Yeah but when's it going to be answered? I'm still confused on it. I've only heard like 3 people my whole life see it as "bad" and it's on plenty of cartoons.. for children.
Or just make it a "funny" moment of caraway just clearing his throat, waiting for rose to remember what he JUST said. Rose is dumb as a brick, it wouldn't be ooc
It's actually kinda jarring just how much the main characters never talk like teenage girls like their supposed to. They talk more like shy 8 year olds that just gained the confidence to cuss
@@TroySpace Have you listened to how ANY of these kinds of people talk in general...? They act like they're the smartest people in the room and that YOU are stupid for censoring yourself around an 8 year old, because the 8 year old apparently cares about whatever sort of thing you might be talking about, and then they use phrases like "Memmies" (I.E. Memories) when being "Nostalgic"...
The sad reality is that these kinds of people (The ones who made the show) ARE 8 year olds... Emotional 8 Year Olds to be specific... They curse and cackle like chain-smoking hags around children but use words like "Memmies" (Memories) around their inner circle because they think they are just the cutest bubblegum princesses out there... But "Fuck X just to be clear"...
@@AnthonyGladbach The irony to all this is that 8 years olds want to look mature to be taken seriously despite being children. These are adults acting like children and expecting to be taken seriously.
I feel like everytime I listen to the dialog the characters themselves in the scene desperately want to leave. It gives off the feeling of like a school play, but if none of the kids were interested and just want to finish to go home.
@@shinysoda6 To me it sounds like they talk like they would tweet. As if their is no visible stuff for the viewer and we have to rely only on their voices to have the show work. Which would work if it was a podcast.
Now this is a plot twist i can get behind, ditch the poorly-done fantasy storyline and make it into a terrible soap opera with a dragon or two, sounds fantastic
I remember back when I was watching the first couple episodes with some friends, one of them came up with this idea that Caraway was actually Rosemary's father. The trans reveal kinda got them off track, but actually, given magic exists, I guess it could still work
Edit idea: Caraway tries to explain but Rosemary knows fewer and fewer words. Example: Caraway: "I'm transgender" Rosemary: I don't know that word." C: "I was born into a female body" R: "I don't know that word" C: "... But it wasn't-" R: "I don't know that word either." C: 🤨
Caraway: I'm transgender. Rosemary: Despite being a gen z teen in high school, I have never heard that word! Caraway: Wow, so realistic, and definitely relatable to the youth of today. Let me explain... Caraway: **Pulls out dictionary** Transgender, noun...
thats because the speech was clearly not for the character, it was for the viewer. which is why it feels so awkward and hamfisted, like an episode of Blues Clues where the guy looks at the camera and talks to the kids.
You know you've failed at writing fantasy when "main character is a gen z highschooler, of course she'd know what being trans is!" Is a valid argument for why a scene is bad
Caraway: "This is a picture of me and your mom" Rosemary: "Is this your sister?" Caraway: *looks at the camera* Caraway: "And you give me sh*t for explaining what transgender means in a cheap way? LOOK WHO I AM TALKING TO!"
They could have actually made it a funny moment, where Carroway clears his throat, Rose looks from the picture to him, goes, "oh...right. Sorry!" Sure, it'd make her seem like an idiot (and probably a 'bigot' to the perpetually offended)...but she is an intellectual black hole who makes those near her dumber, so...
I just realised that they could bring it up when he talks with Snapdragon about it, like that's a way better point to bring it up. As Snapdragon questions if he is a man or not and Caraway can share his experiences about it.
Omg, I'm glad I'm not the only one who does this! Sometimes I get my sister or a friend to read aloud a conversation between characters to see if it sounds believable or not.
what keeps bugging me is "everything hours" because it's NOT everything, it's "anything". Everthing hours suggests you'll do all the choices but anything means you get to pick
What bugged me about it was that, as well as the fact that the design of a free period is just easier to say. I mean if they really wanted to go more skill focused, then it stands to reason they would have all the staff participate by supervising. So instead of just a free period, it is a specific period of school where any student could go to any teacher to improve on specific abilities and skills. If it really was "everything hours" as the show says then Rosemary probably would have ran into the woods destroying trees for "training", run back to get the combat teacher after running from whatever the magical equivalent of a bear is due to the falling trees almost hitting the bear, and after the bear is dealt with Rosemary is sent off to the ethics teacher for being lectured on deforesting as well as just neglect of her surroundings. So "everything hours" just sounds dumb, I am not a writer but they could come up with a better name like " Self Improvement Hour" or "Guidance Growth" . Like just having an hour to improve oneself or as for "Guidance Growth" it is just growing/inproving one's abilities with guidance from a teacher.
@@MrAuthor3DS The naming conventions are one thing, my main issue is just how exposition and just opening up info either comes in large chunks or is not elaborated enough. It is fine if they want something big to happen, but generally the chunks of info should be in small clusters. The only other thing is just focus of writing, I mean Rosemary is worried that she lost her locket because apparently she did not want to lose the photo of cake inside it. Even though it is made clear later that the photo was her family eating the cake, it just felt like it was written a bit out of focus.
what's crazy is that, by changing when their transition happened it could easily be used to explain why rose didn't recognise her teacher as her mothers partner, because rose was looking for a woman and not a trans man. but then this is a self insert, so they had to transition when the author did.
That'd actually be a pretty good plot! Especially if Caraway was dressed much differently than he does now unlike looking like a carbon copy of caraway in the picture that is shown. It could also be made more interesting if caraway was helping her look for the woman before putting two and two together and figuring out she's talking about his friend and him
@@markthefan also transition magic could be entirely new but not openly talked about. The teacher hints that their masculinity is questioned, so why not make their transition a secret to anyone they don't trust as some people may not be as accepting.
Yeah I was thinking the same. Like if all pictures were of Caroway as a woman it would make more sense. Also could explain why she didn't recognise Caroway because all records of her mom's adventures were with a girl and suddenly this guy is like yeah that was me. Still wouldn't square with her mom never bringing up Caroway, but would make much more sense than it currently does.
@@Drbeattles"It'll be so awesome, he'll tell the pink bitch 'Im transgender', so that the audience can like, empathize with him being transgender! Why are there so many snakes under my skin?"
The lack of mentioning Caraway to Rosemary could've worked if Lavender and Caraway had some kind of fight, but HGS hasn't established that so we'll never know
That could’ve been one of the building blocks towards “Lavender works for the bad guys” which just somehow furthers the point that nothing in the show was given much thought beside Amaryllis and Snapdragon (to an extent)
I think part of why HGS is so enticing as a subject is because there are *so many* ridiculously simple changes that could have been made to improve the world building. Like, if they just thought about it for a few seconds, they could make it work and instead they just... didn't. Everything from the magic system to the characters to the world to the story all feel so specifically *not* thought out and it's fascinating.
During the caraway scene when he said "we used to be a lot like you and sage" he could've expressed how he's sad that they're not like that anymore OR EVEN say how the last time he saw her they had a fight and how he regrets that or something.. so many missed opportunities 😞
Alternatively, perhaps their relationship might not be as close and affectionate as Caraway thinks it is; that this was a lot more one directional of a friendship and Caraway warps it all with rose-tinted nostalgia...perhaps those flashbacks aren't exactly how they happened and he's not that as reliable of a narrator as the audience is initially lead to believe. That's another route that could connect to Lavender being revealed as one of the villains in the finale and how she apparently never mentioned him to her kids and how he never visited in their adulthood... Like we all keep saying, every single thing in this show are simple fixes that add way more depth and interest; and the more we look at it, how less and less attention was apparently paid to anything becomes way more glaring and obvious
Even that little scene where Rosemary enters Caraway's office for the first time could have been done more interestingly. Instead of just saying, "Wow, you have a lot of cool stuff in here!", it could have been rewritten to show Rose flitting from object to object in Caraway's room. Maybe she's poking at scrolls, peeping through giant glass jars, gazing at maps, maybe even an object she lingers on (like some sort of magic artifact that's hinted on in the future), and Caraway warns her halfheartedly not to open 'that cork from the potion' before she does and it explodes in her face. A small, funny gimmick that also shows a bit of her hyper side, since the show only pays attention to her hyper side when it wants to. During serious moments, of course, she's always serious and solemn and completely out of character
@@WobblesandBean Any writing talent at all. No offence to buddy, it's far more than I could come up with, but Christ from what little I see of this show I swear I could write something better, and I can't write worth shit.
I remember watching an old clip from some storyteller or animator from I think disney, that explained storytelling well. Never treat the audience as dumb because you will lose their attention. You don't give them "4", you give them "2+2", because its then on the audience to answer the question and they feel accomplished from answering it and thus you keep their attention. If you're shown a propeller, a picture of a father and son in front of a plane with a trophy, and a news clipping of an obituary. you're gonna know who you're looking at if the next shot is of a teenager wearing a pin with an airplane on it.
I think that's called "Chenov's gun" where you explain something or show it with some relevance and then you use that piece of info or prop in the near future. Writing when done properly it's just so interesting lol
One of the problems with the transgender line, is that it doesn’t really say or add much beyond stating the Caraway is trans. While not a perfect fix, non visual character traits that are story unrelated will always feel awkward to write, i can imagine a few things that could improve it. Firstly, if “new magic” were a relatively new discovery and neither wildly known and used outside the Guardian profession, an early dialogue exchange like this could have been made. Rose “wow you were so cute as a child, but now you look so different” Caraway “yeah I was a cute girl but I didn’t feel like it, so I changed that” Sage “that doesn’t sound possible” Caraway “you’d be surprised what new magic makes possible. There are many uses for new magic behind just shooting things. Most unexplored and not well understood. It is part of the guardians responsibility to change that” While still a bit clunky such a rewrite it would say so much more like this. Because while the information of him being trans is now also conveyed, the overall meaning changes from simply stating that character fact to “new magic is powerful and can do otherwise thought to be impossible things” which leads to further non verbal information like how it hints that the magic could be dangerous or have side effects we aren’t aware of. Which is narratively more important and also more interesting from a world building perspective
They could also have completely changed it that Caroway didn't actually transition until way after they left the academy and many of their legendary adventures and Rosemary actually knows female Caroway from the legends and all, but doesn't recognise male Caroway and that actually leads to needing to explain that. Would make a whole lot more sense with Rosemary not knowing/recognising Caroway despite her mom literally being besties all through school and actually partnering up for work for years upon years with them. Like even if they didn't meet with how big of a guardian fanboy Rosemary is they would have read/seen records of her mom's adventures considering everyone knows her mom and some are even familiar enough with her sword to recognise it on sight yet somehow she has never heard of Caroway. All that happening while Caroway was a woman would explain it all and also lead to needing to explain the whole thing in an at least somewhat more natural way. Hell could even say that they had actually met long ago but that at the time Caroway still was female presenting for that extra blowing Rosemary's mind aspect to the talk. Would also make more sense why Caroway is still experiencing more negative reactions from the transition if it was at least somewhat recent and not something that was done decades ago. You want me to believe a legendary guardian that transition decades ago and is not a high ranking teacher at the school, but for some reason people are still giving them shit for using transition magic?
Show, don't tell, and all that. World building and character development are a lot more interesting when they aren't just told with no real connection to anything going on.
@@kamikeserpentail3778 i prefer to file this under “non economic writing” Basically for the most part you want to get as much information out of a scene as possible to make it interesting and keep the tension going. The main exception being a climax, where you only really must conclude the storyline and little else. The “I am trans” scene does only do that. Sure it does a little of setting up Caraway and Lavenders friendship but that is neither important nor a big focus of the story, so it doesn’t matter. As a good example of economic writing I would recommend looking at Will and Jacks duel in the first pirates of the Caribbean film
I just realized, Rosemary not knowing what being trans means is even more dumb when you remember that Rose never questioned Anice being a lesbian and having a wife. Like, the show wants us to believe that Rose doesn't know what transgender means because she's young and all she knows is her heteronormative family, but she's not surprised by two women being in love and living as a couple. There should be a scene where Rose gets explained what being a lesbian means, especially since it's obvious Sage is a lesbian.
@@supermaximglitchy1 But for all Rosemary knows love just exists between a man and a woman (her parents). If she's ignorant about what transgender means, then she also doesn't know what the other letters in the LGBTQ+ community stand for.
I suppose they're banking on Rose being nieve enough to believe that the lesbian couple are just roommates, rather than just being in love. Though give that the couple and Caraway all go to the same "parties" *cough*they're swingers*cough* anything is possible.
@@DexDexter0 I doubt nowdays there's still someone who doesn't know. And in Rosemary's universe, it's pretty obvious everyone does. That's why that talk with Caraway makes no sense.
"This was *OUR* first everything hours." "Is ThAt YoUr SiStEr???" Wouldn't it have been better for Rosemary to just say "Ohhhhh... yeah, that explains your voice."? Or alternatively, if you really insist on keeping the "transgenderism for dummies" lecture in and keep Rosemary and oblivious zoomer, she could have said something like "You used to be a crossdresser?" Or "Wow, you looked so girly back in the day."
Caraway: „That was our first everything.“ Rose: „Wow, mom looks so fierce! …Wait! The other person is a girl, right? Didn’t you say it was a photo of you two?“ C: „That IS me, actually!“ R: „Wow, you used to look so feminine, Mr. Caraway! How cute!“ C: „Actually, I‘m transgender.“ R: … R: „… So you want to be a girl???“ C: „No, Rosemary, that’s not-„ R: „Oops! Excuse my choice of words. You don’t WANT to be a girl. You ARE a girl! Psychologically that is.“ C: … C: „Honey, mh-mh…“
The fact Rosemary always said "you were a girl?" when she saw Caraway with long hair to be so odd to me. If she's supposed to be kind of airheaded, surely she would say something like, "Wow your hair was super long back then!" Leading into Caraway correcting her if he wanted to. Besides, it is a little closeminded of the writers to write an exchange that basically translates to: "Boys can't have long hair, therefore, this must be girl" As if battling of gender stereotypes isn't something the show talks about constantly. With how this show represents transition magic it almost seems like its some foreign, unheard of concept, even if there's really no need for it to be. So if they wanted to go with Rosemary not knowing what it was, then her saying "you were a girl" makes even less sense, as it seems to be that she's suggesting that she knows what transition magic is and immediately assumes that Caraway went with it, even though she doesn't know what "transgender" is in the next scene. The more logical exchange in that moment would just be Rosemary assuming Caraway was always a boy, and that he just had long hair when he was a kid.
congrats, youve discovered one of the biggest underlying issues with the whole trans-trender phase society is going through. trans isnt a medical issue anymore, gender dysphoria, it's a personality trait that people adopt to fit in just like 90% of other personality traits people adopt. and the only way to turn a mental medical condition into a personality trait is to over exaggerate it's symptoms until you can say just about anyone has them. the side effect being the personalities of tomboy girls and feminine guys have been replaced with 'trans.' the worst part of that though is despite them using trans like a personality trait, is that they still push medical treatment for having the personality traits. it's literally 'hey i think if a boy likes pink, then he must be trans. so you should get hormones because you like the color pink.'
blud over there stuck in eurocentric christian essentialism 💀 bet they can't read beyond a 2nd grade biology book 💀 probably thinks intersex people are a myth too 💀
@@DarthZ01Yeah, I remember when people called Abby from TLoU2 (shit game) trans just because she was "muscular." And then they say you don't understand the game whenever you criticize it. It's annoying. They'll have a level of understanding below a five year old, but still treat you like you've got the IQ of the room temperature of outer space whenever you disagree with them.
TBH I don't even mind if a transgender character just openly says that they're transgender. Sometimes making things clear and without ambiguity is a good way to get info across too, *but* it was in a scene where it had no real relevance and had no deeper connection to the underlying themes/concepts of that episode. I definitely agree that the writers should have given that whole section its own scene rather than connect it to something unrelated. If a writer thinks certain information is important, they should treat with importance.
↑ This. I'm so sick of defenders of the show calling us transphobic for not liking this scene. I'm actually happy that a fully out and proud trans character is on the show. But..."I never sniffed her"? Wtf? The dialogue is SO BAD!
Here's the thing, this scene is actually completely redundant with Snapdragon's arc also being in the show. Think how much better it'd be if the reveal came then (preferably with less shit explanation)?
@@izzyj.1079 Yeah, I agree. I think the teacher opening up to Snapdragon specifically when discussing his issues could have been a good way to reveal that.
My issue with it was that that kind of terminology is way too modern for it to work in a fantasy setting (at least in my opinion). The whole "You were a girl?" thing was good enough. Even the stuff Caraway said about being born in the wrong body.
