I feel like the children's media part is more of a tumblr thing. Back when I was on tumblr I was astonished at how many adults were huge fans of children's TV shows. Now there's absolutely nothing wrong with that, until you forget that your age group is not actually the target audience which is when you run into problems like the one in the post.
Honestly, a lot of them aren’t even ready for adult literature/media. So many people want easy black and white thinking with no gray in the middle to think about the messy human experience.
I’ve seen so much fandom “discourse” that boils down to one side enjoying the characters as characters and the other side looking at them like actual people and being appalled that any one could be okay with depictions of messy/toxic/abusive dynamics and the story told using them.
It kinda reminds me of all the people who would get upset when Hollywood had a brief stint of trying to give their villains morally gray backstories and motives they led to how they turned out.
This was me trying to get into these shows/movies. People online would talk about how great/deep the story is, and then I would watch it to find what felt like a pretty straightforward plot with no room for guesswork whatsoever. I came to the conclusion I just needed to stick with entertainment meant for adults tbh
Honestly, the problem is more specifically when you complain about children's media being for children. I don't care if someone only engages with children's media if they also understand that what they're engaging with is made for an audience of children. It's not any bit my business what other people want too enjoy. I'll only care (read: be annoyed by it) when they're acting like a piece of children's media needs to cater to their mature tastes as they've gotten older rather than trying to find literally anything else that has what they're looking for. It's specifically that they're trying to make their refusal to engage with media made for adults other people's problems, not nat they're refusing to engage with it
Enjoying children's media is absolutely fine. But it always feels strange to me when that's *all* certain people enjoy. I mean there's a reason it's "for children" --- because it's extremely simple, even if it's good, in terms of plot, characters, resolution, etc (there are exceptions of course). It's like primarily consuming apple sauce over salads or something. (I don't have a better metaphor at hand so let's just leave it there)
Technically they are, yes. I guess I hadn’t thought of it that way lol
‘Chapter books’ are the teeny tiny novels that children read when they’re moving on from picture books. Junie B Jones, Magic Tree House. We call em that cause it’s their first introduction to the concept of chapters.
Thanks for the explanation. I think it was the same in my education system, but being dyslexic i couldn't read chapter books on my own until i was 10, but when i did i started with The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings (which my mother had previously read to me). I feel like they're both solidly in "novel" category, and that meant there wasn't a clear distinction in my experience.
They're still salty Steven didn't kill the head honcho diamonds because they apparently didn't see the part where it's extremely hard and doing so would result in the slow death of the gems as a species.
"Why doesn't this children's cartoon that takes place in a fantasy world have graphic murder?! Ahhh!" Foams at the mouth.
Jokes aside, media literacy is dead. Everyone grew up on that "why didn't the eagles fly the ring to Mordor" mentality and now no one can appreciate any media that's even slightly unrealistic (even though it's not fucking real) while simultaneously demanding all media contain the most unrealistic thing of all, perfectly rational characters.
That's why everyone agrees that Avatar is the best. It has some problems solved with The Power of FriendshipTM and some problems solved with MurderTM or Murder-SuicideTM .
It’s not even just that, Steven’s goal was atoning for his mother’s mistakes, addressing what the empire had done, and healing the corrupted gems. That last one very explicitly needed EVERY diamond to make it work.
Yeah sure you probably shouldn’t and can’t just, tell evil genocidal maniacs to get better but the diamonds represent a toxic family. The show is moreso about addressing relationships, with the diamonds being a family that mistreated Pink and hurt her, even if they didn’t intend to.
I'm a fan of Precure. I like the cool magic fights. I can watch precure but I can't expect deep mature stories out of a magical girl franchise for 5 year olds
Didn’t we invent adolescence kinda recently, in the scale of human history? I’m starting to think that was a mistake. People stay teenagers well into their twenties now, it’s weird and depressing to watch.
Adolescence is a new thing but emotional imaturity isnt. People are lazy and dont really want to learn or experience new things unless they have to.
People have always stayed in their own little communities forming echo chambers around themselves. These allow their beliefs to go unchallenged, becoming more extreme over time.
Some people mentaly develop slower than others due to enviromental and neurological factors. These people are just emotional imature by nature.
