Change of plans. Run! /// We have to get out of here now!
Parallels in s3 The Titanium Ninja
Let me introduce you to... a typical Ninjago season :
Lloyd gets kidnapped at least once
Cole adopts some traumatized kids / creatures he found in a forgotten, lonely place
Jay becomes the leader of a cult or something
Zane "dies" for the 182737492th time
Nya kicks something (or someone)
Kai runs straight into the danger powered with raw confidence and survives only by pure luck
New outfits for everyone
The animation had another glow up
Jay and Cole are paired for a mission but they have the worst influence on each other's dumbness and mess up so bad you wonder why they're still allowed to work together
Kai tries to show off but miserably fails
Lloyd thinks he's Steven Universe and tries to redeem a villain
Jay spends 99% of his screentime uncontrollably yelling
Wu reveals crazy family lore he was hiding since forever
Kai gets rejected by Skylor
Cole wants cake. Now.
Lloyd gets more daddy issues than he already had (you didn't know it was even possible)
Star Wars reference
Wth is Garmadon doing this time ?
Nya is constantly on the verge of committing murder
Kai bullies Jay
Pixal somehow manages to stay calm
Lloyd is still in his angsty teenage era except he's now a grown adult
Zane is silly, the worst things possible happen to him, then he's silly again
There's another plot hole but the lore is so crazy already no one is gonna care
Shout out to Ninjago City citizen still living here knowing their lives are in constant danger every single second they stay in this place
Nya and Jay keeps being the only healthy stable romance in the whole show
Dareth unexpectedly ends up being useful
Lloyd do the thing with his eyes when it's getting serious (you instantly start screaming)
Kai says "fiyah"
"Yep so I saw [a main character] falling of a rock so they're definitely dead." "But maybe they..." - "NOPE. THEY'RE DEAD" - "aww ok" (they are, in fact, alive)
The team yells "ninja, go !" at least once
Characters are listening to music. It's The Weekend Whip by The Fold.
Why does someone has to stay behind and why is it Zane.
"You know I'm very old I'm gonna die soon" has said Wu every single day of the past 100 years of his life
Nya builds crazy vehicles again
This is a found family trope and they want you to know it
You spotted a pride flag in the background of a 0.5 seconds action scene and you already know the homophobic fans are going to lose their minds over it again
Snakes. Snakes everywhere.
A villain has the most brutal death on screen and you wonder how th this got approved for a kid show, until the show itself makes a joke about it
"Gasp ! Are we... Gonna lose our powers ???" (no they won't)
Jay's parents are in danger
Crazy plot twist happens and you suddenly realize it's been foreshadowed every single season in the previous 10 seasons but you never paid attention to it until now
Something that happened in a previous season gets referenced and you nostalgia cry about it for a whole episode
"Omg, was that the last and final season of Ninjago ???" (no it wasn't, nothing can end this show, we'll all die way before it does, now get ready for the next arc because it's probably gonna last ten more years)
Zane's detective LARPing in prime empire has the same vibe as crude generative ai, in that he's cramming in a ton of material to achieve a likeness to fictional detectives without taking into account how the specifics of the situation may render his emulation unwarranted and seemingly surface level.
Humans and more sophisticated ai models are a lot more shrewd when it comes to processing and selecting data for particular insights.
Do you think Zane learns like a human or like an ai?
To draw a human face, a human has to learn the proportions and proper usage of the drawing tools or materials, and even then it usually ends up somewhat stylised. An ai only has to look at many many images so it can produce a new image that most closely represents the references. A human cannot do that.
Maybe he has a mixture of both, maybe he can fluctuate between the two, I can't decide.
I do, however, like to imagine that if he did learn like an ai, he'd still go through the steps a human needs because they bring him comfort. Even though he can produce near-perfect results, he still makes himself go through the trial and error of human learning, he purposefully gets stuff wrong so he can feel improvement.
It can't be fun to be perfect, right?
Can we. Can we talk about. Ok consider. We all know about kids developing trust issues because of their parents. But I almost feel sometimes like Zane is the reverse? Like his dad raised him completely isolated in the middle of the woods and then erased his memory and left him completely vulnerable and alone. And we know from his behavior, especially in the first seasons, that Zane has a hard time adapting to people and grasping social boundaries, which already sucks for him but I feel like the implications of his upbringing go a lot deeper than that? I know I already made a post that was really similar to this but I'm on a slightly different track rn so hear me out
Like I feel like, intentionally or not, he made Zane COMPLETELY dependant on him in every conceivable aspect and then (by giving him straight up amnesia) he abandoned him without what little preparation he might have had to set him up for the outside world. And in doing that he simultaneously made it practically impossible for him to develop normal, constructive relationships with other people and also failed to give him to ability to discern when to trust people and when to be wary of their intentions.
So basically he put him in a position where he would be completely defenseless and wouldn't have the emotional or social maturity to protect himself from exploitation or abuse. It's super heavily implied (if not outright stated) that Zane was essentially homeless for however long he was wandering around before Wu found him, and it's like??? Can you imagine how traumatic that probably was all on its own? And if anything serious happened to him during this period there's a strong likelihood that he doesn't even realize it was wrong.
It'd be super interesting to have a clearer look into how he functioned pre-season one and the types of experiences he must have had. Plus I think it could serve to give some background to some of his behaviors and thought processes. Also I want to project my trauma on him as is my god-given right as an american
Works Cited:
My feelings which are always correct every time
I think a lot of the people who criticize SU for not showing us every character apologize out loud for something they did wrong and every bit of trauma recovery a character could have and every possible long, complicated, painful discussion characters could hold about their issues forget that... most of that shit would be boring as hell to watch in a cartoon. SU presents you the broad strokes, the moments that matter and can be made into an interesting 11 minute plotline, and expects you're smart enough to imagine that sometimes offscreen Steven has an hour long zoom call where he regurgitates show events to his therapist.
Screencap redraw yayyyyyyyy!!! Wanted to be really experimental w this one to get better at rendering Legos πͺπͺπͺ
Alt ver + og screencap under cut
if they don't give me THAT bruise card, I'll make myself THAT card.
yep, this is another thing that has kept me busy for a while, and now it's FINALLY finished mygod
2 post in one day!?? what??!?? am i crazy!?! nope just excited for it and got to post it like rn
and yeah yeah still nothing official with jay BUT I KNOW IT'LL HAPPENED IT HAD TO BE