The Loud House: Nickelodeon's Moana or: How everyone dedicated to destroy a good show · 4:00pm Oct 25th, 2019
The best show Nickelodeon has released since Avatar: The Last Airbender, one of the few shows that rivals Spongebob in popularity and rankings, the show that has replace MLP in my obsession with its outstanding characters, loved by many people... hated by many people, whose staff has destroyed its creator's legacy, whose fans have wrote cringey fanfics about a certain episode. This is The Loud House.
If something The Loud House has unleashed, are scandals. It’s perhaps one of the most inclusive series that have been done so far and it turns out that everyone was outraged. From now on, the series will no longer be the same one that made us fall in love in its first season and interested in the second. I know people who have stopped watching the series because of the declining quality that has occurred over the months.
This series brought a lot of frustration, headache and apathy for so much wasted potential. I really can't believe how a protagonist who had his balance of pros and cons becomes more and more pathetic, boring, faint-hearted, useless, coward and so uninteresting, the fandom core wants more episodes from the sisters and less than Lincoln, sometimes I think that what Savino did condemned The Loud House and the staff wants to fuck the series to tell him "this was what we did to your creation, we turned it into crap for what you did", it saddens me and worse than Netflix will make the movie (and we all know the average quality of their productions).
There are people who firmly defend the currently declining quality in the series, but for me there are several points I want to bring on to expose my point. I talked with MetaLord395 about them to have a better pespective.
Chris Savino himself
Here's a comparison: Before Lauren Faust left Hasbro, she assigned Meghan McCarthy as chief, followed by Josh Haber and Mike Vogel in subsequent years. All of them put their own ideas on the show, but always trying their best to mantain the show's essence (I'm expecting the finale involving the book from season 1 closing).
When Chris Savino was fired from Nickelodeon, the company chosed Kyle Marshall and Kevin Sullivan as chiefs... starting to see my point? They may have the best intentions, but they don't know the characters as good as the creator himself (I've seen changes for them that are not consistent or present during their first introduction).
Repetition in stories
This is something that sooner or later every show has to go through... but in seasons 6 or 7, not season 3. Half of stories from the third season onwards are recycled from the first two. They're not a carbon copy perse, but they're so similar to previous entries that makes me question what happened.
"The Iron Man 2 effect"
One of the positives of the new direction is expanding the secondary characters, everyone has received buffs. However, and just like in Iron Man 2, by focusing on improving so many characters, they neglected the protagonist. Lincoln barely gets development and stars in episodes that go from just ok to awful I hope this doesn't become a trend in future seasons.
Abrupt change in the premise of the series
What was the original premise of The Loud House? The daily life or adventures of Lincoln, an 11-year-old boy who has 10 sisters. Now the premise is the adventures of a family of 10 girls and one boy, it became another sitcom that believes should focus on 11 characters (miserably failing in the process), became very static and quiet (there is no dynamism as in the first season and the siblings rarely fight), most of the stories are not interesting and their execution is mediocre or horrible to the point where the message and its development are contradicted. I’m not saying the series should return to the first season completely, but its original premise was lost forever. I would ask something like: 50% Lincoln, 50% sisters. I remember when I just started watching the series last year, there were people wanting to see the sisters more than Lincoln (I wonder how they feel right now that their wish has come true). Many believe that, if Savino hadn’t been fired any of this would have happened, but he did work on several episodes that open the third season, making him partially responsible for the disaster in which the series has fallen.
