Some Things I Believe About Stories

and after that post about not being critical I invite you to

GUESS WHAT I’M MAD ABOUT TODAY

what did I say??

and they’re doing it in PARIS

how come not here, what the heck

I’ll be in Disney World Monday and Tuesday as a surprise trip

But this has brought to mind:

You Can Enjoy the Good, Beautiful, and True that a Monument Has to Offer Even if it Sucks Now

I mean like. There are things that are not going to be fun about being in Disney World. Like, I’ll probably have to see a lot of Wish merch and pushes for the Lilo & Stitch Live Action.

But they can’t erase what they already created. They can try to paper over it but as long as Alan Menken’s soundtracks are playing over the ambience, as long as Glen Keane’s Ariel is waving from her ride, as long as the Cinderella statue is holding out her hand to creatures lower than herself, they can’t make me forget.

Disney used to be just saturated with the Good, the Beautiful, the True. There’s too much of it leftover to erase, and the stuff that is good always has a larger, longer-lasting impact than stuff that sucks.

If you let it.

If you don’t focus so much on what you hate and what makes you mad and what you can complain and argue about. We have this brainrot called “pride” that can start to make being critical and finding things to be negative about our default setting. Because we sound smart and right when we’re poking at things that are wrong and bad.

But that shouldn’t be done to the exclusion of enjoying what’s Good and True while it can be enjoyed.

So in the same vein, letting terrible Live Action Remakes “ruin” the originals for you is a choice. Nobody’s forcing you to make that choice.

I’m going to make this post as an intro to Sonic characters for people who don’t know them. For fun.

And also because the new Sonic Movie series I just feel like there are a lot of potentially newer Sonic fans or people who blur the two and they’re really not the same character.

I mean, Movie!Sonic gets the goodwill and acceptance of fans, even though he’s not the game Sonic, because of how genuine and earnest the effort is. And it is genuine and earnest, but it’s also hit or miss. Plus like 1% of my friends know anything about Sonic, so I’m going to make this little post both to remind new Sonic fans of who the characters actually are, from the games, and also to introduce them to my friends. Because they’re all basically confused that I like Sonic.

Starting with the main four you see everywhere:

Sonic the Hedgehog

(I’m not going to go into like, Classic Sonic vs Modern Sonic or the different genres of games and gameplay or whatever. I’m just going to talk about the general characterizations of the character. If you want history, here, in a nutshell: SEGA made an old-timey pixel game to give them a mascot that could rival Super Mario Bros. and they did it in a smash-success with a much more brightly-colored and, at the time, much more sophisticated and cool character than Mario. And then in the 90s he got upgraded to the sleeker, less-cartoony anime character you see everywhere, but people got sad and missed his retro look, so now sometimes his Retro Self makes an appearance as it’s own character.) Sonic’s two superpowers in his natural state are that he can go fast and roll into an energized ball. But he never had lightning in his quills—he just has quills, and it’s implied that they’re sharp, so he can roll up really fast and make himself a spiky wrecking ball.

There are no canon explanations for why he can do the super-speed thing. It’s just his thing. It’s also not treated, in any game, like an amazing Chosen One ability; generally, the Bad Guys tend to go “you think your speed will save you?!” Or something like that. Nobody reacts like he’s got superpowers. Everyone reacts like this is a normal thing for a blue hedgehog to be able to do. Also, nobody is like “after” his “power.” People in general mostly treat Sonic like he’s a really athletic guy who happens to be cool, and the thing they’re most in awe of is generally his personality. Since this post is about characterizations, let’s talk about that personality.

The whole point of the Sonic Story, always, is “Keep Moving Forward.”

Sonic himself is the main propellor of that theme. He’s a teenager (loosely) and he’s heroic, and he’s cocky and committed to doing things “his own way.” He has theme songs about it. But all of those aspects of who he is are just the shiny package around the Main Point of him, as a character: “Keep Moving Forward.”

Sonic never gets angsty. Sonic will not get bogged down in grief. Sonic refuses to dwell on failure. (He also refuses to accept failure but that’s kind of adjacent.)

