So, I watched Jentry Chau Vs. The Underworld.
If you like beautiful (and unique) animation, complex storytelling, themes of coming of age and grief, and references to my favorite band (shout out NCT127), this is a story you should definitely check out. I would recommend it highly, even though I'm going to critique later on in this review.
Complex People and Complex Love
Gugu was a very complex character whom you could both hate as someone who was clearly manipulating Jentry in an almost unforgivable way after doing the unforgivable to her family. And yet, the series opening literally had Gugu sacrificing her life for Jentry, so no matter what was revealed, you always had to handle the uncomfortable reality that Gugu really loved Jentry.
And therein the series explored complexities in love and life, an understanding that comes with growing up and brings on its own grief. The people who raise us, our heroes, turn out to have their own lives and worlds too, their own motivations, that are often not exactly altruistic. We are not at the center of their world as much as we, as children, thought we were.
Jentry's wrestling with her relationship with Gugu was complex and interesting. The handling of Gugu's character was consistently the best in the series, and I loved it even if I'm still not sure I like Gugu. That's a good character--someone you're left pondering the legacy of.
Jentry working through her grief was a major theme of the series--grief for her parents, and grief for Gugu, not just in terms of her actually dying (which does happen), but in terms of her understanding of who Gugu was and who her parents were.
Jentry's grief journey contrasts with Gugu's grief for Iris and of course Cheng's for Xiao Lan. Which is why Jentry reaching out and healing her inner child through saving Xiao Lan was ultimately a beautiful way of handling her arc. She saw a child who was scared and didn't know what was going on, and destructive in that pain, and saved her.
If you look at the series, Gugu was scared and didn't fully understand the consequences of her actions and destroyed Jentry's family as a result. Kit was scared and didn't understand how to be human and was destructive in that pain.J entry too grieves Kit and projects that fear onto the possibility of losing Michael, which leads to a rift in their relationship. And some of that fear is not understanding who they wanted to be. To quote C.S. Lewis after the death of his wife:
No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.
Grief and fear intertwine in many ways in Jentry Chau, including through Moonie allowing herself to be possessed by the Mogui to get her husband back. This also then leads to Gugu's second death.
Gugu's farewell at the end had me full-on sobbing. In a sense, Jentry's entire arc throughout the story is a symbolic way of working through her grief for Gugu, settling with her accepting via choosing to focus on Gugu's love for her, and carrying her memory on in a literal form (the necklace). After accepting Gugu loved her, Jentry loses her fear of the underworld and her powers, and her fear of losing the people closest to her as well.
A Soul Is What You Choose
Jentry's ultimate power isn't burning, but it's being able to see people for whom they want to be. Kit and being human. Ed and being scary. Michael and joining the band.
In a world where everyone, demon or human, is trying to be what they think they need to be, trying to please others, Jentry asks them to be who they want to be, to live how they want to live.
The Best Character and the Worst Writing: Kit
Kit is by far the most compelling character. He's continually sympathetic (while Gugu is somewhat not), conflicted, and torn between how desperately he wants to be human and the inhuman acts he believes he has to commit to be one. Plus, he doesn't understand what it means to be human, nor the complexities of human relationships.
The scene where he helps Jentry create a skinsuit is really a metaphorical sex scene--like fairly obviously. It isn't subtle.
It starts in a bedroom (and yes, animators know what they're doing when they choose setting and objects).
Then we have talking about looking under layers.
Then we have some yonic symbols and this.
Like. And he uses a knife (a traditionally phallic symbol), and the next thing we see is cloth falling... with literal the next frame being clothes (ie, clothes coming off).
Sticking a brush (another traditional phallic symbol) in a vat of wet paint (yonic).
Kit: I've never done this before. It's strange.
Jentry: I stand by what I said in class. You do have a soul, and you're more human than you know.
Also note the hand clasped position.
It ends with them literally "becoming one" in Kit embodying a Jentry skin to help Jentry uncover the truth--in other words, they help each other be human.
Which is why what happens next really doesn't make storytelling sense, and is actually kinda offensive.
