The Biggest Difference

The Biggest Difference

I’ve seen people saying that Lotor became Zuko this season just written worse and while I do believe that there are a lot of similarities between the two this season really accentuated the differences. The whole season built upon the idea that Lotor deserved better. That he tried to overcome his circumstances, but wasn’t given a fair shot by anyone and was punished for his attempts to be better. This showed me the biggest point of divergence between Lotor and Zuko: Zuko had Iroh. Zuko had someone who believed in the best in him and even when he stumbled or made the wrong choice Iroh never gave up on him. It was because of this that Zuko was able to overcome his upbringing and move forward in a better direction. Lotor never had his Uncle Iroh. He had to make do by himself and forge his own path without a guiding light and because of that he got lost along the way. When he finally found found a guiding light in Allura it was quickly snuffed out because of actions he took in his misguided attempts to be better. The loss of the light after finally obtaining it after so long in the dark caused Lotor to snap. I think the flashbacks and characters this season realized that if Lotor was given a fair chance earlier in life or if Allura and the paladins hadn’t given up when they did on him he could have ended up like Zuko. He did do things in his past that were horrible, but he could have created the better future that he had wanted to bring about in the first place. 

Joker-a Master of Perspective

Joker uses perspective to enhance the movie storytelling perspective. It is a story about the descent of a man giving into his darker desires. This is typically seen as a tragic tale, but the music and camera shots portray it as the opposite. It feels like a man going from despair to hope. 

The music in the opening shot is called “Hoyt’s Office” and it has a sinister and foreboding feel to it whereas the music at the end of the film called “Call Me Joker” is much more hopeful and delicate, the music is softer and more personal instead of the sharp low tones of the beginning. The shot choice also changes the perspective of scenes that should be dark like when Arthur kills his mother Arthur sits next to the window which bathes the shot in light and creates an uplifting atmosphere and the lens reflects light which gives the shot a dreamy look like Arthur enjoys his choice and has finally fulfilled one of his wildest dreams. The final shots of him in the asylum are again bathed in light with minimal sound and the actions are happening slower than normal giving it that dream like feel to it once again. The final shot I’ll talk about is when Joker is dancing on the car during the riot. He is the center of the frame once again and everything around him seems to fade away. This is emphasized by the shots at a superior angle where only Joker and the sky are in shot with everyone else just out of view and the wide angle view when everyone else is in shot but the noise they would have been making is overtaken by the score. He is finally “seen” by people. He has become the center of this revolution and the world can finally see his solo performance.

The perspective is also in use when it comes to the fact that Arthur is made to clearly be an unreliable narrator in the film which can bring many interpretations of the events that unfold. Until the first time Arthur gives into his darker desires most of the abuse he endures is physical. Once he kills the three men on the subway the abuse shifts to emotional with his mother and then once he kills her it becomes verbal until he kills Murray and then he becomes the Joker and the movie ends with Arthur feeling free and not hesitating to give into his desires. This can be seen as the journey of how much Arthur can justify his actions. With each killing he is able to justify his actions with less and less provocation. At the beginning he shot the men in self defense and by the end he was killing people because he deemed it “what they deserve”. (This was also seen when he killed Randall when Randall came over to try and comfort him about his mother’s death and he kills him because of what Randall did at the beginning of the movie. Now that Arthur has made it this far in his descent he sees nothing wrong with killing Randall when earlier he held himself back.) Because of how the abuse seems to shift to allow Arthur to justify his actions it can lead to questions on if the abuse was really like the way it was portrayed or if it had been warped in some way due to Arthur’s perception. (This is just a single possibility that is left up to the viewer’s interpretation)

Joker is incredibly interesting in its use of film making techniques and how it uses all of the facets of the audio visual medium to convey its story. I was left fascinated in how well made it was with a great performance by Joaquin Phoenix, masterful cinematography and directing, and an emotive score. The film and superhero nerd in me loved every second of it.

