, though. So the Gaang doesn’t meet him (some ever) until the finale, but they still feel the impact of his actions the entire series.

Who’s Ozai? The guy who burned and banished his son and sent him on a wild goose chase.The guy who’s admiral murdered the moon spirit. Who continues to lay siege to the Earth Kingdom and whose daughter orchestrates its downfall. We don’t need to see who he is for him to be one scary dude. He doesn’t need all these extra scenes to prove how terrifying he is.

The original perfected “less is more” and Ozai (and Azula, and Mai and Ty Lee) just don’t need to be here. Not yet.

With that said, Azula’s great, what little we see of her. Ozai is great. They really seem to be having fun with their roles.

Episode three leaves me curious if all the kids watched the original and wanted so badly to make this show funny, and all the adults told them to tone it down. They’re trying so hard. Props to everyone doing their best with an IP as beloved as this one, and the massive shoes they all have to fill.

More missing humor: Bonzu Pipinpadaloxicopolis! But at least they kept the cabbage merchant.

Episode three decided to combine the Northern Air Temple with Omashu and Jet for reasons. These were two entirely separate plots and locations, but Teo and the Mechanist are incredibly entertaining even if they’re early. They filmed only eight episodes and I feel like a broken record when I say: If you hadn’t given us the wrong filler, you could have properly adapted the missing content. You can skip the Great Divide, though. I hope you skip the Great Divide.

The filler is entertaining. I like the easter egg of the Yu Yan archers training in the background with Azula, implying that she’s as good as they are. I don’t think Azula would bother mastering archery when she’s a firebending prodigy, but the scene is nice. The original Omashu and Northern Air Temple would have been nicer.

Can’t say I miss the original Jet episode and the second I saw this scruffy boy with emo hair in his eyes on that wagon, I thought, “This is Jet, right? It’s gotta be Jet. He’d make a perfect Jet.”

And I was right!

Wrong time, wrong place, but this is the first character who, upon seeing them completely out of their episode, even if he looks nothing like his cartoon version, he fits that character’s vibe perfectly. Excellent casting.

“Omashu” is so far divorced from the original, it might as well be its own thing and it’s buckwild, but it combines elements from three independent episodes and it works incredibly well, even if the plots still feel disjointed from each other, each stays their welcome as long as they need to.

The freedom fighters are amazing. Their costumes are amazing. As each one showed up on screen I was grinning from ear-to-ear. My only detractor is the slight-fanservicey nature of it all once Jet starts naming his team. No notes on Jet dropping his disguise and the slow-mo of the reveal of his hook-swords. One more re-write and it would have been flawless. Can’t wait to see this guy ambiguously pass away beneath Lake Laogai. He’ll be great.

—

I’m liking Iroh less and less every time I see him. He’s just not Iroh. He doesn’t act like him, doesn’t talk like him, doesn’t wax poetic like him, which is a shame because, behind Zuko, I’m pretty sure Iroh is the fan-favorite character. He was an entire generation’s mentor and this just isn’t him.

Zuko’s dickishness was also tempered by him being an awkward turtleduck. Here he’s just aggressive with zero moments for second-hand embarrassment. He doesn’t get bullied by Sokka in the premier, doesn’t bicker with Iroh, he just yells and screams. He’s not endearing in the slightest.

The VFX as well – I know the underpaid and overworked artists did their best but it’s very distracting when they’re so obviously standing in front of a greenscreen.

This show still does not need to exist, make no mistake, and I can see why the original writers left. There’s scenes I’ve legit fast-forwarded through because they just won’t end and I am bored – the massacre of the Air Nomads? Skipped.

With that said, it’s not the worst adaptation in the world, and everyone still showed up to do their best with the script they were given. Does every line land? Heck no. Are the fight scenes cool? Ehhhh, kind of? Is it funny? No, not really, not compared to the original. Is it for kids? I think no less than 20 people have been burned alive at this point so, no, not really. Not like the original was for all ages.

Once again we have a “but was it better than the first attempt?” bar two feet into the topsoil. Yes, so far, it is. At least it’s not like that other horrible adaptation that forgot it was an action-adventure story.

But Jet was awesome. If he carries this review solely on how awesome he was, so be it.

#review #avatar #avatar the last airbender #last airbender #iroh deserved better #netflix

[magnorious]

Review: The Last Airbender Episode 1 - “Aang”

“Long ago, the four nations lived in harm-”

Lol nope. What is it with writers these days fumbling exposition? You had a template, and you botched it.

I nitpicked the heck out of Disney’s Percy Jackson because if you say you’re going to adapt a book, it’s not a very far leap in logic to hope the script might follow said book. But aside from the likes of Twilight, following the source material as it was written never happens.

Netflix had an even easier job. Netflix already had the show they were adapting in a visual medium. Netflix could have gone two ways with this: Shot-for-shot remake just with live action actors, or with an “inspired by” vibe that takes familiar characters, story beats, and themes but tries to make something new with their shameless cash grab.

So, they wanted to take a beloved children’s cartoon and make it gritty and realistic… okay. Sure. No one asked for that and it shouldn’t be embarrassing for any adult to sit down and *gasp* watch a cartoon. For kids.

The original remains amazing, top-tier storytelling, so instead of these reviews stating the obvious “original did X better, why didn’t they do it that way?” we’ll look at the show as if the original didn’t exist… unless it just goes the route of Disney and Amazon and slaps a famous IP on the title screen without making any attempt to stay true to the original just to get butts in seats.

—

We open 100 years ago in Caldera (renamed generic Capital City) with a pretty decent fight scene and special effects. The choreography is solid, the tone is way darker – and so is the lighting, I had to shut the blinds and turn my laptop brightness all the way up – and it establishes pretty quickly that this is Not Your Kids Cartoon Anymore, even if the fight is bloodless.

*Side note: That no one has a Japanese accent in the Fire Nation is… surprising? I know it’s not actual Japan, I know the original didn’t have any accents, but that they’re going for the whole “gritty realism” vibe and didn’t white-wash the cast, not giving them any accent feels like a bit of a missed opportunity. Just the adults, even. Iroh had an accent in the cartoon.

The costumes are also amazing. The original is still a feat of animation but being able to see all the ornate detail in the costumes, particularly in the Fire Nation, is fantastic. The Water Tribe costumes don’t feel quite so lived-in. The colors are still vibrant, there’s no stains, no wear. They don’t reflect the weariness of a remote village still suffering the effects of a hundred-year-long war. Zuko’s scar doesn’t feel quite as gnarly as it could be, more like a very bad bruise and not the remnants of a 3rd degree burn (but at least it’s not on the wrong side). He still has his entire eyebrow and full visibility.

Sozin is amazing, too. Right off the bat he’s shown as clever, cunning, and violent. The original was limited by Nickelodeon’s censorship, so even though it was a kids’ show and they did amazing still scaring kids without showing the violence (like a graphic depiction of Zuko getting his scar), these are firebenders, and fire burns.

… Though if you’re twelve and watching this expecting a fun adventure, watching a man get burned alive in the first 5 minutes wakes you up right quick. I heard a rumor that they wanted to fill the Game of Thrones vacuum and, yeah, they went for it.

Is there a reason they didn’t lift the original opening narration straight from the old script? It was fine! It’s iconic! This feels like a student cracked open a thesaurus for their essay just to sound smarter. Gran Gran gets to deliver it and that is an... interesting choice.

They did salvage some of the original music, and hearing Aang’s theme and the foreboding horns of the Fire Nation theme redone was ear candy, along with the Sun Warrior chant in the end credits. During Aang’s escape from Zuko’s ship, however, the score sounded uncannily like the battle music from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. 

*Side side note: One nitpick. One little nitpick, I think I’m allowed. Aang cannot fly without his staff. It’s a convenient and logical cap on his abilities and there was no reason to not keep it in.

