For me it’s Dragon Ball Z, that was a pretty fucked up show tbh.
Like holy shit, all the characters are terrible people except maybe Gohan and Trunks.
Disney’s Aladdin is pretty racist in that ”if you steal, we’ll cut off your hand” depiction of Middle Eastern society, and it never questions whether having a monarch who lives in a massive palace and forces his daughter to get married is actually bad.
Plus, when Aladdin becomes Prince Ali, the song says he has slaves
Aladdin’s first instinct upon gaining access to incredible cosmic power was to catfish a sheltered underaged girl.
Do NOT rewatch Pocahontas
I instantly remembered that back and forth dueling choirs “both sides equally right and wrong” song.
There’s a much worse song that is just straight up about how the indigenous people are “barely even human”. That’s a line in the song! There’s also the moment where Pocahontas first realizes there’s white people invading and she’s all crawling around on the ground like an animal trying to spy on them.
There’s a much worse song that is just straight up about how the indigenous people are “barely even human”. That’s a line in the song!
It’s pretty obvious the audience isn’t supposed to agree with that. It’s still bad in how it both sides’s it, but the point of that line is to depict the people saying it as bad and racist.
Oh I know, but kids just latch onto things and sing them everywhere.
Working in kitchens I have done that song both with sandwiches and sausages in place of the yeeeah
Are you my old coworker? We used to sing “sandwiches sandwiches, can I get a Reuben?”
Nice!
That’s the same song I think, in fact the “barely even human” line is said both by the white villain about the indigenous and also by the indian chief about the whites. It was definitely both sidesing in a shitty way.
I may be missrememberig but shouldnt aladdin be from china? Isnt the only middle eastern guy the wizard, because in the tropes the evil wizard is persian, maybe the djin is also middle eastern?
It’s sort of a medley of the middle east, India, and central Asia. Very 19th century orientalism.
The original story takes place in China, but I think I’ve heard that it’s used by the creators as a shorthand for a faraway, unknown place. The Disney movie was originally set in Baghdad but it was changed to a fictional country. Still pretty awful either way, with all the inaccurate stuff drawn from countries outside of the Middle East on top of the racism.
The story comes from the north west part of China. Yes, that part. Same as Mulan though actually.
You would think that. Because they are muslim. And he marries a petty kings daugther insted of the emperors daugther.
But there are muslims all over china and there were even more before an lushans revelion. i always figured they were raiding zhou zhengs mausoleum and as such it would be set in shaanxi.
Wich put things in perspective whoever was the original owner of the main djin built a great empire, and while aladin also becomes king his ambitions seem more reduced.
This is a weird one but the nihilism of Robot Chicken used to really get to me. Just vignettes of characters dying horrible ironic deaths. Its funny I guess in a group setting but alone and stoned in my room, not so much. I think the elephant in the room is South Park. Especially around 2013/14 when they helped bring the term “PC” back into the political zeitgeist, which was the buzz word the right loved before “woke”.
Everyone realized South Park’s messaging was horrible even back then, but ”that’s the joke bro, they’re being misanthropic edgelords for the lulz!”, which in itself led to some even worse stuff from South Park poisoned people.
Everyone realized South Park’s messaging was horrible even back then
I wish that were the case. I still get into go-nowhere arguments, sometimes, with fans that claim that "Matt and Trey make fun of everything and everyone" and therefore it’s also so wholesomely nonpolitical in the balance.
I doubt South Park often makes fun of smug enlightened centrism, apathy as a lazy response to actual political issues that actually affect living people’s lives, or for that matter the rich white asshole libertarianism of Matt and Trey.
The Harley f-slur episode did it for me. A couple years prior, my closest friends all got together and agreed to stop using the f-slur. We had no out queer friends (god it took me so long to admit dicks are good actually), and we were just “this is dumb to just use constantly”. The word was so ingrained in our lexicon and a bunch of idiot 13 year olds decide amongst themselves that enough was enough. Then like 2 years later that episode came out. Was a quick “well this is dog shit” realization.
I doubt South Park often makes fun of smug enlightened centrism, apathy as a lazy response to actual political issues that actually affect living people’s lives, or for that matter the rich white asshole libertarianism of Matt and Trey.
They embrace it. There was an ep where Stan starts drinking to accept things. It’s literally “caring will make you unfunny, lonely, and lame”.
