Hi! It’s Annie!
I’m back again very quickly after my last post! And “why” you ask? Because I just finished watching the finale of ‘The Amazing Digital Circus’ in movie theaters and, like everyone, I had a lot of thoughts. So naturally I turned to the internet to see what everyone else thought and to nobody’s surprise I stumbled onto a MESS. Let’s just say, a lot of people did not take the finale well, to the point where many many fans have been claiming that this last episode ruined the entirety of ‘The Digital Circus’ for them. And while I understand this, it really did make me think about my own experiences with a piece of media “ruining” a thing for me and what I believe constitutes a “ruining” of an entire thing due to one piece of media within a series of media. In the past, I’ve stated on this blog that something cannot be fully “ruined” when media that you still enjoy featuring that franchise still exists. However, after some time I’ve begun to feel a teensy bit differently. So in this post I’m going to explore some criteria for how a piece of media could be fully ruined for a person and some examples of media that has been personally ruined for me.
DISCLAIMER: While this post will have SPOILERS for some other media (such as the Disney+ series ‘Ahsoka’); there will not be DIRECT spoilers about ‘Digital Circus’. There have been enough leaks already. I might talk lightly about certain things, but there will be no large spoilers of any kind.
Criteria:
Upon further thinking about this, I have come up with three criteria I feel makes sense for a piece of media to be “ruined” for a person:
- The piece of media completely undoes previous work. To the point where previous work feels unwatchable because it no longer feels canonical.
- The piece of media completely changes the characterization of a character or event in the past as well as the present. Morphing past things into a strange new thing, where everything was leading up to this new and horrible reality. This makes watching of previous work a struggle still.
- A personal feeling. A feeling like your “comfort watch” or “comfort character” is no longer comforting for you due to where it all ended up.
Of course I feel as though you don’t have to hit all of these things for something to be “ruined” for you. Especially when it comes to having a personal feeling about it, which is more than enough. However, I do feel that most media that feels like it’s “ruined” manages to hit all three. So, I’m going to go into some of my biggest most recent examples of this.
‘Ahsoka’:
Not long before the ‘Ahsoka’ series was released, I put out a piece on this blog entitled “Sabine Wren Was Always Great”, with the intention of then reviewing the series afterwards. Obviously, I never did that. I couldn’t bring myself to. Because the ‘Ahsoka’ series not only wasn’t very good in my mind, but it tampered with the character of Ahsoka and it completely ruined the character of Sabine Wren for me. How? Why? How could one series destroy a character that has a complete other series of material to watch? Well, through all three criteria I listed above. The series continues my original complaints about the characterization of Ahsoka Tano from her appearance in ‘The Mandalorian’. She isn’t acting like the fun slightly sarcastic Ahsoka we know and love. Instead she just comes across as a generic Jedi master spewing Jedi ideals that she never believed in and even left the Jedi Order over. But I don’t think that in itself ruins her character. Luke Skywalker has been used in similar ways before and I don’t feel like it touches the original legacy of the character. For one, the legacy for both of these characters is much too strong; but for another, it doesn’t overshadow or seek to rewrite parts of the past of the character. While it is certainly annoying, it doesn’t really “ruin” the character for me.
Now Sabine Wren is completely another story and one that hit personally for me. Sabine Wren was the character who initially got me into Star Wars and she was really dragged low here. For one, they made her a force user. This doesn’t make sense at all. It completely seems to negate Sabine’s training with Kanan and the Dark Saber and it doesn’t make sense with her character. Now instead of the badass Mandalorian fight scenes we got with her before, we are reduced to action scenes almost exclusively with a Light Saber. It undoes all of her prior training while also undoing all the leadership qualities she learned through that training. That’s all gone here. She’s not in charge of anyone, she’s no longer affiliated with Mandalorians at all. So much character development; all thrown out the window. That’s the first criteria. They also completely skew Sabine’s attitude throughout her time in ‘Rebels’ to mean something else. Sabine does have an attitude in Rebels where she can take things too far and push people away. This in Rebels is meant to be because of a mix of teenage rebellion and not having the wisdom that comes with age yet as well as her past experiences making weapons for the Empire. Instead, in ‘Ahsoka’ this is made out to be her entire personality. It’s not as if she learned to open up through her chosen family in Rebels. Instead, that character development is undone and now she acted the way she did in Rebels because Sabine was always selfish. It wasn’t because she was young and traumatized, instead ‘Ahsoka’ takes the view that it’s because Sabine has always been focused on her own survival and she will take the selfish choice if it means she gets what she feels she needs. There’s the second criteria.