On the one hand, opening the series with the Air Nomad genocide establishes immediately that the Fire Nation is led by an evil warmonger. On the other hand, slowly weaving in that exposition over the first few episodes, culminating with “The Storm” took what we thought was a lighthearted adventure and made it so much more. That reveal in “The Storm” still makes it one of the best episodes of the show.

Gyatso is perfect. The casting is perfect. “Gritty realism” or not, they did their homework on Gyatso. The only voice actor that left a hole not-quite filled is Iroh’s. He doesn’t quite sound like the wizened old sage, just… a guy. Through no fault of his actor’s, he’s solid, he’s just not quite Iroh.

—

While the worldbuilding is fine and all the extra additions in the beginning are entertaining… the original cartoon was limited to a cable-bound, 30-minute time slot, with commercials. They did their best to pack as much as they could within that time limit for every episode and you weren’t left wanting. It was also animated and every single frame cost money to draw. Creativity thrives in a box and not having endless Netflix money forced them to do the best with what they had.

With all this room and time to kill on Netflix it loses that tightly-woven polish. Scenes linger and add in dialogue that could have been concise and short. This show marinates, where the original was multitasking in every shot – developing the characters, the world, the story, the lore, the relationships.

In the time it took an entire animated episode, this show front-loaded all the exposition and mysteries to be slowly teased and solved through the first half of the season. We’re not left wondering how Aang survived the Air Nomad massacre. We’re not wondering why he wasn’t there, we’re not wondering who he is and slowly learning him with each episode. Curious now if the “The Storm” episode will even exist.

When Aang takes Sokka and Katara to the Southern Air Temple, neither know exactly what happened beyond that it was bad, and Aang has no clue his people have been destroyed, that it’s been 100 years. This time, the trio and the audience already have that information so the oomph of seeing the aftermath, of seeing Gyatso, doesn’t hit as hard as it should.

The themes, the personalities, the motivations of the characters so far still feel like them, even with all the extra fluff. Aang remains a reluctant chosen one, a twelve-year old with too much responsibility on his shoulders – even if he explicitly ran away after eavesdropping on Gyato’s conversation about sending him away and didn’t just happen to be gone while his home was destroyed.

Everyone except Iroh, which is a shame. He reads less as a “concerned surrogate father figure trying to raise an angsty, bratty, entitled teenager” and more “old man who’s too old for his nephew’s BS so he patronizes instead of showing any genuine support.”

About the only major element that didn’t get the love it deserves is the humor. Aang’s abrupt “will you go penguin sledding with me?” right after he wakes up is just one of many missing lines. Game of Thrones had plenty of funny characters, a show can be gritty *and* funny and he’s still twelve, he’s allowed to be a little cringey and ridiculous.

For a shameless cash grab remake that lost the original writers and took forever to finally air, this is a lot better than I expected it to be. The script isn’t perfect and there’s some lines that aren’t well-executed, but no actor phoned in their performance and visually it looks amazing. The writers did their homework and, so far, even if they refuse to make it a kids’ show, they’re still making Avatar: The Last Airbender.

#avatar #last airbender #netflix #avatar the last airbender #review

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On so-called "ace-erasure" in the Hazbin Fandom

I feel compelled to say something, as a proud ace, regarding the maelstrom of hate and bullying surrounding a fandom I just dipped my toe into, but it concerns the broader concept of fanfic and fanart as a whole.

Y’all. It’s a cartoon. They’re not real people, they’re not based on real people, they exist to be entertainment and to make you smile and sing along and root for their success.

It’s funny how you can look at any straight, cis male in a movie or TV show – whether he be in a happy, healthy straight relationship or otherwise, and the fandom drags his sexuality through the woodchipper in the name of fanfiction.

Oh but there’s queerbating, they’re totally gay even if the writers refuse to admit it. Oh but it’s just for fun. Oh but it’s just wish-fulfillment, it’s not doing any harm. They’re just fictional characters.

Excuse after excuse after excuse for raunchy art and sordid storytelling that can boil over into hating on not only the female characters in these men’s lives, but their female actors.

And yet.

God forbid you drag an ace’s sexuality through the mud for the same exact harmless, wish-fulfilling reasons. Or anyone who isn’t cisgender and straight.

Oh but it’s queer-erasure. It's different because there's already not enough of us and we have to fight for what we have.

No. It’s not. Because you’re not the writer. It’s not your show. So long as the person who made the character proudly defends them and respectfully depicts them, then it’s not erasing anything. Otherwise the thousands upon thousands of wailing fans would have turned some of the most iconic men of fiction into proud gay icons simply by wishing it so.

The whole point of fanfic is being able to see situations, circumstances, and relationships in a what-if scenario. Yes we know this character is straight, or gay, or bi, or pan, or ace or aro, but what if they weren’t for just a few thousand words? Yes we know this is how it happened on screen, but what if it happened a little differently?

It’s supposed to be fun.

I love ace representation. There’s not enough of it and there needs to be more. I want to be able to say See! We exist! Look at us go! with the rest of you.

I also respect shippers doing whatever they damn well please because no matter what they say or do, I can re-watch the show and still see my ace on screen unblemished (as can all the straight viewers who cling to their straight heroes).

Is the motto of fanfic not “don’t like, don’t read?” The amount of nasty comments on incredible art is insane. Don’t like? Don’t look. You’re the one with egg on your face wasting your time and effort typing out and posting that nasty comment. You don’t like it? Scroll on past. Ignore the art and deprive it of the attention the artist posted it for because it’s fanart of fictional characters.

Is this post going to make a difference? No. Am I inviting my own slew of nasty time-wasting comments? Yes. But as an ace who saw an ace and does actually appreciate (if not agree with) the potential in all these what-if scenarios in the right, specific circumstances, I’m fervently siding with those artists who just wanted to draw something pretty and share it with the world.

It’s entertainment. It’s just for fun. Do you really, seriously want this fandom to be looked on from a distance as “oh yeah the violent, bullying nerds that take a cartoon musical way too seriously”? Instead of, I don’t know, “Hey, I want to watch this cool show and peruse some awesome fan content because I can’t get enough of what little we were given, look at how many wonderful options there are.”

#ace pride #acespec #hazbin hotel #alastor

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Hazbin Hotel is the Perfect Musical for People Who Hate Musicals

*Spoiler Free!*

I watched this on recommendation and the pitch was “the cast is filled with Broadway performers, also there’s an aro/ace and he’s amazing”. Broadway is never an enticing detail for me.

I heard the name “Hazbin Hotel” and assumed the plot would be about “has-been” performers staying at the hotel trying to regain relevance through a series of convoluted musical numbers and big dance numbers and boy, was I completely wrong.

Charlie, Lucifer’s daughter, is attempting to redeem souls in Hell so they get a second chance at going to Heaven to save them from extermination by the forces of Heaven, because Hell is becoming overcrowded with sinners. She created the “Hazbin Hotel” as sinner rehab to save her friends.

The show reminds me a lot of Phineas and Ferb in that every single episode features a song and dance, in a show about kids living up their summer vacation building wild and wacky inventions while a pharmacist battles his arch-nemesis platypus in the B-plot. That the show is at all a “musical” is just icing on the cake — not the entire cake.

I might not like Broadway, but I respect it for the art form that it is, and still this show didn’t feel “Broadway”. The songs were explicitly not-meta, no huge cabaret dance and chorus, and except for one single track, no song felt mis-matched to the images on screen (Carmilla’s power ballad felt a little over the top, if great independently).

And, like Phineas and Ferb, everything was so sincere that it went so far into ridiculous and came out the other side wildly entertaining. There was not a single boring character, a single dull voice acting performance, a single scene where I lost interest.

This show is hysterical if you don’t like comedies either, because the dialogue is so fast-paced and witty, throwing insults and slinging dry humor in blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moments. I have to watch it again just to pause and catch all the background details.

And speaking of details! This show is also a perfect example of why animation is not inferior to live action. It’s so refreshingly un-Disney in its character design and so far removed from attempting to ground its animation. I did have trouble at first distinguishing characters from background elements because their silhouettes are so zany, but that faded fast. Arcane and Spiderverse are beautiful achievements in animation, but this is a cartoon through and through.

