Script for "Why 'Filler' is a Bad Criticism (RWBY Volume 9)"

Man, everyone told me this book was peak, but it’s got so many filler arcs. I’m dropping it.
*closes book, revealing that it is the Brothers Grimm Fairytales*

title card: DISCLAIMER

Before I start ripping into what I consider to be a bad take, I want to explain…why I bother to do that. Ever. Dismantling bad takes is very tempting, but it doesn’t often get you very far. Trust me, I speak from experience. A lot of people are arguing in bad faith, unwilling to change their minds even when proven wrong, or just hopelessly ignorant. Hell, a good amount of the people complaining about this volume of RWBY have not actually watched it. That’s like rule 1 of media discourse that you’re not even pretending you followed.

So, here’s a little PSA as well as an important reminder to myself: you don’t have to debate a point like it has merit…if it doesn’t. We live in an attention economy. Sometimes the worst thing you can do to a shithead is not give them any attention. People you do not respect who have opinions that you don’t respect are not worth arguing with.

Usually.

The thing is, not everyone is arguing in bad faith or hopelessly ignorant or the third thing. Fence sitters and people who are willing to be convinced do exist. And there are also people who just, genuinely, don’t know any better. The only way to solve the much maligned lack of media literacy online is to teach media literacy. And hey, I’m aware that I probably shouldn’t be teaching anybody anything. I’m not a professor. I started this channel in High School and, since then, have used it to say stupid things that I regret a great many times. So I think of what I have to say less as a didactic “thou shalt” and more as a… “Here are some things that I have learned that might be useful to you.”

Basically, this is a really long winded way of saying that I don’t dig into takes that I disagree with because I want to propagate an online war against people who won’t seriously consider what I have to say anyway. I do it because it’s a way to enrich our perspectives, collectively.

Alright…now that everybody understands that: AI art is BULLSHIT and RWBY Volume 9 is not filler!

title card: ““““FILLER””””

Ahem. AHEM. Thank you.
*onscreen: more quotation marks appear every time I say ahem*.

There is no official dictionary of writing terms, and even if there was, no useful dictionary is a monarch. If a definition isn’t based on how words are actually being used, it’s not doing its job.

BUT a lot of people are throwing around the word “filler” in a way that I consider to be fucking venomous to any conversation about writing and stemming from an extremely limited perspective on what a story is supposed to be. If we consider the original usage of the word filler, calling RWBY Volume 9 filler isn’t just a bad take, it’s also straight up incorrect. In fact, traditional filler isn’t really a huge thing anymore.

Back in the day when I was an adorable little munchkin running around, stupidly assuming that the systems that governed our society were designed by smart, competent adults with everyone’s best interests at heart, anime like Naruto and Bleach were being made with significantly different production and release schedules than the anime of today. Rather than airing in seasons and then taking a gap between seasons to make more episodes, you could expect a new episode of these shows EVERY WEEK FOR FOREVER.

Which---…I’m not an expert, but that sounds insane to me.

Thing is, both Naruto and Bleach were working off of source material: their respective manga, also releasing weekly in the appropriately titled Weekly Shonen Jump. And since manga chapters are usually shorter than anime episodes, the anime had a tendency of catching up to the manga, thus running out of material to adapt. So what they would do is invent new storylines to animate and release while waiting for more of the manga to come out. They wrote new material to “fill” time, hence, “filler.” Obviously this required deviating from the source material, which, as Game of Thrones demonstrates, is usually the moment showrunners do some of their best work.

Joking aside, there’s nothing inherently wrong with deviating from or adding to the source material you’re adapting. Hell, sometimes it’s a fucking awesome idea. And there is a fair bit of anime filler that people genuinely love, which I think speaks to the idea that, like many things in writing, it’s more about how filler is executed than whether or not it exists in the story at all. But filler did tend to run into a couple of consistent story problems.

Since the objective was to eventually rejoin the manga and begin adapting the source material faithfully again, everything had to remain as close to the status quo that the manga had left them with as possible. Characters couldn’t change in any lasting way and it was dangerous to do any storylines that were particularly adventurous, lest later manga chapters trample over them. Another common problem with traditional filler is long term pacing: when you stretch out a serialized story, it leads to larger and larger swathes between the big events that the audience is waiting for. Meanwhile in the manga, the story would just…keep going. So you’d tune in to your favorite show looking forward to maybe getting to or making progress towards one of those events, and then instead you’d get something that, by definition, cannot actually matter to the overarching narrative.

