I’m not entirely sure how to respond to that…. Is it ok if I ask for examples? Do you mean that they are retellings of Asian folklore by white people, or fantasy books based on Asian culture, or something else?
I should point out it’s less that non-Asian people have written about Asian culture so much as ALL my childhood Asian storybooks were written by white/non-Asian people
Ive just been told that my favorite book as a kid, written originally in 1986, about a group of male dogs and their adventures, is bad because it lacks diversity.
Did anyone actually outright state to you that it was “bad”?
If so, I think they’re missing the very point of this kind of examination. It’s not really about denouncing the media of the past as much as it is about helping creators make effort to avoid pitfalls in the future.
We are only going to progress as a society, and works we have right now are by no means guaranteed to meet the standards we set in the future. No matter how good a work is in this regard, the point is that there’s always room for improvement, you know?
At least that’s the way I understand it. Please correct me if I’m wrong about this somehow, it’s definitely gonna matter when I create content myself!
I suspect they didn’t call it bad but rather criticized it’s lack of diversity and because too many people think any criticism = bad your mind just went there
Yeah, as much as I hate to admit it, I have an especially hard time intuiting the difference between criticism and bad, especially when it comes to my childhood favorites. 😟
Like I know criticism doesn’t mean bad intellectually, but I just can’t seem to get my brain to bend that way. 😑
Any neurodivergents around here have any debugging tips I could use for my brain on this kind of thing?
You could think of criticism as “a variety of points of view,” or “critique,” or “critical analysis” or “critical theory” — that is, that someone cares enough about the art form, finds it important enough, finds it complex enough, to want to study it and analyze it and enter into dialogue with it and create conversation around it. That could be true whether the content is “good” or “bad”. From that perspective, criticism is a gift. It’s from others who want to provide valuable feedback on how a particular statement or action affects them, so that the person making the action or statement can learn from that feedback.
It’s as much a gift as an honest performance appraisal can be at work. Hard to hear, but so much better, long run, than NOT hearing it.
…Just as Joyce needed to hear from Walkie that her talk of “God-pertunities” was unhelpful.
To be fair, the post you were replying to did use the word “bad”, so it wasn’t necessarily YOU who made the error, if it was one at all.
Also, I am curious how a book starring dogs can lack diversity, like was it because they were all male? Did they just “read” as white (in which case, I’d argue that’s a dumb argument)? Were they all similar breeds of dogs? Or was it in reference to the human characters that may or may not have been present?
And once again I accidentally hit the “flag” button by mistake when trying to reply, sorry. I really wish they’d move that so it’s not right next to “reply”, I’d be shocked if I’m the only one making that mistake.
If we’re talking actual dogs, and not anthro characters like Busytown or Mickey Mouse, then I’d say gender diversity is a lesser issue (though I’m not denying that it is an issue).
What I mean is, we need diverse fictional characters so that people of color, and women, and other minorities, can see themselves represented in stories. But no human reader is gonna see themselves in a dog anyway. If you’ll allow the comparison, that’s like saying that an actual Chinese person will feel represented by a Siamese cat.
And yes, OBVIOUSLY this depends heavily on how human-like mannerisms these dogs have. (That’s why the Chinese cat in Aritocats is definitely a harmful ethnic stereotype, for instance.)
As an Asian man (living in the US mind you) I have to say that I disagree with the idea that the Siamese cat in Aristocats is a harmful stereotype. I’ve watched the film dozens of times. I don’t find it offensive at all. Frankly, it’s a hilarious caricature of how Asians appear to lots of white people. I don’t see it any different than when a street artist draws a caricature of you, or seeing a caricature of a politician. I don’t believe they’re actually that way, it’s obviously an exaggeration. It’s only harmful if it’s coming from a position of hate, or malice. I don’t know anybody in my community that thinks different. It would be nice to have our opinion considered once in a while, instead of a bunch of white folks trying to tell us how to feel.
I apologize for giving too one-sided a view of things, but you’re wrong to claim that I didn’t consider Asian people’s opinions. I’ve seen a fair number of articles by Asian people, complaining about ethnic caricatures like that cat.
If I was too one-sided, then I apologize for that. My bad. I just wanna be clear that my statement was in fact based on what I’ve heard Asian people say.
May have previously mentioned that I write a romance novel series. The main character is a multi-linguistic high-empathy blonde woman. Recently, while working on a Child Crush list (inspired by a certain Youtuber), I realized that said main character draws a lot of inspiration from Melody from Hey Dude and Gadget from Rescue Rangers, both of whom I felt a kinship with when I was a kid.
Technically, it’s Twilight: Eclipse. Also technically, Bella is from a big city and then moves to a small town. Not that this really matters, or that I can even say for sure what the specific plot of Twilight: Eclipse is. I’m pretty sure there’s a scene in a cave.
I’m not familiar with the Twilight series, but would that cave scene be the one where people watch projected shadows believing them to be reality, and then one exits the cave, encounters things that actually are real and not merely projections, and their new knowledge makes them no longer fit into the group they came from?
No, I think that was something else. But it might still be fitting for Joyce.
Actually twilight is about a vampire old enough to be a senior citizen who creepily breaks into the bedroom of a high school girl, and she thinks it’s romantic
I subscribe to the Brandon Sanderson/Dan Wells opinion on this:
Twilight is something teenage girls like, and therefore everyone thinks this makes it a great target to dunk on. It’s not some great masterpiece or anything, but it’s not remotely as bad as people make it out to be and it’s frankly a bad look to be criticizing it for not being more than it is.
I think it sucks how people tend to mock things teenage girls like, and what also sucks is some of the things marketed to teenage girls. Twilight for me falls under both of those. There are a wide variety of criticisms of it, some you can tell are rooted in “teen girls are stupid” and some that aren’t, but it does get hard to separate sometimes because the teen girl haters will pick up and repeat the more valid criticisms while really just caring about tearing it down.
I originally hated it because my first name is Jacob and when I was a kid I liked to claim I was a werewolf, and the first time I heard of twilight was when a girl in my middle school choir accused me of ripping it off in a *very* mean tone, and she didn’t believe me when I (honestly) said I had never heard of twilight and had been pretending to be a werewolf for YEARS before it was published. Then the more I heard about it the dumber it sounded to me. I never read it, but of the people who’s opinions regarding fiction I respect who have, none of them thought the writing quality was good. I have also not heard anything good about the movies, but those are adaptations so that’s fairly par for the course.
I’ve never been one to especially care about target demographics, so I don’t *think* I fall into the category of people hating it because it’s for teenage girls, especially considering some of my favorite shows of all time were targeted at young girls (MLP:FIM, DC Super Hero Girls, like half of Disney channel, etc.), but I can’t really be sure if I AM biased in that direction, I just don’t think I am.
I have a complicated history with the Twilight series, but I did read the original series (there’s the series of four novels, then the novella, then the two companion novels). I was thirteen when Breaking Dawn (the fourth book in the series) came out. A little while after that, I developed an anti-Twilight stance, but did not have one when reading them.
My objection to it is it allowed young people to objectify senior citizens sexually and I continue to get barely legal girls on my dating profile when I’m looking for mature women.
And there’s this obsession with going out of their way to watch it so you can dunk on it, instead of passing by and saying “not for me, but you lot have fun.” I’m not that into paranormal romance, and I can’t say I’ve ever been forced to watch or read Twilight.
I don’t doubt that there’s plenty of people who hate it for misogynistic reasons but there’s plenty of valid reasons to hate it – namely that Edward is abusive as hell (so’s Jacob but they never actually get together so).
Yeah, Twilight is bad, but it’s not uniquely horrible or anything. It’s about as bad as 95% of the other YA crap out there, the films deserve about as much scorn as the Transformers movies do…
…which is still a lot, of course, but it really is amazing that the series aimed at teenage girls gets all of the vitriolic hatred, while equally shitty stuff aimed at teenage boys gets mountains of defense.
Any genre that gets “big” will have floods of writers doing it, some for the expected cash cow, some because they are genuinely inspired by popular works, some by sheer coincidence, etc. The issue is that the more different writers are writing in the same genre, the higher the percentage of crap within that genre gets, and for the last few decades most or all of the “big” genres have been YA targeted, paranormal romance, dystopias, coming of age fantasy, etc.
If we assume the percentage of authors publishing crap is more or less constant, naturally any genre with more authors publishing is gonna get more of the crap. YA is easily one of the most popular target demographics, but you see a similar issue with middle-grade targeted books, you have tons of attempts at being the next Percy Jackson or the next Mr. Lemoncello’s Library, and most of them suck, some are gems, but most of them aren’t. Part of the problem is also that publishers have a similar attitude as TV and movie producers, which is that kid-targeted media doesn’t need to be well-written because “kids can’t tell the difference”, which is idiotic, but I digress.
A writer who isn’t already famous who expects YA to be a cash cow for them is kind of laughable, tbh. Some people do get lucky like that, I just wouldn’t recommend anyone have the expectation.
“The issue is that the more different writers are writing in the same genre, the higher the percentage of crap within that genre gets”– see, no. Like, I can understand your logic, I think. Say there are three good authors with good manuscripts out there, and publishers want to publish ten books. Then seven of the books won’t be so good. And if publishers want to publish twenty books, but there are still only three good authors, then seventeen of those books won’t be so good. But 1. the issue there is publisher demand, not number of writers; an increase in writers actually allows agents, editors, and publishers to be more selective. 2. I don’t see that as what’s happening because there aren’t actually only “three good authors.”
Along with the growth in YA has been a growth in the diversity of authors getting stories out there. This is a good thing. (There’s still a long way to go in terms of diversity in publishing, of course.) This is happening in MG as well. There are plenty of stories that I’m sure were good that the world never got to see because of gatekeeping in publishing. There’s not actually a shortage of stories. The more different writers are writing in the same genre, the more that genre gets to grow.
(Also, publishers know that A LOT of YA is purchased and read by adults, and that, to some extent, it needs to hold up with them as well.)
Saying 95% of YA is bad is an opinion I disagree with, but if you think 95% of all published literature is bad, I’m more whatever about it. But if you think YA more “crap” than other genres, I find that pretty yikes.
Also, a lot of anti-YA rhetoric, along with anti-romance rhetoric, has ties to misogyny, with the majority of authors and readers being female.
I’ve met a couple of published YA writers at conventions, and yes, it’s not a field where you can give up your day job when you get your first book deal…. One of them argued that it’s actually harder than writing for adults, as the target audience can be incredibly picky.
When you talk about how the high interest in a genre allows publishers to be more selective, I think you need to take self-publishing into account, too. These days, there are more self-published books than ever before, and self-published books constitute a higher percentage of what’s being published than ever before, too.
That’s not to say that self-published stuff is bad. I buy and read self-published novels and comics, and some of my all-time faves are self-pub stuff.
My point is this: There’s always a horde of lazy writers out there who are eager to jump on whatever bandwagon is going strong at the moment, and write whatever they think will sell instead of what they’re actually passionate about and interested in. When a genre–dystopian YA, let’s say–gets big, then the ever existing mass of lazy writers will churn out hastily-written dystopian YA novels and hope that these will sell just by being part of a popular genre.