Catra-The Thin Line Between Love and Hate

Dreamworks has yet again produced a villain I love from one of their Netflix animated series with the character of Catra. Catra is given a complex dynamic with the protagonist Adora that ties into her journey of the season and her spiral downwards into hate. Her mindset is best explored in the episode “Promise” with the scene the title references being the turning point that causes her to make up her mind and take the plunge.

For Catra’s whole life she was always considered second best. Adora was liked more by everyone around them be it shadow weaver or their teammates. Adora was the only one who cared about Catra and put Catra first. This caused conflict to arise within Catra because her jealousy and anger were towards the person she cared about most and who cared about her the most. When Adora chose to leave the horde in spite of Catra trying to get her to stay Catra was hurt and betrayed. In her mind she came in second. Adora chose the rebellion over her. The only person who truly cared about her had chosen something else over her and the jealousy and hate that that she had tried to submerge came to the surface and she worked to sabotage the cause that had made Adora leave. Everything she does up until “Promise” is do destroy the rebellion not Adora herself and she continually tries to talk Adora into coming back to the horde, back to her.

In “Promise” Catra is forced to confront her conflicting feelings and contradicting actions and appearance. Catra for most of her life has put on a mask of uncaring like nothing phases her. This is an attempt to convince others and herself that nothing can hurt her. The only person the facade slips around is Adora because she trusts Adora. She comes to view her reliance and trust in Adora as a weakness. When Catra is confronted with the images and scenes from her childhood that highlight the disparity in the value placed on her life in comparison to Adora her indecision tipped towards giving in to her negative feelings toward Adora, but what really caused her to make up her mind was the titular scene of the promise. Catra runs from Adora with her world collapsing around her being constantly reminded of her inferiority and runs into the memory. The memory played out in front of Catra and when both young Catra and older Catra asked the question “Promise?” only young Adora was there to respond with reassurance. Older Adora was no longer by Catra’s side and the reality of the situation set in. Catra decided that since Adora wouldn’t come back she had to look out for herself. Because she can’t come to terms with the fact that Adora cared about her and still left her Catra takes on a more negative view of Adora’s actions and convinces herself that Adora never truly cared and made her believe that Catra needed her to hold her back. When Catra comes back and destroys the spiders attacking Adora it somewhat mirrors what younger Catra does in the promise scene except this time instead of running after Adora with new hope and continuing their friendship she comes back having given in to her negative feelings to sever it. This cemented Catra’s stance against Adora and pushed her to fully embrace her role to take down the rebellion along with Adora.

The line between love and hate is thin. A nudge from one side or the other can make one land on the complete opposite side of where they started.

In Defense of the Legend of Korra’s Power Crawl

People seem to take problem with the power crawl within the legend of Korra claiming that she breaks the previously established power ceiling within the series, but that isn’t really the case. The power crawl isn’t like the last airbenders where Aang is trying to build physical strength. Korra’s journey is about self discovery and gaining spiritual strength. In the finale of Avatar the last airbender energy bending is established to exist within the universe with the ability to take away and give bending. Though since it was introduced in the finale it wasn’t able to be expanded upon. The Legend of Korra expands on it and makes it the focal point of the power crawl. 

When Korra is first introduced it is firmly established that she excels at the physical side of bending, but struggles with the spiritual side. She starts the series at the bottom in spiritual development and connection to the world around her. The growth of her spiritual connection is directly linked to her growth of understanding of herself and connection to the world. She connects to her past lives at the end of the first season after finally getting to go out in the world after being secluded all her early life. In the second season she manages to journey to the spirit world and learn of her connection to it. The third season shows how accustomed and comfortable she has grown with it and Raava and ends with her hitting a physical, spiritual, and mental block. This block spurs on her journey of self discovery which leads to an expansion on her ability to energy bend, makes her more in tune with Raava and the world, and she becomes her most powerful within the spirit world. It is her increased spiritual growth that makes her able to overcome her enemies namely Unalaq, Vaatu, and Kuvira. Not becoming a more physically imposing avatar. This power crawl, sans the giant energy projection at the end of season 2, is done well and shows a power crawl that actually makes the main character more pacifistic and mirrors her growth as a person. Making her more powerful, but less likely to use that power unless absolutely necessary.

