American Dragon Jake Long: A Cohesive Narrative I'm Not Willing To Sit Through

8:39 PM · Feb 18, 2021 "Me: spud is gnc as fuck
Izumi: [laugh] you’re insane. But you’re right."

I can totally justify cutting American Dragon off with a 5000 word post about Sofia the First and Elena of Avalor. I swear it actually makes sense. Much like Elena of Avalor does a better job with its themes than Sofia the First does, American Dragon Jake Long season 2 does a better job at being a cartoon worth watch than American Dragon season 1. But none of that will stand out to you if you don't watch the worse one first.

So as you will see from the intro jokes, I watched this show with my friend Izumi! Like with my other friends, we watched the shows over a discord call. However, unlike with other friends up to this point, we watched American Dragon Jake Long over a discord call with mics on. This resulted in me hearing every single time Izumi sighed when she heard a really corny line. Given how American Dragon season 1 is set up, this was approximately every 2-3 minutes. This vastly improved the quality of the show on my end.

The biggest problem of season 1 is that Jake uses a gratuitous amount of slang derived from AAVE. This was probably an excuse to make him seem "hip" and "cool," since he's a middle schooler trying to fit in and trying a bit too hard, but it comes off poorly and honestly, a show written predominantly by white people probably shouldn't have their nonblack character use AAVE solely to sound cool.

Season 2 is a lot better in that regard. In fact, the show got an entire upheaval and went from lousy to decent, with new animation, new designs, and a new take on the theme song.

8:41 PM · Mar 2, 2021 "on one hand the designs are so different from their original one... on the other they're so much better."

 The designs are great, though I do have a problem with one... Or rather... Two. The Oracle Twins.

These are twin sisters, folks!

The other issue I have with season 2 is kind of a weird one... It's not a bad show, but I hate that I have to sit through season 1 to understand what's going on in season 2. Despite season 1 being a lot goofier, the show has a considerable amount of plot beats in the first season. And honestly, how dare this show make me watch its dogshit first season if they knew it was dogshit?

Though that probably would have upset the fans. I remember kids my age being upset with the change in animation style. I didn't really... care all that much. Around the time I got into American Dragon I caught onto the sort of second season style change shows went through and found it kind of weird it was being advertised

I think American Dragon does have some memorable supporting character concepts at least. Out of a lot of the shows we've discussed recently, I remember the ones from this show the most. There was Sun Park, the Oracle Twins as mentioned before, that one teacher voiced by Paul Rugg, the two kids in the Huntsclan who always hang out with one another, and of course, the Bradster.

9:12 PM · Feb 18, 2021 "Beloved Boyboss The Bradster"

And I remember these characters existing at least. I think overall though, Haley was probably my favorite character after Spud. "Family Business" was actually one of my favorite episodes when I was a kid. It was fun to see Jake and Haley's rivalry as they did dragon training together.

8:35 PM · Feb 18, 2021 "Izumi and I hate a lot of the characters but we like the Long family"

I know I talk about family stories a lot, but I do wish this show could have been more focused on the Long family like that.

But this isn't a family and school sitcom like The Proud Family. American Dragon Jake Long is an action-adventure show about forbidden romance.

8:31 AM · Feb 26, 2021 "People act like zutara is about feminism or whatever y’all just watched American Dragon"

Jake's love interest is a girl named Rose. She starts out out of his league but he's determined to woo her, and she's interested. Unfortunately, Jake is the American Dragon and Rose is the number two to the Huntsman. So kind of like Miraculous Ladybug, but fucked up, earlier, and with better pacing. Though even then, Rose was up there with Suzie Crabgrass in terms of "characters my jaded middle school self knew were going to keep leaving and returning to the show for the ratings grabs." 

Honestly, watching through the show this time around, we skipped ahead to season two and missed out on a lot of plot information so I had to rely on what I knew about this show watching it as a kid. And it is one of those shows I liked and remembered a lot from. Unfortunately, it just did not hold up.

Overall Rating for American Dragon Jake Long: C Tier