I recently picked out a new show to watch, and I decided to try Disney's Amphibia.  I'd seen about ten seconds of it on tv years ago and thought it looked cute.  Nice art style, looked like it had potential.  A little while earlier, I had tried Ever After High, a show about fair tale students that is, I am given to understand, set in the same universe as Monster High... I think.  It looked great--the art style was certainly beautiful--but I was bored out of my mind.  I really wanted to like it, and I tried, but I just couldn't do it.  Honestly, it sucked.  (Sorry to anyone who liked it.)

I went into Amphibia with a fairly mediocre mindset, not really expecting it to be anything more than just something to watch.  After one episode, I thought the characters were charming and fun, the voices great, and the world whimsical and beautiful.  I was interested to watch more, but I was very skeptical that it would amount to much.  There didn't seem to me to be enough depth here for anything other than just some shallow antics and a few goofy laughs.  I just didn't think that the story and world they had set up had enough substance to really go places.

I've watched a lot of shows that I knew were masterpieces going in--Breaking Bad, The Sopranos, Bojack Horseman, Avatar: The Last Airbender, Downton Abbey--I was late to the party on all of these.  No specifics had been spoiled for me, but I already knew that these shows were some of best of all time, and they did not disappoint.  But you know what's more exciting for me?  Discovering an unknown hidden gem or a diamond in the rough.  I love trying some random thing that I've never heard of and know nothing about, going in with little to no expectations, and then being blown away.  I love being completely taken aback when a show turns out to be something way more and way different than you expected.  Amphibia is one of those.

If you're at all interested, stop reading now and go watch it.

Because it's spoiler time.

I am now going to spoil the show in its entirety.  You've been warned.

The show is about teen girl Anne Boonchuy who gets magically transported to the fantasy world of Amphibia, inhabited by sapient, talking frogs, toads, newts, and a whole host of monsters.  She's not alone, either.  Anne's friends Marcy and Sasha were transported there, too, but they were all separated, and none of them initially know that the others are even there, much less where.  Each of them starts their journey in a different part of the world.  Marcy finds herself in the bustling cosmopolitan capital where she befriends the king, Sasha is taken prisoner and thrown in a castle tower cell, and Anne is lost in the wilderness and sleeps in a cave.  What follows is a continuous three-season arc that packs in more twists, lore, and character development than I ever imagined.

The humble beginnings feature Anne being taken in and essentially adopted by the Plantars, a family of frog farmers in a quaint village.  There, she slowly learns the ways of this world as she adapts, grows, and overcomes personal struggles.  Sasha has a rougher time, and basically has to buy her freedom by helping the bad guys.  She gets taken in the promise of a villain and breaks bad for awhile.  The show starts off slowly and builds exponentially.  I'm not going to summarize every single plotline, but suffice it to say that this show went big without tipping its hand too soon.

Amphibia appears to be a land of medieval era tech, but it turns out that the king is the last surviving member of an ancient high-tech race that basically hid their tech and kept it dormant.  The king turns out to be evil, biding his time before launching a robot invasion, first against Amphibia, then Earth.  It's a wild ride, for sure.  But what made it a special gem was the character arcs.  They were magnificent.  Sasha had a turbulent arc, changing back and forth between good and bad.  I couldn't decide from one episode to the next whether she was honest or lying, an anti-hero or a sympathetic villain.  I don't think she knew herself.  I love characters like that.  Sasha had an up and down redemption arc that saw her turning temporarily good again, then succumbing to temptation and betraying her friends when the opportunity for personal gain was too good, then finally turning good permanently when she saw the devastating consequences of her actions, and spending the rest of the show desperately and humbly seeking redemption and forgiveness.  Her arc constantly reminded me of that of Prince Zuko, which is the highest praise that can ever be given.  It's also revealed that Marcy, the bubbly, sweet, klutzy, nerdy darling that everyone believed could do no wrong, actually trapped the three of them in Amphbia on purpose in an effort to run from her real world problems.  The characters all end up friends again in the end (it is a Disney kid's show, after all), but it wasn't easy.  An over-arcing theme of the show is that forgiveness is difficult, but ultimately worth it.

The show is crammed full of big adventures, epic fantasy, jaw-dropping twists, and absolutely razor-sharp humor and wit (Grandpa Hop-Pop the frog delivers the best one-liners), but what made it stand out the most for me is that Amphibia isn't afraid to go to dark places.  One of my biggest complaints about MLP:FIM is their complete refusal to directly confront death.  They were apparently banned from saying the words "dead", "death", or "kill".  I brought this up a few times on the forums, and users always responded by saying, "Well, it's a kid's show.  They can't actually kill characters on something made for kids", to which I would respond by simply saying, "Ursula, Mufasa, Scar, Gaston, Judge Frollo, Tadashi Hamada, Anna & Elsa's parents, and Bambi's mom."  Checkmate. 

