Thoughts on the whole FOWL arc, particularly Bradford’s arc and his beef with Scrooge? I felt it wasn’t handled great at all, and I think I sympathized a bit more with Bradford than the writers had intended? I dunno, I just wanted Scrooge to be a bit in the wrong for ONCE and suffer real consequences. Never really bought or understood the show’s idea of family or adventure either, especially the VERY extended family they tried to make in Season 3.
i feel like pcs would have a good answer to this actually but Im personally really fuzzy on the whole bradford thing because ive only seen most of season 3 once and didnt enjoy a lot of it so Im....hm. bradford hates....the nebulous idea of adventure because its inconvenient and expensive? and also personally traumatic? am i understanding that correctly?
and for a while i remember thinking....is bradford going to be a vehicle for exploring why scrooge’s reckless, selfish behavior is terrible for everyone else in the world, why hoarding wealth is wrong, why looting other civilizations is wrong, is there going to be a big heel turn, and we’ll have to reconcile with how watching the show from his point of view has blinded us to the harm he’s causing, and why people like musk and bezos are actual real life villains, and is bradford actually going to be a guy you root for, like poison ivy, wouldnt that be SICK??? wouldnt that be smart and brave and interesting???
and then it not only did none of that, but it leaned extra hard into the nepotism angle, without a hint of irony, and im still totally baffled by it
the bradford thing ended up just being...petty and stupid. like if someone was tasked with writing poison ivy and was like “okay but we cant let her be too relatable, she’s right you know, and people know it, so instead of being an eco terrorist trying to reclaim mother earth from capitalist pigs at any cost, she’s just really mad cus someone overwatered her succulents when she went on vacation as a kid.” You HAD something, it was right there, and you had to dial it back because mickey’s signing your paychecks.
i so, so badly wanted scrooge to be WRONG. he IS wrong. He’s ALWAYS been wrong and thats very often the POINT of his character and I really expected that that would be something we could talk about at least a little in 2017-2021 but apparently not. like i HAVE to believe the crew knows, i follow a lot of them on twitter and I see how they talk about current events so I HAD hoped.
the family thing really got on my nerves after a while because it became a buzzword for, like, “we havent done a good job of selling you this idea but if we say it often enough then you have to accept it as true.” Especially in regards to webby. i think i brought it up sometime around when moonlander aired, because she kept dropping “family” in a way that didnt feel convincing to me and was really obvious every time it happened. and i had a whole long list of things that made it feel forced, starting with “scrooge literally fucking yells that she’s not family and this doesnt concern her and NEVER apologizes” and includes “wow webby says ‘my family’ about the ducks WAY MORE than anyone else says it about her” and “spending a whole season focused on della reconnecting with her biological family SPECIFICALLY, which webby is understandably and justifiably not a part of, leaving her out by necessity” and “lots of episodes about clan mcduck specifically and the power and importance of that bloodline, which is kind of icky actually, but we’ll just paint it as grand and noble and never mention non-mcducks like Quackmore or Elvira because Scrooge is literally the only one who matters.”
and its hard to really sell Webby as part of the unit when you’re so obsessed with the bloodlines and heritage of One Man so I guess in that regard it makes sense why they did what they did. if you’re not gonna devote the time to explaining why she is good and why she matters INDEPENDANTLY of how much scrooge lore she has memorized then i guess yeah just slap some of his genes in her and make it fact because while I wanted to believe that she was part of the family, i dont feel like they ever did the hard work of convincing me she was. they just kept saying FAMILY FAMILY FAMILY until i went “god yeah shut up i get it”
like he NEVER FUCKING APOLOGIZED, guys. and she just forgives him before they ever see each other again. How fucking hard would it have been to have them sit down like “i didnt mean it, i was wrong, and if i didnt see you as my family then thats my own fault because you’ve been here under my roof your whole life and i had my head too far up my own cloaca to see what i was missing. that changes now, you’re one of us”
but that would mean admitting he was wrong. and scrooge is never wrong.
