Review: Krapopolis “Tyrdra”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Stupendous finds a hydra named Camille and gets ready to kill it, but finds out that it actually wants to kill itself because it’s sick of being hated. Feeling pity, she brings it back to the house, where the family learn that the hydra’s many heads can act as a way of passing messages, which then extends to the rest of the city, but that only leads to a spread of misinformation when the hydra tries to please everyone by telling them what they want to hear. Eventually, Tyrannis decides to cut the whole network down and let the hydra go.

OUR TAKE

We’ve reached our last Krapopolis episode for the year of 2023 and it’s actually a pretty relatively strong one! Once again, it focuses on the characters finding something that ends up like a modern day thing, this time being the invention of social media, with everyone finding ways to communicate with each other from long distances while also sharing thoughts with a wider audience and even staying anonymous sometimes, starting major social discord (not that kind of discord). However, like the other episodes of this season so far that I like, it makes use of its ancient and mythical setting to its advantage, in this case making the social media network be a living creature. Honestly, I don’t really remember the last time I’ve seen a Hydra made use of as anything other than a big monster to fight or the name of an evil Nazi offshoot group. The Hydra itself, Camille, doesn’t have a ton of personality other than being nice and wanting to be liked, so the way it’s utilized is mainly as a way to show how certain characters kinda go off the deep end when hooked into this sort of system.

Tyrannis feels unappreciated, so he becomes addicted to getting “likes” on all his comments and doesn’t want to know about anything that dislikes him. Hippocampus ends up starting a kind of dating site, almost going on a date with Daphne before his insecurities get in his way (been there, pal). Didn’t expect them to lean on the possible Daphocampus ship but here we are. Shlub, who hates the influx of this new way of avoiding talking to people directly and kinda invents the first podcast. And so on and so forth until eventually the city is in danger and Tyrannis has to act like a leader in order to get everyone to save themselves. As much as it seems to, I don’t think this is necessarily a message AGAINST social media, but rather just a cautionary tale on the dangers of it if people get too absorbed into it. Also they have an odd sort of epilogue that seems to shift into modern day briefly that made me think for a second that this was a sort of rushed season or even series finale, but then I remembered there’s still at least two more seasons coming and this one isn’t even done yet. But we are done with Krapopolis for this year, so see you back here on January 7th.