#serena warning

[sazandorable]

Serena, since it seems more of a challenge for you to find things you liked. xD;;;

:D yeah, that is exactly why i love this meme, the challenge of finding as-objectively-as-possible GOOD things about stuff i usually criticize and vice-versa (and separating “things i like/dislike” from “good points/bad points”) :D

… i still ended up with a much longer “-” section because i have to expLAIN WHY THE THINGS ARE BAD while i don’t much to say about the good things;;

+:

Her sassy relationship with her mom in the first few episodes, that snark (the hats argument!!), she was really funny and spunky and fun :D That tiny scene when she opens the fridge in her pink Syhorn Racing outfit with a bandage on her nose might still be amongst my favorite screencaps of the series. [i tried to go looking for it in the first page of my serena tag but couldn’t find it >< … that sure was a trip]

Many adorable scenes with Eureka, and quite often with more character to them (the funny impressions game!!!, Eureka generally being her sassy weird self and less scared/disgusted/shocked than Serena…) than just The Big Sis Protecting The Little Girl (though late-series it was often just that)

She. Canonically. Didn’t feel a desire/happiness to see/make people smile. Until the finale. She canonically didn’t really care about people (and likely Pokémon either) for the entirety of the series. I love that, this is no lie one of my favorite tropes/character traits, give me selfish, self-centered human beings who have issues interacting/caring about other people

-:

BUT F****** DO SOMETHING WITH IT, DON’T PRETEND LIKE SHE’S AN AMAZING CARING PERSON WHEN EVERY SINGLE ACTION SHE DOES THAT’S LAUDED AS WONDERFULLY EMPATHETIC IS DONE IN A TOTALLY SELF-CENTERED WAY, ESPECIALLY WHEN YOU’RE GONNA DROP THIS ACKOWLEDGEMENT AT THE END OF THE SERIES…

The “I don’t have a dream” issue is okay in principle but it was. so badly done. And no, you can’t even say “well it’s just a kids’ show, you can’t expect much subtility”, things like that HAVE been done in Pokémon before and much better :[ it took 40 eps to even SHOW UP, it didn’t hinder her, no one questioned it, she didn’t angst about it except occasionally to be moe, and she just suddenly picked something out of the blue without knowing anything about it but there wasn’t anything about that, either (like idk showing that she’s just a beginner who doesn’t know about the performing world!). Bel was done with more subtlety and realism in the games (she picks something she’s not actually passionate about or good at and eventually changes her mind and that was unexpected and interesting!) with a lot less screentime, Hikari’s self-esteem issues was done better in the anime (she LOST AND LOST AND LOST and it was HER FAULT), heck, even Iris’ APPARENT lack of goal was handled better before she ‘fessed up (very early questioned about it and hinted that she’s hiding something, and when we later got backstory, it retroactively made sense that she wasn’t comfortable sharing her personal dream with people she hadn’t befriended yet, and then at least 3 (4?) separate episodes spaced throughout the series about why she wants to be a Dragon Master and what it really means and she is already good at some things but not all!) – Pokémon can do soul-searching and angst and it can do it well. Serena’s ~searching for a goal in life~  arc… was not.

I know you liked the kiss but i’m sorry it was Bad x’D it’s not only that Satoshi wasn’t expecting it, but she KNEW he wasn’t expecting AND WOULDN’T WANT IT, she STEALS it deliberately, she KNOWS she HAS to surprise him to get it, it’s kzjeklfsjdfkdjf nooooo no no no no. + That and her departing line take away all of what little development she did go through by re-making it all about (her crush on) Satoshi, INCLUDING her ENTIRE goal, suddenly her wanting to be a good Performer IS TO BE INTERESTING TO SATOSHIwould have been okay-ish if it’d been framed as that feeling of wanting to be a better person more “worth” of the person you love, but JUST TO GET SOMEONE’S ATTENTION?? NOOOOOOO EWWWWWW, sobaerkjdlkjdkfjsdf i’m getting the skeeved out horrified chills againi’m sorry, i know you and a lot of people found it cute, but the context is so, so, so awful on sooo many levels

