I hate to argue this but I kinda see Eclipsa as a 1-2 dimensional Mary Sue. All those bad consequences and evil spells (Even her dark spells chapter she has done) were completely ignored. Same goes for Globgor. They play them as completely innocent and yet they should be getting punished. It's like the writers have no clue what to do with them. I just wish they could have shown them doing some dark deeds. Globgor has eaten a Mewman yet no one bothers to bring it up.

Kid cartoons trying to deal with complex morality and focusing 98% of that complexity on redemption and positivity, name a more iconic duo. It’s less egregious than SU by far, but SU is far more explicitly centered on pacifism and redemption as central themes to the entire show so there’s a tradeoff there.

One thing I’ve been thinking about a lot in recent months, though, is S4’s plot as focusing on systems rather than people. If you actually look at what happened throughout the season plotwise and where the main points of tension were, it functions way more like a standard story arc if Mewman magic and monarchy themselves, the old traditional ways of living and thinking for Mewmans, are the central “antagonists”. This doesn’t mean that individual characters don’t matter but that the focus of their actions’ morality is more about the historical and societal context they have. Globgor eating someone is bad, but the focus of that section is the bigotry and politics that led to such drastic actions in the first place. Eclipsa’s selfish magic use is a personal flaw that she does generally improve upon throughout the season, but the general idea of “what are the consequences of someone being able to have this sort of power at all” is the real thing paid off with Mina later. If you look at the arc as “Eclipsa becoming a good and accepted queen” only then it just kinda ends anticlimacticly in Cornonation with the crow feeling disconnected. People are OK with her, they accept her, the end. It’s still overly positive of an ending compared to most midseasons, but in the context of monarchy it ties together - they encounter a major conflict, have a turning point in their arcs while solving it, but it also sets up something much worse as a consequence. Another example is that once magic is destroyed, Mina still has her same views but they don’t need to try and fight her anymore because the ultimate conflict was versus the concept of that sort of power being wielded, not Mina the person.

Note here that I’m not necessarily defending how it feels as this plays out. I think even this interpretation has holes and placing the payoff of arcs on systems kinda drops the ball on prior setups with characters (end of s3 eclipsa cliffhanger, among others). Just that I think this is at the very least a rebuttal to the most extreme teardowns of Eclipsa stuff and Cleaved as complete asspulls that don’t serve any purpose to the story.