Long story short, filler had a tendency of feeling like a waste of time.

But I’m talking about it in the past tense because the vast majority of anime these days are made in seasonal batches and have no need for filler. You still do see filler every so often because there are actually more reasons to make it than running out of manga material, but it’s not nearly as pervasive as it used to be. However, you can bet that that hasn’t stopped internet people from using the shit out of the term!

Sometimes, people use it in a way that I agree with. For example, all of the extra stuff they added to the Hobbit trilogy that was clearly only there for the purposes of stretching one small book into three whole movies. Calling that filler, I feel, is somewhat accurate. However, if you refer to RWBY Volume 9 as filler, I hope you’re ready for me to TAKE YOUR SKIN.

Yeah sure, this season isn’t dealing directly with relics and maidens and Salem and going to the place to do the thing, but these characters are changing irrevocably. Discoveries are being made, mental states are shifting, a few character relationships are changing just a little bit—*zoom in on bumblebee kiss*

It’s canon! This all actually happened! Characters are going to refer to it in the future! It’s not some meaningless arc that every character is going to forget because it’s an adaptation of source material that doesn’t have it. RWBY IS the source material! There’s nothing to deviate from! The idea that this is a full season of traditional filler is completely laughable.

Okay, but what about non-traditional filler? What about more modern usages of the term, like with the Hobbit trilogy? Well, regardless of what word we use, treating anything that doesn’t directly advance the main plot as a waste of time is a terrible way to view storytelling.

title card: PLOT AND MEANING

Plot is probably best described as information. When you look up a plot summary, it gives you the raw data of what actually happened in a piece of media. It doesn’t talk about themes, it doesn’t do character analysis, it’s just the basic information being communicated. Character A goes to location B and kills character C.

I’m not even sure I would call plot the skeleton of the story. The skeleton is a much better descriptor for the story’s structure. Structure is how and in what order you deliver the information of the story, which is really important. Plot is simply the information that gets delivered. You can have all the information and still not have the story. If you read the plot summary for the movie Skinamarink, sure you’ll know what happens, but you still won’t know anything regarding what that movie is about on a deeper level or what the experience of it is like.

Now, none of this is to say that plot isn’t at all important. But there’s a couple reasons plot is not the end all be all of writing. There’s actually a ton of reasons, but I’m only gonna mention 2.

title card: ONE: Plot is not the point.

We’re all so spoiled in the age of bingeable tv, interconnected cinematic universes, and constant serialized plots that a lot of us have forgotten or just never learned what a good INSTALLMENT looks like. The truth is: Episodic storytelling is valid.

(Hey! Just like your feelings!)

The idea of a TV show is not “one big story broken into chunks.” It’s “a bunch of miniature stories that are satisfying on their own but add up into a larger narrative.” You can complain about filler in the Bleach anime all you want, but the first couple arcs of that manga are all short little monster of the week shenanigans. And you know what? It’s pretty good! It’s not life changing, but I liked it.

Sometimes stories introduce smaller conflicts and then resolve them in reasonable amounts of time instead of dragging them out for the length of an entire series. It happens.

You can do that in more serialized stuff, you can do that in episodic stuff, Hell you could even, like, make an entire show out of what are essentially short comedy sketches, create the impression of a larger narrative through consistent character writing, and then pay off the audience’s investment by deviating from the vignette structure for moments of narrative import, or something. I don’t know, just a thought. Episodes and other installments have plots, they’re just not always the main plot, and that’s what people have decided they’re mad about.

“You’re giving me information that doesn’t matter! Why are we on Canto Bite instead of learning Snoke’s backstory! I want information about the big bad, not some random episodic antagonist!”

But the point is not the information! The point is the story. The meat on the skeleton. The characters to identify with, the themes to carry with you, the catharsis to help you feel. The information should always be in service of that story. I’m far from the first to use this wording, but it just cuts to the heart of the problem so damn well: Stories are not wiki entries. They are not just the words on the page. They’re also what those words mean.

Art is about human communication, which is something that everyone currently pushing AI art as the future of entertainment utterly fails to understand. It’s exactly as stupid as all those anime clips you see interpolated to 60 fps. Artistry is about what the artist does, not what the fucking machine does to their art.