[sazandorable]

i’m screaming

i’d been thinking for A LONG TIME that Serena has been consistently portrayed as... actually lacking empathy, incapable of empathizing / understanding/spontaneously thinking about other people, self-centered even when she was supposed to be ~understanding~ (what she actually says and does and the way she does was always... just slightly off-the-mark)

of course i didn’t want to say it because lol i’d have gotten crucified, but it was oddly consistent, one of the few things that has been consistent about her from the beginning of the series (I don’t remember when I first noticed it but it predates her suddenly gaining observational skills by at least 5 eps for sure, and I’m pretty sure it was around earlier), and i was just about to give in and planning to make a small post about it if this episode showed it again

TFW IT WAS DELIBERATE AND ACTUALLY HER ENTIRE CHARACTER ARC (AND NOBODY NOTICED APPARENTLY)

TWF SERENA CANONICALLY DID NOT FEEL THE DESIRE TO SEE PEOPLE BE HAPPY UNTIL TODAY’S EPISODE

SHE LITERALLY SAYS SHE COULD NOT FEEL THIS UNTIL TODAY, SHE DIDN’T UNDERSTAND THIS UNTIL TODAY

(... and she still did the thing again at least twice after stating this realization.)

[multiscales]

The Acts HAD to cross over into the main anime though otherwise how was the TF arc meant to progress and the writers probably planned out Alan being the one to defeat Satoshi at the league BEFORE even the first Act was written

I’m not sure if Alan was meant to be this league’s dream killer from the first day we saw him, if he was I do think the badge collecting would have been done way early on and they would have had the two actually have some type of non-battle related dynamic beforehand. It really did seem like something very last minute to be honest, because all the rivals and opposition present in XY were all feeble and unconvincing because every time Satoshi fought then they just had to all lose to him. I blame it mostly on the idiotic trend of the writers wanting Satoshi to win everything in XY to be honest. Serena more or less had a similar issue, only ever losing any TriPokalon through flukes and not because she got outdone.

I mainly wish the Acts didn’t cross into the anime and the Flare plot stayed contained to he Acts because it really makes fans act too fucking obnoxious, especially many who didn’t give a shit about Alan on his own merits and cried for his inclusion in the league who are switching tracks because he beat Satoshi. Have a stadium full of seats. I still can’t believe many fans fell for the whole “he will win the league” horse shit, AGAIN. But I post most of the blame on shippers and people who just started watching with XY hyping up this league battle like he was for sure walking away with the win along with the XY tendency™ to make “troll hype” as evidenced before mostly with Serena’s shipping titles and episodes. 

Any seasoned fan worth their salt should know what this business is about, hell, if I recall the Hoenn League’s titling had a similar phrase that was used in Alan’s victory episode along with all the development given to the TSME characters in the episode prior which should have been a calling card for a loss to any fan. At this point I’m honestly sick of putting up with salty shippers and PokeAni stans who are still crying oceans over a fictional 10-year-old character and, they’re free to do so, but don’t make TSME and its character’s collateral damage in the tags we all enjoyed perfectly fine up until this point in having our fun in and discussing the things we liked and loved about these characters who they view as simple instruments for Satoshi’s world. 

edit: I still do laugh a bit over how ironic it is many wanted Alan in the league but he ended up winning the whole thing. PokeAni stans are a fucking riot. You can’t have your cake and eat it too. 

[sazandorable]

At least Serena lost because someone was stronger, while giving her best.... soemthing that should have happened way earlier, not like, in her very final confrontation lmao

basically :’) but at least it happened I guess. That is a good thing, showing that sometimes even when you don’t make mistakes, there’s someone who’s just better! *insert that one kirk gif* ... but there also should have been times she made fricking mistakes and it was her own fault and she just had to work harder. the wrist thing was framed as an accident as far as i’ve seen.

(and no, lol, fokko and eevee tripping were not recognized as being her fault, she “apologized” but there was no explicit blaming her for, for example, not paying attention to her Pokémon. i’d have been so friggin interested in a character who has to acknowledge that she has been treating her Pokémon badly!!

oh wait haven’t we had that before?)

at least now I can worry a little less that they will make Satoshi win that league...