Every single character (except Adam, his minion angel, and the English Vee demon) are adorable and every silhouette is unique. For a show that’s four hours long, every major character gets the chance to shine and they pack a ton of characters into four hours. Every single character is sincere in who and what they are, fully marinated in this wacky world that would crumble if any one performance didn’t embrace the craziness.

And among the performances, every time they cursed and sang about wildly inappropriate content, I pictured posh Broadway performers in the recording studio having the time of their lives in a role they could never put on stage in front of mass audiences and it was hilarious.

The main cast is also fantastic. Main character – Charlie – could so easily have gone from endearing to annoying with her optimism but she rides that line perfectly. Characters might find her annoying and her rank as the Devil’s daughter is her shield, but no one who calls her their friend makes fun of her behind her back. They know she cares, and they care about her.

Four hours isn’t enough time for plot contrivances and the show knows it. Anyone else would draw out the “liar revealed” plot line for drama and filler fodder for an entire episode and Hazbin doesn’t. Another show would have the double-agent act do more damage and not get them discovered immediately. Another show would draw out a heroic sacrifice with rousing violins and horns and slow motion — not Hazbin.

The rest of the main cast – Vaggie, Alastor, Nifty, Husker, Angel, Sir Pentious — have incredibly strong personalities in the time they were given to shine and even the side characters aren’t lost in the shuffle. I think Alastor is most everyone’s favorite and he’s mine as well. I liked that, as I said above, he genuinely cares about something he probably shouldn’t with the success of Charlie’s hotel. He’s plotting and scheming in the background but he’s not a liar or a pretender and everyone is aware of those plots and schemes. A lesser show would have made him a shrewd villain. I was rooting for everyone to escape their lots in life and succeed almost the moment they appeared on screen, endeared to the entire main cast in seconds because this is a group of friends that are genuinely friends.

The show is Amazon’s, and with that comes permission for all manner of foul language and mature content and it does get dark but never gratuitously dark like Amazon’s Invincible or The Boys. There’s a very polite and considerate content warning for depictions of assault and while I guessed the character it happened to, I expected a lot worse given the platform I watched it on. It didn’t need to be violent or graphic to get the point across, so kudos for respectful restraint.

Lastly, the musical numbers themselves. I grew up watching the Disney Renaissance movies and I have seen productions of Broadway shows. It’s the culture that bothers me, not the performances. So I never anticipated hating the songs and, save for one sung by a random minor character in Heaven, every single track was a banger with incredible variety. The lines are sharp and witty (and take full advantage of being rated 16+) and insanely catchy.

I already feel late to the party with this review and the season just wrapped up. For anyone else who either looked at the title, or the art style, or heard “it’s a musical” and kept scrolling, Hazbin Hotel will surprise you at every turn with its refreshing sincerity, incredible animation, and endearing characters you can’t wait to see more of in season 2.

#hazbin hotel #review #prime video

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Review: 'The Prophecy Comes True', Percy Jackson Episode 8

We made it to the finale!! It takes an impressive level of mediocrity to make watching TV feel like homework. I came here to see how they expect to fit the entire Ares fight, this nonsense with accusing Clarisse of stealing the Master Bolt, Percy’s trip to Olympus, the reunion with his mom, and the Luke betrayal, *and* somehow make a decent send off for what might be the only season of this show… in 30-40 minutes.

**Side note – The music finally fits the episode it’s in and stands out really well across the board.

It’s wonderful seeing the excellent physical acting again that hasn’t really been showcased since the premier, both in the fights and the facial expressions. These kids definitely listened to their fight choreographers. It really feels like Percy’s whaling on Luke in the little flashback and when Percy faces Ares.

On the one hand, I still hate how the characters just. Know Stuff. whenever the plot demands, however I have since forgotten exactly how the Kronos reveal played out in the book and this Ares confrontation is fine.

**Side side note – there’s something really uncanny about the LED sound stage they’re filming on. I don’t know if it’s the shadow-less ambient lighting or the lack of wind or even the waves that are supposed to be crashing on the beach, they cannot convince me these actors are standing on a real beach. They can’t convince me either that they’re standing in a throne room dimly lit and surrounded by braziers when no firelight hits the actors even in dim flashes of orange.

My subtitles say [heroic instrumental music playing] and that about sums up this show having to tell me what’s going on, instead of showing me. Like Percy’s sudden and inexplicable control of a wave, without actually standing in the ocean for his little “sea god power boost”. It looks cool. It’s completely robbed of any tension because audiences (who did not read the book) aren’t waiting for Percy to cleverly gain the upper hand and haven’t been told about Percy’s substantial control over water. But, you know, it looks cool.

The writers read the SparkNotes for this scene, yes indeed, they did.

Ares never curses Percy, and the cops never show up because that wasn’t in the budget, and neither was the rest of this fight scene.

Why Percy thinks his mom is in the Random Beach Cabin from Montauk is beyond me. Ares and Percy fight in California, not New York. Alecto is actually fantastic despite being on screen for less than a minute. Once she’s gone… the plan remains exactly the same for Percy to go to Olympus to appease Zeus so why, exactly, did the show decide they’d already missed the deadline, when it has zero impact on the plot, just to arrive at the same conclusion?

I’ve complained about the emotional acting for the entire show and I take it back for episodes 3 and 8 and these two alone. The trio gets their deserved time discussing the end of the world in Random Beach Cabin and it finally feels like they’re comfortable in their roles and the dialogue they’re given isn’t half bad either.

The Luke flashbacks also feel much more polished than the rest of the series and though we still have to be told, instead of shown, that Annabeth fears spiders, his metaphor lands well.

All the VFX location budget went to Olympus and it’s gorgeous. I haven’t been to Greece so I can’t say if it adheres to any remotely Greek architecture but when they’re not cutting for imaginary commercials, it’s very nice to look at, even if the throne room suffers from the same lack of cringe and whimsy as the rest of the series.

Poseidon’s throne isn’t some chiseled stone, it’s a deep sea fishing chair. Does that sound stupid and ridiculous? Yes. Is that what makes it Percy Jackson and not Clash of the Titans? Also yes. The gods, still, don’t look or act like gods, even when they remove said cringe and whimsy. Zeus is supposed to be, what, 10ft tall in this scene? And he’d never leave his throne to walk to Percy, he’d make Percy awkwardly walk up to him, bow on his knees, and deliver it to his hand. He doesn’t look like he’s itching to smite Percy either, he just looks tired (until Percy starts talking back).

Funny how Zeus needs a shiny new reason to let Percy live because Poseidon decided not to show up for his very first and only scene in the book. A critical scene, where we finally meet the mysterious deadbeat dad who calls him a mistake, and tells him he’s sorry Percy was born.

The writers are trying really hard to emphasize that the Olympians are supposed to be a family and it’s no more apparent than in Percy’s pleading to Zeus, reminding him who’s related to who every chance he gets and… and, what? Is the power of familial love supposed to change Zeus’ mind? He’s Zeus! He cares about his image and his pride and his next pretty mortal conquest and nothing else.

Oh, there’s Poseidon. The writers forgot he’s supposed to be a jerk in this book, tempering Zeus’ wrath with his words, *not* by engaging him in combat, only to “surrender” in a war that happens entirely and inconsequentially off screen. What victory? What has Zeus won? What actually happened after Percy missed the deadline? Did Poseidon lose forces? In what battles? Were there human casualties? Percy failed to prevent a war, why didn’t you show us the war? What was the point of missing the deadline?

We do get one good line from the book, “The sea does not like to be restrained,” and that’s about all that remains from the book version. Percy’s catching of the word “father” takes on new meaning, which is also fine. As [music becomes poignant] and Poseidon is way kinder in this version, notably not apologizing for Percy’s birth and all the misery that will follow his life as a demigod, because he’s a Good Dad unambiguously.

