On animation

   Tomorrow, I will have managed of week's worth of daily posts. I'd say it's been hard, but as I have no fame and in no danger of obtaining fame, the biggest challenge is just summoning the willpower to post something.
   I have something I want to get off my chest. Lily Orchard's most recent glass of water touched on how cartoons have become more angsty and dramatic in the 2010's, and she placed the blame for that on art school grad's being hired to run shows rather than people with writing credentials.
   I don't think that any of the people she's complaining about are good writers, but I don't think that the blame for their problematic writing is entirely due to the lack of language arts classes.
   Firstly, it's fair to assume that all of these show runners went to high school at some point, and all high schools require you to take at least a few language arts classes if you want to graduate. Just about every high school student has to write a book report analyzing a book their teacher has chosen for them. Most of these classes don't go in depth on plot, theme or characters, and most language arts teachers are no better at analyzing literature than their students. I don't know how much this changes in college, but I expect it depends on what the professor teaching you thinks about literature.
    Secondly, it's not necessary to take a language arts course of any sort to learn what makes a work good and what doesn't. Having someone to guide you through the process is helpful, but it can also make it more difficult to figure out what works if they don't know what their doing. A good example of this is Lily Orchard herself. Her fiction is, admittedly, a little hit and miss, but her glass of water videos, give or take a few inaccuracies, are well put together and show that she does know what she's talking about. She has also disclosed that she never went to college, so her knowledge of writing came from self study.
   What I think is more likely is that these writers learned good writing from the internet, which comes with a rather big problem. I'm not talking about rampant spelling or grammar errors, I'm talking about cliff notes. I admittedly love Cliff notes, it's good analysis and well written and thought out. The problem is that lot's of people who used cliff notes to get through their language arts classes saw the points the authors made about why the literature was so good and timeless, and began to try and apply it to other genre's and media. Honestly, am I the only one who's noticed that a lot of analytical tumblr posts seem like they were written by people emulating cliff notes? What they didn't understand was that the symbols and themes that cliff notes talks incessantly about are a nice bonus, but they aren't the core of a good story. That's the job of a plot and the characters.
   Lastly, I want to touch on a small issue I have with Lily Orchard. One thing she goes on about is that cartoons, and shows in general, should focus on being funny. I don't disagree with that opinion, but I would like to point out that if the writers can't manage to make a good dramatic story, comedy might not be a good idea either. Comedy is actually pretty hard to write, you have to know what the audience wants, and you have to be very careful. There's are reason why the writers of How Not to Write a Novel said it was an advanced technique. I don't think they should stick to drama either. There's a nice middle ground that most media falls into where it's not insanely dark but doesn't push into being funny, and I think that's where most authors should try and fall into, since the screw ups won't be as disruptive, and the stories are easier to write. I think that was what Lily meant, but it wasn't really all that clearly communicated.
   I just want to add that I don't think there's an easy fix for the current trends of animation. It's what the audience keeps saying they want and the show runner's clearly don't mind making it, so I don't see it going away. I think what'll happen is that someone will make a show that's more aimed at kid's, like Friendship is Magic was originally, and that'll become very popular, so the people running the network will demand that more shows like that be made, and the shows the current crop of fans say they want will migrate to smaller nighttime networks, where they'll enjoy a small but devoted following. In other words, it's just a trend, and trends have a way of changing as the world changes.