People tend to focus on the brute force end when it comes to power crawl, which if looking at that Korra ends the first season at the strongest she will ever be physically, but power crawl doesn’t have to be about brute strength as explained above. That’s why I think a lot of people miss the real power crawl within the Legend of Korra.

The Dragon Prince Season 3 Review (Spoilers)

My excitement for the 3rd season of the Dragon Prince is what made me push through all my homework and responsibilities this week and I can finally say it was everything I hoped it would be. It wasn’t perfect and there were a few things that I found a bit odd, but overall its emotional moments and struggles hit home and gave me a satisfying conclusion to the major conflict of the first arc. There were some threads left hanging that will leave you craving more and hint at this just being the beginning to an even bigger conflict ahead.

Now onto spoilers, so if you haven’t watched the season you have been warned.

I posted about what I thought about the characters and what their arcs could be earlier this week and I hit it home with some, but was pleasantly surprised by others.

Rayla was the character I was most excited about heading into this season and I’m glad they decided to go more in depth with her character and culture. We see just how deeply her parents “betrayal” has hurt her and how it has given her a heavy burden to bear. She is shown to be 100% willing to sacrifice herself and her possible happiness to redeem her parents and her own mistakes. She believes that she deserves everything bad that has happened to her because she wasn’t/isn’t good enough. This was painful to hear out loud because anyone who has watched the Dragon Prince knows what kind of person Rayla is and that she is, what Callum later dubs her, a hero. Which is only further exemplified when Rayla is the one who gets the finishing blow on Viren in a confrontation that mirrors that of Viren and her parents on that fateful day. She takes Viren down with a last ditch effort that almost takes her out with him and it is through this success that she is finally able to move forward with her life instead of being stuck in the mistakes of the past. While it takes her a little longer to fully believe, or at least try to believe, that she deserves a happy ending she comes to accept the good things that have come her way and the brighter future that her actions have helped to create which was rewarding payoff for the seasons of struggle Rayla has endured.  

The second character I was looking forward to was Soren and his role this season was great and a bit heartbreaking at times. He comes to see his father for the villain he is and ends up helping Ezran, Callum, and Rayla showing that while he was coerced by his father to make questionable decisions in earlier seasons he has a heart of gold beneath it all. He realizes that his father doesn’t truly care about his well being or feelings. He is constantly belittled  by his father and his father makes it pretty clear that he is expendable. Soren’s revelation is a heartbreaking one, but he chooses to break off and take the road he knows to be right instead of continuing to follow hoping his father will eventually be the man Soren wishes him to be and finally showing Soren the love he so desires. Soren, despite everyone calling him dumb, makes the decision to break the cycle of hatred that his father is perpetuating and in doing so ends up making the choice most likely to create a brighter future. Like Rayla said “To break that cycle, someone has to take a stand when no one else will”, it takes one person to start a chain reaction and break the cycle and that’s what the dragon prince is about. Soren got the redemption arc he deserved and I was so glad that it happened.

Claudia is the character I was wishing I would be wrong about, but hit the mark on. So much happened this season that she was sort of pushed to the side, but we did get her downward spiral. When the moment of truth came she decided to continue down the rabbit hole of dark magic and self destruction. Claudia’s biggest downfall is her big heart. She loves those close to her so deeply that she can’t give up on them. She had to have noticed how far her father had fallen like Soren did but she stubbornly kept on her blinders because she loved her father which was tragic. I’m afraid her final desperate actions to “keep her family together” by bringing her father back from the dead just signaled the beginning of her journey down the rabbit hole.

The show’s animation has improved greatly from its less than stellar season 1. There were some genuinely gorgeous shots. The backgrounds were incredibly detailed and the facial animation was great. There was a lot more expressiveness in each reaction shot. The scene where Rayla saves Nyx from the soul fang serpents had incredibly fluid action and was a lot of fun to watch.

