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Club
Snubbed
Relationship drama gets bigger with every season. As you can imagine, this means Season 3 is
where it gets especially crazy. Putting
so much focus on romance matters makes some potential couples look problematic,
but that’s for later episodes. At the
same time, it does bring potential couple that feel healthy. This episode is the first of many this season
on one of the latter types of couples which had previously broken up before the series even began.
The backdrop features
an interesting way Mewni keeps peace between kingdoms. There’s an event called the Silver Bell Ball
where all the princes and princesses dance with each other, the duration timed
by the ringing of a silver bell. For
Star, the prince she gives the most attention to is her ex-boyfriend, Tom. Interestingly, one of these Silver Bell Balls
is where they first met. For this one,
even though she’s made it clear that they’re no longer together, Star is
bothered that Tom seems to be ignoring her.
When it comes to advice on how to deal with this, she gets it from Pony
Head who delights in stirring up the already apparent drama by telling Star
that Tom is club-snubbing her. That is
to say, he’s deliberately ignoring her to get her attention. She claims to know this for a fact, but
deliberately ignoring someone for love sounds incredibly flawed and
unbelievable. Pony Head insisting the
contrary all smug-like further does not do any good for her character. If that’s not enough, even when Star makes
strong attempts to do her princess thing and not get caught up in drama, she
ends up buying into Pony Head’s obviously bad advice. It’s disappointing considering that she knows
how much of a bad influence and jerk Pony Head can be.
There are at least a few instances of Tom
deliberately dancing with someone else after walking towards Star before she
gives in though. Also, for some time
afterwards, a montage of many dances does bring a sense of tension of all the
bitterness towards Star and Tom against something of class and elegance. Its boiling point is when Star dares to dance
with one of the servants when Tom is the only one left, letting it be known how
hurt she is at being club snubbed.
What
comes from this is very telling of Star and Tom’s relationship. When Tom leaves feeling sad, Star firmly
confronts him about his ignoring her. It
turns out that Tom was nobly trying to better his temper by giving Star space,
understanding she’s not into him. Given
his development in his few appearances in the previous season, acting in the
name of what he thought Star wanted is a solid continuation of it. However, the confrontation becomes tense
anyway when Tom can’t comprehend that ignoring Star isn’t the same as giving
her space.
While there is fighting, it’s
nice that it’s capped off with legit maturity.
Star and Tom notice that their club snubbing has led all the kingdom
rulers to fight. While they’re still mad
at each other, Star and Tom decide to stick with the tradition for the sake of
peace. To show for it, they perform a
lively dance of fire and butterflies, quelling the tempers, and surprisingly
warming up to each other by the time their dance has concluded. This is a signal that they do start getting
back together after all which feels shallow after Star moving on from Tom for
so long. However, given how the romance
goes for the rest of the season, it’s not such a bad thing.
Aside from a few unsettling character
moments, interesting concepts and solid character development make this a good
episode about relationship drama.
A-
Stranger
Danger
This is the official introduction to by far my favorite
character on this show. She’s very
charming, but has some mystery to her that gets more intriguing and
multi-layered with every appearance. For
her first formal appearance, it’s not flat-out clear what she’s like, but she
really leans more towards being good than bad.
She is the ever notorious Eclipsa, who’s only been heard of and seen in a
flashback of Moon getting a dark spell from her. However, since Toffee is destroyed, Moon’s
deal allows Eclipsa to be free.
Star
meets her in uncharted rose gardens, and Eclipsa appears as charming and
likable as she did in that flashback.
She and Star have a pleasant conversation about little things in life
like roses and candy bars. However, the
peacefulness is compromised when Moon and the Magic High Commission burst in to
arrest Eclipsa. When they see Star was
with her, they’re immediately worried, fearing Eclipsa affected her with dark
magic.
The more these things go on, the
more ridiculous Eclipsa’s detractors seem.
It’s like they’re insistent that she made Star evil somehow when that’s
clearly not so. In all honesty, they
don’t have any solid proof for their claim.
The known things about her like abandoning her kingdom to elope with a
monster and writing dark spells are easily debunked from being truly evil. At the very least, what she was reported to
have done is disproportionate to the punishment they have in mind, putting her
back in a crystal.
Luckily Star sees the
flaws in that logic. In a fast-paced
intense scene, she rushes to Eclipsa’s dungeon and stops Moon and the Magic
High Commission before they can crystalize her again. Star then brings out her most mature moment
to date by pointing out the fact of the matter for how recrystallization is a
far too extreme move. It was Moon’s
decision to get the spell from Eclipsa, and the deal was that she’d be set free
when Toffee was destroyed, and that’s only recently happened. Moon does bring some reasoning for believing Eclipsa
is evil when she reveals that her magic became dark when she performed that
dark magic spell long ago. That said, at
least to me, there isn’t much weight to this being a bad thing at all. As far as what’s shown, the worst that happened from all this is that Moon’s veins got dark, which explains why she always wears
gloves. She can still perform her magic
just fine despite that and she doesn’t act evil in the slightest.
Heck, Eclipsa has the same effect on her veins and she still acts nice. Maybe I just don’t get something, but there’s
just clearly more proof of Eclipsa not being evil than the contrary. That’s why it’s nice that Moon agrees to go
along with Star’s idea to put Eclipsa on trial, albeit reluctantly.
Even so, the general idea of the importance of
being careful with strangers is appropriately felt. The others might not show it, but Star does
express this herself. At the end, she
approaches Eclipsa saying that she’s sticking up for her so she’s treated
fairly. It doesn’t mean she fully trusts
her. Nevertheless, Eclipsa’s charm and
fascination with the beauty of life makes the possibility that she’s good feel
very genuine. It’s all capped off with a wholesome scene of her and Star
looking out at the roses. Just so you
know, her good qualities continue to feel genuine from here on. This making any legitimacy of her being evil
hard to believe doesn’t make the conflict as strong as it could’ve been. Still, this episode is made great from how
much of a joy Eclipsa is, true morality notwithstanding, and Star handling the
matter very maturely.
A
The Ranking
- Moon the Undaunted
- Stranger Danger
- Return to Mewni
- Rest in Pudding
- Toffee
- Club Snubbed
- Puddle Defender
- Scent of a Hoodie
- King Ludo
- Marco and the King
- Book Be Gone
The next Star vs the Forces of Evil review features Star and Tom get closer during a demoncism, and Marco finds he's unable to truly return to Earth.
Next time on MC Toon Reviews is the season finale of Hilda, "The Black Hound."
If you would like to check out other Star vs the Forces of Evil reviews on this blog, click here for the guide made especially for them.
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