Caraway being best friends with Lavender is so much wasted potential. When she went missing, he could’ve gone to rosemary’s house personally to say that hey sorry but like your family member’s missing, I was there but I couldn’t do anything about it. And then rosemary would ask “if I become a guardian, will I find her?” Her dad could’ve been opposed to the idea, but rose would be determined enough to enroll into academy even without her family’s consent. It would explain so much in so little time I can’t believe they didn’t do simply that
yeah. during their conversation, caraway barely talks about lavender at all, only the exception to HIM bragging how great of being a guy. i don't think the flashback doesn't count. again, caraway just wants to talk about him and only him. And the way rosemary just immediately change the subjects like the whole conversation didn't happened. because it didn't.
I prefer to think that a lot or at least some people know that Lavender went evil, and they are deeply hiding that information, from Rosemary at least, as it would hurt her a lot. Maybe Lavender slowly started to make bad choices, so thats how her friendship with Caraway broke, leading to Lavender never mentioning him to her daughter. The dialogue kinda feels like it wants to imply that they used to best friends, but were not anymore
One thing you didn't mention is that Rosemary looks at "all the cool stuff" when she enters the room but conveniently avoids all the pics of HER OWN MOTHER just so the lizard joke works lol
If Carroway took a moment of offense or confusion (even if he quickly hid it) at the fact that Lavender never mentioned their partnership, it could've been a nice thread starting towards "Lavender Evil" at the end.
A scene kind of like that exists in Sky High. When it's shown that the main teacher of the sidekicks worked with the protagonist's father and a really famous hero, when the protag states that said neither dad nor mom ever mentioned him, the teacher is clearly hurt by that. It's a moment that really shows the darker side of this hero world and hint at some more negative traits of the dad. So this could have been used to great effect here too, but it isn't.
The problem is that the subtext that ends up implied by their writing isn't intentional. They don't even realise the subtext they are implying because they are so focused on how they had to get in their trans speech whether it worked or how it affected the actual perception of the scene as a whole. It's pretty easy to tell that such complicated subtext isn't implied since it isn't present anywhere else in the story. Even the few cases of subtext intentionally being implied are far more simplistic than two people having an entirely different type of interpretation and experience of their shared relationship. If it was intentional and the rest was written around that they might actually almost become ok writers.
@@InDeathWeLove no question. Not giving the writers any credit for it almost being a decent exchange. Everything else is bland and straightforward, so I'd expect no different here. It's just funny how close they can be to something competent, but they deftly avoid it, because they wanted to shoehorn in their message instead of having a plot-relevant conversation.
personally. a story about Caraway being the evil one is a more compelling story. Caraway creating the potion to change genders somehow not being common knowledge because it was created using some unsavory means. Lavender discovers the dark magic being used, they have a brutal fight with Caraway murdering Lavender then covering it up by saying she is simply "missing". Then a later point Lavender comes back with some scars and healed wounds because she somehow barely survived and spent the last few years recouping to confront Caraway. With the plan foiled Caraway is unmasked as the true head of the band of villains would have been harassing the citizenry during the season. You also find out that a couple of the teachers were in the know about his nefarious deeds and have been trying to kill certain students because they have potential to thwart the plans being conconcted, which is a permanent potion since the ones are currently a temp fix.
No, I think the whole project started like in 2016, Im not sure about that. Then they finished it between 2018 an 2019. Wait I do remember very well, is that they waited a year before releasing it
You know, I wanna see a show that starts off poorly made & full of bad tropes, like HGS, but with purposefully made snippets of god tier lore, but a highly renowned but ominous figure shows up, and everything is fixed in his path. Turns out, all the canon bad writing is cause of someone causing in-universe distortions... And it's the mary sue-esque mc who's causing them. Plot can go wherever after that, it just seems like a god tier twist to me. =
Kyousougiga, Flip Flappers, Mawaru Penquindrum, Abenobashi, 18if, Sarazanmai, Yurei Deco, Urahara... that one late episode of Evangelion... You'd be HORRIFIED how much ANY of these aren't even a joke. It's pretty much an entire thing.
@@WobblesandBean LOL idk, but more people really should. I followed the artist Kevin Bolk back in the early 2010's on DeviantArt back when he was still posting pages of the comic and basically saw it through completion. Definitely give it a read! Heck you might get more out of it if you're more familiar with Star Trek than I am lol.
Here's an idea to solve the "why isn't Caraway famous" question: make it so that transition magic had to be invented by Caraway (it can tie to the free period conversation by having inventing tranistion magic be the thing Caraway spent his free time on). He only managed to do actually invent transition magic later in life and finally performed it on himself at around the time of Lavender's disappearance, but it comes at the cost of all the fame because everyone else does not believe he is the partner of Lavender because her partner is widely known to be a female. This can result in wither the general public just assuming that Caraway is either the "real" Caraways twin brother who weirdly has the same name has is his sister and is trying to ride her coattails to fame or, more interestingly, the general public think that Caraway is some cringy attention-seeker with an outlandish story about inventing "transition magic".
It would explain away a lot of the societal backlash Caroway claims to receive(that we never really get to see but lets skip that) and the fact that Rosemary has no clue who Caroway is despite being such a major part of her mom's life from childhood all the way into adulthood. Wouldn't clear up everything, but it would make a whole lot make way more sense.
I had a better idea with Caroway, I know it's not a Trans allegory but it gives contrast to what Snap is. Caroway, like the Cat Girl who I don't remember her name, was an infiltrator and is the culprit of the disappearance of Rosemary's mother and how she feels guilty and everyone sees how the traitor who escaped then decided to fake her disappearance and permanently change her appearance. . He still feels guilty about what happened and always wonders "how people would see it if they found out who she was before even though she stopped being that same young woman who made bad decisions."
I have a fan theory that explains why Caraway isn't famous and it's similar to Guardian HQ's theory that Caraway's friendship with Lavender was one-sided. You know how there's pop stars so famous that they become household names? Like Beyonce, for example. Even though I've been listening to her since the Destiny's Child days, I can't name a single backup dancer she's had. Or backup vocalist. They have to be pretty skilled to keep up with her; so I'm sure most if not all of them are talented in their own rights. Still, unless I specifically look it up, I wouldn't know any of them. Typically only superfans and those in the industry would know who they are. Caraway was Lavender's backup dancer.
I think that is actually a great way that it could've been done, and in my own story there are a few people who hold some minor resentment towards the main character because they are talented and powerful, but they aren't known for that, they are known for being the friend and the sister of the main character.
After a bunch of HGS finally noticed the "uniforms" are not uniform. They're inconsistent on whether girls wear bows or ties. Actually it looks like ONLY Rose, Parsley and Rose's mom wear bows. If it was consistent it could've shown Carroway's social transition before going full on and Rose could've realized it herself from the pictures of "him" young. This is stupid.
One thing I hate about dialogue in any media is when a character says a line solely to beg the next line out of another character. In this show, it's like when Caraway says "you're so much like her." It's very obviously set up so Rosemary can say "like who?" and begin the discussion on Lavender. It's just so unrealistic. Unless someone misspeaks or is accidentally vague, folks don't actually talk like that, and understand they have to be specific in order to get their point across. It's just another example of the writers unnaturally forcing the story to go the way they want instead of finding a way to guide it there in a believable way.
rosemary is NOTHING compare to her mother. okay sure there are certain character tropes that wants to be like their authority figure, however --- the way I see rosemary's action; she acts like this guardianship is fun job, which btw it is not, that is why lavender is missing for 4 yrs. and she is recklessly irresponsible with flowering thorn (dumbest name evah), all she did just swings and swings and almost chop someone's head off plus blamed that person for not paying an attention. if rosemary TRULY the warrior like her mother wants her to be then, don't be an idiot. grow out of it.
A big issue with this entire thing is they have Rosemary move on from the trans thing immediately as a way to say "see, this isn't important, it's just a part of them". But that's incredibly disingenuous because the entire scene is set up to show you how important it was to the writers that you KNOW Caraway is transgender, making the message come across as incrdibly hollow. In terms of the story, it doesn't matter. But the them? That was the entire point.
@@user-vt5qg7hj1m I don't understand why you'd be telling someone unless you are hoping to enter a relationship, or it's medically related since that's when it would be important to divulge that information. Other than that the whole point is you want to be seen and treated as your desired gender; telling people you're transgender defeats the purpose. You know full well people aren't going to treat you as male or female, they're going to treat you as transgender. It's the fact that people now say they're transgender as some kind of badge of honour, status, or whatever that has made it so charged. It feels like it's no longer about wanting to be viewed as the other gender, it's about wanting to be viewed specifically as trans.
@@Ch1l1C0nCarnag3 whoa boy tell me you never met a trans person irl without telling me you never met a trans person irl First of all there's trans people that for some reason or another can't/don't want to transition, so in those cases you pretty much have to tell the people you meet you're trans if you want them to treat you as your gender Second of all ot's actually good to get it out early with people that you want as your actual friends. You'd be surprised just hoe much being trans affects your life, especially when you're early in transition. If you wanna talk to a friend and not feel like you're walking on eggshells or constantly lying, it's good to make sure they're not a transphobe Also so what? So what if people are honoured to be trans? I'm glad they are, actually. It's so difficult to just exist as trans I'm glad so many people nowadays are finding the pride within. Being trans is far more complicated than most of us could ever imagine, so as long as these people aren't hurting anyone can we please stop being mean to them?
@@user-vt5qg7hj1m I'm not telling anyone to be mean to anyone. I'm saying that being trans has been turned into a status symbol that is being worn around like a meat suit by people who just want the perks that come with being part of a minority group without actually being part of it. All the trans-people I personally know don't want to be associated with it because of all the BS that comes with the entire LGBTQ movement; and I'm not saying they receive harassment for being trans, they're tired of people thinking THEY are going to harass people because they're trans. It's being used like a beat-stick to attack anyone who disagrees with anything they say, saying just because you have a different view to a trans-person that immediately means you're transphobic. My viewpoint on the matter is shaped by the trans-people in my life, so if you think this view somehow makes it seem like I've got no experience with this topic then it tells me we associate with people on the far opposite ends of the movement. Which is fine since people aren't a hivemind, just because two people are trans doesn't mean they need to view it the same way. I've just put forward the viewpoint I am surrounded by; they don't want to be seen as trans.
@@Ch1l1C0nCarnag3 Trans people have to navigate more than just romantic relationships when it comes to telling people you're trans. People can see your pictures, jobs will ask for identification, new people you know will potentially meet old people you know, your family members will be confused as to who you are. That combined with the fact that not all trans people are stealth, a lot of fucking trans people wish they could, but it could be potentially dangerous and or not possible at all without hormones or any tools necessary to pass as a cis person.
I think the worst thing about Caraway's trans situation is that...he isn't trans for himself. What I mean is, his transgenderism doesn't visibly provide anything for HIM, specifically - all that's done with his transness is telling others how transitioning works. He doesn't have any struggles with his new gender, nothing clever done with it, none of that. Also, Snapdragon looks like an oblivious moron for not believing there was any way to "just stop being a guy". Never considered that magic could do that. Even after seeing a similar process, a physiological change, happen to Neppy Cat. And then seeing transformative spells - Olive's petrification spark-spell, and the merfolk forms from Redbud's rings - that alter things more drastically than sex-changing would (matter and species, in this case). Also also, the show had already long established Lyngarth as queer-friendly. Caraway's comfy enough to allow pictures of his youth in the academy's public hallways. And yet at the same time, we can clearly see the hand of fate pushing Snapdragon around. SPECIFICALLY Snapdragon. Nobody else gets hit with so many queer-related victimhood events besides Snap. It's just not very consistent. Y'know, in FF10, the grand majority of Yevonites frequently spoke ill of the Al Bhed, not just Wakka. That convinces me that hatred toward Al Bhed is a common thing among Yevon followers. ...In fact, one of those "hand of fate" events is so blatant in its intent (though only in retrospect, because it alone isn't very blatant), it feels like a different conversation replaced the current one - this being Sage generalizing guys and girls in Ep6. When Snap tells her she shouldn't be so hung up about Rosemary, she suddenly changes the topic from "I don't want Rosemary to be with Aster" to "no guy can ever friendship properly". She's saying all this to Snap's face, as if to specifically shame him for being a guy with feelings. Just like, in Ep11, Yarrow shamed him for "sounding like a girl", and Cal shamed him for costuming like a girl (which was Amaryllis's idea in the first place). In fact, if I saw Ep6 completely blind, I'd have thought Snap was sick of Sage generalizing everybody. But thanks to the overall show's intent, this just seems to prove Sage's sexist venting right, as Snap - someone who's willing to talk about feelings - is apparently not truly a guy. Just...ignore the previous episode where PARNELL was talking about his feelings, and got more progress by talking about them to Slime Boy (Sage was too busy figuring out New Magic to notice). Actually, another message that would've been more relevant to Ep6 is that if Sage's friendship with Rose is that deep, then she should be able to trust Rose to sort out her crush on Aster herself - but we get nothing like that. In fact, Sage doesn't even think about apologizing for annoying Snap about it until she sees Rose being snippy with Aster.
The irony of the Aster storyline and Sage's sexist screed being in the very same damn episode and the creators not going hmm we either need to not make Sage a raging sexist or we need to make sure we show that she is wrong will allways be stunning to me. Like you said she effectively eventually gets proven "right" because the only "guy" to disprove that guys can have healthy friendships turns out to be a woman by their own logic meaning they never actually prove Sage wrong. Also if you compare Sage and Aster then Sage comes across as much more clearly a sexist than Aster ever does. Like Aster could simply be hand waved away as a narcissistic asshole because he isn't just an asshole to women. meanwhile Sage is very specifically sexist yet somehow it gets hand waived away meanwhile Aster is irredeemable. I could kind of excuse it as merely slightly incompetent if these two storylines were literally episodes apart, but when it is in the same damn episode it is stunningly incompetent even in a show that is just constantly incompetent in just about every single way.
I don’t think a trans character NEEDS any story or conflict about them being trans. For example dane in fallout. They are nonbinary but it has nothing to do their motivations in the story that’s just who they are no different from a man being a man and woman being a woman
@@Xxsorafan Oh, that's not what I meant. Caraway brings up that he's trans and goes in-depth about the transitioning process - but even with all that focus on his trans-ness, he's not really trans for himself.
The writing in all aspects of HGS is of below average even in fanfic writing and the average there is already pretty bad. It's bad when hobbyists on their own without a budget are doing better than you are with a budget and a team behind you.
Gon going into his dad's line of work to look for him is characterized infinitely better than Rosemary with her mom. It's amazing how someone can be characterized long before they're introduced and how poorly-done it is here.
@@muzikveoyun37 It has nothing to do with its popularity. Remember, Hitler convinced the majority of an entire nation to be Nazis. So then in that context would you be so confident in asserting the same ill considered declaration? Of course not. Herein lies my exact point. HxH is a show that lacks critical thinking skills and doesn’t require critical thinking skills of its audience in return. It’s effectively the Naruto of its era albeit notably worse off due to its shambles of a plot and lackluster, often laughably cliche characterizations. In summation, you should be embarrassed. Though I somehow doubt you have the self awareness or sense of dignity to register such a notion.
I feel like there are ways to make Rosemary’s memory be less inconsistent while still seeming inconsistent (maybe it would have happened later in the show, but I doubt it). The solution is to give Rosemary some level of magical amnesia. Option 1: Say she overheard Lavender and Caraway talking about Lavender’s "last" mission, so Lavender and Caraway had erase Rosemary's memories to protect everyone. However, Lavender and Caraway are emotionally invested, so it messes with the amnesia spell - Rosemary forgot about the mission details, but she also forgot about Caraway and most of Lavender's adventures (which happened regularly during Rosemary's childhood). Since Rosemary didn't remember Caraway and Lavender had to leave soon, they told the father and brother not to mention anything to Rosemary about the Guardians, Lavender's missions, or Caraway. Additionally, Caraway would not return until Lavender did. Unfortunately, Lavender never returned. Option 2 (which I think I like better): This time we'll use Rosemary's nightmare as well as parts of Option 1. Once again, it's the last time Rosemary will see her mom before her year-long mission. Caraway had come to visit/convince Lavender to let him come with, but they ended up fighting and Rosemary overheard them. Rosemary had wanted to get one last round of sword training in with Lavender, but then ran away when she heard her mom and "uncle" fighting. However, Rosemary ran straight into danger, which Caraway and Lavender saved her from. This danger was directly connected to Lavender's mission, so she took the chance she had and disappeared with the monster/enemy while telling Caraway to protect Rosemary. After recovering from the battle and disorientation of Lavender's disapperance, Caraway took a passed-out Rosemary into bed. At first, Caraway thought Rosemary might be fine, but she was clinging to him and having nightmares, so Caraway decided to erase her memories of himself, the night Lavender disappeared, and Lavender's mission. Unfortunately, Caraway's emotional connection messed with the spell, leaving Rosemary with more memories and less memories than she should have had (resulting in it seeming like Lavender was gone on missions more often than she actually was, but Rosemary also remembers some parts of that last night). Then the story progresses with Rosemary more or less as portrayed in canon. For a non-amnesia trope, Lavender and Caraway could literally be on some many missions/missions take long enough, that Lavender is lucky to get to be with her family once every other month. Additionally, Caraway is a teacher while Lavender is a high-ranking/well-known Guardian, so there might only be a few times when Caraway could come around to see Lavender's family, especially if he wasn't close to anyone other than Lavender. Additionally, Caraway could have been doing research and experiments that further limited his time (while also giving Lavender more down time), keeping him from spending much time with Lavender and her family. As for why Caraway never visits after Lavender disappears - with the amnesia spell, his presence could either weaken/break the spell or otherwise negatively impact the spell. With the unfortunate timing of events, it would depend on how close he even was to being with. If he showed up a lot until Rosemary was 5-7 years old, it would be a mix of guilt/regret for not being around more and wishing he could do more/had done more to help Lavender on her mission. If he had shown up a lot up until Rosemary was 10/Lavender disappeared, it would mostly be about blaming himself for Lavender's disappearance. And as it seems to be with a lot of the story, if they had just taken more time to review the plot and see how things connected to each other, thenthey could have made a better story by keeping the good pieces of framework while taking out the extra pieces that seemed nice, but didn't actually make sense where they were.
