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The Umbrella Academy
Apr. 18th, 2019 11:31 pmUmbrella Academy spoilers! Lots of them! 90% spoilers by volume. Two posts imported from tumblr and squished together.
But first:
[turns out I can't get a regular size screenshot to show up larger than 40 pixels wide so: pretend this is a screenshot of a tumblr post that says "tempted to become an english professor just so i can have “characters are not autonomous living creatures: they are reflections of an author’s perceptions and beliefs about the world” permanently written on the blackboard in all caps underlined and circled apprx 200 times for emphasis."]
Okay. Le'ts go.
anyone else notice how neither sister says a single word in the last episode?
didn’t want to put it in tags because they don’t get blacklisted but: out of the named characters, the only women who speak are the handler (shot midsentence) and Agnes (who has spent the rest of the 9th and 10th episodes bound and gagged, and only speaks to reassure the guy that she’s still dtf). I think Cha Cha might have a line but I’d have to check. Mombot is sedately and smilingly trapped in a collapsing building. Unnamed dying wife speaks, to reassure a man and tell him to go on without her. ETA: they also did an Emotionally Significant frame of the detective who was pretty objectively fridged. so technically she is named and in this episode and also does not speak.
and yet Luther, most annoying of them all, runs his mouth constantly and is wrong every single time
***
So I misremembered at least one major detail - Vanya does speak to Pogo - but she does spend most of the episode cryptically silent. There’s also a chunk of time in the penult episode where she’s speaking and pleading when she’s locked up but we- like her siblings outside- can’t hear her.
I really feel like fairly suddenly, between episodes 9 and 10, she stops being a person or character and becomes a Macguffin.
Like, why does she start to destroy everything? The house, sure, that’s clear, and everyone else has had their shot by now anyway. For a while she’s clearly in control of the manifestation of her powers - rides the bus without incident, flips the car but only the car, smiles and keeps playing when she sees Allison came to her performance. I can guess at an in-universe reason for her going full Dark Willow but it would be a guess because I really feel like there’s no clue at all from Vanya’s actions, and she doesn’t tell us. It feels like the writers needed something to blow up and worked backwards from there, because I don’t think even a callous Vanya is evil or heartless.
(For a show underpinned by a premise of child neglect, it’s weirdly unsympathetic to kids lashing out against the abusive authority figures in their lives. Vanya killed several nannies as a child and received more rigidity and an authority who was unkillable. Leonard killed his abuser and that’s how you know he’s completely cuckoopants evil - he’s the one who’s whispering in Vanya’s ear about how it's okay when it's self defense. It’s a grimdark kind of world so of course no one says hey maybe let’s not abuse these kids. But the *show* seems to say that this kid who reacts in fairly age- and situation-appropriate ways but has powers at her disposal was definitely evil all along if not for the drugs holding her back. And the part where she completely wrecks the home she grew up in and then takes the bus to the thing she was scheduled for sure looks like any-coping-in-crisis to me.)
What happened to Vanya who missed her brother when he disappeared? Vanya who kept trying to talk to her siblings even when she got shut down? Is this a point about her being alone and having no one to speak *to*? Was Leonard the last straw? She shows grief and regret when she thinks she killed Allison. So it’s not just the suppressers either.
On a meta level a lot of the show involves people not talking to each other. (I think it’s interesting how no-cell-phones plays with this.) And a lot of people barging ahead with poor decisions because they’re stubborn, or proud, or judging the person who told them, or not listening. Miscommunication and talking/not talking/talking past is a big thing. And the way they use the time travel certainly leads to some self-fulfilling prophecies - they think Vanya is the cause, so they make her do the thing they were trying to prevent. Partial knowledge of the future is what leads to that future. Sure. Everything is Unintended Consequences. Classic!
A whole season about being emotionally stuck in the patterns of the past (manifested in variously literal ways) and now they’re physically going back to that past.
Other miscellaneous opinions:
The way that Allison, Klaus, and Vanya have mental/emotional powers and are the women and the gay sibling. The three brothers whose powers we see in action (excepting Ben, though I think he would fit this too) are very mechanical - Diego point, knife go shcwick. But A, K, and V have to come to terms with their powers in ways that the others don’t - Vanya and Klaus have their powers suppressed by drugs at the beginning but not the end (and wow the layer of moralizing real world psych drugs and addiction even tho I don’t disagree). Plus Allison isn’t using her powers because she depended on them too much. But Five? Any downsides are mainly situational, like an unfortunate coincidence rather than a part of the power itself. And Diego’s and Luther’s are barely commented on - it’s clear that Diego’s shitty Batman aesthetic is separate from his powers, but that distinction isn’t clear for the three feminized chars. I’m not sure what Luther’s power even was before he got dummy thicc.
Klaus scenes are like straight out of kink bingo. Tied up and confessing feelings. The drugs keep away the literal ghosts. Shaving and crying. He's five tropes in a trenchcoat and each of them feel like the ones designed to specifically fuck me up, except I think that's everyone's experience of this character. He was like, mined from our collective subconscious, but what boggles me is that it feels like Gerard Way probably installed like 50% of those things in my cohort's id anyway so it's just... very recursive.
