You know what? Enough time has passed, I'm gonna say it.
'Unseen Academicals' was the last Discworld book published that I actually liked and personally consider canon. 'I Shall Wear Midnight' felt like a betrayal after having been following the Wee Free Men since their first appearance in 2003. 'Snuff' squicked me out in way too many ways, and also felt like it was retconning character backstories to make its point in certain cases. 'Raising Steam' felt so heavy-handed with its messaging that I didn't even finish it, as it lacked the finesse I associate with Discworld. I didn't even bother with 'The Shepard's Crown' after being disappointed three times in a row.
If you liked these books, fine, cool, good for you, you win, but I didn't. Sir Terry was an absolute genius, and I still think the majority of his works are fantastic. However, the Discoworld series began very roughly (as he was figuring out how it all worked and was getting his feet under him) and I feel it ended roughly as well (a thing I put down to the various things he was struggling with at the time, especially his mental health).
For me, however, 'Unseen Academicals' felt like, and still feels like, the perfect place to leave all the characters and the Disc itself, and I'm not going to change my mind on this one.
(I'm also not putting this in the actual Discworld tag, because this is literally just me venting, and no one needs to trip over a vent post while looking for things to enjoy in a tag they like.)
well i already mentioned today i abhor when people unfollow and don't hard block or soft block. it's just common courtesy.
honestly i do not have many pet peeves. like just treat me with respect and i'll do the same. i am generally pretty chill.
i do have was minor strange pet peeve. it is completely not a deal breaker. like i don't hate or judge people that do this. the english language is fucked and can be difficult for a variety of reasons. whether it be learning disabilities, it isn't your first language, etc. so i like genuinely mean this with no hate in my heart.
but when people use the word ‘bemused’ instead of amused. it makes my dictionary loving ass cry a little.
I don’t know how to feel about the leaks. Yeah, sure I think Bakugou was a rather obvious case but the way to do it, I gotta say, I’m not a fan. I mean, he is a prodigy, a genius and I don’t understand the point of him going through all that shit to get character development only to be killed and then having Edgeshot restore him? Why? Plot device or something? Like I said, he’s a natural talent but when we’re gonna see him truly in action?
Bakugou as a character is rather unique so I don’t want to see his potential go to waste.
Remember that these are just my opinions, no need to come at me bro.
Lotor seems to have a lot in common with Chloe Bourgeois from Miraculous Ladybug since they both seem to have great potential of getting redeemed, but the writers decided to screw them over and make them all the sudden villan for no reason even though both shows main protagonists have done far more questionable things than them, heck both shows even romantasize the protagonists creepy stalking behavior
Hi, anon. Thanks for the note! I’ve never watched Miraculous Ladybug, so I’m afraid I don’t know too much about a Lotor vs. Chloe comparison? I’m sorry, though, if that show triggered some unhappy memories about VLD!
In terms of protagonists being worse than the villains, I personally struggle with that statement for Voltron? VLD is complicated because the show starts by treating war/battle as a fantasy violence video game. Like, the Galrans are mostly robots or one-dimensional soldiers who are torturing, killing and conquering. So our protagonists are already light-years ahead of that incredibly low baseline. And it’s easy to cheer Team Voltron on when you know they’re just blowing up robots or a pure-evil villain. It’s that whole fantasy violence thing without accountability. Then, the show gets increasingly more complex in terms of the politics, and the costs of war (with Ulaz’s death, for example), and the humanization of the enemy. But in this environment, our protagonists are still a bunch of ill-prepared teenagers running with scissors. Like, the original paladins of Voltron were leaders and rulers with a history of navigating wars and alliances. These paladins? They grew some over the show, yes, but they still had to go from playing a video game and screwing up flight simulators (or living a royal life in peace-time), to handling actual death and collateral damage in an active combat theater. I doubt Galaxy Garrison had training in their curriculum for how 17-year-olds should handle that. And all of the other older authority figures around Team Voltron and Lotor just totally and utterly failed them.
So I think my frustration with Team Voltron has cooled a lot over the years. From an in-show perspective, they were surrounded by supposedly competent advisors and intelligence officers who should have been able to at least question certain decisions or behaviors. But they did nothing constructive to prepare the paladins for war besides training them to kill.
