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FRIENDENEMIES

This glorious poster that made Tumblr explode has been drawn by Sabrina Cotugno, one of the storyboarder for the episode, who got asked for a “Harlequin-Romance-y poster for Friendenemies” (Harlequin Enterprises being a publisher of romance novel with weird covers, in the poster’s style)

And Marco’s mole is on the wrong side, his right thumb is on the wrong side, and his left hand has five fingers.

- Are you doing a movie hacker impression, Marco? Smashing keys without the screen changing?



- Star can’t use her arms. She has to jump to move.

She knocked on the door with her head, didn’t she?



- Is this a face conveying embarrassment? Even Star is ashamed of following a family tradition being found in such a pickle?



- Mr. Hand’s name could come from Mackie = Marco + Jackie, a way to remind the fandom what happened in Sleepover, but honestly I think it’s just a play on Jackie Chan. He even looks like Chuck Norris (starred in a lot of martial art movies) and… is dead like Bruce Lee, I guess? Anyway, he’s likely a mix of martial art movie stars.



- Marco is trying to buy 2 tickets. Maybe it’s just a continuity error on the animators’ side -a couple of scenes later Tom is seen holding two tickets, maybe he wanted to bring Star with him (Marco says that “he just found out” about the marathon, so it makes sense for Star not to know anything about it yet). Camping Trip established that Marco likes to show Star what Earth has to offer, this could have been a semi subtle way to remind that.

However the episode doesn’t imply, not even with a sad face, that Marco is disgruntled about having to settle to go with Tom instead of someone else, so it’s hard to tell.





- Star definitely doesn’t want to get back with Tom, but it looks like she doesn’t hate him either, and wants him to bond with her best friend. Maybe she just thinks Marco and he could be good friends, maybe she noticed how good Marco is with words and people, and she knows that he could help Tom getting over his anger problem.



- It’s probably just something never meant to make much sense, since the episode needed it for the plot, but Tom already had tickets for a marathon Marco just learnt about. Maybe he got them hours/days earlier, and he just spied learnt enough about Marco to know that he’d have been more than happy to watch old karate movies.

- Tom/demons can apparently cross dimensions through walls of fire, without the need for dimensional scissors.





- (forgive this forced, starco tinted interpretation of the scene. Sleepover was just a few weeks ago, I still haven’t recovered) Star smiles after being corrected by Marco, instead of the classic “Ugh, it’s the same.”



- Tom has his own portrait hanging into his carriage. So tacky.



- Marco might seem a bit petty, being so distrustful of Tom even in the face of all his good intentions (and Star telling him to go), but the demon recently kidnapped him ‘cause he thought that he was getting it on with Star, and then wanted to kill him (sure, it was presented almost as a gag, and Tom then changed idea, but…).



- It’s probably the first time Marco finds someone who’s (apparently) interested into the geek side of his interests (Star clearly shares a lot of interests with Marco, but I don’t think she’d ever care about a movie being better in its localized or original version).



- Poor Tom. It’s not explicitly stated, but I guess that Marco had/has problems making friends as well: the only one we know about, before Star, are Ferguson and Alfonzo (nevermind how they seem to have disappeared from the face of Earth). Would explain why he felt so betrayed by having been used by Tom.



- It’s not like the show tries to hide it, but Marco’s words/actions have much more impact on Tom than all of Brian’s therapy. Both here and in Mr. Candle Cares, where he made the demon see the errors in his way to handle things (and saved his own life in doing so). Marco PhD hasn’t been mentioned again after Sleep Spells, but he’s still shown as good at understanding people.



- Marco lives in Echo Creek, likely a parody of the real live Echo Park, a neighbourhood in Central Los Angeles. Setsun might be Sunset Boulevard.



- Trivia: this scene became what’s probably the SVTFOE related post with most notes on Tumblr.



- I know that I’ve already said it a hundred times, but Marco is a little petty. A wonderful friend, incredibly loyal and infinitely patient, but petty with strangers/enemies/those who did nothing to deserve his love.



- Policewoman from Star Vs Echo Creek



- Tom likes Love Sentence, Marco likes Love Sentence, Star apparently likes Love Sentence (or she just likes the lead singer Justin Towers. Maybe she knows about the band thanks to Marco.)



- Justin Bieber is canadian, the singer in SVTFOE is Justin Towers.



- Are they putting root beer/cola in cereals? And Marco dares being disgusted by Star sugaring her burritos.



- Topical lyrics.