(there’s still a chance tho since satoshi is ~the best~ and better than serena yadda yadda)

[sazandorable]

Erm so Dawn can dress up in cute outfits and perform and she's a great character, but Serena deos the same thing and she's just a "barbie doll"?? I know Dawn got good development and is a solid character either way but, even if you dislike it, you can't exactly say Serena isnt really given the same treatment rather then nothing at all to some degree? Dont answer this if you dont want to, I just wanted to say this

1) If you want to say this, why not say it off anon? Why do you feel the need to come into a stranger’s askbox anonymously? Why do so many people who like XY/Serena (and dislike BW!) feel the need to stay anon?

2) I am under no obligation to answer to someone self-righteously sending passive-aggressive (anonymous) messages into my inbox about a children’s anime.

3) I’m gonna answer it anyway because I just want to say this also (I have said it a lot already though): but the difference is development and character. Yes I can say they do NOT get the same treatment. Basically, Hikari says you can be a girly girl and be a full person and a solid character, Serena is saying being girly (and chasing after a boy) is all a girl needs to be, and that’s the difference and that’s my problem.

Tl;dr: Hikari was built as a protagonist who happens to have girly interests, Serena is the eye candy with a crush on the protagonist. As someone who is a girl and who likes girls, I think I can tell better than heterosexual cis males that Hikari is for girls to look up to, Serena is for the male gaze.

Long and i’m-horrified-by-the-sexism-in-XY-in-general version:

Hikari has personality beyond being a girl, and it’s perfectly fine to be a feminine girl and to like cute and girly things and to enjoy attention. But it’s played as amusing sometimes, like when she panics about her hair being messed up, all the while not faulting her for paying attention to her appearance either. She’s funny, she’s enthusiastic, she has spunk, she fails sometimes, she has problems, she has relationships and interactions with other characters, and she bond and works a lot with her Pokémon. She’s wanted to do Contests since a long time, and it’s hard and she gets an entire arc about how she’s failing at it because she has to work harder with her Pokémon.

Serena also likes girly and cute things, but she has no other personality traits. She is “a pretty girl who likes girly things and is in love with the cool protag” and that’s all, and this is repeatedly presented as ideal and admirable. She keeps saying or bringing people to say that girls should be cute and neat and smile all the time, which just… no. We can if we want to and that’s fine, but we don’t have to. She can’t even interact with other characters — not even with her Pokémon — without it being about either 1) how girly and pretty she is or 2) Satoshi (and how she has a crush on him). She doesn’t interact with Citron, she didn’t interact with Corni, her interactions with all the other girls are about how cute she is and how good she is at… stereotypically-girly things like baking, Pokévision, Tripokalon. She’s a walking stereotype of sexist tropes and it hurts, it hurts, it hurts, because she started out great and promising and interesting, and everything I liked about her in the first few episodes melted away the second she met Satoshi. She had no drive either for a disturbingly long time and it wasn’t treated in any way until she randomly decided to do yet another girly thing for pretty girls. In the meantime, she was literally just eye candy. And since then, she’s done almost nothing for her “dream”, failed once but it ~wasn’t her fault~ except it was but she learned nothing from it, and now she’s won by a landslide without any hard work with her Pokémon.

(Also I just plain dislike everything about Tripokalon because they’re horrifyingly sexist, while Contests were fabulous but about another sort of beauty than the stereotypical one, and gender-neutral.

I hate that Tripokalon is girls-only and I hate that Musashi is presented as ridiculous in Tripokalon, when she and Harley were good Contest performers.)

It’s true there are moments when some shots of Hikari can feel fanservicey (I won’t deny her skirt is VERY short), but it’s nowhere near how objectified and sexualized Serena constantly is by angles, shots, expressions and movements. Hikari managed to wear a cheerleader outfit and I found it cute and non-objectifying or sexualized, while every single episode of XY that I have watched has shots of Serena that make me feel horrified and uncomfortable (and for the ones I haven’t watched, I’ll see something to the same effect in random screencaps without fail).

One of my first comments on Serena, even back when I liked her, was on her legs, because she’s introduced to the group with a focus on her fucking legs and her short fluttering skirt, with her face off-screen.

I would (have) love(d) nothing more than Serena getting development and being a solid, strong character, who happens to be a girly girl — that’s good representation! I was pretty happy and excited when she was introduced! But by now, there’s basically nothing they can do to make up for how badly she’s debuted and how badly they’ve been writing her. If she fails, it’ll be moe, if she’s successful, it’ll be Mary Sue.

