User blog:ThatScrewyDuck/DuckTales 2017 PE Discussion/Proposal: General Lunaris



Alright, it’s time for the moment at least several of us seem to have been eagerly waiting for. Seeing as how it is now September 26th on this wiki, which marks two weeks since the finale of season 2 aired, DuckTales’ latest season is now eligible for PE-related discussion… and who could possibly be more qualified to kick it off than a user with a duck-themed name, and in reference to a character who’s pretty similar to one of the ducks featured on this show no less?

......I’m kidding of course. I really wanted to do this because I love this show, I’ve been following it since shortly after it started, and I figured I could do a solid job on this proposal. So thanks for allowing and trusting me to do it. Until recently, I honestly didn’t believe this show could possibly have a character that’s bad enough to qualify. However, among the numerous characters introduced in this latest season was a new villain who proved to be surprisingly monstrous, and is definitely worthy of examination. So let’s cover him and what he does.

What’s the work?
DuckTales 2017 is an American animated TV show which acts as a reboot to the original 1987 series of the same name. Premiering with a 44-minute special on August 12, 2017 on Disney XD, it has run for 2 seasons and 47 episodes so far with a 3rd season already confirmed. The story kicks off when Donald Duck reluctantly leaves his triplet of nephews, Huey, Dewey and Louie (their full names being Hubert, Dewford and Llewellyn) with his estranged uncle, Scrooge McDuck, at his mansion while he goes to a job interview. After befriending an energetic girl around their age named Webbigail “Webby” Vanderquack, they accidently unleash some ancient evils housed in artifacts and relics that Scrooge and Donald found during their previous adventures. While Scrooge is initially mad at them, after they help him contain them again, he finds his thirst for adventure rekindled, which leads them to move in with him and go on many exciting adventures together where they search for treasure, ancient artifacts and relics, or simply aim to make great new discoveries, all the while bonding, learning the importance of family and other important life lessons along the way.

Initially, the biggest ongoing storyline in the show that developed in-between all the episodic adventures revolved around the triplets (particularly Dewey) trying to solve the mystery surrounding the unexplained disappearance of their missing mom and Donald’s twin sister, Della Duck. Near the end of the first season, we discover that she got herself stranded on the Moon when she used Scrooge’s spaceship dubbed “The Spear of Selene” without permission and ran into a space storm which severely damaged it. And ironically, it is during her exile that the subject of this discussion/proposal is introduced. Meet General Lunaris.

Who is he and what does he do?
General Lunaris is the general/leader of the Moonlanders, an alien species that live on the Moon and reside in the hidden city of Tranquility. Introduced in the episode “Whatever Happened to Della Duck?!”, Lunaris presents himself as a friendly and reasonable foil to the much more hot-headed and standoffish Lieutenant Penumbra when they first encounter Della. After she helps them resolve an issue his people are having with creatures called Moon Mites, he allows her to stay in their city and even use their gold to help rebuild her ship. However, we already get a hint that he’s not as benevolent as he seems when he secretly admits to Penumbra that he’s being hospitable because she’s proven she could be useful to them after seeing how efficiently she solved their problem.

At the end of his next appearance in the “The Golden Spear!”, Lunaris shows his true colors. After Penumbra forces Della to leave early by activating the emergency switch on her now fixed-up ship, he takes advantage of the situation by first asking her for the notes/plans she used to rebuild it, then deliberately shooting himself in the arm. He goes on to frame the situation as an assault on him and betrayal on her part to manipulate his people into believing that the inhabitants of Earth mean to eventually invade them as a means of motivating them to invade the Earth first. This angers the Moonlanders since she had just begun to befriend them, telling them stories about the Earth with the promise to help them travel there with her, after which they begin using the ship plans he tricked her into giving him (and which he claims he smuggled) to build an entire fleet of ships replicated after The Spear of Selene while he has them trained for war. Lunaris then has Donald Duck taken prisoner when he accidently gets himself locked in Della’s ship and shot into space after she gets home by uses his arrival to promote more false propaganda by painting Donald as a hostile invader.