Even though they actually started as straight out enemies, and ended the episodes as friendenemies



- Damn Marco. Savage.



- “Don’t freak out” didn’t take long for Tom to understand Marco’s personality.



- At first Marco is just confused by the lock and Tom’s behaviour, and doesn’t even think about something fishy going on. He was trusting Tom for real.



- I’m getting a “pushy boyfriend” feel from this scene. And I’m not implying TomCo, just that maybe -a completely personal opinion- Tom acted a little like this with Star as well. Might explain why they broke up, other than Tom’s control issues, and why Marco says “Never go with a predator to a second location” in Blood Moon Ball



- Brian even had yarn and cat toys. I have doubts about his professionality as a therapist.

Scratch that, he shouldn’t be let alone with a minor. Never.

- Tom had to pass time alone with Marco, that’s why he couldn’t let him get out and go to the movie marathon yet.





- Marco might have been a bit selfish in this episode, after all: he did agree to hang out with Tom just thanks to the tickets, and he did stop having a good time when he remembered about the movies. He has his share of blame.

But he’s also in the right about being so angry. He genuinely believed that he had found a friend in Tom. As I said before at first he doesn’t even realize that something fishy is going on ‘cause he was already trusting him.

Friendship clearly is extremely important to Marco. Maybe he already got hurt in the past, believing someone to be his friend just to discover that he was being used/deceived. This is just a “headcanon”, not even a theory, but it’s true that this whole episode gave me this feeling: a parallelism between Tom and Marco, two kids who had few friends in their life, with emphasis on Marco giving all himself to those who manage to get into his “shell”.

Ok, maybe I read too much into it and the episode and Marco’s life are not meant to be this deep, but it’s undeniable that “friendship” is the main theme of the whole show.

At least Tom realizes the mistake he made



- Anger-powered super strength, Tom’s magic got weaker since he was feeling guilty, or demon made stuff is just extremely brittle (except for ping-pong balls)?

is Marco surprised by his own feat, or he’s just catching breath?





- Marco doesn’t like lies, I think that this came up often enough to consider it one of his characteristics. In Sleepover he even is the only one who never lies to the cube (not having eaten Star’s brownies helped, though)



- Looks like Tom is not used to be on other side of an anger outburst.



- Since this is such an important scene remember to check out the clips shared by the crew about.

The lyrics for the two songs have been written by the storyboarders for the episode, Sabrina Cotugno and Amelia Lorenz.

And the complete audio track released by the composer, who says that Adam wasn’t exactly thrilled about having to sing.

- The pot calling the kettle…





- Mackie doesn’t realize that he died, apparently after having fallen while filming a scene.

Ahah black humor.



- They’re basically the same person.



- The freshly resurrected Mackie has puppet like movements, as if he has invisible strings.



- Dead creatures living thanks to Tom’s dark powers are not very aware about their current conditions.



- This episode has a lot of sparkly eyes.



- Look at how excited the cinnamon roll is. Look at him.



- I’m almost sure that no movie theater needs so many security guards.



- Need to explain the title and classic lines aside, Tom is not getting immediatly redeemed after having acted with different degrees of assholery for three episodes. Marco is warming up to him, and viceversa, but they’re not going to immediatly become best of friends. Still a good result, given how hard Marco can be to those who hurt him/made his life even more difficult (like poor Glossaryck)





IS MYSTERY



- Ludo’s rats are still stealing corn from the royal fields, despite Ludo having a field on his own by now.



- This could just be a joke about Buff Frog’s / monsters’ horrible handwriting, or a joke about russian cursive being… hard to read.



- The show really wants to remind the viewers that monsters are oppressed as heck on Mewni, and that Buff Frog is best (poor) dad.



- The theme of season 2 is actually “muscles”. Mainly muscles from Mewni

Whoops, sorry. Don’t know why this one ended here.



- Monsters keep calling rats… well, rats. They’re probably just intelligent animals, not a type of monster.



- The monsters working for Ludo are either prisoners, or probably forced to work there for a handful of corn, unable to leave, like Meat Fork. If it’s really Toffee the one influencing Ludo, then maybe the lizard is not exactly trying to free his monsters brethren from the yoke of the Butterflys. Or at least he has a “it’s all just a mean to an end” mindset.



- Oh no! They killed Tom!

- This guard’s spear is corn.





- I don’t think making corn meal to make Mewni’s scale model is the only use for Ludo’s corn.