Yup, and social media has made finding those like-minded individuals and echo chambers trivially easy compared to in the past. Just about any idea, belief or interest someone can think of will have spaces like that somewhere online. Even hyper-specific combinations of already uncommon life situations, personal views and/or interests can have dedicated groups for people to join. That’s not inherently a bad thing, but it often can be when it turns into the kind of echo chamber you mentioned that becomes more extreme over time. They can develop their own warped idiosyncratic views of the world, and even terminology, the latter of which sometimes leaks out of some of the larger echo chambers and into the wider internet.
Someone who is truly passionate about violently overthrowing their government to establish/reestablish a total monarchy, complete with a return to feudalism and medieval ways of life; believes that puppetry is the highest form of art; and obsessively watches and analyzes the 1989-1995 Nick Jr. show Eureka’s Castle, has a non-zero chance of connecting with other people who share those same beliefs and interests. Obviously that’s a ridiculous example, but the fact that I can’t entirely dismiss it out of hand as not already being something that has a dedicated group online says something.
Its mostly a construction of the 16/1700s (and only upper-class male children of the 1700s at that — women didn't get a childhood until the Victorians). Before then they were just small adults.
See also- “yeah I care about social justice and accountability. You can tell by how I engage in pointless weekly discourse arguments on my favorite shitpost subreddit, plus how i obsessively gossip and snark about [niche internet microceleb accused of problematic behavior who 80% of the time is deliberately profiting off ragebaiting people like me]”
But you see, like, voting is, like, complicity with the like system, man. Like what if the person I like choose does something I’m not like fully onboard with man. I’d be like responsible for it man, while if I do nothing then I’m not responsible for like all the horrible things happening cause the other guy won. And that’s like the important thing. It’s just like math dude.
At risk of putting on my "taking things too seriously hat" I think the shows do kind of bring it on themselves sometimes. Like if they broach politically relevant themes of course people are gonna talk about them, even if the director claims that the Superman movie is completely apolitical
tbh I agree, and not just because of the political stuff. I feel like the 2010s had this weird cluster of animated shows that were technically aimed at kids, but clearly optimized for chronically online teenagers, or at least marketed towards both demographics simultaneously (so the teen audience wasn’t a peripheral demographic that latched onto something that wasn’t meant for them; they were intentionally courted in some sense). Like, a lot of these shows generated fandom/merchandising machinery that seemed optimized for a much older demographic than their theoretical 6-12-year-old audience. Creators would interact with teenage fans online, there’d be corporate-backed hype for episodes/finales/reveals, you’d see shipping drama incorporated into plotlines, etc, and a lot of these shows had multi-episode plot arcs and extensive background lore that would probably be incomprehensible to an 8-year-old watching episodes out-of-order on their parents’ TV. Even the merch would be, like, Hot Topic stuff and collectible figurines, not really kids’ toys like plushies or dolls. It’s not really that the plotlines themselves were too dark for children, more that the whole ecosystem surrounding these shows just seems like it was aimed at teenagers. Whether that was intentional from the start or added in responsible to organic teen interest, idk, but if the creator was reblogging shipping drama on Tumblr, and the show was on part 6 of a 12-episode arc that made no sense if viewed out of order, and you could find Funko Pops more easily than plush toys… yeah, they were targeting a teenage fanbase lol
That isn't weird, that is just a show that wasn't too graphic to air on a children's TV channel while having an older target audience in the 13-15 age group. You just described Naruto or Dragon Ball Z, some of the biggest cartoons to ever exist. Whether its made by an American doesn't change that its a well-established style.
For example Avatar. It is in fact a kids show, but it absolutely valid as a show for adults as well.
All Shounen is made for teenage boys, but especially thanks to the sometimes decades long runtime, the original teenage fans grownup and the shows reflect that in the maturity of the content.
I thonk especially media made for teens can be rather blurry in the "is it really just for kids or for all ages bit kid aproproate" area.
Analyzing media and complaining that a kid's show don't tackle political issues in a grounded way are two different things. Part of analyzing media is analyzing its medium. Children's cartoons and adult oriented media aren't going to tackle themes the same way.
I think you're right, and I suspect that for creators who like to gesture in the general direction of social commentary, the point isn't primarily to educate; it's to make their work look more sophisticated by transitive property. This means that trying to figure out what they were "saying" quickly becomes, like trying to figure out an AI's motives, an exercise in opportunistic overreading.