Even the game mechanics of him, as a character, are all centered around that theme. Sonic games aren’t about speed, as in, how fast you can go. They’re about momentum. When something stops you, you get up and try to build up speed and work through the level again. Literally. The character falls into spikes, loses all the rings (points, second chances) he was carrying? He gets up and dashes forward again. But here are some story examples:

All of this is not to say that Sonic doesn’t ever experience grief or rage. That happens all the time. But it’s usually just a brief reactionary moment, and it propels him to win a fight or keep going—and he never takes it too far and gets murderous or vengeful. (Once he almost did in the anime but he stopped, and that’s where the whole “Dark Sonic” you may see floating around comes from.)

But the point is, he’s a positive character, a very secure, very confident character. He knows exactly who he is. He knows exactly what he wants to do. He likes doing it with friends, but he literally will save the world by himself every time, for the rest of time, if for some reasons his friends won’t go with him. Often a staple of the character is that he will run off when everyone else is having a victory party, or he’ll disappear before the people he’s saved can thank him: because he’s just as happy chasing adventure on his own as he is with any friends. 

So Movie Sonic gets that wrong. 

Super Sonic, also, they get wrong. The whole point of Sonic being able to turn into Super Sonic is this Chaos Emerald thing—here, really quickly: the Chaos Emeralds are very powerful mystery items that, when they’re all together, have the power to create change, or “grant wishes,” based on what the heart of the user is feeling. If that sounds vague, it’s vague on purpose so they can do just about anything when the storytellers need them to. But suffice to say: they’re almost always used like batteries, sometimes batteries to empower “Transformations,” and if someone transforms with them into something evil, they turn grey and appear to lose their power. 

BUT SUPER SONIC can fix them. It’s just Sonic, nigh-invulnerable, glowing gold and able to fly—specifically because he’s such a positive guy. It’s literally his positivity that turns him into Super-Sonic. 

And in the movies, he turns into Super Sonic to grimly end a big fight, or to get revenge on Movie Shadow. When in actuality, he should be grinning and flashing around happily. “Super Sonic” is short for “Super Positive Sonic.”

So that’s Sonic. The main point of the character is that everybody else in the story is weighed down by:

But Sonic is consistently associated with the confidence and cockiness that comes with “living in the moment” and “keep moving forward.”  

So the next three or four characters are very influenced by Sonic, for that reason. 

Miles “Tails” Prower

Tails is Sonic’s best friend and is treated like his little brother. He’s a technology whiz, and he has a huge brain. They’ve really been capitalizing on that in the most recent portrayals of Tails, especially in the movies: he’s the “gadget guy” and he speaks in technobabble. 

But the part of Tails that was really awesome, the part that actually had an arc, didn’t have much to do with his big brain, in the beginning. It had more to do with a) his young age and b) his mutated tails. 

Because focusing on those two things made him a great example of one of those Character-Focuses that Sonic does not get weighed down by: Failure. Or, more precisely I guess, Insecurity.

Because of his two tails and his young age, Tails meets Sonic and he thinks Sonic is the most amazing person in the world. He’s cool and confident and really capable. Sonic lets Tails follow him around, and from Sonic, Tails learns how to use his mutated tails and believe in himself. Because every time he falls or fails, Sonic sets the example of, “get back up and keep moving forward.”

Not that the technology-thing isn’t a big part of Tails, too. His name is a pun on “Miles Per Hour.” Which is a way to calculate speed. So as a character, Tails is always running calculations: he’s always trying to see if he measures up (to Sonic), see how to solve things, comparing himself to Sonic. So over and over the games sort of have him “come of age.” He’s usually separated from Sonic in some way, or Sonic appears to “die,” and Tails is left to save the day. Usually he does. 

But the main point is that, even in the games themselves, Tails is an example of how “Keep Moving Forward” is too hard for anybody to do if they don’t have friends. Actually, all three of Sonic’s main-friends are examples of that lesson. Tails, for example, can pick Sonic up after he falls into pits or low areas in the game levels, and carry him out so he can keep running. It’s like a metaphor. 

Generally, the appealing thing about Tails is that he’s always there for Sonic and he has total faith in Sonic—and Sonic returns that favor by having total faith in Tails.

