Now that the special move(ish) event “The Battle For Mewni” finally aired, It’s arguably disappointing that we didn’t get to spend more time with Toffee, especially considering that the whole thing has been the climax to that incredible build-up that started back in the Season 1 finale.
Since his introduction, the lizard turned out to be a very shady, but interesting character, a villain whose plan and motivations were shrouded in mystery. I was honestly looking forward to finally find out what he was truly seeking. However, as the fittingly-named “Toffee” episode premiered, it almost looked like the reptile was simply going after his finger and that everything turned out to be just an overcomplicated revenge plot that it’s honestly baffling it managed to work (for the most part -he’s dead, after all) in the first place.
And, yeah, the show didn’t really do a great job at educating us viewers on its universe, its magical themes, etc. Granted, Season 3 has just started and we’re overall halfway through the entire show (assuming that it doesn’t get even more Seasons after the fourth one), so we may get more answers in the future. But when the show’s villains endgame starts being confusing rather than mysterious, you know something wrong. Or… did it?
No need to re-introduce the character as well all know him already but, yeah, Toffee is not exactly your average boastful, bombastic villain (which is already impressive, given that it’s a Disney XD show we’re talking about here). Do not expect him to burst into an evil laughter (at best, he just giggles menacingly). He’s a very shady, serious character in an otherwise wacky animated series -which SVTFOE was to almost annoying levels at the time.
This “silent” character trait is possibly what made his endgame rather confusing to most of us. “He did all of this for his finger!” except, that, he didn’t, like at all. Losing his finger was a merely a problem that he turned into an opportunity, via some magical mumbo-jumbo, but we’ll get to that.
In “Mewnipendence Day”, perhaps (still) one of the biggest game-changing episodes of the entire series so far, Toffee is seen reading a history book about Mewni, its royals and the magic wand(s). He’s just casually reading it during the first half of the episode and the show makes sure that we see what he’s doing, going as far as giving to the book itself a relatively detailed cover and content (not “Gravity Falls” level to details, but it’s enough to tell what the book is actually about -which is important).
As I said earlier, Toffee is not a villain who gloats about his evil plan and on how fools the heroes have been because they didn’t see it coming. Therefore, neither the writers or the character itself educated us viewers on what the hell he’s doing. Not directly or all at once at least.
Fast-forward to “Toffee”, we find out that the reptile has been “bathing” into what seems to be the source of all magic, corrupting it in the process. While, pacing-wise, all of this came too fast and too abruptly, saying that Toffee’s goal was his finger is rather misleading. Albeit in a sloppy, rushed way, the cartoon clearly did show us what Toffee was doing this whole time, confirming our theories while also removing all of our doubts:
Given the context and the flashback a couple of episodes earlier, and a bunch of other dialogues scattered through almost two entire seasons, it is now clear that the lizard’s endgame was the destruction of all magic, the only thing that still kept Mewmans in power and, accordingly, oppressed the monsters. Neither the reptile or the show directly told us, but they gave us subtle (and not-so-subtle) hints about it since the first Season. All the clues were there: the history book, the tapestry, Buff Frog’s line about Toffee knowing about Star and not liking her magic, and a bunch of other things. The series showed us Toffee’s plot and his Season-long effects on the show’s universe and characters, rather than having some kind of long exposition scene with some pacing issues here and there, but in the end, the whole thing turned out to be clear and perfectly understandable.
The finger wasn’t really his main goal, but instead his ticket back into the real world after his plan turned out to be a success (which is: corrupting the Mewman’s magic), something that could trigger his full regeneration via some kind of spell-thing he possibly read about in all those years of plotting. A bunch of well-deserved bonus points for being a rather spiteful final “middle finger” (hah!) to Moon, the one who blasted his finger off in the first place, who also ended up being the one who gave it back to him.
So, what’s the point of this post?
No one, really; just a summary of what I think Toffee’s plot was all about, which was in fact much simpler than it sounded. The only difference from almost every other (mostly animated) series is that the villain, in this case, didn’t monologue over and over about it so the audience could fully understand it in a single scene, but rather remained shady and silent about it, like a real schemer, which Toffee has been since his introduction, would have done, all while the cartoon showed us little hints here and there, so that us fans could connect the dots only when it was too late, just like the characters involved.
dededos
gummygunk
jacobvanloon
titsay
germansingergirl
