The lunatic rabbits

I just finished season 2 of Mako Mermaids, it's also fine. I liked it a little better than season 1? In my previous post I mostly went on about season 1's longform plot, and I guess I wasn't the only one who didn't care as much for that, because they course-corrected into a season 2 that is chockfull of shenanigans and little adventures, with a bigger plot on top but balanced better. Also fun is that Zac's girlfriend Evie gets transformed into a mermaid (I yelped!) like the original show's trio, so there is some fun there of new exploration.

However season 2 has six main characters over last season's four, which means there's less time to get to know the characters well, plus the main drivers for the season, emotionally and plotwise, are Ondina and Eric, two new characters who (1) already have to get through a hurdle of being new characters, instead of the season relying on returning characters we already know and (2) these characters do not work for me.

The actors for Ondina and Eric look fantastic underwater, they're probably the best at underwater acting, so I get it, and their characters are written to be a particular way in service of the story, and I do like that they're both similar enough that their getting romantically entangled makes sense and that Eric loves Ondina exactly the way she is, but ohhhh I do not care for them. Eric is slightly better in the sense that he's meant to be suspicious and you're not supposed to trust him as he makes the plot happen (and keeps mucking about at work, that made me so MAD! But it's supposed to), while Ondina is (IMO) a meaner, more hypocritical version of Lyla.

When I put on the first episode of the season, my immediate reaction was to yell because DAGNABIT, Lyla is gone??? >:( I guess that answers how they were going to deal with Lyla's feelings for Zac while Zac is with Evie, which is that they don't have to. But then I was curious to see how Sirena, the lone returning mermaid of the season 1 trio, would step up, but... she's just not a character who can drive the plot, or perhaps they couldn't figure out how to do it because she's the nice, sweet one who has learned to trust Zac. So Ondina and to lesser extent Mimmi drive the season, and I can't tell if the reveal with Zac being a merman prince is a retcon or not, but it was fun that the moment that Mimmi and Zac admitted out loud that they have been having visions of each other, I looked at both of them and was like, hey they look similar-ish enough to pass as siblings, which is indeed a reveal that happens in a following episode. As casting goes, that was a good one.

Some of the shenanigans episodes were fun in concept but most of them didn't gel for me. Evie turning into a mermaid is fun but her being a mermaid is only meaningful as far as it means that Cam is the only one in the secret-knowing circle who is human, plus Evie gets a high ratio of slapstick mermaid problems, with the drunk moon where she embarrasses herself, the goop one, the shrinking one, the main sneezing one. The main trio of mermaids do get some funny stuff but not as much, and the mermen of the show don't get embarrassed at all because boys are cool, I guess. This isn't malicious and is probably just a result of Evie's actress doing so well in the season 1 cat shenanigan episode, though it does speak a little to the kinds of situations they felt natural for the characters. For example there's an episode that does the classic Evil Makeover episode with Sirena, complete with dramatic perm and dark eyeshadow, but it doesn't let Sirena do anything really fun and let loose, beyond hyperfocusing on her boyfriend.

There are some episodes that really good! The one where Mimmi refuses to speak to Ondina after Ondina has chosen to stay on land with Eric, felt like some of the best friendship stuff of Just Add Water, as a storyline driven by emotion and characterization, with heartfelt stakes. As the B plot it had Cam and Carly on their first date, which also has emotional consequences in a following episode when Carly learns about the mermaid secret and joins the circle, and the follow-up with that when Cam chooses differently this season than he did the last. The whole sequence that reveals what Cam did with the stone was impressively edited like a much smarter show.

For me the longform plot is still not interesting enough to pull the season together, because the unknowns have the same emotional stakes as in season 1, where the mermaids are for it, the mermen are against it, no one can argue their pov meaningfully because no one knows what will happen, so it's just as repetitive now as it was then. I also don't care for (1) the men actively driving the plots of both seasons, (2) of Zac being the super specialest little boy (though I do like Zac as a general character and wish they would develop his character besides the one episode he got to be mad about discovering he's adopted), and (3) that all the women are emotional support fuckall useless in the finale because the men do everything.

When Veridia praises the trio in the finale for solving the Mako Island problem, I'm just like, but did they? Because absolutely none of the active choices they made over the entire season helped because they wanted to take away Zac's powers (didn't work) and then stop Zac from finding the merman cave (didn't work) and activating it (didn't work). It's Zac's actions to explore the cave, and then Eric's actions for the same, that created a situation where Zac could deactivate the merman cave.

The underwater scenes this season are great, though! And now onward to the third and final season.

Irene Vallejo's Papyrus: The Invention of Books in the Ancient World, as translated from Spanish into English by Charlotte Whittle, is a very leisurely read about books of the Hellenic era, i.e. ancient Greece and Rome. It's not telling a historically linear story, but jumps all over the place, from the library of Alexandria, to the development of writing for administrative work, to the spread of Hellenic culture through their empire, to the journey from oral stories to written ones, to modern conceptions of the classical texts, to the development of the Roman alphabet, to the materials used to make scrolls and parchment... more of that, but that's a rough idea.

There is a vaguely grand throughline from Greece and then Rome (and Rome's appropriation of Grecian canon) but the book meanders here and there with pit stops in the modern day and memoir-like chapters of Vallejo's own life experiences with the written word. A lot of the book's content is interesting to me and I have enjoyed books that jump around through related topics (like that book about time I read a while back) but I couldn't vibe with this one and found it a bit tiring to get through, when I felt like I should have been more excited to get back to it. I think the leisurely journey was a bit too leisurely for me, I needed stronger hooks of getting to the point at each section, even if I enjoyed the content itself.

Tone clash aside, there is a lot that's so interesting to me, for example like I knew that reading books silently is a modern thing and historically they were read out loud, but what's new to me is a consequence where unlike in modern times when literacy has been guarded as a privilege of the elite, in ancient Rome slaves were used to read out loud because of a belief that to read someone else's words was to allow one's voice to be "possessed" by that writer, and of course only slaves should be used that way.