(Feel free to disagree and correct my mistakes on the information in my take, this is solely from my understanding of the story of the series!)
Harumi doesn't deserve any form of redemption, and that's okay. In fact, her "redemption" in crystallized had ruined the character she once had and the reason why she's such a good villain in the first place.
Her motives were good reasons why she should be mad at the ninja. She didn't know who actually released the great devourer and in her mind, had to have someone to blame—Lloyd. So, as she stayed in the palace, she planned her revenge on the people who "took away her parents". She began fixating on his life, planning every step just to make sure everything goes her way with the sole purpose of making the wrong person suffer. In the end, she succeeded. She may have lost her life but her plan worked. She resurrected his father, and made the boy who she thought ruined her life to suffer, and caused damages to his mental health and views about what romantic love was.
One of the popular take on crystallized was Harumi's redemption was terrible and wasn't really redemption. She didn't apologize and only sided with Lloyd to go against the overlord was because the truth came out way too late and had a contribution to the wrong person's trauma. There were scenes in crystalized that had Garmadon say that he sees Harumi as a daughter yet made her have intimate(?) scenes with Lloyd, which I find weird. Her doing one good thing, probably even the bare minimum, does not erase the damages she had caused to everyone affected.
Harumi's ending was perfect, and was a character that was not needed to be brought back or being given a (barely) redemption arc.
I love her, I thought she would be different but no. Once again, another excellent female character being reduced to nothingburger their whole character revolves around a man or a love interest added to my list. (This is genuinely tiring in every piece of media I've ever consumed.)
I know that I'm not at all active with the Hetalia fandom in this blog or even in the past few months, but I was scrolling through Pinterest to add shit to my Hetalia board and I see the ol' ship war discourse of USUK vs. FrUK in the comment section of a Nekotalia pin dating about a year to a few months ago.
I'm not sure if it's still a heated thing. I don't want to know if it's still a thing. The fact that I at least know about this is that those comments were dated to maybe 2019.
It's been like 11 years or something and I hope and pray that this isn't actually a thing anymore in 2020 and everyone just leave other people alone to ship their ships instead of bashing each other, but alas. We're talking about fandoms here. If not in your immediate area, somewhere out there, someone is having this discourse.
Whether you like Misako/Koko or not, you can't exactly deny that they're on the difference side of the same coin with little differences, but I'm only going to mentioning one thing that the fandom always mention—Lloyd's relationship with them.
With Misako, as a child, left him at a boarding school to try and delay his fight with his father as he grew older. Ultimately making her absent from his childhood and only came back when her plan failed and helped them during the final battle.
Koko on the other hand, stayed with Lloyd throughout his whole life. She was present, but barely considering she's a single mother working non stop to take care of her son. (There was a page of this from the ninjago movie book but I couldn't find it by the time I'm writing this.)
That reason alone is why Koko is most preferred by the fandom and most of the time replacing Misako in any Garmadon family content. But no one ever considers the core difference in their circumstances.
Misako knew about the burden her son was about to carry with the prophecy of the green ninja defeating the dark lord. Who, in the end, was his own father. So she worked hard researching ways to prevent it or delaying it, whether it'll be a good reason or not.
With Koko, there was no prophecy that she could mentally prepare for. She didn't go through the same thing Misako did because she was unaware of what will happen to her son in the future, ultimately making her stay with him and oblivious to her son being the green ninja.
It’s crazy to think that we used to live in a time before all of this insanity and world-ending news. Quite personally, I feel unsafe even expressing my opinions online in an account that has not been personally identified by my personal information all because I’ve used similar devices from accounts that do. It’s ridiculous.
I don’t see much of my own circle talking about it aside from the more politically-fired. Maybe it hasn’t reached every person yet? I was certainly surprised when I heard news about it since I’ve focused most of my energy on finishing school rather than the news. Or maybe they just don’t feel like they could express anything about it? I certainly understand that feeling.
The times are uncertain and it’s ridiculous that a lot of governments are overexerting their powers to control their citizens. Tracking down people and finding ways to arrest them. I’m not even talking about what’s going on in America, yet the similarities are extremely striking.
Even if I know it’s a small possibility, I’ve posted some pretty vocal stuff before in an account that does have identifying information so I fear the worst. If they could arrest a man calling someone crazy, they might arrest people for statements before the law was passed which is highly illegal. Then again, with a country that prioritizes a vague law that they could wave around to arrest people who post memes about things that the government doesn’t like over conducting mass testing of an on-going pandemic (at the end of the ECQ, they’ve barely scratched 1% of Manila), is there anything that’s truly sacred?
I just realized how truly upset I am that my high school didn't gave us the ability to make a yearbook quote. Like it's been more than a year now, but I've honestly waited to make some shitpost yearbook quote since like 9th grade.
Basic summary: Because I’m disabled, the PE department of my college prevents me from earning dean’s list. I feel like it’s petty that I’m feeling this way, but I’m still mad even if I don’t want to be mad about it.
Fucked up shit I just realized is that I could never qualify for dean’s list in my college until my junior year since I’m disabled. PE is a required subject to keep up to 86+, but since I can’t actively participate with the doctor’s fears of me being permanently crippled, my teacher could never grade my work anywhere above 85. There’s no restriction as far as I know. No rule in the handbook about those provisions. I think it’s a personal rule or something, or a departmental rule or whatever.
More fucked up that I only got an 85 this semester after I forced myself to participate in some activities which led to me being in agonizing pain for the rest of the week after every class. The moment I stopped because I couldn’t handle it anymore, I was relegated back as teacher’s assistant and was held responsible for things without any credit, just like the first semester of college.
Then the quarantine happened and instead of making good on her promise of sending me my specialized parallel requirements and finals to prevent injury from the school mandated exercise finals, she just urged me to just do the same thing as everyone else and “find something suitable for my condition” even when I told her that I was in no condition to do the assignment. That was after like three messages that she ignored in three different platforms that she could never had ignored. She told me that I could just do “arm” exercises for Retro Fitness.
How the fuck can I trust her to give me a good grade with just that? Maybe she was going to treat me equally, but after an entire semester the previous year of being treated like a lazy as fuck assistant that didn’t get paid, I wasn’t trusting her and just did a simple Retro Fitness routine that still almost broke my leg. I wouldn’t trust her at all to give me a decent grade, especially since she didn’t send over the parallel requirements that I had been exempted from doing since I was disabled all because she said it broke the school policy of not sending in homework after the 23rd of April, which is bull since I’ve been waiting on her email of my requirements since the first week of quarantine.
It sounds petty. It sounds really petty. I know it’s petty. I’ve been trying to get over this since the first semester. I never got a grade higher than 83 for PE that semester while my classmates scored well above their 90s. I get it. Paperwork parallels is not the same as people performing in front. I get it. I’ve been trying to get over this, but it’s so fucking hard to accept that I could never achieve honors all because I’m physically unable to dance at all.
I’ve done all the shit that she’s asked me to do. I’ve stayed in all the activities that she’s required me to stay in. Yet none of those counted.
I remember at finals during the first semester, my class had a giant dance presentation that I couldn’t participate in. She told me that I should attend EVERY PRACTICE to check all of my classmates’ attendances. All the practices, even free days, and not leave until the end of it to count for my own attendance. I was to check my classmates if they were tardy, absent, skipping - then I’ll give her the attendance so she could adjust their grades based on that. I made sure that I had a paper I could check. I attended every practice. I wasted money going to school and going home just to complete this since I thought it would count for something in my grade.
The day of the finals presentation? I was tasked to handle the music for ALL TEN CLASSES’ PERFORMANCES for 3-4 HOURS STRAIGHT. I wasn’t allowed to leave the building and wasted all my time in the gym. I didn’t had anything else to do but sit myself down and made sure that the music was playing. That’d be fine if I didn’t knew that after a performance is done, the class can go home. My class was one of the first performers. I was left by almost everyone there. It’d be fine by me if it was a regular school day, but it wasn’t. I was literally required to attend a day that should’ve been a day I don’t get to go to school - for what? To be an assistant with no pay? I didn’t even get an extra grade from whatever I was required to do from that.
She didn’t even took my own attendance work, and just told the class leader to use me as REFERENCE. She could’ve just asked the leader to do all that shit in the first place without having me involved in any of it and just have me do the parallel work that she hasn’t even sent over.
That parallel work was also the worst. She didn’t give it to me on the day the parallel activity took place. She waited until all my classmates’ activities for the semester were done before giving me what I needed to do. What’s worse is that there was a problem with the email, and she wouldn’t reply to mine so I had to again, travel all the way to school just to talk to her in her faculty room twice just for me to get a fucking picture of her computer monitor. It was a two-page document that she could have just showed me after class or something but instead, wasted a whole week because she wasn’t communicating. She required me to submit the printed work the next day, when she could have just told me to submit through email. The next day, though, the school closed down and weren’t allowing students enter. Wasted another day.
This is all with the fact that she’s implied that I was lazy multiple times when we were talking. The first time I gave her my medical certificate, she jokingly questioned why did it say “requested” on the certificate before I clarified that my doctor actually didn’t wanted to have me do PE at all and I just requested to be allowed simple activities with my discretion. She didn’t even apologize for the confusion, just went on her way. She had pressed on with me on attending all the final practices that I wasn’t even going to participate in, using a tone that implied that she didn’t expected me to attend.
I think that she’s really trying, but thinking back at the bigger picture, it’s hard for me to say that she is. With how she acted and handled my situation, it made me feel like that my disability was my fault, when it was the same PE department during my high school that broke my knee in the first place. To top it all of, I’ll still be required to do another two semesters of PE after this, as if two extra years of PE was too little for them.
With what’s happened to me, what is the school trying to tell me? That my disability means that I could never succeed? I worked hard to earn my high 90s on all my other subjects, and I worked as much with the parallel work that they gave me, but I’ll never get anywhere. It’s petty. Fuck. I’ve been trying to stop this thinking and just let it go because it’s petty, but I don’t know why I can’t. I don’t want to circulate my life on achievements, but when achievement is stripped away from me all because I’m disabled? Why can’t I just let it go? I feel like complaining to the school would make me feel worse. It’ll just make me look petty. I look abled enough to look petty if I complain about this.
I’d accept if I got low grades based on fair assessment. If I scored shit at Math, well then yeah, I guess. This, I don’t know if I feel like it is a fair assessment, but I don’t know if I can complain.
My hs classmates: *avoids people with mental health problems because they're not close friends enough for them to help*
My hs classmates: *had audibly made fun of my sexuality and insecurities when i admitted that i wasn't able to do certain things bc of mental health problems*
My hs classmates: *had blamed me for problems that they had caused and even reported me to our teacher*
My hs classmates: *has depicted problematic scenes and images in performances that had legitimately triggered my panic attack all for a high grade even if they knew i had a condition after seeing me publically go through an attack*
My hs classmates: She's sooo to herself. Why is she like that? I guess she's just a loner :/
My college classmates at the first day of school: Yeeeeah, I've been depressed before, but I'm mostly gucci now bc of therapy and medication. Total lifesavers! Tell ya' what, if you have a problem, I'll be here for y'all! *fingerguns*