So it’s not that popular genres are bad, or that publishers publish anything no matter the quality, but it’s a fact (if you ask me) that the popular genres will be the ones to get the sloppily written cash-in novels. I’m not claiming that, say, epic poetry is automatically good, but I am saying that if you buy a newly written epic poem then there’s little chance that the author wrote it in a weekend in order to earn big bucks from undistinguishing readers. That’s usually more common in the big genres.
Disclaimers: This isn’t a diss against dystopian YA in itself; I’m fully aware that the opposite also happens sometimes and super-niche genres gets poorly written crap that sells just because there’s so little competition (just look at dinosaur erotica, or better yet, don’t).
I’m just saying that we no longer live in a world where publishers rejecting a novel makes it hard for that novel to reach the public.
Okay. I was specifically talking about traditionally published stuff, but I could have made that clearer. Like, I was going to go into the “if you count self-published/unpublished writing” then the idea is more accurate, but it wasn’t what I was talking about, and I thought I had gone on long enough.
That’s actually referenced/joked about in chapter 1.1 of the web serial “Pact” by Wildbow:
“What looks like a goblin could be a demon, or a wraith, or a glamour. I mean, you remember those ‘vampires’ from out west.”
“The faerie? Sure.”
“You’re not getting what I’m saying. If they can fool themselves into thinking they’re vampires, and believe it to the point it becomes sort of true, sparkly skin aside, then they can fool us.”
It’s fantasy. None of these vampires are written like they’re the equivalent of very old humans, especially the ones who are treated most like Bella’s peers. If this isn’t what you’d go with re: How Vampires Work, okay, but that’s what this criticism comes down to.
Also, a lot of people fantasize about things that would not necessarily be great for them in real life, and that is okay. If you actually have a stalker, you can’t stop them from stalking you even if you really, really want to. If you’re reading about or thinking about a scenario where stalking is portrayed as romantic or hot and you don’t want to keep doing it, you can revoke consent at any time by putting down the book or thinking about something else. When someone thinks actual stalking is okay because they read about it in a book that was never trying to be realistic and they are not a very young child, then somewhere along the line there was a catastrophic failure in sex and relationship education, and also that person is probably trying to justify a bad situation they have no idea how to deal with. (I’m not including scenarios where two weirdos are doing a thing consensually, which is probably generally okay.)
Unfortunately, “a catastrophic failure in sex and relationship education” was pretty common at the time the books were coming out. A thirteen year old just starting to think about getting into a relationship could read a book where stalking from a romantic interest is acceptable and think it’s not as big of a deal as they might otherwise. And the “never trying to be realistic”– that’s obvious for the stuff like vampires, but less so for how relationships work.
While I sort if see your point, I also think fiction is in many way people’s first introduction into many subjects, and it makes sense to look at it critically. If for no other reason so people can point out the bad lessons and try to explain that they are wrong.
You don’t get to go ‘well they’re not actually the equivalent of very old people’ and then go on and on about how ohhhhhh they’re so wise and mature and polite and experienced and totally from a different era and he’s lived so much longer than you.
And there’s a world of difference between someone who thinks stalking/possessiveness/controlling behaviour is hot in fiction and someone who doesn’t know how to recognize those things and how dangerous they’d be in real life and so defends it as fine because ‘he’s hot/they’re in love/etc.’ I’ve seen SO MANY people saying Edward isn’t abusive when his behaviour absolutely is. If you’re into it in fiction, fine, but that is very much not the problem with Twilight.
Are they? I’m very visually impaired so even with glasses I cannot see a difference in color at all. They look like the same shade of blue to me so it must be subtle.
They’re different enough that I could quickly see they weren’t the same by looking at the comic, but similar in both being flashblack blue. I could give you the hex code for each of them, but those numbers mean remarkably little to me, so I don’t think that’d be helpful.
The thing I’m using says Joyce’s hair is #72acdc. What’s fun about that AC/DC formed in 1973. So. Close. And Dorothy’s hair is #83b9e7. I don’t have a fun fact for that.
Hmmm….. i dont know how Willis picks colors, albeit because most professional tutorials I’ve seen in the past emphasize the importance of removing colors that look too similar to each other.
Also for what it’s worth, the “b9” in Dorothy’s hex sounds like “benign”.
In this particular instance, my personal bet is that Willis drew most things with the usual colors and then applied a hue filter to make everything flashback-blue.
This is useful to keep light/dark constrast consistent with usual ones, but can lead to very close colors since we can no longer use hue to distinguih them.
Yeah, in case you’re wondering, definitely more variation in luminosity and saturation in the regular pallette than the blue one. Checked it myself in photoshop.
Sixties/Seventies kid here. It’s a practical impossibility to find anything from my pop culture childhood that ISN’T objectionable by modern standards.
Song of the South avoided my 80s childhood, Br’er Rabbit didn’t. I keep catching myself wanting to reference the briar patch, which wouldn’t be an issue if not for the reason Rabbit was caught in the first place…
Some John Wayne movies are just painful for me to watch due to what wasn’t considered objectionable in that time period. I know people that still like them though. I would hope that adults would have the capacity to understand what might be acceptable for old movies, would not be in actual everyday interactions, but you never know.
Yeah it really always carries a silent secondary part that no one says out loud.
“It wasn’t a problem [for white people/men/cis people/straight folk] at the time.”
Because, for everyone else? The people enduring that in their daily lives? It was a fucking problem. So I’m totally with you. I cannot stand that justification.
At some level though, cultural context does matter. There’s definitely some works where everyone should have seen it as a problem from the start, but what about stuff that was pushing the boundaries in a progressive direction for the time, but is still problematic by today’s standards?
Like maybe the original Star Trek for an example?
Yup. Obviously we can and should critique all media from all ranges of time, but if we threw out everything we deemed “problematic” by modern standards we really wouldn’t have much left to enjoy.
Also imo “problematic” isn’t the same as a film that outright encourages bigotry and hatred, like say Triumph of the Will or Birth of a Nation. Fuck both those movies, but they also aren’t the same thing as John Wayne in Searchers. Context always matters.
I tend to think of it – and public figures outside of media as well – not so much as where they (or the works) were on some absolute scale, but on where they were pushing the culture. Which direction were they moving.
Unspoken corrolary that certain people DEFINITELY imply by it:
“This was a masterpiece, in spite of those old-fashioned attitudes. So without those old-fashioned attitudes it probably wouldn’t be a masterpiece. So we need more old-fashioned attitudes in fiction today so we can create masterpieces instead of all that SJW crap.”
Just in general to the discussion, I think it is possible to both be nostalgic for something and understand it has problematic parts and issues. Sometimes we can’t just remove the good feelings & memories many of us got during childhood from old problematic media. And i don’t think the point there is to say those good feelings should never have happened, or to disconnect from the positives we felt. It’s just that alongside that we should have to also reckon with the issues problematic media perpetuated, and the people it hurts, and realize what was wrong, and try to do better next time.
If you know what’s in there, you can take appropriate steps to filter it out. If you pretend it’s fine you’re gonna be ingesting all sorts of stuff you might really not want to.
>Enjoys Lovecraft’s writing, also sees all the racism in it.
Sixties/Seventies non-American kid here. Always thought it was Sixties/Seventies (and later) society that was objectionable. Pop culture almost by definition does not usually transcend current society values.
Yeah, but it was Shinzo Abe. I’ve heard some stuff about that guy, and he didn’t sound like the kind of politician worth mourning. Severely conservative, nationalist, homophobic, thought Japan was given an unfair rep after WW2 with historical revisionist views, lots of bullshit like that. Everyone I heard talk about him basically said “Fuck that guy”, so fuck that guy.
A political assassination is not comparable to the accidental death of somebody who went out of his way to make people happier around the world. Takahashi mattered and still matters to people from all sorts of backgrounds. Abe is gonna be just another politician who got what was coming to him.
It’s worth noting that by the standards of Japanese politics, Abe was nothing particularly out of the ordinary—and on a variety of topics he was practically moderate compared to many others in his party, including to the current Prime Minister. It’s also worth noting that Japan has effectively been a single-party state since basically the end of WWII, with the LDP being the only party of note. Abe was also retired from personal politics, being 67 years old and having stepped down as Prime Minister in 2020 due to health reasons.
There’s also the possibility that Abe’s assassin—who is ex-SDF, I’ll note (and that being a rather right-leaning sector of Japanese society to say the least)—may have killed him because he wasn’t extreme/bigoted enough to his liking, which…yeah.
In conclusion: political assassinations almost never work out the way the murderer intended them to do so, and if they do…that does not make it a good thing. I had little love lost for Abe either, but it’s no one’s place to make themselves out as judge, jury, and executioner.
Also factor in that gun violence is almost unheard-of in Japan (let alone directed towards such a high-profile figure as a former Prime Minister), and you should be able to see why this makes today a Not Fun Day In Japan, as Azhrei Vep put it above.
Sure, there’s definitely some nuance there. But frankly, I’m entirely out of patience and compassion for Abe’s brand of politician, regardless of how normal they are in their home country. And if an extremist gets taken down by somebody more extreme, that’s still one less extremist. I’m not going to ease up, the guy sucked ass. Way I see it, at least somebody did something.
Whatever your views on Abe, for legal reasons if nothing else I’d strongly advise you against making pro-assassination comments (“he got what was coming to him”, “at least somebody did something”, etc.) on Willis’s website.
Yeah, you’ve got a point there. Sorry, I got a little ornery there. Seeing that guy held up next to Takahashi got me more riled than it probably should have.
You seem to take issue with blood family vs adopted family(even if bio parents are still alive) but I’m not sure why. I could be wrong of course. So what do you mean, for clarity’s sake?
Considering that there are actually people who kidnap children out there (and people), I would hope that the difference could be recognized. If anything, I think Tangled is more of a commentary on an abusive relationship (separation from friends and kept isolated, blamed for anything that goes wrong even if it isn’t their fault, etc) than adoption vs blood relatives.
It’s a common trope, and it’s problematic. Another example is from Once.
Sure, she kidnaped a baby. She also was the only mom he ever knew, has by all appearances been responsible and loving, though gentleness, admittedly, isn’t in her nature (equating gentalness with love is it’s own mess btw). But as soon as he meets his ‘real’ mom he picks her. And when he’s dying, only his ‘real’ mom can save him with true love’s kiss.
I can’t speak to the film ‘Once’ having not seen it, and google has failed me.
But in Tangled, Gothal is a gaslighting and controlling monster. There are
actual children who were kidnapped to be used as slaves. Comparing Gothal
to an adoptive parent spits in the face of those victims, and the people who actual adopt children.
Yes! Exactly! Thank you. I was wondering if anyone would call out the fact that Dorothy is Dead Wrong in her characterization of the movie. Gothel had ZERO love for Rapunzel.
I kinda feel like finding out you were KIDNAPPED BY YOUR “MOTHER” is enough grounds to renounce her and pick the bio mom. Yeah, even if the kidnapper was responsible and loving (and I’m taking your word on that since I haven’t seen it).
I dunno, maybe I’m touchy because the Supreme Court revising fostering/adoption rules for Native kids is giving me massive “Sixties Scoop” alarm bells, but I feel like there’s a distinct difference between ‘loving adoptive mom’ and ‘loving KIDNAPPER’.
