EvilRoy said:
I dunno, i still think its a good portrayal of a vital theme, particularly when held against the more recent Brave. Merida is extremely physically skilled off the bat and it takes away from the struggle relative to Mulan who spends the first half of her movie visibly suffering to achieve her goal.
That's wrong ... Brave's ideas was about the journey for independence and self-constructed value. The fact that she's skilled allows the movie to actually move on with this theme that justifies why she feels like her parents are underappreciating or underevaluating her capacities for independence to begin with.
It's like all the idiots who complain about Princess Cadance because she has the audacity of being the only Princess in Equestria
that acts like an adult and all her predominant concerns are realistic to simply her duties and her private family life. Sure, there's not much you can do about that long term with character growth, but then again the character wasn't even meant to be main cast and she's already supposed to be the occasional Mr. Miyagi to Twilight from the first scene she's introduced in a flashback.
Brave would lose all its pacing if they paint Merida as incompetent ... and if the movie spent
half of its runtime just showing why her parents treat her like a little girl, the actual narrative of independence and self-discovery would be lost.
Brave has a shitload of problems ... this criticism you're spouting off isn't one of them.
Brave does not have the benefit of showing an Arya style
badassedry as time goes on. It has about 100 minutes. Moreover, the idea of a person feeling unappreciated due to their talents and self-willed independence loses all fucking meaning if the movie makes it a point
this person is incompetent. I don't know about you, but I wouldn't have wanted to watch Aladdin is he was treated as
utterly incapable of surviving on the street as he clearly does for
half the movie's run length.
Because that's not what the movie is about.
Merida's desires to lead a moreself-willed independent life is
enhanced by the fact that clearly she has
already spent a large amount of time validating her capacities as a person capable of independence. To highlight that constant desire to be without her helicopter parents dictating her life by the fact that she has obviously been training her entire life and her
skills are self-evident and impressive.
Because, you know ... that's what people do. We don't just sit on our arses and whine, we develop skills as we grow up to justify our ideas of self-worth. Merida would have been a worse character, a worse moral lesson, if all she did was whine about her parents rather than being shown 'off the bat' to have been developing the skills she best feels articulates her proof that she can be independent.
You know ... like
regular people do with their lives.
But apparently some people would ratherwatch movies about incompetents whining aboput being treated as incompetent ... I guess different folks, different strokes ... but I wouldn't want
my kids to think mediocrity is a virtue. I would rather them be young and pursue skills-building like any reasonable person would ... as a point of pride and endeavouring to be thebest
even if you never get there.
That's what makes Eddard Stark in GoT taking on a tutor to train Arya such a touching scene. Because he recognizes off the back she has more to give than just someone's arm candy. That she has the capacity to be
incredibly skilled .. the desire is there and he allows it to flourish.
Brave is essentially the flipside of that narrative, where her parents 'indulged' her 'boyish' traits but then refuse to recognize her talents or desires that her activities and skills beyond simply indulgences within some set parameter of her still being a young adult in a patriarchal world. And the movie would utterly undermine itself if Merida wasn't the type of person to expend all her efforts trying to prove them wrong.
The big reason why the Disney 'renaissance' is secondary to the 'Animation Silver Age' of the 2010s onwards is because you had people who made the cartoons in the 90s, going on to throw in the trash the emo-garbage of 90s grittiness response to the 80s Reaganesque consumerist trash, and rather presenting less tropish role models of 'kids' programming...
And whether the total delivery is lacking or not, I'd rather have a child identifying with a Merida over whatever fucking nonsense people pretended to see in Mulan.
Because 'kids' programming beyond the the Dora the Explorers of the world aren't really 'just for kids' ... and I would trade good role models and less fucking stupidity masquerading for whatever media that contains non-extant character and story development on behalf of a handful of idiots complaining how a girl can be a gifted archer. Shocking, I know. I want kids to be exposed to driven, capable role models undermining Disney tropes about their female characters through the ages.
