Cartoons and happiness

As I've said before, I watch a lot of cartoons. In fact, by and large, the majority of my television watching is cartoons or otherwise diverting fare (I have, of late, been watching Tiny House Hunters: the concept of tiny houses intrigues me as much as I know I couldn't do it myself, and sometimes the "house hunter" type shows bug me when the people doing the hunting get very entitled or whiny, but still, it's fun to see the houses*)

(*Okay. I COULD see a tiny house being something like either a vacation house, or a "I really need to bug out of town where people can't find me" type house. But I couldn't live in one full time. Not with our summers; I'd go stir crazy trapped within 400 square feet or whatever. And I also remember how depressing it was when I lived in a studio apartment and could see the dirty dishes in the kitchen sink from my bed....)

The Mary Sue ran a story the other day on Star Vs. The Forces Of Evil, a fairly new Disney cartoon on Disney XD. I really like this cartoon a lot. Over at The Mary Sue article they bring up some of the "feminist" (a word, I think, that has become kind of useless because it can mean so many things) implications of the show and such, but I admit the show just makes me HAPPY in a lot of ways, and that's why I like it.

I can't quite explain what it is about it that makes me happy. It's colorful, for one thing, and colorful things make me happy (I think this also explains part of my love of yarn and fabric). And yeah, it has a female protagonist who SO doesn't do the damsel-in-distress thing, and also it doesn't seem to be in a hurry to 'ship' any of its characters (One thing I object to about a lot of shows for grown ups is the frequency with which some of the main characters seem to fall into bed (and I suppose, out of) with each other... granted that I don't pay much attention to my friends' social lives but it seems almost no one out here in the heartland is nearly that "active" as the people on tee vee. This may actually be a reason why I like cartoons in general: less stupid relationship stuff).

And it's just nonsensical in some ways: Star's best friend from her old planet is named Flying Princess Pony Head, and Pony Head is literally a floating, disembodied pony head. And this is totally normal to Star, she doesn't see it as strange at ALL. Or that she gets chased by bizarre villains. (There is one called Spikeballs; he has spiked balls for hands. And he actually shakes hands with either Star or Marco in one of the episodes...) Or that she can use scissors to open up a wormhole to another dimension....

The show is essentially a parody of the old "Magical Girl" style (something from anime; I'm not that familiar as the only Magical Girl show I have really seen was the old American dub of Sailor Moon). But Star has the magic wand, and she states the "spell" she's going to use to fight the baddies - this is standard Magical Girl stuff. Except hers are wonderfully goofy:

NARWHAL BLAST!  (Tiny narwhals attack the bad guy)
RAINBOW BUTTERFLY ARMAGEDDON! (Huge burst of rainbow butterflies....)

(And okay, I admit it: occasionally now when I have some difficult thing to do, that will require a lot of "emotional spoons," I find myself thinking NARWHAL BLAST or RAINBOW TORNADO or something Star-like before it, to psych myself up)



I think also I like the show because of Star. She's incredibly, goofily optimistic and she is also far more confident than I ever was as a tween or am as an adult. I also like the friendship dyad with Marco, the son of the family Star is staying with as an 'exchange student' - Marco is far more cautious and controlled. And Star helps him break out of that a little bit. (I need a friend sort of like Star).


(Also, some people in the fandom are wanting to "ship" Marco and Star. NO. STOP. Their relationship needs to be more like a brother-sister relationship for this thing to work.)


One reason SOME people criticize the show a little bit is they say it's too "simple," that it doesn't try for deep plotlines. That's actually a big reason why I like it: it's silly and goofy, it's 11-minute episodes. Problems happen but they get taken care of in that time span. The show doesn't strive to be emotionally deep like Steven Universe has become, or like Adventure Time became even before Steven Universe.

And I have to admit, the deeper, more metaphysically-minded cartoons: there's a place for them, but I have to admit I tend to wander away from a show a bit when it gets too, what I call, "sad." I think part of it, for me, is that there's not resolution: big questions are raised and left hanging. In Adventure Time, at least last I watched it, the universe of Fin and Jake was one that was post nuclear-war, the Ice King had originally been a nice researcher-type who was driven mad by an evil crown, and Princess Bubblegum had gone from being a cute squishy ruler to someone with kind of messed up ways of dealing with the world.

