Disney still doesn't understand what made The Owl House special (which the Hexed trailer clearly shows)
(Note: this is gonna be a long unfiltered rant about my thoughts on the hexed trailer and why I think this movie is gonna end up being a much weaker ripoff of the owl house)
I wanna talk about Hexed now that the new trailer just came out and why I'm so mad and disappointed about it. And I feel like, at this point, it's impossible to talk about this movie and its already obvious flaws without mentioning the owl house as a comparison, since disney doesn't even try to pretend that the movie isn't a ripoff of it anymore.
Aside from the uninspired character designs of the movie and the fact that they're all essentially Elsa with different hair, or the art style itself which too is as bland as it gets, things that people have complained enough about already, the premise of the movie and the way it's presented somehow managed to be just as if not more uninteresting. In fact it may be my biggest complaint about the movie so far and it is honestly insulting that disney thinks this is even remotely comparable to toh in any way.
The premise of this movie is that the protagonist, a teenage girl who feels like an outcast, suddenly discovers she has magical powers as well as some magical destiny that she's expected to follow, which means her main reason she ends up in a world of witches is because she feels compelled to explore this magical potential that makes her special.
And I simply cannot stress enough just how laughably overused and generic this trope is at this point and I cannot believe they had the audacity to use it for an owl house ripoff. I guess disney executives still don't get what made people love the owl house, which is typical of them.
The main reason the owl house's premise is undeniably more interesting than whatever hexed has going on is because Luz didn't have any special powers that made her want to go to the demon realm, in fact she was even told from the start that humans couldn't do magic so she didn't know she had any magical potential until she discovered it herself way after she'd already decided she would stay there. And even then, it was never about her being special in any way in particular.
Because the whole point of the owl house wasn't for the main character to be some kind of chosen one or even special in any way, but that she was seen as a weirdo and that she'd been ostracized her whole life up to that point in her world because of that, to the point where her eagerness to escape that and find people who understand her caused her to want to ignore her mom's wishes and throw out common sense to run away to another world.
And the world she ran off to didn't even favor her in any obvious way, as it was presented as dark and ominous instead of the whimsical fairyland she was picturing in her fantasies. And what's more, she chose to trust two complete strangers who aren't even human so much that she chose to stay with them and all it took for her was one bonding experience and a vague feeling of connection with them.
That's how desperate she was to escape her reality. Not because it was the obvious thing to do, not because someone told her to or because she had some magical destiny or potential promised to her, but because she consciously chose to, despite the obvious risk. And, while her hopeful naivete and the fact that she was a young teenager at the time definitely played a role in her reckless decision, I still believe she had a lot more agency in it that people give her credit for.
She could've gone back and thought about it more or at least be more conflicted about the prospect of staying in a monster world with total strangers for an indefinite amount of time, but she didn't and that's part of what makes her so interesting as a character. Because, while she did end up traveling to another dimension through a portal by accident, she could leave at any point afterwards and was even encouraged to do so, but actively chose not to. In her case, staying there wasn't the reasonable decision, but the decision she made regardless of reason and out of purely selfish desire and need for an escape.
And, of course, we have her whole arc of realizing that she doesn't have some magical destiny and that finding this world was just a random coincidence, something that Eda also emphasizes and helps her realize and at a very early point of the show. The entire point of the show is that you don't need to be special in any way to live out some magical fantasy, that you can choose to explore a word of hidden magic anyway and learn to appreciate its beauty, despite how gloomy it may seem at first.
And that brings me to my next point in this long comparison, which is the difference between the fantasy worlds of the movie and the show respectively. On one hand, we've got the magical dimension of hexed, which seems to be more or less your typical fantasy world, beautiful and whimsical, filled with witches, mythical creatures, magic and wonder. And that's nice and all, I'd even say it looks pretty. But, once again, I can guarantee that the world of this multimillion dollar budget film still somehow managed to pale in comparison to the owl house's demon realm.
The demon realm is far from your average fantasy world. It isn't sunshine and rainbows or fairies and dragons. The land of the boiling isles is literally a titan's rotting corpse, the water of the sea and the rain there are constantly boiling, the creatures there are hostile and dangerous and the whole place just looks monstrous and gnarly, yet beautiful in its own peculiar way.
And it doesn't just exist in vacuum either. It has extensive lore and history behind it that slowly unfolds and reveals itself throughout the show, with very compelling worldbuilding that also connects it to the human realm and, consequently, our own world's real history. The demon realm isn't just a land where magic exists, it is a whole ecosystem of magic, one that, despite being formed by death, feels profoundly alive. And I just feel like hexed's magic world lacks this aspect of weirdness and originality, that it lacks personality.
And another thing I wanted to talk about is the difference in how Billie's weirdness is presented (at least from what we've seen so far from the trailer) compared to Luz's and why one is objectively more relatable and makes for better weird kid representation than the other.
Billie's weirdness, from what we've seen so far, can be boiled down to "she's just not like the other kids" and that, as she herself says in the trailer, that she's always felt like there was something wrong with her, without actually showing what makes her weird or different. I guess having purple hair and not doing your homework is enough to feel like an outcast from your peers your whole life. And, while I know that teenagers can be awfully judgemental and that they'll find the dumbest things to make you feel bad about at that age, I just don't see how something like that alone would make someone go as far as to feel like there's something fundamentally wrong or different about them.
Though, I guess I can give the movie the benefit of the doubt about this one, since all we have right now is a trailer. And, for as much as I'm praying for this movie's downfall, I still sincerely hope the movie ends up being better than what the trailer promises. But, even with that benefit of doubt, I still won't set my expectations too high for the weird kid representation in this movie, since it would make more sense for the trailer to actually have shown the protagonist's weirdness in the trailer, since it's supposed to be a fundamental part of the movie, instead of just her spelling it out for us.