Knuckles the Echidna

Knuckles is Sonic’s first “rival,” which turns out to be a recurring character-type in the franchise. But because he was the first, now he’s just one of Sonic’s best friends. (He also introduced “lore” to the Sonic games. Before Knuckles, they were sort of cartoons.)

Knuckles is can hit really hard, climb walls, dig, and glide (by catching air in his dreadlocks. So. If that doesn’t scream “Rad Red.”) 

Knuckles is a dupe in the movies, and he’s a dupe in the games. But that’s only one facet of his character. Remember how I said Tails is the Character-Focus of “Insecurity?” Knuckles has a Character Focus of “Heritage.” You can see that in the movies, too. They did an okay job with Knuckles. 

Basically, Knuckles is the last of an extinct race, and his job is to guard a really big magical Emerald called the Master Emerald. The Master Emerald can trump the Chaos Emeralds, and it sits in a big shrine on an island, and causes that island to float (it’s called “Angel Island.”)

Because every other echidna is wiped out, Knuckles doesn’t have anybody to ask for advice on the best way to do his job, or protect his home (he’s basically a crabby hermit.)

So he just does it his way.

But that’s the thing about Knuckles, and about Sonic rivals. They usually take one character trait of Sonic and then SPIN IT OUT OF CONTROL.

So, Sonic likes to do things “his own way,” right? Knuckles likes to do things his own way too—but like, on steroids. He won’t budge if he thinks the Master Emerald is in danger, and he prioritizes it over everything, everything else. If the world is in danger but the Master Emerald is ALSO in danger, Knuckles usually says “let the world burn, I have to save this Emerald.” Or his island. Whichever comes first. 

Sonic’s more “adaptable” than Knuckles, is what I’m saying.

While Sonic would never be saddled with a type of “guardianship” that forces him to stay in one place and never grow, Knuckles refuses to abandon his post, ultimately. You do see him grow a little bit: he does go on adventures with Sonic and Tails, so he’s not always chained to the Master Emerald and his island like a Guard Dog. But he still takes that same singleminded approach to every problem: for example, in the anime, when they think their little girl pal Cosmo might be a spy, Knuckles is like “okay then let’s take her out…”

… because he starts to see whatever his mission is as the new metaphorical “Master Emerald Which Must Be Protected At All Costs.”

Whereas Sonic would never do something like that. Sonic always believes in doing things his own way: but his “own way” would never hurt somebody who’s only-bad-by-accident. He’d find a way to stop the bad guys and save the naive person they’re using. Knuckles would just punch everything—innocent, misunderstood, doesn’t matter.

But I will say, the thing Sonic teaches Knuckles (because remember, it’s always Sonic teaching other characters) is that he can adapt. He can change his mind. The first thing Knuckles changes his mind about is Sonic himself. 

When they meet, Knuckles has been tricked by Eggman (main bad guy) into thinking Sonic is after his Master Emerald. Sonic turns out to be the hero, and Knuckles gets a little more open-minded from that point on. Now they’re friends.

One of the other prime examples of Knuckles learning to be more open-minded is his repeat-rival/lover: Rouge the Bat.

(Rouge is a super-spy-jewel-thief-treasure-hunter. She comes to steal the Master Emerald, and Knuckles throws hands, in his usual straightforward way, and doesn’t like Rouge. Except he does. And after saving her life, she gives him back what she’d stolen—and he apologizes to her for being too rough and from then on they have like a flirtatious maybe-friendship maybe-rivalry. So there’s another example of him changing his mind, opening it up, a little.)

Amy Rose

This is the Girl Character. She just showed up at the end of Sonic Movie 2. She has undergone the most change out of the Main Four over the years, because…well, because this is the West, and because ideas about what an acceptable Girl Character can be have changed.

For better or worse, Amy Rose is Sonic’s Love Interest. She’s introduced as a fangirl of Sonic’s who is rescued by him—because he’ll rescue anyone, not necessarily because he has any special interest in her—and then she follows him around.

Amy’s “powers” are that she can run fast (to keep up with Sonic) but she’s got a really big hammer. That’s it. (We don’t know where it came from or how she always has it with her or what it’s made of, it’s just a big hammer.)