There’s nothing wrong with AI tools if given to an artist to use with fair pay. But you’re never gonna be able to cut artists out of the art-making process and get a result that isn’t soulless or derivative. Sure, some art made by humans is soulless and derivative. But at least, in some way, those humans are conveying their perspectives with their work. That happens no matter how bad it is. AI has no perspective. It isn’t art because there isn’t an artist.

And please don’t tell me that the artist is the person putting in the prompts. If you give someone 20 dollars to go draw a picture of Spongebob, are you the artist of that image?

I’m gonna keep saying it until it’s considered common sense: art is more than ideas. Ideas are cheap, originality is an illusion, the execution of the ideas is what matters.

If an AI makes a brush stroke, the person putting in the prompts cannot tell you why that brush stroke is there any more than a studio exec who ordered a movie to profit the company can tell you why a writer wrote a line of dialogue in a certain way.

Maybe AI tools are the future, but not in the way that they’re currently being used. Not without the artist. And hopefully not without paid artists, although I’m less and less optimistic that we’ll ever escape this cyberpunk dystopia we live in. Seriously, it’s like seeing a person use a microwave for the first time in history and thinking “Amazing! Now we can fire all the gourmet chefs!”

If a piece of art is just a bunch of various bits of information mashed together and nothing more, OR if it’s not, but it’s viewed that way, meaning is what we sacrifice.

In other words, if it’s pointless…then it’s pointless.

That’s what you’re saying when you use the word “filler” as a criticism. You’re saying “this is pointless.”

Which is really easy to say during sections of a story that aren’t heavy on the main plot when you think that the main plot is the point. But it’s not, for the same reason AI art is bullshit: because there’s more to art than information.

By the way, please remember the disclaimer. If you’re at all anti-artist or anti-worker, I’m not gonna argue with you, I’m just gonna delete your fucking comment.

Anyway, that took a minute, but moving on to reason number 2!

title card: Two

The second reason that plot is not the end all be all of storytelling is that... well, I feel like we might be lost in the “definition” sauce again.

In thinking about plot as information, we’re separating it from the rest of the story. That’s what definition is, it’s taking a concept and separating it from all the other concepts.

However…you guys wanna know something crazy?

Stories don’t have any concept of plot, or structure, or character work, or theme. Those are words we invented to help ourselves understand stories. But they aren’t intrinsic in the texts of stories themselves. Character work isn’t cordoned off from plot and plot isn’t cordoned off from theme. It’s all one experience. It comes together in a big package. Stories are soups, not salads.

In other words, like every other aspect of a story… plot and character are one in the same. Most of the time it’s useful to distinguish them from each other, but the second it stops being useful, it’s time to acknowledge the subjectivity of the discussion and find a different way of looking at things.

There’s a tendency to think of plot as some kind of material gain for the protagonists. Going to the places, getting the things, killing the bad guys, uncovering the mysteries, etting the cetera! But what a good story actually (typically) needs isn’t some barbaric notion of killing at least one bad guy or getting one magic artifact per season. What it needs is a sense of PROGRESS! Overcoming setbacks and moving towards inevitabilities. That’s the stuff good storytelling is made of, and it doesn’t have to take the form of villain fights or Macguffin chases.

In fact, character change is maybe the most important kind of progress. Vinland Saga season one is an epic about Vikings killing each other, and it’s fucking riveting.

Vinland Saga season two is about guys working on a farm. ……………and it’s fucking riveting.

There is actually some violence, especially further in, but you get my point. The actual activity doesn’t matter, the storytelling is good. I don’t need these characters to be killing each other with swords to be interested, because I’m invested in their lives, how their stories progress. And those stories are progressing. They’re making internal progress, and progress between one another in the form of relationships.

I know we make fun of Volume 5 for setting the entire season in one fucking Airbnb, but we do understand that it’s not actually the location that’s the problem, right? It’s pacing, and exposition, and season structure and a million other things. Sure it gets a little visually stale, but think about how many sitcoms are about characters hanging out on the same set every week. Handling the plot well as an ingredient in a story soup isn’t about traversing physical spaces or relics or maidens or anything as superficial as that, it’s about the underlying mechanics of storytelling.