Percy returns to camp to follow up with the Clarisse nonsense, minutes that could have been spent on the Ares fight, but this show hates action scenes in this urban fantasy adventure. I *think* it’s here so Luke has a scapegoat, but no one ever suspected Luke in the first place. They skip straight to the Luke-Percy confrontation (pretty darn accurate to the book for a change). It’s also funny how Percy’s been so, so smart the entire series, being handed information whenever he needs it. I half expected him to realize Luke was the traitor by the powers that be without any evidence- oh, wait, that’s exactly what happened.

The random Clarisse accusation was because they didn’t want to use the pit scorpion instead, gotcha. Luke’s acting is also solid, compared to how he was seven episodes ago.

**Side-side-side note, Anaklusmos is glowing like a golden lightsaber when Backbiter is supposed to be half-celestial bronze, too, and makes Backbiter look that much more fake and plastic-y. It’s supposed to be intimidating the second Percy sees it, because it’s made with mortal steel with intent to kill regular humans.

So they’re okay with poisoning Percy with chimera venom, but not pit scorpion venom? Percy carries that scar through the rest of the books. Luke very nearly kills Percy here and he’s terrified at the lengths Luke went to do so.

They skipped the beading ceremony, which is a shame, and ever describing the other beads from past years. They also didn’t include the letters warning of death by vicious harpy.

“Rey. Rey Skywalker.”

They managed to stick the landing with a sweet camp send-off. These kids actually feel like friends who’ll stay that way for the next five seasons. Music swells and Percy gets a fake-out dream and a meeting with Kronos, robbing audiences of a genuine reunion with his mom and her plans to murder Gabe, and then a setup for season 2.

Hooray. We made it.

#percy jackon and the olympians #percy jackson #pjo series #review #pjo #pjo hoo toa

[magnorious]

Review: ‘We Find Out The Truth, Sort Of’, Percy Jackson Episode 7

TL;DR the flashbacks were the best part of this episode and because they exist, precious minutes serving actual plot were eaten by missed potential. Also someone kidnapped Hades and replaced him with a caricature imposter.

This show is quickly becoming not even enjoyable enough to make fun of, but with two episodes to go, might as well see it through to the end.

Episode 6 left off with some wild Hollywood-y changes to the source material, the biggest being that the summer solstice deadline has already passed and the gods are at war, because tension? Everyone knows the world isn’t going to end, everyone knew it wouldn’t end in the book either — the stakes came from whether or not Percy would be able to prove his innocence and recover his mom. We knew somehow that things would work out, the question was what the cost would be if he failed.

Giving Percy the 4th pearl and making him already fail by the powers that be was an interesting decision. It robs the tension from the rest of the plot if there’s no clock ticking down anymore. Hades, Ares, every single hurdle they face burns more time and forces Percy to risk flying on a plane to reach New York before the deadline... all for Zeus to not give a damn anyway.

But did this interesting choice make for a better or more entertaining story?

—

I’m shocked they kept Crusty’s Waterbeds given how much plot they have left to shove in this story. And, of course, Percy already knows exactly who he is. They finally got a character to look like they did in the book and (for Supernatural fans, it’s the same actor as Death) it’s pretty well done for the costume and makeup department. But all of that is moot once again when the script gives away all the answers.

Percy has no time for Crusty because the plot has no time for Crusty. They try to give him some thematic relevance but they’re sprinting to the finish line now, and they can’t even let Percy kill him, going out of their way to make Annabeth tell him to be happy he gets to keep his head.

Side note- the pearls look like tiny Ferrero Rocher chocolates.

Oh and DOA Studios doesn’t exist, because there’s no time for that but there is certainly time for flashbacks. If I had to pick between Crusty and Charon, I would have preferred Charon 100%, he’s actually a decent guy — but not this version of him. He does actually appear, looking more like a grim reaper than an underpaid middle manager bereft of his Italian suits.

The flashback itself is wonderful, I wish the rest of the show was so nicely written. The second flashback they don’t have time for is also great. I like seeing more of Sally and their struggles growing up, her tireless search for ways to protect her demigod son. This is the kind of filler that helps tell the story, unfortunately it’s at the expense of the existing story this episode, eating up minutes. The *third* flashback eating up minutes is also good, this just isn’t the time for any of these. They should have all been in the St. Louis episode. I hate how good these are, because it shows how good the writing could have been. Baby Percy still runs circles around the older kids’ line deliveries. The **fourth** flashback is well-acted but baffling, more on that later!

The Underworld is grey. Painfully grey. Another reason I wish this show had been animated was full creative freedom to go all out with the design and the colors and the scale. This is just boring- grey and hazy to hide how boring it is. The Underworld is an entire kingdom, it’s a realm, terrifyingly beautiful. There’s black poplar trees and all the different rivers and Elysium and the Isles of the Blessed and Persephone’s garden. The ghosts actually look like ghosts. The kids in this version don’t actually look intimidated by the magnificence of the place. There’s no time to be intimidated.

Cerberus is fine. Annabeth’s waterland ball is swapped in for Grover’s stress ball. But he remained a Rottweiler. What’s not fine is the plot handing Percy 4 pearls only to randomly rescind one by making Grover lose his to recreate the tension they murdered. Percy doesn’t hesitate to give his to Grover and there’s no time for them to have any kind of dramatic argument over who should actually stay behind.

Asphodel is a forest, not a field, i.e. the Fields of Asphodel. The concept is cool, actually. These souls stuck there for so long they’re growing roots into the very fabric of the Underworld. So kudos there, that’s genuinely creepy. The rest of Asphodel is a desert, still not a field, and bright as daylight for some reason when it should be permanent night down there unless you’re in Elysium.

Buuut then said roots tangle up Annabeth and make them leave her behind. Percy doesn’t even try to cut her free and she just takes a pearl to the surface, to be ejected from the plot for now. What regret did she have? Doesn’t matter, no time.

Percy is still too smart for his own good and the plot still hates any mystery whatsoever, so he finds the Master Bolt immediately after the brush with the Pit. The Pit also has no voice of Kronos to make it extra creepy, because there’s No Time For That. The entire point of the Chekov’s gun that was those shoes is tossed aside.

The Underworld continues to be painfully grey and beige. Hades isn’t grey, though, oh no. Hades isn’t Hades either. I kept waiting for the reveal that he’s just one of Hades’ Furies in disguise or even a lesser spirit he orders around to screw with people. I waited, and kept waiting. The dude who played Hades in the movie was more accurate.

They still do argue. Percy still accuses Hades of meddling. They argue in front of a random living room instead of a godly Underworld throne. Maybe that wasn’t in the budget. I’m still waiting for Hades to drop this ridiculous act and toss this puppet aside. He starts offering sanctuary when book Hades desperately wanted absolutely nothing to do with whatever was brewing between Zeus and Poseidon, claiming now he needs another god’s weapon to defend himself and I don’t think signature weapons are so easily transferable. Percy and Grover get the heck out of dodge shortly after.

Then Poseidon shows up in the fourth flashback and, well, Percy does have his hair (but not his random British accent). No Hawaiian shirt and khakis in sight. This exists to make Poseidon and Sally’s love for their son more tangible, but in the first book he’s a dick. He’s not seen on the page until Percy meets him on Olympus and the god is a huge disappointment to him. Poseidon begins narrating like this is the season finale, Ares shows up, and cut to black.

The entire book we’re left in limbo on where Poseidon stands, if he’s going to be as spiteful and selfish as Zeus or Dionysus. That reveal on Olympus meant something. But at this point I’m tired of arguing why scenes matter when the show couldn’t care less.

At this point making book comparisons doesn’t matter anymore because this just isn’t Percy Jackson anymore. The characters have their names, sure, but that’s about all the due diligence that’s paid to the source material. I watched this with someone who hadn’t seen a single episode before nor read the books and even they commented that it’s horribly rushed. Even without Percy Jackson’s name on the marketing, they’ve been questing to the Underworld for the entire season and *this* is what we get for it?

