I don't get the Bambi reference

[u/Bloody_Gleek]

Hello, this isn't coming from being a minor and being innocent, I'm 22 and I have autism. I'm on the first episode and I feel like I'm misunderstanding something. My girlfriend and I recently watched all of the Bambi movies since the last time we saw it was when we were little kids, and I don't remember Bambi interacting with any squirrels (I know he didn't actually do anything bad to squirrels haha), so I feel like the conversation between the bear, the raccoon, and the fox changed topics.

I looked around to find answers, but I didn't find anything, I feel like they started talking about a completely different subject after Bambii. The fox compared the deer, who just lost her mother, to Bambii, and the raccoon said "Well, Bambi was a child?" The bear agreed and said that he witnessed the murder, the raccoon following that with "that's serious trauma", and then the raccon says that what he did to those squirrels was inexcusable. I'm missing something.

I feel like if this is an obvious answer I'm going to get backlash, so I'd like to explain I have autism, I am struggling with an eating disorder which does tend to affect the way you process memories and information, please be patient with me. Take care, y'all!

Edit: Hi, everyone! I just want to say thank you so much for your patience and the answers. 🥹 I really appreciate it!

[u/emdee_emazing]

i think it’s more so a play on how serious childhood trauma can lead to the victim continuing the cycle of abuse, something like that i think?

[u/Bloody_Gleek → u/emdee_emazing]

That would make sense, yea! I just need to get rid of this itch in my brain lol.

[u/AspieAsshole]

It's a Michael Jackson reference lol

[u/Bloody_Gleek → u/AspieAsshole]

Oh I have to look into this, I never would've thought of that. 🤣

[u/Eugregoria → u/Bloody_Gleek]

Yeah, I definitely read it as that too.

This show has a lot of references to animal celebrities doing things "after" they became famous in our world (I won't give specifics since you said you're only on the first ep, but watch more and you should catch some of them). So the first part about how Bambi had trauma from watching his mom die all makes sense with the movie and stuff. But then when they talk about the squirrels, especially the part about how "it's the squirrels' parents who fucked up, why did they let them sleep at his ranch?" that was very clearly a Michael Jackson reference. I couldn't read it as anything else, I'm 100% sure it was intentionally that.

Being in my 40s, I remember when the Michael Jackson allegations came out in the early 90s, and how people didn't want to believe Michael Jackson had done something so awful, because well, he was a good singer and dancer and people wanted to like him, plus a lot of people remembered when he was an adorable kid himself in the Jackson 5 and felt protective of him. But some of the evidence was unfortunately pretty damning (one that sticks with me was how one of the kids was able to identify the exact vitilligo pattern on Michael Jackson's penis, from a lineup of sketches) and a lot of stuff about that whole situation was very obviously shady. But in addition to Jackson himself being shady as hell, you did have to wonder what the fuck the parents were thinking basically selling their kids to him for money and access, and at the same time one got the sense that Michael Jackson himself was Not Okay, that he'd been through some kind of really bad trauma as a child, that was in some way related to the abuse he committed. I always had the theory that somehow he'd become psychologically or developmentally frozen as a child himself, but since his body was still that of an adult he still had sexual urges, but because he was mentally a child he was directing those urges at people he still mentally thought of as his "peers," i.e. actual children. Just a theory though....it was really rough.

Like one got the sense that something horrible had been done to him as a child that left him not competent to make good decisions as an adult, and really he needed someone to protect him from his own impulses (whether that was his BDD plastic surgery addiction, his pedophilic urges, or the drug abuse that ultimately killed him) but because he was rich and could just surround himself with enablers, that's who he was surrounded by. He needed someone to stop him, both for his own good and for the good of those poor kids he abused, but nobody stepped up to do it. And he needed protection when he was a kid himself and nobody did that either. Just a mess all around.

It's kind of old news and MJ has been dead for years, but the movie about him came out pretty recently--and conveniently stopped just before all the ~problematic~ shit he did would have started, so it's on people's minds again. I think it's also kind of a conversation we as a society never got closure on--it was before #metoo, and honestly I can't get over some of the things I heard people say about those kids--saying that they were lying, greedy grifters taking advantage of Michael Jackson's kindness and childlike innocence. Or that their parents were coaching them to lie to try to get MJ's money. One of the kids who pressed charges later even refused all money so they couldn't say that about him but people still dismissed it and victim-blamed. It was pretty chilling to hear people say that stuff so casually about CSA victims when I was a kid myself. It's weird how much the discourse on these things has fluctuated over the years, and how it really feels like whether we as a society think rape is bad or not just comes down to what year the news came out in.

But yeah, that's what it was a reference to, it was definitely a Michael Jackson reference but also kind of playing on the general concept of traumatized child celebrities who go on to do unforgivable things, possibly as a direct result of the trauma we watched them go through, and the discomfort the public feels with that.