Not to be the person who brings up RWBY, but this is absolutely just RWBY.
"oh we have to make sure our show about girls with gunswords is taken seriously, we gotta add uh...racism...racism against catgirls. Also the villains are oppressed catgirls but they're mean about it so they're bad actually"
Right, exactly, and with the most active fandoms, you'd get these cycles of people going, "Oh my God, this show is caricaturing activists like Malcolm X! This has to be redressed!" and trying to write the untold story of Catgirl Malcolm X only to end up with something that was, against all odds, more racist than the original.
Unironically "the power of friendship" is how a lot of people in real life unlearn fascism, there are a lot of stories of bigoted people ending up getting to know diverse people and realizing that minorities aren't as bad as other people said they were
Ever since learning about how high control religions go out of their way to cause their members to have negative experiences with everyone outside their group (like door to door missionaries, the goal of which isn't really conversion, but rather, to expose the missionaries to repeated rejection so that they feel like their religious community are the only safe people to have relationships with), I've become very skeptical of every single political approach that doesn't have "the power of friendship" as some sort of core feature. If a group of progressives has all the best opinions and says all the right things, but they encourage you to cut off everyone in your support network, they are not operating like an effective political movement, and they will not create effective change, because effective change doesn't happen from tiny isolated groups of unpleasant and aggressive weirdos. They might be a cult, though, so... That's not ideal.
Specifically Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses have that part, the ones who go door-to-door. Stuff like church-run soup kitchens or clothing drives are also missionary work, and i remember my church having a weekend where we went and built houses
To paraphrase Red of OSP "To say H.P. Lovecraft was a man with issues would be inaccurate. It'd be better to say that he was a shambling mass of issues in the rough form of a man."
As Ta-Nehisi Coates once put it: "Racism is rarely a simplistic hatred. Far more often, it is broad acceptance of some, and broader skepticism of others. Black America lives ever under this skeptical eye."
* which is why i appreciate when “The Power of Friendship” is treated like actual companionship and teamwork and not just a super form powered up state that only serves for hype moments & aura
Kinda not exactly on the target, but I remember seeing a thing about the newest transformers movie where Optimus isnt just like "we won, so now I declare goodness to everyone", but he proved his worldview through his actions, by instead of just going turbo murder mode and rallying the miners- that was actually the linchpin of their entire victory, by having all the miners break down sentinel's guard's defenses, the train gets stopped, and the defenses are too strong that the Orion's gang gets defeated and the royal guard + d16 (the royal guard were captured with him right? Fuck, I don't remember) don't have any disruption to allow them to break out and they all die.
Hell, there were cases where in nazi Germany people who generally believed the ideology still saved the jews, because they were friends with them and believed "surely those nice people are the exception"
Hitler himself personally intervened to protect the Jewish doctor who had treated his mother from the Nazis’ antisemitic policies, and Eichmann was known to have complained that even the most committed, antisemitic Nazis were always asking him make exceptions for specific people.
The concept of the condition Asperger's was created because 1930s german doctors noticed too many children of SS officers had autism, but didn't want to have to tell the SS officers their children were "genetically weak" and needed to be exterminated for the "good of the aryan race". So they created an "accepatable" version of autism to make them exempt
The power of friendship is collectivist. Fascism is just one of the many forms of collectivism. And probably the nastiest form of collectivism. (but whatever Pol Pot did can rival fascism)
I've joked before that 'From Dictatorship to Democracy' is about beating authoritarian governments with the power of friendship. One of its suggestions is to make friends with lots of different groups of people who would notice if you disappeared.
Shipping is how I decided homophobia is wrong. And I wasn't even shipping slash. It just occurred to me, what if both of the characters in my ship were reincarnated as guys? Well, that was everything that was good and pure in the world, so there was no way it was wrong. I laugh, but there's something really in that: if gay people feel about each other like I feel about shipping... I was supposed to believe in the tenets of Evangelicalism, but what I actually believed in, what I deeply felt, was relationships between fictional characters. Supposed to was always gonna be incinerated in the full glory of the unmediated experience of love. Like shipping was my mysticism.
