We thought you all had the wrong idea about what you find satisfying for an ending, so we changed it ...
is a HELL of a white take.

Mulan: On Adapting Another Culture’s Stories and Missing the Point by @DawnXianaMoon https://link.medium.com/KpvZmmj0A9 

Fellow writers have been discussing how imposing the Three Act Story structure on all stories is a disservice because Not All Cultures use that.

East Asia, frex, has historically used something else, with a completely different goal.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kish%C5%8Dtenketsu

Aside from "our pacing isn't wrong, maybe we're using a four act structure instead", the white gaze re: what is "satisfying" or not is ...problematic.

Having Mulan be happy to return to her old life goes against everything USians think a story about a woman needs.

The reason why I disliked the first Disney Mulan is because I didn't know why Mulan had to be a failure as a daughter to set up the story.

Why did she have to hate her life?
Why did her life have to be restrictive and unfulfilling for her?

I'll note that the hobbits didn't precisely want adventure anyway, but they got it in spades.

But Disney Culture, amirite?

Where the inciting event of everything is always "we didn't like the status quo and we hated our lives, let's go".

It gets especially gross with Pocahontas, if you think a little bit about the background, about John Smith, about anything at all.

But of course, it's always "feisty heroine wants something different from her life because it's always worse than White Culture TM".

Mulan went off to war, like actual war with PTSD and death and stuff, because she loved her parents and was loyal to her country.

Yet it's inconceivable that she may wish to return to this life that gave birth to Mulan-the-woman and fostered such devotion in her.

White Gaze TM.

In 2020 Mulan, the question is ...

well, the question is WHY IS QI GENDERED

but the other question is why does Mulan have to have a home life where she's unsupported and gets critiqued for almost everything she does?

Something you gotta know about Chinese culture and "working for the gummint" is that there's a wealth of writing on "did my turn for the gummint, did my best, now I'm gonna retire and be a farmer/fisherman in retirement".

The first and most famous of the "farmer-poets" was Tao Yuanming, who apparently compared living in society as being ensnared in a net and wanted nothing so much as to hide in the mountains.

Obviously a lot of people went into politics and were dirty or got dirty.

But there were also people who had grand ambitions of changing the world for the better, serving their country and emperor, and then returning home to what they were familiar with to retire.

告老還鄉 - I'm old, going home
退隱田園 - retreat-hide field-garden