Her deep backstory (which faded away in the early 2000s but is making a reappearance because it’s “trendy” to be a witch nowadays,) is that she had special tarot cards that told her Sonic was going to have a big impact on her life, or was her destiny, or something like that.

Bottom line: she steadfastly believes that Sonic is her One True Love. 

Sonic, initially, was portrayed as running away from her affection because he’s either not interested or he just doesn’t want to be tied down, and she’s clingy and possessive.

And initially, Amy was portrayed as chasing after him endlessly, no matter what. That was her character. But slowly, they’ve added in stuff and reshaped her so that she has her own fighting ability (big hammer) and is more about “loving all creatures in general” than “obsessively loving Sonic.”

The thing that I would say stays thematically similar about Amy, even from her damsel-in-distress-clingy days, is that she never gives up.

So her Character-Focus is “Insecurity” like Tails…but more intensely. More like “Self Focus.”

Amy’s whole sense of who she is comes from Sonic, and how close she is to him. But he literally won’t stay close to her, so she complains and gets mad and keeps trying. But her first big moment of “character development” comes from watching Sonic, who never focuses on himself—he always looks at what needs to be done for the day to be saved, and wastes no time feeling sorry for himself or wondering if he can do it. 

Amy starts realizing that she should stop focusing so much on herself and how people treat her, and focus on “helping others.” That happened late in the story, around the time Shadow the Hedgehog was introduced. But since then she’s slowly but surely become more (bland) about “helping others” than “helping herself,” so that’s been pretty consistent.

And of course, the Villain. 

Dr. Ivo “Eggman” Robotnik

Eggman is the villain, he’s only recently become more than one-dimensional, and he was intensely unlikeable (except ironically) until recently. But his whole thing is that, as a character, he’s Sonic—if Sonic were an opposite-day parody of himself. 

But paradoxically, some things about him and Sonic are similar. 

Recently they’ve tried to make it Eggman’s “thing” that he’s kind of a lonely soul. That nobody has ever appreciated his genius, so he’s content to remake the world to be full of robots—but whenever he has the opportunity to feel kinship with mankind, he actually begrudgingly finds a way to welcome it. 

The movie did just recently start nodding at that character-theme. But this first happened in the early 2000s, when he started the adventure off chasing his grandfather’s legacy, and ended it by helping Sonic and the gang save the human race. He’s also helped end alien invasions, and in the anime, actively fights aliens, too. It’s culminated nowadays in Eggman creating a little Artificial Intelligence girl named SAGE who he winds up feeling affection for and wishing she could remain his “family,” (which isn’t really character growth, because he always wanted to invent a world of his own where non-organic life forms adored him, so.)

Now he’s getting likeable. His sheer tenaciousness and the fact that when the chips are down and non-mortal, evil entities threaten the world, he jumps in and draws the line out of stubborn “if I can’t have the world nobody else can” is weirdly likeable. 

Let’s talk about just one of the other characters you’ll hear about, so they’re definitely going to be in the movies at some point:

Shadow the Hedgehog

Shadow I’ve already made more than one post about. He’s bizarre, on the surface. If I try to explain to you that Shadow is not a cartoon hedgehog like Sonic—he’s a Frankenstein’s monster made of alien DNA invented to cure all disease and grant the human race immortality while inexplicably being shaped like a hedgehog and wearing rocket-skates and shooting lightning out of his hands and teleporting—

then you’re going to go “that’s so weird.”

And it is.

But they managed to make it feel totally acceptable and correct in every iteration.

In the movie, he’s not a science project brought to life by a mad scientist made from the DNA of an alien and a hedgehog. He’s just an alien, himself. So that’s…that’s somehow more believable.

In the games, however, Shadow the Hedgehog is Sonic’s thematic shadow. He was thought up as this dark, twisted version of Sonic himself.

The best way I can describe it, and the most succinct way, is:

Shadow the Hedgehog is Sonic the Hedgehog, if Sonic had, at a young age, saved a bunch of birds from Eggman’s robots only to have those birds turn around and peck Tails, his best friend, to death right in front of him, burn his home to the ground, and somehow lock Sonic away to stew on that traumatic event for 50 years afterward. He’s like an alternate-universe Sonic, where instead of positive and carefree, Sonic is negative and full of nothing but cares.

