Wuk Sucks

[Dogempire]

She's OK to me, but she truly reminded me of OG Naruto and that felt weird. You know, the really optimistic, quirky, cringe, fun character that speaks loudly and adores food. Was waiting for her to shout dattebayo bro.

That being said she's OK. I came across more unbearable characters (looking at you, Asahi).

The biggest difference between Wuk Lamat and characters like OG Naruto and other sorts of "golden retriever" type characters (that are actually well-written) is that they have their own struggles that serve to ground them, Naruto is the way he is because he seeks attention and approval from *someone*, because he's all alone and shunned by the village. In that sense, the way he is is justified.

I absolutely adore the "golden retriever" character archetype and it's lowkey one of my favorites to the point I really liked Wuk Lamat at the beginning and thought she would become one of my favorite characters, but there's just no substance to the way she acts, no compelling and underlying reason for her positivity and optimism aside from "Well daddy likes peace so I like it too."

People who are overly nice and extremely positive/energetic/silly usually have some underlying trauma that makes them act the way they are, Wuk Lamat has no such trauma, no issues of abandonment by her real father, hell she doesn't even seem to be curious who her real father is. She never saw the horrors of war and that's why she came to value peace, she doesn't have an irrational fear of having the people around her hurt which is why she so stubbornly clings to the idea of peace, she's just a talking piece for a very generic morality of "Gais, fighting is bad and let's all work together"

Hell, they don't even go the route of making it so that Wuk Lamat lacks the power to maintain the peace that her father created, maybe they could have explored that the only reason Gulool Ja Ja was able to create peace was because behind the scenes there were overwhelming acts of violence to reign the citizens in that maybe have been lost to generations, maybe they could have put a twist on her father and made her suffer some sort of breakdown because the person she believed raised her wasn't the ideal she believed him to be.

Just ahhh, traumatize the characters, SE. If you're going to create a character that's too good for this world then you need to mess them up mentally by making them experience the horrors of the world or have things that they don't deserve to have happen to them end up messing them up mentally.

It makes for compelling writing and it makes us want to cheer for the character even more and see them succeed, if we actually watched Wuk Lamat struggle to come to terms with *something* before finally getting the resolve she needed at the end of the last trial because she doesn't want to let her friend fight alone and actually wants to confront her problems, then it would actually work, or at least not be so crappy