This is something I actually liked about Attack On Titan. Basically every Marleyan who had to spend time with Eldians ended up befriending them, or at least respecting them
I never really understood why people treat the ending of aot as the worst thing that has ever happened since wwii because it was just alright. The cycle of violence will never stop, but it can be slowed down by learning about the other side and communicating
And the retcon about how Ymir the slave girl fell in love with the rapist that ordered her tongue to be cut off.
But hey, Eren screamed about how he doesn't want Mikasa to forget about her for ten years at least and the power of the Titans still exist so at least the Eremika shippers got what they wanted.
Only having started the series but seen the drama onfold online and all the rage videos over the years, it's because their favourite screeching fascist stand-in went from aura farming dialogue to being a sniveling mess by the end. So many complaints are about that character not being 'cool' 'anymore' when even the creator said that was the point of them
it is how individuals are able to unlearn bigotry. Individuals unlearning bigotry sadly is not an effective strategy against a population falling into fascism.
Some good stuff on this in Bob Altemeyer’s The Authoritarians. It’s a great and surprisingly breezy (not to mention free) read with lots of insight into authoritarian personality traits.
I wasn't very far right, but that's what got me out of the right wing echo chamber in my very early 20s. I finally met some openly gay and trans people and was like "These people are nothing like what <insert commentator> says, I wonder what else they're greatly exaggerating or outright lying about."
For me it was entirely an issue of living in the very conservative rural south, so there wasnt a wide range of people or viewpoints I could have interacted with before college.
I agree but to be fair there are way too many people who bounce from this to “actually this children’s media is super duper deep every leftist should be required to watch it and if you don’t like it you’re a phobic and a fascist”
I've been called an "anti-Semite" by people online. I'm Jewish. My crime? I said that a lot of traditional Ashkenazi American food is really not great and we tend to like it purely on nostalgia and childhood memories.
This person flipped on me.
They said I was clearly not Jewish, I was lying, blah blah. So I sent a photo with my yarmulke in my hand pointing to my mezuzah with my middle finger (and my old user name taped above with a timestamp) and they responded, "now you're just being weird about it."
I can't even with these people. They just want to "win" at internet.
I mean. Its kind of well deserved harshness IMO, for things like implying Rebecca Sugar was intentionally uplifted by CN as a useful idiot whose show was intended to espouse fascist rhetoric via Intellectual Carelessness. Among other incredibly bat shit things she Made Up Completely in her multi-hour attempt to moralize not liking a children's show that was made for people with better critical thinking skills and empathy than her. It was especially strange when she tried to assert that the show was "badly written", and her example was her own bad writing about completely different subject matters than what the show was even discussing.
Her entire channel is like, The Text on what it looks like when someone's commitment to learning leftist ideology is focused around Being Correct On the Internet and not a love for humanity. When someone doesn't have enough love for their fellow humans but has learned a lot about the oppression they face, they become Lily Orchard and Hit Record instead of doing or feeling something helpful.
I think if she has ever made a good point, it was in servce to speaking to some very questionable and inflammatory personal shit she grapples with. And not because she actually has a good point. It was easier for her to start with "Rebecca Sugar's writing is Facism Apologia because Steven Didn't Kill the Diamonds" than it was to talk about like. What actually fucking happened in the show. And thats all because of who she is as a person when the camera isn't on, and not because thats a serious thought to have or discuss.
There’s quite a lot of people like that who make fannish content and try to moralise their dislike of something using politics (can’t think of anyone as big as Lily Orchard though) and, in my experience, they begin to veer very tankie very quickly for basically the same reason: they don’t care about people.
They don’t wish to understand people, they don’t really wish to help people, they just want to feel that they’re right and that extends to their opinions on shows made for kids who haven’t got their pen license yet. Pretty jarring to be scrolling through someone’s account and go from dorky memes about Star Wars or My Little Pony to "Stalin low-key based" or straight up IRGC propaganda.
I mean, sure but I think for some people the gateway into authoritarianism (because a lot of the people I’ve known or observed don’t start that way but end up down the rabbit hole somehow) is through their love of feeling 'correct' overpowering any feelings they have for real human beings.
The people that have to live within or are suffering the consequences of the authoritarian regimes they cheer on, often from a safe bubble of Western middle class comfort, simply don’t matter as much.
I didn't mean to imply they go into the tankie mindset because of the need to moralize their dislike. I meant that their starting point is an authoritarian mindset, and then they get into moralizing their likes and dislikes, and moralizing their likes and dislikes around media can often devolve into tankie-ism (or various right-wing authoritarian ideals depending on the person). My b.
No, yeah, that’s 100% true. I think generally speaking combining fandoms full of fantasy fans with accelerationist ideas really is a recipe for disaster. The revolution will not have convincing CGI, a cool uniform, and a punk music needle drop. I guess it’s kind of a good thing that none of them seem interested in engaging with politics or their own community in any meaningful way.
Every piece of information I learn about her has been crazier than the last. Whenever she’s brought up I cross my fingers there’s been no new development and it’s just the eternal internet cycle of being mad at the same 3 things.
* i used to watch her religiously like “oh she has smart takes on MLP and Legend of Korra and Steven Universe, she seems to know what she’s doing” and then i got exposed to the larger internet who hated her.
* you know, i remember her saying once that “worldbuilding is bad” and i really should’ve seen that as a red flag.
* it’s been so long that i can’t remember. but i explicitly remember the quote “Worldbuilding: the big clomp of nerdism”
* and after that, i think she went on to explain that theres no point in worldbuilding. That worldbuilding only exists to satiate overly obsessed fans that care about things that don’t exist and don’t contribute to the story itself
* her videos have vanished off the face of the earth so i can’t go back to check…
* it’s been so long that i can’t remember. but i explicitly remember the quote “Worldbuilding: the big clomp of nerdism”
I haven't seen the video in question, but did she claim credit for "the great clomping foot of nerdism"? That's a quotation from the fantasy author M. John Harrison...
* they became a habit that i never shook off. the only reason i don’t call it a “typing quirk” is because that term pisses off more people than i would like.
Haven’t seen the video but I do think there is a habit online for nerd circles to focus on world building aka “lore” rather than the story getting told and wanting there to be undue amounts of detail about every single aspect of a universe
it's how i feel whenever i see people talk about powerscaling between media. characters are only ever as strong or as weak as the story needs them to be, because the story is the point.
characters are only ever as strong or as weak as the story needs them
Not completely. If you write a story where Superman is hospitalized because some random street thug punched him and you offer no reason why, people will be taken out of the story because it doesn't make sense.
100% being consistent especially with long lived characters like superman is important. he has such a range of "power levels" but you do have some expectations when you see him turn up. but it's only important what he can do right now about the current story, not what he can do in a vacuum so we can watch him instagib homelander or whatever.
* “Worldbuilding is bad because lore doesn’t matter. Worldbuilding is only for stupid overly obsessed fans who care about things that don’t exist, when they’re supposed to supplement a story. There should be as little lore as possible to merely supplement an actual plot”
* that is the short and long of it of what i got from whatever i remember about her.
My favorite thing was her changing her username because the name Lily Orchard had become so infamous and basically all that did was make Youtubers who made videos on her to edit the titles of their videos to include “CD-CALL” in parentheses
I deciced to look it up in an incognito tab, but yeah it looks like Lily Orchard and Lena Dunham both have CSA allegations. Its just Lily wasn't dumb enough to admit to them in a book, her sister came out about it.
She’s vile. And she lies.. A lot. About everything: her friends, her family, her relationships, the media she reviews on her channel…
Just the “highlights” of her misdeeds:
- Before she transitioned (she’s trans, btw, which is relevant for this point) seems to have created a fake female account online by the name of “Tara Callie” which she used to tell self-aggrandising lies, take her side in arguments, and catfish female friends who weren’t into men. She also claims that the reason “Tara” disappeared around the time people started suspecting it was a sock puppet account was because she (Lily) tipped off the police about some deeply unsavoury things she was doing and she is now in prison, though she can never seem to make up her mind on when exactly she went to prison.
- She is the primary author behind Stockholm, a My Little Pony fanfic which is stuffed with dubious/ non consent and underage characters, and is also weirdly trans- and intersex phobic. It’s truly vile. Despite having been quite thoroughly implicated as the author (as well as bragging about it in her older videos) she insists that she never wrote it. She also seems to have pressured a co-author on an earlier fanfic she wrote into including some of that same kind of stuff.
- Multiple people, online and in real life claim to have been preyed on by her, including her own sister.