In this case, as I think they’re referring to the show Once Upon a Time, Henry was placed up for adoption by Emma (who was 18 and in jail at the time of his birth). Henry was adopted by Regina, the Evil Queen, who may have tried to be good to him, but also at that point sucked in general. She brought him to a town full of residents under a curse she was responsible for, in which he was the only one who aged. That’s a fucking bizarre upbringing she subjected him to.
She may have tried her best to be loving. He didn’t feel loved. So when he learned he had a birth mother, he hoped it would be different. As the show progressed, his relationship with both of them grew.
Are you talking about the show Once Upon a Time? Because I feel like the relationships between Henry and Regina and Emma were a lot more complex than that, and later in the series, Regina does break some curse by giving Henry true love’s kiss.
I do in general agree that the idea that biological family should be valued over adoptive family is present in media and it’s messed up. There’s just more to it in these examples.
^ Yeah, this. Bio family automatically going over adopted family in media is a real thing and it is shitty (Winx Club is the first that comes to mind but there’s other examples), but I feel like citing examples where the child was KIDNAPPED and there were a lot of toxic or abusive elements to the relationship (Regina ….definitely is not solely a responsible, loving mom according to my friends) or are straight up abusive like Gothel are not good examples of that.
You mean Once Upon a Time? To her credit, Regina didn’t actually kidnap Henry; she genuinely wanted to adopt a child and be a family (I forget if she picked him due to coincidence or magic, but it doesn’t really matter). But the rest of it? Sure, Regina is loving but not gentle to Henry, but she was also the embodiment of “I Hate Everything But You,” which can’t be an easy way to grow up (how lonely must it be when your mom hates and/or bullies literally everyone else in town?). Emma kissing Henry in the first finale wasn’t a reflection of Regina’s love; it’s not like Regina tried first and it didn’t work. And they make it very clear in later seasons that Regina and Henry are loyal to each other and share true love. In the first season Henry supports Emma because he wants to break the curse, which is diametrically opposed to his mother’s goals; as soon as the curse breaks, he’s basically the only one defending Regina because he DOES love her, even knowing that she’s the evil queen. Like, did you not watch past the first season, or…?
Also, according to one of my friends, the worst part of their relationship was him not trusting her for a while because she kept doing evil things like ‘wanting to kill everyone in town’. Which……I think is VALID???? Like, I feel like if I was adopted and my mom was talking like that, then YEAH I might wanna keep my distance for a bit.
Yeahhh no. Mother Gothel (though i adore her) was not by all appearances loving and responsible, she was abusive and manipulative in a way that would look caring on the surface. Like a lot of abusive mother’s. Just look at the song Mother Knows Best, it’s literally all just Gothel fearmongering and tearing repunsel down, even subtly insulting her like a negging PUA, so that she can maintain ultimate control over her. Tangled is about how you can escape an abusive household, even if it’s the only family you ever knew
Zach was talking about a different character (Regina Mills from Once Upon a Time) with the “by all appearances been responsible and loving.” Still not a description I’d agree with.
I would seriously question whether she owes a couple of random strangers any loyalty just because they share genes. But she definitely needed to get the ever-loving hell away from Gothel, because yeeesh… there’s nothing good there.
I don’t necessarily see it as a loyalty issue. Rapunzel discovered who she was and wanted to reunite with the family that missed her and had been mourning her loss – on a kingdom-wide scale, no less – since her abduction. Also, looking at it from another viewpoint, Rapunzel had a duty to her kingdom to fulfill her role as the Princess and rule when her parents step down. It may be difficult to understand for those of us raised in a well-established republic, but historically kingdoms have needed kings. Especially if the king/queen or royal family or whatever was a good one, the people would insist on having a king or king-equivalent.
Also … where else do you think she would go? I suppose she could live in the tower, but that place had some less-than-optimal baggage, and she stated several times that she was glad she left it. If she and Eugene tried to make a life without reconnecting with her family, he would still be an outlaw, and would likely be forced to continue his thieving ways, which might cut short BOTH their lives.
I consider that she made the best decision she could have. Yes, building a relationship with her parents will take time and effort, but it’s worth it.
Tangled is a movie where a child is forcibly separated from her family and placed into the care of a manipulative narcissist whose interest in her is entirely self-serving, and I’m very sad to say that there’s quite a bit of real precedent for that.
….. you mean the actual family being the mother that abused her? That kept her locked in a friggin tower until she was 16/17 and escaped? That kidnapped her from a family that wanted her but had no choice in keeping her? I am unsure what twist you’re trying to make here but it’s impressive and you should look for a career in gymnastics.
I get what you mean but, like, that is the worst movie for that take. Mother Gothel not only kidnaped Rapunzel (which is not quite “adoption”) but also abused her for her whole life.
This is not “adopted family” vs “blood family”, this is “blood family” vs “abusive kidnapper”.
I think the case on Tangled is pretty clear as to why she’d choose the bio parents, but it is part of that trend where writers will tend to construct situations where the adoptive parents are abusive and returning to the bio parents fixes the problem. so even when the writing justifies it, it’s a trend worth examining.
I think its more of a trend than it should be its not the only trope.
Bio parent (usually dad) who abandoned you just wants back into your life for selfish reason’s the one’s who raised you are your real parents is also a trope.
Usually its giving bio parents too much credit but not over your actual parents.
I know its the entire story but I think the Willowbee’s is a good reversal of that trope.
Kinda agree, kinda think it’s more complicated, definitely think this movie has some issues with how it portrays familial relationships.
She was kidnapped by someone who then abused her which is not generally the same as adoption, and as someone who had extremely shitty parents, of course I would’ve been excited to find out I had bonus parents who might be less shitty – I would’ve ditched the family I grew up with too, regardless of which relations were by blood and which were by adoption. And if I had an excuse to go “my abusers weren’t my real parents anyway”, I absolutely would’ve leaned into it.
But I had a really bad time watching that movie because Gothel definitely felt like she was written as an abusive mother, albeit a little bit of an exaggeration of one because Tangled is a cartoon. Whenever she was doing things onscreen I kept being reminded of shit my real abusive mom did to me, and to the best of my knowledge we are blood relatives and no kidnapping was involved. And then… Rapunzel’s feelings about this were all resolved extremely neatly when the kidnapping plotline was revealed, as if she hadn’t spent her entire life thinking of this person as her mother and wouldn’t have had a lot of residual emotions about it even if at the same time this person kind of wasn’t her mother, too. (This also went really weirdly with the love interest going back to using his birth name, although it’s hard to explain why.)
I think Disney did a lot better with the child abuse plotline in The Little Mermaid, even though it ended with a reconciliation which is generally not my thing. It wasn’t my own shitty abusive childhood, but everything in that plotline felt pretty true to shitty families and people in general.
Tangled the TV series , where birth parent is better than kidnapper but still an abusive piece of crap, and even if you stand up to him your supposed to recognise the abuse comes from a place of love and reconcile.
As an adoptive parent, I think this is kinda a weird take. Even beyond the whole Rapunzel was kidnapped not adopted part. Adoptive family and bio family are both “real” family. Adoptees often feel like they’re betraying one set of parents by loving the other, which can lead to extra tension. But if both sets of parents treat each other with respect and encourage the adoptee to love both, it often goes much better. I get that some bio parents (and some adoptive parents too) really really suck and aren’t a safe relationship for the kid, but I don’t believe that’s the case most of the time.
I read somewhere that the original design for Rapunzel was way more “Disney Princess Beautiful”, but everyone who looked at it was like “…That’s just Barbie”.
So they added little “flaws” like an overbite, some babyfat, subtle freckles, a bit of a slouch, etc, and it ended up a vast improvement. Making her a little dorky only made her more attractive.
I love the idea that someone is going to see Joyce’s hair parted slightly differently and go, ah, this is obviously meant to evoke Rapunzel’s famous side part!
I always have mixed feelings about Tangled because despite enjoying the movie it essentially put the final nail in the coffin for Disney’s era of 2D animation.
On the other hand, have you seen the Tangled TV show? It’s not hand-drawn, but it does have a very unique, very appealing 2D art-style. (And is pretty good generally. I kinda love how much Deep Lore it has, considering the Deep Lore of the movie is just, “Magic flower turns into magic girl, don’t think too hard about it.” Also some of the songs are bangers.)
Counterpoint: Tangled had a traditional 2D animated television series that followed after the movie for three seasons, and it is *extremely good*! Perhaps that will help settle some of those mixed feelings?
They even got the original voice actors back! And they sing! With music by Alan Menken, even!
Seriously I love Tangled but I honestly might love the sequel series even more.
Ay, nice! Glad to introduce someone new to such a good show. The premiere has some great songs all on its own, and then they somehow manage to get even better as the show goes on. “The View From Up Here” and “Waiting in the Wings” from season 2 are my personal favorites, hope you enjoy the show enough to get that far!
I don’t blame Princess and the Frog at all. It was essentially released to be a flop much like Treasure Planet because Disney was already transitioning away from 2D. They released in like a week before James Cameron’s Avatar and with a much smaller advertising budget for reasons we can leave up to speculation. It’s a very good movie that’s only flaw is probably underplaying the racism that was existent at the time the movie takes place cause it’s a family movie.
That’s not what I meant at all. There’s things like the fact Tiana’s best friend is probably an heiress to a plantation fortune and that her mom worked for them and it’s just kind of glossed over. It presents southern white folks of the time as better than they probably were which is the same tone as Pocahontas subtlety presenting a both sides argument to colonization. It’s just Disney presenting a bit of idealized misinformation that is common with their brand. It undercuts the message they could’ve shown.
I’m not asking for hard racism in a kids movie just don’t try to show revisionist history cause that’s a problem too.
I was being slightly facetious, but I also did just straight-up misunderstand what you meant. I’m not smart/educated enough to come up with ways to not have hard-R racism in a kids’ movie and also not shy away from its existence, aside from “pick a different setting maybe”. Then again, neither were the movie’s writers, and they got paid (beans but it’s still a check) and I didn’t.
I do wonder if it will reverse at some point, though I doubt it will ever go back to being fully hand drawn because that is a lot of time and work (man power) in order to make a good movie. You might end up with hand drawn stuff that is then manipulated in a computer to interact with stuff, or stylistic cgi.
Or people could stop being so goddamn cheap when they’re the biggest media conglomerates around and just pay some fucking animators. Who cares if it’s expensive, they’ll make it back in a week anyhow.
But that’s how you become the biggest media conglomerate around…
Jokes aside, yeah stuff like that has always bothered me with movies, especially animated ones: you are producing a single thing that will make hundreds of millions in revenue, how can the producers be that cheap?
And for fuck’s sake, it’s not like they aren’t hiring teams of people to basically go in and animate/rotoscope their live-action shit as it is. Especially with Disney, where they have like 5 real-life streets they film on and the rest is basically sound stages and green screens that have to be filled in digitally any-fuckin’-way, so I really don’t wanna hear “It’s too hard/expensive” because that just minimises how much work already goes into every fucking frame noatyer what they’re doing. And if anything, a drawing is much easier to get a fantastical idea out of because you don’t need Theoden in front of your camera so you can make him Animorphs into a slightly fucking older version of himself.
