>>10604
>(or "it's just a kid show, don't think deeply into it!)
I'm glad that it's gotten pushed back this far at this stage, but that type of rhetoric still irks me. Once, the normie mainstream thought much the same of Lord of the Rings, by which I mean that "don't think too deeply into it" is a response which occurs in escapism. In pieces of art with clear overt messaging, this sort of transcendent dissociation with reality doesn't occur - for example, in allegorical works like, say, Infinite Jest (I'm not saying I understand it, but I have read it) the world can't facilitate escapism since it's a sort of mixture of allegory for the real world (at least in historical fiction you can sort of "escape" into the past, albeit much less so in my experience than in speculative fiction) and rhetorical jokes, like with the north American super-union being called ONAN in a reference to onanism, unserious joke details that intentionally burst any illusion that this world of the book is real. That's not to say escapism can only come from strict worldbuilding, or even has to be set in a different world (there are parts of The Count of Monte Cristo, for instance, where one is transported by the investment in the struggle and the vengeance), but ultimately any type of over-investment in anything is still villified and sneered at. The fact that it's children's media exacerbates this response, naturally, but "don't think deeply into it" is the phrase that really angers me as it crops up all over the place, this pervasive idea that really, keeping your nose in the grime and muck is what matters, as if the grime and muck itself could not convince you of it's own meaninglessness and worthlessness. To my mind it takes a special type of soulless person to not need even a modicum of transcendence beyond the mere material reality in their life to make things worthwhile.
>I think, for analysis of Episodes and the shows' lore itself, it is better to view things through a lens of:
Season Canon:
There are patterns that hold for entire seasons but may not make sense in a future season.
Episode Canon:
There are patterns that only hold for single episodes, or one off lines and implications that never went anywhere.
I guess the insecurity is in the idea that the canon is flawed in some way, but since that's inevitable I think your way of viewing things is preferable. Ultimately I find at this point that I can view the reality behind the screen as "real" to me whilst also seeing contradictions and a changing canon, those changes are just part of what that reality entails. After all, my reality seems to change drastically in ways that break "irl canon" as I understood it up till that point all the time. If irl has inconsistent canon according to human perception, then I'm willing to give the same slack at least to fiction.
>The idea of all the powerful magic messing things up and making all the contradictions we see I think is a pretty cool idea.
Another way I think of it is a sort of ranked system. In Stein's Gate, the ideal timeline aligned to a particular point in reality, so in the same vein if I set Season 1 of this show as my "target" I can then sort of regard where the show contradicts Season 1 as "divergences" from the "true" or perhaps just "preferable" timeline.
>I think you should hold onto that theory and maybe try to build it up as that is a pretty novel way to explain everything.
In my mind it puts this idea that the original timeline has continued out there somewhere, and that the conflicts in the later show are mere echoes of similar things happening back in the "real" timeline. In that sense I doubt I could do the mysterious, half-dreading half-excited feeling that out there the "true" story is continuing justice. I'd feel I'd want to fill in what the "real" canon of the "real" timeline would be, which I couldn't do justice to and would dissipate that wonderful feeling of a phantom world just beyond reach. But if I focus more on the show's specific timeline, perhaps I could make it work.