My Reaction To This Entire Arc

why are the best mangas so niche. read show ha shoten it's about a pair of high schoolers striving to be the best manzai comedy duo in japan. what's manzai comedy? well hold on let me finish tying you to this chair so i can get your full undivided attention. your family is fine stop crying. manzai comedy is

not even joking, if the fifth movie comes out and a random white boy is introduced, I’m barging into the directors office with a bomb strapped to my chest

If you did not like her half time performance then don’t buy tickets.

scooby doo mystery incorporated is crazy bc can you imagine if you were raised adopted but you didnt know and your dad was super emotionally unavailable your entire life and then when you found out your dad wasnt your bio parent he immediately went to jail and your bio parents came into your life for the first time and after spending ~1 month bonding they ally with the evil german parrot who wants to kill you and wake up an evil entity and start actively working to help him kill you and wake up the evil entity. and then when the parrot succeeds in his plan the evil entity he was trying to awaken just immediately kills him and then it also eats your bio parents. and then almost immediately after it takes your adoptive dad out of jail and eats him too. and then you and your friends defeat the entity and you wake up in an alternate reality where the adoptive dad who you came to view as your real dad was just your football coach/principal and your evil insane parents were suddenly really nice and you can never get therapy for what you went through because reality reset and none of what happened actually happened in this universe. youve taken over a life that isnt yours and your memories of the past year or so are all fake they never happened. what the fuck.

Ben not seeing the love potion as malicious is actually so important to me. Because why would he think someone giving a love potion would have ill intentions for him? Sure, he's heard of the heroes horrific pasts but those are just stories of the ye ole' days the adults share. He's the result of the Happily Ever After, things like that don't happen anymore. All the evil-doers are put away. He believes all the Isle Kids have that same kind of experience. Of course he'd just think Mal was actually this shy girl who was too afraid to ask him out. He wants to see the best in her; he sees the best in everyone.

Mal, on the other hand, knows just how wrong it is. She never, ever corrects him on his assumption of her having a crush on him and being too afraid to ask him out. Because why would she want to do that? Making him understand the implications of a love potions just drags him into her world, into the Isle where stuff like that was always malicious.

Obviously I don't condone Mal's actions, and the implications of a potion that makes someone obsessed ("love") with another person is something from a fucking horror novel. I just think it makes sense (in-universe) that he'd never think that she had malicious intentions and that she would never want to tell him.

come on, chase, i know my brother is still in there. where is he, chase? where is my brother?

I wanna have something clever to say about these pics (mostly the way he's staring in the first one because oh wow,) but that just made me realize this is really genuinely the last moment that he actually has any clarity or agency as a character, allowed to make his own decisions.

After this scene, for the rest of this movie and even D3, he's Never Allowed to Disagree With Mal Ever (but expected to take the blame for her actions, somehow) and like. I just wonder if he knows that's how it's going to turn out. He disagreed with her once, she ran off, and all her friends think he's the bad guy. He's still compassionate and it's framed as a bad thing ("The Isle are my people too" vs. "Ben, Uma captured you".) And he tells Mal, "do what you need to do."

The choice is squarely on her. If she wants to leave, fine. If she wants to stay, fine. She already told him they were done on the Isle of the Lost.

Cotillion comes, and hurray! Mal stayed! But Ben's under a spell and everyone acts like he's to blame, like he betrayed Mal somehow. Carlos even implying he would rather have left Ben for dead on the island.

I just wonder, if maybe Ben took a look at all the circumstances and everything, and Mal's mastery of manipulation, and understood what his future was going to be: Agree With Mal, Always, or he would be hated.

Unless Mal made the choice to leave again, but she doesn't.

To the people saying "Jason wouldn't have jumped into tartarus for Piper, like Percy did for Annabeth" as a way to demean him. Jason, plunged into the sky from the grand canyon to catch Piper in the first few pages of the lost hero without even knowing who she was, and without the knowledge that he could fly. so he basically jumped to his death attempting to catch her. In the first few pages of his journey, he didn't mind dying to save Piper, and ironically, that's also what he did in the last few pages of his journey. Y'all just be making the most out of pocket claims abt jason fr

i find it really annoying that people are all like "omg ella totally pranked bridget on purpose as a plot twist since that was the only thing they changed in the past and they successfully stopped her from doing that"

did none of you listen to get your hands dirty?? or even pay attention to anything about ella's character at all?? or pay attention to the original cinderella fairy tale?? bfr

an IMPORTANT detail of the cinderella fairytale is that cinderella was BANNED from going to the ball by her unreasonable, evil stepmother. the vase gave lady tremaine a valid excuse to ground ella in the movie, but if not for the time travel intervention, she would have found some other reason to just ban ella from going to castlecoming to try and get her own daughters to snag a prince. at THIS point fay would swoop in and save the day, but because she's already been established as bad at magic, THIS is why she is limited by midnight - after all, if ella wasn't banned and went dress shopping with bridget, how would the glass slippers ever be so important that she ended up getting her daughter her own glass shoes

two, the villains ONLY crack open the evil cookbook to lord it over red and chloe to rub their loss in their faces, once they think the coast is clear because red and chloe have ALREADY dispatched merlin's security, and they got too self assured. without time travel, they would've been racing against the clock to get out before they were caught by merlin. they wouldn't have had time to crack open the book. so once they were FINALLY safe i believe they would've been more cautious. perhaps ulyana would have consulted the souls of the black lagoon, or maybe one of her friends snatched it out of her hands and froze themself opening it in their excitement. it doesn't matter, all we need to know is that ulyana figures out that she has to trick someone good into opening it to the page she needs. since we know that ulyana intended to pretend to be bridget's friend, i think it's possible that she herself tricks ella into opening the book by telling ella she wants to make amends with bridget, which makes the betrayal so much more intense for bridget and explains away why she'd be so angry at her in the modern day

Hyuse having to justify being canadian every other interaction bc he keeps saying weird shit is genuinely the one of the best parts of recent arcs