All I’m saying is, if you can pay Benedict Cumberbatch a million bucks to talk at a tennis ball for 20 minutes and somehow get a fucking superhero wizard movie out of that, you can pay some hungry artist to draw something more visually impressive a couple thousand times.
She has more of a middle-ish part normally (you can see hair tucked behind both ears) and now it swoops a lot more to one side.
I also understand her not wanting to change her hair part, because I am much more aware of my hair and the sensation of the part when it’s different. Not that I have any hair atm since my solution to sensory overload one day was to shave it all off…
I think Willis is continuing to lampshade: I had to go back and it does look like Joyce had left-sweeping bangs (her left) at the start of the comic, and she has right-sweeping here and also after the time-skip. Like Yumi said, it’s not rigidly consistent, but I think the change is there.
Relatedly, right-facing things/people in comic panels (our right) go along the flow of reading, so they’re usually the hero or just a chill person. Left-facing goes against the flow of reading, so there’s a confrontational or rebellious nature to it.
Makes sense why it would ever-so-subtly assist us in feeling out Joyce’s change during the skip and after Halloween. That’s my take!
What was the movie they watched at Joyce and Becky’s movie party that they hadn’t been allowed to see before because it promoted the idea that parents don’t always know best? I was thinking it was tangled. Maybe it was Frozen? That’d fit better…
Well, I can’t reveal much details here, but I can tell you that while the game is likely gonna be rated M for mature, there’s very likely not gonna be any blood or gore, and there’s not gonna be any content that’s gonna get it an Adult Only rating.
Lots of voice roles to choose from, so don’t worry!
Do you have a Twitter or Discord handle with which I can reach you?
Dorothy would probably look pretty cute in a Dark Magician Girl cosplay, tbh. Velma’s always an excellent choice, but sometimes a gal wants some variety.
Also, Tangled is a pretty alright movie. The sapient dog-horse was a little much, but the scenery was nice to look at and Mother Gothel was hot, so it evened out.
(Just got Yu-Gi-Oh! on the mind today. Found out this morning that the creator died in some kind of diving accident, which… fuck. Spent all day at a bonfire memorial on FF14 celebrating the guy’s creations though, which helped ease the blow.)
My favorite princess to this day is still Cinderella. Yes, I realize the character animations are often derpy and she falls in love with a guy in the course of a few hours while barely talking to him. But something always resonated with me about the situation she was in.
The villains weren’t fantastical. They didn’t have magic, couldn’t turn into dragons or curse people, didn’t try to murder anyone, etc. They were just *mean*.
In the Disney version, you don’t see them physically abuse Cinderella or deprive her of survival necessities like food. The stepmother blatantly favors the other two children and showers them with gifts while only making sure that Cinderella’s basic needs are met. She treats her like a servant, giving her an unfair amount of chores and criticizing her when she does a less-than-perfect job. The stepmother enjoys a power rush when she’s able to control and manipulate Cinderella into working harder for a show of “kindness” that will never come. She expects Cinderella to be grateful for what little she’s been given.
Cinderella didn’t want to go on an adventure or find romance and she wasn’t chased away in fear for her life. She just wanted one night to relax and have fun. And she was crushed when the stepmother pretended to allow it before destroying her ability to go.
Granted Cinderella could talk to animals and was given magical assistance to get to the ball anyway. But getting to the ball wasn’t possible *without* magic. There was no realistic way for her to get past all the obstacles put in her way by the stepmother.
And having no realistic way of getting out of a realistically neglectful, emotionally abusive situation with an authoritative family member was something I was very, very familiar with.
i just assumed she was done by saying ‘how’s the hair’ as opposed to/rather than a ‘check-in’ like “how’s it look so far?” but who knows there’s probably enough girls around to where at least one of them would prolly have clipons. or at least flower accessories or so lol
Well sure but Dorothy makes you aware of problematic media and/or raising that you (meaning Joyce in this case) are probably just fine with forgetting or just filling away in your brain as “this is good”
Sounds like Dorothy is doing you a favor. Being aware of less-than-ideal qualities in something doesn’t bring a moral imperative to reject it wholesale.
Joyce’s relationship with movies is really weird. But when some parents are so horrible to forbid you to see Disney movies you can’t be different. In the next Disney movie there will be three generations in contrast (adventurer father who wants the son to be an adventurer, farmer son who wants the son to be a farmer and the grandson who wants to be an adventurer. The grandson is gay and everyone is totally supportive, there will also be a dog with three legs and full of joy). When I saw the presentation I thought it was an incredibly simple story, totally predictable and so extremely full of politically correct elements to became annoying (not like Tangled, that was a masterpiece of character and history) but when I think there are people in the world who they take offense at stories like this, I don’t know what to think … Maybe stories so predictable and positive to the extreme have a reason to exist after all? To offend these miserable people!
Hahaha called it! I wonder if this is just a throwaway line or if it will get explored further. Still, I’m glad I got my questions answered in terms of Joyce’s history with the movie.
Does anybody know why the RSS feed only seems to update every week or so? I assume it isn’t the intended functionality, but as far as I can determine that is how it works generally, and not just for me because I somehow did something weird to it in my feed reader.
I don’t speak XML, but my peering at the feed’s code seems to suggest that, at the current moment, it thinks that the newest comic was “Your Ex”, the last installment of “Don’t Stop Billie-ving”. That said, my feed reader thinks the latest is “Assault” which was the previous comic.
Yeah, sounds about right. Absolutely no reason I enjoyed all those shows that obsessively fixated on one activity (card games, catching animals, talking to purple birds voices by Gilbert Gottfried, etc) to the point that it dominated the world’s economy, reason at all.
“I’m interested in stories about trans people because I’m an ALLY. I feel sick when learning about transphobia, like an ALLY. I want to learn more about chest binding as an ALLY.”
–me from ages, like, 12-17
I relate to Booster in some ways because I’m also non-binary, and also a few other ways that don’t necessarily have to do with us being non-binary.
Same goes for Dina, I relate to her in a few ways because I’m also autistic, and some other ways that don’t necessarily have to do with us being autistic.
The reason we admire characters is each our own, I don’t think anyone can claim to know the way we love our favorite people and stories better than we do as unique individuals.
Aaand I flagged you by (and it is “by” I will die on this hill) accident. Sorry. Just wanted to say, I’m not 100% sure Kino’s trans? GNC, definitely, but that’s not the same thing.
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wow, feeling this
*has just noticed that some of my beloved childhood books are Asian stories… written by white people*
😳 yeah, white washing is like the corn syrup of past American media, virtually everywhere,
But at least moving forward, we can make effort to avoid it!
Believe it or not dodged that bullet just now when figuring out how to hire voice actors for my DOA fan game. Particularly though voice acting roles.
Woops ignore that repetition in that last sentence, could have SWORN I removed it before posting 😅
I’m not entirely sure how to respond to that…. Is it ok if I ask for examples? Do you mean that they are retellings of Asian folklore by white people, or fantasy books based on Asian culture, or something else?
Maybe Aladdin or Mulan
Maybe even the 1.001 nights, which where redistributed (and rewritten in some cases) by europeans
Some of them:
The Story about Ping
The Revolt of the Darumas
Shen of the Sea
The Laughing Dragon
A new one I found in a little library:
Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes
I should point out it’s less that non-Asian people have written about Asian culture so much as ALL my childhood Asian storybooks were written by white/non-Asian people
These days I counter that by reading manga 🙄
Ive just been told that my favorite book as a kid, written originally in 1986, about a group of male dogs and their adventures, is bad because it lacks diversity.
Did anyone actually outright state to you that it was “bad”?
If so, I think they’re missing the very point of this kind of examination. It’s not really about denouncing the media of the past as much as it is about helping creators make effort to avoid pitfalls in the future.
We are only going to progress as a society, and works we have right now are by no means guaranteed to meet the standards we set in the future. No matter how good a work is in this regard, the point is that there’s always room for improvement, you know?
At least that’s the way I understand it. Please correct me if I’m wrong about this somehow, it’s definitely gonna matter when I create content myself!
I suspect they didn’t call it bad but rather criticized it’s lack of diversity and because too many people think any criticism = bad your mind just went there
Yeah, as much as I hate to admit it, I have an especially hard time intuiting the difference between criticism and bad, especially when it comes to my childhood favorites. 😟
Like I know criticism doesn’t mean bad intellectually, but I just can’t seem to get my brain to bend that way. 😑
Any neurodivergents around here have any debugging tips I could use for my brain on this kind of thing?
You could think of criticism as “a variety of points of view,” or “critique,” or “critical analysis” or “critical theory” — that is, that someone cares enough about the art form, finds it important enough, finds it complex enough, to want to study it and analyze it and enter into dialogue with it and create conversation around it. That could be true whether the content is “good” or “bad”. From that perspective, criticism is a gift. It’s from others who want to provide valuable feedback on how a particular statement or action affects them, so that the person making the action or statement can learn from that feedback.
It’s as much a gift as an honest performance appraisal can be at work. Hard to hear, but so much better, long run, than NOT hearing it.
…Just as Joyce needed to hear from Walkie that her talk of “God-pertunities” was unhelpful.
When did Joyce hear that from Walkie again? I forget.
Here’s the source:
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2014/comic/book-4/04-the-whiteboard-dong-bandit/godpertunity/
Ta!
To be fair, the post you were replying to did use the word “bad”, so it wasn’t necessarily YOU who made the error, if it was one at all.
Also, I am curious how a book starring dogs can lack diversity, like was it because they were all male? Did they just “read” as white (in which case, I’d argue that’s a dumb argument)? Were they all similar breeds of dogs? Or was it in reference to the human characters that may or may not have been present?
And once again I accidentally hit the “flag” button by mistake when trying to reply, sorry. I really wish they’d move that so it’s not right next to “reply”, I’d be shocked if I’m the only one making that mistake.
To be fair, like half of criticism these days is all ” Thing bad?!” A more useful question is, are they starting a conversation, or ending it?
I suspect you haven’t seen some of the internet drama over fiction lately.
How can you have a lack of diversity if its dogs? Are there like no German Shepherds or something?
I think it’s because there are no female dogs? It’s the only reason I can think of why ktbear would feel the need tos pecify MALE dogs.
If we’re talking actual dogs, and not anthro characters like Busytown or Mickey Mouse, then I’d say gender diversity is a lesser issue (though I’m not denying that it is an issue).
What I mean is, we need diverse fictional characters so that people of color, and women, and other minorities, can see themselves represented in stories. But no human reader is gonna see themselves in a dog anyway. If you’ll allow the comparison, that’s like saying that an actual Chinese person will feel represented by a Siamese cat.
And yes, OBVIOUSLY this depends heavily on how human-like mannerisms these dogs have. (That’s why the Chinese cat in Aritocats is definitely a harmful ethnic stereotype, for instance.)
As an Asian man (living in the US mind you) I have to say that I disagree with the idea that the Siamese cat in Aristocats is a harmful stereotype. I’ve watched the film dozens of times. I don’t find it offensive at all. Frankly, it’s a hilarious caricature of how Asians appear to lots of white people. I don’t see it any different than when a street artist draws a caricature of you, or seeing a caricature of a politician. I don’t believe they’re actually that way, it’s obviously an exaggeration. It’s only harmful if it’s coming from a position of hate, or malice. I don’t know anybody in my community that thinks different. It would be nice to have our opinion considered once in a while, instead of a bunch of white folks trying to tell us how to feel.