Shadow was created by Eggman’s grandfather. In the movie, Eggman’s grandfather is a psychotic old villain bent on revenge. But in the games he was a kindly old genius who just wanted to use his intellect to benefit the world, starting with his sick granddaughter, Maria. He made a ton of stuff, it all pops up in the games all the time, but the main two things he made were a) Shadow himself and b) a big space station that doubles as a giant laser cannon.

It’s a laser cannon because he was hired by the military to make weapons. He kept cheating them out of weapons and inventing like, healing pouches and living water-robots and stuff, instead, though. Shadow was supposed to be a weapon—a living weapon—but Eggman’s grandfather doubled his purpose and used him as a part of his research into curing his sick granddaughter Maria. 

Shadow came to life on the space station and spent an undetermined amount of time bonding with Maria, his only friend, and testing out his superpowers, and dreaming about the day they’d go to earth, the planet he was made to protect. Shadow’s superpowers are: teleportation, time-warping, and controlling Chaos Energy (he can shoot lightning out of his hands and turn into a living energy-bomb.) But then the military got scared of what he could do, even before he’d really done anything, and raided the space station. In all the confusion, they captured Eggman’s grandfather and chased Maria and Shadow into the escape-pod room. She knew they were after Shadow, so she made him promise to live his life protecting the people of Earth and giving them a chance to be happy (which is a very Sonic the Hedgehog wish to make) and then jettisoned him out of the space station. But not before one of the military soldiers got trigger-happy and shot her to death in front of Shadow’s eyes.

So. You know. The humans he was brought into existence to protect murdered the little girl best friend he was brought into existence to cure. And then her sacrifice almost didn’t matter because they captured him anyway and locked him away and he woke up looking for revenge. 

But then Sonic (and AMY people forget AMY) showed up and stopped Shadow, and reminded him of Maria’s real wishes, and his real purpose. So from that moment on, Shadow becomes this self-sacrificial character.

But remember, all Sonic Rivals (and Shadow is the Ultimate Rival of Sonic) take one character trait of Sonic’s and they blow it way out of proportion. So which one is Shadow’s? 

Shadow has a lot of the same character traits as Sonic. He is cocky, but with him it usually comes off as “I’m objectively the most powerful thing ever created.” He is competitive, but with him, again, it’s usually just to prove the previous statement. He is caring about his friends, but not demonstrably caring; it’s all hidden. He is a teenager, but because of everything about his existence, you can’t tell.

So what does that leave us with?

Shadow is basically Sonic’s “Never Give Up” mentality, on steroids. But like Knuckles with the “I Do Things My Own Way” extremity, Shadow usually takes his borrowed-Sonic-trait way too far. Sonic will never give up on reaching the goal, but he will change the goal if it means some good will come out of it. For example, in one of the video games based on King Arthur’s Knights (stop laughing, it’s the best one) Sonic has to reach a certain milestone within a time limit to be knighted and save the world. He doesn’t let villains, traps, or rivals get in his way—but as soon as a little girl is crying on the side of the road he willingly drops all chances of getting to the milestone in time and becoming a knight…and potentially even saving the world. Just because he’s not going to leave a little girl crying on the side of the road.

In another example, Sonic always jumps into smashing Eggman’s robots with both feet. But when Amy tells him one of Eggman’s strongest series of killer robots is actually “nice,” he shrugs and goes “whatever you say” and moves on immediately.

So Sonic will never give up on his goal—unless he finds out there might be a chance for somebody to do the right thing. Even if he doesn’t believe in that person, and he’d rather fight them and get it over with, if one of Sonic’s friends protests, Sonic is easygoing, shrugs his shoulders, and believes in his friend’s judgement. Because for Sonic, it’s not a personal vendetta. He’s too cool to make everything about himself.

But Shadow? It takes a lot to convince Shadow that when someone does something wrong, they shouldn’t immediately be neutralized. Even though he, himself, was wrong and had to learn to do the right thing once. His “Never Give Up” mentality is very “Mission: Complete.” Mostly because he was invented to save everyone, but the people he had a personal interest in saving all got tragically murdered a long time ago. So now he does everything out of a sense of grim duty, and gets very little pleasure out of it.