And in the case of s5-s6, all of these experts and allied civilizations gave Team Voltron the green light on an official alliance with an empire they had seen brutally torture/experiment, enslave, and colonize. Actual weeks had passed between s5-s6. And yet, we never saw Kolivan warning the team that this was a really bad compromise for the Voltron Coalition to make; we never saw the paladins having to handle upset questions from their vast allies, who no doubt had recent memories of trauma at the hands of Galran military officers. But the instant Lotor is revealed to have also been a quintessence vampire in some way, like every other Galran officer with a body count they’d allied with, that’s the uncrossable line for Krolia, Coran, Kolivan watching this all go down—? Like?
When Shiro linked the Voltron Coalition to Galran military intelligence, what the heck did they think all of these soldier reports included? Military commanders happily sipping cocktails with locals on a beach? So I don’t think it quite hit the paladins yet that they weren’t working with uwu morally unproblematic people with easily forgivable pasts or a clear record of trying to make up for that past. And Team Voltron had zero guidance for how to navigate pursuing justice/reparations while also not leading to another war or worse outcome. Ultimately, even all of these concerned authority figures forgot about the show’s most plot-important victims that they were fine with dissolving the alliance over.
(RIP Patrulius in the harvesting pod, did you ever get out??).
The incompetency of elder authority figures also feeds into my frustration about Lance’s character, and how it was once again Coran in s8 who pushed him into this weird 1950s dating construct where Allura isn’t an agent over her own body. Like, Lance is still pretty young here, mimicking all the toxic masculinity he’s picked up on, and Coran’s behavior is supposed to be…better. Like, even Lance himself was uncomfortable in that scene, and that was wild to watch.)
And speaking of the ongoing failures of authority in the story, I still can’t believe that Coran didn’t cut in on Lotor in season 5, even, to warn him that exposure to the rift was known to make people lose control over their darkest thoughts. I could plausibly believe Allura didn’t think to question this because she was doe-eyed over Lotor and desperate for anything that could secure peace. But it’s not like Coran, who is supposed to be a king’s advisor, didn’t see this happen with Zarkon and Honerva. He could have questioned Lotor’s plans, and that actually would have been fascinating. Because if Coran, being a king’s advisor, had employed that kind of logical foresight, we might have seen something unsettling in Lotor that could more clearly foreshadow a fatal flaw he wasn’t working on (you know, like that classic Icarus Syndrome). But this show just didn’t question itself or self-reflect, lol.
So I don’t think anything Team Voltron did was them necessarily intending to be cruel where they wanted trillions to die in the name of justice, but their ignorance and the blatant inaction/silence or questionable guidance from anyone with higher credentials or experience resulted in some very uneasy outcomes.
But those outcomes were what this show wanted to keep the drama rolling.
I can’t speak for Chloe’s arc and the reason for why she misses the mark, but Lotor’s fall resulted in another several episodes of big robot battles and extended drama to meet a predetermined 78-episode directive. And given that the production team complained about having no breaks at all through the development of this show, I doubt they had time to weigh the cost of every decision they made to keep drama going. (I mean, we saw several other haphazard, concerning things happen since the beginning of the show; the colony twist wasn’t an isolated incident of plot over-complication and questionable handling of topics a;sdjfasf.)
I do think it’s easy to stay bitter about things and to let that poison everything, including even other shows. And I don’t think that’s a mentally healthy place for me to be—even though, clearly, I do still have frustrations with the art of story construction, lol. So I guess... canon is someone else’s story, but I do have control over how I respond and how I might try to tackle hard topics in my own works. And I’ve got to work with that.
I hope for what it’s worth that you can still find things worth enjoying in your other show, and that you can explore the characters and the stories in ways that are meaningful and feel right to you. It might help as well to look for shows and media that explicitly do have redemption arcs for a main antagonist or villain, or that handle traumatized or abused characters well.
ok i Need to get this off my chest before I do anything serious with rakan but the whole ‘well rakan and xayah exist individually and have their own lives outside of each other’ thing is great and all but i am not going to sit here and pretend that they are not literally essential to each other’s development as individuals