Every time I hear someone claim that entertainment has no effect on people’s attitudes, beliefs, or behavior, I can glance back in time at the cultural ripples that occured each time South Park programmed its consumers to do something like, say, dismiss climate change entirely as a concept by getting credulous smug “nonpoliticals” to say “MANBEARPIG LOL” to terminate further thought.
Or that time they popularized redhead hate in the US
Or that time they popularized redhead hate in the US
I didn’t even know redhead hate was a thing or have to hear about it until that episode aired and then it was everywhere around me “as a joke” for a while.
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the season in either 2016 or 2017 I remember a lot of people, including leftists, were trying to tell me was super progressive and a biting critique of society.
When
got elected, that very biting critique suddenly went silent because Matt and Trey are cowards and always have been.
Watching this is definitely not one of my proudest life phases. I remember it really got to me with neurodivergence and how they chose to depict that. Also it’s incredibly violent to fat people, the way Cartman gets portayed and what the supposed reasons are for his behaviour.
Someone posted a Red Sails article here yesterday that goes over the way entertainment conditions us to the status quo. I think South Park is a perfect example of that, in making horrible be supposedly mainstream.
Someone posted a Red Sails article here yesterday that goes over the way entertainment conditions us to the status quo.
Could you send a link to that? It may be useful the next inevitable time some treat defender chants “entertainment has no effect on people” at me, usually prepackaged with whatever salad bar leftist jargon they add to it.
Here you go: https://redsails.org/masses-elites-and-rebels/
Appreciated!
“What if fun thing that made kids happy… but now characters killed off in cheap and gory ways for a quick giggle?”
That same attitude sums up most of Kurtzman’s reign over the Star Trek IP too.
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I have real and visceral anger towards South Park and also Family Guy and Call of Duty, which was the unholy trinity of what middle school boys were into when I was in middle school.
This resonates with me so much.
The first I ever learned of climate change was through my friends telling me it wasn’t real because that’s what they heard on South Park and then showing me the Al Gore manbearpig clip. I don’t think society has yet had a reckoning with how damaging those shows were.
To this day there’s still that persistent belief (largely derived from South Park consumers themselves) that they aren’t influenced by the entertainment they consume while parroting what the entertainment taught them anyway.
You how people talk about Rick and Morty? South Park is actually the show they say R&M is. They don’t actually have a problem with edgy nihilism.
my mother will not stop loving south park
This and Celebrity Deathmatch were absolutely unwatchable to me. Same with Sons of Butcher. Just poisoned apathy.
I was enthralled with celeb deathmatch and clayfighter
Claymation is just cool, so that’s fine
South Park for me has a handful of 10/10 eps and then a septic tank of increasingly frequent steamers. the first 3 or so seasons were funny, but they increasingly felt they needed to Say Something while also running out of having anything to say. the “everyone who cares about this is stupid” default was arrived at because they got through all the things they actually care about.
okay actually i’m gonna check wikipedia to make sure the first 3 were actually funny and i’m not just having a reaction to enjoying like 2 episodes ever bolstered by my memories of being a teenager
No, there are definitely quite good episodes. The beginning, when they were leaning into immaturity and absurdism was definitely when it was the best. Plus, even in later seasons, there are some episodes like that, more about how ridiculous kids can be, which people remember more, like the superhero one, or the Lord of the Rings one, or the one where they get shurikans and bladed weapons.
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jfc agro was awful
you’re not wrong, you find clips on youtube now and it’s basically just a supercut of Ann-marie being sexually harassed
Damn I literally enjoy a FailArmy video once in a while 😥
I remember my mom actually liking AFV, but even then, sometimes stopping laughing, because that’s actually a pretty serious injury.
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I think I was 12 or 13 when book 5 came out and it clicked for me that it wasn’t setting up for anything, it was just creating obvious commentaries and then hand waving them. Nothing was coming about Potter’s wealth and the Weasley’s near poverty. “SPEW is a silly acronym” was everything we were getting about the house slaves. I hadn’t even made the Semitic connections to goblins and was uncomfortable with the implications of them being exclusively bankers. The bad people were bad because they were bad, and the good people were good because they were good.
