https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phWcmwlpjQo this scene's all punching and talking, but you have a REAL contrast between a supe grappling with the unachievable ideals of an open society that doesn't live up to them, vs. a supe purely about rule with a fist so tight his victims feel grateful for it; there's something that stays behind for the 99.99999% of us who aren't earthshattering superspuds or peasants on a volcano planet 1,000 light-years away

it's why the Sith were so interesting even in the prequels because they were so bent on self-seeking they crawled their way to the throne, while in the sequels they just have big ships, blow up a village so they can find thousands of more ships, and yell Britishly; then every planet somehow overthrows them at once

that's what made WandaVision different from half the MCU, it wasn't just "okay, we filled our quota for quips": it's not "Captain Wasserface knocks Particle Man with a blast of water, then Captain I-Beam hits him so hard the ground cracks magma, and she makes a smart-aleck comment about men fighting over her" (felt dirty typing that)

I see these failures as basically FAILURES to use animation (or CGI for the MCU/Star Wars): each way of showing something to an audience (opera, splatter painting, Soviet Girl Meets Tractor painting, concrete poem) has its own rules and "grammar" determined by the substance itself: that's why you don't waste a comic strip or cartoon on having the characters just yipyap at each other (it's even called "illustrated radio"); if you have an Important Message for readers, don't make it 50 pages long, otherwise the only devotees will be weird sex-culty types enveloped by the other 1,150 pages (lookin' at you, Ayn Rand); Dr. Who was a cavalcade of terrific female characters, then they decided to "stick it to the chuds" with Thirteen and made her a giggling airhead for half a season until they went back to the cavalcade of weird shit

so bringing it back to the 2022-3 purge, even if the shows aren't actually that similar there's a sense that they were drawn the same, run by the same people or sort of people (these creators are queer 20-35yos, not a 55yo experienced in some international gay underground animation scene), same beats and poses and pacing (since it's the same boarders), same Joe Rogan jokes (those definitely won't age badly by like 2023), same Anglo-American social categories (there's no Latin travestis, nothing besides shallow undergrad politics, little European animation influence): so no matter the differences, it still feels that a lot of different versions of the same show are getting axed (only Kid Cosmic and Infinity Train looked like they didn't come from the same studio)--my reaction's more "oh, that one ... too?"