My favorite thing about Amphibia is just how unapologetically cheesy it is. Uh hell YEAH these characters gain the will to go on from their favorite song!!! hell YEAH the main character uses the power of friendship!! oh, what? cringe? on the funny frog show? yeah ok.

It was supposed to be just a sketch but I couldn’t stop 🙃

The Calamity Trio’s Group Dynamics

I just saw this image of the writers’ board after season two:

And it got me thinking. What are all of the obvious group dynamics present with Sashannarcy?

1. Moral, Immoral, Amoral

This is obviously one of two dynamics referenced in the above photo. Anne has a standard, acceptable moral compass, Sasha has a socially unacceptable moral compass, and Marcy lacks any clear moral compass at all.

2. C student, B student, A student

The second dynamic from the writers’ board- Anne is an underachiever, Sasha is apparently an average student, and Marcy is an overachiever with nearly perfect grades.

3. Red, Blue, Green

I think that the girls’ gem colors represent what they could be, not necessarily what they are.

Anne’s color is blue, the color of loyalty, friendship, depth, and freedom. She displays this the best in both season finales and during her temple, where she sticks up for her loved ones and displays great generosity. She didn’t start out the series seeming much like this at all… in fact, her skirt color was always purple, a combination of blue and red, possibly indicating that Sasha influenced her away from her color and delayed her progress. Even though she’s naturally empathic, she took on Sasha’s mannerisms after so many years of friendship, and needed time away from her to skew back to her natural instincts.

For Sasha herself, red is the color of strength, leadership, anger, and violence. But her actual color is pink. Pink is typically associated with love and kindness, but Sasha definitely acts (and wears) more red, which is essentially a darker version of her gem color. It could represent that it’s more of an act that she makes it seem, but I think that it means she’ll grow into her color as well, to be red without so much baggage and anger.

Marcy’s color is green, the color of nature, intelligence, progress/growth, and… rebirth. It’s obvious that she represents intelligence already- but she resists change so desperately, as evidenced by her decision to trap herself, Anne and Sasha in an entire alternate dimension because she was going to have to move. As for rebirth, she’s definitely grown into something different. Just not by choice. When she’s free, she can start her real process of growth. With effort.

4. Heart, Strength, Intelligence

The show has already explored this and will continue to. Their three temple challenges are a great example of how these traits shine through in their personalities, as well as the underlying lessons they each need to learn in order to advance their understanding of them.

5. The Two Who Are Closer

Although I do think that these three were pretty much equally close friends before Amphibia, there are definitely times where Anne and Marcy just tend to get along better. And judging by Sasha’s line “I am not gonna fail! Not while Anne and Marcy are getting by without me!” she is definitely sensitive about it. This is also basically the entire plot of season 2, episode 19.

6. The Follower, The Leader, and The Mediator

Anne, as also seen above, is a follower. She nearly lets Sasha kill all of her new friends, and ends up needing Sprig to step in, because she’s so used to taking orders. Sasha is the leader who doles them out, literally stating that she needs to be in control and that it’s “actually kind of exhausting.” And Marcy tries to step in multiple times during Sasha and Anne’s fights, calm things down when they get emotional, and at times is even dismissive of others’ feelings in an effort to get them to just play nice. Marcy is kind of a follower, in that she listens to Sasha’s direction too, but also kind of a silent leader in that she directs a lot of the background, making choices for the greater good of the group (as she sees it) without consultation or consent from the others. She wants everything to work out (“guys, guys, stop fighting! This is crazy. We’re supposed to be friends for life. We don’t split up.”). She’s referring not just to physically being apart, but also to disagreements and tension, which she sees as inherently threatening to the group dynamic.

The non binary urge to theorizing everything around kids cartoons and explaining it to the first person who gives you a bare minimum of attention

Anne, responsibility, and compliance

If there’s anything to be said about Season Three Anne, it’s that she is doing so much better than Season One Anne. Well, maybe not in terms of trauma, but there is something to be said for how much positive change Anne’s personality has experienced.

Her parents agree: she has grown much more responsible. Even Anne acknowledges it. In five long months, she has grown so much. The Anne of the debut episode would never have done what Anne does now. 

Right?

Yeah, no. 

Ever since her friend was skewered like the main course at an amphibian cookout, Anne has been going back to the same old things she used to do. This is really something she’s been doing for a while, something that she worked so hard to get rid of, that she went to the other extreme.

Anne is a pushover. Still.

Allow me to explain. As the Protagonist, Anne has a lot of things to do. She has to hide the Plantars from the government, find a way to make an interdimensional portal, destroy a tyrannical and homicidal king, save her friends, make up with her friends, figure out what’s going on with her weird glowing blue powers, and return the Plantars back to Amphibia. 

That’s a difficult list, one that really has me wondering how she’s going to pull it off in 20 episodes–especially when she has already used up 3 of them and only found more problems.

But you see, that’s exactly the issue here. Anne has overcommitted. She has taken on too much. Because if she doesn’t do all this stuff, then she’s going to lose everything.

Sound familiar?

Anne’s sense of responsibility for things hasn’t grown this drastically. She hasn’t done some grand heel-turn from a lazy slacker to a diligent soldier. She has just changed the things she was responsible for.

