Willow: The Series will be gone from Disney Plus in a couple of days after premiering the last day of November of 2022. I’m writing this on May 24th, 2023. Yep. The Mighty Mouse has decided to get rid of its own spawn before it became 6 months old. I’m about to give you my head canon as to why.
The year of our Mousy Lord 2022 saw an explosion of content like never before from the loins of the corporate corpse that is Disney. Moon Knight, National Treasure, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Ms. Marvel, Tales of the Jedi, and Willow were among those. But also the cinema genitals of said corpse gave us, Wakanda Forever, Multiverse of Madness, and Thor: Love & Thunder. Most of these things have a very dark theme in common: the use of a known male character as hook, only to deliver a female-centric narrative.
Proper representation aims to give voice to groups that have been silenced for a long time. The problem is that those who have been given the opportunity to use their voices have not known how to use that moment to tell stories of triumph. They’d rather take revenge for the grievances, real and imaginary, suffered by their peers. Women writers decided they needed to humiliate as many male characters as possible. POC creators decided it was more important to change the race of known characters than share real stories from their ancestry. Gender and sexual diverse storytellers thought it was cute to eradicate heterosexuality, basically imitating their detractors. You know, the old “fight fire with fire” because that shit had gone well every single time. Nevertheless, not one of those groups has come with an actual good story to tell.
Sad, ain’t it?
Underrepresented groups are not trying to tell their stories anymore; they are just checking boxes on a propaganda list. Forget character development, plot, good world building; nah, we only need to mention a character’s race and sexuality for they/them to be epic— and remember to insult those who hated us before to round the narrative.
And that’s how we arrive at Willow: The Series. First of all, who the fukk asked for this? That 1988 movie was not a big hit; yeah, people kind of liked it, but no one was doing hunger strikes for more of that. It’s not a great movie either, neither by the 80s standards nor today’s nostalgia. So why did we need a TV series based on it?
It’s in the title of this piece: CRAPPY REPRESENTATION.
By the time this aberration came to life, we, the audience, were tired of the bait and switch. Call things by what they are, and maybe we’ll give them a chance. Don’t title it Willow, if the guy is going to be a mere sidekick to all the females in the story. Now, in all fairness, Willow Ufgood was barely half of the movie’s story. Val Kilmer’s hunkiness was very distracting and it was more about the destined child than about Willow’s journey, but still he was important to the plot. In the TV show, Willow Ufgood is there, but none of it is about him, it’s about female empowerment.
In two more years, having a lesbian lead is going to be as tired and rehashed as any big burly macho man in 1990s action movies. Funny thing is those BBMM at least have character arcs. Our Sapphic heroines do not grow, they only kick ass and munch muffins. Not so funny is the fact that they are so boring and wooden their girl-on-girl antics can’t even excite straight men who enjoy those vignettes in their porn stash.
The point of representation is to promote a message of hope. That narrative that we need to SEE people like us on TV is bullshit. Logical human beings do not need a character to be identical to them to be relatable. For starters no one looks like you, unless you have a twin. Even within the same race, not everybody is identical. And don’t get me started about the representation of sexuality because not all sexually diverse people are created equal. So yes, it’s nice to see someone who sort of looks like you on the screen, but that person does not have your story, did not have your struggles; their reality is not the same as yours.
Interestingly, products cannot be better than those who create them. Poor storytelling comes from lacking, ineffectual storytellers. People with zero real qualifications are giving projects because they check boxes of representation. In turn these individuals check some more boxes of diversity/representation in a narrative without foundation and think they have created massive hits. If they were only clueless as to why others decry their product we’d be more lenient with them, but they get angry, and that is fukken annoying.
You’re giving us shit sandwiches and then get mad when we say they stink.
I wonder if Willow: The Series will evaporate from the internet in the same way it’s being erased from the monstrosity which created it.
