How Star Vs The Forces of Evil Destroyed Itself

I strangely found myself diving down the rabbit hole of video essays discussing where Star Vs. the

forces

of

evil

and one thing I love is that the fandom is in full swing people are trying to figure out what went wrong when they don't I didn't realize that what went wrong was something they were applauding so let's talk about Star vs the

forces

of

evil

, a charming cartoon about a crazy space princess from another dimension sent to Earth to learn how to calm her down while fighting the monstrous minions of the evil Ludo became popular immediately from its first episode establishing

itself

among what in that moment at least animation had been called the Silver Age fulfilling the silly humor to accompany the interpersonal comedy the surreal drug trip the tense mystery and the one that doesn't I don't talk about that, but at some point people are divided as to When did Star Versus become something else, a hodgepodge of missed opportunities that grew tumors in the romance plot and generally isn't funny, the fanbase is divided on what went wrong, was it too much of a shipping?

Was he wrong? the allegories of racism was the problem that they used allegories was the story too complicated if the villains weren't funny well it answered all those questions as yes but the core problem remains largely undefined because

star

versus

star

ted moving in stomach in the first season and the audience applauded him for making them see all the little problems with Star vs. coming back to a big major problem one thing that really set the show on the path to becoming a terrible nightmare of misery, depressed and depressed , of confusing themes and sending the problem was this guy Star vs the Forces of Evil opened beautifully with a magical princess from another dimension fighting monsters with crazy magic and a villain whose wand will be mine and then the universe, actually the universe should do it, he was perhaps the best villain the 2010 cartoon had.

It all formed a very good framework for a silly show about fighting monsters and high school where the star keeps misunderstanding everything because she's a literal alien, like Kim Possible and Dave the Barbarian had a baby that was brilliant, especially considering what was being broadcast. At the time, it was probably the first and last time in the 2010s that animation continued to be as diverse as it had been in the previous decade. It's a really fun, light-hearted show that accompanies the mystery of Gravity Falls and all lives. The Steven Universe thing oh, also MLP was still a sitcom at this point, but unfortunately the Creator is a crybaby and you all know how that goes.

At this point, halfway through they introduced The True Villain, a boring, personality-less misery who positions himself as a brand of menace and sucks all the joy out of the show, impersonates Ludo, arms all of his henchmen, and hangs around. the rest of the season until he's finally confronted and exploited by a star now, unlike Ludo who wanted to take over the universe because well, that's just a pretty viable villain motivation, Toffee was a character we knew until his death, so it was a big mystery, a mystery we could solve in the next episode, hey mom, I met this lizard in a suit, do you know who he is? but instead, why don't we spend the next two seasons wondering about it and pretty much from then on, candy looms over the show like one big miserable specter?

Its entire purpose was to make the story more serious, in fact, Neffsy even stated the goal. was going to be more serious from the beginning, now there's a bit of conventional wisdom regarding opening a series with a light-hearted, silly episodic vibe and then deciding to pivot to being a serious story driven and serialized, don't do that, okay, the People do that, no. Don't do that from this point on, the show became a big drama, baby, waste of effort, value, money, space and time, most of the episodes that focused on the story achieved nothing and ended with the baby Cliffhangers and nefc seemed to operate on the idea that she would.

I have infinite time to tell her story as a 24 season anime and in fact the anime was a huge inspiration for her so I wouldn't be surprised if she wrote her story as a single piece with the intention of having a thousand episodes and taking decades. to get to the point. or like Pokémon, where you have a thousand episodes and it takes you decades to get to the point, but also people bother to watch you, the problem is getting serious, it's a means, not an end, you only do it if you have a reason to and The best thing Star vs could come up with to justify all this drama was a failed fantasy race as a metaphor.

Oh boy, I sure love it when writers talk about racism, but they're too cowardly to do it with my blood in 2023. If I point out a similarity to Harry Potter, does that automatically count as a criticism on its own? It is better to qualify it, just in case. See the problem with fantasy racism, and indeed science fiction racism, is that it always seems like it's trying to highlight something about our modern culture and problems. we have here, but we didn't have the stones to do it or we didn't have the knowledge to do it, instead it covered topics that white people think are already over.

Star vs had a great metaphor for colonialism and stolen land that, while considered a controversial issue of far-right Looney Bins, remains an ongoing issue given the fact that large tracts of colonized and stolen land have not been returned. to its legitimate inhabitants, but also characterizes these problems as something in the realm of distant fantasy. It creates enough separation, especially when you have the human-looking Mumans and the monsters, not that the audience doesn't have to think about it. Beyond, oh, it's an allegory for racism and then I decidedly don't have to go, oh wait, should I be thinking about that? creates enough separation that when the silly Sailor Moon parody from the first season returns with a sad secret story about how she was a poor peasant girl before the queen recruited her to become the new secret Nazi ubermensch, don't go right away .