(tbh basically everyone is badly written in XY except Eureka, Corni, and the TSME characters. You guys tend to focus on those of us who have a problem with Serena but gloss over what I think is most telling about XY: most of us have loved Satoshi for the entire series up till now, yet hate him in XY. There’s a problem with how XY is being written as a whole and Serena is just the most obvious and sexist bit of it.)

[noodlerama]

I think Serena’s first 40 episodes wouldve been easier to swallow if she had like an Iris or Misty level of assertiveness in the filler episodes. Where even though it didnt have anything to do with she was still actively getting involved in the episode events, offered more then just very light commentary at the events going on, standing off to the side. Like in the BW episode with Cottonee you have Iris getting just as into Cotonnee’s love quest as Ash and CIlan and she was an active participant rather then off watching to the side, letting Ash or whoever do all the work.. A lot of Serena’s presence in those first 40 episodes could’ve been phased out and nothing about the episode would be lost, I really think that was her worst offense to me, she was just a rather dull character, and whether that was “intentional” or not I still they dropped the ball either way.

[dentos-wife]

Now I don't know if they mean to or not but currently Serena has excelled in baking, Pokevision, and now racing. Baking and Pokevision I can see as a set, it'll go into her dream of being Kalos Queen after all. Even though it was a little hard to believe that whole episode being told Pokepuffs are more for Pokemon and not people, and her video focusing more on her than Pokemon but OKAY we'll ignore that, it'll go into her performance skills, little hard to swallow but it makes sense right?

But racing? RACING?! The thing she left her mum to get away from? She's good at that too? Like protege level good? That blows my mind. She didn't even want to try out Gogoat racing and yet she can still win? I just...beliveablity here. It would have made more sense for her to lose because she shouldn't be good at racing and her mum understands anyway and lets her go on with her dream. 

I'm just praying this is setting her up for a loss in the performances because SHE HAS TO LOSE SOMETHING

And so does Satoshi, which is my main issue with this whole series, no one ever faces true conflict it just comes off as so fake to me.

I just I'm super excited to see how her goal plays out and her personality is adorable but the writing is really killing enjoyment here

[dentos-wife]

In response to dracoflarex's Serena post I mainly agree but the only issue I have is she wasn't well written at all. Like look at Serena in XY 1 and 2 and compare her to how flat she was when she first joined the cast, it's almost like we had a different character. I'm also aware that this is Pokemon and the writing style is...less than spectacular. But if she was so indecisive then it should have been her main trait and not her crush. She should have been trying more things, she should have felt the full effect of her indecisiveness early on and not a year later, she should have been called out on it like Haruka was. And she probably shouldn't have excelled in everything she tried. To this day the Pokepuff episode bothers me due to her somehow beating the more experienced cook even though her recipes were more for humans than Pokemon. Her Pokevision was more about her than her Pokemon, which I now understand totally fits the idol thing as it looks like idols are more focused on them with the Pokemon as props sort of what she has been doing this whole time. Plus her being so good at it probably means she was born to be a performer

Now that I think about it the issue I have with Serena is the same I had with Hikari, yes they set up an arc but they didn't do the best job on it. Hikari's "depression arc" is another one I feel they could of handled better. 

So while I feel they dropped the ball on her in the beginning I think it's because they had no idea what she was going to do just that something was going to come up in the near future. And if they DID know this whole time then the only question I have for the writers is why?

Why didn't you give her more focus knowing what was coming up? Was was her only trait the longest time just her crush on Satoshi? Why didn't you do more with her? Why didn't she fail at anything?  

And in regard to the payoff, I think it would have been so much sweeter if she DID have some struggles to overcome while finding her goal not just being background fodder until they finally decided oh yeah we need to do something with her don't we? It just really rubs me the wrong way

ANYWAY the point of this post is I'm perplexed why they waited a whole year to get her going when in writing hooking the watchers and readers is important. Or else you lose the interest of the people. T

Again I like Serena but man do I hate her writing, it's all over the place. I think her fans should have done her writing because they handle her better than the XY writers currently have been xD