Oh, hey, I fit two reviews on this post after all!

All right, I know I’ve reviewed a lot of kid-aimed novels in my reviews here, but I think this is the first time I’ve been 100% embarrassed to admit to what I’ve been reading. The Kingdom Keepers series is definitely not up to the same level of quality as, say, the Harry Potter series. The characterization is a lot more basic, the dialogue is poorer and largely indistinguishable between characters, the conflicts within each novel feel inorganic and arbitrarily formed, and it’s all held together by random nostalgic Disney references, which while nice for hardcore Disney fans, isn’t really enough to qualify as world-building. Unfortunately for me, I am a pathetic gluttonous reader and a Disney fanboy, and I will not be able to stop reading the series, unless it really takes a downturn at some point in the future.

Well, thanks for reading my review. See you all next time.

. . .

. . . Yeah, no. I’m going more in-depth than that. Spoilers follow for Kingdom Keepers: Disney After Dark, Kingdom Keepers II: Disney at Dawn, Kingdom Keepers III: Disney in Shadow, It and vague character arcs in the Animorphs series. And apparently also Disney’s Sleeping Beauty, for anyone not up on their centuries-old fairy tales.

. . . I barely know where to start. I should mention it’s been a very long time since I read the first two books, and only got back into the series recently because I saw the third in a Goodwill. I don’t feel like I actually remember the first two very well, so I may be flat-out wrong/unfair about certain things due to faulty memory.

Let’s look at the main cast. I, perhaps unfairly, can’t help but see the main five Disney Host Interactives as rip-offs of the five human Animorphs. Finn is the Jake, the reluctant leader who gets roped in to becoming the authority in the group despite questioning why the role had to land on him. They both know their teams thoroughly well, and assign different tasks on missions based on their specialties. But whereas Jake got saddled with his position as part of the Animorphs’s group dynamics, Finn was basically forced into the role arbitrarily because he was the first to meet Wayne (the Dumbledore in this now-tangled comparison). So it feels less natural and more engineered. (Although Wayne is an Imagineer, so maybe that’s intentional?) Charlene is the Rachel, an athletic blonde cheerleader-type who takes things more seriously as the series goes forward, but in Charlene’s case, she was useless and whiny for the first two books and suddenly began book three announcing that she was focusing on exercise to serve a more active role to the team. So that felt kind of engineered to me, too. Maybeck is basically Marco, a façade of self-confidence and snark that covers the fact that he’s just as fearful and unsure as the other preteens in the group. His characterization works the best out of the main characters, since he’s willing to criticize and question the group’s plans, and has the most easy-to-recognize dialogue that stands out from the other kids. The connections get a little trickier after this. Philby is superficially the Cassie, in the sense that they both have technical know-how that’s critical to support each team’s needs (animal care and traits for Cassie, electronics and computer usage for Philby). But while we got to know Cassie so well over the span of Animorphs, as the troubled pacifistic caregiver torn between her duty to protect the world and her loved ones and the violent tool she was given to achieve that end, Philby . . . “does machines.” At least up through this third book, I really have no idea what kind of person Philby is, only that he knows how to computer. And that leaves . . . Tobias and Willa. But even if I were to be unfair to Tobias and overlook his character arc of being the orphaned Animorph with the missing mom and the confusing empty holes in his family tree due to alien shenanigans, even if I delineated his entire character to “the one who got turned into a bird,” he still triumphs as a paragon of complex characterization over Willa, who . . . can I get back to you? Like, Willa is basically just another pair of arms present. She has the same lack of character focus as Philby, but at least Philby has a hobby that happens to be directly useful for breaking into theme parks at night. Three books in and I just haven’t gotten to know Willa yet.

Now, as I said, I know I’m being unfair. Animorphs is a literal miracle for being children’s literature as good as it is, and not many series made for the same audience can ever measure up to it. Maybe I’ve forgotten something about Philby and Willa from the first two novels (though if I forgot that easily, can it really be so central to their characters?). Also, the books are focused unerringly on Finn as the focus character, so we don’t get to drop inside the other characters’ points of view like we could in Animorphs—although the Potter main series stuck pretty closely to Harry, yet we certainly know a lot about most of the Hogwarts characters and their families, don’t we? But one thing I know I’m not being subjective about is the dialogue in KK. Aside from Maybeck, who’s regularly self-aggrandizing or snide, the Keepers pretty much all sound alike. This often leads to conversations like this from chapter eight:

“Are you thinking what I think you’re thinking?” Philby asked.

“Do you see any other choice?” Finn asked him right back.

“Will some clue me?” said Charlene.

“Yeah, me too,” said Willa.

Painful. Generic. Interchangeable. And worst, it feels like an empty attempt to build up suspense for no reason. It’s almost half a page later that Finn and Philby finally reveal the plan they’ve just simultaneously cooked up to their teammates. But there was no reason to keep it from them that long.