Amnesiac Rosemary is such a cool idea, like imagine the following scenarios: 1) Mandrake disguises as Lavender and tries to convince Rosemary to join the Triumverate by telling her a story the real Lavender told her as a child. However, the amnesia spell prevents her from remembering this story and leads her to question "Lavender"'s authenticity. (And rightfully so, but for different reasons) 2) As it turns out, the healing water from the cave reverses magical amnesia (if amnesia = damage to memory, and the water heals all damages). When Rose and friends enter the cave for the first time, Rose jokingly play around with the water, gets a bit of it on herself, and boom! Turns out half of her childhood memories were lies and she had somehow lost another half of them.
7:45 How exactly does pottery, ballet dance, or drawing, help with a physical adventure in the realm of ice dragons? "Hold on Mr. Dragon, you're being very rude attacking me when I'm not done sketching out your portrait yet".
It would have been cool if the purpose of this was to show that Guardians are more than just monster hunters; that they are, or at least can be, also cultured individuals who participate in society in a lot of ways. It could show that there could be "Guardians" that are fighters/defenders, but also "Guardians" of magic or arts or knowledge. That taking one's vows is deciding what kind of Guardian you want to be, and that your extra hours are where you get to dedicate yourself to that Guardian path. ...... But instead it's just there because magic school slice of life stuff.
Thank you! Finally, somebody brought up just how stupid that word is! “Swordsing?” Seriously? That hurts my soul. Call it ‘swordsmanship’ if you MUST call it anything! Also, what do you mean they “cover broad stroke stuff?!” Caraway is admitting right here that they don’t even bother properly teaching the kids. How has no one died from just standing in this asylum?
I can kind of understand Rose not knowing who Caraway is in relation to her mom, since my parents never really introduced me or my sister to any of their friends when we were growing up. But it is still strange. I feel like the show was going for the whole sort of 'Oh, so many people knew my parent(s)' that Harry Potter went for but didn't execute it that well.
Problem in HGS is that Rose is actively researching guardian stories and her mom, it's one thing for Lavender to never mention Caraway. Another for none of the books or reports or tabloids to mention him. Or her dad, who should know Caraway and know he is working at the school.
Made in Abyss did this concept beautifully. The MC is the daughter of a legendary explorer/warrior who went missing (at MC's birth) and MC goes on the same journey to find her. The mother is depicted in a flower garden similar to Rose in this show, and Rose seems to not remember much of her mother even though she went missing only 4 years prior to the start of the show. There are so many similarities that I feel like the creator of HGS was likely influenced by Made in Abyss and wanted to copy it.
Harry Potter pulled that off well partly due to Harry's upbringing keeping him from knowing anything about his parents or their world, with no way to access that information either. So his ignorance, and then surprise upon learning all this, makes a lot of sense. High On Spice is lacking in sensible reasons Rosemary wouldn't have access to this information. Though on the note of cross-media comparisons, this situation reminds me of the movie Sky High. There, Will (protag) never knew about his superhero father, The Commander, having a Sidekick - Mr. Boy - that he worked with for a time before meeting and teaming up with Jetstream (Will's mom). Except in Sky High, that is used by the story. It is utilized as fuel for running gags - namely, how self-absorbed The Commander is (just kind of forgetting about Mr. Boy, never mentioning him at all for years) and how much of a joke Mr. Boy himself is. It's also used to highlight the darker side of this setting's hero society -- in particular, the divide between Heroes and Sidekicks/Hero Support and how society as a whole views them. That Heroes are the cool people and Hero Support are viewed as losers/outcasts, little more than servants of the Heroes they are paired with. That this dynamic will not fade with high school, but define the rest of their lives. Even someone who fought alongside one of the country's most famous heroes is not recognized or taken seriously by anyone. Which creates a pretty bleak outlook for the Sidekick class... and makes the ending that much more satisfying, when the Sidekick class members who saved the day get proper recognition for their efforts. ... Meanwhile in High On Spice, the fact that Lavender had this wizard partner who Rosemary had never heard of was just a poorly thought out point that doesn't really add to anything.
@@Tijopi11Thank you, this is what I've been saying! There's so many parallels to Made in Abyss that clearly shows how many of these concepts can work. It can't be exactly the same due to the slice of life wanted in HGS that isn't really present in MiA but they could've taken some cues about the white whistles and such for how guardians work at bare minimum.
Dang, you've really picked apart every little facet of this show, at this point, I'm surprised you haven't just straight-up remade the entire thing just to spite the original creators,
What gets me is that not even a world where magic literally exists can just turn you into the opposite gender, you have to take the magical equivalent of hormone therapy once a month. Which feels like there SHOULD just be a way to do this better in the story, and honestly seems to sort of say to the audience that even in a magical fantasy world, they can't just transition magically and be done with it.
I would be cancelled for this if I had any sort of online presence.. If they insist on keeping the monthly potion in there, then it can be used to hint at the dark side of New Magic. Maybe Caraway tried just using a spell to transition, but it kept wearing off/reverting, because New Magic goes against the natural order of the world (or something like that), so Caraway made a potion to maintain the transition without continuously casting the spell. And to keep it consistent, make it clear that the mermaid rings require the ring being on to hold the transformation (maybe Rosemary or Parsley loses the ring during the battle and starts drowning). This would work really well if we wanted to keep the plot thread of the Rot being tied to New Magic, showing that New Magic is able to do all this awesome stuff because it's really a corrupting force, and using it has a negative effect on the world. ...or just drop the potion thing, that could work too.
@@insulttothehumanrace3807 Yeah I get they want to create something for the audience to engage, but this is a work of fantasy, surely it feels limiting to be told that even in a world with real magic, you have to take hormones every month.
I mean, if you could literally transform yourself into an opposite gender, you wouldn't be trans person. You would be a woman, or man, if you transformed from woman. So guardian spice has to limit the capabilities of magic to make their trans story work within modern trans experience. Which is ridiculous handicap already. If people could change their genders, there would not be transgenders around, because everyone could be exactly what they want to be.
I was reading this story. Baiscally a bloodborne fanfic with heavy monster-fucker influences. Usual "man meets werewolf, they go from enemies to friends" type stuff. Well late in the story, there's a part where the hunter and wolf are visiting a blind old woman. The wolf comments that, due to her huge and beastly body, she doesn't feel suited for "women" work. Then this old woman, who hasn't been relevant save for one chapter some time ago, goes on a little talk about how gender is performative and that if she feels like a woman, she is. In a bloodborne fanfic. It just took me right out of it for how I could practically see them turning towards the imaginary screen and saying it directly. It's so out of place.
@moonrains5876 Yeah, when Cleric Beast came down from that tower, onto the bridge, and screamed "I'm a trans woman" at the top of her lungs, it was the most gender comment of all time. Truly, the most comment we needed in the entire world.
writing this as i go through the video. tbh the voice acting also affects the overall dialogue, but the writing affects the voice acting. the voice acting sounds so unnatural because the actors have to say things that are unnatural, and its difficult to make that sound normal. its like trying to do good voice acting in a language you dont understand, its next to impossible. 14:40 Carroway laughing here id say is passable. my grandparents laugh at my everyday behavior constantly. 21:10 the fact that Crunchyroll decided to age-up the show was def one of the leading factors that killed it. if it stayed a kids show i imagine it would do pretty well, at the very least things could be explained away by it being aimed at young audiences.
hgs can't seem to decide if being trans is just a casual part of the worldbuilding no different from turning into a mermaid, or if being trans is a Big Deal Actually and transitioning makes you Brave and Cool. I've seen good stories that do either, but no good stories that do both
The irony here is the show could have made it seem like gender doesn't matter, not just with the teacher. But with slime boy and the shape shifter. Much like the slime, Rimuru, and shape shifting sphere, Fushi, (from to your Eternity) both are technically genderless and can be anyone and anything that they feel like. Rimuru is just sees them selves as male because he was a man in the past. While Fushi uses the first boy's body, because they made a promise that he can travel the world and learn new things. This was Fushi keeping that promise for the boy. Without realizing it. But with slime kid and shape shifter, they could have been ambiguous with their gender. So the teacher being a transgender would be... You know... NORMAL.
You may be interested in the symbiotes from Star Trek. This is a theme that comes up multiple times with the Dax symbiote in Jadzia Dax since Dax was previously known in a male body by other characters and spends the show in two female bodies.
Yeah, this is why "Transgenderism" doesn't really work in a fantasy setting, because when you have shape-shifters, body snatchers, genderless creatures, and magic that can literally do anything changing one's gender becomes a non-issue.
@@robinthrush9672 That's another great example. They could even said that the new magic, the teacher uses to change their sex, is based off studying these two races. This would have given extra points to world building, knowing that the teacher observation them so people like him, who can't change freely, can change his sex as well. It's honestly wasted potential at how everything was there to make it all feel natural.
Funny story, in any system where you can change gender (and form) easily, no one would actually care enough to call it 'transgender'. It'd just be, "so yeah, this is John. He calls himself Jenny now, but you know how it is with wizards and their potions. We don't care, he had three kids to continue our bloodline so we just tolerate him. Hey, Jenny, I see you've lost weight!"
Well, in society with fluid gender, nobody really care about pronoun, except those who have pronunciation fetish, like those people who insist their name pronounced "Mack-dow-nald" not "Muck-doe-nald"
I never truly paid attention to what he says till this video "Im trans" ok fine, we understand it, kids dont yet, so explain "Means I was born in the wrong se*/body so I changed" Ok so far so good How tho? "I use a spell to change my form" cool, makes sense so far "And I use a potion to keep that spell active" THATS NOT HOW SPELLS WORK, if anything thats a Manapotion as the spell would continously drain your magic but that is not how the spell SHOULD work cause whats the point of transforming if its only temporary?? Also youd need to chug that potion on the daily if not 4 times a day cause that aint a small fear to change the anatomy and biology of your own body. Mans not a transitioned woman, Mans a Man for all intent and purpose.
Some fixes that could be done. Have Caraway mainly talk about "Everything Hours", and at some point comment that Rosemary reminds him of her mother, then show her the album and let the pics show how close they are, with maybe a few comments here and there. Have Rosemary question why no one talks about him, since everyone apparently knows her mother but he doesn't seem to have that same fame. Have Caraway maybe dodge the question a bit. At some point during this, have Rosemary flipping the pages to the earlier portions that show Caraway as a girl. Even without realizing the emphasis on LGBT in the series people would guess from the context that there's something up with that girl and Caraway, maybe even guessing he's trans, and those that had *somehow* managed to put together the theme would guess immediately. On top of that, bringing up the fact that Lavender's done a lot of the same stuff as Lavender but doesn't share her fame would raise possibilities of discrimination. With just that, things would be made more subtle, the scene would be more focused, and we'd be given at least some actual indication of the discrimination Caraway alludes to later. This would also imply that transition magic, while named, isn't exactly as widely accepted as initially apparent.
Loved the explanation at the start, of how our brains can unconsciously identify when something doesn't seem quite right, and that's exctly how I felt after seeing the scene, the dialogue just feels ... off, like aliens trying to imitate human conversations.
In a large portion of HGS is it way too obviously they are writing to get to certain lines and points they want to get to. Like you can tell just from hearing it which line they had decided had to be part of the scene and then how every other line was bent and twisted to try to get to that point no matter how clunky the end result ends up being. Now almost every writer has a direction they intend a scene to go in, but this comes across as a novice writer who is holding on so firmly to how it HAS TO GO even when they run into problems with it not working. Then rather than making some slight changes to some of the steps they had decided had to happen they just soldier on refusing to make those adjustments.
I think the funniest thing about the dialogue is the weird and unneeded swearing. This show was definitely meant for kids, but they got told they had to age it up, so the only thing they did to do that was add a couple of awkward swears in the generally kids show sounding script, coming out the mouths of characters that are basically written like kids.
Ikr, and I don't feel like they were pushed by a powerful network to make them add things to push up the age rating all of a sudden because they didn't want kids to be watching this so that there'd be less backlash over normalisation of homosexuality or something
Wait. This setting as a demon world? I mean, that makes sense with the demon teacher lady and all but that just hit me like a brick to the head. Namely, where the hell does this demon world fit in with the rest of the world building?!
Ok, on the everything hours list of whys, I think it does explain in the show the answer. Prof. Dretch mentions that they'll have to use the skill they choose in an adventure set by the teachers throughout the semester during that time. In other words, a "practical test". So the teachers would need to know what the choice is and the scope would need to be limited to devise standardized testing. I'm looking forward to the art students' survival ratio.
Good video, it really does go in depth to explain not just this show’s lackluster writing, but the use of dialogue as a whole. Your comedic quips - especially the Door Monster reference, that joke a shocked laugh out of me - did well to keep me invested and not let the video get tuned out upon other distractions.
I'm so glad these reviews, video essays and critiques exist because I had someone recommend HGS to me by saying it was kinda like The Owl House for adults. I'm grateful not to have wasted my time and kept my expectations from being assaulted 😅
C: this was our first everything hours. R: *looks confused. Looks at picture back at Caraway.* C: new magic brought new solutions to the world’s problems, and ours. *smiles.* R: *smiles before looking sad.* i wish it could tell me where she is.. C: *sad smile.* yeah..i wish that too.
what kills me is how few good queer and especially trans stories there are when they basically write themselves. like, figuring yourself out, changing as a person, fear of being rejected by society and/or those close to you, keeping secrets, living life differently with different people, potentially being ashamed of who you are and having to accept yourself... that's the queer experience right there, and think about how many stories have these as their core elements. to the point that it's become a running joke in trans communities that trans people see everything as trans allegories. being queer *is* a story, how is it so difficult for people to write stories about being queer?!
For one there is a difference between people who actually suffer from gender dysphoria and retards who jumped on the bandwagon for the attention turning the whole issue into a fad. Second is that if you actually talk to someone who suffers from gender dysphoria, their entire life's goal is to eventually make the full transition so that they pass off as Cis. Their mind and body finally align to the point where they can no longer be considered 'trans' and just be a normal person. They don't want to glorify their journey. They want to be 'normal'. The idea of 'trans eraser' is a self-fulfilling prophecy when the goal is to finally become whole and 'normal'. You are doing them a disservice by constantly pointing out how they are different when they want to be 'same'. See the latter half of point 1. Third and finally, 'trans' is just the latest flavor of the story of 'self discovery'. It is literally no different than any other story about learning about the self, what makes you different, and accepting that part of you even if some people around you don't. This runs HARD COUNTER to these fad chaser's belief of an 'all or nothing' acceptance. As you've pointed out, the 'journey of self discovery' comes in many flavors. Trans don't have exclusive claim to it. But for some reason the Transactivists and 'allies' do not understand this. And this has far more to do with their narcissistic attention seeking behavior than any real story being told. Again. Latter half of point 1. No surprise that people in universe don't understand the concept of transsexuals or transgenders when there is a literal magical shortcut that bypasses months to years of dangerous medical procedures into the trans holy grail of a pill they can take to become their ideal form instantly and no one ever has to know they were once crosswired. That shows a bad setting when you have people who can literally transform into anything or warp reality and people get surprised when it's literally an everyday thing. "Oh look there goes Barry on his third day as a dog." "Golden Retriever?" "Yep." "Must be Thursday. Handy you can set your calendar by what breed he is that day. Means it's my day to go pick up the kids." "How is your youngest?" "Still wants to be a dinosaur when he grows up. We're not letting him have access to that incantation until he's 12. We learned that lesson the hard way with the second eldest and the 'Unicorn' incident."
