Jan/10/24

A Writer's Reflection!

As Told by Ginger is a 2000's Nickedlodean series. It has the rare honour of being a children's cartoon that is paced and ended the way the writers intended.

I've been watching an episode of As Told by Ginger for breakfast about four times a week. It's not exactly my first time watching it; I had seen bits and pieces of it when I was a preteen- the exact demographic that this show was intended. Back then, I was only just discovering anime and linear story telling, rather than the slice of life "return to the status quo" style that I most often saw from cartoons my whole life. From first glance, that describes As Told by Ginger; a simple and sweet cartoon based on these girls going to Lucky Junior High. It was very much so preteen-girl entertainment fodder with episodes about wearing makeup for the first time, or trying to make sure your birthday party isn't seen as too babyish by the other middleschoolers. It was meant to be relateable, and I'm sure to a lot of little girls out there, it was. But Ginger wasn't exactly your typical status quo slice of life kind of show.

These characters grow up, and things change. People change. And sometimes, growing up means growing together, or growing apart. It's a natural part of life that too rarely ever gets brought up in a children's cartoon.

This, I think, is one of the show's greatest strengths. I think it's easy to take for granted how much of a rarity this sort of story telling was in North American kids cartoons. These days, Avatar the Last Airbender is old news. Adventure Time went from being so episodic, to having pretty solid storylines that addressed hard and big feelings often had growing up. Steven Universe has made its stamp on the industry saying, that yes, kids and teens crave stories that they need to pay attention to catch from previous episodes! There's many others, but this is all relatively recent. Of these shows listed, the earliest one began in 2005, but As Told by Ginger was doing it five years earlier than that, without even being fantastical. While Ginger wasn't the first, it did feel like the first for something with so little action.

Yes, the story does follow Ginger and her friends going to Lucky Jr. High, but we watch them grow into high schoolers, with Ginger's elementary school-aged brother going into her old middle school. These kids make mistakes, they make them all the time. They're quite good at making age appropriate mistakes in fact, but they also will grow from them most of the time. Othertimes, it just gets to be a part of of their character, that, yeah, they have a weakness in reguards to this or that. All of the characters have character progression, with the exception of Mipsy, whom, I will get into very slightly later.

My favourite of these character progressions though has got to be the younger brother Carl. We watch him for two seasons terrorizing and harrassing his teachers. He's a goober who likes gross and yucky things, and, also, I think he might be a genius? He's experimental, he's loud, he's to the point, he's messy, and he's so curious. All of his rough edges comes from his love of the unknown, and how he experiments with it and makes it everybody else's problem. He never loses his gross edge, just like his mother never had, she just prefers her gross things to be different than his gross things, and she's also more adult about how she approaches her weird gross interests. No, instead of Carl growing over the show to become more "normal" in the sense of his tastes, he instead learns to grow more mature with it, and not against it. He makes a promise that he's not going to be a "bad kid" anymore, and despite being set up for failure by his teachers and principle, as they expected the bad kid that he didn't want to be, he still does it. I feel like I watched him grow qualities that he will take with him into adulthood to be a very good man with.

The show causes dicussions like these, between this character, or that character. There's episodes that would just stick with me as what it did for the character, or how yes, I had teachers and a principle literally conspire against me, too, and how it's real. How so much of what the characters go through as being real. Really real. I'm not going to say that it touches on a whole lot of deep topics like some of the other shows mentioned of this style; Avatar with its propaganda, Adventure Time with dementia, becoming disabled, and so many more, or Steven Universe with PTSD or c-PTSD. But, there's so many smaller but very real experiences that kids go through, with very real emotions attached, some so artistically put to animation that you can just feel the love for this show oozing out of the creators.

The situation with Ginger's mom and divoced dad is one of them. They are both mature adults and handle their divorce as such, but the kids have two very different and valid reactions to every time they see their dad. Ginger wants nothing more than to see her father and have him be a part of their lives. She wants him to show up for her school tallent shows, have him over for the holidays, and have him keep the promises that he makes to her. Whereas, Carl wants nothing to do with him. Carl wants him replaced and with a man better than his father ever was to them. He doesn't remember his dad was well as Ginger does, and so his leaving has a different effect on him, especially seeing how he let down his mom and sister so many times. These are things that come up multiple times throughout the series. Feelings about him don't actually change that much, if at all, but their feelings towards their father does play into the story and where the story goes and the people they meet and the baggage these characters have that they take into their own relationships.