The Maleficent in this series is weird. Just, off. Let’s do a quick run-down of the magic we see the Maleficent in Sleeping Beauty do:

-fire
-lightning
-oddly specific curses that take years to fruit
-thorns
-dragon

Now, how about KK!Maleficent:

-ice and cold—her body temperature literally chills the room
-lightning
-fire at the end of book three, finally
-dragon, but also
-vulture?

Actually, I liked the vulture transformation. It did feel like something the OF (original fairy) would do, and since she was standing on a raised stage at the time, it makes sense she would go for something smaller and lighter to fight with. But the cold and ice thing still weirds me out. In SB, she’s constantly got fiery particle affects around her, and even breathes fire at the end. Why the choice to focus her more on cold and even lightning than on fire in KK? All I can think of is that these are hints that she’s going to be revealed as a literal animatronic at same point (powered by electricity, and computers function at higher performance when kept cool), but that contradicts the idea that the characters who roam the parks at night are the literal characters, so I just don’t get where it’s coming from or going.

Now one thing that KK does handle better than most “child superhero” stories, even my bae Animorphs, is the involvement of the parent characters. Most such stories have the parents be so oblivious and unobservant of the literal war or whatever their kids are participating in that it starts to feel like neglect, even knowing that in some cases it really just is a necessary part of letting the setup work. But in KK, the weird goings-on in Disney parks of course start leaking out to the public as rumors, and the guardians of the Keepers themselves catch wind of it, immediately becoming suspicious of the physical signs of their children being outdoors at night, despite being in their beds all night. While it’s way too sidelined for the action to continue, I like the realistic mix across the parental figures of pure refusal to belief that Sci Fi Things Are Happening; to nearly full skepticism, but needing to take some precautions to prevent them from doing the maybe-thing because protecting the children is paramount; to starting to believe to the point that maybe I can help the kids a little if it’s for a greater good, but also they’re so incredibly grounded for putting themselves in harm’s way. It’s not focused on quite enough to be realistic, but it does seem to have ramped up quite a bit for book three, so I’m hoping to see more of it in the future. And like I said, it’s such a rarity to have realistic parents in a series like this, I like that I got any of it at all.

Buuuut typing that last paragraph also reminds me how arbitrary it is that the conflict against the Disney villains is being saddled on a bunch of preteens at all, when Wayne, his daughter, and a bunch of other Imagineers all know what’s going on. Like, I understand that they don’t want the world at large to find out that Walt set the parks up for his characters to secretly live in safely without the world knowing, but there’s no reason they can’t handle the situation on their own, internally. Especially since they should have all the Disney heroes on their side, who have a pretty decent track record of stopping villains. Most other stories that put a group of kids in danger have at least some internal reason for doing so in universe. The Animorphs couldn’t trust most of the adults in their lives, because anyone around them could have a Yeerk in their head. The adults in It were subconsciously being influenced to look the other way, and Pennywise’s imagination-fueled nature prompted child protagonists to be more effective anyway. Harry Potter was just purely the unhealthy obsession of Voldemort, and Voldy had enough power and influence that the adults in Harry’s life couldn’t keep him out of harm’s way with 100% success, forcing Harry and his friends to take actions of their own frequently, both for personal survival and moral responsibility to others. But here in KK . . . it’s child protagonists because it’s a child buyer demographic, I guess.

So like . . . has anyone else here even read these? I usually get proven wrong in this community when I feel like I'm treading undiscovered literary ground, but for once, I feel like I might be alone in the boat . . . Anyone?

—doctorlit supposes Pearson may be dealing with a huge amount of executive meddling from the Mouse, so not all of this is necessarily under his control?

“Finn opened his eyes to find himself lying beneath what looked like a giant spoiler. He flinched, flailing his arms, still half asleep.” “Finn opened his eyes to find himself lying beneath what looked like a giant spoiler. He flinched, flailing his arms, still half asleep.”

So It: Chapter One did a good enough job of getting my mom emotionally invested in the main characters that she was willing to come see Chapter Two, despite the fact that she isn’t exactly a consumer of horror media. Most impressive! But I can’t believe it’s already been twenty-seven years . . .

Warnings
Spoilers: It the novel, It the 1990 miniseries, It: Chapter One and It: Chapter Two
Content: Not Safe for FourMoonsWatching to read. Warning for general warning for violence and maybe gore, I don’t think I really need to go too in depth about specifics, but mileage may very about how in depth “too in depth” is, so. A warning just in case. Also, a warning for discussion of bullying and its inevitable development into abusive behaviors, as well as discussion of suicide and the reasons behind it. Finally, warning for mentions of homophobic violence.