That’s kind of the beauty and tragedy of his character, and it’s why it’s so fun to watch him interact with Sonic. Because any time he has to team up with or duke it out with Sonic…you see that deep down, Shadow enjoys the competition. And it’s fun to see him just enjoy something. That’s what Sonic brings out in him.

The main thing Sonic brings to the table with a character like Shadow is that Shadow is entrenched in the Past. And Sonic is all about Keep Moving Forward. So Shadow takes that lesson more like “marching orders” than Sonic’s “race” mentality. But it’s still a cool dynamic.

Anyway. There are many more characters that are awesome. I particularly like the “Redeemed Robot” characters, and there’s this interdimensional Princess who’s awesome, too, and many people are going to be mad that I didn’t include Metal Sonic on this post.

But this is just the rough overview. If you’re not into Sonic, that’s fine. But just to set the record straight on one of my favorite franchises ever: it has a profound point, the main character is as likeable as say, iconic characters like Percy Jackson and Luke Skywalker, and the movies are nice because they’re a genuine labor of love, but not because they get Sonic exactly right.

That’s all.

To be honest with you, I actually DO have your ask, in my drafts, half-a swerved. But the perfect truth is that I haven’t gotten down to the bottom of Pocahontas yet. I haven’t figured out the Good, Beautiful, True things about it all the way. I have like…some of it. And I definitely feel like I know what it’s not. But I got halfway through answering you and then felt like my answer didn’t add all the way up. So I’m re-watching it and thinking it over before I hit “post.” But thank you for asking, because sometimes tumblr does eat my posts.

What do yall think the Good, Beautiful, True things in Pocahontas are? What do you think the main point of the movie is?

You know what I would do if I were going to make a Jack & the Beanstalk movie based off this poster?

I’d make Jack a Flik-from-Bug’s-Life type of dreamer who is highly ambitious. Instead of being an inventor like Flik, Jack is just sort of entangled in his own imagination. He’s always coming up with hare-brained schemes to win himself fame and his family glory, and he’s an easy mark for con men because he’s always jumping at the next chance to grow up and away from his little impoverished town.

But I’d make the little giantess around 10 years old. She’s the princess of the giant kingdom, and she's the most important thing in the world to the Queen Giantess. Her name is "Cynnie" which is short for "Cyneburg."

Princess Cynnie wants to explore the world because that's what her father the King Giant does—he's always going out hunting or conquering. But her mother is bound and determined to keep Cynnie at home. She gives her everything she could ever want, lots of toys and distractions, and whenever Cynnie becomes disobedient, throws a tantrum, or tries to run away, the Queen Giant calms her with a special treat: a song from a rare captive human singer. The singer's name is Daina, but the giants keep her locked up to do their bidding and refer to their slave only as "the golden harp."

Jack climbs the beanstalk and discovers the giant kingdom, and wants the gold there to prove what he's found and make his family rich. But he's discovered by Princess Cynnie during a welcome-home banquet for the King Giant. She hides him from her ever-hungry father, and he tries to make friends with her as soon as they're alone.

This sort of backfires, because Princess Cynnie is so excited that there's a way to get down to the human world that she immediately wants to escape with Jack. She's caught but keeps Jack a secret, and out comes the Queen Giant's "golden harp" singer. Jack learns two things. 1) That the song has a weirdly powerful affect on Princess Cynnie, and 2) the golden harp is a very pretty young woman of his own age who is trapped against her will.

Jack befriends the isolated Princess Cynnie to keep himself alive and learn more information about where Daina is kept, but has to tread carefully because the spoiled princess loses her temper often and is only mollified when he lets her treat the much smaller human like a toy.

Jack comes to empathize with Cynnie and trust her enough to bring her in on the plan to free Daina. However, just as she begins seeing him as more than a toy, she also fears losing her one friend and gets jealous of Daina. Meanwhile, Daina explains that her song calms Cynnie because she's an enchantress. The Giant Queen uses her magic singing to keep the child from getting wild ideas and leaving home. Jack has to convince Daina to stop enchanting Cynnie, and use her song to try and trick the Queen instead, even though it jeopardizes her own life.