Here’s to hoping the entire budget for fight scenes went to the finale so Percy can kick Ares’ ass.

#percy jackon and the olympians #percy jackson #pjo series #review #pjo #pjo hoo toa

[magnorious]

Review: ‘We Take a Zebra to Vegas’, Percy Jackson Episode 6

***Spoilers Ahead for all books and show. TL;DR at the bottom***

After episode 5 I was starting to wonder if episode 3 was a fluke. Here we have the potential for the only non-book reference I wanted in the entire show: Would Nico cameo in the Lotus Casino?

Small, I know, but book fans were robbed of ever seeing him on screen once already when Titan’s Curse was never adapted and with his massive popularity, I was almost certain he’d be here. The closer we got to the Lotus Casino, however, the more I wanted to be wrong. Almost none of the characters look like they’re supposed to, many of them with inconsistent personalities to match. I went from hoping for a blink-and-you’ll miss it reference with a little scruffy 10-year-old that book fans would be able to tell is Nico by his appearance alone to hoping they’d not touch the matter with a 10-foot pole.

After the absurdly dramatic and angsty episode 5 that was supposed to be semi-dangerous and funny, there was a chance to have both the whimsy and wonder of the Lotus Casino, and the rather chilling escape. Before that, the conversation about conservation in the back of the zoo trafficking truck. There was a lot of opportunity for more quiet character moments as well as the adventure and absolutely no need for more nonsense filler.

Onto the episode and given that Hermes is in the thumbnail, are we all in agreement that he only exists here because he’s played by Lin Manuel Miranda? That’s the reason, right? He barely exists in the first book otherwise.

We start right off the bat with more interesting changes. Instead of IM-ing Luke in some random car wash, they do so in the zoo truck. The scene in the book was funnier, because it existed in the place that it did to be funny and the pay-to-pump water gave a clear time limit. But more importantly – they decided to scapegoat Clarisse… for reasons.

Why? Just why? In the book they spend 99% of their quest accusing the wrong person, Hades, and don’t realize they’re wrong until it’s too late. Everyone in the book was like “it’s Hades, it’s gotta be, his kids were Nazis” (a detail I still can’t believe exists, wow). Chiron said it was Hades, everyone said it was Hades, based on ancient biases that Hades spends the entire series proving wrong. He is the best godly parent by a country mile by the end of Book 5 and all of that groundwork started here, when Hades was just as much a victim of the Master Bolt nonsense as everyone else.

Clarisse is neither here nor there, because the writers didn’t have the foresight to script or film any scenes at camp of this random arrest that’s supposed to be important now. The jump cut from ‘the animals have a plan’ to them stopping traffic on the Vegas strip was funny, but it robbed the scene of the seriousness it should have had. More powers Percy doesn’t get: His ability to talk to horses and horse-adjacent animals.

Once they make it to the Lotus Casino, the script does this incredibly irritating thing where it removes the tension of the unknown from every hurdle they meet. Percy’s trapped alone against a mysterious monster in the book and has no idea how to beat it? Nope, Annabeth exposits all over it. They enter a seemingly-abandoned, mortal waterpark and only get suspicious once it’s too late? Nope, Annabeth figures out immediately that it’s a godly amusement park and they must be careful. Two twelve year olds and a satyr are immediately charmed by the glitz and glam of the lotus casino and get trapped for almost the rest of their time limit for the quest? Nope, Grover exposits all over that, too, ruining the mystery and any danger or threat.

Why?

The show also does the irritating thing where it creates problems just to solve them later and before you go “that’s the point of conflict” I mean it creates meaningless problems through meaningless contrivances, like every horror movie cliche that forces its characters to make illogical choices so they don’t just run away from the horror.

And another irritating thing! Spoiling bigger mysteries before their time: We didn’t learn about May Castellan until book 5. Why is this here? What purpose does this serve? Percy realizing he didn’t even know Luke’s last name for five whole years meant something to him. Seeing Luke’s tragic, mortal mother, after hating him for five years *means something* to Percy and to the readers. The gods damned Lotus Casino was absolutely not the place to discover any of this. Why did they do this?

Also, who tf is Augustus? He’s fine. Grover’s random side quest is fine. Every consecutive episode leaves me more and more annoyed with him, but it’s *fine*.

They do actually forget their purpose in the casino, thank the gods. Or, Grover does. Annabeth continues to give away May Castellan exposition like Halloween candy, smack-talking Hermes in a way that she’d never dare at 12 years old. Hermes is still only here because he’s played by Mr. Miranda. He’s fine, he’s just not Hermes. His “woe is me, loving mortals is so damn hard” speech exists. The sentiment is four books early, but it exists.

I understand why it’s here. They’re trying desperately to capture Percy’s internal conflict over whether or not the gods and his dad care about him, if he should let himself be disappointed presuming that they don’t. Problem is– in the book, Poseidon didn’t send a naiad to give him false promises of a clandestine meeting. In the book, the naiad told Percy there’d be a vague “gift” in Santa Monica, and Percy was never naive enough to think that gift would be his dad.

The entire season so far has tried to give nuance to both sides of the “do the gods care and should they be expected to” argument and it’s just not a very well written attempt. Why? Because it had five entire books to give both sides, and they’re shoving as much of it as they can here like they’re afraid they won’t get renewed for season 2. In doing so, they’ve made a tonal mess.

Once Hermes is gone and done randomly and spitefully sabotaging their quest, Percy, unseen, figures out that they’ve lost time and lost Grover. Also, Annabeth pick-pocketed the God of Thieves? Funny, but no. The script has its weird Mitichlorian moment sciencing lore by adding in the detail that lotus nectar or whatever is pumped in through the air, a question no one had and a plot hole that didn’t exist.

They do manage to keep the fear and unsettling realization that they’ve lost time, but their amnesia is inconsistent and confusing, considering that they overexplained how the casino works. Then they’re gone using a God of Thieves’ Car gimmick.

No Nico, thank the gods, unless he was one of the VR kids in the background. It would have been wonderful to see him in a better script.

In the book, they get instantly dazzled by the food, the video games, the nice clothes, nice suite, all things Percy could never dream about growing up poor. There is no Hermes and he only figures out something’s wrong when he meets other kids displaced from time and has to shake Annabeth and Grover from the illusion. They use their casino cash cards with infinite money to hail a cab all the way to LA and it’s funny.

They create more problems that didn’t need to exist by forcing Percy to drive a taxi and okay, that was genuinely funny. I am shocked, though, that Annabeth’s pride let him drive.

The episode comes to an end with them supposedly by the Santa Monica Pier… in a thunderstorm. In southern California. Odd choice, but okay. I'd say the storm exists because Poseidon's pissed but I really think it's there beacuse "dark and stormy night" fit their new vibe better than bright sunlight.

Maybe in live action it was tricky trying to make him both dry underwater and still plausibly underwater and not just rotoscoped in with a hazy green filter. For all their love of exposition, they never actually told non-book watchers about that, or that he can breathe underwater and control some currents. It’s also supposed to be night time, and yet he’s lit as if it’s high noon far above on the surface – they could have just written the beach scene at noon.

Then the naiad he was supposed to talk to in St Louis drops the bomb that the Summer Solstice deadline already passed, Poseidon got too impatient to wait for Percy after the casino delay, and the gods are now at war.

What the fu…..?

Percy resolves to keep going despite armageddon already happening apparently. She gives him exactly the right amount of pearls that he needs, not three, which would force him to choose, and then cut to black.

—

How is the best part of this episode Annabeth’s completely deadpan and exasperated Dude when Percy asks her not to make fun of him? That, and Percy driving the taxi.

Once again, to all the set designers and VFX artists and costumes and makeup and foley and music and score and everyone in between – you’re amazing, keep up the great work. To the actors, you were given a bad script and bad direction and you did the best you could.

Having just come off watching Game of Thrones for the first time and seeing little Arya, Bran, and Rickon Stark’s actors doing donuts around these three just goes to show that it’s not that child actors’ lack of experience that’s the problem. Heck even Baby Percy is better than these three. It’s how much or how little help they get in conveying what they’re supposed to. These kids were thrown to the wolves.