I apologize for giving too one-sided a view of things, but you’re wrong to claim that I didn’t consider Asian people’s opinions. I’ve seen a fair number of articles by Asian people, complaining about ethnic caricatures like that cat.
If I was too one-sided, then I apologize for that. My bad. I just wanna be clear that my statement was in fact based on what I’ve heard Asian people say.
Fair enough, sorry if I came off too harshly. I just get so tried of being told what to feel…
I’m also feeling it, but in a different way.
May have previously mentioned that I write a romance novel series. The main character is a multi-linguistic high-empathy blonde woman. Recently, while working on a Child Crush list (inspired by a certain Youtuber), I realized that said main character draws a lot of inspiration from Melody from Hey Dude and Gadget from Rescue Rangers, both of whom I felt a kinship with when I was a kid.
Emerichu?
Affirmative.
Where did Joyce “absorb” tangled?
NGL, it might be that I was born in the late eighties, my childhood was mostly written by Asians (by which I mostly mean a single Asian country).
Isn’t Joyce’s favorite movie Twilight?
…The one about the smalltown girl who keeps secret from her parent her desire to be corrupted and join the legions of evil?
Technically, it’s Twilight: Eclipse. Also technically, Bella is from a big city and then moves to a small town. Not that this really matters, or that I can even say for sure what the specific plot of Twilight: Eclipse is. I’m pretty sure there’s a scene in a cave.
I’m not familiar with the Twilight series, but would that cave scene be the one where people watch projected shadows believing them to be reality, and then one exits the cave, encounters things that actually are real and not merely projections, and their new knowledge makes them no longer fit into the group they came from?
No, I think that was something else. But it might still be fitting for Joyce.
Actually twilight is about a vampire old enough to be a senior citizen who creepily breaks into the bedroom of a high school girl, and she thinks it’s romantic
Actually Twilight is a silly YA romance wish fulfillment fantasy and overthinking it is sort of low-hanging fruit at this point.
I subscribe to the Brandon Sanderson/Dan Wells opinion on this:
Twilight is something teenage girls like, and therefore everyone thinks this makes it a great target to dunk on. It’s not some great masterpiece or anything, but it’s not remotely as bad as people make it out to be and it’s frankly a bad look to be criticizing it for not being more than it is.
I think it sucks how people tend to mock things teenage girls like, and what also sucks is some of the things marketed to teenage girls. Twilight for me falls under both of those. There are a wide variety of criticisms of it, some you can tell are rooted in “teen girls are stupid” and some that aren’t, but it does get hard to separate sometimes because the teen girl haters will pick up and repeat the more valid criticisms while really just caring about tearing it down.
I originally hated it because my first name is Jacob and when I was a kid I liked to claim I was a werewolf, and the first time I heard of twilight was when a girl in my middle school choir accused me of ripping it off in a *very* mean tone, and she didn’t believe me when I (honestly) said I had never heard of twilight and had been pretending to be a werewolf for YEARS before it was published. Then the more I heard about it the dumber it sounded to me. I never read it, but of the people who’s opinions regarding fiction I respect who have, none of them thought the writing quality was good. I have also not heard anything good about the movies, but those are adaptations so that’s fairly par for the course.
I’ve never been one to especially care about target demographics, so I don’t *think* I fall into the category of people hating it because it’s for teenage girls, especially considering some of my favorite shows of all time were targeted at young girls (MLP:FIM, DC Super Hero Girls, like half of Disney channel, etc.), but I can’t really be sure if I AM biased in that direction, I just don’t think I am.
I have a complicated history with the Twilight series, but I did read the original series (there’s the series of four novels, then the novella, then the two companion novels). I was thirteen when Breaking Dawn (the fourth book in the series) came out. A little while after that, I developed an anti-Twilight stance, but did not have one when reading them.
If you have sparkly vampires, people are going to dunk on it regardless of who it is for.
My objection to it is it allowed young people to objectify senior citizens sexually and I continue to get barely legal girls on my dating profile when I’m looking for mature women.
I call them grandpa chasers
And there’s this obsession with going out of their way to watch it so you can dunk on it, instead of passing by and saying “not for me, but you lot have fun.” I’m not that into paranormal romance, and I can’t say I’ve ever been forced to watch or read Twilight.
I don’t doubt that there’s plenty of people who hate it for misogynistic reasons but there’s plenty of valid reasons to hate it – namely that Edward is abusive as hell (so’s Jacob but they never actually get together so).
Yeah, Twilight is bad, but it’s not uniquely horrible or anything. It’s about as bad as 95% of the other YA crap out there, the films deserve about as much scorn as the Transformers movies do…
…which is still a lot, of course, but it really is amazing that the series aimed at teenage girls gets all of the vitriolic hatred, while equally shitty stuff aimed at teenage boys gets mountains of defense.
A general anti-YA stance isn’t actually better.
Any genre that gets “big” will have floods of writers doing it, some for the expected cash cow, some because they are genuinely inspired by popular works, some by sheer coincidence, etc. The issue is that the more different writers are writing in the same genre, the higher the percentage of crap within that genre gets, and for the last few decades most or all of the “big” genres have been YA targeted, paranormal romance, dystopias, coming of age fantasy, etc.
If we assume the percentage of authors publishing crap is more or less constant, naturally any genre with more authors publishing is gonna get more of the crap. YA is easily one of the most popular target demographics, but you see a similar issue with middle-grade targeted books, you have tons of attempts at being the next Percy Jackson or the next Mr. Lemoncello’s Library, and most of them suck, some are gems, but most of them aren’t. Part of the problem is also that publishers have a similar attitude as TV and movie producers, which is that kid-targeted media doesn’t need to be well-written because “kids can’t tell the difference”, which is idiotic, but I digress.
A writer who isn’t already famous who expects YA to be a cash cow for them is kind of laughable, tbh. Some people do get lucky like that, I just wouldn’t recommend anyone have the expectation.
“The issue is that the more different writers are writing in the same genre, the higher the percentage of crap within that genre gets”– see, no. Like, I can understand your logic, I think. Say there are three good authors with good manuscripts out there, and publishers want to publish ten books. Then seven of the books won’t be so good. And if publishers want to publish twenty books, but there are still only three good authors, then seventeen of those books won’t be so good. But 1. the issue there is publisher demand, not number of writers; an increase in writers actually allows agents, editors, and publishers to be more selective. 2. I don’t see that as what’s happening because there aren’t actually only “three good authors.”
Along with the growth in YA has been a growth in the diversity of authors getting stories out there. This is a good thing. (There’s still a long way to go in terms of diversity in publishing, of course.) This is happening in MG as well. There are plenty of stories that I’m sure were good that the world never got to see because of gatekeeping in publishing. There’s not actually a shortage of stories. The more different writers are writing in the same genre, the more that genre gets to grow.
(Also, publishers know that A LOT of YA is purchased and read by adults, and that, to some extent, it needs to hold up with them as well.)
Saying 95% of YA is bad is an opinion I disagree with, but if you think 95% of all published literature is bad, I’m more whatever about it. But if you think YA more “crap” than other genres, I find that pretty yikes.
Also, a lot of anti-YA rhetoric, along with anti-romance rhetoric, has ties to misogyny, with the majority of authors and readers being female.
Sturgeon’s Law applies, as it always does.
I’ve met a couple of published YA writers at conventions, and yes, it’s not a field where you can give up your day job when you get your first book deal…. One of them argued that it’s actually harder than writing for adults, as the target audience can be incredibly picky.
When you talk about how the high interest in a genre allows publishers to be more selective, I think you need to take self-publishing into account, too. These days, there are more self-published books than ever before, and self-published books constitute a higher percentage of what’s being published than ever before, too.
That’s not to say that self-published stuff is bad. I buy and read self-published novels and comics, and some of my all-time faves are self-pub stuff.
My point is this: There’s always a horde of lazy writers out there who are eager to jump on whatever bandwagon is going strong at the moment, and write whatever they think will sell instead of what they’re actually passionate about and interested in. When a genre–dystopian YA, let’s say–gets big, then the ever existing mass of lazy writers will churn out hastily-written dystopian YA novels and hope that these will sell just by being part of a popular genre.
So it’s not that popular genres are bad, or that publishers publish anything no matter the quality, but it’s a fact (if you ask me) that the popular genres will be the ones to get the sloppily written cash-in novels. I’m not claiming that, say, epic poetry is automatically good, but I am saying that if you buy a newly written epic poem then there’s little chance that the author wrote it in a weekend in order to earn big bucks from undistinguishing readers. That’s usually more common in the big genres.
Disclaimers: This isn’t a diss against dystopian YA in itself; I’m fully aware that the opposite also happens sometimes and super-niche genres gets poorly written crap that sells just because there’s so little competition (just look at dinosaur erotica, or better yet, don’t).
I’m just saying that we no longer live in a world where publishers rejecting a novel makes it hard for that novel to reach the public.
Okay. I was specifically talking about traditionally published stuff, but I could have made that clearer. Like, I was going to go into the “if you count self-published/unpublished writing” then the idea is more accurate, but it wasn’t what I was talking about, and I thought I had gone on long enough.
No no no, they aren’t actually vampires. They run through the forest and sparkle in the sun they’re faeries.
Fairies with an iron deficiency instead of iron burning them is the best description of twilight I have heard in a bit.
That’s actually referenced/joked about in chapter 1.1 of the web serial “Pact” by Wildbow:
“What looks like a goblin could be a demon, or a wraith, or a glamour. I mean, you remember those ‘vampires’ from out west.”
“The faerie? Sure.”
“You’re not getting what I’m saying. If they can fool themselves into thinking they’re vampires, and believe it to the point it becomes sort of true, sparkly skin aside, then they can fool us.”
But luckily, the main other romantic option also sucks.
It’s fantasy. None of these vampires are written like they’re the equivalent of very old humans, especially the ones who are treated most like Bella’s peers. If this isn’t what you’d go with re: How Vampires Work, okay, but that’s what this criticism comes down to.
Also, a lot of people fantasize about things that would not necessarily be great for them in real life, and that is okay. If you actually have a stalker, you can’t stop them from stalking you even if you really, really want to. If you’re reading about or thinking about a scenario where stalking is portrayed as romantic or hot and you don’t want to keep doing it, you can revoke consent at any time by putting down the book or thinking about something else. When someone thinks actual stalking is okay because they read about it in a book that was never trying to be realistic and they are not a very young child, then somewhere along the line there was a catastrophic failure in sex and relationship education, and also that person is probably trying to justify a bad situation they have no idea how to deal with. (I’m not including scenarios where two weirdos are doing a thing consensually, which is probably generally okay.)
the werewolf stuff was for sure pretty racist tho
Unfortunately, “a catastrophic failure in sex and relationship education” was pretty common at the time the books were coming out. A thirteen year old just starting to think about getting into a relationship could read a book where stalking from a romantic interest is acceptable and think it’s not as big of a deal as they might otherwise. And the “never trying to be realistic”– that’s obvious for the stuff like vampires, but less so for how relationships work.