Before, her responsibility was to keep her friend group together. So she agreed with everything they said, doing things she didn’t want to do, just so that they would stay friends. She hid parts of her personality away, afraid of being mocked. And it worked, up until she gained a sense of self worth.

Then, her responsibility was still to keep her friends together, but it changed. Now she was determined to make sure Marcy wouldn’t get herself horribly injured or die. She even extended that to Sasha, despite her past, offering her a chance at forgiveness and trying to work things out with her, even though Sasha was a known backstabber.

As for now? Now, everything there has failed. Keeping the friend group together didn’t work. Marcy did die, despite Anne’s best efforts. Sasha did betray them again, despite Anne’s best efforts. And while neither intended to do that, the fact is there: staying friends with them that easily isn’t going to work.

But the thoughts are still there. Watching your friend die doesn’t get rid of bad thoughts, it worsens them. 

So now Anne has these ideas in her head. She has to do what is expected of her, or else she’ll lose what she has. She can’t do anything that would indicate that she’s struggling with her tasks. She can’t have people acknowledging her opinion, as that would make more problems and disrupt the fragile status quo. She can’t have people worrying about her, not when she should be prioritizing others and worrying about everybody else.

Just because she’s in another dimension doesn’t mean Anne isn’t still Anne.

That’s why we see her throwing herself into her responsibilities. Every time she’s alone, she looks scared–but she won’t show that in front of her family.

She has this huge list of things to figure out, but she takes this on by herself, strictly keeping her parents out of it and only somewhat including the frogs.

Anne isn’t being responsible, no. Not in a healthy way. Anne has allowed her responsibilities to completely surpass her boundaries, taking up every ounce of herself and leaving her no room to rest. Furthermore, she has become more and more secretive, refusing to let anyone even know what’s going on in her head. Her compartmentalization is in full effect, and it’s making it impossible for her to fully understand why she feels so awful.

It makes Anne unable to ask for help.

Now, difficulty asking for help is not a new thing for any of the Calamity Trio. We’ve seen it in Sasha, how she would rather fling herself off a cliff than admit her weakness–and even in redemption, she still won’t let anyone breach her walls. We’ve seen it in Marcy, how she would rather send her friends to another world than admit that she’s scared of losing them, because even if she did ask for her help, what’s the use? They can’t help her, not when her problems are this bad, and not when she believes she had them coming.

Anne has the same issue going on. For her, asking for help would destroy her carefully curated façade of composure and compliance. It would make her a problem, something that needs to be addressed. And in Anne’s world, there are already enough problems without her, too.

But what Anne doesn’t realize is that asking for help is exactly what she needs. If her parents can help her fight off robots, then she won’t have to hide from them. If the Plantars can help her search through the museum, then she can find a portal faster. And if she can communicate what she needs, it’ll make it so those big confrontations like Reunion and True Colors don’t happen–because Anne won’t hide her problems and try to solve them on her own.

Thought that was the only one? HAHA! there’s another one! Blame the one and only @retrodork for this. lol.

Original image by @cursed-amphibia

ANOTHER ONE OMF I'M LOSING IT poor marcy

cause of @retrodork I got back to my old tumblr just to upload this vid I made in 5 mins. Image is from @cursed-amphibia

https://cursed-amphibia.tumblr.com/post/664558056509751296/more-low-effort-frog-show-doodles-sasha

BRO HDJDBRHDNX WHAT!!!! /POS I AM OBSESSED. I feel so honoured my art was used for this masterpiece

The Neurodivergency Is Real

See, this is actually what I really like about the slight canon confirmation from Matt about Sprig probably having ADHD, because it isn‘t just a thing that this man confirmed outside of the media and left it at that.

The writers continuously make it clear that Sprig is a hyperactive and impulsive boy. He isn’t just mentioned to possibly having ADHD and then just never showed again in how he acts or how it affects him or the plot. Instead you get to see how these behaviors become not only a strength in stuff like curiosity, initiative, and stubbornness to authority but how it could also be a struggle in resistance, impulse control, and attention span.

You get lessons where the people around him do get hurt for his impulsiveness and he has to take account for it. You do get lessons where his curiosity not only reveals new secrets and mysteries, but encourages other people like Anne to become her true self and fight for her identity, or have Hop Pop question his strictness.

It steers the behaviors away from the neurodivergency being mainly written as a comedy thing and more of something that’s just human for Sprig to go through as someone with a differently wired brain. He uses these different perceptions and views to be his strengths, his weaknesses, and this doesn’t mark him as a caricature (this could be debated of course, I am no expert on this topic).

For this instance through Hop Till You Drop, not only do we see Sprig actively get curious over every single new stimulating thing but we also see how absolutely anxious he gets when he resists and tries his best to hone his attention span to something else.

He knows he has to resist, but it’s just really hard and it takes so much mental effort just to do so, it honest to god stresses him out.

And even when he and the Plantars apologize for not being able to do well in the course, it’s really cool to see Anne say that her basically expecting to put them through intense training rather than letting them slowly ease into their own strategies wasn’t the best route. It shows it’s not fully their faults for not doing so hot.

They still need to keep account of themselves and the fact they’re in a new environment, but they also need guidance and a helpful hand rather than punishment when it comes to understanding her world. And I love that.

Like I don’t see what Matt said in the Q&A to be a full confirmation of his neurodivergency, but it’s really cool that the crew had something in the writing itself that showed they weren’t just saying this out of nowhere.