Topic Meme: Day 11

[pockysquirrel]

 thesecondbatgirl requested a post on the best and worst mentors of PR.

CLEARLY the thing to do for a topic like this is to go through all the PR mentors and rate them on a completely subjective scale of 'epic' to 'suck.'

Zordon
- First to tap the Grid and create Power Rangers, so there's that.
- Beloved father figure to the MMPR and Zeo teams.
- Dramatically sacrificed himself to destroy a bunch of evil.  
- Actually did help the Rangers out with stuff. Sometimes. Inconsistently.
- Just as often or more often was mysteriously nonresponsive when needed, or ignoring/withholding important information from the Rangers.
- Totally bailed without giving anyone any kind of a head's up when he went to create Tommy's new powers.
- And then arbitrarily handed leadership of the team to Tommy on nothing more than the basis of "Sorry Jason, he's stronger than you now."
- Often seemed to give zero fucks about the Rangers' emotional state.
- Traumatized the hell out of Andros by forcing him to kill him to save the universe.
Rating: Mild to moderate suck.

Dimitria
- Showed up to help the Rangers when Zordon bailed on them to go to Eltar...then bailed on them to go to Eltar.
- Annoyed the fuck out of everyone by speaking only in questions, as is customary on her homeworld...until, you know, she decided she didn't have to do that anymore.
- May or may not have been related to Divatox, may or may not have KNOWN about this, and failed to do anything about it. 
- Forced 4 members of her team into retirement and replaced them, regardless of whether they wanted to/were ready to leave the team or not, simply because they had graduated high school and she figured they were getting too old for this shit. 
- Really, did she ever do anything useful at any point during her time on the show, ever?
Rating: Major suck.

Captain Mitchell
- Earns points simply for being a hot dad with an epic 'stache.
- Actually HAS REASONS for acting like a douchenozzle or withholding information from the Rangers when he does so - allowing them to learn stuff and become better Rangers in the process.
- Had to make a Sophie's Choice and a literal deal with the devil for the sake of his kids, and feels reasonably bad about that, but does not let his angst impede his functioning.
- Except he does have a little bit of a Heroic BSOD at the finale, but really, given all the shit he goes through, he does better than you'd expect.
- Saved Carter's life and inspired him to become a firefighter...and then apparently kept tabs on him for the rest of his life until recruiting him for Rangerdom? Which is a little creepy, but still mostly cool.
Rating: Fairly epic.

Princess Shayla
- OK, is there any actual rhyme or reason to why she gets stuck hibernating on the Animarium for centuries?
- Pretty good at explaining what's going on to the Rangers and keeping them in the loop.
- Also seems to genuinely care about the team and is a pretty good team mom.
- She's clearly got powers of her own that are nothing to sneeze at, so WHY are the Rangers having to rescue her all the time??
- And her mooning all over Merrick seems to impair her judgement.
- She demoted Taylor and gave Cole leadership of the team WHY??? Just because he's Red? Never mind the fact that he's a derp Tarzan wannabe who can barely take care of himself while Taylor has the most experience and common sense on the whole team? I call BULLSHIT, Shayla.
- The end of the series. "OK guys, give me back your morphers and those questionable vests. You're done. I'm going back to sleep. No Merrick, you can't come with me. Tough titties. Are we good? OK, bye!"
- THE GODDAMN DEER ZORD SONG.
Rating: Mild to moderate suck.

Kanoi Watanabe
- Immediately his usefulness and credibility are reduced by the fact that he spends most of the season as a goddamned guinea pig.
- I'll grant, however, that he is a super badass fighter when he actually does have a human body.
- It was kind of shitty that he made Cam grow up surrounded by ninja stuff and then refused to let him train as a ninja, but I do sort of respect his reasons for that.
- Having evil family members sucks. Having evil family members and still being able to fight them effectively is worth respecting. 
- Smart as fuck and consistent purveyor of good advice, despite being trapped in the body of a rodent.
Rating: A bit epic as a guinea pig, way more epic as a human. 

