#frogshow

[cottoncandysprite]

Maybe have some apricot jam and you'll feel better

Based on this:

[mood-owl]

made this little doodle comic while on vc with my sister

falling for you.png

do not repost or use w/o permission

[artbyblastweave]

Also while I’m still on the Amphibia kick- something I appreciated is that the show is pretty good at peppering in little details about the underlying.... logistics? Structure?  of how the government/society works, (or doesn’t,) in a way that isn’t precisely didactic or Trying To Teach Children About Government or whatever. But it definitely answers a lot of questions about the show’s version of status-quo forgive-and-forget snap-backs work, and it acts as foreshadowing for how far up the ladder the institutional rot goes.

How come Toadstool maintains his position come hell or high water, even after blatantly embezzling? Because the only rung higher than him on the local totem pole is occupied by the quissential stationary bandits who don’t give a shit what he gets up to so long as they get their money, some time, some how. How come the occupying forces suck shit? Because Frog Valley is a backwater, and pretty strongly implied to be the dumping ground for all the soldiers who are dumb or flighty enough that they couldn’t safely be assigned to something more important (hence why they get played like a fiddle by a fuckin ’13 year old, and why the other tower captains write Grime off so easily at the moot.) Why is it a backwater? Because mountain pass gets frozen over for half the year (which shapes the first season) and it’s a month-long journey through a predatory hellscape to get to the seat of government.

Why hasn’t anyone higher up in the government done anything about the bandits and monsters plaguing that route? Funny you should ask...

The entire valley is a massive  round-robin chorus of people going “I’m not locked in here with you, you’re locked in here with me.” Basically anything can go down with no accountability and all parties left alive at the end sort of just glower at each other, lick their wounds, and get on with it, because what the fuck else are you gonna do? Who’s gonna arbitrate? If you stretch it, this also pretty neatly explains most of the episodes where some misadventure that you’d expect to be an ongoing point of contention in a small town just get neatly waved away. There are at least four characters explicitly hiding out in Wartwood, probably because of that larger culture of things just getting dropped.

And! Once the protagonists have unlocked fast-travel, we actually get to see what the wheels of the Newtopian Bureaucracy look like in situations that don’t have the king’s personal attention- It takes three-quarters of a season for an official to make it out to Wartwood to do something about the garrison that, you know, got fucking bombed to the ground by the locals, and then they deliberately pick someone violent and ruthless to keep everyone in line.

“Funny incompetent small-community leader” is a pretty common trope in cartoons, but someone on the writing team was pretty clearly thinking about what the underlying dynamics driving that might look like, and those dynamics crop up in enough other spots in the larger plot that it never feels like they’re doing an aesop, they’re just.... showing us how the world works. If you cut the scenes expressly showing that Andrias is the thrall of an elder god, I think you’d still probably be able to get Bad Vibes off of Andrias from how the show juxtaposes his friendly demeanor and the splendor of Newtopia with the palpable neglect of literally everywhere else under the direct control of this 1000-year-old-god-king. 

[cyanocittae]

(click for better image quality)

Still thinking about them

[carf-writes]

What happens in frog world

[anshiel]

Still thinking about how the sashannarcy are simultaneously the most tragic and funniest polycule

[pyroclastic727]

Absolutely love the vibes of the Amphibia tag. The majority of the time it's some funky little frog show. But then there's the fact that amphibia, as a word, is also a taxonomic class, so occasionally a scientific picture of an actual frog shows up.

[sheriff-lasso]

Loved the Anne/Sasha parallel shot.

This episode may have very well ruined my life.