Then we cut to my personal feelings on the matter. It’s really hard to watch one of your favorite characters get gutted and then character assassinated. I wrote a whole post about how Sabine Wren has always been amazing, just to watch my social media feed fill with hatred for Sabine after every subsequent episode. And I couldn’t blame the people who hated her because I hated her too. I started out feeling like the Sabine Wren I knew would never do those things, but then the show began to purposefully draw comparisons to the way she was acting now to the way she acted in Rebels. It was the direct creator of Sabine Wren who originally made her saying, “No, this is why she was doing all that.” I watched Sabine leave Ahsoka Tano to die and had to take the explanation that this was apparently always who she was. This twisting of her entire story made it very difficult to return to her character for me. I’m not going to say I hate the ‘Ahsoka’ show overall. As I’ve gotten older I’ve found that my favorite Star Wars character has naturally changed from Sabine to Hera Syndulla. She’s a character I can relate to more now that I’m older and she was actually done pretty well in the ‘Ahsoka’ series. But I will never forget how I felt watching a favorite character of mine get torn apart on screen and online and that experience very powerfully removed her from being a comfort character for me.
‘Multiverse of Madness’:
I just did a full post about Wanda Maximoff, so I’m not going to deep dive too much into this right now. If you want to see more of a deep dive into where her character went wrong, feel free to go back to my last post where I go into it in detail! However, I do think that Wanda got pretty ruined by this movie. While I definitely think her past content is still watchable, specifically ‘WandaVision’, I do think that this undid so much from ‘WandaVision’. It completely erased her past grief storyline and all her character development from that. It also did twist her storyline pretty horribly in general. I don’t think her being evil was the problem; it was entirely the mischaracterization of her grief. She was definitely ruined for quite a lot of people and I would say, reasonably so.
‘Digital Circus’:
Now I kind of want to use the criteria from before and ask myself the question; did the finale ruin ‘Digital Circus’ for me? Because while I didn’t like the finale, it wasn’t for the reasons a lot of people didn’t like it. Major things happened to major characters; but none of those major characters were characters that I felt any personal attachment to. That was one of my major issues. This finale focused about seventy percent on one specific character and basically info dumping about them while thirty percent of the very last episode was left for literally every other character. Which means that almost every other character was kind of given nothing for the last episode where we’re supposed to feel satisfied about the ending for them all. Including characters that have been seemingly pushed to the background for almost every episode getting to this point. I felt like the ending made sense for them all; but I really didn’t like how we got there with some pretty bad pacing and with most of the characters getting the shaft. I also felt like quite a lot of the “answers” we were supposed to get in this episode were hinted at rather than given to us. It felt as though nobody wanted to commit to any one decision. Anything could be interpreted in any way. You could even imagine that it ended differently. In that way, I felt like it avoided taking any risks. It has also been clear from the beginning that the ‘Digital Circus’ has been a metaphor for mental health and I felt as though the finale didn’t even commit to that. There was this feeling of “Appreciate what you have even if you’re stuck!” and that was a message I loved. But I didn’t even think there was enough of that.
So does it cross off my criteria? Maybe. I do feel that the finale undid a lot of the mystery that made the show so intriguing before by not committing to or focusing on answers. That checks off the first box. I also feel that the finale completely changes characterization almost by not completing it for many characters. I feel like we were promised more than we were given, which does, to me, twist the story. There was so much I watched of this show where I felt like I was running towards some sort of finish line. Like, “I like this character but not quite yet because they need more character development,” or “I like this plot line but not quite yet because it needs more time”. And I felt like a lot of that ended in nothing. So that checks off the second box for me. Does it personally completely “ruin” it for me. I would say…kind of. I think the ending solidifies that I don’t think I would go back and watch this again. So maybe not necessarily in a dramatic way like my experience with Sabine Wren, but maybe in a more subtle way of me not thinking I’ll have enough motivation to return to the series in the future.
I want to reiterate that the most important factor of something being “ruined” is simply where you feel like it isn’t personally for you anymore. It’s lost that comfort. That you feel it was “ruined”. This is why I still feel like it’s ridiculous to say that something was “ruined” for everyone, because that’s such a personal feeling. You can’t say that a specific piece of media ruined something for everyone because for someone it didn’t. Someone out there loved it and thought that it was a natural continuation of the media that came before it. This idea of someone or something “ruining” a franchise can make sense in some scenarios; but far too often it is used to bully creatives and I absolutely still disagree with this. However, it is ok to say that a change that happened in a franchise didn’t work for you to the degree that it removed it for you from among your comfort media or your favorite media. But overall, that’s a personal decision. It doesn’t mean that the people who don’t feel that way aren’t valid. But it does mean that your feelings are incredibly valid. Everyone has had some sort of media “ruined” for them before. And it’s ok. Something else always comes along! And often the media that’s most important to you will never be ruined for you, no matter what happens or what the creators decide.
See you across the pond!
Sincerely, Annie
Oreos & Peanut Butter 