Sunday Samplers are a “lightning round” of different subjects, none of which really warrant a full post, that have popped into my head over the course of the past week. They may or may not be regular weekly posts.
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One thing that consistently gets under my skin is a very specific form of hypocrisy. It’s when someone is being hypocritical but instead of just ignoring it, they instead double down on why theirs is acceptable. I’ve seen this with everything from doxxing to outright bigotry. And right now, I’m seeing an awful lot of it with yet another politician pushing for “healthy” living.
People have been rightfully decrying the whole “make America healthy again” thing pushed by the latest failson in an overrated political family, saying that it’s fueled by eugenics and designed explicitly to stigmatize people with disabilities and/or lack of time/financial access/resources to expensive “health” foods or fitness routines. And that’s true. But it didn’t start with the current admin, and the best reaction you’ll get is “lalala, not listening” when you try to remind people. But I was there, dammit.
People tried to reduce the whole “Let’s Move” campaign First Lady Obama did to “she just wanted people to walk more”, but that wasn’t the truth. Part of that whole campaign was working with numerous “wellness” grifters to push the exact same rhetoric that RFK Jr has been pushing. If you’re unable to work out, because that’s something EVERYONE can clearly do, it’s just because you’re being lazy. If you’re unable to afford, cannot eat due to dietary restrictions (allergies, beliefs, anything), or just plain don’t like the frequently bland “healthy” foods that folks like Jamie Oliver were pushing as part of this, you’re just being childish & picky and NEED to learn better. You had the rise of Dr. Oz and his constant “diet or DIE” shows, all enabled by Oprah & her compulsion to make her viewers join in on her newest crash diets.
And I shouldn’t even HAVE to remind everyone about The Biggest Loser. THAT shit found its way into classrooms. ELEMENTARY SCHOOLS.
But y’see, all that? That somehow wasn’t eugenics, because of WHO was selling it. Yet, if you were from a naturally heavy-set lineage, if you were disabled in any way, if you admitted that you liked chicken nuggets or soda occasionally, the reactions from the adherents to this “fat equals EVIL and somehow a social threat” attitude were identical. The only real difference that I’ve seen is that the people who wanted to be awful to us in the Obama era were more likely to frame their fat-hate in terms of “I’m just CONCERNED for your/my health” instead of outright fat jokes.
This shit was always here, and it never really went away; it just warped form. You’ll still see people who will decry RFKJ & Oz, yet will blissfully ignore that they used to LOVE Oz when he was aligned with a politician that they liked. They’ll be angry about the whole “national duty to be thin & thus healthy” comments, forgetting that they basically said the same things and frequently still do. Even the Netflix doc about how much The Biggest Loser fucked up the lives of its contestants ends with a tone of “they meant well, because SOMETHING needs to be done about all these gross fatties, it just wasn’t this”, and people are either blowing off that this is exactly the attitude that was endemic to the early 2010s or agreeing with it.
I have zero patience for that uniquely leftist form of “it’s okay when WE do it” hypocrisy, and this is just one of the bigger examples. Some of y’all aren’t as ethically estranged from the people you oppose as you wanna think, and some of us have noticed it. We’ve been noticing it since you reframed your fat jokes as “I just don’t want you to die of diabetes” pseudo-concern, and we’re still seeing you fail to realize or change anything.
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Maybe it’s the cynicism or depression talking, but I find myself asking a question pretty often.
Is there such a thing as NON-toxic positivity anymore?
Because what IS considered positivity now really strikes me as forced & fraudulent.
Two examples of modern positivity and hopefully two examples of something that will spike my blood pressure
I think the reason sentiments like “Everything will be okay” or “You’re special & you matter” get under my skin is because they’ve become catchphrases. People repeat them mindlessly, as though saying them will magically make anyone & everyone feel better in some way, and it’s easy to tell when someone doesn’t actually mean it. At least it is for me, since it seems like most people even a year or two younger than me REALLY buy into the magic phrases.
I don’t get it. Whenever I see these phrases or hear someone saying them to me, my brain doesn’t feel comforted or put at ease. I feel… dismissed. Blown off. Like no one actually cares about whatever is bothering or upsetting me, but they’re not rude enough to just say as much & thus fall back on cliches to get me to shut up. I’ve seen the truth whenever I give the slightest pushback, even if it’s just asking “why”. WHY will it be okay? WHY do I matter on my own human merits? They never have answers and usually just get angry that the magic words didn’t work.
