Star VS The Forces of Evil's Esoteric Happy Ending rant

As a warning, I'll be providing major, unmitigated spoilers for the finale of Star VS The Forces Of Evil, as well as Samurai Jack because I will go into that too. Turn back now if you don't want to hear spoilers.

So the summary of Cleaved is like this: Star goes along with her plan to destroy all magic, she and her friends managed to uncorrupt Tom and repel Mina to manage it, and the plan succeeds which the show milks to provide suspense about Marco's fate, then eventually, a portal shows up for both worlds, Star and Marco both run toward it before the portal explodes and fuses both worlds ala what happened in Final Fantasy 5, ending with Star and Marco greeting each other.

I think this qualifies as Esoteric Happy Ending. And yes, I speak as the guy who did the YKTTW on Savvy Guy Energetic Girl. Okay, so Starco is able to sail out without the leads being permanently separated, thanks to the worlds being.....yes, you guessed it: cleaved. Together. That isn't the problem, oh no. The problem is the execution in general. So these worlds get cleaved together. Wouldn't be there some irksome chaos, like either world's wildlife being introduced to the other's populace without sufficing warning? This isn't even unseen Fridge Horror either; there's a comedic gag where one of the people running in response gets eaten by a venus fly trap that would have been from Mewni. And with no more magic, yeah, have fun with Mewni's wildlife.

The "destroy magic" solution was idiotic in its own right, even if we ignore the morality issues with it, which were brought up with how the likes of Hekapoo would outright die. Let's not forget the Laser Puppies, by the way, because the show didn't think to do THAT. To be sure, Mina and the Magic High Commission had been abusive with it, but I would have expected somebody who would call herself Star The Underestimated would have realized to go the route of David VS Goliath against the Solarian Warriors and figured out an alternative solution, probably in time to STILL save the wounded monsters at that. But no, Solarian Warriors are blatantly overpowered beyond any hope of overcoming them without some easy way out, so just destroy magic and that's it. This screams rage quit, and it's even worse when you remember that, oh right, STAR IS A FREAKING GENKI GIRL.

You want to know what makes the Genki Girl appealing, besides tons of reasons I would list on a notebook page because my memory has issues? It's that she can come up with surprisingly innovative solutions that augment and inspire faith and love. Ya know. Like magic? It helps when she does prove she IS smarter than she can seem at times, the problem being reliability, hence a guy like yours truly is supposed to come in to cover for that much, managing points about strategic or tactical concepts like chokepoints or flanking, which is why it just pisses me off to be told to never consider looking after females, never mind one who would be called an idiot behind her back because the world wants to be hostile for its own sake. You'd think Star would have come up with something else, but nope, NOTHING really disrupted committing to the farce of a "plan", when she didn't even tell Marco about the tapestry not having him on it.

I'm sorry, but I remember how people took issue with Samurai Jack's own finale being a singular episode too, and finding it rushed for that reason too. At least with Samurai Jack, Ashi becoming Ret Gone due to her geneaology, while irksome, didn't break any themes or even create Logic Bombs, and neither did the warrior who became the Lava Monster failing to make a cameo during the denouement of Aku's destruction, as much as I would have felt better about the averting of that guy's Fate Worse Than Death. Contrast to Star VS The Forces of Evil, where we're supposed to believe in hope and love, not some idiocy Star would call a brainchild when she came up with it during a Heroic BSOD. I'm not even sure how the finale would have fixed enough with the length of 2 episodes instead of only 1, because the problems scream innately tied to the episode's ideas.

And sure, maybe the Esoteric Happy Ending IS deliberate, providing Starco at a definite cost, but we would want our case of Earn Your Happy Ending to work well with the world around them, not make sure Only The Leads Get A Happy Ending. Better yet, don't have the problem solved by the clearly faulty "obvious" idea.