#frogscape

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*spoilers for Olivia and Yunnan if you haven't seen it*

Excited to hear your thoughts on how our latest episode fits into Marcy's dreamscape.

I think the part with Olivia, Yunnan, and Marcy fighting their fears could be a desire to share her fears, vulnerabilities, with others without feeling like a burden as it is out of her control and everyone experiences it together. I think the whole idea of Olivia and Yunnan being the ones to rescue her comes from a desire to be wanted and cared for by people who have no obligation to do so, as opposed to Anne and Sasha who she might fear stay with her out of pity, or because it's what they've always done.

I heard someone describe the possession as a "mind-rape", and, like, yeah. But I wonder how the Core being a collection of the greatest minds plays into this. Maybe it's her fear of being completely overwhelmed by people more powerful than her playing out in a masochistic fantasy, that will hopefully end with the catharsis of overpowering and eliminating them. Maybe the whole thing with the core's eyes being everywhere is a manifestation of feeling watched all the time- like your analysis about the male gaze.

Anyways

Hi, anon! Thanks for the thoughts!

I like your take on Marcy wanting to be vulnerable and also not wanting to be vulnerable and oh wow. Okay. I'm putting the rest of this paragraph under the cut.

As for wanting to be rescued by people outside the trio, maybe? The fact that Marcy mistakes Yunan and Olivia for Sashy and Anne is making me reconsider whether I was right about this after all:

I’ve wondered whether [Sprig is Marcy according to Anne,] Polly is Sasha according to Anne, Olivia is Anne according to Marcy, Yunnan is Sasha according to Marcy, and Percy and Braddock are Anne and Marcy according to Sasha (but I can’t figure out which one’s which). This is probably wrong.

It helps that Olivia seems primarily aligned with Heart; plants tend toward Wit, but she puts a Heart spin on them with themes of stewardship, moral responsibility, tradition, and obligation to family. Yunan, of course, is aligned with Strength.

I could easily be wrong. The newt ladies do have mom energy (not as much as the fandom was hoping for, but it's still there), so maybe they signify Marcy's desire to have good parents? Or maybe her mom is actually a better parent than her dad.

Other stuff! Yunan's childhood trauma might haunt her still because it signifies the creeping threat of old age and senility? Maybe? Arm injuries are associated with Strength is all. (Hm, I should do a follow-up post about the primary/secondary/tertiary attribute thing. There's a lot that the initial post missed.)

Given Marcy's enthusiasm for necromancy and her desire to stay friends "forever" and "never grow apart," I strongly suspect she wants to cheat death and become immortal. This wish just came true in the worst possible way.

The line "But my lord craves a host" stands out to me, if only for the possible connection to Marcy's weird cannibalism motif. (NB: Anne also has a cannibalism motif. I have no idea what the heck is up with cannibalism in this show.)

Someone on Discord suggested that the Core's possession of Marcy is akin to a trans kid experiencing unwanted puberty—especially if Tarantulad is foreshadowing a permanent physical change in Marcy's appearance. I'm pretty interested in this interpretation, given that I already read Marcy as AFAB and vaguely trans; in particular, their quest in Marcy at the Gates to prevent the female (barbari-ants) from overwhelming the male (Newtopia) has vibes of staving off puberty.

(Having invoked the trans reading, I will now refer to Marcy as "they" for the rest of this post.)

The Core's eye motif just got dialed way the fuck up, which means that between it and the shadowfish I am now very interested in this line from Scavenger Hunt:

Yeah, sure, I'm good at solving puzzles and calculating the check, but you're amazing at making connections. Me, I have trouble looking people in the eye sometimes.

(cw: rape)

And then, yeah, the whole "mind rape" thing.

So I'm pretty confident that Newtopia is Marcy's fantasy of college, but there are still some major unresolved questions about their dreamscape. More than anything, I want to know what's up with all this metaphorical sexual trauma. The king is arguably coded as a sexual predator, his impalement of Marcy as rape, and the Core's possession of Marcy as rape resulting in pregnancy.

I can think of four possible reasons for this, which aren't mutually exclusive.

One, Marcy was sexually assaulted on Earth, and the shit they're going through right now is a symbolic reenactment of that trauma. This is what I argue in the post about Andrias, although I'm no longer as confident as I used to be. Might be true! Might not.