And I haven't kept up with Steven Universe* but it seems like it got very dark very fast. (A recent episode I DID see involved some kind of a plotline with "experimentation" that cast one of the side characters in a vaguely Mengele-like role. Oh, we don't see the atrocities on-screen, just the after effects of them, but still).

(*Part of this is Cartoon Network's goofy way of scheduling stuff, where there are no new episodes for months on end, and not even really re-runs of the existing ones, and you think the show must have ended, and then, boom, there's a whole mess of new episodes all dropped at once when you don't have time to watch them. I find these days mostly when I turn on Cartoon Network, they're showing either Teen Titans Go which ranges from mildly funny to meh, or The Amazing Adventures of Gumball, which is stupid-funny and I do like stupid-funny things but I've seen all the episodes like three times already....)

And I admit: there are enough sad and confusing things in real life for me that I prefer cartoons that are simpler and more straightforward. As I said in a comment at TMS, Star makes me happier after I've watched it, and there aren't a lot of entertainment things these days that do it - where I just, plain and simple, feel happier for having watched.

And I admit: my current favorite cartoon deals with some fairly heavy emotional stuff (see my review of the latest episode, a couple days ago), but to quote Sweetie Belle: "If it's a friendship problem, it'll be wrapped up in about half an hour." And again: that sense of resolution, that, by and large, the world has been put right again, is part of what makes me happy about these kinds of shows.

And YES, it's unrealistic to wish life were that simple, that problems could be easily dealt with - but sometimes I am (to quote a family friend) a Bear of Very Little Brain and I do wish life were that simple.

(Also, apparently the creator - her name is Daron Nefcy - originally wrote the story as a comic, and in the original story, Star was not an interdimensional princess sent to Earth, she was a delusional sixth-grade loser who only BELIEVED herself a princess superhero. I definitely prefer the final version of things. That first one would have been crazy frustrating and depressing as a cartoon).

I also like the Disney XD show Gravity Falls. (And I DID get to see the new episode; they re-ran it the next night). This episode was a big "reveal" and kind of a bringing together of a few threads in the show. (At one point, Soos* makes the comment that he hopes everything that comes out will be in line with his "fanfiction"

(Yeah. That's a thing now, I guess. The idea that there's a fan base that speculates on stuff and is Deeply Disappointed when their speculations don't bear out. This is where I depart from fandoms a little)

Anyway. I will say the summing-up-of-threads worked out pretty well (IMHO). Yes, Stan Pines (Stanley, not Stanford, as it turns out) is still a grifter and a crook, but that's explained. And he has a brother. And some of the reason Fiddleford McGuckett became a crazy old prospector type is explored....

the comment is made by the REAL Stanford that Stan can stay around "until the end of the summer" which makes me think that maybe the show is getting ready to wrap up....but then again, Phineas and Ferb lasted what, seven years? over the course of what was supposed to be one summer.

I find myself wondering if the person who came up with this series had an incredibly detailed plan of what happened when, up to and including the final episode, or if he's just really, really good at incorporating stuff and dealing with earlier issues without having to retcon anything.

(*Short for Jesus; he is Hispanic, apparently - at least, his grandmother is called Abuelita** and she has an accent, and I find myself asking, why is his nickname not Chuy then?)

(**And although Abuelita's role tends to be very small, I love her as a character. At one point, Stan (the old-man character) kisses her for some reason and her response is "Okay. I go vacuum my face now." Heh.)

Gravity Falls is another show that makes me happy. It's not as self-consciously CHEERFUL as either My Little Pony or Star vs. The Forces of Evil, but there's something about it....the fact that Mabel is so happy and Dipper wants to use his intellect to figure crazy stuff out, and the fact that there is this crazy stuff happening that, at least this far, isn't so much creepy-crazy as it is just crazy-crazy.

(Though I still didn't like Bill Cipher. Or Li'l Gideon, both of them were pretty creepy and I'm glad the show has kind of moved away from using either one)