Side effect of the LGBTQIAS2+ Community insisting on the unspoken rule that straight people HAVE NO RIGHT to write queer stories because "they'll never understand what it feels to hate yourself for being you and be discriminated and be unable to love the one you love and have power in society", resulting to the most stereotypical and degrading portrayals of queer people written by the LGBTQIAS2+ community by 80% of the time. It baffles my mind that most of the time the queer characters written by LGBTQIAS2+ are sex pests in comparison to the queer characters written by "istaphobes"-- mostly leaders, homemakers, family men, soldiers, etc. where their sexuality is mostly an off-hand because it doesnt matter in comparison to their entire personality.
> that trans people see everything as trans allegories. Damn I'm glad it's not just the trans people I know that do this XD Honestly though, I think there is a bigger issue with like LGBT media as a whole. I feel like a big part of the problem is when people try to write stories about queer characters, they end up making then exclusively about the person's gender/sexual orientation, and forget to actually add an interesting story outside of that. I feel like the best stories about LGBT characters are things like "I love you Phillip Morris" or "Cloud Atlas." Those stories have queer characters, but they aren't the be-all end-all of the plot, they're just the actors playing out a greater narrative.
@@nattteo ok there's a good reason why it's a meme that trans people see everything as trans alegories. however you can still write good queer stories where the LGBTQ+ aspect is at the forefront. like Heartstopper. you can write a good story WITH trans representation as much as you can write a good story ABOUT being trans. it's mostly a matter of... writing good stories. i think what you said is true, but in reverse: when you see a bad story about queer stuff, you only end up remembering "that guy was gay" because everything else was shit. in a good queer story, you also remember and think about how fun the story was or how interesting the characters were or how cool the action looked. the good gay romance that was also in that story is just another cool thing.
First time coming across this channel (possibly), but not the first time experiencing snippits of this show and being confused about how some of these lines got through to the final production. The "I'm transgender" scene is so strange. It treats its audience like they're idiots, despite the audience being the exact people who know who trans people are and what transitioning can mean for someone. The whole point of rosemary finding the picture of lavender is to initiate the conversation to learn more about what her mother was like. It could have been much more organic to have caraway say something along the lines of learning to become comfortable being himself around lavender, which is enough to explain his transition with the visual aid of his photobook as well as tell us a bit about the positives of lavender's character. Why did the writers feel the need to have him explain himself being transgender as well as the magic system for transitioning? As an aside, why did the writers settle on a magic system that forces people to keep up their desired appearance in regular intervals as oppose to letting them change themselves indefinitely? Baffling choice. Edit: just caught the follow-up video, great job on that! The story actually became intriguing.
For me it was mostly just 'snooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooore' like I was nodding off even with the awkwardness to examine. Some things can be so bad its good but this def had moments of 'this is bad and not good just I am bored.'
This scene but better: R: "Is this your sister?" C: "It's me, actually. I'm trans." R: "Woah, I've never seen transformation magic done in real life before, I've only ever read about it." C: "It's one of the many types of magic you will learn more about here, but that's not important right now. What's important is your Everything Hours-"
As a trans guy myself I think that the "I'm transgender" scene is the definition of the "shoving it down your throat" conservatives are always talking about. I want trans characters who are normal people. I don't want to be preached to like I'm six years old. It also feels almost transphobic in a way how all of the other male characters are portrayed as awful but "not the TRANS one because he's not a REAL MAN."
Agreed on all your points. And hell, I wouldn't mind if they DID do a scene where he goes into "Actually, I'm a trans guy, I transformed with magic because I wasn't comfortable with my body", but not HERE. This scene is about pink girl, both finding out more about her mother and finding her own path in life, any big character revelation should be related to that. Then, once we know the Caraway character better, they can do an episode or just dedicate a section of an episode to his character and backstory where he goes into detail about that, maybe dropping some hints in previous episodes, just putting this revelation in a place where it actually makes sense instead of just impeding the plot. There's nothing wrong with trans characters talking about being trans, the problem is just bad writing.
I like the subtlety of "As 3-Dimensional as a stick figure" as an insult here, because a stick figure is barely even 2-dimensional, which is about what HGS is
Because if it was it would break the trans and hormone metaphor even more than it already does. It's already questionable that in a world where magic can make you biologically another sex simply by taking a potion once a month that being trans would have the same status as it does in our world. If you added that it was a you take a potion/spell once and you are permanently the other sex it would take away what little of the metaphorical value that is even left.
@@theuncalledfor I’m not saying they’re good reasons I’m just saying why the creators would never do that and insisted on it being this way because they NEED that metaphor to be in there. So even if it makes no sense and actually harms the world building they are going to include it anyway.
Can’t say how on a show that makes rwby look like Shakespeare, but I will say this: when you have to take something monthly to stay trans, then that type of magic is bullshit!
Being one of the few people who have actively watched and re-watched the show, it's truly wild how constant this problem of dialog twister is. Doesn't matter what the previous line is, the next line will bend over backwards and end up not making any sense why these two phases would logically flow into each other, because all the writers are focused on is "how can we wrestle against the character writing in order for us to get to *this* line?" I will say I personally quite liked that line in this scene about how Rosemary’s sword still has all the battle marks from Lavender but Rose is against leaving any herself. It's a good bit of character writing, as it paints a picture of a reluctant warrior who is intimidated by the legacy around her sword to the point of taking extreme care of it and not even using it in battle yet. Explains why she may freak out so much if even the pommel inevitably gets chipped. I would even defend it if it wasn't tied to Rose, because let's be honest it really doesn't go with *her* character who would whip out her sword against random flies... And the fact that once that glimpse of good characterization dialog is finished, they immediately drop it like it shouldn't matter, like they just wanted some fancy dialog lesson for this one moment. Ugh... why must they keep throwing out their show's potential like it's water on a hot city pavement... Truly, it's fascinating how far you can rewrite this show by having the dialog extend and impact past/more than just the one scene that they dumped it in... It's like they were playing a game of telephone with it I swear 🙄
Caraway: What have we learned Rose? Rosemary: That I don't need to change and continue to be a spazz? Caraway: And? Rosemary: Errr, that I am going to be a great warrior like my mom no matter how much of a fuck up I am? Caraway: Ok...And? Rosemary: Errr, uh, swordsing....? Caraway: I'm transgendered Rose.
the way someone talks about their transness can be written as a reflection of their personality, and I think this should have been considered more when writing Caraway. he talks about his experience so blandly. on the rare occasion that I talk about my trans identity, I usually say "I was born a chick" or "back when I was a sheila" or "back then, when I looked like a girl" and I think that says something about my relationship with my current appearance and past identity. Other people I know say things like "when I was female-passing" or "when I wasn't out of the closet" because they have different feelings re: their past selves. hell, even small things like whether someone uses the terms "amab/afab" "mtf/ftm" or just "born a girl/guy" can say a lot about how they relate to these words and ideas. caraway just kind of has no personality. it's like they were afraid of making him less than perfect representation, and because of this, they made him vastly uninteresting.
I mean it's pretty clear he was there entirely to handle the we need a trans message portion of it(besides the general creator self insert part of it). This could have worked, but when you have an exceedingly incompetent writing team it just makes the whole thing worse because the only thing worse than a bad writer is a bad writer that is trying to force in one of their pet ideas/concepts into the script no matter what. This means that in the end Caroway's personality is being trans(which isn't a personality to any sane individual). Aside from that he is just written to be as bland and inoffensive as possible. I guess maybe this is because showing a trans person actually not being flawed would be negative to the message despite humanising them actually being something that would help people empathise with the character more making the message itself more salient. However that would require them to be good writers which everything in the show disproves.
"it's like they were afraid of making him less than perfect representation, and because of this, they made him vastly uninteresting" And that right there is my whole issue with the current trend of obsessing with representation. Writers are no longer creating characters with dreams, struggles and goals, but rather cardboard stand-ins for whichever group to self-insert into. And because they're stand-ins, they can't give them flaws because then the self-inserting group would immediately assume the writer is painting their whole group with such flaws. And thus we get anti-characters, empty vessels for shallow people to project themselves onto instead of characters for people from all walks of life to relate or be inspired by.
True but I’m also sick of the trans representation where the trans person is just always in a struggle always mopey always pitiable. My fav trans character is hibari kun. She’s not perfect but she’s confident in who she is and never lets anyone tell her otherwise.
Everything in between "This was our first Everything Hours" and "I'd give anything to know where she is right now" could be replaced by a shot or two of the photo album showing Lavender and Caraway over the years and get the same message across.
You know, if it had been done well "everything hours" could make sense and even have potential (and another name, something more like "specialty hour" at a quick idea). The explanation makes it sounds like free time, but also mentions that the students only have a week to choose what to do there. So to me this is basically "elective time", where they train a personal skill, something outside their usual classroom range but you *are* expected to train something in it with a teacher that is more focused on that specialty. If you took another fictional school as an example, FF8's Gardens, they have classes about GFs and magic (you need to use GFs to be able to use magic), physical fighting and actual classroom classes (we start the game after the last class and go right to the exams). If you gave them "everything hours", I assume it is where they learn their exclusive skills. Sure, Squall's gunblade triggering and Zell's combos count as close combat, but they are also more specialized so they would be like Rosemary's "swording". And Quistis learns Blue Magic from enemy items, Rinoa is basically a one-dog beast tamer, etc.
The only remotely creative point in this conversation is how knicks and scars are how you know a weapon has seen battle, and that point was made much more effectively in the _Legend of the Guardians_ movie, and they actually had the balls to use a veteran warrior's heavily scared face to illustrate the point.
My problem with the whole "I'm Transgender" scene is not that Caraway points out he is trans, but the ENTIRE conversation not only leaves nothing to the imagination but also changes the subject of Lavender completely, which makes him out to look selfish. If he said something along the lines of "Let's just say I've had a few changes" after Rosemary questions him being a girl, not only does that allow the audience to put the pieces together themselves, but also adds a comedic yet charismatic dialog to Caraway. Plus, it'll make it so the subject isn't changed. But hey, that's for competent writers to know.
Caraway's voice is just...it's so unprofessional. I get what type of voice they were going for, but it's way too...whispy and mumbly. Voice acting should be clear and easily presented.
As someone who is trans, this scene always hurt to listen to. It's so unnatural, and not how we typically interact with the world. Maybe newer trans people feel safe to just share all of their life history with people, but us older trans folk... that takes time. Lots of time. And trust. Because you never know who will attack, murder, or call the police on you. I went four years at my current company before I told people I'm trans, and even then I only bring it up when it's relevant to what we're discussing. I think it would have felt more natural if it had gone: Rosemary: Is that your sister? Caraway: Ah... no... that was me... (showing some discomfort with discussing it, uncertainty of sharing this information, etc.) Rosemary: Really? You were a girl? Caraway: ... Once upon a time, yes. It feels like a lifetime ago. Rosemary: Cool! How did you change into a man? (I assume Caraway is a man, I don't know these characters lol) Caraway: With magic. I take a potion once a month to perpetuate the effects. Something like this would have felt significantly more natural to me.
Remember the scene in Owl House where Luz says “I’m homosexual” and the other scene where she says “I’m Hispanic”. You don’t? That’s because those scenes don’t exist and the writers of Owl House understand the golden rule of representation: “Show don’t tell”. It’s stuff like that that shows that shows like Owl House are written by actual adults while shows like High Guardian Spice are written by insecure man children.
Number of “is crap a cussword?”comments: 30
Why comment that now?
@@wrjtung3456everyone's probably coming to this vid
Crap is a "curse word" kids would use and feel rebellious
Yeah but when's it going to be answered? I'm still confused on it. I've only heard like 3 people my whole life see it as "bad" and it's on plenty of cartoons.. for children.
@@ILI.D. Fuck
As a writer, the very existance of HGR gives me courage to keep going, knowing that my writing isn't all too bad
@@Vichy_France I think the person just meant that they were a writer in general, not a writer on HGS
@@LongFry oh my god I must be so dyslexic I read it as "as a writer of HGR" 😭😭😭
Same 😂 My first series is the Crescent Crown Saga
@@Vichy_France lmao
HGR? High Guardian Rice?
"and that's us"
"you were a girl"
"were"
there i fixed yo dialogue
IT'S LITERALLY SO EASY
Or just make it a "funny" moment of caraway just clearing his throat, waiting for rose to remember what he JUST said. Rose is dumb as a brick, it wouldn't be ooc
Not to be a grammar Na** but it’s more like
“You were a girl?”
“*Was*”
Was*
@@sovereign9708 i more meant that he put emphasis on the were in the second quote, but was would work too i guess.
It's actually kinda jarring just how much the main characters never talk like teenage girls like their supposed to. They talk more like shy 8 year olds that just gained the confidence to cuss
When you can tell the writers got their dialogue skills by watching 90s/early 2000s Funimation dubs.
@@TroySpace Have you listened to how ANY of these kinds of people talk in general...? They act like they're the smartest people in the room and that YOU are stupid for censoring yourself around an 8 year old, because the 8 year old apparently cares about whatever sort of thing you might be talking about, and then they use phrases like "Memmies" (I.E. Memories) when being "Nostalgic"...
The sad reality is that these kinds of people (The ones who made the show) ARE 8 year olds... Emotional 8 Year Olds to be specific... They curse and cackle like chain-smoking hags around children but use words like "Memmies" (Memories) around their inner circle because they think they are just the cutest bubblegum princesses out there... But "Fuck X just to be clear"...
I think that might be unfair to Funimation honestly. @@TroySpace
@@AnthonyGladbach The irony to all this is that 8 years olds want to look mature to be taken seriously despite being children. These are adults acting like children and expecting to be taken seriously.
I forgot how unsubtle the writing is, it's like dumping a pile of bricks on my desk.
I feel like everytime I listen to the dialog the characters themselves in the scene desperately want to leave. It gives off the feeling of like a school play, but if none of the kids were interested and just want to finish to go home.
@@shinysoda6 To me it sounds like they talk like they would tweet. As if their is no visible stuff for the viewer and we have to rely only on their voices to have the show work. Which would work if it was a podcast.
i feel like it would have been better if it was just
"you were a girl"
"WERE" [with the reverb]
and then the conversation ends
I felt like these writers don’t know how to talk to actual normal people in real life.
@@jithianlaurent6490 This is like National Geographic and the voice is just explaining everything on the screen
The reason why Caraway is unknown to Rose is one simple reason, Lavander was cheating on her husband
Now this is a plot twist i can get behind, ditch the poorly-done fantasy storyline and make it into a terrible soap opera with a dragon or two, sounds fantastic
Oh fuck, that might actually work.
Funnily enough it would be pretty fine plot twist and would give this whole "Lavender is SUDDENLY EVIL" a better foundation
Nah her dad would definitely be ok with being a cuckold and just jacking off in the corner while his wife gets fucked by a tranny
I remember back when I was watching the first couple episodes with some friends, one of them came up with this idea that Caraway was actually Rosemary's father. The trans reveal kinda got them off track, but actually, given magic exists, I guess it could still work
Edit idea: Caraway tries to explain but Rosemary knows fewer and fewer words. Example:
Caraway: "I'm transgender"
Rosemary: I don't know that word."
C: "I was born into a female body"
R: "I don't know that word"
C: "... But it wasn't-"
R: "I don't know that word either."
C: 🤨
I don't know that face.
@@VOgaming51official
I don't know how to not know that I don't know
I don't know that word either
C: "...Yeah, you're definitely Lavender's daughter."@@VOgaming51official
@@bendavenport4136 R - Who's Lavender?
Caraway: I'm transgender.
Rosemary: Despite being a gen z teen in high school, I have never heard that word!
Caraway: Wow, so realistic, and definitely relatable to the youth of today. Let me explain...
Caraway: **Pulls out dictionary** Transgender, noun...
thats because the speech was clearly not for the character, it was for the viewer. which is why it feels so awkward and hamfisted, like an episode of Blues Clues where the guy looks at the camera and talks to the kids.
Rosemary: is dictionnary food?
You know you've failed at writing fantasy when "main character is a gen z highschooler, of course she'd know what being trans is!" Is a valid argument for why a scene is bad
🤣
Apparently "Show don't tell" is not in the shows vocabulary. May as well watch Sesame street then if there going to do that.
Caraway: "This is a picture of me and your mom"
Rosemary: "Is this your sister?"
Caraway: *looks at the camera*
Caraway: "And you give me sh*t for explaining what transgender means in a cheap way? LOOK WHO I AM TALKING TO!"
The show would've been way better if Caraway was fed up with everyone's stupidity
They could have actually made it a funny moment, where Carroway clears his throat, Rose looks from the picture to him, goes, "oh...right. Sorry!"
Sure, it'd make her seem like an idiot (and probably a 'bigot' to the perpetually offended)...but she is an intellectual black hole who makes those near her dumber, so...
@@QueenAleenaFan*Intellectual Black Hole*
I just realised that they could bring it up when he talks with Snapdragon about it, like that's a way better point to bring it up. As Snapdragon questions if he is a man or not and Caraway can share his experiences about it.
