MCOG, short for the Mysterious Cities of Gold, is a french/japanese show that originally came out in 1987. This was supposed to be a standalone, but unexpectedly, a sequel came out in 2017. As the sequel was not made by the original writers of the show, but by fans who grew up watching the original, a lot of changes were made.
Now I could talk about these differences all day, but there wouldn't really be any point about it, so here's the tl;dr: the sequel is fine, but it's tonally pretty different from the original, and personally the themes of the original appealed to me more. Now that we got that out of the way, there is, in fact, one difference I want to analyse: the character of Zia.
Some context. MCOG, as you can guess from the title, is a show about a bunch of lads trying to find the cities of gold. The crew features Zia, a little incan kid who was stolen away and offered as a slave to the queen of Spain, and then stolen back by some guy who wanted to use her as a way to find the cities of gold.
As you can expect from a show made in the 80s, Zia isn't what I would call a Strong Woman Who Needs No Man. She's the damsel in distress a couple times (she's the only person around who can read incan writing and therefore possibly lead the way to the cities of gold, so you'd understand she's wanted by a lot of people around) and while you could easily argue that she's a 10yo kid and therefore doesn't have much fighting chance to begin with, fact is that the other kid characters do get to throw hands while I don't recall that she ever does.
What did, however, surprise me quite a lot when watching the original show, is the fact that Zia is angry. She's pissed at her kidnappers. She's pissed at the colonialists who have been ravaging her country. She's pissed at the people who stole her from her family and she's pissed at the horrors that keep happening because entitled greedy spaniards would stop at nothing to get some gold. Zia befriends the other kid characters pretty easily, and then shows herself outright hostile to everyone else. The protag may be a wide-eyed idealist, but Zia is the one to tell him "you shouldn't trust these people, they're bitches and motherfuckers, they'd sell you for a piece of gold, they fucking kidnapped me." Zia in the original show may not get to physically throw hands, but she gets to be rightfully angry, and to rightfully mourns her family, and also she gets to blatantly lie & impede spaniards at every turn, and that's great.
Now onto the sequel! 2017 era Zia is a #girlboss. She gets magic powers that absolutely slap. She can talk to animals. She can control the earth. She attacks a dude by chucking a rock at his face. It's great!
But also, the first thing that puzzled me when I watched the sequel, is that Zia is no longer the one to distrust the spaniards; that role has been given to someone else. In fact, Zia doesn't get to be hostile to anyone anymore. Instead she is the mom friend, the one who calms others and try to mediate when there are tensions, ect ect. I don't recall seeing her ever feeling anger that was truly hers, or sadness for that matter. She gets to be angry and/or sad when everyone else is as well. She has a brief moment of anxiety when she starts awakening her own superpowers, but it only lasts an episode or so. She is perfect, she never feel anything negative whatsoever, she's never frustrated with her friends, never nostalgic of her homeland, never angry over how other people got to have cool cultural sharing while her own are being colonized and slaughtered, she's just... perfect.
And I find that fascinating, how the sequel was clearly made with modern audiences and modern sensitivity in mind, yet by making their female character stronger (in term of abilities & mental fortitude) they ended up making her... well, less of a character. Everyone else gets to scream or cry or fight each other and she's just here. A perfect little girl.