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Western Animation - Discuss American, Canadian, and European cartoons here (or just bitch about wokeshit, I guess)
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HOLY SHIT, EVEN 20 YEARS AGO PEOPLE WERE ALREADY SNIFFING THEIR OWN FARTS ABOUT SUBVERTING THIS EXPECTATION IN FICTION. EVERY MONTH I GET SEVERAL HEHE HAHA FUNNI TOONS/COMICS ON YOUTUBE WHERE THE ENTIRE JOKE IS THE FACT THAT THE GUY/GIRL WAS ACTUALLY INTO THE SAME SEXED RIVAL/FRIEND INSTEAD OF AN ALLEGED STRAIGHT LOVE INTEREST ALL ALONG. WOOOW HOW DARING AND UBER ORIGINAL!
I have heard about the fact that media is always a decade late in terms of representing reality, but this is like a strawman based on the freaking 50s.
These people are horribly, horribly outdated and sheltered. Somebody get a broom and sweep these dusty fuckers out of the studios.
>So many times, young girls in movies and TV talk about boys, or they're princesses.
Yes, because that's what they talk about, and what they fantasize about being, respectively
I have mentioned this in the post where I shared my impression on the movie, but the media came from one extreme to the other. All these retards refer to a problem of a restrictive portrayal of how girls act. Back then writers were lazy and didn't bother to delve deeper than the most obvious observation and hyperbolize it. Now these fucks do the same mistakes but in the reverse direction.
KDH and Totally Spies back in the day did their homework right. Because, I don't know, you can easily make girl characters gush about boys but also give them interests and traits beyond that? In fact, you can use the boy craze to characterize them? Oh wait, you actually have to do some goddamn writing work instead of wrinkling your face at the audience you are supposed to make a movie for.
"Little girls, how can you want well-written stories where heroines fall in love with cute anime boys instead of my creepy self-therapy dyke fantasy? Clearly must be the work of patriarchy and conservative networks!"
"Little girls, how can you want well-written stories where heroines fall in love with cute anime boys instead of my creepy self-therapy dyke fantasy? Clearly must be the work of patriarchy and conservative networks!"
but I don't get why little girls wanting to be princesses is so bad. You get to wear pretty dresses, live in a big castle, and do whatever you want. What little girl wouldn't want that kind of life? They always talk about "toxic masculinity", yet girls not wanting to be like men is bad?
Christ, now I’m remembering a personal artcow I’ve got who’s basically an overgrown tumblrina. Making comics about feminist activist princesses who don’t need no man, because “there’s nothing romantic about getting married off at 17 to a spoiled prince who does nothing for the rights of women in his kingdom”. Ignoring the fact that he can’t really do shit until his dad dies.
But as for the general reasons why princesses are allegedly bad? The usual arguments are “normalizing strict gender roles, damsel in distress archetype, overemphasis on physical beauty, and emphasizing a lack of agency on her own destiny”. So yeah, mostly outdated shit.
Actually, I just realized it but the "sealing up the Panda" thing could easily be seen as an allegory for getting a hysterectomy since you're using a powerful ritual to seal away your menstruation cycle forever.
Millennial calarts lady: halt, check this original idea of mine! What if a whimsical girl show but.... ugly, cynical and mudding up female friendships with lesbian overtones? Also no cute boy love interests unless they are gay. My honest reaction:
Christ, now I’m remembering a personal artcow I’ve got who’s basically an overgrown tumblrina. Making comics about feminist activist princesses who don’t need no man, because “there’s nothing romantic about getting married off at 17 to a spoiled prince who does nothing for the rights of women in his kingdom”. Ignoring the fact that he can’t really do shit until his dad dies.
But as for the general reasons why princesses are allegedly bad? The usual arguments are “normalizing strict gender roles, damsel in distress archetype, overemphasis on physical beauty, and emphasizing a lack of agency on her own destiny”. So yeah, mostly outdated shit.
Dealing with GLITCH recently has unironically made me sympathize with the network executives,
Some people really just want to complain about their “trauma” ( aka average first world middle class problems). And they feel entitled to millions of dollars and hours of man power to make a show as a replacement for therapy.
That was where I was at when it came out, I saw it with a friend online and I loved it, but he shit on my reaction like "you think the last movie you saw is the best movie you've seen," so I started getting all irony-poisoned and afraid to like things. Well FUCK YOU [redacted] I WAS RIGHT!