While I sort if see your point, I also think fiction is in many way people’s first introduction into many subjects, and it makes sense to look at it critically. If for no other reason so people can point out the bad lessons and try to explain that they are wrong.
You don’t get to go ‘well they’re not actually the equivalent of very old people’ and then go on and on about how ohhhhhh they’re so wise and mature and polite and experienced and totally from a different era and he’s lived so much longer than you.
And there’s a world of difference between someone who thinks stalking/possessiveness/controlling behaviour is hot in fiction and someone who doesn’t know how to recognize those things and how dangerous they’d be in real life and so defends it as fine because ‘he’s hot/they’re in love/etc.’ I’ve seen SO MANY people saying Edward isn’t abusive when his behaviour absolutely is. If you’re into it in fiction, fine, but that is very much not the problem with Twilight.
I don’t think she’s saying favourite movie, just favourite disney movie.
Speaking of hair this blue atrocity allows us to pretend Joyce and Dorothy are the same kind of blonde.
like carla does
xD
The shades are still somewhat different, though.
Are they? I’m very visually impaired so even with glasses I cannot see a difference in color at all. They look like the same shade of blue to me so it must be subtle.
I actually downloaded the comic and opened it in Photoshop to check– they are indeed different shades, albeit only slightly.
They’re different enough that I could quickly see they weren’t the same by looking at the comic, but similar in both being flashblack blue. I could give you the hex code for each of them, but those numbers mean remarkably little to me, so I don’t think that’d be helpful.
Go ahead! 🙃 I love hex codes. And hexes in shows like Owl House! 😆
The thing I’m using says Joyce’s hair is #72acdc. What’s fun about that AC/DC formed in 1973. So. Close. And Dorothy’s hair is #83b9e7. I don’t have a fun fact for that.
Hmmm….. i dont know how Willis picks colors, albeit because most professional tutorials I’ve seen in the past emphasize the importance of removing colors that look too similar to each other.
Also for what it’s worth, the “b9” in Dorothy’s hex sounds like “benign”.
A benign hex, the most interesting kind of hex! 😛
In this particular instance, my personal bet is that Willis drew most things with the usual colors and then applied a hue filter to make everything flashback-blue.
This is useful to keep light/dark constrast consistent with usual ones, but can lead to very close colors since we can no longer use hue to distinguih them.
Also, Joyce gives (to me) every appearance of being AC-DC.
Joyce’s is ever so slightly darker
Yeah, in case you’re wondering, definitely more variation in luminosity and saturation in the regular pallette than the blue one. Checked it myself in photoshop.
I dunno, Joyce’s hair here seems to be a tint or two darker than Dorothy’s. Either that or I’m imagining things.
Sixties/Seventies kid here. It’s a practical impossibility to find anything from my pop culture childhood that ISN’T objectionable by modern standards.
What about AC/DC? Everybody still likes them right?
By my recollection they weren’t big in the States till I was a teenager. As for counting down their objectionability index, I’ll leave that to others.
What about Godzilla films made during that time?
Watterson had something to say about those.
Song of the South avoided my 80s childhood, Br’er Rabbit didn’t. I keep catching myself wanting to reference the briar patch, which wouldn’t be an issue if not for the reason Rabbit was caught in the first place…
Wait, what? …..[wikipedia-ing] so people have taken a phrase from an old African-American folk tale and turned it into a racist insult? People suck.
Some John Wayne movies are just painful for me to watch due to what wasn’t considered objectionable in that time period. I know people that still like them though. I would hope that adults would have the capacity to understand what might be acceptable for old movies, would not be in actual everyday interactions, but you never know.
I absolutely cannot stand the people that justify questionable media by going “it wasn’t an issue at the time”.
1) Still watching it through a 2022 lens.
2) Yes, it was.
Yeah it really always carries a silent secondary part that no one says out loud.
“It wasn’t a problem [for white people/men/cis people/straight folk] at the time.”
Because, for everyone else? The people enduring that in their daily lives? It was a fucking problem. So I’m totally with you. I cannot stand that justification.
At some level though, cultural context does matter. There’s definitely some works where everyone should have seen it as a problem from the start, but what about stuff that was pushing the boundaries in a progressive direction for the time, but is still problematic by today’s standards?
Like maybe the original Star Trek for an example?
Yup. Obviously we can and should critique all media from all ranges of time, but if we threw out everything we deemed “problematic” by modern standards we really wouldn’t have much left to enjoy.
Also imo “problematic” isn’t the same as a film that outright encourages bigotry and hatred, like say Triumph of the Will or Birth of a Nation. Fuck both those movies, but they also aren’t the same thing as John Wayne in Searchers. Context always matters.
I tend to think of it – and public figures outside of media as well – not so much as where they (or the works) were on some absolute scale, but on where they were pushing the culture. Which direction were they moving.
Or another one, the Gerry Anderson show “UFO”. Not only misogynist, but anti-cat (the Aliens were portrayed as cats).
Unspoken corrolary that certain people DEFINITELY imply by it:
“This was a masterpiece, in spite of those old-fashioned attitudes. So without those old-fashioned attitudes it probably wouldn’t be a masterpiece. So we need more old-fashioned attitudes in fiction today so we can create masterpieces instead of all that SJW crap.”
Just in general to the discussion, I think it is possible to both be nostalgic for something and understand it has problematic parts and issues. Sometimes we can’t just remove the good feelings & memories many of us got during childhood from old problematic media. And i don’t think the point there is to say those good feelings should never have happened, or to disconnect from the positives we felt. It’s just that alongside that we should have to also reckon with the issues problematic media perpetuated, and the people it hurts, and realize what was wrong, and try to do better next time.
I see it like drinking river water.
If you know what’s in there, you can take appropriate steps to filter it out. If you pretend it’s fine you’re gonna be ingesting all sorts of stuff you might really not want to.
>Enjoys Lovecraft’s writing, also sees all the racism in it.
Sixties/Seventies non-American kid here. Always thought it was Sixties/Seventies (and later) society that was objectionable. Pop culture almost by definition does not usually transcend current society values.
sorry it’s not to relevant to today’s discussion but
The creator of Yugioh died today 😢😭
R.I.P. Kazuki Takahashi
May you live on in the Heart of the Cards.
o7
Oh, that’s horrible. He had such an influence on so many.
Also, because it’s just a fun day to be in Japan, apparently: Their former prime minister was shot and killed.
Yeah, but it was Shinzo Abe. I’ve heard some stuff about that guy, and he didn’t sound like the kind of politician worth mourning. Severely conservative, nationalist, homophobic, thought Japan was given an unfair rep after WW2 with historical revisionist views, lots of bullshit like that. Everyone I heard talk about him basically said “Fuck that guy”, so fuck that guy.
A political assassination is not comparable to the accidental death of somebody who went out of his way to make people happier around the world. Takahashi mattered and still matters to people from all sorts of backgrounds. Abe is gonna be just another politician who got what was coming to him.
It’s worth noting that by the standards of Japanese politics, Abe was nothing particularly out of the ordinary—and on a variety of topics he was practically moderate compared to many others in his party, including to the current Prime Minister. It’s also worth noting that Japan has effectively been a single-party state since basically the end of WWII, with the LDP being the only party of note. Abe was also retired from personal politics, being 67 years old and having stepped down as Prime Minister in 2020 due to health reasons.
There’s also the possibility that Abe’s assassin—who is ex-SDF, I’ll note (and that being a rather right-leaning sector of Japanese society to say the least)—may have killed him because he wasn’t extreme/bigoted enough to his liking, which…yeah.
In conclusion: political assassinations almost never work out the way the murderer intended them to do so, and if they do…that does not make it a good thing. I had little love lost for Abe either, but it’s no one’s place to make themselves out as judge, jury, and executioner.
Also factor in that gun violence is almost unheard-of in Japan (let alone directed towards such a high-profile figure as a former Prime Minister), and you should be able to see why this makes today a Not Fun Day In Japan, as Azhrei Vep put it above.
I have no great love for any of Britain’s recent ex-prime ministers. But it would still be a gut-punch if one of them was actually assassinated.
Sure, there’s definitely some nuance there. But frankly, I’m entirely out of patience and compassion for Abe’s brand of politician, regardless of how normal they are in their home country. And if an extremist gets taken down by somebody more extreme, that’s still one less extremist. I’m not going to ease up, the guy sucked ass. Way I see it, at least somebody did something.
Whatever your views on Abe, for legal reasons if nothing else I’d strongly advise you against making pro-assassination comments (“he got what was coming to him”, “at least somebody did something”, etc.) on Willis’s website.
Yeah, you’ve got a point there. Sorry, I got a little ornery there. Seeing that guy held up next to Takahashi got me more riled than it probably should have.
I foresee that Mike will show, awake from his coma, say, “SUCKERS! I’M ALIVE!”
Then Ruth will shoot him out of a panic, apparently having a gun after the kidnapping.
Which is why Billie is mad.
Make Alice go to the party dressed as Mike and I buy it.
LOL
NOW PUT FLOWERS IN IT
DO IT
They’re going to San Francisco?
They’d be certain to meet some lovely people there.
Ah, Tangled, the movie about how you can always leave your actual family for rich strangers because adoption doesn’t count versus blood relations.
You seem to take issue with blood family vs adopted family(even if bio parents are still alive) but I’m not sure why. I could be wrong of course. So what do you mean, for clarity’s sake?
My brother was adopted from an abusive home and got enormous shit for it and his biological relations to a really crappy person.
So I’ve made it a point to think blood relations mean absolutely nothing.
My wife and her sister are also adoptees.
Okay but surely you can see the difference between adopting from an abusive home and kidnapping a child INTO an abusive home.
Considering that there are actually people who kidnap children out there (and people), I would hope that the difference could be recognized. If anything, I think Tangled is more of a commentary on an abusive relationship (separation from friends and kept isolated, blamed for anything that goes wrong even if it isn’t their fault, etc) than adoption vs blood relatives.
Not really sure how you get that.
Rapunzel was never “family” with the woman who kidnapped/raised her, and she returned to her real parents.
It’s a common trope, and it’s problematic. Another example is from Once.
Sure, she kidnaped a baby. She also was the only mom he ever knew, has by all appearances been responsible and loving, though gentleness, admittedly, isn’t in her nature (equating gentalness with love is it’s own mess btw). But as soon as he meets his ‘real’ mom he picks her. And when he’s dying, only his ‘real’ mom can save him with true love’s kiss.
I can’t speak to the film ‘Once’ having not seen it, and google has failed me.
But in Tangled, Gothal is a gaslighting and controlling monster. There are
actual children who were kidnapped to be used as slaves. Comparing Gothal
to an adoptive parent spits in the face of those victims, and the people who actual adopt children.
Yes! Exactly! Thank you. I was wondering if anyone would call out the fact that Dorothy is Dead Wrong in her characterization of the movie. Gothel had ZERO love for Rapunzel.
But Dorothy didn’t say she did? I also didn’t think that was Vukodlak’s point…
If your objection is that Dorothy refers to Gothel as “her mother,” that could be fair, but seems like kind of a different point.
I kinda feel like finding out you were KIDNAPPED BY YOUR “MOTHER” is enough grounds to renounce her and pick the bio mom. Yeah, even if the kidnapper was responsible and loving (and I’m taking your word on that since I haven’t seen it).