And, just to make my point more clear, let's compare Billie to Luz at the beginning of their respective stories. From the very beginning, Luz was presented to the audience as a kid who's genuinely different and weirder than the other kids. And it wasn't just the show itself straight up spelling out "she's weird" for us or showing scenes with Luz being bullied for seemingly no reason, but we actually witness her bad school experiences first hand.
We see that she has a hard time making friends because she has unusual interests and likes things most people don't. She likes nerdy stuff, like fantasy, books, comics and anime, her favorite creatures are snakes and spiders, she pulls jokes and pranks that scare people and she keeps getting in trouble for generally expressing herself and being creative in unique and unusual ways.
She's expressive as hell and she's initially loud and proud about her uniqueness, until she realizes that no one around her is supportive of that, not even her own mother, which was the turning point for her. Her mom sending her to what is essentially an allegory for conversion camp was the last straw for her and the thing that made her urge for an escape even stronger and what made her choice to stay in another dimension without much hesitation so believable.
It's also been heavily implied and afterwards confirmed by Dana that Luz is supposed to be neurodivergent, which makes her terrible social experiences have all the more weight to them. Because it's one thing to just have a hard time making friends due to external factors that have nothing to do with you and a whole other thing to have a differently wired brain and to struggle your whole life to fit in because of something about you that you have no control over. And, so far to me, Billie's negative social experiences feel more or less circumstantial and that her personality has little to do with it.
Also, as the show progresses, we learn about Luz's father and how her losing him so early was so significant for her. And not only for the obvious grief and trauma that comes with losing a parent this young, but also because we can infer that her dad was the only supportive one of her interests in the family, since he's the one who gave her what would later become part of her favorite fantasy book series. She didn't just lose a parent, she lost the only person who she probably felt understood by, her support system, which made her childhood all the more lonely.
And, I'm sure Billie's dad had some similar fate and that it'll be brought up as a plot point in the movie too at some point as a way to make us sympathize more with her, but I can't help but feel like the impact of whatever tragic backstory this movie is planning to give us won't hit half as hard purely because, from what I can tell so far, Billie doesn't struggle with fitting in nearly as much as the movie wants us to believe, or at least I don't buy that her struggle to fit in is due to any key characteristics of her as a person. As I said already, the trailer makes it seem like her situation is more just kids being assholes instead of something about her being inherently different. It feels more circumstantial and random, like it could've happened to any normal person.
And that's not weird kid representation. It is average everykid representation and it is as boring and bland as it gets, for me at least. And, don't get me wrong, there's nothing wrong with having an average normal person as a protagonist or representing people with normal childhoods, but it is when these average normal characters are treated as weird or unusual that it pisses me off.
And I hate it because it's big corporations' way of making their movies feel relatable to kids who genuinely struggle with being seen as weird, without actually depicting any of the real struggles that these kids are facing. They play it safe and present the most surface level experiences as something profound and worth more than they are, something anyone could come up with and relate to. Something that's just weird enough for weird kids to relate to without making normal kids feel ostracized. Something that appeals to as many people as possible so that it's highly marketable while also exploiting people's need to feel seen and understood by the media they consume. And maybe it's not actually that deep and I'm just emotionally exaggerating, but right now that's what it feels like.
And, evidently, the final nail in the coffin of this movie for me is that I can just feel it in my soul that there's gonna be some queerbaiting in it. The trailer already briefly showed us a scene of Billie fighting some witch girl that seemed to be around her age and I have a hunch they're gonna have some typical rivalry that's reminiscent of Luz's relationship with Amity.
And I know this dynamic is gonna piss me off because it's an obvious way to get people talking about the movie and theorize about a potential queer relationship and queer representation in a disney movie, which we all know that at the end of the day will not happen. And I know it because I've been here many times before. I too have had hope multiple times in the past for explicit queer rep in a new upcoming disney film, something that inevitably never came.
Because disney doesn't actually give a fuck about representing queer people, but about appealing to as big an audience as possible. And that means that queerbaiting is bound to happen. Making a character's sexuality and gender identity just vague enough to be subtextually read as queer without actually canonizing anything in fear of backslash is typical of disney movies and bif corporate animated movies in general.
But god forbid there's a disney show that's explicitly and anapologetically queer with a gender non-conforming bisexual protagonist in a sapphic relationship. Same gender friendships that can vaguely be interpreted as romance is all we can get from an actual movie. They even released the trailer during pride month, which could be a coincidence, but I have a feeling it might've been deliberate. And I know I'm making a lot of assumptions here, but I can't help but have this feeling that this will happen again and that we should prepare ourselves for disappointment.
And what sucks so much about this is that, once again, making the protagonist of an obvious ripoff of a very queer show not explicitly queer takes away one of the factors that made that show resonate with so many people who've felt like outcasts at some point in their life or people who still do.
Because, while in the owl house queerness was fully normalized and accepted in the demon realm, Luz still had to properly come out to her mom about her sexuality in the human realm. And, while her mom was very accepting of it and fully embraced her queerness, the fact that she had to explicitly state it and do a whole presentation about it was a subtle reminder that the human world isn't yet nearly as accepting of these things as it should be, which is also part of what made this fi6ctional fantasy world so enticing.
But, anyways, this rant is already too long and I think I've complained plenty for now, so I'm gonna wrap this up. Also, I should give a disclaimer that none of this hate is targeted towards the artists, animators and creative minds behind this movie, my complaints are for the executives that are responsible for the direction the movie has taken and for what the final product looks like. I am fully aware that the people who envisioned it and brought it to life aren't at fault, since they don't have much control over what the movie they put out ends up actually being. That's all I have to say on this topic for now I think.
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