#also extremely funny to me how much of our linguistic patterns are bleeding over onto each other through these. formatting aside

[un-pearable]

I HAVE RETURNED WITH SEASON 11 THOUGHTS. yes. i finally stopped what was a completely unprompted several week long procrastination for no reason at all.

ok first things first: not a fan of the 11 minute episode format!!!! i want my b plots back!!!!!!! its not fine but whatever i'll survive. number two this season was a little all over the place and definitely couldve benefited from being two separate seasons just because the first and second halves are so entirely disconnected from each other but its not the end of the world.

it is now time to talk about one of my most favorite things about ninjago ever: namely, the COMPLETELY INCOMPREHENSIBLE TIMELINE. following in the footsteps of the last writers, whoever has taken the reigns this season has carried on the age old tradition of sticking dates onto the ninjago timeline that make it more convoluted than beforehand. its wonderful. its delightful. i dont think ive ever seen a messier timeline in any piece of media in my entire life. the timeline was broken from the literal beginning between lloyd's existence & wu's flashback to garmadon getting banished to the underworld or whatever and it Just Got Worse. (no for real that entire thing is so terribly funny its like. ok garmadon got banished to the underworld when they were both presumably young adults maybe (???) so logically lloyd had to have been born sometime around there but when we meet him lloyd is probably like somewhere from 8-13 years old and wu and garmadon and misako are Very Old. and its just. so funny. its so funny. THAT ASIDE)

so back to the latest edits to the timeline. evil snake lady claims that wu betrayed her thousands of years ago. so wu is thousands of years old, but is also presumably somewhere around kai and nya's parents' ages given that they all seemed to be young adults at the time. which was also in ancient ninjago times and also like 50 years ago max. does it make sense? no of course not its the ninjago timeline. it gets even better though, because we are now introduced to the concept that … allegedly. there was a tenuous peace that existed for millenia between the serpentine and humans pre-wu & garmadon almost screwing that over so bad. and we can reasonably assume that the serpentine were created along with the rest of ninjago, so …… did the fsm just create garmadon & wu a few thousand years after chilling out in ninjago for a while? who knows. least of all me.

actually speaking of the first spinjitzu master i want to complain for a minute because i hate this guy. frankly i dont think he was a very good dad. i dont even think he was a mediocre dad. in fact i think he was a pretty crappy parent. like. like okay evidence number one: look at his children. the amount of mental illness there is unreal. you cannot look at wu and garmadon and tell me that the fsm was any sort of decent at parenting. like… ok im 99.9% sure they did not have a mom, which would imply that the fsm created them himself. which would FURTHER imply that, for some completely and entirely incomprehensible reason, he gave garmadon mostly (??? im still really unclear on this but we've gone through that) oni blood and wu mostly (??? see above) dragon blood. instead of, yknow, giving them half and half. to get more clear: he specifically screwed over garmadon for no reason. also it should be noted that even after wu and garmadon have found out that the evil snake lady is evil and 10000% intends to use spinjitzu to kill everybody they still dont tell the fsm about any of it because they fear his reaction more than they do the consequences of this. they go behind his back and use an expressly forbidden technique to clean up this mess because, again, they fear his reaction more than any of the other consequences. i do not think he was a good parent at all.

back in like season 2 garmadon says that wu was always the fsm's favorite and honestly i believe it given whatever the heck is going on with their blood, but its quite unfortunate that even the favored son still got massively screwed over by the fsm because said fsm SUCKS and is a TERRIBLE PARENT. like at some undefined point prior to the anacondrai drama the fsm just up and leaves for no reason in particular and like. wow. the guy really did just make one of his sons evil by default and then when it got worse he ditched and and dumped the responsibility of cleaning that up onto his younger son, thereby forcing him to send his brother to hell and traumatizing him for life. okay. thanks first spinjitzu master. and if that wasnt enough he then drops back in 50000 years later to try to drag lloyd off to who knows where and then immediately ditches again. his entire lineage is just mental illness: the family. i dont think that the fsm was like. actively trying to be an atrocious parent or anything but i do firmly believe he was grossly neglecting his duties as a father and was in general incredibly distant and unhelpful and probably spent more time getting mad at his children than anything else. tldr i hate the first spinjitzu master. i hate him so much.