Wait, wait, what is this Iron Dream thing? There's usually some wisdom in that if you can portray something directly, then do it. Racism is not about humans versus non-humans, but about humans versus humans who look slightly different, but could. I wouldn't make him a different kind of moomin because that would be too close and would make white 20-somethings sulk and cry about wokism. Oh wait, no, it was 2016. They would cry over sjws and identity politics, but I've always been of the opinion that those people can cry in their rooms like sad little ones, they're Hell Star vs they've got the human kingdom, they have the Diaz family, if they wanted to talk about racism they could have, it's not like Disney would have done it.

I didn't let them have the family proud a few years before I did this all the time. Hell, they had the proud family twice, except the proud family was made up of people who knew them most of the time and Neffsy probably doesn't because the fact that Marco named his scooter nacho, he's obsessed with tacos and has nine cacti in his front yard, which makes it clear how much effort Nipsey wanted to put into writing a Hispanic person and when fantasy and sci-fi decide they want to cover something like racism instead of covering Honestly and Directly with direct parallels , they have to invent all new people to be bigoted against, like muggle-borns, turians, and monsters, oh god, neffsy, no, fairy lives don't matter today, the whole story was one big story anti-colonialist, but with an understanding of colonialism that is superficial at best and all shrouded in the taboo of the past.

Eclipse and globgor romance where Eclipsa was the queen of Muni's rifles and then was excommunicated to a fake Royal put on the throne because she fell in love with a Monster and the Butterfly family don't actually have the right to rule, but they do anyway to prevent the monsters from potentially having the throne and ensure that they remain an oppressed minority and the main plot is to restore eclipsa and globgor to the throne, after which eclipsa proceeds. to do nothing because at the end of the day she wasn't really a different person, she was just after a big demon.

This is what all this drama was about something we could have done on Earth, we could have had an episode starring in something. in the human kingdom and the police Point Marco instead and the stars to get a wake-up call about the fact that his blonde butt could endanger other less privileged people, that's it, that's the whole story, A single episode made, this monarchy plot is what takes three. seasons to solve the monsters are oppressed the monster now has the right to rule right to rule removed puppet leader put on the throne put the rifle king and queen back on the throne and that's what the whole Topi thing is about, that's it In the same way, every adventure fantasy story is told in that character's waffle for 15 minutes and then they give you a shocking Cliffhanger until the fourth season, where Disney told Neffy that it was time to leave this, so it ended with a rushed and open-ended conclusion. in case they were ever renewed, if there was ever a problem with this style of writing it's that for some reason, probably the anime inspiration to be honest, it always seems to take so long for adventure cartoons and fantasy to summarize the simplest stories because they never bother to do so. use the first or second act of an episode and people always blame the studio when they can't be given infinite time to spin their wheels, both Star vs the Forces of Evil and Steven Universe ended in a rushed ending due to not being renewed for another season, but they had four and five respectively to get through all of this and finish it properly and they just couldn't do it.

The Owl House is currently having this problem the instant they were in a position where they had limited time to conclude this, they started talking and wasting time and extending arcs from a single episode to multiple episodes over the course of of two seasons, why do you always do this? Some people feel sympathy for these creators who surpassed themselves with the study, but no, they themselves refused to do so. Get your butts in gear and hurry up, they moved at a snail's pace until the final episode and wrapped it all up in a rush just as the studio was breathing down their necks.

This is a natural consequence of how they chose to tell these stories if you only have three seasons to do something, you have to act like a show with three seasons, not a show with three seasons, but there's a small chance you'll get seven and this isn't it. just the story, the characters also suffer from this, that's why Starko became such a tumor because instead of handling it for two seasons when the confession came out they dragged him for two more with red herrings and red herrings until the end and there was no reason to do that if Starko had gotten together when Marco left for Muni We would have had a season and a half of them going through the same stories, like a couple, that episode where they lock themselves in a photo booth could have been We haven't had our first kiss yet , this is awkward and would have gone from being too adorable, but for some inexplicable reason Nessie wanted to tease this stupid will they won't, they will plot and the reason they won't, it's a stupid plot for as long as she could.

It's because they will. It's never the resolution they always make, that's how romantic arcs always seem to go. They got to the logical point where the couple should reunite, but instead of bringing them together at that point, they just left it there until the final episode or two. for absolutely no reason and no justification, yes, shows do this all the time and have done it forever, but there has never been a justification for it. This is the part where I make a vague gesture towards that French show, everyone is begging me to talk about it, it's part of the reason why. lumine was received so positively because it got to a point where the only place it could go was to ask Amity out and guess what happened.