It’s in “Whatever Happened to Donald Duck?!”, however, that the true extent of Lunaris’ villainy starts to reveal itself. First, he orders that Donald be sent to the gold mines to break his spirits. However, not at all in favor of what he’s doing, especially since their people are not experienced or well-trained in the ways of war, Penumbra decides to work with Donald to destroy their ships. It’s while they’re looking for the blueprints that they discover Lunaris’ secret war room, which even Penumbra didn’t know about. They learn, much to her horror, that he’s been meticulously studying the Earth and who could be a potential threat to him in preparation for an invasion long before Della arrived. Just then, Lunaris shows up and uses a remote button that causes her suit to electrocute her into submission before cornering Donald, who notices his research on his family. Lunaris takes this moment to gloat about how while most foes would target Scrooge McDuck, “the key to victory is to take the children out first to break your spirits”, before quipping “say goodbye to your precious Hubert, Dewford and Llewelyn”. Luckily, Donald manages to escape from him in his prototype rocket, which he dismisses due to not believing any living thing can survive it based on his tests. However, through his strong will, Donald does survive the trip back to Earth, although he unluckily crashes on a deserted island.

In the season finale “Moonvasion!”, he puts his invasion plan into motion by having his people spread out across the globe in their new fleet of ships to subjugate the citizens of Earth; armed with their disintegrating lasers, the Moonlanders who touch down in Duckburg start hunting down and enslaving any citizens they can round up, causing massive amounts of property damage in the process. While Scrooge and the rest of the family escape to the safety of the heavily fortified Money Bin, he discovers that all their best defenses have already been taken out, after which Lunaris sends him a message to gloat about this and announce that he plans to take away his greatest source of strength next; his family. Under the guise that she is taking them to recruit more allies from around the globe, Della tries to get them as far away from Duckburg and Lunaris as possible in her cargo ship, the Sunchaser, while Scrooge assembles all the allies he can to storm his mansion and reach Lunaris’ ship, which is parked on top. However, although Scrooge succeeds in breaking in and reaching the ship, Lunaris reveals it’s only a hologram and that he correctly predicted his moves before proceeding to show footage of most of his allies being captured and the Sunchaser being shot down by a ship he sent in pursuit. He then reveals his real flagship, an enormous Planetary Engine, which he plants in the Earth to force it into orbiting around the moon, which quickly messes up the climate and causes Duckburg to start freezing over.

In hiding with only Mrs. Beakley, Launchpad and his horse Manny left uncaptured, Scrooge reluctantly decides to team up with none other than Flintheart Glomgold, one of his biggest enemies, when he steps forward with an absurd plan that he doesn’t think Lunaris will anticipate, due to all of his well-thought out plans failing to work. It works surprisingly well, with Scrooge (who’s dressed as Santa Claus in a Manny-drawn sled) and Glomgold distracting him while Launchpad (who’s dressed as a cannonball and fired by Mrs. Beakley using a giant slingshot) and Glomgold’s sharks take out two of the ship’s engines. The two rivals and Manny then engage Lunaris in hand-to-hand-combat, but are still overwhelmed despite their best efforts. Before Lunaris can finish Scrooge off, however, the rest of his family, who are alive and well, having survived the crash and laid low on the same island Donald crashed on, arrive to back him up, along with Donald and Della’s cousins, Gladstone Gander and Fethry Duck, on the back of Fethry’s giant mutated krill friend, Mitzy. Thanks to Mitzy and Gladstone’s inherently good luck, they succeed in destroying the Planetary Engine’s supports holding it in place, with Mitzy using its still-active main engine to point and launch it into space along with Lunaris.

It’s not over yet though. Furious that his seemingly perfect invasion failed and refusing to accept defeat, Lunaris decides that “if the Earthers won’t live in fear of the moon, then they’ll die in fear of it”, and puts the Planetary Engine on a course to dive-bomb and destroy the whole planet, completely uncaring that his own people are still on it. When Della takes Donald, Scrooge and the kids into a Spear of Selene ship to intercept him, he uses a multitude of guns at the rear of the ship to trap them behind it so he can incinerate them all with the main engine. However, just as it looks like the family and the Earth are doomed, Penumbra shows up just in time and crashes her ship into the engine (don’t worry, she survived by evacuating right before the impact), finally crippling it for good, saving the family and the rest of the Earth. The goddess Selene then cheerfully contacts Lunaris to tell him her brother Storkucles has gotten Earth back into orbit and that his ship is now essentially a second moon, dooming him to float around in it alone and indefinitely.