anyways lets talk about wu for a minute while we're on the topic. i think its incredibly interesting that he wanted to 1) turn himself into snake lady whose name escapes me at the moment despite the fact that its pretty clear she wouldnt have stopped at just getting back at him and 2) go by himself to save zane when he had absolutely no way of getting home and knew it. frankly i would not be surprised if there was some amount of suicidal ideation / martyr complex going on there. in other news i am SO delighted 1) we got a garmadon and wu flashback. huge win for tumblr user iratusmus and 2) wu got to be the bad influence this time because that is so terribly funny. i think wu should want to do things he's not allowed to do more often. i support it. also, tangentially related: i know john mulaney is cancelled now or whatever but this is really just wu in a nutshell

and since i've already mentioned him, lets go ahead and talk about zane for a minute. i am…….. honestly incredibly disappointed with ice emperor zane like. the biggest problem here is that they didnt really do anything interesting with it - its never really relevant that its zane specifically who has become the ice emperor outside of 1) elemental power and 2) so that we can turn him to our side. like… it doesnt really have any connection to his past or even like. okay earlier in the season while lloyd, nya, and zane are trying to steal the other forbidden scroll of spinjitzu (im going to talk about that briefly in a second but we'll hold off on it for a minute) they come across a mirror that shows the onlooker's worst fears - lloyd's is becoming lord garmadon, nya's is failure/never amounting to anything in life, and zane's is losing his humanity. so you'd think that in an arc where zane gets corrupted they'd try it play into that but…. no. because even if the ninjago writers are new, it wouldnt be ninjago if we didn't set up a million concepts that couldve been really interesting if they had been properly explored and then we drop all of that to take the most boring route humanly possible. thank you, ninjago writers.

brief commentary on the forbidden scrolls of spinjitzu: i am SO confused on 1) why the fsm wrote them down. like bestie if you, specifically, are the one who forbade this, WHY ARE YOU WRITING IT DOWN!!!!!!!!! I HATE YOU 2) how sticking them on a staff gives you an incredible amount of power. not even like. reading it or something. doing what it says on the writing. just the concept of holding it gives you power. hello ? 3) why it can banish people to the never realm if used in a certain way. they didnt even try to explain this one at all and im so confused about it. also, if it can banish people to the never realm, why cant it transport people across other realms? many questions, no answers.

ok back to this season's villains: lets talk about SNAKE LADY! in all honesty i dont have that much to say shes kinda a mid villain but at least shes a girlboss so i'll take what i can get. motivations are kind of lacking but whatever. i do really wish the writers would commit on whether or not its valid to be racist to serpentine. as a general rule im very much against demonizing an entire species/race/family as a result of "youre the children of [x] so you are born horrible and anybody who treats you poorly because of that is right" bc it reeks of racism and is incredibly supportive of unfounded prejudice and so on and so forth but like. ok if youre going to do that. the least you can do is STICK WITH IT!!!!!!! its literally like "ohhh the serpentine are evil" "ohhhhh condemning all the serpentine by virtue of their blood is actually kind of racist!" "ohhhhhh wu was so stupid for trusting that snake he shouldve been racist from the start" MAKE UP YOUR MIND. PLEASE. im not asking for much.

i also didnt like how they kind of tried to give zane's power to nya its like. ….. ok look i get it we've all watched atla if you can control water logically you should be able to control ice. HOWEVER. since you have decided that these are two separate elements you need to KEEP it that way because otherwise whats the point of having zane's power if nya is just going to take it. they didnt quite go that far but they were sort of angling for it and i dont like it. please give the women something of their own to do instead of just taking each other's (see: pixal becoming samurai x (actually unrelated but technically shouldnt it be ronin x given that nya/pixal dont serve a feudal master) instead of making up her own thing to do) or taking the men's (whatever the heck was going on this season with nya and ice). but whatever.

miscellaneous thoughts

akita is cool i support wolfgirls. i dont really have any deeper thoughts on her than this but i would like to see her again

didnt like how they brought back the giant hairy eyeball for a useless filler episode and had pixal beat it completely by herself, thereby cheapening the entirety of season 5 (or whatever season it was)

and. of course. this wouldnt be a proper season 11 review if i didnt talk about the literal most important part of the entire thing. that is right.

super saiyan jay.