At least by that time I’d discovered PTerry, so i already had better stuff to get on reading.
a lot of that stuff went over my head cause I was pretty young, but the one thing that I couldn’t shake was the nagging feeling that hermione was always playing second fiddle to her doofus friends one way or another. even tho she was nice about it by the 4th book I was frustrated for her. she worked so hard and was so brilliant and caring but ??? I guess she’s not the golden boy and that’s all that matters
I think Rowling was trying very hard to avoid favoring her “self-insert” character to the detriment of the story, and ended up detrimenting the story by overcorrecting for it. Hermione can’t be right, she can’t win, she can’t be recognized as competent and capable and justified by the other main characters, because then that’s just Rowling applauding herself. I think was her mindset, anyway.
Not that it would have made the story good if Hermione were handled better, because Rowling still just isn’t a good writer. But this is one flaw I can empathize with at least. It’s a mistake I could see myself making, though I probably wouldn’t imply that slavery is good in the process.
Five is when I stopped as a teenager because I just got bored with it? I think at that point they stopped editing JK Rowling because they realized that a shitload of people would buy almost anything Harry Potter-related with her name on it.
Yeah, some friends and I decided to revisit Harry Potter, the movies and the books, and we noticed both Book and Movie 1-3 were much better than the rest. They managed to build a world without filling it with mindless exposition and actually tried to make it feel magical. We also had some specific criticisms of how the movies were made, as well as some of the actors (especially Dumbledore’s later actor), but those had little to do with Rowling.
That’s exactly where I was around that time, and when the last book came out it felt so half assed. It was the first time I really felt betrayed by a medium like that.
She obviously had no plans whatsoever about how to wrap this story up and made up a bunch things that didn’t really make sense in the context of the previous books for the last one.
At least by that time I’d discovered PTerry, so i already had better stuff to get on reading.
It’s not usually regarded as his best novel, but “Jingo” is my favourite. It feels particularly relevant this past year.
Soooooo much shit I enjoyed as a kid had a plot where a dude ‘wins’ a woman as a prize for completing the hero’s journey, and I genuinely think it messed up the entire millennial generation
Completely agree, this messaging that you get a woman as a treat for good behavior is the basis of the Nice Guys beliefs system.
That plus romcoms teaching people that its actually cool to be an asshole if someone rejects you.
That plus romcoms teaching people that its actually cool to be an asshole if someone rejects you.
Adam Sandler’s acting career has been primarily “being a persistently annoying asshole until one gets laid.”
That was one of the main points on Anita Sarkisian’s Tropes Vs Women in Video Games, how women are usually represented as the trophy to be won by the male playable character.
And internet misogynists spent decades screaming into the void because she pointed this out.
“Pixels,” the Adam Sandler movie, was like the shit cherry on top of that cake of “win the sex trophy” misogynistic shit that came before it.
1980s GI Joe is the most glaring example I can instantly think of.
I am still baffled by the fact that decades later some blue curtain bazinga in my guild in one of the games I played insisted that the good old days of cartoons had zero political messaging, unlike today, and his example was… GI Joe.
After I gave exhaustive examples of the political messaging of that show (everything from the plain as day glorification of the US military, the OPEC oil crisis being simplified as being backed and perpetuated by a bunch of terror-loving puppet governments… puppets of Cobra of course) and what I got back was, verbatim, “did anyone ever tell you… the curtains are fucking blue?”
I was too young to watch the G1 Transformers cartoon (although I did have Transformers toys and comics), but it had a Gaddafi expy called Abdul Fakkadi (back when Libya was Amerikkkan non-Soviet boogeyman #1) who ruled a country called Carbombya.
but it had a Gaddafi expy called Abdul Fakkadi (back when Libya was Amerikkkan non-Soviet boogeyman #1) who ruled a country called Carbombya.
That’s exactly the episode I was bringing up when it came to the OPEC stand in and summary for little kids to absorb.
I would actually hunt someone down and kill them for this
and what I got back was, verbatim, “did anyone ever tell you… the curtains are fucking blue?”
Bruh
I want to chain this guy up and forcibly give him a basic literature class
I want to chain this guy up and forcibly give him a basic literature class
If you did that, you’d have to somehow prevent him from chanting “DEATH OF THE AUTHOR!” all the way through it to justify whatever he already wanted to believe about anything he consumed.
People who simultaneously believe Death of the Author and The Curtains Are Fucking Blue.
Lots of people bounce from one to the other like a metronome without the slightest hesitation or awareness of the contradiction because they want their treats to mean exactly and only what they want them to mean.