My only real complaint this season was episode 2. While I absolutely loved the content the tonal shifts were a bit jarring at times. That really does feel like a stretch though because the content was pretty strong and gave a lot of development to Ezran.

This season delivered the spectacle and climax it promised and finished out a lot of the main characters arcs. The cliffhanger we were left on has me begging for more and it feels like there is so much more that can happen with the world and characters. I hope it gets a season 4 and the hanging plot threads are allowed to reach their conclusion and we are allowed to see the aftermath of reuniting the dragon prince with his mother. This season is one of my favorite seasons of television this year and I think it was worth the wait.

The Dragon Prince Rewatch Thoughts and Ideas About the Future

Since season 3 is right around the corner I have decided to rewatch the first 2 seasons of the dragon prince. And the show was better upon a rewatch than I remember it being. Knowing certain things that are going to happen changes how you read scenes near the beginning and allows you to notice the seeds for future events or character choices. There is a scene in the second episode, before we are told of Rayla’s fear and dislike of water, where she is determined to set her mistakes right and she gets to a river and hesitates, gathers her berrings, and then crosses. This scene is only a couple of seconds long, if that, but you can tell that she is wary of water even before you’re told. There are plenty more moments like this and it astounded me while I was watching. 

The pacing also feels better while rewatching. When I first saw the dragon prince I remember thinking the pacing felt off. In some moments it was really fast while others it was really slow. I’m typically not that affected by pacing, but there were certain moments that I felt needed more time to develop that were rushed through and some that were given too much time that weren’t that important to the story. I still think that some moments were rushed, but the slower moments fit a lot better now. For example when I first watched season 1 I was genuinely surprised that it ended at episode 9. It didn’t feel like a finale at the time, but going immediately into season 2 felt a lot more organic.

Now to get into talking about my thoughts on the show as a whole. And my predictions for the future.

Characters:

Rayla- Rayla is my personal favorite character. Our introduction to her manages to showcase the characteristics of her that will become the driving force of the story, her compassion which clashes with her mission and immense skill. It only takes a single scene to set up her most important characteristics to the story. It was interesting to learn how her culture affects the way she sees herself and the people around her. And how it lead to her negatively viewing herself because compassion and fear are frowned upon. She also didn’t just get over her bias against humans. Her view changes gradually and her decision to travel with the princes didn’t come from her being more enlightened than other elves, but from her unique set of circumstances with her past and inner conflict. The writing of Rayla managed to impress me yet again while watching the show. I couldn’t believe that they managed to create a character that was able to organically kick start the plot without neglecting the societal biases that would affect her character. I believe Rayla is a really well written character that has a lot of potential to grow. We will probably get to explore a lot of it in season 3. I hope to get her backstory and a greater expansion of Moonshadow elf culture now that her and Callum are in Xadia.

Callum- Callum really becomes a great character in season 2. Season 1 felt like it was setup for his character and season 2 was the season where he actually got to shine. His insecurities and disposition made for an interesting, yet predictable, starting point that was enhanced by how well it juxtaposed with Rayla’s insecurities and personality. They used it to create an interesting dynamic between the two. This insecurity lead to him gaining an intense focus on magic, because it was the first thing he felt he excelled at, until he finally learns how to perform it without a primal stone or resorting to dark magic. This also lead to a juxtaposition between him and Claudia, which I have no doubt will be explored more in depth later. Claudia is falling farther and farther down the hole that is dark magic and becoming over reliant on its “quick fix” nature, while Callum is taking the long path to learning primal magic which seems to be a safer, longer term fix than dark magic. Callum is a character I find the most interesting when he is mirroring other characters. He manages to put the journeys of others into a different perspective.

