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
deleted by creator
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?
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.
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.
deleted by creator
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.
deleted by creator
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”.
deleted by creator
Or that time they popularized redhead hate in the US
deleted by creator
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.
deleted by creator
jules verne.
i didnt notice the absolute hilarity of arguing for anticolonialism AND colonialism in the same fucking book (nemo).
and the mysterious island is a fucking parody of the west and he never realized.
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
deleted by creator
Good one
Riki Tiki Tavi by Donovan is an absolute banger though.
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
deleted by creator
deleted by creator
There’s no need to generalize. Not all western media is like that. Sometimes the message is that young men are entitled to sex and it’s very funny watching them try to get it without regard for the desires of the girls they’re pursuing, especially if they’re weak beta men who are inept at doing so.
cumming of age storydeleted by creator
Marvel movies are not just bad in a cynical lefty over-analysis kind of way, they’re shockingly and obviously fascist in ways that will be looked back on in utter horror
iirc captain america civil war was basically just about how the idea that
the policesuperheroes should have any legal limitations on what they could or couldn’t do was basically just wishy washy nonsense from naive liberals who didn’t understand the gritty realities of being a superhero - basically just a modern day version of Dirty Harry but dressed up in stupid superhero leotards(It’s been a long time since I’ve watched the film though so maybe there’s some section were they come out and say “actually, legal responsibilities for superheroes is good” in the end or something)
At least they show the Ultron project to be a scary over reach. That’s one of the few (only?) wins in the MCU.
One of the more recent spider mans literally has a workers union as a villain and their hate for billionaires as a motivation 🤡.
Their plan is faking climate catastrophes to fight against so they can look cool and better than the billionaires.
This somehow has gone unnoticed since then.
shockingly and obviously fascist
Can you go into detail?
The whole premise is basically ubermensch shit but we could get past that
They have a lot of scenes and plots about how the democratically elected are just too stupid and the strong need to take matters into their own hands
But most of all, every other fucking marvel movie is this:
Ubermensch #3: Wow, Shmartin Shluther King Junior and Shmernie Shanders want to end wealth inequality and provide health care to poor people? But isn’t that literally impossible to do??
Shmartin Shluther King Junior: *shoots underling for no reason* it’s only impossible if you’re unwilling to activate THE TORMENT CRYSTAL!!!
deleted by creator
solving society’s problems
When do they do that? The capeshit I’ve seen restores the status quo.
deleted by creator
deleted by creator
Luckily some have “compensated” by having everyone written by the same Screenwriting Class writer phenotype so that everyone talks in exactly the same quippy, good-for-screenshots way and nobody sounds human (Show is somehow still racist)
deleted by creator
Removed by mod
I thought you meant like…people in your life for a moment
This. Friends also sold us in the idea of the way these semi-unemployed people just sat in cafes and lived in that apartment. It was a prelude for Sex and the City in some ways. Which is another one I watched.
Looking at it now and the fat suit and jokes about Monica when she was the only character I could even remotely relate to. It felt like being back in school getting bullied, but it’s fine right when it’s "comedy. No wonder it took me decades to stop forcefully starving my body.
deleted by creator
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
deleted by creator
deleted by creator
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
deleted by creator
How I Met Your Mother. Neal Patrick Harris’s character is a total creep. Even Ted is a bit of a sex pest.
Pokemon Black and White. It’s basically just a “what if people trying to do good are the bad guys” plot targeted at animal rights activists. It hits all the classic plot points like “members of the team caught hurting Pokemon” and “the leader didn’t actually believe in their stated ideals and was using it for power”. It’s even more shallow than an average plot of this type because “being captured and made to battle makes Pokemon happy” is emphasized in every other part of the game (and every other game in the series) and I don’t think that an abused Pokemon is shown on screen even once.
Like obviously they’re not going to allow the premise of the world’s biggest cash cow to be criticized, but nobody forced the writers to bring up the topic in the first place. It’s an incredible shame that there’s a fair portion of the adult fanbase that considers it the best written Pokemon game (not that any of the others are particularly well written, but at least they’re not slandering activists).
Krillin was my favorite Z fighter and they turned him into a cop
