#ditto answers

[ditto-ditto]

imagine a standard outlet.

the vertical eyes and frowning mouth, yes?

the eyes are instead ears, like those of a cat;

the mouth a marker for the head.

what

is

it?

Ohwww!! It kinda wooks wike a wittol buny now!!

ish so cute!!

[dittomander]

Steven Universe I know but what are EoA fans doing now??

hhhh okay. so.

to be totally fair up front, there's nothing nearly as virulent as the absolute insanity that comes out of SU spaces (to my knowledge, no one has accused Craig Gerber of being a fascist). The EoA fandom doesn't have the kind of headcount necessary to sustain drama for very long, and most of the people in it are pretty chill and normal. So what we have instead is the world's slowest conga line of bad takes, where every 1-3 months or so we get someone popping up to talk about how bad or how wild a certain writing decision was for reasons that completely ignore elements like target audience, genre conventions, and theme.

I'm not sure of your personal level of familiarity with EoA, so to set the stage here: the central message of EoA is that it's never too late to change your future. You can't undo the past, but you can always take accountability and learn from your mistakes going forward, and it's important to give others the opportunity to do so, as well. This theme is stated out loud in varying ways throughout the show, including via an entire musical number in the finale literally titled 'Never Too Late'. It's all pretty unsubtle - while this show delves into some surprisingly heavy topics for Disney Jr., it is still a Disney Jr. show, and the messaging is very direct. They do everything short of looking into the camera at the end Veggie Tales-style and asking "so kids, what did we learn today?"

So with how heavy handed the messaging can be, it's genuinely surprising to me how many people seemed to miss the point. An incomplete list of takes I've seen the last few years, in no particular order:

Victor and Carla were never really bad/were just misunderstood/etc. and the reason they got redeemed is because they never really needed redemption in the first place. (ignores sizable amounts of their textual actions and misses the point of the show - if it's never too late to change, then it shouldn't matter how bad or deserving of 'redemption' they ever were)

Actually, Victor didn't do enough to be forgiven and doesn't deserve it. (okay, and? your point? He outright acknowledges that he may never earn forgiveness in the text of the show! His personal ability to change is the important part, and is unaffected by whether others forgive him!)

Esteban did too many horrible things and should have had to die as a consequence. (to what end? what would that accomplish? how is that better than him living to actually make amends? what would this satisfy except your own punitive sense of vengeance?)

Actually, the show is victim blaming Esteban by expecting him to be accountable for his actions because he was always being influenced by Shuriki/Ash/Cahu/etc. (Ok look he's a complicated guy and his motives certainly range in sympathy but like. he is still in control of his own actions. he still needs to change. owning up to his mistakes is a part of that, or else he'll continue to make the same ones over and over again. which Cahu actually comments on. In the text.)

Elena is evil/crazy/too violent/etc. and can't possibly come back morally from her behavior. (even if I give the benefit of the doubt and assume that misogyny isn't a driver on this one, it still misses the point of the show and an awful lot of the text. her pursuit of vengeance is treated as a character flaw to overcome! it causes problems for her! and she overcomes it! and if you can give leeway to the others to change, why is Elena where you draw the line?)

Actually, Elena wasn't evil/crazy/violent enough after everything she went through! She was trapped in an amulet for 41 years she should be completely insane! (ok this isn't even a thematic thing this is just you don't understand the genre conventions of a children's fantasy. cool fanfic, still not a sensible critique of the show)

Like. This sort of stuff just keeps. Popping. Up. These types of takes have made it into YouTube videos with hundreds of thousands of views. People have made money off of saying this kind of stuff, among all kinds of other misinterpretations of more granular parts of the text. Genuinely, when I see long analysis text posts in the tags or new retrospective videos, my stomach just sinks in dread at this point. And right when I think that's all been left behind I'm blindsided by something else. If bad Steven Universe takes are floodwaters, overwhelming and everywhere, then bad Elena of Avalor takes are the endless drips of a broken sink - infrequent and largely just obnoxious as individuals, but the sound will still slowly drive you mad, and it's still a problem that needs to be fixed.

I'd be more understanding if the show was more obtuse, but none of the themes are even subtextual. It's literally just the text. They say it all out loud. How do we still have people in the year 2025 saying Esteban should have died? I'm baffled and tired.

[thegimmickblog]

you're a good mimic im very proud of you

*The mimic panics. It does not take compliments well. They quickly evade, sending the compliment elsewhere, to a different mimic.*

!!!

[steelchairinhand]

i have a family member who has DID so if they do this as a storyline IDK if it'll be done well if I'm being honest. It's never done well IMO

The only mainstream DID stories (that I've seen) that I think are good representation are:

Red vs. Blue (yes, the internet series)

Moon Knight

Also, I've seen a few small projects written by people with DID that potray it really well!

So I wouldn't say it's never done well. It's just rarely done well (mostly because production companies consult psychologists instead of people who experience the disorder).