The most irritating part, to me, is that it's not just a line, it's a LIE. Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Beauty and the Beast, The Little Mermaid, everyone holds these movies in contempt like they're horrible sexist propaganda, but I suspect they never actually cared about princess movies. They already dismiss them as girly-therefore-stupid-and-lame, then they take the most bad faith surface-level misinterpretations and are like "wow, your whole genre is stupid and I hate it, I'm gonna subvert it!" and they make the most boring and bitter irony-poisoned bullshit as a result and wonder why nobody likes it. You can't "fix" a genre, let alone write it properly, if you hate it and don't actually care about it to begin with!
as someone who genuinely likes Turning Red (yes yes call me retarded I don't care) the lore is basically this:
A long time ago, the family's patriarch went off to war and left the womenfolk vulnerable. The matriarch begged the gods or ancestors or w/e to give her the power to save her daughters, so they granted her the ability to transform into a giant red panda and kill anyone that tried to hurt her community. She passed this ability down the female line of the family, so now when the girls in the Lee family come of age, their hair turns red and they can turn into a red panda too. It's triggered by strong emotions, which are generally frowned upon, and it's less useful in the modern day than it is in ancient china to be a giant animal, so after their panda powers awaken the Lee women do a ceremony and seal their panda away in a totem (usually jade jewellery. It's like the soul gems in Madoka.) After that, their hair goes back to black and they can't access their powers anymore.
They expect Mei to NOT turn into her panda form for a month 'til the soonest red moon ceremony (it has to be on a red moon), because "oh you won't be able to control yourself and it's dangerous," but Mei sneaks around and turns into her panda form all the time for fun and profit, and she learns how to control it better than any other woman in her family as a result. She gets into trouble though, plot happens, bla bla bla, anyway during the ceremony she sees her panda and refuses to get rid of it because she's grown attached to it, and she runs off. Her mom is SO FUCKING MAD about it that her panda shatters the jade it's trapped in and she transforms into a giant kaiju that the whole family has to stop with their own panda powers.
They decide to let Mei keep her panda unsealed after that and their lives are better, etc. The "abortion" joke at the end of the movie is Mei about to head out with her friends (which she wasn't allowed to do before) and she has her panda ears and tail out like accessories. Her mom is like "you're not going out like that," and Mei says "My panda, my choice, mom!" They look like they're about to fight, but it's a bit and they hug it out and it's okay. It was absolutely jarring and I think that phrase was too intense for that scene, but it's not as horrible in-context as it is out of context.
SO TL;DR: they don't unlock the panda form later on, that's the whole point. They lock their unpleasant feelings away and never think about them again, except Mei doesn't want to do that, and because of that she learns how to use her feelings in a healthier way and it heals the family's generational issues. That's one of the big metaphors of the movie, that and menstruation (which is mostly used as a joke, but does make the "selling access to her panda" thing inappropriate. I don't know if this movie could've avoided that implication though, any kid selling access to something only they have and keeping it a secret from their parents is gonna look bad no matter what. We live in a post-Epstein world at this point, nothing is safe anymore.)
I've said this about turning red before, but compared to the self servicing feminist writers working for Disney gave menstruation in turning reds wake (molly Mcgee, and moon girl in particular) I have mixed feelings about it. There's only like a couple of scenes where they say period and discuss to some extent WHAT it is but you can either skip or ignore the scenes and not miss much. (But like you said it's next to impossible to not see anything unsettling in the subplot of Mei offering photos with herself as the panda for money...In light of the likes of epsiten)
Compare that to molly Mcgee, the episode title alone (a period piece) ot just went on and on and on about it...and it got everything...wrong like you'd swear it wasn't written by actual women but genderspecial genejokes who worship periods...cause they want to be able to have them (and never will)
And moon girl? They actually wanted a whole song called "spread your wings" which would have had them using actual winged pads as angel wings to fly with. What they went with wasn't much better.
She passed this ability down the female line of the family, so now when the girls in the Lee family come of age, their hair turns red and they can turn into a red panda too. It's triggered by strong emotions, which are generally frowned upon, and it's less useful in the modern day than it is in ancient china to be a giant animal, so after their panda powers awaken the Lee women do a ceremony and seal their panda away in a totem (usually jade jewellery. It's like the soul gems in Madoka.) After that, their hair goes back to black and they can't access their powers anymore.
I do too. As a femoid myself, I like the idea of having one or two period things in media so young girls know it's normal and it's not this like, super secret "you're dirty and evil" nonsense. It's part of life, it doesn't need to be a horrible secret, whatever. But then it's just cringe and weird and almost fetishistic when the cartoons actually do it.
I liked that one episode of Teen Titans way back when, when Starfire went through Tamaranian puberty and didn't know what was going on, and had to be reassured that no matter what changed, her friends would still love her. It wasn't a literal period, it was alien nonsense, but it was fun and got the same point across. It's kind of funny looking back on it now, how Starfire's parents didn't tell her anything about it so she ended up running into the arms of a friendly stranger that would tell her the truth...and then try to kill and eat her because they were some kind of Tamaranian-cocoon-eating monster. It's like a metaphor for kids getting groomed.