And the mechanics of volume 9 are on full fucking auto. I’d say there are two central driving forces to this volume: the mystery of the Ever After and the character’s mental states. Let’s talk about both of those things in two separate sections for your viewing convenience.

title card: FAIRY TALES, AND MYSTERY AS PLOT

Futzing about with this copy of the Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm, specifically the essay at the front, reminded me of something. It was that thing about history that is so damn easy to forget: that historians, the people writing down the history that you’re learning, were people. And people have agendas.

The Brothers Grimm were not a completely neutral, unbiased party documenting the stories from a particular time and place like a Mars rover collecting rock samples. They were men. And as you might expect from men, they felt the need to insert their opinions into everything.

(What? Hypocrite? What do you mean?)

The brothers were scholars, they were interested in the study and preservation of German folklore, but they were also interested in German Unification. They wanted their tales to foster a sense of cultural identity across what was, at the time, not a single nation. So they edited them, removing any material that might be offensive for their audience. You know, removal of sexuality, enforcing gender roles, adding Christianity, the usual. Later editions were aimed specifically at children for use as an “educational manual”, yeah that’s right, those exact words, an “educational manual.” Those straightforward morals that we associate with fairy tales may be there because they were in fact used to teach children basic lessons, but also undoubtedly because the Brothers Grimm thought they should be there.

So the Grimm versions of the story are edited versions of the original tales, which were spread orally so you can bet that there were a bunch of differing versions being told, but also, the Grimm edits aren’t even the versions most people are familiar with. There have been movies and children’s books and re-tellings and references. Not to mention the extra layer between us and the original stories that is translation, an extremely complex field of study where changes simply have to happen. All of this ambiguity adds up into such a varied popular perception that it’s hard to look at an individual fairy tale through all the layers of time and history and analysis and change, and not wonder:

What are you?

What is your purpose?

Why were you written? Why were you told?

In the context of all that, Volume 9 being a mystery plot about trying to find the truth of a fairy tale and understand a world of apparent nonsensical whimsy makes a lot of sense.

Narrative tension can often be summed up or described in questions. On a simple level, the tension of this volume is “will the characters make it home to Remnant physically and mentally intact?” However, the deeper question of this volume, is: “When you strip away the simple diction and lesson of a folktale, what truth do you actually find on the other side?”

Our protagonists find themselves in a story from their childhoods, but it’s different. It’s not in keeping with their expectations. Things don’t work the same way as reality in this strange, alien land, and everyone they meet is some variety of eccentric. But what I truly love about this volume is that the Alice in Wonderland-esque eccentricity of each Afteran eventually comes to make perfect sense. Little seems ignorant, and the Herbalist obtuse, both of them oddly obsessed with purpose, but in the context of how every Afteran’s life is an endless cycle of choosing a purpose to live for, either completing it or abandoning it, and then being reborn anew, it’s easy to see how their customs and use of language came about.

So that’s one of two reasons that this volume is so damn rewatchable, the other being, of course, Robbie motherfucking Daymond.

*robbie daymond clip*

The Cat, the Cat, the Cat, the Cat! I fucking love the Cat.

They get to do so much creative animation, modeling, and shot composition with the Cat, the Cat gets to emote in all these delightful ways, the Cat gets to say all the most fun lines, including some that are totally just the writers winking at us in the best way.

“Even this conversation was rather tedious.”

If the Cat is on screen, I am having a wonderful time.

Between them and my girl Weiss absolutely slaying this volume…I would watch a whole show of just the two of them fucking with each other. *Tom and Jerry*

“I guess your little plan to get out of here…didn’t work out?” *We serve cunt here sir *

But beyond just the surface level appeal that the Cat is constantly gushing, they’re also just a well utilized character. They appear right when the Ever After’s unhelpfulness is at its most frustrating, and despite their curious behavior, prove to be a reliable guide, leaping in to save team RWBY from the herbalist, teaching them all sorts of things about the Ever After, and even staying behind to hold off the Jabberwockers. So when Jaune shows up and is like “The Cat fucking sucks!” your response as an audience member is: “What? But I like the funky little cat! They’re a good lil guy!”

Then they show up again, seemingly to save Ruby, and you feel vindicated!

Briefly.

After it’s over, you go back and rewatch the Volume, and you realize that the Cat shows up right when Ruby loudly announces that she’s human.

Ah, Human you say? Like from REMNANT?