Claudia and Soren- These are the characters, other than Rayla, that I think will benefit the most from season 3. There is a lot of setup with their relationship between their father, the princes, and each other. They seem to be set up to take different paths within the third season to either follow their father or find some sort of redemption. Soren is the one with the most interesting relationship to their father in that, while Claudia ultimately seems to care more for her brother’s well being than their father’s opinion of her as shown with her decision to save Soren not the “egg” during her moment of truth, Soren wants so badly to make their father proud that when he’s paralyzed he’s happy because now he can’t do the bad things he felt he had to do to make his father proud. This moment changed the way I saw his character. He no longer seemed mean spirited or “evil”. And it lead to me believing that he could be heading toward a path of redemption where he eventually breaks free of his father’s influence. Claudia on the other hand has relied more and more on dark magic to where she will find herself at a crossroads where she will acknowledge the negative aspects of dark magic and choose either to continue down the rabbit hole or reject it. I want to believe that Claudia will make the decision to reject dark magic, but I have the feeling that Claudia and Soren will find themselves on separate paths where Soren will reject their father and try to save Claudia from herself and Claudia will continue down her path of dark magic and by association down the path of her father’s acceptance, at least initially. She is characterized as someone who cares a lot about the people close to her and she will do anything for them, so I think in the end she will make the right choice unless something drastic happens.

Ezran- The final member of our trio. He’s the character who’s future I’m the least sure of/have the least ideas of where it can go. He’s finally grown enough to stop running from his problems like he did so many times before, but he hasn’t shown an affinity for leading, mostly due to his young age, which leads me to believe he won’t hold the throne for very long in season 3. Ezran running from his problems and him liking hide and seek become sort of intertwined. In the first episode Ezran plays hide and seek with Bait and later runs away to hide in the secret tunnels in the castle when Callum harshly told him the truth about the moonshadow assassins. Later in season 2 he plays hide and seek with Bait and Zym while Callum and Rayla are defending the dragon, which he realizes was a bad idea when he can’t find Zym. He later “runs” away after learning the truth about his father’s death, but actually goes to talk with Claudia to go back and take the throne. The realization that hide and seek was a bad idea can be paralleled with his realization that he can’t run and hide from his responsibilities like he tried to before. Him actually playing hide and seek with someone other than Bait, who is easily found, made him realize that “hiding” actually created more problems, possibly losing Zym, than it solved, combating boredom. This was an interesting parallel I found on my second rewatch that once again hints at what is going to happen before it actually happens.

Story:

The dragon prince is a show that finds its basis in darker themes such as the cycles of war and vengeance, societal bigotry, that neither side is entirely just in war, etc. These are all heavy themes that the dragon prince handles surprisingly well. The pilot episode alone shows all of these things directly and doesn’t shy away. It ends with King Harrow and all the elven assassins but Runnan dead with Rayla, Callum, and Ezran on the run in hopes that while they have lost today they may be able to stop future all out war if they manage to accomplish a near insurmountable task with everyone seemingly against them. There isn’t a victory, just a quiet desperation that they must succeed later. This is very different from most animated shows aimed at the same demographic. This starts out dark and then gets lighter then slowly becomes even darker than before. Shows I’ve seen this compared to like Avatar: the Last Airbender, the Legend of Korra, etc all had much lighter pilot episodes before delving into much darker territory. This sets the bar right out of the gate. The story does a much better job than a lot of cartoons I’ve seen at dealing with the messiness of war. Both the humans and elves have done bad things in the name of “justice” and the show acknowledges this instead of naming a side that is “right”. This is rare in shows that thrive off of good vs evil. With the dragon prince no one seems truly evil. Even with Viren, who is the closest to a big bad this show has, is steeped in shades of grey. This is the major thing that sets the dragon prince apart from its contemporaries. The basic premise of the story is pretty straightforward and something that has been done before, but the way it does it is unique.

 It’s a bit hard to put into words all the things I think about the dragon prince, but this is my best stab at it. It looks like the dragon prince will continue to raise the stakes with this upcoming season and become darker and more morally nuanced with the upcoming season. I’m really excited for season 3 to release and hope it manages to continue the great things that it has done with its previous two seasons