Amphibia had permission to go darker, and they didn't mess around.  They aren't shy when it comes to directly talking about death and mortal danger.  Anne's adopted frog family consists of two youngsters living with their grandfather.  Their parents were killed in an attack on their town, which they directly describe, rather than the little trick with the Apples where the closest we got was "if mom and dad were here..."  After an intense duel between Anne and a then misguided and bad Sasha atop a castle tower, Sasha falls off the edge.  Anne catches her, refusing to let her friend die, even though they're currently on opposing sides.  The tower is crumbling, the stones are breaking, and Anne's grip is slipping.  Sasha, in a moment of regret and selflessness, looks Anne in the eye and says, "Maybe you'd be better off without me," and let's go.  Another character catches her before she hits the ground, but she fully intended and expected to fall to her death, and they had me going for a second.  Sasha's redemption arc also sees the begrudging and reluctant redemption of the rough and gruff villain then she was helping, Captain Grime.  In the penultimate episode of the series, a noble Grime and Sasha (now a selfless commander of the amphibian resistance against the king), are dueling against the true villain, a mind-controlled Marcy who's been taken over by The Core, an evil AI comprised of all the greatest minds of the ancient race.  During the fight, Marcy cuts off Grime's arm.  It's not gory, of course, but it was still pretty legit.  I mean, could you imagine a pony getting their leg severed during the battle for Canterlot or something?  No, you couldn't.

Amphibia isn't afraid of the dark, not only in the serious scenes, but in the comedic ones as well.  Many sharp jokes had my jaw hitting the floor and me thinking, "holy sh*t, did they just say that??!"  I swear, many of the jokes and one-liners from Hop-Pop and borderlined sociopathic tadpole Polly could have come straight out of Bojack Horseman.  In one scene, Polly offers to off the Plantar's landlord just so they won't have to pay rent on their vegetable stand.  It was a joke, of course, but it when it comes to Polly, I'm never 100% sure... 

But my favorite scene in the show was the finale of season 2, shortly after the king's evil nature is revealed.  Sasha has just betrayed her friends, and her fate is uncertain.  Marcy, Anne, and her frog family are frantically trying to open a portal back to Earth to escape Amphibia and the king.  Anne and the Planters are halfway through and turn back for Marcy, who's just a few steps behind them.  She calls out to them, but her voice is suddenly cut short by a slicing crunch sound.  Her eyes go wide and haunted.  She looks down--as she sees, so do we: the king's huge, flaming sword is sticking straight out of Marcy's chest.  "Now look what you made me do," the king mutters in a low, dark voice.  He pulls the sword out.  As tears stream down, Marcy apologizes to her friends with her last fading breath, then falls to the ground, lifeless.  Anne screams Marcy's name as the portal closes.

I really thought Marcy was dead.  I seriously did.  As it turns out, she lived, but only because the king had use for her, (he wanted to merge her with The Core) so he used some of that ancient tech he had buried beneath the castle to save her.  In season 3, we see Marcy unconscious, floating in a stasis chamber, hooked up to all sorts of tubes.  She absolutely would have died otherwise.  Seeing Marcy stabbed was the moment that Sasha finally snapped out of it and turned over a new leaf.  Those were the consequences that she couldn't live with.

In some ways, I kind of wish Marcy had actually died.  I love the dark.  I live for the dark.  I love shows that make me sad.  I'm a messed up weirdo.  My favorite scenes in any show are the dark moments and death scenes.  I'm depressed and don't like being alive, so I like stuff that... idk... makes me feel the way I already do?  If that makes sense?  I think it's that the dark scenes sort of vindicate my feelings.  Something like that.  You give me a cute and colorful kid's cartoon about sweet BFF girls, then stab one of them through the chest with a flaming sword, and that's instantly going to be my favorite scene, hands down.  F*ck, when you put it that way, I sound like a monster.    I'm not, I swear!  I just find funny, goofy antics mostly boring, and I love stuff that makes me FEEL things.  Does that make any sense?  Does anyone else feel that way?  I also find it thrilling when something ostensibly made for kids goes hardcore and pushes the darkness further than you expected.  That's why Marcy's "death" scene made more of an impact for me than any of the thousands of people getting clipped in The Sopranos or beheaded in Game of Thrones.  You expect it there.  I love when cartoons blow my mind.

The Marcy scene, though not actually a death, was an intense humdinger that will live in my memory for long time.

Overall, FIM is the superior show, but Amphibia was a helluva ride that definitely went to dark places where Pony would have kept the lights on.