Then Sage asks "Why not just take one potion to stop wanting to be a man?" seconds before her lynching.
As a writer who speaks the dialogue out loud before I write it, this dialogue makes me cringe. How did they not realize how awkward this sounds?
I mean worst case scenario they get into the recording studio and hear it then they should go damn this sucks we need to fix this first.
Omg, I'm glad I'm not the only one who does this! Sometimes I get my sister or a friend to read aloud a conversation between characters to see if it sounds believable or not.
Hearing the advice to speak out your dialogue is a game changer as a writer.
I plan to do that in my second draft of a novel I’m making! This is more assuring to do than the dialogue expressed in this show
As someone who is also writing a fantasy setting based on anime, High Guardian Spice scares me.
what keeps bugging me is "everything hours" because it's NOT everything, it's "anything". Everthing hours suggests you'll do all the choices but anything means you get to pick
Thank you!
It was nagging at me, but that's the perfect explanation
shouldn't be just every hours
What bugged me about it was that, as well as the fact that the design of a free period is just easier to say. I mean if they really wanted to go more skill focused, then it stands to reason they would have all the staff participate by supervising. So instead of just a free period, it is a specific period of school where any student could go to any teacher to improve on specific abilities and skills.
If it really was "everything hours" as the show says then Rosemary probably would have ran into the woods destroying trees for "training", run back to get the combat teacher after running from whatever the magical equivalent of a bear is due to the falling trees almost hitting the bear, and after the bear is dealt with Rosemary is sent off to the ethics teacher for being lectured on deforesting as well as just neglect of her surroundings. So "everything hours" just sounds dumb, I am not a writer but they could come up with a better name like " Self Improvement Hour" or "Guidance Growth" . Like just having an hour to improve oneself or as for "Guidance Growth" it is just growing/inproving one's abilities with guidance from a teacher.
To be fair, quite a few lines in the show sound weirdly unnatural. That unnaturalness very likely extends to the naming conventions.
@@MrAuthor3DS The naming conventions are one thing, my main issue is just how exposition and just opening up info either comes in large chunks or is not elaborated enough. It is fine if they want something big to happen, but generally the chunks of info should be in small clusters.
The only other thing is just focus of writing, I mean Rosemary is worried that she lost her locket because apparently she did not want to lose the photo of cake inside it. Even though it is made clear later that the photo was her family eating the cake, it just felt like it was written a bit out of focus.
what's crazy is that, by changing when their transition happened it could easily be used to explain why rose didn't recognise her teacher as her mothers partner, because rose was looking for a woman and not a trans man. but then this is a self insert, so they had to transition when the author did.
That'd actually be a pretty good plot! Especially if Caraway was dressed much differently than he does now unlike looking like a carbon copy of caraway in the picture that is shown. It could also be made more interesting if caraway was helping her look for the woman before putting two and two together and figuring out she's talking about his friend and him
@@markthefan also transition magic could be entirely new but not openly talked about. The teacher hints that their masculinity is questioned, so why not make their transition a secret to anyone they don't trust as some people may not be as accepting.
@@Roboshi2007 that'd be a much better story! Honestly we should just get the fans to write the show
Yeah I was thinking the same. Like if all pictures were of Caroway as a woman it would make more sense. Also could explain why she didn't recognise Caroway because all records of her mom's adventures were with a girl and suddenly this guy is like yeah that was me. Still wouldn't square with her mom never bringing up Caroway, but would make much more sense than it currently does.
@@markthefanas a trans person, I agree
Ah so the trans scene wasn't a drug induced bad trip.... damnit
@@subaru4920 for us sadly no. for the writers probably
@@Drbeattles"It'll be so awesome, he'll tell the pink bitch 'Im transgender', so that the audience can like, empathize with him being transgender! Why are there so many snakes under my skin?"
So it had nothing to do with drugs? 🤔 damn
@@subaru4920 the writers probably were high when they wrote that scene
Shhh, you in a multi-personal coma. We are all in a drug trip.
The lack of mentioning Caraway to Rosemary could've worked if Lavender and Caraway had some kind of fight, but HGS hasn't established that so we'll never know
That could’ve been one of the building blocks towards “Lavender works for the bad guys” which just somehow furthers the point that nothing in the show was given much thought beside Amaryllis and Snapdragon (to an extent)
I think part of why HGS is so enticing as a subject is because there are *so many* ridiculously simple changes that could have been made to improve the world building. Like, if they just thought about it for a few seconds, they could make it work and instead they just... didn't. Everything from the magic system to the characters to the world to the story all feel so specifically *not* thought out and it's fascinating.
During the caraway scene when he said "we used to be a lot like you and sage" he could've expressed how he's sad that they're not like that anymore OR EVEN say how the last time he saw her they had a fight and how he regrets that or something.. so many missed opportunities 😞
@@nrnrn999 it's a kind of irony considering they were hyping the show up by saying they had an all female writers room
Alternatively, perhaps their relationship might not be as close and affectionate as Caraway thinks it is; that this was a lot more one directional of a friendship and Caraway warps it all with rose-tinted nostalgia...perhaps those flashbacks aren't exactly how they happened and he's not that as reliable of a narrator as the audience is initially lead to believe. That's another route that could connect to Lavender being revealed as one of the villains in the finale and how she apparently never mentioned him to her kids and how he never visited in their adulthood...
Like we all keep saying, every single thing in this show are simple fixes that add way more depth and interest; and the more we look at it, how less and less attention was apparently paid to anything becomes way more glaring and obvious
Even that little scene where Rosemary enters Caraway's office for the first time could have been done more interestingly. Instead of just saying, "Wow, you have a lot of cool stuff in here!", it could have been rewritten to show Rose flitting from object to object in Caraway's room. Maybe she's poking at scrolls, peeping through giant glass jars, gazing at maps, maybe even an object she lingers on (like some sort of magic artifact that's hinted on in the future), and Caraway warns her halfheartedly not to open 'that cork from the potion' before she does and it explodes in her face. A small, funny gimmick that also shows a bit of her hyper side, since the show only pays attention to her hyper side when it wants to. During serious moments, of course, she's always serious and solemn and completely out of character
See, that's because you actually have writing talent.
@@WobblesandBean Any writing talent at all. No offence to buddy, it's far more than I could come up with, but Christ from what little I see of this show I swear I could write something better, and I can't write worth shit.
But showing is so much harder than telling, especially in a visual medium like animation.
Wait a minute...
"no one ever questions your manhood"
"you have no idea"
**no one ever questions it in the show**
yeah i sure don't have an idea
Well there is never a situation where some asshat questions
carraway manhood in a oganic way
I certainly would. She does look like a man but the voice...
I remember watching an old clip from some storyteller or animator from I think disney, that explained storytelling well. Never treat the audience as dumb because you will lose their attention. You don't give them "4", you give them "2+2", because its then on the audience to answer the question and they feel accomplished from answering it and thus you keep their attention.
If you're shown a propeller, a picture of a father and son in front of a plane with a trophy, and a news clipping of an obituary. you're gonna know who you're looking at if the next shot is of a teenager wearing a pin with an airplane on it.
I think that's called "Chenov's gun" where you explain something or show it with some relevance and then you use that piece of info or prop in the near future.
Writing when done properly it's just so interesting lol
@@therobens22*Chekhov's Gun
@@ajasilikonreffkmimmon yeah that, thanks for the correction
Or like a rhetoric question,
"someone went missing"
"Thats horrible, i wonder if they're ok"
Instead of
"They died"
@@therobens22 It doesn't even have that near of the future, just future
One of the problems with the transgender line, is that it doesn’t really say or add much beyond stating the Caraway is trans.
While not a perfect fix, non visual character traits that are story unrelated will always feel awkward to write, i can imagine a few things that could improve it.
Firstly, if “new magic” were a relatively new discovery and neither wildly known and used outside the Guardian profession, an early dialogue exchange like this could have been made.
Rose “wow you were so cute as a child, but now you look so different”
Caraway “yeah I was a cute girl but I didn’t feel like it, so I changed that”
Sage “that doesn’t sound possible”
Caraway “you’d be surprised what new magic makes possible. There are many uses for new magic behind just shooting things. Most unexplored and not well understood. It is part of the guardians responsibility to change that”
While still a bit clunky such a rewrite it would say so much more like this. Because while the information of him being trans is now also conveyed, the overall meaning changes from simply stating that character fact to “new magic is powerful and can do otherwise thought to be impossible things” which leads to further non verbal information like how it hints that the magic could be dangerous or have side effects we aren’t aware of.
Which is narratively more important and also more interesting from a world building perspective
They could also have completely changed it that Caroway didn't actually transition until way after they left the academy and many of their legendary adventures and Rosemary actually knows female Caroway from the legends and all, but doesn't recognise male Caroway and that actually leads to needing to explain that. Would make a whole lot more sense with Rosemary not knowing/recognising Caroway despite her mom literally being besties all through school and actually partnering up for work for years upon years with them. Like even if they didn't meet with how big of a guardian fanboy Rosemary is they would have read/seen records of her mom's adventures considering everyone knows her mom and some are even familiar enough with her sword to recognise it on sight yet somehow she has never heard of Caroway. All that happening while Caroway was a woman would explain it all and also lead to needing to explain the whole thing in an at least somewhat more natural way. Hell could even say that they had actually met long ago but that at the time Caroway still was female presenting for that extra blowing Rosemary's mind aspect to the talk.
Would also make more sense why Caroway is still experiencing more negative reactions from the transition if it was at least somewhat recent and not something that was done decades ago. You want me to believe a legendary guardian that transition decades ago and is not a high ranking teacher at the school, but for some reason people are still giving them shit for using transition magic?
Show, don't tell, and all that.
World building and character development are a lot more interesting when they aren't just told with no real connection to anything going on.
@@kamikeserpentail3778 i prefer to file this under “non economic writing”
Basically for the most part you want to get as much information out of a scene as possible to make it interesting and keep the tension going.
The main exception being a climax, where you only really must conclude the storyline and little else.
The “I am trans” scene does only do that. Sure it does a little of setting up Caraway and Lavenders friendship but that is neither important nor a big focus of the story, so it doesn’t matter.
As a good example of economic writing I would recommend looking at Will and Jacks duel in the first pirates of the Caribbean film
@@frankwest5388 I was actually thinking of that exact scene as I was reading your comment.
As opposed to...a lot of action scenes.
I just realized, Rosemary not knowing what being trans means is even more dumb when you remember that Rose never questioned Anice being a lesbian and having a wife.
Like, the show wants us to believe that Rose doesn't know what transgender means because she's young and all she knows is her heteronormative family, but she's not surprised by two women being in love and living as a couple.
There should be a scene where Rose gets explained what being a lesbian means, especially since it's obvious Sage is a lesbian.
love is love, my friend
transgender is something completely different
@@supermaximglitchy1 But for all Rosemary knows love just exists between a man and a woman (her parents). If she's ignorant about what transgender means, then she also doesn't know what the other letters in the LGBTQ+ community stand for.
I suppose they're banking on Rose being nieve enough to believe that the lesbian couple are just roommates, rather than just being in love. Though give that the couple and Caraway all go to the same "parties" *cough*they're swingers*cough* anything is possible.
@@giorgiapetrei5421does anyone anymore?
@@DexDexter0 I doubt nowdays there's still someone who doesn't know. And in Rosemary's universe, it's pretty obvious everyone does. That's why that talk with Caraway makes no sense.
"This was *OUR* first everything hours."
"Is ThAt YoUr SiStEr???"
Wouldn't it have been better for Rosemary to just say "Ohhhhh... yeah, that explains your voice."?
Or alternatively, if you really insist on keeping the "transgenderism for dummies" lecture in and keep Rosemary and oblivious zoomer, she could have said something like "You used to be a crossdresser?" Or "Wow, you looked so girly back in the day."
"You used to be a girl" should indicate she had some cursory idea of what "transgender" might mean.
Transgenderism isn't a thing
Caraway: „That was our first everything.“
Rose: „Wow, mom looks so fierce! …Wait! The other person is a girl, right? Didn’t you say it was a photo of you two?“
C: „That IS me, actually!“
R: „Wow, you used to look so feminine, Mr. Caraway! How cute!“
C: „Actually, I‘m transgender.“
R: …
R: „… So you want to be a girl???“
C: „No, Rosemary, that’s not-„
R: „Oops! Excuse my choice of words. You don’t WANT to be a girl. You ARE a girl! Psychologically that is.“
C: …
C: „Honey, mh-mh…“
@@seyspectra And from that moment onward, Rosemary referred to Caraway exclusively with female pronouns.
@@seyspectrathat would be hilarious, but too transphobic for the creator
The fact Rosemary always said "you were a girl?" when she saw Caraway with long hair to be so odd to me. If she's supposed to be kind of airheaded, surely she would say something like, "Wow your hair was super long back then!" Leading into Caraway correcting her if he wanted to. Besides, it is a little closeminded of the writers to write an exchange that basically translates to: "Boys can't have long hair, therefore, this must be girl" As if battling of gender stereotypes isn't something the show talks about constantly. With how this show represents transition magic it almost seems like its some foreign, unheard of concept, even if there's really no need for it to be. So if they wanted to go with Rosemary not knowing what it was, then her saying "you were a girl" makes even less sense, as it seems to be that she's suggesting that she knows what transition magic is and immediately assumes that Caraway went with it, even though she doesn't know what "transgender" is in the next scene. The more logical exchange in that moment would just be Rosemary assuming Caraway was always a boy, and that he just had long hair when he was a kid.
congrats, youve discovered one of the biggest underlying issues with the whole trans-trender phase society is going through.
trans isnt a medical issue anymore, gender dysphoria, it's a personality trait that people adopt to fit in just like 90% of other personality traits people adopt.
and the only way to turn a mental medical condition into a personality trait is to over exaggerate it's symptoms until you can say just about anyone has them.
the side effect being the personalities of tomboy girls and feminine guys have been replaced with 'trans.'
the worst part of that though is despite them using trans like a personality trait, is that they still push medical treatment for having the personality traits.
it's literally 'hey i think if a boy likes pink, then he must be trans. so you should get hormones because you like the color pink.'
@@DarthZ01 Not really, but I know arguing with you won't accomplish anything.
blud over there stuck in eurocentric christian essentialism 💀 bet they can't read beyond a 2nd grade biology book 💀 probably thinks intersex people are a myth too 💀
@@DarthZ01Yeah, I remember when people called Abby from TLoU2 (shit game) trans just because she was "muscular." And then they say you don't understand the game whenever you criticize it. It's annoying.
They'll have a level of understanding below a five year old, but still treat you like you've got the IQ of the room temperature of outer space whenever you disagree with them.
Why it can't be an illusion instead?
TBH I don't even mind if a transgender character just openly says that they're transgender. Sometimes making things clear and without ambiguity is a good way to get info across too, *but* it was in a scene where it had no real relevance and had no deeper connection to the underlying themes/concepts of that episode. I definitely agree that the writers should have given that whole section its own scene rather than connect it to something unrelated. If a writer thinks certain information is important, they should treat with importance.
↑ This. I'm so sick of defenders of the show calling us transphobic for not liking this scene. I'm actually happy that a fully out and proud trans character is on the show. But..."I never sniffed her"? Wtf? The dialogue is SO BAD!
Here's the thing, this scene is actually completely redundant with Snapdragon's arc also being in the show. Think how much better it'd be if the reveal came then (preferably with less shit explanation)?
@@izzyj.1079 Yeah, I agree. I think the teacher opening up to Snapdragon specifically when discussing his issues could have been a good way to reveal that.
Yeah, the problem isn't that he said transgender its more
That the timing of the reveal, the dialogue and the impact around it was just...iffy.
My issue with it was that that kind of terminology is way too modern for it to work in a fantasy setting (at least in my opinion). The whole "You were a girl?" thing was good enough. Even the stuff Caraway said about being born in the wrong body.
Caraway being best friends with Lavender is so much wasted potential. When she went missing, he could’ve gone to rosemary’s house personally to say that hey sorry but like your family member’s missing, I was there but I couldn’t do anything about it. And then rosemary would ask “if I become a guardian, will I find her?” Her dad could’ve been opposed to the idea, but rose would be determined enough to enroll into academy even without her family’s consent. It would explain so much in so little time I can’t believe they didn’t do simply that
yeah. during their conversation, caraway barely talks about lavender at all, only the exception to HIM bragging how great of being a guy. i don't think the flashback doesn't count. again, caraway just wants to talk about him and only him. And the way rosemary just immediately change the subjects like the whole conversation didn't happened. because it didn't.
@@Muna-Jlore0997 He wasn't bragging, he was just explaining what being transgender means(and badly, I will admit, but still not bragging).
@@imthebossmermaid3648 guess you’re right. But still, it didn’t relates to any rosemary’s question about lavender.
@@Muna-Jlore0997 True.