Tommy Oliver
- ...Oh, come on. Do I HAVE to do this? Fine. 
- Widely considered to be the best of the best, and a Ranger legend. Is this because of his actual prowess, or because he just won't fucking go away? Sure, he's a badass fighter and a decent (though not great) team leader, but as a mentor? Well...
- Smart enough to get a doctorate in six years. Smart enough to be involved in the creation of all sorts of dinosaur mutants and questionable technology. And yet TOO DUMB to realize that all the stuff he's making is a REALLY FUCKING BAD IDEA. Or that Mercer has gone rogue. Or that his boss moonlights as an evil dominatrix.
- He was the original evil Ranger. HOW DID HE NOT SEE TRENT COMING. Shouldn't he have noticed the signs? 
- Spends WAY more time being kidnapped, frozen, stuck in morphed mode, stuck in invisibility, comatose, mysteriously absent, forcing Kira to rescue him, or simply running around trying to reclaim his lost adolescence than he does making any actual effort to mentor the team.
Rating: SUCK. SUCK SUCK SUCK. 

Doggie Cruger
- A badass. Earns points for being a more effective Ranger/Mentor combo than, say, Tommy (Tommy sucks as a mentor I WILL NOT LET THIS GO) and also for his cool disposition and sassy one-liners.
- Does quite frequently allow his angst to impede his judgement. Really, REALLY frequently. But he will generally own up to his mistakes when this happens. 
- OK so he knew about the mutant children of the original SPD Earth team, he KNEW two of them were living on the streets, and he did NOTHING about it? I call bullshit, Doggie. 
- And sure, you have to follow SPD regulations to a certain extent, but demoting B-Squad and immediately accepting A-Squad back into the fold without at least doing a little more investigation first was pretty shitty. More discretion and more loyalty to your team could have saved you a lot of headaches.
Rating: Meh. Epic as a Ranger, mentoring needs a bit more work.

Udonna
- The undisputed master of letting her angst interfere with being a good mentor. Spends WAY more time wibbling than leading.
- Seriously. I want to like her SO BADLY. A mom-slash-sorceress who rides a motorcycle and spends most of the series trying to rescue her lost husband? She really should be so much more badass than she actually is. But for pity's sake. She gets captured more than once, loses her powers, disappears during episodes for no real reason and is absent when the Rangers need information from her, abandons the team ENTIRELY to go on her own quest...she's knowledgeable about magic and a decently good teacher, but her personal agenda always comes first. 
Rating: Unfortunately, suck.

Andrew Hartford
- Brace yourself for all-caps rage. Andrew Hartford is a DICK.  
- First of all, the entire series is his fault. If he had decided to do something useful with his money instead of fucking around playing Indiana Jones and messing around with shit that ought not be messed with, none of this nonsense would have been necessary.
- He then recruits a know-it-all, a bitch, a sleaze, and a dumbass to help him rectify his own mistake and save the world, and PAYS THEM to do so.
- Not to mention deciding he's going to lead the team himself, never mind the fact that his own son REALLY REALLY  wants to be a Ranger and is the best damned candidate for the job on the whole show...and yeah, I get that he's the Worried Dad, but it's bad parenting to crush your kid's dreams like that.
- It's even worse parenting to implant your son with false memories of a childhood he never had and then spend his whole life lying to him about that and about what he is. Dick.
- And you of course can't teach your Rangers how to Ranger when you don't know WTF you're doing yourself. End result being a team that is 4/5ths prepared to lie down, give up, and let someone else take over when Thrax busts their powers.
- Really this whole season is a train wreck and it's Hartford's fault.
Rating: SUCK.

RJ
- Oh boy, does this come as a relief after this wave of fail. Tommy better be ready to take notes, because THIS is how you Ranger and mentor simultaneously.
- He is smart as fuck. And yet it's so easy to underestimate him because he walks around acting like a hippie space case. I am half-convinced he does this deliberately so people WILL underestimate him.
- Not only does he teach good lessons to the Rangers, he does it by making them figure shit out for themselves, rather than spoon-feeding them the answers.
- The episode in which he trains Casey a la Karate Kid's "wax on, wax off" deserves its very own bullet point.
- He has lessons of his own to learn, and sets a damned good example by being on point with that, too.
- And Tommy had better be taking notes at this point, because when RJ gets powers of his own, it does NOT result in his treading on Casey's role on the team, and does NOT interfere with his own role as team mentor.
- He runs a fucking secret Ranger base and a city-wide surveillance system out of a PIZZA PARLOR. Your argument is invalid.
Rating: EPIC.