A much funnier, light hearted one was when Ginger found out that she wasn't just Christian white but Jewish white and she suddenly deep dove into Jewish culture as hard as she could to the point of snobbery to all of her friends. That's a real experience that some kids have; a very EMBARRASSING experience to look back on, but a real one all the same, one that I could think back on in my own secondhand embarrassment of something similar. What a gem, truly, to kill me softly, as art is meant to make one feel.

Most conversations this show has with its viewers are much smaller, but nevertheless, is going to be some little kid's experience. Courtney Grippling went to a pool party with older kids and and some of the meanter ones removed her bikini top in front of everyone. Because of this, when I went to a pool party I came prepared and double knotted my bikini top. And guess what happened? Somebody tried to pull the same B.S. on me as they did Courtney, and not to anyone else. Thank you, As Told by Ginger. I'm glad I saw that episode when I was a kid and I hope this didn't happen to any other viewers before or after.

I'd regret, however, not talking about some of the show's major flaws. I mentioned before that the linear story telling was one of the show's greatest strengths! Its other greatest strength is in how dimensional the characters are, which I absolutely adore. But that's where the problems also make their home.

It is so refreshing to see characters as dynamic and fully fledged as they are in Ginger. All of them have their beauty marks as well as warts!

We have Ginger, who is a generally pretty kind and thoughtful person. She will stand up for what's good a majority of the time, but she's also young. She has to juggle prioritizing people in her life, and she doesn't always get it right. There's Macie, who is a thoughtful, intelligent, and sensitive friend, who sometimes gets caught up within all the drama. There's Dodie, who, well, hum.

Okay, there are strengths and negatives to Dodie, but this is where it starts to get a little difficult. It gets hard to not compare Dodie, one of Ginger's best friends, to Courtney, the rich popular girl who views Ginger as one of her best friends! And from there we get to the flaws.

So, knocking it out of the way real quick, there's a couple of other important characters to mention as far as being "multifaceted" or not.

Miranda is Courtney's actual best friend for the first two seasons. It's important to know that there's only 3 black teens in the show, and one didn't get introduced until the last season to be the "other woman" in a relationship, and didn't really get any screentime outside of that dynamic. While Darren is a fully fleshed out character, Miranda is the opposite. Miranda is a truly flat character, and, in my, maybe uninformed opinion, is being used exclusively to be an "angry black woman" trope. She's flat, bitter, and mean. Her only interest is to get Courtney to like her more than she likes Ginger, and, well, to screw Ginger and her friends over because they exist and she hates remembering that they exist.

At one point, Miranda was finally given some sort of characterization. Just like many other characters, you see a pocket into her life that makes her who she is as a person a little bit more understandable. We had an episode where we found out her dad is a drill seargent. Okay, okay, great! Where do we go from here? Are we going to learn even more about her? Is she going to soften her edges at all? I don't need her to be friends with Ginger or even be nice to her, but just having her own interests would be a huge jump in the right direction! Okay, okay. Huh. So Miranda dates Darren for a short while, it doesn't last as many young relationships don't and, that's fine! Okay, I'm still happy with this! Maybe she grew and will learn and change from the breakup? M'mm. No. She reverts right back to the one note she always has been. Only now, she gets an even flatter companion buddy named Mipsy, who was only invented to be an evil best friend to conspire along side. Mipsy even has her own evil cousin who plots against Ginger also, who is also-also named Mipsy. Hm. Somehow not as fun as the "Mita, Mita, and Mita" joke I made last review.

Okay, so, if the biggest flaw is nestled in the bed of its greatest strengths, that's hopefully it, right? Is that we get a couple of flat characters in an otherwise cast of fully dimensional characters? I wish. Simply, I believe there's just a lot of unchecked biases that can be found in this cartoon from 2000 that ends up just making the whole show feel mean spirited and shallow within the comfort of "people like me are good, and those who aren't, aren't."

Courtney Grippling is, along side Carl and, to be honest, Ginger's mifly mother, my favourite character.