[true-ditto]

[I pet ðis mimic, too.]

{Its eyes tilt into horizontal lines, and a mouth appears beneath them, trying to bite your hand}

Piss off ya creep!

[dittolicous]

two ends of a spectrum xD

@clemm0ns I'm sooooo glad someone noticed the header too!!! ;w; i was tired of dark, we’re goin full pastels baby! the ditto icon was harder to choose cuz all the really cool official art had words over it, but I'm happy with what I got =3

@coolthinghere pjghxgffgjgugoh I actually keep seeing it as kitty in a monocol and wonder who the fuck that person is - oh, it's me ovo

[dittomander]

Any headcanons on Cristobal? I feel like we don't talk enough about him in the fandom.

I can't say I'm surprised he doesn't see much discussion - he's a one-off static villain that seems to mostly exist to foreshadow Elena's conflict with Esteban. That said, if you want to see more exploration of him and his motives, he plays a pretty major role in @nontacitare's fic The Past is Proglogue, so I'd recommend giving that a look.

As for my own headcanons on him, sure, I have a few:

Cristóbal was much closer to Elena in age than Esteban was, within just a few months of her. His father was Raúl's younger brother.

Despite that, their relationship was much more distant - even before moving into the palace, Esteban lived closer to Avalor City, so he and Elena spent more time together than either spent with Cristóbal.

mostly Cristóbal saw the others annually when they came to Nueva Vista for their summer trip, with the exceptions of the year Isabel was born (Lucía was due very soon after when their usual trip would be and wanted to make sure she was home for that) and the year of Elena's quinceañera (the royal quinceañera for the heir to the throne? that was being planned the entire summer, so the Castillo-Floreses didn't travel - instead, Cristóbal and his family visited them for Elena's birthday)

He was still really young when the sirenas sank his father's ship. His mother ran the duchy as duchess regent for over a decade.

That old guy in the portrait during "Familia Forever" is Cristóbal's maternal grandfather. He passed away of natural causes a few years later.

After his father's death, he was scared of the water for a long while. He mostly got over it as he got older, but he still doesn't particularly like swimming.

Unlike Elena's excitement to rule, Cristóbal never really wanted or understood the responsibility of running anything, but he liked the luxury that being nobility brought him. He was pretty disengaged from his mom's attempts to prepare him for a more political role.

So when Shuriki showed up, fully planning to kill him since he would've had a claim to the throne with Elena's immediate family out of the way, he backed down basically immediately and agreed to do whatever she wanted as long as he still got to be wealthy. His mom was technically still regent at the time, but didn't push back out of fear for her son's life.

Esteban knew that Cristóbal was getting money from Shuriki - he was too involved in kingdom affairs to not know - but with how guilty he felt about his own role in the coup, he legitimately thought that Cristóbal was acting out of survival instincts rather than genuine loyalty.

Cristóbal knew that Shuriki was alive before even Victor Delgado knew - he was basically the first person she reached out to as an ally after her initial defeat, and he's actually part of how she and Victor got back in contact. His own guards picked up the Delgados near Nueva Vista, and when he and Victor realized their mutual contact, they started scheming. Carla was mostly left out of the loop of the planning process.

Post-series and after the whole situation with the Delgados and Esteban, Elena instates a new Second Chances Policy to try and better rehabilitate criminals, and grudgingly acknowledges that that includes Cristóbal. Results are mixed - he never fully earns his family's forgiveness, and he certainly never gets his duchy back, but he does manage to avoid spending the rest of his life in prison.

[dittomander]

How much time passes in between the events of “Giant Steps”and “The Lightning Warrior”? Which months do these episodes occur in? Do we get any hints?

There's probably about a six week gap between the two! Elena breaks her arm in "Giant Steps" and finally gets the cast off in "The Lightning Warrior", and a broken arm will typically take about six weeks to heal.

"The Lightning Warrior" takes place sometime after "Sweetheart's Day" and sometime before "Día de las Madres", so sometime between mid-February (assuming Sweetheart's Day is meant to be analogous to Valentine's Day) and May 10th (assuming Avalor's DdlM takes place the same day as Mexican Mother's Day). It can't actually take place in May - even if Elena had broken her arm the day before Sweetheart's Day, six weeks later would still only put "The Lightning Warrior" in late March, and there's a couple other episodes before "Sweetheart's Day" to account for.

"Giant Steps", then, takes place sometime after Hanukkah ("Festival of Lights") and before Sweetheart's/Valentine's Day ("Sweeheart's Day"). It also can't be more than 6 weeks before the latter, because Elena doesn't get her cast removed until afterward.

All together, with, again, the assumption that Sweetheart's Day is the same as Valentine's Day, that tells us that "Giant Steps" takes place sometime between early January and mid-February and "The Lightning Warrior" takes place about six weeks later, between mid-February and late March.