Love Triangle: What Not To Write
The love triangle pretty clearly was supposed to represent Jentry's links to the supernatural (via Kit) and her links to the human world (via Michael). Great potential for a love triangle, a trope I generally hate because it's almost never well done.
This was not well done. What makes it even more frustrating is that it had a ton of potential to be well done via the thematic and symbolic potential.
Having Kit suddenly go aggressive ex who can't take "no" for an answer was lazy writing, nonsensical within the characters they'd set up, and offensive. Offensive, primarily, because you absolutely should never introduce a triggering element like, oh, harassment and controlling men if you don't plan on dealing with it in the story. And they didn't. At all.
The only reason that element was there was to resolve the love triangle in a clear way--oh, Jentry should be with Michael because Kit acted threatening, even though he never had before. That's just bad writing, because if there's a clear choice in a love triangle, you gotta actually write it. Make Michael the more compelling love interest. (More on how they didn't do this later.)
The entire sequence with Kit makes no sense. Jentry tells him he's actually "hundreds of years old," parroting Tumblr-esque anti arguments about Twilight and every other paranormal love story ever. Except, the story had always explicitly framed Kit as a child being abused by Cheng and "parented" by puppets. His journey to understand who he was, that he mattered, that he could be a human too, was clearly a coming-of-age story.
You don't tend to end coming-of-age stories with death, but they did, pretty much because after the threatening scene there was no coming back.
Plus, Jentry's treatment of Kit actually was pretty bad. Now, there's never an excuse for a threatening ex, but--Kit was right about her hypocrisy in terms of how she treated demons like Ed and himself, something that Jentry isn't really asked to reckon with.
If they wanted Jentry to end up with Michael, that's fair, but her decision was taken away from her because they just decided to stamp Kit with a lazy and offensive development and then kill him off in a redemptive death that emphasizes everything that can go wrong with that trope.
I feel like they didn't know entirely what to do with Michael. He started off with a cool arc, torn between his desire to be a band geek and his talent for football. His indecision leading to conflict with Stella and Jentry was also a great flaw, especially given that he also has visions of the future. An indecisive teenager with precognition has a ton of potential.
But, Michael's arc vanishes after the festival. Instead he's just... kinda there. Jentry chooses him because she wants to be a normal, human girl. But this isn't a good reason, because she's not (and arguably, he's not either!). Yet this isn't unpacked--the idea that everyone in this triangle is both human and supernatural, to varying degrees.
One interesting idea I spotted during the scene where Kit (as Jentry) gets asked out by Michael is that--well, it's a romantic-coded scene with two men, even if Kit turns him down for Jentry.
But it also coming on the heels of the metaphorical sex scene kinda seemed to almost hint at a throuple. Plus the scene after Kit's death where Jentry views them as merging, and where Michael expresses that Jentry views them the same. This would have actually been a very interesting turn for the story to take in future seasons, if they get those (especially since Stella x Tokki is apparently a thing?).
Honestly, almost all of the writing flaws I've talked about come down to the writers just not having enough time. If they had a guarantee of further seasons, they wouldn't have needed to rush to finish the love triangle. They wouldn't have needed to kill Kit. They wouldn't have needed to abort Michael's arc and conflict with Stella.
And really, Netflix continues to disappoint me in emphasizing just how much they focus on profits and money over art. They prefer fast food over an actual nutritious meal. They give shows like one season to get record ratings and if they don't, they get axed. Of course writers are going to rush to cram their story into a single season, because there's no guarantee of another season. Series aren't given any leeway to explore their interesting elements, or to find their footing. It's bad for art. However, Warner Bros exists so Netflix can't fully win the crown for worst example of capitalistic corporations killing art just yet.
I continue to be disappointed that series with no actual story that the writers want to tell (merely a concept of a plan) get renewed for seven seasons based on the writer's reputations (that they then tank with their terrible non-writing) while interesting stories with beautiful art and animation, complex ideas on grief and growing up, have to scramble to beg for another season.
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