I don’t watch the teasers and I stay away from all marketing for the show. I don’t know who’s been cast to play any characters we haven’t already seen so what Hades and Poseidon look like are a complete mystery that I do hope pays off.

With two episodes to go they have the following left from the book to adapt: Crusty’s water beds, the DOA studios, the entire trip to the underworld and Cerberus and Hades that took two hefty chapters, the Ares fight, Percy’s trip to Olympus, Luke's betrayal and reveal, and the return home to find Hades had paid his debt.

Suddenly the mini series with an episode to burn in St Louis has to sprint to the finish line.

Maybe if they hadn’t spent ten minutes expositing with Hermes they could have at least crammed in Crusty and the DOA, but it looks like armageddon is already upon us so who knows? They might’ve just tossed out the rest of the book to write their own ending.

TL;DR This show is a mess and this episode actually has me nostalgic for the brevity of the horrible movie because they didn’t even try and it’s fun to make fun of. This is just disappointment stretched out across seven hours instead of speedrun in 90 minutes. The skeleton of the book (mostly) remains intact and to all those who keep saying “at least it’s not the movie,” you’re right. Enjoy.

#pjo series #percy jackon and the olympians #percy jackson #review #pjo

[magnorious]

Review: ‘A God Buys Us Cheeseburgers’, Percy Jackson Episode 5

**Spoiler Alert for the entire book!**

I would like to start this review off on the nature of adaptations and when to go astray, given the less-than-stellar dip in quality of episode 4. Inevitably, details must change from the source material, some things are unfilmable. The source material in question here is in first person, which leaves so much of the story outside the protagonist’s head unwritten.

Had this season been given, say 10 episodes, and worked to establish the side characters we watch fight and die in the name of the gods and their friends later down the line, no one would have complained. Characters I won’t name (but iykyk) that got criminally little ‘screen time’ during Percy’s POV in the later books, only to have incredibly tragic demises were sad enough. Now imagine if, assuming the Disney show can accomplish filming all five books, we got to see these characters grow for all five seasons.

The era of TV we find ourselves in treats filler as universally bad and unacceptable. Plopping down on your couch on a weeknight to watch an off-beat episode of that cop drama you love or that addictive doctor show, or teen romance, that didn’t require your full attention all the time because every scene was important to the plot doesn’t happen anymore. An episode that was funny or charming or a romantic little side quest putting the characters we love in interesting circumstances is now far and few between. It still told the grand story, even if it didn’t service the grand plot. That’s the nature of television.

The filler everyone complains about is when it’s uninteresting, contrived, and very clearly for no other reason than to pad the runtime. Taking a C-list monster and giving her an unnecessary monologue and a need to ‘hunt’ that wasn’t in the book? Boring filler.

Cutting back to camp and really selling us on how Luke is an awesome dude looking out for all the younger kids so he can twist the knife later? Good filler! He’s the main villain of the series (besides you know who) and we got so little of him in the books because it was limited to Percy’s POV. Build his relationships with Chiron, Beckendorf, Silena, Clarisse, the Stolls, and the other demigods he ends up turning Dark Side with him. Make him the lovable everyman because he really did love the kids. He hated how the gods treated them. Die hard book fans, if the writers really went for it and understood why his character does what he does, would have loved it.

Now onto the episode that I was hoping and praying would be more like episode 3 than 4.

So. They included the snipping of the thread. And Percy wasn’t there to see it, nor was it at all as creepy and foreboding as it should have been. I kept waiting for them to flash back to Percy’s experience in the river with the naiad and they didn’t. Maybe they ran out of under-water effects budget. Percy’s “maybe my dad does love me” tonal whiplash is disappointing since 90% of the river scene was lost (and he didn’t even come out of the water dry).

Ares’ casting isn’t what I pictured but it fits really well and I can’t place why. His features don’t really feel *godly*. Him starting Twitter wars is wonderfully petty and absolutely in-character. He just acts like an unhinged jerk, not the God of War, as funny and entertaining as it is.

It is also disappointing that Annabeth is the one that snarks to Ares and not Percy, because his attitude is what eggs on their big fight on the beach while she and Grover actively try to tame Percy’s temper. The episode, to this point, is *fine*.

Everything after… I was laughing at the absurdity. The absolute deadpan confusion on their faces when “What is Love” starts playing like the mixer accidentally edited in a track from their Spotify. The set designers forgetting that “Waterland” is a waterpark, not just an amusement park. Grover being unrecognizably sly and confident in front of Ares when he wasn’t supposed to be there at all. Some of the dry attempts at humor, like Percy’s “I think I heard this at an orthodontist” line, not in itself funny, but his dry delivery was.

Grover’s ongoing conversation trying to probe Ares is hilarious, even if that’s not Grover on screen. It’s not bad, it’s just… not Grover. Percy and Annabeth’s jaunt and awkward exposition and line delivery in the Tunnel of Love is also *fine*. Them hyperfocusing on the Fates’ string this episode is another *interesting* change and so is Percy’s second attempt to sacrifice himself in a scene that’s way more dramatic than it needed to be. Boy is all teary-eyed convinced he’s going to die here in this trap when, in the book, he was trying to get Annabeth to move her behind because she was petrified by robotic spiders. She has her come-to-Jesus moment here, which was sorely needed for this version of her character who, up to this point, had very little depth.

And there are no robot spiders. Did they not have the budget for robot spiders? Is Percy not allowed to have the rest of his powers? Were they too afraid of giving Annabeth a phobia? Did they just desperately need to inject some angst into this scene? All of the angst, to the sound of heartbreaking violins in a score that also went way too hard. Nobody seriously thought Percy was going to bite the dust here, did they?

Overall, this is better than 4, but not as good as 3, if I had to rank them. If you pretend this isn’t supposed to be the first season of at least five, Grover likely doesn’t seem like a problem. His whole arc, across all five books, is gaining self-confidence and courage. He can’t grow into a brave Lord of the Wild if he starts his journey back-talking the God of War.

Annabeth not having her entirely useless panic attack over the spiders and forcing Percy to have to save them was the main takeaway from the original trip to Waterland. She’s not perfect, but this flaw is also entirely outside of her control, it’s in her blood as a child of Athena. It’s ridiculous that someone as smart and strong and cunning as she is can be petrified by spiders – but that’s the point. 

The commentary on how the gods, as a family, constantly backstab each other was interesting. Not sure that this episode was the best place for it, but it’s nice that it exists.

The changes that were made were entertainingly confusing. It was not what I ordered, but I didn’t hate what I was served. Ares is easily the best part of this episode, but it is glaringly obvious that this show, whether by budget or the Powers That Be, is allergic to action scenes.

Here’s to hoping they saved all their eggs to drop in the basket of the big climactic beach brawl, because this is still an action-adventure series, not just adventure.

#pjo series #percy jackon and the olympians #percy jackson #review

[magnorious]

A Titan’s Curse Retrospective, 16 Years Later

Lightning Thief and Sea of Monsters **Spoiler Alert**

When I first got my hands on this book, I looked at how thin it was and worried that each consecutive book would be shorter than the last. Titan’s Curse is the off-beat middle episode of the five, occurring around the winter solstice instead of during summer break.

It was never my favorite, but I remembered liking it because it felt darker. I remembered that, for the first time, characters we were supposed to care about were dying on the page. The gods were up close and personal now, at the heart of the quest. There were guns in this book, destiny-challenging decisions to forestall the Great Prophecy for a little while longer.

And, of course, Blackjack, the Dam Snack Bar, Fred, Rachel Elizabeth Dare, and the arrival of the di Angelos.

Maybe that’s just nostalgia talking, ‘cause I’m pretty sure that when it came out, before HOO, Titan’s Curse was dead last on everyone’s tier list for one reason: Annabeth is absent for most of the plot, and Zoë is kind of irritating.