I dunno, maybe I’m touchy because the Supreme Court revising fostering/adoption rules for Native kids is giving me massive “Sixties Scoop” alarm bells, but I feel like there’s a distinct difference between ‘loving adoptive mom’ and ‘loving KIDNAPPER’.
In this case, as I think they’re referring to the show Once Upon a Time, Henry was placed up for adoption by Emma (who was 18 and in jail at the time of his birth). Henry was adopted by Regina, the Evil Queen, who may have tried to be good to him, but also at that point sucked in general. She brought him to a town full of residents under a curse she was responsible for, in which he was the only one who aged. That’s a fucking bizarre upbringing she subjected him to.
She may have tried her best to be loving. He didn’t feel loved. So when he learned he had a birth mother, he hoped it would be different. As the show progressed, his relationship with both of them grew.
Yeah, realized that after I posted this. I took their word for it on the kidnapped part.
Oh, no. I looked up Sixties Scoop, and went down that rabbithole… so terribly sad, now. 🙁
Yeaaaahhhhh. It’s not an easy thing to learn about.
Are you talking about the show Once Upon a Time? Because I feel like the relationships between Henry and Regina and Emma were a lot more complex than that, and later in the series, Regina does break some curse by giving Henry true love’s kiss.
I do in general agree that the idea that biological family should be valued over adoptive family is present in media and it’s messed up. There’s just more to it in these examples.
^ Yeah, this. Bio family automatically going over adopted family in media is a real thing and it is shitty (Winx Club is the first that comes to mind but there’s other examples), but I feel like citing examples where the child was KIDNAPPED and there were a lot of toxic or abusive elements to the relationship (Regina ….definitely is not solely a responsible, loving mom according to my friends) or are straight up abusive like Gothel are not good examples of that.
You mean Once Upon a Time? To her credit, Regina didn’t actually kidnap Henry; she genuinely wanted to adopt a child and be a family (I forget if she picked him due to coincidence or magic, but it doesn’t really matter). But the rest of it? Sure, Regina is loving but not gentle to Henry, but she was also the embodiment of “I Hate Everything But You,” which can’t be an easy way to grow up (how lonely must it be when your mom hates and/or bullies literally everyone else in town?). Emma kissing Henry in the first finale wasn’t a reflection of Regina’s love; it’s not like Regina tried first and it didn’t work. And they make it very clear in later seasons that Regina and Henry are loyal to each other and share true love. In the first season Henry supports Emma because he wants to break the curse, which is diametrically opposed to his mother’s goals; as soon as the curse breaks, he’s basically the only one defending Regina because he DOES love her, even knowing that she’s the evil queen. Like, did you not watch past the first season, or…?
Also, according to one of my friends, the worst part of their relationship was him not trusting her for a while because she kept doing evil things like ‘wanting to kill everyone in town’. Which……I think is VALID???? Like, I feel like if I was adopted and my mom was talking like that, then YEAH I might wanna keep my distance for a bit.
I mean, I feel like if I wasn’t adopted and my mom was talking like that, I’d still want to keep my distance.
^ Okay, fair point. XD Any mom.
I think The Dark One had something to do with the coincidence of Henry getting adopted.
Yeahhh no. Mother Gothel (though i adore her) was not by all appearances loving and responsible, she was abusive and manipulative in a way that would look caring on the surface. Like a lot of abusive mother’s. Just look at the song Mother Knows Best, it’s literally all just Gothel fearmongering and tearing repunsel down, even subtly insulting her like a negging PUA, so that she can maintain ultimate control over her. Tangled is about how you can escape an abusive household, even if it’s the only family you ever knew
Zach was talking about a different character (Regina Mills from Once Upon a Time) with the “by all appearances been responsible and loving.” Still not a description I’d agree with.
Yes, your actual family to who you owe your loyalty, the woman who abducted and abused you.
I would seriously question whether she owes a couple of random strangers any loyalty just because they share genes. But she definitely needed to get the ever-loving hell away from Gothel, because yeeesh… there’s nothing good there.
I don’t necessarily see it as a loyalty issue. Rapunzel discovered who she was and wanted to reunite with the family that missed her and had been mourning her loss – on a kingdom-wide scale, no less – since her abduction. Also, looking at it from another viewpoint, Rapunzel had a duty to her kingdom to fulfill her role as the Princess and rule when her parents step down. It may be difficult to understand for those of us raised in a well-established republic, but historically kingdoms have needed kings. Especially if the king/queen or royal family or whatever was a good one, the people would insist on having a king or king-equivalent.
Also … where else do you think she would go? I suppose she could live in the tower, but that place had some less-than-optimal baggage, and she stated several times that she was glad she left it. If she and Eugene tried to make a life without reconnecting with her family, he would still be an outlaw, and would likely be forced to continue his thieving ways, which might cut short BOTH their lives.
I consider that she made the best decision she could have. Yes, building a relationship with her parents will take time and effort, but it’s worth it.
Tangled is a movie where a child is forcibly separated from her family and placed into the care of a manipulative narcissist whose interest in her is entirely self-serving, and I’m very sad to say that there’s quite a bit of real precedent for that.
….. you mean the actual family being the mother that abused her? That kept her locked in a friggin tower until she was 16/17 and escaped? That kidnapped her from a family that wanted her but had no choice in keeping her? I am unsure what twist you’re trying to make here but it’s impressive and you should look for a career in gymnastics.
She wasn’t adopted she was a victim of human trafficking.
I get what you mean but, like, that is the worst movie for that take. Mother Gothel not only kidnaped Rapunzel (which is not quite “adoption”) but also abused her for her whole life.
This is not “adopted family” vs “blood family”, this is “blood family” vs “abusive kidnapper”.
There’s…no adoption angle to Tangled. Rapunzel is straight up kidnapped and then emotionally abused for her whole life.
I think the case on Tangled is pretty clear as to why she’d choose the bio parents, but it is part of that trend where writers will tend to construct situations where the adoptive parents are abusive and returning to the bio parents fixes the problem. so even when the writing justifies it, it’s a trend worth examining.
Yeah, it’s why Matilda is the best pony.
“No, yeah, my bio-parents are complete crap. I prefer to live with my teacher.”
I think its more of a trend than it should be its not the only trope.
Bio parent (usually dad) who abandoned you just wants back into your life for selfish reason’s the one’s who raised you are your real parents is also a trope.
Usually its giving bio parents too much credit but not over your actual parents.
I know its the entire story but I think the Willowbee’s is a good reversal of that trope.
We need more movies like “The Willowbee’s”.
Kinda agree, kinda think it’s more complicated, definitely think this movie has some issues with how it portrays familial relationships.
She was kidnapped by someone who then abused her which is not generally the same as adoption, and as someone who had extremely shitty parents, of course I would’ve been excited to find out I had bonus parents who might be less shitty – I would’ve ditched the family I grew up with too, regardless of which relations were by blood and which were by adoption. And if I had an excuse to go “my abusers weren’t my real parents anyway”, I absolutely would’ve leaned into it.
But I had a really bad time watching that movie because Gothel definitely felt like she was written as an abusive mother, albeit a little bit of an exaggeration of one because Tangled is a cartoon. Whenever she was doing things onscreen I kept being reminded of shit my real abusive mom did to me, and to the best of my knowledge we are blood relatives and no kidnapping was involved. And then… Rapunzel’s feelings about this were all resolved extremely neatly when the kidnapping plotline was revealed, as if she hadn’t spent her entire life thinking of this person as her mother and wouldn’t have had a lot of residual emotions about it even if at the same time this person kind of wasn’t her mother, too. (This also went really weirdly with the love interest going back to using his birth name, although it’s hard to explain why.)
I think Disney did a lot better with the child abuse plotline in The Little Mermaid, even though it ended with a reconciliation which is generally not my thing. It wasn’t my own shitty abusive childhood, but everything in that plotline felt pretty true to shitty families and people in general.
Tangled the TV series , where birth parent is better than kidnapper but still an abusive piece of crap, and even if you stand up to him your supposed to recognise the abuse comes from a place of love and reconcile.
As an adoptive parent, I think this is kinda a weird take. Even beyond the whole Rapunzel was kidnapped not adopted part. Adoptive family and bio family are both “real” family. Adoptees often feel like they’re betraying one set of parents by loving the other, which can lead to extra tension. But if both sets of parents treat each other with respect and encourage the adoptee to love both, it often goes much better. I get that some bio parents (and some adoptive parents too) really really suck and aren’t a safe relationship for the kid, but I don’t believe that’s the case most of the time.
I like Tangled because she had green eyes. Also I liked Mandy Moore.
I also like how Tangled got a tag.
I read somewhere that the original design for Rapunzel was way more “Disney Princess Beautiful”, but everyone who looked at it was like “…That’s just Barbie”.
So they added little “flaws” like an overbite, some babyfat, subtle freckles, a bit of a slouch, etc, and it ended up a vast improvement. Making her a little dorky only made her more attractive.
Oh no, does Joyce not like Tangled anymore? (Has Joyce actually seen this movie?)
I think it’s more “oh, that’s why it resonated with me”
And I assume if she didn’t see it precanon she’s seen it at some point offscreen while in college
I love the idea that someone is going to see Joyce’s hair parted slightly differently and go, ah, this is obviously meant to evoke Rapunzel’s famous side part!
Looks the same to me. Hope you don’t examine Dorothy, though, we don’t know if the relationship was chipped during the timeskip… yet.
Tangled and Enchanted? *chef’s kiss* Good songs, good soup
I always have mixed feelings about Tangled because despite enjoying the movie it essentially put the final nail in the coffin for Disney’s era of 2D animation.
On the other hand, have you seen the Tangled TV show? It’s not hand-drawn, but it does have a very unique, very appealing 2D art-style. (And is pretty good generally. I kinda love how much Deep Lore it has, considering the Deep Lore of the movie is just, “Magic flower turns into magic girl, don’t think too hard about it.” Also some of the songs are bangers.)
Counterpoint: Tangled had a traditional 2D animated television series that followed after the movie for three seasons, and it is *extremely good*! Perhaps that will help settle some of those mixed feelings?
They even got the original voice actors back! And they sing! With music by Alan Menken, even!
Seriously I love Tangled but I honestly might love the sequel series even more.
derp, beaten, lol. Oh well, point stands!
Thanks, both of you. I just watched the first episode on Disney Plus and it was quite enjoyable.
Ay, nice! Glad to introduce someone new to such a good show. The premiere has some great songs all on its own, and then they somehow manage to get even better as the show goes on. “The View From Up Here” and “Waiting in the Wings” from season 2 are my personal favorites, hope you enjoy the show enough to get that far!
I will blame more Princess and the frog to be bad 2d than tangled to be good 3d
I don’t blame Princess and the Frog at all. It was essentially released to be a flop much like Treasure Planet because Disney was already transitioning away from 2D. They released in like a week before James Cameron’s Avatar and with a much smaller advertising budget for reasons we can leave up to speculation. It’s a very good movie that’s only flaw is probably underplaying the racism that was existent at the time the movie takes place cause it’s a family movie.