The Casagrandes
This family, which is only loved for its aesthetics or for being inclusive just for the sake of being inclusive, is also guilty of the decline of the series. They’re a direct copy from the main family and these characters make room in the original series just to give them attention for their spin-off (which hasn’t shown anything different or relevant so far and hasn’t really shown the interest of ... anyone). Perhaps the most disappointing thing is that, for the spin-off to work, Ronnie Anne had a very drastic personality change and not for the best (now she’s more proactive, cheerful, spontaneous and wanting to help others, like a Season 1 Lincoln, because having a reserved, violent tsundere bully as your main character wouldn’t be politically or economically viable for today’s standards and the worst thing is that fans support this decision). Their 9 introductory episodes in the fourth season caused the series to lose its status of 1 million views per episode. It doesn't matter if The Loud House recovers the million views, if it keeps up with the views of the introductory arch or even if the views go down more, the Casagrandes are guilty of its downfall. To be fair, their episodes are fun, but they haven’t bring anything different from what I’d rather watch in The Loud House. There is no favorable scenario for them and they have to do something unique if they want to be saved from cancellation.
By the way, when a supporting character is more interesting and charismatic than your protagonists, something is going wrong.
Shippings
Once again this topic strikes back. Matching characters is becoming more important than the story itself. People are more expectant of which ship will become official instead of the premise itself, the episode itself is no longer talked about but the formed couple or the new showed waifu. Anyone who matches a character with another that hasn’t become official has also been attacked and fanon couples most of the time don’t make sense. The series has shown once again that people are not ready for LGBT representation in animation (both for and against). This would have been avoided if there had been more development in the series. Star vs the Forces of Evil and Miraculous Ladybug welcome you.
My reaction when one of the most nonsensical ships in the story of the show was deconfirmed.
No Such Luck
Despite of abusing sentimentality and its mediocre ending, the end of this good story represents the end of an era in the fandom... for better and worse.
No Such Luck is obviously the most hated episode for most of the fandom, not to say in its entirety. And believe it or not, for me it’s a record. I don't know in any fan community such a large amount of hate against a particular goal, there is no curse in Elvish, Entish, or the tongues of Men for this treachery. But here comes a part of the fandom: The Writers. Like all fandom, there are writers, and in any case, there are ideas but No Such Luck, made a radical change in the fics. From one moment to another, there were lots of No Such Luck fics, there are all kinds of plots. Although there are parts where they're ingenious, there are others that only make Lincoln suffer. They go from a traumatized Lincoln to a beheaded Lincoln (and there are people who read it but it's practically normal). With the exception of some there are writers who criticize the fics where Lincoln suffers or not or where the No Such Luck is simply involved just for the sake, then there are some who have fics where Lincoln is treated worse even by characters who had nothing to do with him and there are others who simply hate him for following the hype without having any view of the episode.
But why do I say that the fault lies with the fandom itself? Simple they may or may not see the fic, if they don't like it, don't see it. There are sensitive people who see the fics where Lincoln is mistreated, and leave it and there people who are in their right mind, see the fic where it is mistreated, traumatized, insulted and even killed, and they do nothing, they only see it. Yes, the abuse that some of us do in the fics is stupidly extreme but... if literally a junk fic that makes Lincoln die in 17 million different ways has too many views to be relevant, why not a fic where everything is normal has less? Not to mention, there's a lot of fanfictions written out of "No Such Luck" and other infamous episodes (including ones with interacting ships whenever they were canon or not), which are usually "sequels" or "alternate endings" that follow the "fix-fanfic" trend. This shows that most of them can't handle the canon of the episodes, this is an ocurrence I haven't seen in any other fandom and I'm grateful for it. Could you imagine if the MLP community started to write What About Discord? fanfics like these ones?
Behold, the only good No Such Luck fanfic!
In conclusion, and unfortunately, The Loud House will go down in history with more pain than glory, and more for the scandals that have surrounded it instead of its quality as a series, just like Moana with Disney. Which is a shame because it has non-toxic elements of female empowerment, of nostalgic fun without taking advantage of it, of respect for the elderly and for our own peers, well, it has even ecological elements, but feels empty after all. And it saddens me because I really want to love this show more, to this day I continue watching it despite all of this, more for obligation rather than pleasure and I don't want that.
I really hope the best for you, because you deserve more and you can do more.