—

The Titan’s Curse

We open immediately to a much more serious tone than before, and a timeskip unlike before. The growth of Percy and Thalia’s relationship happens entirely offscreen between books, which is a bit disappointing. During the gap between TlT and SoM, the time in between books was filled with school, details unimportant to the plot. Here, though, we’ve missed some potentially juicy plot beats like Thalia’s reaction to the passage of time, her meeting Percy, another illegal demigod, her reunion with Annabeth and discovery that Luke turned traitor.

Maybe, if the Disney show makes it that far, we’ll get to see those missed opportunities on screen. But you do start the book feeling like there was a chapter left on the cutting room floor.

Doubly so, they spent at least a couple months together before chapter one, enough to build a rapport and make a confident team together, and yet Percy somehow has never seen Thalia manipulate the Mist before.

Sixteen years later and it is buckwild even seeing Nico’s name dropped for the first time nine pages in. He’s not even in the book for more than the first couple chapters and right at the end for the big reveal. He was nobody’s favorite leading all the way up to House of Hades four whole ass books from now, just an eager little kid, then a bratty little goth wannabe, then an angsty goth wannabe.

Getting flung back to lil’ wide-eyed and bushy tailed 10-year old Nico is sobering. He was such a little nerd with his Mythomagic figurines and cards and dumb, dorky 10-year-old questions.

**Side note - in my SoM I falsely recalled that the Grover empathy link never made a reappearance and I am pleasantly surprised that it does get mentions here, even if it doesn’t do much.**

—

The opening fight, while thrilling, is held back a little by Percy’s continued ignorance. He’s fourteen, he’s been at this for two years now, and he’s still the last to find things out (for the benefit of the audience). Before, it made sense, he was young and inexperienced, but if he’s out here leading raids and rescue parties, he’s got no excuses to not be doing his homework and I wish Riordan had come up with a different method of getting exposition to the audience this time around.

Immediately after, enter the Hunters’ blatant sexism and I’m left scratching my head on why I remember liking this book so much. It’s off to a rather rocky start.

It’s not so much that Artemis leads a club of eternal tweenage virgins. The Hunters are a sanctuary alternative to Camp Half-Blood and it has its pros and cons. My problem, especially as I’m older reading this, is that Artemis gets Bianca murdered promising her a break from her horrible, no good, very bad baby brother, and there’s no reckoning for that.

There’s no alternative to her statement of only being patron to girls “before they go astray” like the moment puberty hits Artemis kicks these hedonistic sinners to the curb. Thalia sure hates them and calls it stupid (before joining them in the end) and Percy makes his opinions on Bianca’s selfishness clear, but beyond a reluctant approval of Percy after he almost dies holding up the sky, there is no “yeah our club isn’t actually as awesome as us snooty girls think it is”. Artemis is still a good guy, so are the hunters, and their ideology is never challenged.

Bianca dies! She’d still be alive if Artemis hadn’t been a predatory patron, snatching her up in a moment of weakness and ripping her little brother’s only family away because, by nature of being a boy, he sucks.

In other words, she doesn’t get to be painted as a decent goddess when she’s no better than Hera and Zeus with her strawmanning. Especially when Apollo and, heck, Dionysus, show so much more humanity in this book.

Artemis is just so hard on the poor kid and thank the gods Percy didn’t die before he could save Nico from himself. Nico would have absolutely joined Luke and burned Olympus to the ground without Percy’s intervention, and it would have been Artemis’ fault. “Yes, boy. You see, Bianca di Angelo is not the only one with an annoying brother.” My good bitch, who do you think you are? He’s 10!

It is abundantly clear why the Nico di Angelo Protection Squad found such strong footing. The whole nexus of this series is the gods’ neglect and the first 70 pages of this book are a stellar example of what Luke’s been yammering about this whole time.

—

As always, the foreshadowing and subtle reminders are solid. Tyson’s throwaway line about the Princess Andromeda heading toward the Panama Canal so it can eventually reach the West Coast, the reminder of the dragon that scarred Luke’s face via souvenir claw in the Big House attic. The reminder that Percy’s sword Riptide has a tragic past and all the hints that Bianca and Nico are children out of time as they suddenly remember forgotten details from their past and Bianca’s lucky strike on the skeletons.

Oh, and this poignant little nugget from the souvenir pile in the attic, a tag attached to a broken sword hilt: “This broke and Leroy got killed, 1999.” I can picture Leroy’s surviving friends staring at that broken weapon and having nothing more to say than that, and abandoning it to collect dust in the attic.

Percy is still rife with realistic, humanizing flaws. He’s jealous of Thalia and suffering an inferiority complex, mucking up the di Angelo rescue mission thinking he can do it on his own, and then the capture the flag game, and then going off on his own during the second quest that’s not about him. His rivalry with Thalia, the only demigod that can go toe-to-toe with him in terms of abilities, is something fresh for this book. Thalia’s like a less obnoxious Annabeth because she doesn’t suffer that Athenian hubris making her a know-it-all.

—

Bianca fits right in with the Hunters, not missing her little brother one bit (stone cold, girl. Stone. Cold.) Acting like a sudden expert at the Ping Pong table counselor meeting. I know she’s been groomed by a selfish misandrist but she’s not long for this book and it has done nothing to endear audiences to her.

She gets worse when she has her first minute alone with Percy and he reassures her that abandoning her baby brother is perfectly fine so long as she’s happy when… no? Percy took like, two weeks to come to terms with being a demigod and an entire quest. Bianca takes two days and she’s rearing up to go on a quest to save her cult leader.

She explains that she’s raised Nico all her life and wanted to experience something outside of caring for him, even though she knows it’s selfish of her to just up and abandon him, his feelings be damned. Thing is, it is selfish. I feel zero sympathy for this girl and I doubt she fully understands what she signed up for. She will be twelve forever and Nico will, theoretically, grow up, grow old, and see her only a handful of times in their lives before he’s dead. All because he’s a bit irritating at his age and she wants a vacation.

When she dies not long after, the point of her character even existing beyond being Nico’s motivation gets a bit muddied. Artemis and the Hunters aren’t punished by the narrative for getting her killed, she doesn’t die doing anything spectacular and she wakes the very monster that kills her trying to get a trinket for Nico, then she’s dead.

Trying to be independent set her on the path to dying young, feeling guilty about abandoning the only family she had left is what sealed the deal.

—

The original cover art! The ‘07 American version with Percy and Blackjack in indigo. TLT’s art didn’t pull from any one specific scene and SoM was more inspired by the rope bridge with Polyphemus on the sheep island, but TTC’s art is ripped straight from the page and I love how it has both nothing to do with the title of the book and is totally out of left field concerning Dionysus (and I think the best moment of the book).

The scene in question is Dionysus interrupting Percy and Blackjack’s pursuit of the questers in Manhattan, showing more agency in that moment than he had in the past two books. He tells Percy about Ariadne and why he hates heroes (because they’re selfish) alluding to why Zoë hates heroes. Percy has been quite self-important in this book, but he's no Theseus, not even close.

The settings in this book aren’t nearly as colorful as the previous two, and the same goes for the monsters along the way. It’s winter and it feels like it, in more ways than one. There’s human mercenaries, the grey skeletal soldiers, the Nemean lion that doesn’t talk, Talos that doesn’t talk, and a few other oddballs.

The junkyard of the gods where they fight Talos has wonderfully creepy and foreboding vibes. Things that get thrown away there are abandoned for a reason.

All the quirky sense of adventure that existed before is gone this time around and while I enjoy the tonal shift personally, I don’t know that it was the best choice to make for the series as a whole. The lack of “color” is made worse by all the other irritating and frustrating elements.

The best elements remain the most off-beat ones, like Apollo in incognito mode, the Dam snack bar, everything I remembered from reading this as a kid, along with Dionysus’ moments and Dr. Chase.

TTC’s prophecy is solid, and since we get it at the beginning this time, we get to wrack our brains trying to solve it along with the cast. It’s not as ambiguous as TLT’s prophecy, but I like the cadence, how long it is, and how ominous it is – right off the bat, you know two people are dead this book.