Idk, maybe it wouldn’t have been a better movie if Tiana was constantly getting called the N-word. I wouldn’t necessarily call that a flaw.
That’s not what I meant at all. There’s things like the fact Tiana’s best friend is probably an heiress to a plantation fortune and that her mom worked for them and it’s just kind of glossed over. It presents southern white folks of the time as better than they probably were which is the same tone as Pocahontas subtlety presenting a both sides argument to colonization. It’s just Disney presenting a bit of idealized misinformation that is common with their brand. It undercuts the message they could’ve shown.
I’m not asking for hard racism in a kids movie just don’t try to show revisionist history cause that’s a problem too.
I was being slightly facetious, but I also did just straight-up misunderstand what you meant. I’m not smart/educated enough to come up with ways to not have hard-R racism in a kids’ movie and also not shy away from its existence, aside from “pick a different setting maybe”. Then again, neither were the movie’s writers, and they got paid (beans but it’s still a check) and I didn’t.
I do wonder if it will reverse at some point, though I doubt it will ever go back to being fully hand drawn because that is a lot of time and work (man power) in order to make a good movie. You might end up with hand drawn stuff that is then manipulated in a computer to interact with stuff, or stylistic cgi.
Or people could stop being so goddamn cheap when they’re the biggest media conglomerates around and just pay some fucking animators. Who cares if it’s expensive, they’ll make it back in a week anyhow.
But that’s how you become the biggest media conglomerate around…
Jokes aside, yeah stuff like that has always bothered me with movies, especially animated ones: you are producing a single thing that will make hundreds of millions in revenue, how can the producers be that cheap?
And for fuck’s sake, it’s not like they aren’t hiring teams of people to basically go in and animate/rotoscope their live-action shit as it is. Especially with Disney, where they have like 5 real-life streets they film on and the rest is basically sound stages and green screens that have to be filled in digitally any-fuckin’-way, so I really don’t wanna hear “It’s too hard/expensive” because that just minimises how much work already goes into every fucking frame noatyer what they’re doing. And if anything, a drawing is much easier to get a fantastical idea out of because you don’t need Theoden in front of your camera so you can make him Animorphs into a slightly fucking older version of himself.
All I’m saying is, if you can pay Benedict Cumberbatch a million bucks to talk at a tennis ball for 20 minutes and somehow get a fucking superhero wizard movie out of that, you can pay some hungry artist to draw something more visually impressive a couple thousand times.
Maybe, if the hungry artist is capable of drawing a realistic Benedict Cumberbatch.
We already have a realistic Benedict Cumberbatch at home.
Can anyone else see any difference in Joyce’s hair?
Her bangs point the other way, but honestly sometimes they do that between panels anyway.
Thank god im not alone with this
She has more of a middle-ish part normally (you can see hair tucked behind both ears) and now it swoops a lot more to one side.
I also understand her not wanting to change her hair part, because I am much more aware of my hair and the sensation of the part when it’s different. Not that I have any hair atm since my solution to sensory overload one day was to shave it all off…
Done that. Often.
I think Willis is continuing to lampshade: I had to go back and it does look like Joyce had left-sweeping bangs (her left) at the start of the comic, and she has right-sweeping here and also after the time-skip. Like Yumi said, it’s not rigidly consistent, but I think the change is there.
Relatedly, right-facing things/people in comic panels (our right) go along the flow of reading, so they’re usually the hero or just a chill person. Left-facing goes against the flow of reading, so there’s a confrontational or rebellious nature to it.
Makes sense why it would ever-so-subtly assist us in feeling out Joyce’s change during the skip and after Halloween. That’s my take!
Hm I should probably say middle part but she is so often shown with her left side facing the reader that it gives that effect more often IMO!
…I should really read the alt-text before commenting any of my silly little interpretations.
Never have paid attention to these details. It’s incredible how they worked even you never figured it out.
Maybe if she’d move her hand out of the way.
I feel you, Joyce. I worked Halloween Retail for 8 years and the price of the costume accessories was not the only theft they were getting away with.
Dorothy thinks your dress is pretty and brushes your hair, Joyce! Truly a great day.
Ah yes, extremely relevant to Joyce’s life. Poor kid. Mama Gothel is too similar to Carol and Toedad.
Tangled was after I graduated and I definitely saw my parents in it, but I also knew many people, still homeschooled, who loved it “for some reason”
“Wow these songs really resonate with me and are really catchy!”
*after a little therapy and deconditioning* “Oh.”
The songs are still great.
What was the movie they watched at Joyce and Becky’s movie party that they hadn’t been allowed to see before because it promoted the idea that parents don’t always know best? I was thinking it was tangled. Maybe it was Frozen? That’d fit better…
Either case, she hands down looks perfect in that outfit! 😃
BTW Robbie are you still interested in voice acting for my DOA fan game?
Maybe, I think I need more info first. I don’t want to commit to something I wouldn’t actually be able to do or would be uncomfortable doing.
Totally understand! 😊
Well, I can’t reveal much details here, but I can tell you that while the game is likely gonna be rated M for mature, there’s very likely not gonna be any blood or gore, and there’s not gonna be any content that’s gonna get it an Adult Only rating.
Lots of voice roles to choose from, so don’t worry!
Do you have a Twitter or Discord handle with which I can reach you?
Yeah, it was Frozen.
Dorothy would probably look pretty cute in a Dark Magician Girl cosplay, tbh. Velma’s always an excellent choice, but sometimes a gal wants some variety.
Also, Tangled is a pretty alright movie. The sapient dog-horse was a little much, but the scenery was nice to look at and Mother Gothel was hot, so it evened out.
(Just got Yu-Gi-Oh! on the mind today. Found out this morning that the creator died in some kind of diving accident, which… fuck. Spent all day at a bonfire memorial on FF14 celebrating the guy’s creations though, which helped ease the blow.)
😭😭😭
Wish I could have been there for the bonfire memorial, I have yet to ease the blow of his untimely death myself. 😔
Would you be willing to play Master Duel with me sometime soon, Taffy?
My favorite princess to this day is still Cinderella. Yes, I realize the character animations are often derpy and she falls in love with a guy in the course of a few hours while barely talking to him. But something always resonated with me about the situation she was in.
The villains weren’t fantastical. They didn’t have magic, couldn’t turn into dragons or curse people, didn’t try to murder anyone, etc. They were just *mean*.
In the Disney version, you don’t see them physically abuse Cinderella or deprive her of survival necessities like food. The stepmother blatantly favors the other two children and showers them with gifts while only making sure that Cinderella’s basic needs are met. She treats her like a servant, giving her an unfair amount of chores and criticizing her when she does a less-than-perfect job. The stepmother enjoys a power rush when she’s able to control and manipulate Cinderella into working harder for a show of “kindness” that will never come. She expects Cinderella to be grateful for what little she’s been given.
Cinderella didn’t want to go on an adventure or find romance and she wasn’t chased away in fear for her life. She just wanted one night to relax and have fun. And she was crushed when the stepmother pretended to allow it before destroying her ability to go.
Granted Cinderella could talk to animals and was given magical assistance to get to the ball anyway. But getting to the ball wasn’t possible *without* magic. There was no realistic way for her to get past all the obstacles put in her way by the stepmother.
And having no realistic way of getting out of a realistically neglectful, emotionally abusive situation with an authoritative family member was something I was very, very familiar with.
So yeah.
feels like there’s not much of a diff/seems like she could’ve at least braided it or clipped on a fake extension lol
I think Dorothy only just started the front.
i just assumed she was done by saying ‘how’s the hair’ as opposed to/rather than a ‘check-in’ like “how’s it look so far?” but who knows there’s probably enough girls around to where at least one of them would prolly have clipons. or at least flower accessories or so lol
Dorothy should come with a warning like cigarettes: May ruin your childhood.
Dorothies don’t ruin your childhood. Your terrible parents already did that.
(That’s the Royal You, not the specific you.)
Well sure but Dorothy makes you aware of problematic media and/or raising that you (meaning Joyce in this case) are probably just fine with forgetting or just filling away in your brain as “this is good”
Sounds like Dorothy is doing you a favor. Being aware of less-than-ideal qualities in something doesn’t bring a moral imperative to reject it wholesale.
Erm… Joyce is not a child anymore.
May ruin your childhood retroactively.
Yet*
Joyce’s relationship with movies is really weird. But when some parents are so horrible to forbid you to see Disney movies you can’t be different. In the next Disney movie there will be three generations in contrast (adventurer father who wants the son to be an adventurer, farmer son who wants the son to be a farmer and the grandson who wants to be an adventurer. The grandson is gay and everyone is totally supportive, there will also be a dog with three legs and full of joy). When I saw the presentation I thought it was an incredibly simple story, totally predictable and so extremely full of politically correct elements to became annoying (not like Tangled, that was a masterpiece of character and history) but when I think there are people in the world who they take offense at stories like this, I don’t know what to think … Maybe stories so predictable and positive to the extreme have a reason to exist after all? To offend these miserable people!
Hahaha called it! I wonder if this is just a throwaway line or if it will get explored further. Still, I’m glad I got my questions answered in terms of Joyce’s history with the movie.
Joyce got so lost about this information that totally forgot Dorothy is brushing her own hair.
Does anybody know why the RSS feed only seems to update every week or so? I assume it isn’t the intended functionality, but as far as I can determine that is how it works generally, and not just for me because I somehow did something weird to it in my feed reader.
I don’t speak XML, but my peering at the feed’s code seems to suggest that, at the current moment, it thinks that the newest comic was “Your Ex”, the last installment of “Don’t Stop Billie-ving”. That said, my feed reader thinks the latest is “Assault” which was the previous comic.
She’s been wearing her hair this way since the time skip,right? That’s the “I’m not keeping it” joke?
Okay, I gotta admit I didn’t even notice Joyce’s bangs changed in the timeskip
I didn’t notice that either until now. I guess I was more focused on other things that changed during and after the timeskip.
This is tongue-in-cheek but I do NOT appreciate the quick cutaway past the homoerotic hairbrushing scene. We demand more Bi Joyce moments!
I just want to know if in the timeskip someone told her about the sweater.
Me, a trans guy digital nomad: There is absolutely NO REASON I enjoy reading this manga about a trans guy that travels with his talking motorcycle.
Kino’s Journey?
Yes!
Yeah, sounds about right. Absolutely no reason I enjoyed all those shows that obsessively fixated on one activity (card games, catching animals, talking to purple birds voices by Gilbert Gottfried, etc) to the point that it dominated the world’s economy, reason at all.
“I’m interested in stories about trans people because I’m an ALLY. I feel sick when learning about transphobia, like an ALLY. I want to learn more about chest binding as an ALLY.”
–me from ages, like, 12-17
I relate to Booster in some ways because I’m also non-binary, and also a few other ways that don’t necessarily have to do with us being non-binary.
Same goes for Dina, I relate to her in a few ways because I’m also autistic, and some other ways that don’t necessarily have to do with us being autistic.
The reason we admire characters is each our own, I don’t think anyone can claim to know the way we love our favorite people and stories better than we do as unique individuals.
Aaand I flagged you by (and it is “by” I will die on this hill) accident. Sorry. Just wanted to say, I’m not 100% sure Kino’s trans? GNC, definitely, but that’s not the same thing.