The Reason Behind Amphibia’s Weird Tone
Amphibia is a show powered by emotions. At its core is this powerful familial bond between Anne and the Plantars. There’s also the relationship between Anne, Sasha, and Marcy, borne of strong feelings and fears and complicated by a pattern of codependency. This show has succeeded at providing emotional gut punches and the cathartic reward of how the characters cope with it.
So then why does Season 3 feel so numb?
It’s especially prevalent when you look at the Anne episodes. Anne really doesn’t feel like the same person she was before.
Before season 3, Anne had a lot of emotional issues. She compartmentalized heavily, leading to a lot of snapping at people and crying over things.
When Hop Pop hid the box, she stormed away and sulked for an entire episode. Then she said she forgave him, which turned out to be an empty promise. The problems didn’t go away overnight, and it wasn’t as if the previous episode suddenly hadn’t happened. The events from before had an effect on the plot afterwards.
Look at Anne’s anger at Sasha. She literally headbutted a guard out of rage at Sasha’s betrayal. We’ve heard these huge lines from her, about not wanting to be pushed around anymore, how Sasha is a horrible friend, and we see that Sasha’s actions are too big to ignore, and Anne can’t stay silent about them.
Even if we look at Anne’s crying. She cried a lot, often over things that just didn’t really matter. Look at the humorous crying in Day at the Aquarium. She’s right in the middle of that sob pile, afraid to leave her frog family behind.
And damn, did she long for her friends a lot. In Best Fronds and Marcy at the Gates, she stares at that polaroid she carries around everywhere. She mentions Sasha and Marcy offhand all the time, reminiscing over all the things they used to do back home, and how she’s excited to spend more time with them once they reunite.
Well, then Marcy died. And Anne didn’t seem to feel anything at all.
I mean, sure, we saw her say that Marcy has to be alive somehow, but she didn’t really talk about it at all after that. And while there have been allusions to her staying up late at night, the focus has seemingly shifted to the goal of getting the frogs back home.
Which, according to her speech in The New Normal, isn’t even her main goal. Anne wants to find a way to get her friends back and make peace with them, and she wants to finish defeating Andrias. Getting the frogs home? That’s, like, her 3rd most important goal. The goals that are closest to her heart are the goals that have to do with regaining her friends and getting revenge.
In The New Normal, we actually did see a lot of this emotion. That episode felt like coming home for a lot of viewers. Anne was reasonably stressed about keeping secrets from her parents. Her dad dropped hints about Sasha and Marcy (when he said “you three–I mean, four”) and we saw their names carved into Anne’s bedpost. Anne even looked at the picture of the three of them, the one she has saved to her phone. We haven’t seen it since.
Actually, Anne has been increasingly more emotionless since then.
I mean, look at her. She’s been staying up late researching ways to get back to Amphibia, but she’s been doing it more to get the frogs home than anything else.
And she’s been going on a lot of irrelevant adventures. Like when she made cookies for the frogs. Or when she took them to the movies.
Actually, after her blue-charged fight with the cloak-bot, Anne seems to have lost interest in her main goal–a fact only highlighted by its pairing with the horrific events that have happened to Marcy.
That’s when we see this overarching pattern: every time Anne uses her powers, the subsequent episodes get less and less focused on Anne’s emotional goals. Hell, they don’t even show as much emotion.
See If You Give a Frog a Cookie, for example. That episode showed a lot of the Plantars in full tears, crying on the floor around Anne. Which seems like normal Plantar shenanigans, until you think about how, in Day at the Aquarium, Anne was crying with them.
Or think about Hop til you Drop, where the frogs do all of this irresponsible stuff. Anne blames herself, almost halfheartedly, instead of getting mad at them for abusing her hospitality and being blatantly direspectful. Which seems like decent character growth, except didn’t she just have a season finale, two episodes ago, where her anger motivated her to try to murder a newt king?
It almost feels like Anne’s desires, her motives, her emotions, are being drained from her.
Anne is losing her heart.
And suddenly, this has a lot of chilling implications.
Let’s take, for example, the part in The New Normal where she mentions to Sprig that these powers feel bad, somehow. Every time she uses her powers, she passes out for a little bit. Watching her weakened, watching her energy get drained by these powers, it’s hard not to wonder if it’s not just her energy getting drained.
Using the powers is triggered by a need to protect. By principle, Anne’s desire to protect people is rooted in her love for them–that is to say, an emotional attachment driven by her heart.
It has been logical to assume that the heart gem enhances these qualities. However, enhancing is not the only thing it does.
The most perplexing thing about the Amphibian temples is their function. These temples have been repeatedly used to remove powers. Why would a society set up trials to test that someone is worthy to have their powers removed? Wouldn’t a temple exist to reward powers to those who deserve them?
That’s where it gets kind of creepy that Anne’s heart seems to be drained.
Wouldn’t it be easy to use a test to find people strong of heart, and then let the gem drain that heart from them, to put it somewhere else?
Let’s take a look at Marcy. She used to be a heavily emotionally-driven character, with her fear and trust issues leading her to send her friends to another dimension. Now she has become Darcy, a character known for its cold detachment and robot qualities.
It’s almost as if Andrias’s goal requires Anne, Sasha, and Marcy to be drained of the very qualities that they are strongest at.
Because where else is someone going to find a natural charge for a gem? The temples transferred them, sure, but the charge itself has to be activated by the correct combination, the perfect group of three.
The box hadn’t been activated before. It wasn’t activated by Sasha randomly opening it in True Colors. The only thing that could activate the box by merely opening it was the perfect combination of three people who already possessed each gem’s trait.
Now all the box needs to do is drain it from them.