Or like putting a 12 year old on a cocktail of antidepressants and mood stabilizers instead of actually dealing with her growing pains
I do too. As a femoid myself, I like the idea of having one or two period things in media so young girls know it's normal and it's not this like, super secret "you're dirty and evil" nonsense. It's part of life, it doesn't need to be a horrible secret, whatever. But then it's just cringe and weird and almost fetishistic when the cartoons actually do it.
I liked that one episode of Teen Titans way back when, when Starfire went through Tamaranian puberty and didn't know what was going on, and had to be reassured that no matter what changed, her friends would still love her. It wasn't a literal period, it was alien nonsense, but it was fun and got the same point across. It's kind of funny looking back on it now, how Starfire's parents didn't tell her anything about it so she ended up running into the arms of a friendly stranger that would tell her the truth...and then try to kill and eat her because they were some kind of Tamaranian-cocoon-eating monster. It's like a metaphor for kids getting groomed.
I think the problem with periods in animation is that they often try way too hard to make it some beautiful spiritual hippie shit. Its never 'oh (x) cant join our swimming adventure today bc she has her period, we will see her next time tho!' its YOU ARE A MYSTICAL CREATURE ENTERING WOMANHOOD. Like damn I know some spheres shame it too much but you dont have to overcorrect this much either by overly celebrating something that sucks and adds 0 potential benefits to your life till youre an adult who wants to have kids...
And some kids get their period at like age 8 and have no interest in 'entering womanhood' or anything yet. Really, its best to just portray it as neutral as possible and not try to tie it to any concept or message in kids media. Its just a bodily function/mild ailment, its like trying to make a meaningful story around the ability to piss or the common cold.
Mei's mom (Ming) forbade Mei from going to a boyband concert, which is what Mei was raising money for by selling panda merchandise and where she ran off to from her ceremony. Ming loses her mind, she goes full kaiju-panda and attacks the concert, and that's where the big showdown happens. She's completely blinded by rage and she scolds Mei for disobeying her and for not being a "good little Mei-Mei," and Mei basically snaps like "I'm not your little Mei-Mei anymore, I'm thirteen! I like boys and music and GYRATING, deal with it!!"
Then the family's like "we can do the ritual on Ming if we get her in a circle," they draw this giant circle and tell Mei to lure her into it, so Mei provokes Ming by arguing with her. Ming is like "BOYBANDS ARE SO VULGAR" and Mei's like "YOU WANT VULGAR, THIS IS VULGAR," and she starts dancing around to piss off her mom, including the so-called "twerking."
The thing that bugs me is calling it "twerking," because I feel like it was barely twerking. It was more like hopping around with her ass in the air, like an angry cat or something. Something else is that it doesn't pretend there's no baggage around the act of shaking your ass as a dance move, like, the whole point of that moment is Mei is doing something her mom would find distasteful/inappropriate to piss her off because A) now we can finally have this fight we've been narrowly avoiding the whole movie, and B) we need to get Ming into this giant chalk circle on the ground and the only way to do that is make her mad.
What actually knocks Ming out is Mei leaping high into the air and ramming herself into Ming's forehead, sending her falling back onto the metal scaffolding around the stage. The KO wasn't intended, which is why all the other Lee women had to unleash their pandas, so they would have the strength to drag Ming's giant kaiju ass into the circle all the way to let the ritual work.
Did you watch Turning Red? The question made me think you haven't seen it, but now you're saying it's a horrible overall film even without that one scene.
One of my favorite moments is at the end of the movie, after the rest of the family leaves the spirit realm and allow Mei to stay behind so she can leave her panda unsealed, and the passage out of the spirit realm disappears leaving Mei alone with her ancestor that started the whole thing. She's never met Sun Yee before, obviously, she's just been this painting in their family shrine, and the only other time she SAW sun yee was when they first started the panda-removal ceremony before and sun yee was the guardian of the passage that strips the panda out of you. Her face was dour and sad, she was still, she was still like this figure rather than a person. Then when Mei decides to keep her panda and sees Sun Yee standing there, she asks her "I'm not going to regret this, am I?" and Sun Yee smiles for the first time in the movie, whisks Mei into her arms and flies them into the sky where they watch the red moon fade, and Sun Yee (in her panda form) boops Mei's nose with hers, giving her this like, spiritual blessing from the first woman to BE a panda to the first girl to not reject it in generations. It's beautiful and emotional and it's extremely chinese tbh, but idk it's just really cool. Here's the clip if you want to see it:
