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.
—
There are certain aphorisms that make my skin crawl upon hearing them said in all sincerity, and one of the biggest is “hurt people hurt people”. Not only is it a little pissant to type out without it looking like you’re double typing, it’s also the ultimate excuse for bad behavior, bad writing, bad… everything. And I seldom ever see it applied to the defense of an actual incident where that might apply, only ever to justify letting someone’s favorite squishy continue being awful without any counterbalance.
Thus, I was very glad that this video popped up on my horizon and said, “No, it’s okay to hate someone even if they’re ~hurting~, cuz they always have a choice in their behavior.”
Now, quick disclaimer: I don’t watch the digital circus thingie show. I watched the pilot, and it was… fine. But between it becoming catnip for the AI slop fetish farms to steal from online and attracting an audience that would turn around & defend that by angrily declaring “its not for kids!1!” when people pointed out the layers of grossness, I lost interest in it. So sadly, it made perfect sense that the audience it attracted of fragile fandom children (in their 20s & 30s) would see a character who’s a complete piece of shit, whose design is “(implicitly white) willowy thin dude”, and turn him into the pure & innocent Sexyman of their dreams. It, along with shipping, is one of the few ways that they’re capable of connecting with any media. Having only seen the pilot I knew that guy would get the “it’s okay, he had a sad backstory” pass. They have a lot of those to dole out, unfortunately.
I wish I knew who drew this, because this has been pretty much every “villain” in every cartoon in the past decade or so that’s become popular with fandom kids. Even when the canon villain ISN’T that, they’ll still try to cram them into this mold.
The worst part, as you’ll see if you poke through the comments of the video, is that people really don’t want to accept that this phenomenon exists. They want to believe that, no, the sad backstory justifies it, cuz they’re secretly sooooo sad about it despite everything that says otherwise. Or no, you’re actually evil & bad for hating anyone, let alone someone who hurts you as a way to make themselves feel better for a microsecond. It’s just a matter of ~reaching out~ and of ever-affordable, ever-abundant, ever-effective CBT therapy, and then they’ll be okay. It’s ~cruel~ of you to assume otherwise from their history and behavior.
There are whole series (which I am NOT naming) aimed at kids where the villains routinely do terrible things & wrack up body counts & cause massive amounts of suffering… but they’re given a pass cuz we got to see their softer sides now & then, or we learned that they had an abusive parent, or they were picked on for a disability-coded trait, or there was an even worse villain making them do these things. No apologies, no moments where they realize that they need to make amends, just the cartoon above from the heroes (with maybe the “jerk” in their circle pointing out that hey, is that really okay, cuz they did a lot of evil stuff, to underline that only a “jerk” would be concerned about accountability). For all that people think it did that, not even Steven Universe went that far and showed that, yes, you can still just… dislike people who hurt you, and that reaching out to the “hurt” person who hurt you doesn’t always end well for you & that’s on them. That’s somehow worse than “it’s okay, you had a sad backstory” to a not-insignificant chunk of the audience.
Even when a creator makes things extremely clear and handles the topic well, there’s still an audience tendency to fall back on the aphorism. Yes, it’s time to praise Umineko again. The Ushiromiya siblings are all shaped by their abusive upbringings, but Rosa in particular gets special attention. She was abused by both her parents & her older siblings, and the story makes it clear that this has adversely affected her. What it doesn’t do, however, is use her own upbringing as an excuse for her own abusive treatment of her daughter Maria, which ranges from abandoning for days to go on a trip to breaking Maria’s things to beating her horribly in public for behaving “under” her age. An explanation, maybe, but it’s clear that there’s no excusing of her behavior. Her moments of clarity when she realizes that she genuinely loves her daughter only serve to make her tendency to default to neglect or abuse that much more tragic, because somewhere along the line, those reactions became Rosa’s default. She’s not sympathetic - she’s pitiable. Yet people will try to paint her as such because of those lucid moments or will shift focus to the (admittedly pretty cool) scene with the goat demons & two sawed-off shotguns or fall back on a skeletal understanding of PTSD to wave it all away. When it comes to certain topics, Ryukishi07 is not a subtle man, and this is one of them. Yet, they still choose to miss the point.