The example pic of the signs up at the college really made me laugh without a note of joy, since that was where I first noticed the pattern. I was at the end of my tether, being harassed for not letting the RA’s friend play wall-shakingly loud music at all hours without complaint, at a school that wouldn’t let me transfer credits if I left so that’s 3 years sunk, with only a rotating series of Pysch students serving as “counselling”, and would eventually have a massive nervous breakdown. But as I kept inching closer & closer to that, guess what sentiments kept getting thrown at me. I don’t think there was real concern there; there was just a desire to change the subject to something more upbeat. Even the “counselors” did that, when they weren’t talking mostly about their own dating woes (which, given I didn’t know I was aroace at the time, was… so very fun). Whatever school that was, I just know in my heart that there was at least one student who saw those signs & had the same STFU reaction I did.
It’s all part of a larger conversation I wish people would have, instead of dismissing it. One about how, in mostly well-intended efforts to “end the stigma” around mental health & mental illness, all that was created was a new & equally damaging stigma. That there are probably people like me, who’ve turned away from supposed supports or have been told outright that they’re somehow doing their depression “wrong”, because they didn’t feel like being babied. The whole “you matter” scene always feels like it’s talking down to you, assuming you’re just a child who needs a little bit of reassurance to be just fine and that’s all. And because the internet has kinda ruined 90% of psychological terminology and/or prefers to use Buzzfeed quizzes to actual diagnoses, that usually IS all that they need.
But if you need more than a pat on the head and a compliment? If you need actual help trusting people again or feeling like it’s worthwhile to leave your house again or to not have that constant low-simmering frustration at keeping up your “acceptable” front all the time? Well, then, you’re just not trying now. YOU’RE the one that just wants “attention” or is being ungrateful.
It’s not gonna be okay, cuz when you act like it will as a matter of nature, you just keep ignoring the things that you could fix. And if you can’t say WHY I “matter”, then I know you’re full of shit. I can’t find comfort in blow-offs anymore, and it only irritates me that apparently I am in the minority for this. As an online friend named Darci once put it, “The people who say ‘it gets better’ only say it because it did for THEM. No one thinks about all the people who it didn’t ‘get better’ for, because they’re not here to ask.”
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This week’s video recommendation: “It’s as if every Pixar writer got therapy degrees and decided every protagonist needs to go through therapy sessions.” Honestly, this video sums up a LOT of my problems not just with recent Disney/Pixar movies & their monofocus on yelling at the animators’ parents via their characters but about what is celebrated in animation circles online. Namely, the desire to illustrate a Very Important Lesson About Trauma rather than actually tell a decent story.
It seems like every single thing that gets a massive following in online animation circles is something that is being EXTREMELY heavy-handed with its messaging, especially if it’s about something they’d probably heard in passing in a Psych class. It’s one thing to use topics like intergenerational trauma (which is an unfortunately common experience) or to have a journey setup be a metaphor for healing from some inner wound. That’s fundamental to storytelling, but when it’s used badly and/or used in everything, it becomes a crutch. But damn if it isn’t the quickest & easiest way to get online animation fans to defend you to the death.
There’s some stuff that I was initially excited for but dropped once it became clear that it was made with this audience in mind. There’s stuff where it’s grafted onto pre-existing characters where it just doesn’t fit, but if you point this out, you get attacked for not seeing some “realistic” or “deep” vision that just isn’t actually present. There’s stuff that instantly attracted this “let’s dissect the intensely obvious message like it’s some well-woven theme instead of literally being stated to the camera” audience, thus ensuring I’ll never bother with it. But so long as animation fandom can slap a vaguely psychological sounding term on it, it’ll get that audience. That’s bad enough, but when animators knowingly encourage & cater to this audience (I can list examples if desired but y’all should know them), that’s when it makes me kinda sad for the future of the industry.
Look, I’m not saying that stories & heroes shouldn’t have any traumatic elements. I’d be a massive hypocrite if I did, and I work HARD to make sure that I don’t fall into that wangst trap. Not sure if I’m successful, but I’ll leave that for any readers I may have to decide (if they exist, that is, they’re as elusive as Bigfoot). I DEFINITELY try to avoid the “turn to the screen and spell it out for the audience so they can feel extra smart for ‘noticing’ something that was already ham-fisted” trend that’s decried in the video.
