I honestly wish for s3 that the episodes were longer than 11 minutes, so we could get some good development.
Anyway. I kinda like how they handled Macaque's START at redemption (whether he continues on it remains to be seen). I don't consider it full redemption because of the crap he pulled (regardless of circumstances), but it's a start. And Wukong apologizing to MK was great, not as emotional as I thought it'd be, but I was content. And, in regards to MK, the kid appears very understanding and forgiving, and I personally think a lot smarter emotionally than people give him credit for. (Also the fact he put Macaque in time out made me laugh so hard)
I will say it does feel like something in Macaque did change, maybe after getting his ass kicked by possessed Wukong, he realized "well shit, if I wanna live guess revenge isn't gonna help me, I'm just gonna die again". I need more backstory into what happened between them because I feel like A LOT would be explained (not excused, obviously) knowing that info. I want to analyze this monkey's psyche.
Also apologies for this being all over the place 😅 I tend to ramble
Hey no worries @ladyzerodark ! I get where you're coming from & definitely agree that the season 3 special would work best as the START to Macaque's redemption arc rather than its totality. Kind of like I agree that Sun Wukong apologizing to Xiaotian works well as a BEGINNING to an arc of the Monkey King working hard to be the best shifu he can be rather than his apology being a one-and-done kind of deal. Like it's more and more clear that Xiaotian is quite forgiving & wants to give people the chance to change for the best rather than freezing them out of his life or always going straight for the ultra-violence (even though he is very clearly willing to use said ultra-violence to end a bad situation if needed), but tbh in that regard I often feel like the most satisfying stories about redemption/improvement are those that give more weight to the choices & behaviors of the person working to become better rather than treating it as an afterthought to acts of forgiveness. Changing your behavior is hard and arduous process--especially if there's trauma underlying it--but it's still possible & can give you and the people you love a level of peace of peace that didn't seem possible. And seeing the road to get there, making choice after choice to be better even when it's really difficult, can make for really powerful tales.
But that's precisely where I feel a lot of "redemption" stories fall completely flat or become downright insulting and damaging. Like so many seem to be set up in such a way where character A is just dishing out one act of forgiveness/second chance after another even though character B refuses each and every one of them, getting worse and worse & hurting more and more people to the point where you're left like "wow! You could have literally saved a lot of lives if you just murked this a-hole instead of giving them YET ANOTHER chance to be slightly less horrible than they currently are!" And I'm not saying that that kind of story is inherently bad; I think you could do a lot of interesting stuff in terms of exploring how love for one person can blind you to their actions, explore what might happen when explanations for bad behavior becomes excuses for said behavior, and explore the positives and detriments of the concepts of forgiveness and redemption as a whole. What we often get, however, is stories where even after a character is in the deep pit of their moral event horizon and has consistently taken every single opportunity they could to hurt/kill/maim for their own goals, suddenly all of a sudden in the 25th hour they'll be like "okay no longer evil now I want to be loved" & we're just supposed to forget everything they've done. Like what.
BUT ANYWAY, coming back from my own rant about this story type & with apologies for my own act of being all over the place, I feel like even though it was kind of jarring to see how quick Xiaotian was to leave a door open for Macaque given everything this shadow basturd has put him & his loved ones through it definitely was a good move in my book that Macaque isn't a part of team Monkie & that he still clearly has a lot of hostility with SWK. They were allies in an extreme situation, but they still have a LOT of stuff to work out before they could be considered friends, if ever. It will be interesting to see where Monkie Kid will go from here in terms of what they might do with SWK and Macaque's development, but yeah fingers crossed that as you said they treat the s3 special more as the BEGINNING to acts of conscious self-improvement rather than the end point for these two monkeys.
That said, I have to have a laff both at your completely possible idea that Macaque's going to lighten up his attempts at bloody revenge because he's starting to like Xiaotian as a person but mainly because he's now fully aware of just how much SWK has been holding back, and as per usual at the way all of their backstory is treated as such a mystery even though you can turn to JTTW right now & read all about the Six-Eared Macaque's attempt to murder-replace the Monkey King asdfewadf. Yes yes I'm sure they'll add a lot more complexity to the situation in Monkie Kid but honestly it's been a source of constant amusement for me to see people going to JTTW to get a sense of other Monkie Kid characters' backgrounds & motivations but when it comes to Mr. Macaca the popular fandom reaction seems to be "suddenly I could not read <3". IDK why this is. Maybe because it makes Macaque seem a lot less forgivable & SWK's disdain a lot more understandable if the shadow monkey's backstory is still the og classic of "beat up the Tang monk & held SWK's monkey family captive & tried to murder-replace the Monkey King & maybe also cannibalized at least one monkey." Maybe it's because shipping him with SWK is made much more creepy given that basically his entire appearance in JTTW was running around in a SWK fursuit and insisting he was the one and only Monkey King lmao. But at least for me it's starting to get kind of baffling to see the extent to which people just WILL NOT even acknowledge that Macaque's role in JTTW was as SWK's evil twin, or all the reasons that SWK would be enraged at Macaque as a result. We'll see I guess, but personally I'm hoping that they keep in the og background because I think it would make for a really interesting and unique struggle between SWK & Macaque if Macaque's story was "my hatred & admiration of you reached the point where I decided to be you except better & I've now spent centuries living with the fallout of my entire identity revolving around someone I've grown to loathe but I have no idea how to live otherwise," while SWK, after rotting in self-imposed exile for 500 years, seems to have made some hesitant steps to live and grow beyond his past by taking on Xiaotian as his tudi only for that to get almost immediately effed up by both his own errors & a whole host of yaoguai turning against Xiaotian for being SWK 2.0, so that now the Monkey King is left in a state of "why the @#$#!* would you want to be me?!" and/or perhaps worst of all for both of them "yeah man go for it you couldn't possibly be worse at being me than I was."
But yeah in conclusion keeping in at least elements of the og classic could make the background of these two monkeys quite the interesting conundrum far beyond ye olde trope of "you were my friend but then you weren't so I made that everyone's problem until they forgave me for my violent bullshite at the last possible second."