“She learned her lesson, didn’t she?” “I’d certainly say so.” * Holy moly guy *

When the cat brings up Salem and it takes the wind out of Ruby’s sails, it seems completely innocent. The Cat didn’t realize they were hurting her, they were just responding to the information that they just learned about Remnant. Right?

Basically, the cat twist is really good.

What was I talking about? Oh yeah, the mystery.

I’ve criticized RWBY before for how it handled mystery, but Volume 9 is constantly updating the audience and the characters with relevant information, which is the kind of mystery writing that is satisfying instead of frustrating. It gets your brain working and then it rewards that work with new pieces of the puzzle, rather than leaving you with two out of like four hundred pieces of a jigsaw and going “isn’t it mysterious?” Or just not giving you any and expecting you to enjoy the puzzle anyway.

And hey, guess what those pieces of the puzzle are serving as? Progress! Each bit of information they learn is another step towards the overarching story of getting home to Remnant! Hooray!

I do wonder if there were ever plans during production to do a full Jaune backstory episode where we’d actually see the events he describes with Alex and Lewis and the Cat outside of those storybook illustrations, because I think it would have helped a bit. As the volume stands, a lot of the mystery of what actually happened in the Girl that Fell Through the World is based around what characters tell us instead of things that we’ve actually seen. I don’t think it’s particularly egregious anywhere other than maybe the last exposition scene with the Blacksmith, but there is a lot of telling over showing in this volume. And it would have been easier to keep everything straight regarding Alex and Lewis and the Tree and the Cat if we had concrete information we could rely on mixed in with all the hearsay.

But honestly, that’s a small thing, which is how I feel about most of my criticisms about this volume. They’re all finicky little things about about moment to moment execution and how slight tweaks might’ve enhanced what they were going for, all of which feels pointless to bring up in the face of how this volume just works. It works really well. Not just because it’s structured well, but because it has something to say.

There’s another reason that this volume’s fairy tale framing device is perfect, and it’s CONTENT WARNING. If art is about meaning, I should probably talk about what this volume means to me, which means…it’s time to talk about the heavy stuff.

title card: STORIES, DEATH, AND MAKING SENSE OF TRAUMA

Stories are really important.

I’m not just talking about the fictional stories that we tell for the purposes of entertainment as well as spiritual and emotional nourishment, but also the quote unquote “real” stories that we tell about the world and especially about ourselves.

You ever tell a story to a friend about something that happened to you and catch yourself making that experience into more of a story? Not necessarily by fibbing, though I think tiny fibs while telling stories do tend to happen a lot more than we like to think about. But also through implying cause and effect where there might not have been any, doubling down on details that you’re not sure you remember correctly, and guessing about information you don’t know. Taking the raw, unfettered chaos that is experience and sculpting it into a shape that pleases our story-obsessed brains.

As John Truby puts it, “stories are maps of humanity.” They’re how we humans take our existence, which doesn’t make sense because it doesn’t have to because it’s indifferent to us, and make peace with it. Story is also a good way to describe how we conceive of ourselves. We have an inner narrative, describing where we’re at and what our lives have been. When the hap starts fuckening, we get hurt, we get down, but as long as we can fit whatever happened into our narratives, our minds do not, in fact, shatter like that of a Call of Cthulhu investigator. Praise be to the great old ones.

So…what happens when we can’t do that? What happens when our stories about ourselves and our lives suddenly and violently stop making sense?

Well, it turns out…that’s what trauma is. Trauma makes you ask: If the story I’ve been telling isn’t true, if what I thought I was isn’t what I am…then, what am I?

Consider Jaune Arc and Ruby Rose. Two young heroes, both spinning an internal narrative heavily influenced by fairy tales. Jaune seems to have been raised on gender role-enforcing shit that the Brothers Grimm probably wouldn’t even edit. You know, being the stoic, masculine icon of safety, who doesn’t ever falter or look goofy. He wants to be THE hero. He doesn’t just want people to be saved, he wants to be the one to do it. Ruby, on the other hand, is enchanted by the romance of being a huntress, but also by the do-gooding, the idea that whenever her mother left on a mission, she was off making the world a slightly better place.

“That’s why we’re here. To make it better.”

However, fairy tales are simple, whimsical. The people writing them down sometimes prune them of upsetting things. And it’s easy to learn the wrong lessons from stories of grand heroes and their exploits. We can be swept away by the clean narratives our favorite stories present, failing to take into account that real life is never so neatly organized or just. We can forget that existence is just raw chaos.