At the end of the day, it’s movies for people who don’t take therapy to get better and improve their lives. They take therapy to have all of their issues “validated” and treat them like key personality quirks, to be told it’s never their fault & there’s nothing that they need to do to fix it, that’s always on someone else. I can’t stand people like that in my daily life, so why should I waste my time with movies or TV shows that do the exact same thing? More than any art style, THIS is the trend in animation whose death I cannot wait to see.
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Lightning-squared round! The stuff I used to post on micro-blog sites like Xwitter & Bluesky, only without the risk of running into unwell term searchers.
Look, edgelords, it was already obnoxious enough when a sizable chunk of people online (especially at Bluesky) decided that any & every person who references Jonny Quest in a positive, non-Adult-Swim way HAS to be doing so out of gleeful racism, but you really didn’t need to start doing exactly that to “prove” their stupid point.
The overwhelming urge to write a Puella Magi universe story that’s also a dig at a very beloved recent comic story that I utterly loathed is killing me. The last thing I need is another writing WIP that I wind up freezing on after a while…
Oh, hey, speaking of JQ… thanks to the people who appeared out of the woodwork at long last to agree with me that the 2nd season of Real Adventures was the better season. I was alone in that in the old Yahoo ML days and still felt like I was even now, thanks to most TRAJQ fans seemingly being there 90% for either Jessie or shipping or both. Also, the 2nd season didn’t have the lead character voiced by the asshole who’d proudly produce The Biggest Loser and doing a shit job at voice acting too.
One of the worst things about the rise of AI videos on YouTube is that there’s even more demand for “face reveals” for anyone who just wants to narrate/use a proxy avatar like a PNG or VTuber rig, since it’s automatically assumed that anyone who just doesn’t want to be on camera isn’t real. Privacy really is a dead concept now.
Gotta love seeing someone debunking false info that was playing on left-leaning biases to get spread being met with both “well, the other side does it, so let us do this one” and calling the people preferring to stick to the truth “centrists”. Again, I find myself almost respecting the honesty of the right just going “yep, we’re assholes, we don’t care” instead of trying to justify it. Almost.
Wow, y’all really dropped that whole “don't hold the horrible shit Israel is doing against all Jewish people” thing and just dove right into being awful, huh?
Saw one of those “like this and I’ll give my opinion of you” posts on Bluesky, and as tempted as I am to do it, I don’t need to be reminded that no one actually likes or cares about me any more than usual.
Sometimes I'll pop on social media, see a moot who has thoroughly deteriorated into just the worst behavior & attitude in the past couple of years, and think to myself, “Yet people like him wonder why the r-slur is making a comeback.” I guarantee you, if you’re reading this & think it's about you, it's not, you're good.
It's not just the “forever stuck in high school” thing that makes that engagement announcement cringey. It’s that someone whose lyric writing makes me look sublime & poetic is casting herself as “the English teacher”.
Every story I hear from BookTok related events is worse than the last. It'd be better to be illiterate than to be part of that whole scene.
Oh boy, Supergirl as an obnoxious Zoomer coed AND the movie's taking cues by a run by my most-hated writer, the ex-CIA asshole? Thanks for saving me time & money!
“Hey, Wrestlesky, can everyone be normal about the AEW/Arena 2300 situation?” Lol. Lololol. El. Oh. El.
Funny, I don’t remember the whole “having a dog is contributing to climate change” line getting pushback when Vox & The Nib did numerous articles trying to guilt you into killing your pet. I wanna think it’s cuz people finally realized that these pieces are bought & paid-for by the actual culprits, but given that The Nib also popularized the whole “only bigots own dogs” thing at the same time & y’all still run with THAT, I’m pretty sure it’s just that the “wrong” people are saying it now.
Every time I see AEW and/or its fans leaning into the “it’s for the sickos” thing, I have one question. Which sickos, the ones that doxxed & threatened someone for not sufficiently worshipping the greasy cowboy or the ones that helped bully both LuFisto & Thunder Rosa into being suicidal? Cuz that’s your online fanbase, and that’s who Tony & Co keep encouraging with the whole “sickos” thing. Maybe one day I'll talk more about this, but I need to gather more wards to scare off anyone from Wrestlesky.
“I just can't get invested in something if it has ZERO romance in it.” Oh, so YOU’RE the reason that keeps happening to ruin otherwise fine stories.
Someone needs to tell porndogs that someone or something biting a lip isn’t inherently sexual…
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Well, that’s it for another week. Since I’ve been doing cat pics of my one kitty, I’ve decided to include one of my other cat for a change. Here he is, loafing & silently begging for his dinner, after knocking the paper underneath him off my desk.
See you next entry!
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