I prefer to think that a lot or at least some people know that Lavender went evil, and they are deeply hiding that information, from Rosemary at least, as it would hurt her a lot. Maybe Lavender slowly started to make bad choices, so thats how her friendship with Caraway broke, leading to Lavender never mentioning him to her daughter. The dialogue kinda feels like it wants to imply that they used to best friends, but were not anymore
"Like her."
"One of my closest friends."
"Your mom."
Bro I was laughing out loud so hard holy shit...
THAT'S SO FUNNY OUT OF CONTEXT 😭😭😭
Bro pulled the ultimate ur mom joke
One thing you didn't mention is that Rosemary looks at "all the cool stuff" when she enters the room but conveniently avoids all the pics of HER OWN MOTHER just so the lizard joke works lol
Time for my bi monthly dose of crash courses of writing.
how is bi related to this at all
@@BopitBrandBimonthly means “two months”
Bi is a prefix that means “two”
@@BopitBrand silly goofy question
If Carroway took a moment of offense or confusion (even if he quickly hid it) at the fact that Lavender never mentioned their partnership, it could've been a nice thread starting towards "Lavender Evil" at the end.
A scene kind of like that exists in Sky High.
When it's shown that the main teacher of the sidekicks worked with the protagonist's father and a really famous hero, when the protag states that said neither dad nor mom ever mentioned him, the teacher is clearly hurt by that. It's a moment that really shows the darker side of this hero world and hint at some more negative traits of the dad.
So this could have been used to great effect here too, but it isn't.
The problem is that the subtext that ends up implied by their writing isn't intentional. They don't even realise the subtext they are implying because they are so focused on how they had to get in their trans speech whether it worked or how it affected the actual perception of the scene as a whole. It's pretty easy to tell that such complicated subtext isn't implied since it isn't present anywhere else in the story. Even the few cases of subtext intentionally being implied are far more simplistic than two people having an entirely different type of interpretation and experience of their shared relationship. If it was intentional and the rest was written around that they might actually almost become ok writers.
@@InDeathWeLove no question. Not giving the writers any credit for it almost being a decent exchange. Everything else is bland and straightforward, so I'd expect no different here.
It's just funny how close they can be to something competent, but they deftly avoid it, because they wanted to shoehorn in their message instead of having a plot-relevant conversation.
personally. a story about Caraway being the evil one is a more compelling story. Caraway creating the potion to change genders somehow not being common knowledge because it was created using some unsavory means. Lavender discovers the dark magic being used, they have a brutal fight with Caraway murdering Lavender then covering it up by saying she is simply "missing". Then a later point Lavender comes back with some scars and healed wounds because she somehow barely survived and spent the last few years recouping to confront Caraway. With the plan foiled Caraway is unmasked as the true head of the band of villains would have been harassing the citizenry during the season. You also find out that a couple of the teachers were in the know about his nefarious deeds and have been trying to kill certain students because they have potential to thwart the plans being conconcted, which is a permanent potion since the ones are currently a temp fix.
Another issue with the dialougue is that its often abused as a tool to dump large amounts of exposition on the audience
It's wild to think that HGS is almost 2 years old.
Even wilder: it’s even older
it’s published 2 years ago but it was finished around 2016 or 2018. They just left it to rot for a few years
No, I think the whole project started like in 2016, Im not sure about that. Then they finished it between 2018 an 2019. Wait I do remember very well, is that they waited a year before releasing it
You know, I wanna see a show that starts off poorly made & full of bad tropes, like HGS, but with purposefully made snippets of god tier lore, but a highly renowned but ominous figure shows up, and everything is fixed in his path. Turns out, all the canon bad writing is cause of someone causing in-universe distortions... And it's the mary sue-esque mc who's causing them. Plot can go wherever after that, it just seems like a god tier twist to me.
=
Kyousougiga, Flip Flappers, Mawaru Penquindrum, Abenobashi, 18if, Sarazanmai, Yurei Deco, Urahara... that one late episode of Evangelion...
You'd be HORRIFIED how much ANY of these aren't even a joke. It's pretty much an entire thing.
You should read the web comic Mary Sue Must Die, it's basically what you are describing
@@amberdawn868And it's Star Trek? _How have I never heard of this?_
@@WobblesandBean LOL idk, but more people really should. I followed the artist Kevin Bolk back in the early 2010's on DeviantArt back when he was still posting pages of the comic and basically saw it through completion. Definitely give it a read! Heck you might get more out of it if you're more familiar with Star Trek than I am lol.
Scoob and shag
But it’s not really the same? But it’s got the same vibes.
13:35 A better line would’ve been, “I never sniffed her, we weren’t _that_ kind of friends.”
Here's an idea to solve the "why isn't Caraway famous" question: make it so that transition magic had to be invented by Caraway (it can tie to the free period conversation by having inventing tranistion magic be the thing Caraway spent his free time on). He only managed to do actually invent transition magic later in life and finally performed it on himself at around the time of Lavender's disappearance, but it comes at the cost of all the fame because everyone else does not believe he is the partner of Lavender because her partner is widely known to be a female. This can result in wither the general public just assuming that Caraway is either the "real" Caraways twin brother who weirdly has the same name has is his sister and is trying to ride her coattails to fame or, more interestingly, the general public think that Caraway is some cringy attention-seeker with an outlandish story about inventing "transition magic".
It would explain away a lot of the societal backlash Caroway claims to receive(that we never really get to see but lets skip that) and the fact that Rosemary has no clue who Caroway is despite being such a major part of her mom's life from childhood all the way into adulthood. Wouldn't clear up everything, but it would make a whole lot make way more sense.
I had a better idea with Caroway, I know it's not a Trans allegory but it gives contrast to what Snap is. Caroway, like the Cat Girl who I don't remember her name, was an infiltrator and is the culprit of the disappearance of Rosemary's mother and how she feels guilty and everyone sees how the traitor who escaped then decided to fake her disappearance and permanently change her appearance. . He still feels guilty about what happened and always wonders "how people would see it if they found out who she was before even though she stopped being that same young woman who made bad decisions."
I have a fan theory that explains why Caraway isn't famous and it's similar to Guardian HQ's theory that Caraway's friendship with Lavender was one-sided. You know how there's pop stars so famous that they become household names? Like Beyonce, for example. Even though I've been listening to her since the Destiny's Child days, I can't name a single backup dancer she's had. Or backup vocalist. They have to be pretty skilled to keep up with her; so I'm sure most if not all of them are talented in their own rights. Still, unless I specifically look it up, I wouldn't know any of them. Typically only superfans and those in the industry would know who they are. Caraway was Lavender's backup dancer.
I think that is actually a great way that it could've been done, and in my own story there are a few people who hold some minor resentment towards the main character because they are talented and powerful, but they aren't known for that, they are known for being the friend and the sister of the main character.
After a bunch of HGS finally noticed the "uniforms" are not uniform. They're inconsistent on whether girls wear bows or ties. Actually it looks like ONLY Rose, Parsley and Rose's mom wear bows. If it was consistent it could've shown Carroway's social transition before going full on and Rose could've realized it herself from the pictures of "him" young. This is stupid.
The misgendering isnt nessisary to make your point
that's not misgendering and even then its not a negative @@josephinehendricks
@@marcusclark1339 They literally wrote "him" in quotation marks, implying that he's not a "real" guy. So yes, it's misgendering.
One thing I hate about dialogue in any media is when a character says a line solely to beg the next line out of another character. In this show, it's like when Caraway says "you're so much like her." It's very obviously set up so Rosemary can say "like who?" and begin the discussion on Lavender.
It's just so unrealistic. Unless someone misspeaks or is accidentally vague, folks don't actually talk like that, and understand they have to be specific in order to get their point across.
It's just another example of the writers unnaturally forcing the story to go the way they want instead of finding a way to guide it there in a believable way.
rosemary is NOTHING compare to her mother. okay sure there are certain character tropes that wants to be like their authority figure, however --- the way I see rosemary's action; she acts like this guardianship is fun job, which btw it is not, that is why lavender is missing for 4 yrs. and she is recklessly irresponsible with flowering thorn (dumbest name evah), all she did just swings and swings and almost chop someone's head off plus blamed that person for not paying an attention.
if rosemary TRULY the warrior like her mother wants her to be then, don't be an idiot. grow out of it.
A big issue with this entire thing is they have Rosemary move on from the trans thing immediately as a way to say "see, this isn't important, it's just a part of them". But that's incredibly disingenuous because the entire scene is set up to show you how important it was to the writers that you KNOW Caraway is transgender, making the message come across as incrdibly hollow. In terms of the story, it doesn't matter. But the them? That was the entire point.
It'd also be very unnerving to real trans people to be given no reaction, given how politically charged our sheer existence has become
@@user-vt5qg7hj1m I don't understand why you'd be telling someone unless you are hoping to enter a relationship, or it's medically related since that's when it would be important to divulge that information.
Other than that the whole point is you want to be seen and treated as your desired gender; telling people you're transgender defeats the purpose. You know full well people aren't going to treat you as male or female, they're going to treat you as transgender.
It's the fact that people now say they're transgender as some kind of badge of honour, status, or whatever that has made it so charged. It feels like it's no longer about wanting to be viewed as the other gender, it's about wanting to be viewed specifically as trans.
@@Ch1l1C0nCarnag3 whoa boy tell me you never met a trans person irl without telling me you never met a trans person irl
First of all there's trans people that for some reason or another can't/don't want to transition, so in those cases you pretty much have to tell the people you meet you're trans if you want them to treat you as your gender
Second of all ot's actually good to get it out early with people that you want as your actual friends. You'd be surprised just hoe much being trans affects your life, especially when you're early in transition. If you wanna talk to a friend and not feel like you're walking on eggshells or constantly lying, it's good to make sure they're not a transphobe
Also so what? So what if people are honoured to be trans? I'm glad they are, actually. It's so difficult to just exist as trans I'm glad so many people nowadays are finding the pride within. Being trans is far more complicated than most of us could ever imagine, so as long as these people aren't hurting anyone can we please stop being mean to them?
@@user-vt5qg7hj1m I'm not telling anyone to be mean to anyone. I'm saying that being trans has been turned into a status symbol that is being worn around like a meat suit by people who just want the perks that come with being part of a minority group without actually being part of it.
All the trans-people I personally know don't want to be associated with it because of all the BS that comes with the entire LGBTQ movement; and I'm not saying they receive harassment for being trans, they're tired of people thinking THEY are going to harass people because they're trans. It's being used like a beat-stick to attack anyone who disagrees with anything they say, saying just because you have a different view to a trans-person that immediately means you're transphobic.
My viewpoint on the matter is shaped by the trans-people in my life, so if you think this view somehow makes it seem like I've got no experience with this topic then it tells me we associate with people on the far opposite ends of the movement. Which is fine since people aren't a hivemind, just because two people are trans doesn't mean they need to view it the same way. I've just put forward the viewpoint I am surrounded by; they don't want to be seen as trans.
@@Ch1l1C0nCarnag3 Trans people have to navigate more than just romantic relationships when it comes to telling people you're trans. People can see your pictures, jobs will ask for identification, new people you know will potentially meet old people you know, your family members will be confused as to who you are. That combined with the fact that not all trans people are stealth, a lot of fucking trans people wish they could, but it could be potentially dangerous and or not possible at all without hormones or any tools necessary to pass as a cis person.
I think the worst thing about Caraway's trans situation is that...he isn't trans for himself. What I mean is, his transgenderism doesn't visibly provide anything for HIM, specifically - all that's done with his transness is telling others how transitioning works. He doesn't have any struggles with his new gender, nothing clever done with it, none of that.
Also, Snapdragon looks like an oblivious moron for not believing there was any way to "just stop being a guy". Never considered that magic could do that. Even after seeing a similar process, a physiological change, happen to Neppy Cat. And then seeing transformative spells - Olive's petrification spark-spell, and the merfolk forms from Redbud's rings - that alter things more drastically than sex-changing would (matter and species, in this case).
Also also, the show had already long established Lyngarth as queer-friendly. Caraway's comfy enough to allow pictures of his youth in the academy's public hallways. And yet at the same time, we can clearly see the hand of fate pushing Snapdragon around. SPECIFICALLY Snapdragon. Nobody else gets hit with so many queer-related victimhood events besides Snap. It's just not very consistent. Y'know, in FF10, the grand majority of Yevonites frequently spoke ill of the Al Bhed, not just Wakka. That convinces me that hatred toward Al Bhed is a common thing among Yevon followers.
...In fact, one of those "hand of fate" events is so blatant in its intent (though only in retrospect, because it alone isn't very blatant), it feels like a different conversation replaced the current one - this being Sage generalizing guys and girls in Ep6. When Snap tells her she shouldn't be so hung up about Rosemary, she suddenly changes the topic from "I don't want Rosemary to be with Aster" to "no guy can ever friendship properly". She's saying all this to Snap's face, as if to specifically shame him for being a guy with feelings. Just like, in Ep11, Yarrow shamed him for "sounding like a girl", and Cal shamed him for costuming like a girl (which was Amaryllis's idea in the first place).
In fact, if I saw Ep6 completely blind, I'd have thought Snap was sick of Sage generalizing everybody. But thanks to the overall show's intent, this just seems to prove Sage's sexist venting right, as Snap - someone who's willing to talk about feelings - is apparently not truly a guy. Just...ignore the previous episode where PARNELL was talking about his feelings, and got more progress by talking about them to Slime Boy (Sage was too busy figuring out New Magic to notice). Actually, another message that would've been more relevant to Ep6 is that if Sage's friendship with Rose is that deep, then she should be able to trust Rose to sort out her crush on Aster herself - but we get nothing like that. In fact, Sage doesn't even think about apologizing for annoying Snap about it until she sees Rose being snippy with Aster.
The irony of the Aster storyline and Sage's sexist screed being in the very same damn episode and the creators not going hmm we either need to not make Sage a raging sexist or we need to make sure we show that she is wrong will allways be stunning to me. Like you said she effectively eventually gets proven "right" because the only "guy" to disprove that guys can have healthy friendships turns out to be a woman by their own logic meaning they never actually prove Sage wrong. Also if you compare Sage and Aster then Sage comes across as much more clearly a sexist than Aster ever does. Like Aster could simply be hand waved away as a narcissistic asshole because he isn't just an asshole to women. meanwhile Sage is very specifically sexist yet somehow it gets hand waived away meanwhile Aster is irredeemable.
I could kind of excuse it as merely slightly incompetent if these two storylines were literally episodes apart, but when it is in the same damn episode it is stunningly incompetent even in a show that is just constantly incompetent in just about every single way.
I don’t think a trans character NEEDS any story or conflict about them being trans. For example dane in fallout. They are nonbinary but it has nothing to do their motivations in the story that’s just who they are no different from a man being a man and woman being a woman
@@Xxsorafan Oh, that's not what I meant. Caraway brings up that he's trans and goes in-depth about the transitioning process - but even with all that focus on his trans-ness, he's not really trans for himself.
That's shame I see better dialogue in fan fanfic than this show
The writing in all aspects of HGS is of below average even in fanfic writing and the average there is already pretty bad. It's bad when hobbyists on their own without a budget are doing better than you are with a budget and a team behind you.
Gon going into his dad's line of work to look for him is characterized infinitely better than Rosemary with her mom. It's amazing how someone can be characterized long before they're introduced and how poorly-done it is here.
And even then Hunter X Hunter is a massive shit show. Not nearly as bad as Low Guardian T But still trash.
@@VidelxSpopovich Sick troll account chief do you do more than just have shit takes on anime?
@@VidelxSpopovich damn bro, you need to get your brain checked, I think it's rotting.
@@VidelxSpopovichHxH is one of the best animated shows, what are you talking about? Stop hating on something just because it is popular.
@@muzikveoyun37 It has nothing to do with its popularity. Remember, Hitler convinced the majority of an entire nation to be Nazis. So then in that context would you be so confident in asserting the same ill considered declaration? Of course not.
Herein lies my exact point. HxH is a show that lacks critical thinking skills and doesn’t require critical thinking skills of its audience in return. It’s effectively the Naruto of its era albeit notably worse off due to its shambles of a plot and lackluster, often laughably cliche characterizations.
In summation, you should be embarrassed. Though I somehow doubt you have the self awareness or sense of dignity to register such a notion.
I feel like there are ways to make Rosemary’s memory be less inconsistent while still seeming inconsistent (maybe it would have happened later in the show, but I doubt it). The solution is to give Rosemary some level of magical amnesia.
Option 1: Say she overheard Lavender and Caraway talking about Lavender’s "last" mission, so Lavender and Caraway had erase Rosemary's memories to protect everyone. However, Lavender and Caraway are emotionally invested, so it messes with the amnesia spell - Rosemary forgot about the mission details, but she also forgot about Caraway and most of Lavender's adventures (which happened regularly during Rosemary's childhood). Since Rosemary didn't remember Caraway and Lavender had to leave soon, they told the father and brother not to mention anything to Rosemary about the Guardians, Lavender's missions, or Caraway. Additionally, Caraway would not return until Lavender did. Unfortunately, Lavender never returned.
