The first time Kaeya truly understood the sheer frustration Diona goes through everyday is when he spiked Venti’s drink with rat poison only for him to go “😋 oh yum! my what’s this? Its delicious! 😋😋 Is this new on the menu😋😋?”
Venti n Kaeya best frenemies to me… .. y’know how it goes, you write a ballad about someone’s deep rooted trauma and sing it in the city square so in exchange they discreetly gift you a lesser known yet highly potent variant of catnip to keep as a houseplant
I really hope it stays this way, while it’s puppet / childish(?) horror, it does so uniquely
And strangely brings a relatability that I don’t have much besides ‘haha isn’t that relatable’
While I love the usual approach, it’s the usual approach, it’s time to see something new from the genre
I'm having a certain amount of weird cognitive dissonance about partycoffin's Welcome Home (not tagging them because this is kinda speculation...)
I normally absolutely loathe the "the cute thing was EVIL ALL ALONG" genre, especially with Muppety puppets. I have a very strong squick about it. The Henson Workshop was one of baby's first hyperfixations, and The Dark Crystal is so important to me that it's hard to describe how without invoking religion.
... It's important to me, for these reasons, that the Muppets, especially the Sesame Street crew, are... innocent. Not in a Calvinist way, in an ... autistic hippie way. They're joyfully weird. They're not cruel for cruelty's sake. Some of the Muppets are grumpy and mean because it's what they were made to be, but they're not...
Look, it's hard to explain, but there's a very specific kind of Mean Comedy that, before Henson's death, the Muppets just did not do. Even Statler and Waldorf's heckling doesn't push that button for me. The Muppets shouldn't be capable of that kind of interpersonal cruelty. And that's important enough to me that I can't watch something like Avenue Q (much less Actual Puppet Horror) without getting sick to my stomach.
But *thus far*, the horror elements of Welcome Home haven't gotten to me in the same way. And I think it's because... Clown respects that aspect of the children's puppet genre?
Like, I know we're still in early days, and That One Fucking Picture Of Maisie freaks me the fuck out (for, uh, different reasons). But so far, it seems like at least part of the horror aspect... Is that innocence, and how it can't survive contact with humanity.
So far, at least in the newest version of WH, we've seen very little to indicate that the Home crew's joy and innocence aren't genuine. Everyone has Depths to their character, obviously, that can't be plumbed without going into the Gruesome Shit. But like.... with the possible exception of Wally, they don't seem Cruel. Fuck, even Wally seems Oblivious and Earnest, just... willing to do horrible things for the sake of Keeping Home Intact.
And that LACK of malice is ironically where the horror comes in! Because the sunny days of a kids' puppet show can't survive contact with a reality where people are cruel and ableist and homophobic, and once the show ends, there's nothing left but that reality... and everything falls apart.
Agh, I don't know. I might have to drop this fandom if I get that button pushed too many times. But for now, it's interesting to see an adult take on the genre that isn't gleefully mean and disrespectful towards one of the things I love about puppets.