It’s a low bar, but all the copaganda shows (CSI, Castle, Brooklyn 99, Bones, etc) for obvious reasons. Even the heckin’ wholesome funny NYPD detectives in B99 talk about defense lawyers being scum, all suspects being guilty (otherwise they wouldn’t be suspects, would they?) and of course even when they did touch on the rampant racism in the NYPD the solution was “be a better pig and change from the inside!” (Don’t laugh!). I could go on about the others too, but it’s a topic that’s already been covered better by other people
Long post short, even light-hearted cop shows where Malcolm Reynolds plays a goofy man-child writer have dogshit politics
Andy samberg found out that cops are bad after a decade of making a cop show and it’s honestly pretty funny how they try to cram it into the last season
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I was never a huge fan of cop shows, but when I studied computer forensics in college, damn near everyone there was someone who watched too much NCIS. Should’ve tipped me off that I should’ve switched majors, but I graduated with that anyways…
I almost studied forensic science in uni, going to an open day at one of the University of South Wales campuses and seeing every other person looking to study it was an NCIS fan was what ultimately led me away from that path and towards studying biomed.
Having actually studied it, I’m now convinced forensic science is a pseudoscience. I’ve talked to a few lawyers who agree with me.
Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, which takes place in colonial India, and is about a mongoose defending a white settler family against evil indigenous cobras. The mongoose kills all 3 snakes and squashes the mother cobra’s eggs, then a bird sings about how that is good actually, and all the snakes never dare enter the white colonist family’s garden again, the end
The mongoose kills all 3 snakes and squashes the mother cobra’s eggs, then a bird sings about how that is good actually, and all the snakes never dare enter the white colonist family’s garden again, the end
"Based 🤣 😂 🤣 😂 🤣 😂 🤣 😂 🤣 😂 "this definitely had no implications from the author whatsoever
The short story is part of The Jungle Book. He’s universally hated in India
as he should be
Good one
Riki Tiki Tavi by Donovan is an absolute banger though.
it’s pretty hilarious how he depicts the big white man as this godlike thing with no upper body (we only ever see his legs and his gun, pretty much)
Looking back, with the political education I’ve had, a case could be made that Paw Patrol contains some subtle pro-police messaging. Can’t be too sure tho.
Paw Patrol is among the most egregious; but as someone who is very involved in checking out what my kids watch, copaganda is pervasive in a lot of TV shows these days.
One of my kids in school was just assigned to read a novel called Witness Protection :(
On the other hand there’s apparently an “ecology dog”
And a disabled dog
Unlike the other pups, Rex has a disability with his back legs and is unable to walk with them, so he uses a high-tech dog wheelchair to get around.
The Irish Times review is classic
Stickdeath.com, although I was already a teenager at that point. Stuff like ”Crackhouse Clean-Up” where the bad guy green stickmen were obviously supposed to be black stereotypes, but back then I didn’t know enough about
racial politics to realize.After 9/11, the guy started doing cartoons of racist Middle Eastern caricatures being killed by US soldiers while Korn played and racist caricatures being tortured in Gitmo, and the fucked up messaging was no longer hidden
You’re awakening years of newgrounds and flash memories. So much overly racist shit post 9/11. But hey it also brought me into furry shit so… yeah fucked me up.
I still remember when my elementary school friend did the classic “I made all of these animations.” posturing. He ended up becoming a neo-nazi so now I find it believable
This is unlocking elementary school memories where I too did stick figure animations. I did like, skateboard stuff and sorta looney tunes style things. Later I figured out i could import images and used video game sprites, got backgrounds in and figured out how to shrink and grow things in pace of the framrate to fake 3d. Good times
and used video game sprites
90% of the videogame sprite websites have disappeared now and I feel like something incredible was lost with them all as a resource for kids making animation.
pivot stickfigure animator was the best. I should really get back into animationThey had a beta version that could import images and backgrounds. I made a 3d version of the first level of super Mario bros. Shit was tight
Anyone remember thst program Pivot that was basically just animating stick men and had the same kind look with the pre-built stuff? Cause that’s how I got into animation
The first Ace Ventura movie is unwatchably transphobic now.
oh lord. I hadnt though about that movie in decades. yes it wouldnt had aged well.
For different but still
reasons, City Slickers is also unwatchable now. 