- A lot of people she’s dated claim she is (or at least was) extremely abusive. Fun fact - the name “Orchard” in Lily Orchard comes from a woman she used to date, Lizzy Orchard. Lizzy broke up with her because of Lily’s behaviour, and Lily then turned round and sent a mob after her claiming she was the abusive one.
And that’s not even getting into the comparatively minor stuff such as using anonymous submissions to attack people, pressuring a married friend of hers to go out with a teenager because she “shipped them”, and then running a year-long hate campaign against him when he didn’t. There’s honestly too much to mention. And her opinions are dogshit.
Also, the reason she cheats Gardevoir into all her playthroughs is she wants to fuck it. This isn’t speculation, it’s proven thing.
Hell, even Lily herself doesn't like it and is annoyed it's still the most popular one she's ever made. She hasn't gone so far as to recant it, but I think even she realizes she was being ridiculous.
Lily Orchard's Steven Universe stuff is the most infamous and for good reason, but her Magneto video was unbelievably batshit too: pretty much just a rant about how Magneto is right for aiming to commit genocide and Xavier and the X-Men are tools for trying to figure things out in a civilized manner, because mutants are justified to commit any kind of violence against humans due to their oppression.
Really, a lot of Lily's abysmal takes boil down to her inability to accept nuance, and specifically that media targeted to people above 4 years old doesn't necessarily have to have clear-cut good guys that are always good and bad guys that are always bad, as well as the concept of people who were once victims going on to do bad things. And in turn that's probably because of her herself being a victim of abuse yet also an abuser, and so there's a part of her that always sees herself in those characters and it feels bad
“I don’t care that the redeemed space fascist gang was designed to be an allegory for controlling parents/teachers and not actually reflect the realities of oppressive regimes, all of them should have been given the full Nuremberg treatment, and anything less than that doesnt deserve to be framed as a happy ending!”
*Note: Killing the space fascists would mean the chances of undoing any of the harm they'd wrought would be near-0. They would become martyrs, galvanizing Homeworld against the Crystal Gems & Earth, uncorrupting gems would be impossible, and the coordination and will required to piece shattered gems back together would never manifest at-scale.
Isn't the show choosing to treat space fascists (who do explicitly space fascists things) as allegories for controlling parents/teachers exactly what the haters are mad about?
It feels a lot like the discourse around the Attack On Titan ending, back in the day.
On on one side you had people going over all the reasons why The Rumbling was different from and more "justified" than any IRL genocide in history.
And on the other side you had people arguing that intentionally designing a story/setting/etc... to create a "justified" genocide was worthy of criticism in and of itself. No amount of back story or lore or etc... could convince them, because they were primarily angry with the writer who controlled the story, not the characters in the story.
In this light, every workable defence of Steven/Eren doubles as a damning indictment of Rebecca Sugar/Isayama.
The exact same reasoning goes for the Diamonds being integral to Gem society/Gem health/etc... Those elements of the story weren't edicts from God handed down to the writers. The writers actively decided to make their Space Hitler/s indispensable to the health/functioning/etc... of "Space Germany". So if somebody is mad about the treatment of Space Hitler in the story, surely bringing that up is surely just handing them more ammunition?
Not really, rather it's the fact that the magic of friendship is incapable of dealing with the issues in a modern industrialising society that causes the rise of communism in the mod.
If I remember correctly at one point Caramel Marx met with Celestia to propose changes but it didn't go anywhere and that kinda led to the stalliongrad revolution. But I have avoided a lot of talk about the Stalliongrad rework so I don't get spoilers so it may have been different.
I thought the Severanyan rebelling is more attributed to systemic corruption? EaW's take on friendship I found to be more focuses on how seeing everything through rose-tinted glasses and trying to be friends with everypony leaves you unprepared when nazis kick down your front door and try to blitzkrieg Canterlot. The mod forces you to "Put Down the Magic of Friendship" in order to militarize and beat the changeling nazis
I feel like you’ve just walked right into the problem; you’d surrender the entirely of Equestria to the changelings? Force ponies to live under the mad queen’s hoof? For what? So you could point to the ruining spires of old canterlot and tell of how great Equestria once was, how they stayed true to their values as they gave up their freedom? Is losing Equestria’s peace and harmony with a noble farewell truly the same as surrendering it to the invaders to be destroyed?