But first:
[turns out I can't get a regular size screenshot to show up larger than 40 pixels wide so: pretend this is a screenshot of a tumblr post that says "tempted to become an english professor just so i can have “characters are not autonomous living creatures: they are reflections of an author’s perceptions and beliefs about the world” permanently written on the blackboard in all caps underlined and circled apprx 200 times for emphasis."]
Okay. Le'ts go.
anyone else notice how neither sister says a single word in the last episode?
didn’t want to put it in tags because they don’t get blacklisted but: out of the named characters, the only women who speak are the handler (shot midsentence) and Agnes (who has spent the rest of the 9th and 10th episodes bound and gagged, and only speaks to reassure the guy that she’s still dtf). I think Cha Cha might have a line but I’d have to check. Mombot is sedately and smilingly trapped in a collapsing building. Unnamed dying wife speaks, to reassure a man and tell him to go on without her. ETA: they also did an Emotionally Significant frame of the detective who was pretty objectively fridged. so technically she is named and in this episode and also does not speak.
and yet Luther, most annoying of them all, runs his mouth constantly and is wrong every single time
***
So I misremembered at least one major detail - Vanya does speak to Pogo - but she does spend most of the episode cryptically silent. There’s also a chunk of time in the penult episode where she’s speaking and pleading when she’s locked up but we- like her siblings outside- can’t hear her.
I really feel like fairly suddenly, between episodes 9 and 10, she stops being a person or character and becomes a Macguffin.
Like, why does she start to destroy everything? The house, sure, that’s clear, and everyone else has had their shot by now anyway. For a while she’s clearly in control of the manifestation of her powers - rides the bus without incident, flips the car but only the car, smiles and keeps playing when she sees Allison came to her performance. I can guess at an in-universe reason for her going full Dark Willow but it would be a guess because I really feel like there’s no clue at all from Vanya’s actions, and she doesn’t tell us. It feels like the writers needed something to blow up and worked backwards from there, because I don’t think even a callous Vanya is evil or heartless.
(For a show underpinned by a premise of child neglect, it’s weirdly unsympathetic to kids lashing out against the abusive authority figures in their lives. Vanya killed several nannies as a child and received more rigidity and an authority who was unkillable. Leonard killed his abuser and that’s how you know he’s completely cuckoopants evil - he’s the one who’s whispering in Vanya’s ear about how it's okay when it's self defense. It’s a grimdark kind of world so of course no one says hey maybe let’s not abuse these kids. But the *show* seems to say that this kid who reacts in fairly age- and situation-appropriate ways but has powers at her disposal was definitely evil all along if not for the drugs holding her back. And the part where she completely wrecks the home she grew up in and then takes the bus to the thing she was scheduled for sure looks like any-coping-in-crisis to me.)
What happened to Vanya who missed her brother when he disappeared? Vanya who kept trying to talk to her siblings even when she got shut down? Is this a point about her being alone and having no one to speak *to*? Was Leonard the last straw? She shows grief and regret when she thinks she killed Allison. So it’s not just the suppressers either.
On a meta level a lot of the show involves people not talking to each other. (I think it’s interesting how no-cell-phones plays with this.) And a lot of people barging ahead with poor decisions because they’re stubborn, or proud, or judging the person who told them, or not listening. Miscommunication and talking/not talking/talking past is a big thing. And the way they use the time travel certainly leads to some self-fulfilling prophecies - they think Vanya is the cause, so they make her do the thing they were trying to prevent. Partial knowledge of the future is what leads to that future. Sure. Everything is Unintended Consequences. Classic!
A whole season about being emotionally stuck in the patterns of the past (manifested in variously literal ways) and now they’re physically going back to that past.
Other miscellaneous opinions:
The way that Allison, Klaus, and Vanya have mental/emotional powers and are the women and the gay sibling. The three brothers whose powers we see in action (excepting Ben, though I think he would fit this too) are very mechanical - Diego point, knife go shcwick. But A, K, and V have to come to terms with their powers in ways that the others don’t - Vanya and Klaus have their powers suppressed by drugs at the beginning but not the end (and wow the layer of moralizing real world psych drugs and addiction even tho I don’t disagree). Plus Allison isn’t using her powers because she depended on them too much. But Five? Any downsides are mainly situational, like an unfortunate coincidence rather than a part of the power itself. And Diego’s and Luther’s are barely commented on - it’s clear that Diego’s shitty Batman aesthetic is separate from his powers, but that distinction isn’t clear for the three feminized chars. I’m not sure what Luther’s power even was before he got dummy thicc.
Klaus scenes are like straight out of kink bingo. Tied up and confessing feelings. The drugs keep away the literal ghosts. Shaving and crying. He's five tropes in a trenchcoat and each of them feel like the ones designed to specifically fuck me up, except I think that's everyone's experience of this character. He was like, mined from our collective subconscious, but what boggles me is that it feels like Gerard Way probably installed like 50% of those things in my cohort's id anyway so it's just... very recursive.
