#comparative media

[mask131]

Is it just me or... I mean, think about this... "The Black Cauldron" (1985) is for Disney what "Tales from Earthsea" (2006) is for Ghibli?

[flowercap]

Fallen Angels (1995)

Amelie (2001)

[existentialcrisistime]

Philippians 3:20-21, The Mountain Goats

I Can Feel a Hot One - Manchester Orchestra

The Sound of Engines - Owen Pallett

[mask131]

Exploring the Ice King (1)

As I write these lines, the first snowfalls happened in France. To fit with the weather, I thought of starting something I was planning to do for quite a long time... A series of posts talking about Adventure Time's Ice King.

Well... not posts talking really about him. But rather posts talking about the origin, the formation, the tropes and archetypes at play with this character. Adventure Time is a very, very weird media in terms of mediatic evolution as it is a very bizarre yet influential step in the evolution of fantasy, placing itself as the unusual crossroad between faithful homage, absurdist parody and fresh continuation. It's... well it's weird. And the Ice King, one of the most crucial characters of the series, is a literal melting pot of MANY many different elements of the fantasy fiction.

I will start in this post with the function of the Ice King, mainly how he manifests the type of the "recurring pitiful villain".

When I think of a potential cultural ancestor for the Ice King, being a French person, I immediately think of Gargamel, the main antagonist of the Smurfs.

Why? It seems at first the two have nothing in common... And yet when you think about it, the two are old, ugly men practicing magic. The two are recurring villains that become one of the iconic head of the show. The two start as a legitimate, creepy, evil threat and then devolve in a pathetic, foolish, almost friendly foe - notably because each of their scheme and plan is bound to fail or blow back in their face, as part of the law of "evil can't win". The two are driven by a monomania, an obsession that becomes their main trait (capturing princesses/capturing the Smurfs), and the two have an animal sidekick that they treat with a mix of abuse and love (Gunther/Azrael).

I can't claim that the Ice King was directly inspired by Gargamel... But it is interesting to point out that the Ice King answers to a very specific type of villain in older children cartoon: the recurring but ineffective villain, the returning protagonist who always fail and despite his antagonism is part of the "main cast" so to speak, the "evil" guy who isn't so much evil as just a weird goof we laugh more at than we really dread.

A more American example could be Dick Dastardly from "Wacky Races", who has the bonus point of also having an animal sidekick:

There are many, MANY iconic and classic exemples of the "recurring, ineffective villain" in older children cartoons. I evoked Gargamel and Dick above because of their familiar animal, which highlights the parallel, but other "predecessors" of the Ice King include The Professor from Felix the Cat (bonus point for being an old man with a strong white theme and this huge mustache - and extra bonus point when you know that "Felix the Cat" was one of the first inspirations for Adventure Time's artstyle):

Elmer Fudd, who was eventually so pitiful in his evilness that Yosemite Sam had to be introduced (Yosemite Sam could also have played a part in the Ice King's creation as he has the King's short-temper mixed with the luscious facial hair):

You can also count in Wile E. Coyote - he isn't obviously related to the Ice King and I don't think he was an inspiration, but he is one of the icons of the "loser villain" that keeps inventing extravagant schemes, a monomaniac who is doomed to never succeed.

Or Shredder, from the old Teenage Turtle Ninjas cartoon...

... Or even "Eggman" Robotnik from the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise (there is something to be said about how a lot of these characters enjoy excentric facial hair).

And to conclude we need, of course, to bring forward the greatest of all these ineffective antagonists, and one that clearly did have an influence over Adventure Time: Skeletor, who was such a failure that the writers of He-Man themselves took pity on the guy and ultimately replaced him with alternate antagonists.

All of these "predecessors" did form a type of villain, a niche that the Ice King nicely filled. However, the Ice King's first "function" was not to be such a sad clown of a villain...

[mask131]

Finally reading "The Gods of Pegana"*!

And now that I have met Trogool, I can add him to the chain of cosmic eternal readers - at the very beginning, in fact, since you won't tell me later characters like The Old Man of the Wandering Mountain and Destiny of the Endless were not inspired by him.

I need to dig more into this type of character - world-changing books I have known since the Book of Ages (JCA) and the In-Octavo (Discworld) but here I am speaking of an eternal/cosmic reader. I might have to check "The Book of Life" next.

I actually read before The Gods of Pegana proper, but online and it wasn't working much for me. I'm reading it now physical format, and it is like reading it for the first time anew.

[likealittleheartbeat]

Religious Symbolism in Hunter x Hunter

Twitter: https://twitter.com/aleczandxr MAL: https://myanimelist.net/profile/AleczandxrPatreon: https://www.patreon.com/AleczandxrIn case you'd like to make ...

Hunter x Hunter has been the only show I’ve found similar to ATLA in the richness of its comparative religious explorations through spiritual themes and referential motifs. That they both so naturally depict how these intertwines with questions of national politics and gender suggests, at least to me, how integral it is to investigate religious/cultural philosophies in stories that entertain questions of morality. Both shows provide a protagonist and narratives that engage audiences deeply while seeming to deflate their typical expectations of pure good, evil, and comeuppance in ways that feel more aligned with reality than most modern media tropes.

[mxlabradorite]

Comparative Media

I swear to god, there’s a master’s thesis in the differences between the crushes between Aang and Katara and Dipper and Wendy. The way the characters treated each other, the way the text handled the arcs of the relationships, and the squickiness or appeal of the states of those relationship in “the future.”

A lot of it, though just has to do with how Wendy always treated Dipper as an equal, and Katara was basically a surrogate mother to Aang. Such a crucial, crucial difference.