Look, this is a topic near to me creatively, since it’s one of those themes that I want to put into my work but know that I probably don’t have the skill to handle. When does “hurt people hurt people” become a crutch that lets someone constantly get away with making the worst choices? Is there a hierarchy of whose “hurt” matters more & thus justifies worse behavior? What’s the toll of deliberately NOT choosing to use that crutch, even though it was readily available to you? And most importantly - how ham-fisted do you as a creator need to address these topics so that the audience will actually “get” them instead of falling back into fannish self-righteousness? It’s an infuriating thing, and given how many people in “nerd media” circles mistake reading Wikihow for actual real-world experience with difficult topics, I don’t see the audience getting any better about ignoring the Sexymans or the misused psyche terms in favor of the actual story.
—
Lighting-squared round! Just imagine that familiar stock Hanna-Barbera lightning sound effect playing..
It sucks that work is the only time I know for sure when I’ll have time to do my nails, because once I have an email I need to respond to, I’m bound to smudge them at least a little.
“Sex negativity is fashy, you NEED to be public about what turns you on cuz it’s healthier!” Counterpart: you’re a fucking diaper freak now. Even the least p*do-ish interpretations of that aren’t ANY kind of healthy. Also, having enough rudimentary social awareness to recognize when a topic should or shouldn’t be shouted about around strangers is not “sex negativity”. It’s just you getting so isolated & warped that you’ve developed an actual gooner brain. God DAMN, has this person deteriorated in the past few months… I gotta stop checking, cuz it’s just gonna get worse.
I’m enjoying the Crescent Memoria event in Magia Exedra, but I also dread when the inevitable happens to Sumire. I’m also curious if the thread about the territorial disputes in her town is gonna be picked up in the next part.
Maybe I’d be less jaded about politics if the ones that align the most with me didn’t seem to enjoy being suckered by obvious grifters, while laughing smugly at their equal opposites being suckered by their own obvious grifters. But they also probably think “Won’t Get Fooled Again” isn’t anything more than a theme song to a bad TV show, so…
I don’t know how to edit Wikipedia - and I don’t WANT to know - so it’s stupid that I am consistently bothered that the Pier 34/Club Heat collapse isn’t listed as a “nightclub disaster” on the site. Can’t help but feel it’s part of a “eh, it’s just Philly” attitude people interested in man-made disasters & their history tend to have towards stuff that happens there.
Oh, they’re going to make a Buck Rogers movie? Hmm… Oh, the screenwriter is the same guy whose comics started the whole “Doug Ramsey is a creepy autistic stereotype unrecognizable from any & all past characterizations now cuz certain Big Name Fans Turned Pros wanted that” thing that’s led us to here? Ew, I’m out.
Another day, another p*do diaper freak trying to hide behind claims of being “asexual”... and no pushback from the ace community cuz they’re so desperate to be seen as “like ~normal~” that they’ll give a pass to these sorts.
“What went wrong for the WWF in 1999?” I can think of one very big thing off the top of my head…
Pendog updated for Halloween! Poke around, say hi to the trick or treaters (including a couple familiar faces), and see if you’re able to figure out the puzzles.
Today in “Mela, You Need To Stop Looking At Fandom Spaces”, an attempt to determine where a dubious bit of info on IMDB originated turns into a weird rant/headcanon about Thatcher, cuz the poster seems to think that no one in the world had the name “Margaret” before her.
There are many words I'd use to describe Britt Baker, but “legend” definitely isn't one of them.
It’s amazing how much losing someone who was a passive presence in your life for your actual calendar existence stings. Pierre Robert’s passing feels less like the loss of a local celebrity and more like a pleasant natural force ceasing to exist. He was probably the last old-school FM DJs out there, doing stuff like playing an entire vinyl album or playing music from artists that weren’t in the station format just because he felt like it to doing interviews to seemingly attending every single concert that came through Philly. The kind of FM radio that was fading out by the 80s and is all but gone now (to the point some stations don’t even have in-house DJs) lived on with him. Even if MMR plays “Alice’s Restaurant” this Thanksgiving, it’s never gonna feel the same. Farewell, thank you, and rest well, good citizen.
—
Well, that’s another week older and deeper in debt. Instead of a cat pic, this week I’m posting my last rose of the season on my bush, poking out of its winter burlap bundle.
Yellow roses really are the loveliest. Not pictured: the wonderful sweet scent.
Hoping everyone enjoyed Halloween and see you next time!
No comments:
Post a Comment