Courtney has strengths, and she has those faults! She's very faulty, but also very good! She is a girl who comes from money. Her daddy is always away and never at home, but they don't start eating dinner until they recieve his phone call. Her mother is constantly in and out of her life, which leaves Courtney and her little brother to be mostly raised by her driver. She has a bad case of foot in mouth desiese which would be remedied if literally anyone actually sat down and talked with her about it. She mostly talks fashion to her best friend Miranda who is always vying for her attention, but Courtney is always vying for the attention of another. Courtney displayed some very strong feelings towards Ginger, constantly wanting her attention, wanting her approval, wanting her to be near by, and even wanting to be more like Ginger, aspiring to be within Ginger's values. Courtney had the sort of strength that she only ever let people see her be upset over the little things and never the big things, at least at first. Later on, we see her grow even more and, she's not going to have a pitty party over the small things, either. Instead, she carves out the type of day she wants to make for herself, and what sort of memories she wants to create, and, out of all of Ginger's friends, it's Courtney who was her most loyal, most good to her friend she had, and has never done Ginger dirty at all.

Ginger never considered her a friend.

But Dodie?

Even when Dodie backstabbed her, she'll forgive Dodie. Even when Dodie climbes all over her to get to the top, she won't mention it again. Dodie will hurt Ginger time and time again and never really apologizes. Dodie will do the nastiest things to Ginger, but if Ginger even looks in another person's direction, she'll make it all about herself. She'll do all this just to have a couple of friends, but she'd drop if it meant she could be Popular. Ginger always forgives and forgets, even when there wasn't an apology involved.

Courntey, despite seeing Ginger as one of her best friends, was never considered her friend a single time, because Courtney was rich, and did have foot in mouth disease. It was a disease that Dodie had way worse, and that even Ginger suffered from, but she couldn't be a friend because she was popular and rich.

I start to see all of these little cracks in the story telling that shows the man behind the curtain, trying to portray this large truth about people. And it's mean.

All the characters are mean, except for Ginger's Mom. The show is mean, too. Ginger never returns Courtney's friendship, but fantasizes over the idea of benefitting over Courtney's coattails in popularity. When I thought it was just the characters doing that to Courtney, kind of dehumanizing her for "what she can do FOR me", I was okay with these flaws. Instead, the show seems to revel in Courtney's downfall in the last season, despite the many episodes that seemed to try to humanize her to us. She is done so dirty by the show, that she becomes houseless at the end over a crime her father committed. The last bit of dialogue we hear from her is crying for help as she gets pushed down a hill in a porter potty by Carl trying to be mean to somebody else. And, again, Courtney's not perfect, but so many other characters have flaws bigger than hers that we're meant to forgive and forget. All the while, while we are supposed to take home that the reason why she's unforgiveable is because she's rich, she gets unhoused at the same time Ginger moves into a giant house in her neighborhood. There's no problem there? Is it because Ginger is actually so exceptionally moral that it's not okay to be rich unless it's her? And we are supposed to laugh and be happy that this teenager and her kid brother has everything taken away from them after seasons of her championing the protagoinist? It's not like Courtney ever laughed at anyone for being poor.

But at the same time, we are also supposed to be judgemental over people who are poorer than Ginger. We meet characters that we know for a fact are more poor and living in trailer parks, and one ended up being a terrible and sexist man who always broke things and let his wild kids run amuck, and then the other one being a comically dumb woman who is willing to be paid off to literally homewreck at a wedding on the last episode, which ended up being de-wigged and outed, transphobic style. We don't get to know them as thoroughly in debt. They needed adult bad guys, so they thought poor people would do the trick! So I can't really even go into detail about them because poor people only existed to be a tool for two episodes.

It's a shame that the show ended on some a meanspirited note, not just with the last episode. It was there the whole series, but the longer it went on, the more I caught on that this wasn't just the characters, it was the writers. I'm sure the last episode touched so many people's hearts, and I wish that could have been me. It probably would have if I was a kid, but it just didn't vibe with me as an adult who can't turn off their brain and the message I got was from it was that it's okay to have flaws. It's okay to never improve from those flaws! As long as you're Ginger and her closest friends.

Overall, it's still an impressive cartoon from it's time. I do think it was one of the better shows on Nickedlodean during 2000, in fact. For a cartoon to watch with breakfast before work, I recommend it still!

But in total, I'd put it straight down in the middle. That's not a bad thing. For me, "mid" means average. Until further notice, I'm in between. 2.5 out of 5.