Doctor K
- She kind of pulled a Hartford in that Venjix is technically her fault. Except not, since she actually TRIED to stop it and Alphabet Soup got in the way (really, everything is THEIR fault), and spends the entirety of the series trying to atone for her mistake.
- And yeah, she hides this from the Rangers for a good long time. Wouldn't you? But hey, they work through it. 
- She has her work cut out for her, being not only younger than the Rangers she's trying to mentor but also the youngest Ranger in PR history. Under those circumstances, I think she performs pretty admirably.
- Particularly because she has a team of sassmasters, and is able to fight sass with sass.
- She's not always the most empathetic and starts off trying to keep herself emotionally detached, but she does open up and accept the Rangers as her family after awhile.
- She is unmatched on attentiveness. Seriously, she is always up on what the Rangers are doing and what they need, and she is always up on what Venjix is doing and how the Rangers can stop him. None of that random absence bullshit with her. 
Rating: Mostly Epic.

Ji
- Ji...is also a dick? But he gets just a little bit of ACTUAL CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT, and by the end of the series is less of a dick?
- He's a bit of a dick to Mike at first, but that gets better. And he's DEFINITELY a dick to Antonio at first, but that gets A LOT better. 
- He's a strict, no-nonsense teacher with high expectations of the Rangers. He's also the guy who cooks for them (till Antonio shows up and takes over his kitchen), tends to them when they're ill or injured, and knows when they need a break from training to rest or blow off steam. He's like the Team Dad AND the Team Mom at the same time. *_*
- And speaking of being an Awesome Dad, his paternal relationship with Jayden warms my little fangirl heart. Hell, he even broke the rules to go find Jayden and drag him home after Lauren showed up. Sure, his loyalty is to the Shiba House, but Jayden is his KID.
- He's mostly content to let the Rangers do their own thing, but he's generally aware of what's going on and ready to step in as needed.
- OK, let's have a few words about Something Fishy. I approve of Ji coaxing Antonio into trying to activate the Lightzord. But, although it was effective, I do NOT approve of the "Stop whining and eat the sushi" method of curing his phobia. That's not how anxiety works, Ji. For shame.
- How can you beat a badass samurai who wears a leather jacket and rides around on a motorcycle?
Rating: Mixed. Some suck, some epic, definite A for improvement.

Gosei
- Goddammit.
- He's like, all of Zordon's worst qualities and none of his redeeming ones.
- He's also about as useless as Dimitria.
- All he ever does is name stuff after himself and occasionally yell at Tensou to do work for him.
- He so flagrantly hides stuff from his team that the team actually CALLS HIM OUT ON IT, and then all he has to offer in return is weak-ass excuses. 
- He built Robo Knight, but couldn't fucking fix him.
- Actually, and I take this verbatim from my original rant on the related episode: "you built him, you put him into stasis lock to use later, YOU DIDN'T EVEN BOTHER TO WAKE HIM UP WHEN YOUR TEAM WAS GETTING ITS ASSES KICKED AND THE EARTH HAD TO DO IT FOR YOU, you are SURPRISED that his processor isn't entirely in working order after being offline and buried for centuries, AND you can't fix him. Gosei, you REALLY suck." 
- Seriously, out of 20 episodes there has been exactly ONE in which he took a break from being a complete douchewaffle.
Rating: WORST EVER. 

And you know, while we're on the subject of mentors, I think this is the first time I've really taken note of the fact that a handful of teams just...don't have one? Three, in fact. PRiS, Lost Galaxy, and Time Force are mentorless. And interestingly, all three of them end up with an awesome (though not really mentor-ly) AI helping them out instead. I'd argue that Time Force didn't really need a mentor. Wes taught the others about living in the 21st century, and the others taught Wes about Ranger stuff. Thus, TEAM BONDING. And LG muddled through pretty well, all things considered. PRiS probably needed one the most, simply because of all the angsting and aimlessly wandering the galaxy. But on the whole, kudos to those teams for mentoring themselves.  
 

Tomorrow's post will be a general headcanon ramble as requested by tsukino_akume . Which...I have a lot of headcanon. And I have already posted about a lot of my headcanon this month. So if there's any specific fandoms/characters/things you'd like to see me opine about, feel free to let me know. And Day 13's post is on THE PAIRING THAT DARES NOT SPEAK ITS NAME, AKA Ji and Jayden's dad, as requested by punkpinkpower , which is only fitting since that pairing is her fault in the first place. 

Also, I am in need of 9 more topics if I'm going to make this a complete month of spamming you all with meme posts. Let's keep the streak alive!