Two, Marcy is afraid of being sexually assaulted; Andrias, the Core, and the leering eyes of the shadowfish are all manifestations of this fear.

Three, Marcy experienced and continues to experience puberty as a violation of their bodily autonomy, an assault on par with rape.

And four.

I like your take on Marcy wanting to be vulnerable and also not wanting to be vulnerable and oh wow. Okay. Literally in the process of typing that out it occurred to me that "wanting the thing but wanting it to be out of your control so you can avoid the shame and stigma of asking for the thing" is a common thread in many rape kinks! Which is. I don't know if that counts as a breakthrough—I don't know if that's actually what's happening here—but it's certainly an idea!

But I wonder how the Core being a collection of the greatest minds plays into this. Maybe it's her fear of being completely overwhelmed by people more powerful than her playing out in a masochistic fantasy, that will hopefully end with the catharsis of overpowering and eliminating them.

Yeah, could be! Fear and fantasy can certainly overlap. I don't really have anything to add to this; we'll have to see how it plays out in canon.

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If you need me, I'll be listening to the new outro on loop, thinking about the fact that it uses the word "baby" like three times for no apparent reason.

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cw: rape, unwanted pregnancy: keep having this thought of: andrias violently injecting marcy's body with code, data that puts *other people* into her body with her, parasitizing her, taking away her autonomy, forcibly changing her body and turning it into a prison, and how much that reads like a rape resulting in pregnancy to me. (eager to read pro-abortion narrative into it when/if they evict the Core regardless of whether it can survive without marcy, because it has no right to her body)

Oof, ow. Yeah. That's a metaphor. See also, perhaps, the fertilization imagery from True Colors.

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(Spoilers from the new S3 trailer)

We know the Night has at least thirteen eyes. But both times it's been connected to Marcy, we see eleven. (If you count the "eye" on her chest, at least.) Beholder vibes.

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I'd love to hear your thoughts on the various corruptianne theories going around

Lol I was literally just talking about this on Discord. I mostly don't have opinions on specific theories because I haven't actually read many. The one full-fledged Corrupti-Anne theorypost I've read is Unfated Friends, and my response is mostly that I hope Amphibia doesn't do the "How dare children be asked to save the word?" thing because I think it's a bad take.

But I've witnessed the trends in speculation from a distance. To my understanding, the idea is that Anne will end up aligned with the Night for some portion of this season, and will thus have a kind of "villain" arc; maybe this will be the result of the Night manipulating or possessing her. The evidence is:

Sasha worked for the S1 villain, and Marcy worked for the S2 villain. Anne working for the Night in S3 would complete the pattern.

What we've seen of Anne's Calamity powers (in True Colors, the S3 opening, and S3 promos) suggests that they're fueled by rage, anger, and other strong negative emotions. As Anne cultivates these powers, we might see a dip in her mental health that leaves her open to manipulation. Or she might just snap.

Anne gets called the "Angel of Death" in two separate episodes.

Hop Pop's death is heavily foreshadowed, and some of that foreshadowing (e.g. Anne as the black heron in flipwart) involves Anne as the harbinger.

I'd put the odds of some kind of Corrupti-Anne arc at 30%. (This isn't exclusive to scenarios where Anne kills Hop Pop. It also doesn't have to involve the Night, as long as Anne is on a villainous path.) I think the evidence is real and worth considering, but most theories are wrong simply due to the sheer number of different directions a story can go.

I personally want it to happen. And I hope it's a continuation of Anne's tendency toward binary, us-versus-them morality. I had Corrupti-Anne on the brain when I wrote about Anne's moral stagnation.

If the nature of Anne's Calamity plays a significant role in her corruption, then this will probably inform or be informed by my current reading of Calamity as puberty. I really hope the show doesn't go for a "haha hormones make teenagers crazy" metaphor, and I don't think they will.

Finally—and I don't believe this is especially controversial—I think the odds of Anne becoming and staying a villain are very low. I think that when the story ends, all three girls will be alive (95%) and not villains (98% if they're alive).

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Recent interview on TheGamer confirms that the amphibia girls were written to be high school age (~15) and then aged down by disney, but without any real changes being made to the characters

I saw that, thanks! (Link to the interview)

Upon being transported to human society, fans began to notice that the characters of Anne Boonchuy, Sasha Waybright, and Marcy Wu were performing feats that shouldn’t really be possible for 13-year-old girls. Anne is seen to be driving in the latest trailer, while her friends are studying for exams and working part-time jobs that would be more akin to high school students. There’s a reason for this: Disney aged them down from the initial pitch.