Option 2 (which I think I like better): This time we'll use Rosemary's nightmare as well as parts of Option 1. Once again, it's the last time Rosemary will see her mom before her year-long mission. Caraway had come to visit/convince Lavender to let him come with, but they ended up fighting and Rosemary overheard them. Rosemary had wanted to get one last round of sword training in with Lavender, but then ran away when she heard her mom and "uncle" fighting. However, Rosemary ran straight into danger, which Caraway and Lavender saved her from. This danger was directly connected to Lavender's mission, so she took the chance she had and disappeared with the monster/enemy while telling Caraway to protect Rosemary. After recovering from the battle and disorientation of Lavender's disapperance, Caraway took a passed-out Rosemary into bed. At first, Caraway thought Rosemary might be fine, but she was clinging to him and having nightmares, so Caraway decided to erase her memories of himself, the night Lavender disappeared, and Lavender's mission. Unfortunately, Caraway's emotional connection messed with the spell, leaving Rosemary with more memories and less memories than she should have had (resulting in it seeming like Lavender was gone on missions more often than she actually was, but Rosemary also remembers some parts of that last night). Then the story progresses with Rosemary more or less as portrayed in canon.
For a non-amnesia trope, Lavender and Caraway could literally be on some many missions/missions take long enough, that Lavender is lucky to get to be with her family once every other month. Additionally, Caraway is a teacher while Lavender is a high-ranking/well-known Guardian, so there might only be a few times when Caraway could come around to see Lavender's family, especially if he wasn't close to anyone other than Lavender. Additionally, Caraway could have been doing research and experiments that further limited his time (while also giving Lavender more down time), keeping him from spending much time with Lavender and her family.
As for why Caraway never visits after Lavender disappears - with the amnesia spell, his presence could either weaken/break the spell or otherwise negatively impact the spell. With the unfortunate timing of events, it would depend on how close he even was to being with. If he showed up a lot until Rosemary was 5-7 years old, it would be a mix of guilt/regret for not being around more and wishing he could do more/had done more to help Lavender on her mission. If he had shown up a lot up until Rosemary was 10/Lavender disappeared, it would mostly be about blaming himself for Lavender's disappearance.
And as it seems to be with a lot of the story, if they had just taken more time to review the plot and see how things connected to each other, thenthey could have made a better story by keeping the good pieces of framework while taking out the extra pieces that seemed nice, but didn't actually make sense where they were.
Amnesiac Rosemary is such a cool idea, like imagine the following scenarios:
1) Mandrake disguises as Lavender and tries to convince Rosemary to join the Triumverate by telling her a story the real Lavender told her as a child. However, the amnesia spell prevents her from remembering this story and leads her to question "Lavender"'s authenticity. (And rightfully so, but for different reasons)
2) As it turns out, the healing water from the cave reverses magical amnesia (if amnesia = damage to memory, and the water heals all damages). When Rose and friends enter the cave for the first time, Rose jokingly play around with the water, gets a bit of it on herself, and boom! Turns out half of her childhood memories were lies and she had somehow lost another half of them.
7:45 How exactly does pottery, ballet dance, or drawing, help with a physical adventure in the realm of ice dragons? "Hold on Mr. Dragon, you're being very rude attacking me when I'm not done sketching out your portrait yet".
It would have been cool if the purpose of this was to show that Guardians are more than just monster hunters; that they are, or at least can be, also cultured individuals who participate in society in a lot of ways. It could show that there could be "Guardians" that are fighters/defenders, but also "Guardians" of magic or arts or knowledge.
That taking one's vows is deciding what kind of Guardian you want to be, and that your extra hours are where you get to dedicate yourself to that Guardian path.
...... But instead it's just there because magic school slice of life stuff.
Thank you! Finally, somebody brought up just how stupid that word is! “Swordsing?” Seriously? That hurts my soul. Call it ‘swordsmanship’ if you MUST call it anything! Also, what do you mean they “cover broad stroke stuff?!” Caraway is admitting right here that they don’t even bother properly teaching the kids. How has no one died from just standing in this asylum?
I can kind of understand Rose not knowing who Caraway is in relation to her mom, since my parents never really introduced me or my sister to any of their friends when we were growing up. But it is still strange. I feel like the show was going for the whole sort of 'Oh, so many people knew my parent(s)' that Harry Potter went for but didn't execute it that well.
Problem in HGS is that Rose is actively researching guardian stories and her mom, it's one thing for Lavender to never mention Caraway. Another for none of the books or reports or tabloids to mention him. Or her dad, who should know Caraway and know he is working at the school.
@@jithianlaurent6490 Oh, yeah, that is true. That makes it extra weird then.
Made in Abyss did this concept beautifully. The MC is the daughter of a legendary explorer/warrior who went missing (at MC's birth) and MC goes on the same journey to find her. The mother is depicted in a flower garden similar to Rose in this show, and Rose seems to not remember much of her mother even though she went missing only 4 years prior to the start of the show. There are so many similarities that I feel like the creator of HGS was likely influenced by Made in Abyss and wanted to copy it.
Harry Potter pulled that off well partly due to Harry's upbringing keeping him from knowing anything about his parents or their world, with no way to access that information either. So his ignorance, and then surprise upon learning all this, makes a lot of sense. High On Spice is lacking in sensible reasons Rosemary wouldn't have access to this information.
Though on the note of cross-media comparisons, this situation reminds me of the movie Sky High. There, Will (protag) never knew about his superhero father, The Commander, having a Sidekick - Mr. Boy - that he worked with for a time before meeting and teaming up with Jetstream (Will's mom).
Except in Sky High, that is used by the story. It is utilized as fuel for running gags - namely, how self-absorbed The Commander is (just kind of forgetting about Mr. Boy, never mentioning him at all for years) and how much of a joke Mr. Boy himself is.
It's also used to highlight the darker side of this setting's hero society -- in particular, the divide between Heroes and Sidekicks/Hero Support and how society as a whole views them. That Heroes are the cool people and Hero Support are viewed as losers/outcasts, little more than servants of the Heroes they are paired with. That this dynamic will not fade with high school, but define the rest of their lives. Even someone who fought alongside one of the country's most famous heroes is not recognized or taken seriously by anyone. Which creates a pretty bleak outlook for the Sidekick class... and makes the ending that much more satisfying, when the Sidekick class members who saved the day get proper recognition for their efforts.
... Meanwhile in High On Spice, the fact that Lavender had this wizard partner who Rosemary had never heard of was just a poorly thought out point that doesn't really add to anything.
@@Tijopi11Thank you, this is what I've been saying! There's so many parallels to Made in Abyss that clearly shows how many of these concepts can work. It can't be exactly the same due to the slice of life wanted in HGS that isn't really present in MiA but they could've taken some cues about the white whistles and such for how guardians work at bare minimum.
Dang, you've really picked apart every little facet of this show, at this point, I'm surprised you haven't just straight-up remade the entire thing just to spite the original creators,
Do it. Do it. Do it.
He did it lol. He's the one making the abridged version of HGS lmao
@@ShadowWolfRisingDew it!
What gets me is that not even a world where magic literally exists can just turn you into the opposite gender, you have to take the magical equivalent of hormone therapy once a month.
Which feels like there SHOULD just be a way to do this better in the story, and honestly seems to sort of say to the audience that even in a magical fantasy world, they can't just transition magically and be done with it.
I would be cancelled for this if I had any sort of online presence..
If they insist on keeping the monthly potion in there, then it can be used to hint at the dark side of New Magic. Maybe Caraway tried just using a spell to transition, but it kept wearing off/reverting, because New Magic goes against the natural order of the world (or something like that), so Caraway made a potion to maintain the transition without continuously casting the spell. And to keep it consistent, make it clear that the mermaid rings require the ring being on to hold the transformation (maybe Rosemary or Parsley loses the ring during the battle and starts drowning).
This would work really well if we wanted to keep the plot thread of the Rot being tied to New Magic, showing that New Magic is able to do all this awesome stuff because it's really a corrupting force, and using it has a negative effect on the world.
...or just drop the potion thing, that could work too.
@@insulttothehumanrace3807 Yeah I get they want to create something for the audience to engage, but this is a work of fantasy, surely it feels limiting to be told that even in a world with real magic, you have to take hormones every month.
I mean, if you could literally transform yourself into an opposite gender, you wouldn't be trans person. You would be a woman, or man, if you transformed from woman.
So guardian spice has to limit the capabilities of magic to make their trans story work within modern trans experience. Which is ridiculous handicap already.
If people could change their genders, there would not be transgenders around, because everyone could be exactly what they want to be.
Man if transformation magic was real i could do a lot with that lmao.
I was reading this story. Baiscally a bloodborne fanfic with heavy monster-fucker influences. Usual "man meets werewolf, they go from enemies to friends" type stuff.
Well late in the story, there's a part where the hunter and wolf are visiting a blind old woman. The wolf comments that, due to her huge and beastly body, she doesn't feel suited for "women" work. Then this old woman, who hasn't been relevant save for one chapter some time ago, goes on a little talk about how gender is performative and that if she feels like a woman, she is.
In a bloodborne fanfic. It just took me right out of it for how I could practically see them turning towards the imaginary screen and saying it directly. It's so out of place.
It's bloodborne, the game's themes are like in big part about that, being graceful about this should be easy!!
"ah yes, bloodborne, a game about eldritchian horrors beyond my comprehension, lets add gender bullshit."
@@ManCheat2 wait you unironicly think BLOODBORNE doesnt comment on gender? it's as much about womanhood as elden ring is about trees!
@@moonrains5876 When Sif came in and lit the bonfire,looked at the camera and said "I'm no man" it send shivers down my spine.
@moonrains5876 Yeah, when Cleric Beast came down from that tower, onto the bridge, and screamed "I'm a trans woman" at the top of her lungs, it was the most gender comment of all time. Truly, the most comment we needed in the entire world.
writing this as i go through the video.
tbh the voice acting also affects the overall dialogue, but the writing affects the voice acting. the voice acting sounds so unnatural because the actors have to say things that are unnatural, and its difficult to make that sound normal. its like trying to do good voice acting in a language you dont understand, its next to impossible.
14:40 Carroway laughing here id say is passable. my grandparents laugh at my everyday behavior constantly.
21:10 the fact that Crunchyroll decided to age-up the show was def one of the leading factors that killed it. if it stayed a kids show i imagine it would do pretty well, at the very least things could be explained away by it being aimed at young audiences.
"Im transgender" "Mate most of us arnt even human anymore, we dont care lol"
“Gurl one of our professors is a literal demon. We do not care”
hgs can't seem to decide if being trans is just a casual part of the worldbuilding no different from turning into a mermaid, or if being trans is a Big Deal Actually and transitioning makes you Brave and Cool. I've seen good stories that do either, but no good stories that do both
Yea, it can't be both! It's a problem in a lot of escapist fantasy media.
The irony here is the show could have made it seem like gender doesn't matter, not just with the teacher. But with slime boy and the shape shifter.
Much like the slime, Rimuru, and shape shifting sphere, Fushi, (from to your Eternity) both are technically genderless and can be anyone and anything that they feel like.
Rimuru is just sees them selves as male because he was a man in the past.
While Fushi uses the first boy's body, because they made a promise that he can travel the world and learn new things. This was Fushi keeping that promise for the boy. Without realizing it.
But with slime kid and shape shifter, they could have been ambiguous with their gender.
So the teacher being a transgender would be... You know... NORMAL.
You may be interested in the symbiotes from Star Trek. This is a theme that comes up multiple times with the Dax symbiote in Jadzia Dax since Dax was previously known in a male body by other characters and spends the show in two female bodies.
Yeah, this is why "Transgenderism" doesn't really work in a fantasy setting, because when you have shape-shifters, body snatchers, genderless creatures, and magic that can literally do anything changing one's gender becomes a non-issue.
EXACTLY!
The time I got reincarnated as a slime was a good show too
@@robinthrush9672 That's another great example. They could even said that the new magic, the teacher uses to change their sex, is based off studying these two races.
This would have given extra points to world building, knowing that the teacher observation them so people like him, who can't change freely, can change his sex as well.
It's honestly wasted potential at how everything was there to make it all feel natural.
I never thought the phrase "ok next question" would make me choke woth laughter. She really said "k." to him being trans
Funny story, in any system where you can change gender (and form) easily, no one would actually care enough to call it 'transgender'. It'd just be, "so yeah, this is John. He calls himself Jenny now, but you know how it is with wizards and their potions. We don't care, he had three kids to continue our bloodline so we just tolerate him. Hey, Jenny, I see you've lost weight!"
This dialogue still not seem like a good thing? they got the character's pronouns wrong several times and seem to only accept them in their presence
" *He* calls himself Jenny now "
" *he* had three kids to continue our bloodline so we just tolerate *him.* "
Lmfao
@@vini005 Wow, turns out that people are pretty complicated and don't immediately understand things.
Well, in society with fluid gender, nobody really care about pronoun, except those who have pronunciation fetish, like those people who insist their name pronounced "Mack-dow-nald" not "Muck-doe-nald"
Or more likely scenario, erasing gender specific pronunciation and using neutral pronoun, like in Japan or many asian countries
I never truly paid attention to what he says till this video
"Im trans" ok fine, we understand it, kids dont yet, so explain
"Means I was born in the wrong se*/body so I changed" Ok so far so good
How tho?
"I use a spell to change my form" cool, makes sense so far
"And I use a potion to keep that spell active" THATS NOT HOW SPELLS WORK, if anything thats a Manapotion as the spell would continously drain your magic but that is not how the spell SHOULD work cause whats the point of transforming if its only temporary?? Also youd need to chug that potion on the daily if not 4 times a day cause that aint a small fear to change the anatomy and biology of your own body. Mans not a transitioned woman, Mans a Man for all intent and purpose.
One of the villains is a shapeshifter, the girls easily transform into mermaids
Some fixes that could be done. Have Caraway mainly talk about "Everything Hours", and at some point comment that Rosemary reminds him of her mother, then show her the album and let the pics show how close they are, with maybe a few comments here and there. Have Rosemary question why no one talks about him, since everyone apparently knows her mother but he doesn't seem to have that same fame. Have Caraway maybe dodge the question a bit. At some point during this, have Rosemary flipping the pages to the earlier portions that show Caraway as a girl. Even without realizing the emphasis on LGBT in the series people would guess from the context that there's something up with that girl and Caraway, maybe even guessing he's trans, and those that had *somehow* managed to put together the theme would guess immediately. On top of that, bringing up the fact that Lavender's done a lot of the same stuff as Lavender but doesn't share her fame would raise possibilities of discrimination. With just that, things would be made more subtle, the scene would be more focused, and we'd be given at least some actual indication of the discrimination Caraway alludes to later. This would also imply that transition magic, while named, isn't exactly as widely accepted as initially apparent.
Loved the explanation at the start, of how our brains can unconsciously identify when something doesn't seem quite right, and that's exctly how I felt after seeing the scene, the dialogue just feels ... off, like aliens trying to imitate human conversations.
In a large portion of HGS is it way too obviously they are writing to get to certain lines and points they want to get to. Like you can tell just from hearing it which line they had decided had to be part of the scene and then how every other line was bent and twisted to try to get to that point no matter how clunky the end result ends up being. Now almost every writer has a direction they intend a scene to go in, but this comes across as a novice writer who is holding on so firmly to how it HAS TO GO even when they run into problems with it not working. Then rather than making some slight changes to some of the steps they had decided had to happen they just soldier on refusing to make those adjustments.
I think the funniest thing about the dialogue is the weird and unneeded swearing. This show was definitely meant for kids, but they got told they had to age it up, so the only thing they did to do that was add a couple of awkward swears in the generally kids show sounding script, coming out the mouths of characters that are basically written like kids.
Ikr, and I don't feel like they were pushed by a powerful network to make them add things to push up the age rating all of a sudden because they didn't want kids to be watching this so that there'd be less backlash over normalisation of homosexuality or something
Wait. This setting as a demon world? I mean, that makes sense with the demon teacher lady and all but that just hit me like a brick to the head. Namely, where the hell does this demon world fit in with the rest of the world building?!
Don't think about it, just enjoy product! And don't forget to stand up and clap at how much diversity it has!
Ok, on the everything hours list of whys, I think it does explain in the show the answer. Prof. Dretch mentions that they'll have to use the skill they choose in an adventure set by the teachers throughout the semester during that time. In other words, a "practical test". So the teachers would need to know what the choice is and the scope would need to be limited to devise standardized testing. I'm looking forward to the art students' survival ratio.