Does he have any redeeming qualities or a valid excuse for his actions?
Ultimately, Lunaris has no truly positive qualities. While he initially presented himself as a kind-hearted and fair-minded leader who cared about the wellbeing of his people, it was just a façade to manipulate Della into helping him finally kick-start the invasion he had been planning long beforehand. And if there was still any hope that he truly cared about his people even after he manipulated them with lies and propaganda to convince them to invade Earth in spite of their lack of battle experience, he completely demolishes it when he tries to destroy the planet with practically all of them still on it.

The excuse part is a little more interesting. His actions are motivated by his late father having the Moonlanders live in fear of the Earth, which at the very least, makes it understandable that he wouldn’t want his people to keep living like that. However, it doesn’t even come close to justifying the extremes he goes to. While he could have just as easily used their interactions with Della to promote the fact that many "Earthers" are actually friendly and that they could coexist peacefully, he instead cares about weaponizing fear to subjugate the Earth to both show up his late father and prove the Moon’s superiority, which it becomes increasingly apparent is so he can assert his own superiority over the inhabitants of Earth. At the end of the day, his motive seems to boil down to satisfying his own ego, pride and desire to be feared.

Is he heinous by the standards of the work?
General Lunaris is easily, hands down, the most heinous character in the DuckTales reboot to date. For comparisons’ sake, most of the other villains in DuckTales’ rather large rogues’ gallery, like Flintheart Glomgold, Ma Beagle and the Beagle Boys and Mark Beaks, to name a few of the most significant ones, have ambitions along the lines of getting rich, defeating Scrooge, or in Beaks’ case, gaining attention and popularity. While some of them have been willing to endanger or outright murder members of the Duck family depending on the situation, they rarely, if ever, go beyond that, which is standard villainy even for a more family-friendly show like this. Plus, they pretty much all have their fair share of comical traits, to the point that the times any of them are taken all that seriously are the exception rather than the norm. Even Magica De Spell, the most evil villain and serious threat before he entered the picture, heavily pales in comparison since her goal was merely to destroy Scrooge and his family (though she was also willing to destroy the town if it meant hurting him), not to mention even she can be played quite comedically at times, especially in recent appearances since losing her powers.

Lunaris, in stark contrast, is an aspiring planet conqueror with almost no comedic quirks. His stubborn insistence that the Moon is a planet, which other characters often feel the need to correct him on, and some bewildered reactions to other character’s antics are about the closest he gets to being funny. Along the way, he manipulates his people into going to war for him without a shred of concern about their lack of readiness, has them enslave most of the Earth, including many defenseless civilians, upon invading it, and forces the planet into an orbit that, is strongly implied, will eventually make at least most of it uninhabitable. Even his threats to kill the children, which other villains like Glomgold and Magica have been willing to do, stand out for how coldly pragmatic he is about it, and for the motive behind it being specifically to break Scrooge and the other adults’ spirits so they’ll be easier to finish off. And if all of this isn’t bad enough to already solidify his place in the category, then attempting to outright destroy the Earth out of sheer spite for being foiled, even if it means wiping out almost all of his own people along with it, definitely is. Attempted omnicide is on a completely unprecedented level of villainy for this franchise, and blows even his own previous actions out of the water in comparison.

What’s the verdict?
Well, since it’s an ongoing and popular series and he hasn’t explicitly been killed off, it’s hard to be 100% positive it'll stick. However, as of now, Lunaris is currently in an appropriately karmic, dire situation that he’s not likely to escape from, and he’s even less likely than that to redeem himself based on his characterization so far. So for the time being, I think it’s safe to say that DuckTales has its first solid PE candidate.