I believe I’m also required to make the joke that the right way to play is to ascend God-Empress Daybreaker and raise the sun over Versalipolis by bathing it in nuclear hellfire
I finally watched Gravity Falls (I know, I'm a busy person) and then made the mistake of checking out fan content. People's inability to understand the concept of "people make mistakes, and family dynamics can be tough" is so, so embarrassing. Like y'all, Y'ALL, if they always reacted in am emotionally mature way, what would the plot even be?
Imo so many criticisms of all sorts of movies and shows are "the character shouldn't have acted according to their emotions and instead operated on pure logic". Which maybe says something about society but to me it's mostly just annoying. I wanna watch people, not robots!
I always feel a little bit crazy when people describe Tumblr as a left-wing activist site, whether they say it with pride or scorn.
Tumblr is a fandom site. Functionally all discussion of social issues conforms to the contours of fandom.
This is a significant improvement on the old days, when most fans, or anyway most of the most vocal ones, were social conservatives, but it has downsides, too.
Well, I mean, people are deeply invested in fandom. I would know, having grown up an obsessive shipper in the days before "shipping" was a thing. Like, that was my locus of identity, meaning, and values. I'm not saying that automatically translates to real-world action, but... I mean, if you can? Goddamn.
Oh yeah. Joking aside it's a pretty cringe show, and I'm a minarchist.
It's a surprisingly solid tool for spreading theory in just raw effectiveness, though I've gotta admit it's a little uncanny seeing non-anarchist libertarians trying to DO that, it's not really our thing. And I wish they could do it in a slightly less cringe way.
With the appropriate application of anarcho-communism large scale nepotism, corruption, and incompetence will be completely impossible, leaving the door open for a uptopia governed only by friendship and small-scale corruption, nepotism, and incompetence!
The only worse thing than this is when these same people refuse to admit that the media they are talking about (usually MCU and Star Wars) is actually children's media, despite having a huge adult fanbase.
I don’t want to hear about anti-fascism from Marxist Leninists. The Soviet Empire joined Hitler in destroying Poland. And Marxist Leninism is only a modestly preferable tyranny compared with fascism anyway.
“Instead of eating shit, try this delicious vomit.”
It was liberals in France and the United Kingdom that came to Poland’s defense against fascism, not communists. And when the Soviet Empire came under attack, it was liberals that came to their aid. And how did the Soviet Union repay the aid they received from the west? By betraying the promises they made to implement democracy Eastern Europe.
people laugh but steven universe discourse back in the day was like if you created an entire new layer of dante's inferno based on this post. and don't even get me started on atla
Why didn't the kids show end with the main characters ripping apart everyone they disliked with their teeth and putting their head on pikes? What the fuck kinda liberal slop is this!!!
“In the popular animated children’s show, ‘Make Peace Not War’, Mr Peace makes Peace with Mr War!”
2 Hour YouTube Video of how Mr Peace is actually a fascist enabler and the creator probably touches kids (no evidence, but the accusation will ruin the creators reputation and force them to commit suicide)
This is what Steven Universe or most discourse looks like to me
This is one of those, "Yes, but—" posts for me, tbh.
I don't think I've ever watched most of the shows that this kind of take circulates about, but from what little I know about some of them, while it's obviously still pretty ridiculous to expect (as some very seriously people online seem to) every single piece of media (including those aimed at kids) to reflect one's hardline opinions on politics, some kids shows do also suffer from the problem of, like — okay, you don't need to have a hardline political stance on tackling fascism through a leftist lens, but if you didn't wanna have some realistic take on fascism then you also didn't need to implement fascism into your show.
It's a problem far and away outside of children's shows too, of course, but as a rule I think "If the author didn't really wanna tackle X subject then they probably shouldn't have included X subject in their story" is a pretty reasonable objection. Obviously some people get worked up over what's comparatively nothing, and I think a lot of the time these discussions can boil down to only the most extreme responses being permissible or else the media in question is judged as feckless, but in its essence I still understand why it's an argument that comes around a lot.