These two characters are, in fact, the heroes of their story, but they don’t know that. They’re trying to live up to the fairy tale concept of a hero in their heads and feeling like they aren’t good enough. The platitudes of those stories do them no good as they repeatedly run headfirst into trauma. Most commonly, Death, that which haunts the human experience at every turn. And not romantic, fairy tale death. To them, at least, it’s messy, unfair, unsatisfying death, so much of which they feel like they should have been able to prevent.

If they were the heroes that they’re trying to be, they would have saved those people. And they didn’t. But …heroes also put on a brave face. Yeah, sure, their loved ones keep dying and the world is ending despite their best efforts to save it, but those are the moments that we just have to keep moving forward, right? Right? Right?

You are running out of it is what is, are you sure you want to continue?

Of course the Ever After wears them down. Jaune, left to stew with a decision he made (under intense time pressure) to assist a friend’s suicide, alone, for decades. Trying to make up for it…failing. Losing his mind. Wanting to justify his presence in the world with the fairy tale concept of a hero so badly that he’ll save a people who do not want to be saved every single day. And Ruby? When she lands, she’s already struggling with the weight of failure, and then she finds out that one of her closest friends died. Again! Add this trauma onto the pile with everything else, and now you’ve got a mountain of the stuff, forcing her to ask herself who she is, but the circumstances aren’t giving her the space to breathe and figure it out.

Her team doesn’t know what to do, they’re counting on her, and the Ever After itself, particularly the fucking cat, is pushing her to be that hero. So she has to keep going even as she wonders constantly if she should just give up. She runs out of spirit and effort to give, so she starts giving away pieces of herself instead of just slowing down for a moment because she feels like she can’t. Of course she snaps! Of course it’s bad enough for Neo to exacerbate until she decides she just wants it to stop.

*silence*

These are two people whose stories stopped making sense. Their inner narratives broke. And they broke with them.

There’s an innate power in stories like this. It’s catharsis, yes, the glorious sensation of letting your emotions out somewhere free of consequence, but it’s also valuable to recognize ourselves in characters who fail, or fall short, or hate themselves. Their humanity helps us to recognize the humanity in ourselves.

But this is not a tragedy. The lesson learned is not a warning about walking a certain path. No, the lesson exists in another thing stories can provide for us: triumph.

Calling it a “lesson” sounds reductive, and maybe if you were to express that lesson in mere words without further context, it would be. But the thing about lessons, about fairy tale morals, about oft-repeated platitudes, is that we hear them so much or treat them as so obvious, that we forget how much truth they hold. The reason we teach lessons and convey messages through narrative is because stories can get around that desensitization, convey more than simple statements. You might be able to boil down the lesson of Cinderella into a single sentence, but the story of Cinderella is more meaningful than the phrase “kindness will be rewarded and selfishness will not,” or whatever else you come up with.

It’s one thing to state the morals of Volume 9. It’s another thing to watch Jaune’s face change as the Ever After shows him how every end is a new beginning, how for every piece of the world and of life that goes, something new takes its place, to see him and the others start to understand that there is room for failure.

It’s another thing entirely to watch Ruby look at what seemed to be failure, seemed to be evidence of the uselessness of her struggling, and suddenly see the effect that all of her effort has truly had on the world. It’s another thing entirely to see her broken, hurting, unsure, on the verge of giving up… beckoned by the truth that her mother wasn’t the perfect fairy tale hero that either of them set out to be, and that in spite of that, her love for her daughters was total and unconditional, right up until their last moment together.

It’s another thing entirely to watch Ruby Rose choose herself.

Suddenly, even the most painful things in the world…they make sense. And they can be a part of their stories. That’s the power of storytelling, right there. It doesn’t just teach. It shows. It immerses. It inspires. And that’s what Volume 9 does, maybe better than any other volume.

Volume 9 cannot be filler because it matters. It matters!

It does that thing that stories can do, that makes them so much more than information or simple statements: it takes a platitude that you’ve heard before and makes it transcendent, makes it so much greater than the mere words you’d use to express it but at the same time, somehow makes those words more powerful, as if filling them up with all of that meaning, giving them the ability to actually answer the question that everyone won’t stop asking: “What are you?”

title card: YOU ARE ENOUGH.

And that’s that.