Something like that. And the idea is, people aren't toys. You can't trick and manipulate and hair-brained-scheme them into behaving how you want them to behave, even if you are bigger and louder and convinced that your way is right.

But they cancelled the movie so we'll never know now

Let’s be real. Rachel Zegler is responsible for her own actions and attitude and bad taste, and she’s hurt her own image.

But the Snow White movie isn’t failing because of Rachel Zegler alone. It’s failing because it sucks as a whole. It’s failing because these remakes are Disney trying to flash colors and names and sounds we recognize in front of our faces and go “we made the sound you like, now beg for a treat,” instead of making a good story, or at least paying genuine tribute to one. But their audiences (most of them) are not going to shell out for a bad product, and that’s it.

I hate how Rachel Zegler talks about the real Snow White.

But I also think if she were 100% respectful and wanted to pay genuine tribute to the original and really understood the character, it still wouldn’t have saved this remake. Because the story got changed. The effects are bad. The songs are worse.

I also think the company is totally fine subtly pinning the entire disaster on Rachel Zegler as a way to make it look like her fault and distract from the fact that they made another bad movie and this time nobody went to see it.

If they can get everybody talking and commenting about the 23 year-old who won’t stop running her mouth, and how “Even Disney is pulling her from the press tour!” then they’re painted in a slightly better light and then nobody’s talking about the fact that they made another bad movie. They’re talking about how insipid one actress is.

I have lots of posts defending the original Snow White or analyzing it or talking about why load-bearing parts of it shouldn’t be changed…but by far the one that gets the most clicks and reblogs is the one that’s focused on Rachel Zegler’s comments.

So Disney’s strategy is working. Yall would rather make hubbub about a 23 year-old girl’s immature lack of understanding than you would the bigger problem; there’s a whole company of executives and producers and shareholders who think they can buy your time and repurpose your nostalgia while they corrode the original—and then when it goes wrong they let you eat one actress alive instead of taking the blame, themselves.

Rachel Zegler is an actress. More than anybody, she is responsible for her own mannerisms and choices when it comes to how she presents what she thinks and what she supports. She’s responsible for her own actions. She’s not responsible for all of the company’s actions, though.

And again real quick—the reason any of it is important is because stories convincingly harness your emotions to argue for certain values. Values strung together make up a worldview. A worldview fuels your choices. And choices have eternal consequences, they make or break the world we live in and the world our kids live in. Therefore stories are a hammer in a storyteller’s hand: they can build or break the audience.

Disney’s been using the fact that they are a unique storyteller—they have the upper hand, they raised us on their older stories so our emotions from being kids are tangled up in their older stories—to take advantage of us. They’re using their “hammer” as a weapon to make them money, not a building tool to make the world better.

But watch Disney keep subtly pretending to “be on our side about the whole Rachel Zegler thing, boy isn’t she the worst?” until the next Live Action gets cast, when they cast someone vaguely conservative-leaning or someone who’s still amazingly liberal leaning, but has been coached to say all the right things about the original in press tours. So that bloggers and content-creators and influencers can start their reels with phrases like, “looks like Disney has finally learned its lesson in casting after the Rachel Zegler mistake!”

And that’s so not the point, also it’s super underhanded. Don’t fall for it.

and you know what else is interesting

Mulan does not exactly encourage belief in "luck" or "praying to the ancestors."

Every time Cri-Kee is referred to as "lucky" he's in an extremely unlucky situation, it's more like he's "lucky to have survived."

The Ancestors don't help Mulan at the Matchmaker, the Great Stone Dragon basically never existed (Mushu rang that gong plenty of times before breaking the statue, no spirit came out of there) and the Ancestors were totally wrong about how to help Mulan anyway. They're not holy, enlightened, or wise, they're bickering worse than Mulan's living, mortal family.

What is encouraged is selflessness and self-sacrificing driving discipline which creates strength...none of which is necessary to make you "worthwhile," because your dad already loves you, you can't earn love.

Food for thought.