If there’s anything to be said about Season Three Anne, it’s that she is doing so much better than Season One Anne. Well, maybe not in terms of trauma, but there is something to be said for how much positive change Anne’s personality has experienced.
Her parents agree: she has grown much more responsible. Even Anne acknowledges it. In five long months, she has grown so much. The Anne of the debut episode would never have done what Anne does now.
Right?
Yeah, no.
Ever since her friend was skewered like the main course at an amphibian cookout, Anne has been going back to the same old things she used to do. This is really something she’s been doing for a while, something that she worked so hard to get rid of, that she went to the other extreme.
Anne is a pushover. Still.
Allow me to explain. As the Protagonist, Anne has a lot of things to do. She has to hide the Plantars from the government, find a way to make an interdimensional portal, destroy a tyrannical and homicidal king, save her friends, make up with her friends, figure out what’s going on with her weird glowing blue powers, and return the Plantars back to Amphibia.
That’s a difficult list, one that really has me wondering how she’s going to pull it off in 20 episodes–especially when she has already used up 3 of them and only found more problems.
But you see, that’s exactly the issue here. Anne has overcommitted. She has taken on too much. Because if she doesn’t do all this stuff, then she’s going to lose everything.
Sound familiar?
Anne’s sense of responsibility for things hasn’t grown this drastically. She hasn’t done some grand heel-turn from a lazy slacker to a diligent soldier. She has just changed the things she was responsible for.
Before, her responsibility was to keep her friend group together. So she agreed with everything they said, doing things she didn’t want to do, just so that they would stay friends. She hid parts of her personality away, afraid of being mocked. And it worked, up until she gained a sense of self worth.
Then, her responsibility was still to keep her friends together, but it changed. Now she was determined to make sure Marcy wouldn’t get herself horribly injured or die. She even extended that to Sasha, despite her past, offering her a chance at forgiveness and trying to work things out with her, even though Sasha was a known backstabber.
As for now? Now, everything there has failed. Keeping the friend group together didn’t work. Marcy did die, despite Anne’s best efforts. Sasha did betray them again, despite Anne’s best efforts. And while neither intended to do that, the fact is there: staying friends with them that easily isn’t going to work.
But the thoughts are still there. Watching your friend die doesn’t get rid of bad thoughts, it worsens them.
So now Anne has these ideas in her head. She has to do what is expected of her, or else she’ll lose what she has. She can’t do anything that would indicate that she’s struggling with her tasks. She can’t have people acknowledging her opinion, as that would make more problems and disrupt the fragile status quo. She can’t have people worrying about her, not when she should be prioritizing others and worrying about everybody else.
Just because she’s in another dimension doesn’t mean Anne isn’t still Anne.
She has this huge list of things to figure out, but she takes this on by herself, strictly keeping her parents out of it and only somewhat including the frogs.
Anne isn’t being responsible, no. Not in a healthy way. Anne has allowed her responsibilities to completely surpass her boundaries, taking up every ounce of herself and leaving her no room to rest. Furthermore, she has become more and more secretive, refusing to let anyone even know what’s going on in her head. Her compartmentalization is in full effect, and it’s making it impossible for her to fully understand why she feels so awful.
It makes Anne unable to ask for help.
Now, difficulty asking for help is not a new thing for any of the Calamity Trio. We’ve seen it in Sasha, how she would rather fling herself off a cliff than admit her weakness–and even in redemption, she still won’t let anyone breach her walls. We’ve seen it in Marcy, how she would rather send her friends to another world than admit that she’s scared of losing them, because even if she did ask for her help, what’s the use? They can’t help her, not when her problems are this bad, and not when she believes she had them coming.
Anne has the same issue going on. For her, asking for help would destroy her carefully curated façade of composure and compliance. It would make her a problem, something that needs to be addressed. And in Anne’s world, there are already enough problems without her, too.
But what Anne doesn’t realize is that asking for help is exactly what she needs. If her parents can help her fight off robots, then she won’t have to hide from them. If the Plantars can help her search through the museum, then she can find a portal faster. And if she can communicate what she needs, it’ll make it so those big confrontations like Reunion and True Colors don’t happen–because Anne won’t hide her problems and try to solve them on her own.