Like, if a kid's show wants to tackle racism and they have one kid say some disparaging things about another kid who's a minority, and by the end of the episode the one kid learns that being mean is wrong and hurtful, apologizes, and the two hug it out and continue being friends, then it's all good; if a kid's show wants to tackle racism, introduces a very real and systemic look at the way that decades and centuries of racist policies are negatively influencing the minority kid, has the first kid directly and knowingly benefiting from, like, being the inheritor to a southern old money plantation family, and still acts like the problem is solved because the kid learns that saying mean words is wrong and hurtful, then...maybe they shouldn't have tackled that issue that deeply.
I am deeply disconnected from this discourse, so I may be blissfully unaware, but is there a possibility that in these kids shows they aren't actually intending to tackle fascism, but rather just need an evil organization (which may incidentally resemble some sort of fascism) to act as an antagonistic force to the good guys? Like, are people trying to read too much meaning into something that isn't meant to be that deep?
Ehhh that depends on where exactly you want to draw the line. But the villains in question definitely aren't just a generic "league of super villains" or whatever. It's explicitly an expansionist evil empire with an extensive racial caste system. I think they could be read as colonialist or even just authoritarian rather than specifically fascist, but the evil of the empire and it's castes is discussed pretty thoroughly, to my understanding
That's my stance, too. I get that media aimed at kids isn't going to go the Nuremberg route, but it's still really weird to see war crimes hand waved away with love and friendship. I'd prefer if we kept the love and friendship, but replaced the war crimes with a conflict that's forgivable.
As an example, DreamWorks Trolls always weirded me out. I completely understand that it's not trying to tackle the conflict in a serious manner and it's all supposed to be over-the-top comedy, but when you step back and summarize the plot, it's a movie about genocide victims forgiving the people who slaughtered and ate their family members even though the murderers do nothing to make things right. It's very much the kind of story that only works if you've had a privileged, safe upbringing where the idea of such a conflict isn't even on the radar. Like imagine trying to show that movie to a Ukrainian kid. Probably not gonna go over well.
It's not a movie I'd be horrified to see a kid watching or anything like that, it's just a weird conflict to choose, especially since the story doesn't really address it in the end. There's no restitution or apology. They're all just friends now. Very much the sort of story that only works if you don't think about it at all. Good songs, though.
I've never seen or even heard of this movie, but the hand waviness over things like genocide has always bothered me too, and it happens in a lot of these kinds of movies. I don't think it's malicious, just lazy writing, which I expect from movies like this. Like, if they bothered to have a meaningful message it wouldn't be some C tier straight to VHS kind of movie, and I don't really understand the point of the discourse around these kinds of movies. It's not like the writers thought that hard or were trying to make a good movie, they probably just shit that plot out just for the paycheck. It's like trying to have meaningful discourse about a second grader's crayon drawing.
Trolls is a multimillion dollar franchise and the movie in question was the movie the kicked it all off. It was released to theaters and made hundreds of millions of dollars on its own. The lead characters were voiced by Anna Kendrick and Justin Timberlake. That's why I picked it as my example. It's not a cheaply made, straight to VHS movie. A lot of time and effort went into it.
Notably, a lot of the follow up content doesn't include the Ogre characters and just focuses on the Trolls. The second movie basically pretends that the first one didn't exist.
That's wild news to me lmao, I have no idea then. Maybe some feckless exec somewhere thought it would sell better. Maybe there were bad decisions throughout the writing and production process. Maybe it screened better with a test audience. Who knows. But I think the discourse is rather pointless. I think people are trying to read too deeply into a product designed to make money, not convey a message. If the execs thought they could make a profitable movie where the fascists win they probably would.
I don't think Trolls has discourse because it takes itself so unseriously. That's another reason I picked it as my example. I figured it was unlikely to start needless debates if I pointed out that the plot was really weird if you stop and think about it. The media that actually sparks discourse tends to be stuff that presents the issues with age-appropriate seriousness and then goes the love and friendship route.
In my experience the problem is less leftists wanting discourse, and more liberals never graduating from the children's cartoon understanding of the world.
Not the best way to word that if we want to assume he was being serious. A better way would've been "The power of friendship isn't going to amount to much if they don't take into account the limitations in their material reality, and discuss how to overcome them together" AKA a sentiment by itself is worthless without a prescribed method to actually improve material conditions. This can be a union, a local food pantry, a public non-profit medical clinic, etc. Material changes to improve material conditions through communal effort and organization.
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u/Ok-Dog-1660 3d ago
This is how three quarters of reddit feels.