Five shall go west to the goddess in chains,

One shall be lost in the land without rain,

The bane of Olympus shows the trail,

Campers and Hunters combined prevail,

The Titan’s Curse must one withstand,

And one shall perish by a parent’s hand.

—

Zoë is… frustrating. I hate to go all “not all men” but jeez, girl, not all men. She even says those exact words herself as she’s dying. So much bitterness and resentment in her long life. Why couldn’t Artemis be a good patron of immortal tweenagers and find them a decent therapist? I’m lumping her in with Artemis for their antiquated and frankly ridiculous pontificating. I get that’s Artemis’ schtick; doesn’t make it fun or interesting to read.

Zoë is a victim of godly propaganda and her death is as tragic as Bianca’s, the fate of heroes little more than divine chess pieces tossed aside at a whim. Her memorial as the new constellation is poignant, it just unfortunately was given to a character more frustrating than endearing. Her whole arc in this book is appreciating that not all heroes are awful thanks to Percy, but she struts around like her sh*t doesn’t smell.

Zoë hates heroes because Hercules did her dirty, Thalia hinted that Annabeh considered joining the Hunters because of Percy, and Dionysus told Percy he’d never stop being selfish and self-centered and the thing is he’s… not?

Yes he messes up at the start of this book but they’re kind of strawmanning him, like by nature of being a boy and being a Greek demigod he’s doomed to be exactly like his predecessors when he’s shown no indication so far of using and abusing people. His fatal flaw is loyalty. Annabeth was never going to be his Ariadne.

—

The villains plan here is solid, Riordan has a good track record of walking the line between complex and contrived. They needed Artemis to hold the sky to get her away from the Solstice meeting so the gods wouldn’t be productive. To get Artemis, they made do with using Annabeth as bait. Then they needed Bessie and an illegal prophecy child (Thalia, the oldest) to trigger the prophecy two books early. It almost works, until Thalia dips out of turning 16 by becoming an immortal fifteen-year-old at the last possible second.

The villains also use mortals this time, and mortal weaponry – guns and helicopters and mortal mercenaries. They don’t do much, none of them even get named, but they exist and they help make this book a little grittier.

—

Despite all the above complaints, the book doesn’t fall to middle-chapter syndrome. The story is fast paced and gritter than the two before it, the battles are all well written and unique. It’s not a bad story by any means, it just has some frustrating elements that dampen the enjoyment. The slower beats aren’t between Percy and Annabeth this time and Grover spends a lot of the book mooney-eyed over the moon goddess so he and Percy don’t get a lot of solid moments either. Thalia is too prickly to let her guard down long enough for a deep conversation but she almost gets there.

Major characters die this time and the approaching war feels that much closer, delayed for now but still looming ever over our heroes. I do like the characterization of the gods this time around being much more involved in the story. When Percy and Annabeth do finally reunite, matching grey streaks in their hair, it's cute and fluffy and a great way to wrap up the story before the Nico reveal, and what a reveal it is. It's not Thalia, unambiguously older, it's Nico, definitively younger leaving you antsy that, still, Percy might not be the prophecy kid after all.

#percy jackson #pjo books #pjo series #pjo hoo toa #titans curse #percy jackon and the olympians #retrospective #review

[magnorious]

Review: I Plunge to My Death; Percy Jackson Ep. 4

TL;DR: They turned a pit-stop into a main event and troubles ensued.

The consequences of shoving half the book into the first two episodes? Episode 4. Baby Percy is, again, adorable, no complaints. The opening scene, Kronos’ slithery voice – we are right back in the thick of it, until we’re not. Best part of the episode is easily the first 4 minutes and it does not recover, I am sorry.

Echidna gets a ridiculous amount of screen time, monologuing on and on and on… On the train, no less, not in the Arch.

Adaptations are allowed to be their own thing, but they are *adaptations* first. The choices that were made in the source material were made for a reason. If the book was bad, no one would have read it, and money wouldn’t be spent turning it into a TV show.

So, in the book, Echidna had a couple pages, and Percy was completely alone confronting her. She showed up, revealed herself, got a one-liner or two in, kicked his butt, and then he fell – end of scene. It was a whirlwind of chaos and incredibly efficient without being spoonfed “I am a monster” until they get the picture.

The purpose of this beat in the story came from Percy’s experience in the river and then St. Louis is behind them – it’s a pitstop, not a centerpiece. Echidna has no thematic connection to any of the characters like Medusa, she doesn’t need to overstay her welcome.

If you didn’t read the book, the episode is fine. The writing is okay, the acting, the VFX. They do retain the family of centaurs and establish Grover being a Searcher for Pan.

It’s not bad! It’s puzzling. The changes are puzzling.

All the filler – Echidna’s monologue, Athena’s temple, Annabeth being unnecessarily rude to Grover, Percy getting poisoned – they don’t feel like the same meaningful changes that were made to extend Medusa’s scenes. They feel like they exist to fill an entire episode before the next big set piece that has to wait until episode 5. The pacing has been thrown completely off balance.

Which wouldn’t have happened if they didn’t rush ten chapters of content.

Because they knew exactly how long the chimera fight would be – about 45 seconds, beat for beat, exactly as it was written. Echidna is just not important in the grand scheme of the story. They still have to fill an entire episode now, so what do they do?

They double back on the character development and the growing friendship established in episode 3 when they all start arguing over Athena for… reasons? In Athena’s temple, Annabeth’s suggestion for Percy to reach out to his dad there would be mighty offensive to the goddess. She calls herself out, saying she knows she’s forcing herself to believe Athena cares about her, the way it was written just makes her look selfish and rude.

There Grover is, all upset about the monument filled with paintings of humans over-hunting buffalo and Annabeth’s response is basically “get over it”. Doesn’t matter if she regrets it once he’s gone, she doesn’t apologize to him and she still believes what she said.

Percy doesn’t need to be poisoned to lose hard to Echidna and the chimera. He’s at his full strength and still panics and botches the fight. He already doubts that his dad cares about him.

The episode does recover its footing somewhat (after padding the runtime) by finally getting him alone in the last 8 minutes. Percy cements his disdain for his dad and how little he feels appreciated, respected, or even noticed by the gods – enough to decide he’ll fight and probably lose alone because he doesn’t matter to the gods anyway. Once he’s in the river, the nereid shows up, tells him to breathe, that Poseidon’s proud, and… cut to black. There's no wonder at his new abilities, no fascination, no "maybe being a demigod is a little bit cool, wow," and no consideration that his dad does care, even a little bit.

The only book change for the better? Percy choosing to go at it alone instead of ending up alone by accident.

I hate to come down so hard on this episode but pacing is critical. The beginning of the book feels slow because there’s a lot of internal monologue, a lot of introspection, lots of breaks between action, and several time skips – Percy spends a couple days at camp before going on his quest and packs a lot of character building moments into it – and they rushed through it all.

St. Louis was already rushed in the book, and this is where they decided to throw in all the filler to slow it down? Writers, if you wanted to pad the runtime, include Gladiola the Poodle giving them directions. Include chapter 14 – the entirety of which is spent in the river establishing new powers and getting told about the gift in Santa Monica, and exacerbating the problem of Percy being mistaken for a terrorist. Ares can still wait and no one would complain.

It’s not the acting, from anyone. It’s not the directing, either. Everyone who worked on this show: The actors, the editors, the set designers, costume department, makeup department, VFX, foley, props, music and sound design, and everyone in between – you all did fantastic and your work is recognized and appreciated.

It’s the big picture that just did not come together this time.

I really, truly, wanted to enjoy this episode coming off the high that was Episode 3 and I’m just left confused once again at all the choices that were made. Just because the bar for greatness was two feet into the topsoil from the first adaptation doesn’t mean it gets to skate by on “well it’s better than what we got before”.

#pjo series #percy jackon and the olympians #percy jackson #review