That scene in a decent country would have had the writers arrested
That scene
I know the exact scene you mean. It wasn’t the only scene, but…
It’s the only scene I’ve ever seen from the movie. It’s so absolutely cruel and repulsive to me. Jim Carrey should be forced to make a public apology on live television for his involvement with that scene. Treating a suffering minority like they are repulsive and monsters is… well I don’t want to
here but I will use a whole bunch of these emotes 
As a kid I thought the United States of America was the best in the world. Hell I pledged allegiance to the flag nearly every day.
Turns out its just a racist fascist shithole run by and for corporations.
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I still remember being like 12 and somehow thinking that Americans were especially self-critical compared to most other nations. I really don’t know how I even came to that. I have no idea
Because of
duh
Yeah from like 13-17 I was really into the stars and stripes and “America fuck yeah” shit. Really believed “America isn’t perfect, but it’s better than anywhere else.”
I remember thinking as a kid how lucky I was to be born in the best country on Earth.
Finding out that the author of Death Note’s absolute dogshit way of writing women wasn’t just the usual shonen author bullshit and fanservice but he’s actually a big misgynist chud who writes women badly on purpose.
Mf Light killing people that were already in prison in episode 1, pretty disgusting fash shit.
I just read Light as being unambiguously evil from the outset, even though it’s pretty clear that wasn’t the author’s intent. Still found it pretty shocking to encounter people who don’t see it like that.
You know how you know light was bad? He was a cop.
Cause if I found a death note, it could only be bankers and ceos
I thought the point was to show Light is an evil asshole. I don’t see how that is problematic, because it is supposed to be problematic, illegal and immoral.
I have more issues with how women are written, but hey, even Harley Quinn has similar issues…
Donalc Duck. It has a status where I live, it “teaches kids to read”. One of our brainwormed metal music artists who is a fan even did the whole “woke-mind virus” outrage in the media after it was suggested we remove the most obviously racist and colonial images from it.
Tbh I have noticed and known how problematic it is from the start, as a girl reading the way women are framed in these comics was eternally annoying to me as a kid. So was the way it Others anyone who isn’t Western.
But it took me longer to notice how incredibly white it is, how it frames people who do crime and how Scrooge McDuck is a settler colonialist image that worships billionaireism/getting rich. Pretty sure most of my age group also were in a Scrooge McDuck Club where the comic would send you tips on making money, saving money and essentially idolizing the figure by making sure we think he got that rich by wit, by being smart with his money and by courage alone.
Another offshoot of this here is the Italian versions of it where the incredible meanness and kind of violent framing of life always bothered me a lot as a kid, the way Donald got put into basically slave labor for lols and such.
I read it on the toilet sometimes still, mostly to re-educate myself on the framing in it. Just the other day read a story with Mickey Mouse and the Goofy Indiana Jones where language like “the savages” is just casually used. It has been an effective tool for Othering here for sure.
The comic was brought to this country by a right-wing capitalist and framed as project to get the kids to read. I get it now.
Have you read the book How to Read Donald Duck? It was written by two Chileans and published right before Pinochet’s coup
But yeah, The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck is rich guy bootstraps bootlicking shit with some seriously racist parts
I haven’t, but have hoped to find something about this as it’s so blatantly obvious. Thank you for the hint.
Redwall. Such a fun book series, but when you think about it, it strongly endorses something that pretty neatly maps to racial essentialism (the “bad” species, e.g. rats, stoats, ferrets, etc, are portrayed as inevitably irredeemable, even when raised by “good” creatures).
Yeah, I enjoyed the books as a kid but there was always something about this that bothered me.
I still have a couple books I got Brian Jacques to sign when I was a kid. Haven’t read any of them as an adult though
Yeah I have a signed copy of The Legend of Luke myself. I still love the books, tbh, I just would never suggest that a kid read whichever one has the Veil character (the one that goes whole-hog in explicitly endorsing what I’ll call species essentialism). Apparently that was Outcast of Redwall (which as I recall wasn’t a very fun book anyway).
Yeah this is something fantasy suffers from in general but it just feels worse in Redwall. I remember finding it odd even as a kid (partially because I liked the Ferrets and wanted them to be good)
I loved those books. I kept wanting one of the bad creatures to be a hero, i thought there was at least one that did it? Or maybe I just wanted it to happen so much and the author did a switcheroo on me. That said the badgers got me hyped af