There was an entire episode dedicated to who literally locked them in a well until they did it, although the episode was about single words about wanting it to be perfect and being told if it really has to be. It's almost like a direct subversion of the Trope. Oh, this has to be perfect, so I have to wait for the right moment you thought to come in. Love Pit, on the other hand, Star vs couldn't stop harping on the whole Starko thing to the point where people got angry and wanted Nefty to just get up his lazy ass and move.

It was painfully obvious that Star and Marco were going to get together and every attempt atdistracting didn't fool anyone, it felt like that thing every bad writer does where once the obvious plot twist becomes clear to the viewer, they get cranky and hastily rewrite or try to deflect and this isn't even a match. the fact that the crew was constantly doing this kind of thing like babies with other shippers who knew they were never going to get what they wanted and when a good show does these things it's kind of cute but when a bad show does it it's just idiotic behavior.

The question about the show is why are we going to drag out this simple royalty dispute for three seasons? Because you won't know what the candy is about until two seasons after its debut. Why Star and Marco won't get together until the penultimate episode. Because? there is no answer there is only the question well actually there is no answer this is malicious storytelling this is all designed to keep you watching when the story is drip fed in the third act Cliffhangers is to surprise you and make you tune in for the next episode, if you want to know what happens when romance and shipping are constantly hanging over you like a carrot on a stick, you should keep watching because if they did it in two seasons they wouldn't make as much money as if they had done it in four or five and had They had to make up a new story to fill out the other two seasons, they knew how much story they had and they ran it through four seasons because four seasons of advertising The revenue was more than two seasons of advertising The revenue now works on this model, yes, yes, yes , works.

The sinking cast fallacy is very much alive in the fandom. I know people who came to despise Steven Universe, but kept watching until the end because they wanted closure for the time they had invested and they can't deal with the idea that if they leave and stop letting it live for free in their head, they will feel a lot better. . I often wonder to what extent the toxicity of a fandom is due to the fact that people convince themselves to keep watching things they don't like just because they've already invested time in it, honey, time is not an investment that you are not receiving.

That time back and wasting your limited time on something you hate is the exact opposite of a good investment, which is a waste. You only have a limited amount of time on this Earth. You might as well spend it happy instead of angry. People were surprised when I left Moon Girl despite my glowing first impression on the executive producer's word that it could be serialized, but after 10 years covering cartoons for a living, when a creator says a show is leaving to serialize, I immediately think that they are going to have it. drawn out stories that go nowhere for years, they'll have some kind of drawn out romance that either takes too long or gets dropped and forgotten, and they'll probably torture Lunella for the drama and two of those things are tropes that I'm sick of of that and the third one is a real trigger right now.

I just don't trust you. That's the thing when you say we're going to serialize. I don't trust you to do this right and I don't even trust you to be competent and I know better than to get involved in a show that I can't trust and the creators know it, they know that many audiences get addicted easily and will continue to watch something. what you do not like. from a sense of closure or the strange phenomenon of hate seeing that they know that if they cheat on you you will keep coming back and you won't have the willpower of Spiner to simply say no.

I swear we need a version of the show Dare, but since binge-watching Star Versus pretty much pulled out all of its tone for basically nothing, creating boring, bland characters in the name of a bland, boring story that way, too many people were applauding, the simple fact is that it was nonsense that wrote people, they just didn't have to do it. with it and what they did with it they weren't happy with just making a fun show, they had to start turning it into an anime immediately because the Creator was a fucking crybaby who mistakenly believed that Japan was the only place where there was anything interesting. happening in animation chasing fanfic tropes without having an actual story in mind only serious men show up and then the show gets serious and that means well I don't know monsters versus Muni well maybe the monsters were right but no They had to be. dicks about it, you know, and it was strange to see people applauding this celebrating that the show was becoming more plot-focused and moving.

I think it's nice that cartoons can have a mature, introspective tone and then I look at them and then I look at the star and then I look at them again and I'm like, she's a magical space princess who shoots narwhal lasers. I mean, if you don't understand my point, I don't know how to explain it to you, it's like trying to explain to someone why you should do it. Without cayenne pepper and cake frosting, this was surprising at the time because the notion of cartoons sinking into pathetic, edgy garbage was still a relatively new concept.