And I can’t understand if those maize maze like streets are supposed to be Mewni’s roads, or it’s sewers/secret passages. Anyway, looks like Ludo is training the rat/ monsters to penetrare the royal castle.

- We know that “Buff Frog” is just how Ludo called Yvgeny Bulgoyaboff, not knowing his name. Since Ludo called his new pets “Arachnid” and “Bird” it’s likely that all the other monsters’ names (Beard Deer, Lobster Claws, Three Eye Potato Baby…) are actually just nicknames given by an evil overlord with no talent for onomastics.

And then comes Meat Fork, a beefy monster with a fork for a hand workin for Ludo. And that’s his family name. This show, I swear.

- Green magic is super evil

- Ludo enters the scene riding blackened Bird and Arachnid, almost as if they were a single creature, and he’s been riding them in a similar fashion every time he’s in an episode. It’s probably just to show that he tamed them, and they protect him, but I wonder if in the future the wand is going to fuse them in an orrific eldritch abomination, possibly with Ludo “riding” it.



- Ludo is still far from having mastered the wand (in Wand to Wand and By The Book he just shoot randomly), this is probably one of the first times he manages to blast what and who he wants

- Ludo has been getting more and more tired looking since the wand started talking to him

- Buff Frog basically betrayed Ludo in Storm the Castle, so this would be a reasonable reaction, but the wand might also be making Ludo more paranoid.

That’s a classic for “character gets corrupted by an evil magical artifact”.

- Ludo hasn’t forgotten, and we can’t forget either: he gave Buff Frog babies.

We. Can’t. Forget.



- The wand still shoots with no control when Ludo gets angry. Or at least angrier than the average level required to operate the wand.

- Buff Frog should have heard Ludo talking about “getting a book”, but acoustics works in mysterious ways in cartoons, so he might as well just want to give Star a generic warning about Ludo being powerful and plotting.



- Arachind and Bird even move in block. They’re so magically getting fused together sooner or later.

- If this is just a way to tease us and it turns out that Toffee is not really talking to Ludo through the wand I swear that I’m going to punch someone.

Even the music, in this scene, sounds a little like the one in Storm the Castle (but I might be wrong, I definitely don’t have an ear for such things)

- Buff Frog partially “betrayed” Ludo, so it makes sense for him to be angry, but to the point of wanting him to die? I wonder if this is just what surviving in the wild turned Ludo into, a ruthless leader, or if it’s the wand’s doing.

- Toffee clearly never liked Buff Frog, and even made sure to get rid of him before enacting his plan in season. He also knows that Buff Frog never trusted him. Doesn’t make much sense to want him to work for Ludo (granted that Toffee actually is the voice in the wand). Either he wanted to keep a close eye on him, or he wants Star to be ready, to fight Ludo on equal ground, weakening/defeating each other.

- Ludo definitely has a plan, and he started enacting it even before beginning to hear the wand talking (he’s been ammassing corn since On The Job). It’s hard to tell if this is the new Ludo, or if he’s been influenced by Toffee since the day he found the fragment -after all he was lead to it by a vision, likely conjured by the wand/Toffee itself-

- Toffee never said a line like this (the closest one is the pic below), but it definitely sounds like something that he, and not Ludo, would say (even more since the evil bird quoted Toffee a couple of scenes before)

- Stop sucker punching your old friends, Buff Frog.

- Apparently Buff Frog doesn’t completely hate Ludo (yet), despite everything. After all he gave him babies, and he rescued him from… a life like the one he now has.



- I don’t think Toffee wanted Buff Frog to take the wand for himself: Ludo clearly is easier to manipulate (and he’s already done it once)

- Despite everything Buff Frog considered being once again Ludo’s underling, if anything to have some food for his babies, but he wouldn’t have been able to spend time with them and, maybe, he even thinks that Ludo actually is a menace for Mewmans and monsters alike.

- Boo Fly likely babysat the babies while Buff Frog was on missione. The tadpoles are going to have a lot of non blood related uncles and aunts!

- Who mustn’t hear Buff Frog talk about warning Star? Other monsters, ‘cause he’d be branded as a traitor, someone who helps the royal family? Ludo?

He’s likely aware of how risky it is to help the royals, calling it a “crazy idea”, but his allegiance is for Star the girl who helped him twice, not Star the Butterfly Princess.





Episode 1

Episode 2

Episode 3

Episode 4

Episode 5

Episode 6

Episode 7 (soon)

Episode 8 (less soon)

Episode 9

Episode 10