So I’m inevitably drawn to nitpick over all the details, but listing every difference between the new pair of films and their predecessors wouldn’t be very fun to read, and also start muscling in on YouTube’s territory. There are a couple of changes I do want to talk about in more detail, though. First, the Ritual of Chüd, which I very much thought was not going to be referenced in the film at all. In the novel, the ritual is a very abstract thing, where a human gets launched out into the Macroverse to fight It in a battle of wits. This film instead portrayed the ritual as gathering physical objects and burning them to seal It away inside of an . . . ancient Native American lampshade, basically. While I normally hate Hollywood’s tendency to dumb down plots to simplify things for the audience (Prince Caspian film, anyone?), in this case I actually agree with the change. It would be really difficult to adapt the novel’s Ritual into a visual medium. I also liked the subversion of how Native American culture and practices are often portrayed as “magical” in a lot of U.S. media. In this case, the Ritual of Chüd failed hard with deadly consequences for those ancient Native Americans; they weren’t any more equipped to handle a being like Pennywise than anyone else. (And total side note, I was hoping to see Its giant bird transformation, as that was my favorite form in the novel. We didn’t get it full CGI, but at least the bird appears in the weird sketch-animated fever dream. Makes sense that the ancient Native Americans would see It as more natural-looking forms as well, since clowns are from Europe-based cultures.)

Another change I liked was making Richie gay. The theme of homophobia that got introduced here in Ch. 2 was present in the novel, but not among the main protagonists. There’s a metaphorical element of Its nature where Its cycles of violence are only representational of the systemic injustice societies inflict against their minorities, and the blind eye the town turns on all the weird violence represents how biases allow such injustice to continue without being addressed. Pennywise’s massacres are self-inflicted by Derry on itself; the clown is only a face put on the town’s problems, and the apathy to solve those problems. Since a lot of this information was delivered through narration in the novel, it again would have been difficult to get it across in the movie. Making Richie a part of the same minority group that sees the film’s first on-screen victim (of both a traditional hate crime and It) ties the audience closer to those suffering in the town. It also adds a further element of tragedy to Eddie’s death. It felt a little arbitrary in the novel that the Loser’s Club sees one suicide, one hospitalization, and one direct death at Pennywise’s jaws. Having a closer emotional tie to one of the other Losers makes the loss of Eddie more meaningful and painful.

One change I was not on-board for was the idea that the Losers had been “infected” by . . . something . . . when encountering It in the 80s, and that it would eventually end up killing them all if they didn’t put the clown down for good this time. Aside from contradicting the novel, where Pennywise pulled cosmic strings to give the Losers who left Derry prosperous, comfortable lives to entice them not to return, this rather diminishes the bravery of the characters. With this revelation, they’re all obligated to stay, rather than choosing to stay to prevent further murders. The movie also contradicts itself a bit here regarding Stanley’s suicide. The suicide scene itself actually faked me out for a moment, with Stan reaffirming his promise to Bill to return and help fight It. I would have been completely down with all seven Losers returning! But the next shot is of the slit wrists. This at least could have been explained by the supposed infection making Stan’s body work against him unconsciously. However, at the end of the movie, the other Losers receive a suicide note where Stan admits that he chose to kill himself in order to break the power their unity gave them over It, hoping that would discourage his friends from risking their lives. These three plot threads just don’t fit together well at all, and it seems clear that everything would have been a lot smoother if at least one had been removed. It feels like multiple explanations for the suicide got drafted, and for some reason all of them were left in the final product.

Aside from being invested in the characters, the other facet of these films that Mom has latched onto is the theme of bullying. Stephen king is no fan of bullies, and a lot of his novels find a way to fit them in, even if no young “school-age” characters are present to do it in a traditional way. It is among his stories that employ the theme most strongly, and the people behind this film really put it to use. Pennywise heavily relies on bullying and teasing to torment his victims, to the point where a lot of his lines could be swapped with Henry’s without feeling out of character. This helps to strongly get across the earlier mentioned metaphor where Pennywise is only an imitation of what Derry’s residents do to each other. What Mom particularly appreciated, though, was the difference between the finales of Ch. 1 and Ch. 2. In the first film, the Losers’ Club tried to fight off their bully with physical violence, which failed to get rid of It; It returned right on schedule, business as usual. But in the second film, after more physical confrontation only serves to get Eddie killed, the remaining Losers turn to teasing the bully right back, insulting Its appearance and abilities, and as Mom was delighted to point out, literally belittling It until It shrunk down to baby size. The key to stopping Pennywise was to make It feel the same hurt It was making Its victims feel all those centuries.

—doctorlit, by contrast, goats down here

“For twenty-seven years, I’ve dreamt of spoilers. I craaaaved spoilers. I’ve missed spoilers!” “For twenty-seven years, I’ve dreamt of spoilers. I craaaaved spoilers. I’ve missed spoilers!”
“For twenty-seven years, I’ve dreamt of spoilers. I craaaaved spoilers. I’ve missed spoilers!”