“They were older in the original pitches,” Braly says. “[Anne, Sasha, and Marcy] were around 15 originally, because it was supposed to feel a bit more like high school than middle school, but we did age them down to better fit the demographic. But the characters never changed. I’ve seen before where fans are like ‘She feels much older,’ but the story is relatively unchanged regardless of them being aged down or up. I did see some comments of people going, ‘She can drive?!’ but in the context of the episode it will definitely make sense.”

I guess I'll just…wait and see? How this affects my unfolding existential crisis? The fact that I've been able to write meta at all in the last week is good.

Honestly, what interests me most is the claim that “the story is relatively unchanged regardless of them being aged down or up.” I assume he's talking not just about plot beats, but broader thematic stuff. This is a story about growing up and figuring out who you are, about family, about a group of friends who grow and change and fall apart and end up stronger for it. None of this is contingent on the girls being in a specific grade.

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*cracks knuckles* Time to find out how newt exes factor into Marcy's dreamscape.

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Do you think that the temples are a metaphor for puberty? In Legend of Zelda : Ocerina of Time, the Forest and Fire temples (which was the inspiration for the first and third temples in Amphibia, respectively) were completed by Link as a child, and shortly afterwards he became an adult.

I like the way you think, anon. I'm adding Ocarina of Time to the long list of media I want to consume for Amphibia analysis purposes. (See also: Dragon Quest V, The Iron Giant, Harry Potter, theoretically every episode of Dragon Ball Z.)

My own take: Not puberty specifically, but growing up in a broader sense. Each girl's temple maps her preferred path to adulthood.

Anne is scared by her own increased agency as she gets older, because (at the start of the series) she doesn't trust herself to make good choices. Adolescence for Anne is primarily about the moral lessons she'll need to learn in order to confidently exercise her agency. Heart tempered by responsibility.

Marcy wants to excel in school and flourish in college; her temple mostly tests intellect, and she brags about her grades on the way there. Her final lesson in tempering Wit with humility also stems from her college-bound fantasies: It's an admission that she still has room to grow ("The humble seed: so much potential for growth!"), that there's always more to learn.

To be clear, the temples aren't unique for their growing-up symbolism. Anne's self-appointed moral journey is built into the core of season 1, and the whole of Newtopia is structured around Marcy's love of school. Nor do I think the the temples are where they actually become adults, except maybe in their own heads. It's more like each girl's temple is a tidy little microcosm of her larger character arc.

How Sasha fits into this paradigm is unclear to me. My best guess is that Strength is as straightforward as it looks on the tin: Sasha wants to become big and strong so she can protect her loved ones. In her Third Temple flashback, we see her aspiring to the heroic ideal: a valiant warrior of the light, defending the defenseless and combating the forces of darkness. Can't fight evil if you're three feet tall.

[The rest of this response is nsfw and touches on sexual trauma.]

On the other hand, Strength is body within the traditional trinity (where Wit is mind and Heart is soul or spirit), and one interpretation of "growing up in a bodily sense" is puberty. It might be that the third temple in particular symbolizes physical puberty, because Sasha values physical puberty as testament to adulthood in a way that Marcy and Anne don't. This is pretty speculative! But it's not completely without evidence. Much of Sasha's behavior in Reunion reads to me like she's trying to seduce Anne, and their duel is sexualized—so it's possible that Sasha values puberty because it grants her sexual agency. "Kid actively seeks out sex because it's a marker of adulthood" is, y'know, a thing.

Marcy also provides some evidence: She's the girl least aligned with Strength, and you can read some degree of sexual trauma or sex aversion into her impalement. Hints of puberty-related body dysphoria are scattered elsewhere in Marcy's arc—especially in the feminized, procreative barbari-ants which threaten to transform her masculinized, sexless Newtopia into a giant anthill.

Questions whose answers are not at all obvious to me: Why does each temple quest end with the respective girl putting her Calamity back in the box? Why does Anne get to keep some of her powers while Marcy and Sasha don't? I currently read Calamity as puberty, but I could easily change my mind depending on how season 3 shakes out. It would certainly be weird if each girl's Temple Of Become Adult ended with her forsaking physical growth.