Nowadays, we know the multiple levels of pathetic insecure nerd that lives in the basement and continues demanding this horrible garbage, but back. So it was really surprising, since everyone likes candy, the guy is boring, they like him more than Ludo, the problem was a show about a magical princess from another dimension fighting monsters with narwhal lasers trying to be mature, First of all, he never has. There has been a more excellent parallel with Shadow the Hedgehog or Prince of Persia My Chemical Romance Edition. This is one of those things where the fandom needs to take a step back because every problem you acknowledge with a star comes from the same source as making drama into everything.

Not only was the premise of the show just not right for it, as many producers just can't do drama because she doesn't know dramatic storytelling and what she knows about drama comes largely from schlock anime, if anything Star vs is patient. zero of why Disney really needs to start asking people what anime they like at Pitch meetings and if their first response is an action show, security escorts them off the premises, this is the main problem, it's that's why you don't like any part of the show you don't like you don't like the allegory of racism it's because it's sloppy and drags to create drama and uses monsters to make it more acceptable to white people because using human racism would have been too much simple and would have sparked a ton of response videos from subhumanoid scammers and it's hard to pretend that things are complicated in the human realm because they aren't complicated in the human realm if you hate shipping cancerous tumor, the reason you hate it is because it lasts until the end of the show because The drama constantly has the star and Marco abandoning their feelings.

They hang out with other people. They try to come together, they just miss each other and the audience constantly to keep them engaged and keep watching because God knows the story wasn't doing that and you're not. fooling anyone we all knew we were going to get together was just getting out of the hole the reason it's so hard for some people to recognize this is because the places where the show went wrong are a direct result of the things they clapped for in the first place First, the fandom always applauds shows for going dark, mature, and serialized and then acting surprised when the natural consequences of that happen.

I don't know how you look at the first few episodes and see the vibe that the show is putting off. and then conclude: you know, I like this, but I would like it a lot more if I didn't have anything I'm seeing now. It is the collision between fandom expectations and reality. I've been saying this for a while. The cartoon fandom is obsessed with the notion of serious story-based cartoons because they think it will make mom stop laughing at them or they think it will be like one of their animes and the repeated flops, critical flops, and sinkholes. of money have generally led to fewer being produced and that is on the The fault lies with the creators who have the same fandom brain, they assume that if they simply imitate Peak TV and bad anime they will elevate animation as a medium and some argue that Star vs had to be that way because it's inspired by the anime, but that's a statement. that needs to qualify which anime, well Sailor Moon obviously, but it's a sentiment found in a lot of these other shows, anime is a pretty broad medium with a lot of iron and a lot of fire, but the anime-inspired phrase is always reduced to a small niche and culturally embarrassing side. that even Japan doesn't like to be reminded when someone says inspired by anime, they never say they were inspired by Hello Kitty or Hamtaro or that silly thing where everyone is very well dressed and ridiculously muscular, no, it's always that no one in their right mind whatever we call Dead Magical Girls or Haramisakais or that whole middle half where every woman is designed to look like a girl because some guy in the '80s caught on to the fact that you can make a ton of money appealing to pedophiles and Men who see women as pets, so the anime-inspired phrase could mean anything since we also have great laser fights.

There's a lot of genocide and racism going on here and Star Versus always felt like a show that didn't know what it wanted to be, it just knew it. I wanted to be serious and I wanted to be like Sailor Moon, everything else was made up as they went along and there's your problem, being serious is not a goal, it's the method you use to achieve your goal, if your goal is to be serious, you . If you're an empty shell of a show, the fandom has to deal with this notion that serious serialized shows aren't the end goal of television, aren't inherently better than episodic comedy shows, and why they disappoint with So often it's because episodic shows know what they want. but many serious cartoons don't want to be anything more than serious because of a false idea that it gives them some kind of pedigree.

This is part of the problem with millennial cartoon fans and creators who still act as if serialized shows still have to justify themselves. their own existence, but they've been around for 30 years as art, it all ended when Digimon came out and gained a massive cult following of serialized cartoons, now they have to struggle with the fact that the talent doesn't exist anymore and they need creators. with visions more thoughtful than those of that show I watched when I was a baby, but darker and braver until that happens and until the fandom stops applauding shows that strip them of everything charming to chase a prize that doesn't exist, let's Keep getting shows like Star vs the Forces of Evil at least until people realize they aren't very profitable.

I know I'm talking to a wall. I know people who shoot too hard for these things don't listen to me on this. and they're probably dismissing all of this based on Lily Orchard saying she's a bad woman. I know this because I watched some of her videos about her, but that's what happened with Star vs. He got serious and got the big villain out of him. It's a big mystery plot and then he said no one and that's what always happens every time because Creative Vision started and stopped being serious and vaguely like his favorite anime and when that's all you want to be, that's all you go To be.