so yeah. season couldve been better but honestly super saiyan jay makes up for everything wrong the ninjago writers have ever done

my apologies for the v e r y late reply this weekend was hw hell. but i did learn my favorite heartwrenching fact about neanderthals so :] small wins. absolutely THRILLED to see these in my inbox let's goooo

b-plots how i miss you... hate hate hate that the 11 minute episode is default now in animation, it works well for some shows (having watched all of SU through - yeah it works, but only really well for shows with very specific scopes, and ninjago is nothing BUT vastly outsizing its own scope)... having just finished rewatching s1 all in one sitting holy crap does the b-plot do so much heavy lifting for making the story actually work. s1 is. a mess. but it genuinely does so much better at foreshadowing than i expected and the ability to juggle multiple plot points in a single episode is SUCH a loss for the later seasons... the netflix season chopper curse my beloathed. nothing else to say there we both know we've experienced vld

yes!!! kudos to the team for fuckin it up even worse than archie sonic i love it to bits. we've got time loops we've got alternate realities we've got immortal(ish) old guys with fucky aging and a kid with even fuckier aging and retconned in hereditary superpowers. we've got every possible "what the fuck thats not how that works-" moment imaginable and it's stunning. everything about wu and garmadon's childhood (if you can call the implied thousands of years where they looked like kids/teenagers that) is fascinating to me and i am thrilled to find out how the spinjitzu brothers books fuck it up even more. the bad luck these guys gotta have for all their positive relationships dying out (humans :() and making all their enemies out of psuedo-immortal weirdos who can hold a hell of a grudge.

tangentially related yess obsessed with the FSM's pioneering fatherly shittiness. first dad worst dad. objectively better than if he was an actively good dad or was genuinely trying to harm his kids this is just what happens when god has zero positive role models. or role models at all. and deals with his complex feelings about his heritage with baby creation. idk the way they handle garmadon's morality is utterly deranged and i love to see them repeatedly shoot themselves in the foot trying to justify him being ~evil all along~ this honestly does more to explain why wu is. like that. than anything about garmadon adjfaksd. all this aside using this entire segment as my ref for my never-to-see-the-light-of-day spinjitzu bros fic thank you for having the wu and garmadon thoughts of all time <3

wu and zane.... i will never get over them. as previously mentioned i just finally finished rewatching s1 with Intent and ohhhh boy do i have infinite emotions over them and while 99% of it is extrapolation it is so incredibly sweet how much wu genuinely cared about zane and his lack of memory and how much he tries to comfort him. meanwhile all of that goes over zane's head bc he is. very bad at understanding his + others emotions at the time and most of the stuff wu is trying to help him with either hasn't registered or zane isnt even close to being able to put words to it much less internalize someone else's attempt to help. all this for wu to disappear on the brother acquisition mission for two weeks and come back to him being Completely Fine And Cool Cuz I'm A Robot Master :D. theres no way wu has any idea what a robot is in s1 and im living for it fuck the retcons. man's bewildered and his pseudo son (mark III) is Overcompensating.

my eternal inability to shut up about zane aside. all that to say wu's eagerness to make Terrible decisions in this part? stunning. the squandered potential of the ice emperor? i could complain about this for weeks. and have done so much to my discord friends chagrin. thank you for validating me AND reminding me to be infuriated. i will go read seven fics about it and have equally strong opinions about those (one day i will write the nature v nurture themed zane fic that lives in my brain and only contribute to this problem). uh. where was i going

LITERALLY YEAH?? ive never seen ANYONE bring up the complete nonsense of the staff and it's abilities WHY does it get magic cheatcodes to the ninjago multiverse. why did they not take the chance to make a joke about chima again. the world may never know

serpentine racism... once again the most common of kids media "everyone in this group is Evil bc we need punching bags" consequences and entirely unanswered. the early seasons imply the skulkins just integrated into everyday life and like half the snakes are just chilling... if you can accept the whole ass skeletons why are we still conflicted about pythor girlboss edition. tangentially: i am now obsessed w/ the idea of pixal stealing ronin's identity bc she was being pedantic about the definition of samurai. do it girl dude doesn't stand a chance.

THE ANIME EPISODE.... i have unwittingly entered the orbit of dragon ball fandom and i am SO excited to torture my brother who's a fan with this one it's such. it's so. it's beyond words. i've seen people hate on this and they are SO wrong this is exactly what ninjago has always been. utterly bonkers and doing whatever the hell they want.

#text✨ #liveninjablogging #ninjago #HELLO BELOVED MUTUAL TYSM FOR THIS. AGAIN. these remain the highlights of the entire fandom for me tysssssm #also extremely funny to me how much of our linguistic patterns are bleeding over onto each other through these. formatting aside #once again. the opinions of all time