It could work fine within a relatively small population size, as teachers would know the students more personally
Good video, it really does go in depth to explain not just this show’s lackluster writing, but the use of dialogue as a whole. Your comedic quips - especially the Door Monster reference, that joke a shocked laugh out of me - did well to keep me invested and not let the video get tuned out upon other distractions.
The writers should've chosen writing for their everything hours LMAO
PFFTTT😭
Man, you're getting more work out of this dead horse then the showmakers ever could.
I was just finishing Spilling the Milk's High Guardian Spice reaction and then this vide popped up. Coincidence?
This makes my fantasy setting look like friggin Tolkien
I'm so glad these reviews, video essays and critiques exist because I had someone recommend HGS to me by saying it was kinda like The Owl House for adults.
I'm grateful not to have wasted my time and kept my expectations from being assaulted 😅
C: this was our first everything hours.
R: *looks confused. Looks at picture back at Caraway.*
C: new magic brought new solutions to the world’s problems, and ours. *smiles.*
R: *smiles before looking sad.* i wish it could tell me where she is..
C: *sad smile.* yeah..i wish that too.
Imagine a Show so bad, even 2 years later, you still have something new to say about how bad it is.
I thought you were already rewriting the dialog to be better in the abridged version. That's at least 5 times better than the show.
Dialog in HGS sounds like it was written while on shrooms and English is their third language
Lmfao, Pokémon Vietnamese crystal is more coherent
what kills me is how few good queer and especially trans stories there are when they basically write themselves. like, figuring yourself out, changing as a person, fear of being rejected by society and/or those close to you, keeping secrets, living life differently with different people, potentially being ashamed of who you are and having to accept yourself... that's the queer experience right there, and think about how many stories have these as their core elements. to the point that it's become a running joke in trans communities that trans people see everything as trans allegories.
being queer *is* a story, how is it so difficult for people to write stories about being queer?!
god this comment is so damn real
For one there is a difference between people who actually suffer from gender dysphoria and retards who jumped on the bandwagon for the attention turning the whole issue into a fad.
Second is that if you actually talk to someone who suffers from gender dysphoria, their entire life's goal is to eventually make the full transition so that they pass off as Cis. Their mind and body finally align to the point where they can no longer be considered 'trans' and just be a normal person. They don't want to glorify their journey. They want to be 'normal'. The idea of 'trans eraser' is a self-fulfilling prophecy when the goal is to finally become whole and 'normal'. You are doing them a disservice by constantly pointing out how they are different when they want to be 'same'. See the latter half of point 1.
Third and finally, 'trans' is just the latest flavor of the story of 'self discovery'. It is literally no different than any other story about learning about the self, what makes you different, and accepting that part of you even if some people around you don't. This runs HARD COUNTER to these fad chaser's belief of an 'all or nothing' acceptance. As you've pointed out, the 'journey of self discovery' comes in many flavors. Trans don't have exclusive claim to it. But for some reason the Transactivists and 'allies' do not understand this. And this has far more to do with their narcissistic attention seeking behavior than any real story being told. Again. Latter half of point 1.
No surprise that people in universe don't understand the concept of transsexuals or transgenders when there is a literal magical shortcut that bypasses months to years of dangerous medical procedures into the trans holy grail of a pill they can take to become their ideal form instantly and no one ever has to know they were once crosswired. That shows a bad setting when you have people who can literally transform into anything or warp reality and people get surprised when it's literally an everyday thing.
"Oh look there goes Barry on his third day as a dog."
"Golden Retriever?"
"Yep."
"Must be Thursday. Handy you can set your calendar by what breed he is that day. Means it's my day to go pick up the kids."
"How is your youngest?"
"Still wants to be a dinosaur when he grows up. We're not letting him have access to that incantation until he's 12. We learned that lesson the hard way with the second eldest and the 'Unicorn' incident."
Side effect of the LGBTQIAS2+ Community insisting on the unspoken rule that straight people HAVE NO RIGHT to write queer stories because "they'll never understand what it feels to hate yourself for being you and be discriminated and be unable to love the one you love and have power in society",
resulting to the most stereotypical and degrading portrayals of queer people written by the LGBTQIAS2+ community by 80% of the time.
It baffles my mind that most of the time the queer characters written by LGBTQIAS2+ are sex pests in comparison to the queer characters written by "istaphobes"-- mostly leaders, homemakers, family men, soldiers, etc. where their sexuality is mostly an off-hand because it doesnt matter in comparison to their entire personality.
> that trans people see everything as trans allegories.
Damn I'm glad it's not just the trans people I know that do this XD
Honestly though, I think there is a bigger issue with like LGBT media as a whole. I feel like a big part of the problem is when people try to write stories about queer characters, they end up making then exclusively about the person's gender/sexual orientation, and forget to actually add an interesting story outside of that. I feel like the best stories about LGBT characters are things like "I love you Phillip Morris" or "Cloud Atlas." Those stories have queer characters, but they aren't the be-all end-all of the plot, they're just the actors playing out a greater narrative.
@@nattteo ok there's a good reason why it's a meme that trans people see everything as trans alegories.
however you can still write good queer stories where the LGBTQ+ aspect is at the forefront. like Heartstopper. you can write a good story WITH trans representation as much as you can write a good story ABOUT being trans. it's mostly a matter of... writing good stories.
i think what you said is true, but in reverse: when you see a bad story about queer stuff, you only end up remembering "that guy was gay" because everything else was shit. in a good queer story, you also remember and think about how fun the story was or how interesting the characters were or how cool the action looked. the good gay romance that was also in that story is just another cool thing.
First time coming across this channel (possibly), but not the first time experiencing snippits of this show and being confused about how some of these lines got through to the final production.
The "I'm transgender" scene is so strange. It treats its audience like they're idiots, despite the audience being the exact people who know who trans people are and what transitioning can mean for someone. The whole point of rosemary finding the picture of lavender is to initiate the conversation to learn more about what her mother was like. It could have been much more organic to have caraway say something along the lines of learning to become comfortable being himself around lavender, which is enough to explain his transition with the visual aid of his photobook as well as tell us a bit about the positives of lavender's character. Why did the writers feel the need to have him explain himself being transgender as well as the magic system for transitioning?
As an aside, why did the writers settle on a magic system that forces people to keep up their desired appearance in regular intervals as oppose to letting them change themselves indefinitely? Baffling choice.
Edit: just caught the follow-up video, great job on that! The story actually became intriguing.
i’ve been watching all your videos from almost a year ago, so i was excited to see you talking about this show again so recently
For me it was mostly just 'snooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooore' like I was nodding off even with the awkwardness to examine. Some things can be so bad its good but this def had moments of 'this is bad and not good just I am bored.'
This scene but better:
R: "Is this your sister?"
C: "It's me, actually. I'm trans."
R: "Woah, I've never seen transformation magic done in real life before, I've only ever read about it."
C: "It's one of the many types of magic you will learn more about here, but that's not important right now. What's important is your Everything Hours-"
As a trans guy myself I think that the "I'm transgender" scene is the definition of the "shoving it down your throat" conservatives are always talking about. I want trans characters who are normal people. I don't want to be preached to like I'm six years old.
It also feels almost transphobic in a way how all of the other male characters are portrayed as awful but "not the TRANS one because he's not a REAL MAN."
Agreed on all your points. And hell, I wouldn't mind if they DID do a scene where he goes into "Actually, I'm a trans guy, I transformed with magic because I wasn't comfortable with my body", but not HERE. This scene is about pink girl, both finding out more about her mother and finding her own path in life, any big character revelation should be related to that.
Then, once we know the Caraway character better, they can do an episode or just dedicate a section of an episode to his character and backstory where he goes into detail about that, maybe dropping some hints in previous episodes, just putting this revelation in a place where it actually makes sense instead of just impeding the plot. There's nothing wrong with trans characters talking about being trans, the problem is just bad writing.
REALLLL
I like the subtlety of "As 3-Dimensional as a stick figure" as an insult here, because a stick figure is barely even 2-dimensional, which is about what HGS is
Why is it called transition magic and not transformation magic, and why is it temporary?
Because if it was it would break the trans and hormone metaphor even more than it already does. It's already questionable that in a world where magic can make you biologically another sex simply by taking a potion once a month that being trans would have the same status as it does in our world. If you added that it was a you take a potion/spell once and you are permanently the other sex it would take away what little of the metaphorical value that is even left.
@@InDeathWeLove
Okay but that's not really a justification, is it? There is no viable in-universe reason for it being called that.
@@theuncalledfor I’m not saying they’re good reasons I’m just saying why the creators would never do that and insisted on it being this way because they NEED that metaphor to be in there. So even if it makes no sense and actually harms the world building they are going to include it anyway.
@@InDeathWeLove
...I guess that's fair.
Can’t say how on a show that makes rwby look like Shakespeare, but I will say this: when you have to take something monthly to stay trans, then that type of magic is bullshit!
The "I'm Transgender" joke at the beginning was extremely funny. I didn't expect that at all.
Yup, I totally agree
@@TheSoulCalledZuzia Glad you do.
Possibly yes maybe no but increasingly possible in the realm of non-existing
Being one of the few people who have actively watched and re-watched the show, it's truly wild how constant this problem of dialog twister is. Doesn't matter what the previous line is, the next line will bend over backwards and end up not making any sense why these two phases would logically flow into each other, because all the writers are focused on is "how can we wrestle against the character writing in order for us to get to *this* line?"
I will say I personally quite liked that line in this scene about how Rosemary’s sword still has all the battle marks from Lavender but Rose is against leaving any herself. It's a good bit of character writing, as it paints a picture of a reluctant warrior who is intimidated by the legacy around her sword to the point of taking extreme care of it and not even using it in battle yet. Explains why she may freak out so much if even the pommel inevitably gets chipped.
I would even defend it if it wasn't tied to Rose, because let's be honest it really doesn't go with *her* character who would whip out her sword against random flies... And the fact that once that glimpse of good characterization dialog is finished, they immediately drop it like it shouldn't matter, like they just wanted some fancy dialog lesson for this one moment. Ugh... why must they keep throwing out their show's potential like it's water on a hot city pavement...
Truly, it's fascinating how far you can rewrite this show by having the dialog extend and impact past/more than just the one scene that they dumped it in... It's like they were playing a game of telephone with it I swear 🙄
Caraway: What have we learned Rose?
Rosemary: That I don't need to change and continue to be a spazz?
Caraway: And?
Rosemary: Errr, that I am going to be a great warrior like my mom no matter how much of a fuck up I am?
Caraway: Ok...And?
Rosemary: Errr, uh, swordsing....?
Caraway: I'm transgendered Rose.
I love watching your videos, man. Wish you were verified.
Trying to find logic in HGS is like trying to find water in the desert, during the really dry season.
the way someone talks about their transness can be written as a reflection of their personality, and I think this should have been considered more when writing Caraway. he talks about his experience so blandly. on the rare occasion that I talk about my trans identity, I usually say "I was born a chick" or "back when I was a sheila" or "back then, when I looked like a girl" and I think that says something about my relationship with my current appearance and past identity. Other people I know say things like "when I was female-passing" or "when I wasn't out of the closet" because they have different feelings re: their past selves. hell, even small things like whether someone uses the terms "amab/afab" "mtf/ftm" or just "born a girl/guy" can say a lot about how they relate to these words and ideas.
caraway just kind of has no personality. it's like they were afraid of making him less than perfect representation, and because of this, they made him vastly uninteresting.
I mean it's pretty clear he was there entirely to handle the we need a trans message portion of it(besides the general creator self insert part of it). This could have worked, but when you have an exceedingly incompetent writing team it just makes the whole thing worse because the only thing worse than a bad writer is a bad writer that is trying to force in one of their pet ideas/concepts into the script no matter what.
This means that in the end Caroway's personality is being trans(which isn't a personality to any sane individual). Aside from that he is just written to be as bland and inoffensive as possible. I guess maybe this is because showing a trans person actually not being flawed would be negative to the message despite humanising them actually being something that would help people empathise with the character more making the message itself more salient. However that would require them to be good writers which everything in the show disproves.
"it's like they were afraid of making him less than perfect representation, and because of this, they made him vastly uninteresting"
And that right there is my whole issue with the current trend of obsessing with representation. Writers are no longer creating characters with dreams, struggles and goals, but rather cardboard stand-ins for whichever group to self-insert into. And because they're stand-ins, they can't give them flaws because then the self-inserting group would immediately assume the writer is painting their whole group with such flaws. And thus we get anti-characters, empty vessels for shallow people to project themselves onto instead of characters for people from all walks of life to relate or be inspired by.
True but I’m also sick of the trans representation where the trans person is just always in a struggle always mopey always pitiable. My fav trans character is hibari kun. She’s not perfect but she’s confident in who she is and never lets anyone tell her otherwise.
"I dont know that word" you're literally a wizard and he sair he used potions..
Holy crap, the transgender scene feels like my nails are being pulled out
I was genuinely cringing away from my phone at the writing and delivery 😭
Everything in between "This was our first Everything Hours" and "I'd give anything to know where she is right now" could be replaced by a shot or two of the photo album showing Lavender and Caraway over the years and get the same message across.
You know, if it had been done well "everything hours" could make sense and even have potential (and another name, something more like "specialty hour" at a quick idea).
The explanation makes it sounds like free time, but also mentions that the students only have a week to choose what to do there.
So to me this is basically "elective time", where they train a personal skill, something outside their usual classroom range but you *are* expected to train something in it with a teacher that is more focused on that specialty.
If you took another fictional school as an example, FF8's Gardens, they have classes about GFs and magic (you need to use GFs to be able to use magic), physical fighting and actual classroom classes (we start the game after the last class and go right to the exams).
If you gave them "everything hours", I assume it is where they learn their exclusive skills. Sure, Squall's gunblade triggering and Zell's combos count as close combat, but they are also more specialized so they would be like Rosemary's "swording". And Quistis learns Blue Magic from enemy items, Rinoa is basically a one-dog beast tamer, etc.
'i take a potion once a month' im actually sobbing rn
The only remotely creative point in this conversation is how knicks and scars are how you know a weapon has seen battle, and that point was made much more effectively in the _Legend of the Guardians_ movie, and they actually had the balls to use a veteran warrior's heavily scared face to illustrate the point.
Rosemary should have at least heard and known what the word "transition" means.
"You're a girl?!"
"I used to be."
End of story
Thank you for making this video. It really puts to words what i picked up on in this show, but couldnt express.
"He is sooo baked right now."
I HOLLERED-
My problem with the whole "I'm Transgender" scene is not that Caraway points out he is trans, but the ENTIRE conversation not only leaves nothing to the imagination but also changes the subject of Lavender completely, which makes him out to look selfish.
If he said something along the lines of "Let's just say I've had a few changes" after Rosemary questions him being a girl, not only does that allow the audience to put the pieces together themselves, but also adds a comedic yet charismatic dialog to Caraway. Plus, it'll make it so the subject isn't changed.
But hey, that's for competent writers to know.
Caraway's voice is just...it's so unprofessional. I get what type of voice they were going for, but it's way too...whispy and mumbly. Voice acting should be clear and easily presented.
I AGREE IT SOUNDS SO BAD
As someone who is trans, this scene always hurt to listen to. It's so unnatural, and not how we typically interact with the world.
Maybe newer trans people feel safe to just share all of their life history with people, but us older trans folk... that takes time. Lots of time. And trust. Because you never know who will attack, murder, or call the police on you. I went four years at my current company before I told people I'm trans, and even then I only bring it up when it's relevant to what we're discussing.
I think it would have felt more natural if it had gone:
Rosemary: Is that your sister?
Caraway: Ah... no... that was me... (showing some discomfort with discussing it, uncertainty of sharing this information, etc.)
Rosemary: Really? You were a girl?
Caraway: ... Once upon a time, yes. It feels like a lifetime ago.
Rosemary: Cool! How did you change into a man? (I assume Caraway is a man, I don't know these characters lol)
Caraway: With magic. I take a potion once a month to perpetuate the effects.
Something like this would have felt significantly more natural to me.
You know what? I’m just happy to see you still making videos man. Good on you.
Remember the scene in Owl House where Luz says “I’m homosexual” and the other scene where she says “I’m Hispanic”. You don’t? That’s because those scenes don’t exist and the writers of Owl House understand the golden rule of representation: “Show don’t tell”. It’s stuff like that that shows that shows like Owl House are written by actual adults while shows like High Guardian Spice are written by insecure man children.
I remember the scene where she says she’s bisexual. Lmao good point though
@@rfurthegamer3412
That scene makes sense cuz it's specifically a coming out scene
@@plushcentric that’s the joke
The "baked" joke got me.
The TF2 meme was unexpected and quite funny. Anyway, you hit the nail on the head. I'm looking forward to your rewrite.
Carroway isn't a bad character because he's trans, he's a bad character because he's a poorly written Gary Stu self insert.
I say this as a trans man.