It doesn’t even have to be that the message is bad or completely objective and propaganda fuelled, it could just be its often incredibly recited, copied and pasted or just a blatantly obvious good lesson that you are completely aware of.
A great power comes great responsibility.
Yeah I get it unless you’re a morally corrupt psychopath.
I don’t (at least, I try not to) consume media with typical “morals of the story” and narratives. But looking back into my childhood, I hate the stories about solving conflicts diplomatically, in a nonviolent way. I wish I had someone to teach me stand up for myself with my fists. I really lacked the skill of giving one a good smack when needed, and still do. Because in real life nobody listens to what you say, unless you can back your words with something sensable.
Any kind, empathetic character in a book sacrifices themselves to help others? “Oh, that character is an allegory for Christ, that’s why they acted that way.” I used to hear this all the time in English classes from middle school on, and eventually it got annoying enough that I wound up sitting down and reading the whole damn bible, just so that I could ask “In what way are this character’s actions better explained by them representing Jesus than by the fact that they’ve been an empathetic, kind character who looks out for others for the whole book?” and actually be able to call out teachers that were just using it lazily.
Yes, there are plenty such allegories out there in books, but it got to the point where it seemed like some sort of thought terminating cliché for literary analysis in middle school and high school.
The amount of references to Christianity in random pieces of media makes me want to crash out God damn America cult
Christ is already a fucking allegory! Maybe there can be people who are just nice.
Anyone can achieve great things, even if they come from nothing… As long as they secretly have a great background and heritage out the wazoo. Or it is pre-ordained and has to be them; all other attempts doomed to failure.
The initial message might be fine, but it then undermines itself.
Basically any moral plugged into hallmark movie channel or similarly designed crap. Things rarely “just”work out, and certainly never because of love, god, or good vibes.
I’m tired of seeing the telling of “the scorpion and the frog” fable ham fisted into so many stories. I don’t think I ever heard that one growing up, yet I’ve heard it a dozen times in shows.
The power of love saves the day
I may be biased since im ace
The original Frozen was a nice twist on that, where it wasn’t romantic love that saved the day, but familial love.
Interstellar and Arrival, great films ruined by this lazy pathetic trope.
except it’s not the day, it’s the entirety of space-time.
God how much better they would have been had they had like a cool science solution to the plot, but they’d have never made any money without the hackneyed ‘love saves the universe’ shit endings they had.
“This character is a freak, let’s make fun of them for being different, even run them out of town.” Character saves their lives, usually using the thing that makes them different “Hey everyone, this character is the best, we love them!”
Acceptable theoretical moral: Love everyone. Actual implied moral: Love everyone because you’ll never know when they might be useful to you.
Rudolph’s Nose trope.
Exactly. HATED that and the Clifford books as a kid for that reason.
It’s also kinda harmful to disabled people. The implication is they can only be accepted if they prove themselves exceptional
Right???
Or worse only love them after they proved helpful
It’s so gross.
Almost as bad is if they get treated worse for saving the town, with the townspeople blaming them for any collateral damage.
I hate it when they come up with something to help with someone’s disability, but it’s thrown out because the disability “is what makes them special”
to be fair, some in the disabled community live this way. they like refuse to accept solutions to their disabilities and see it as cultural destruction when such available solutions are embraced.
big problem in the deaf community w/ the advent of cochlear implants and the advancement of that tech, because they see deafness as a unique and defining feature of themselves they want to pass on to their children.
Is it really a problem though?
Let people live the way they want to live, it’s not even hard
I hate when media tells us that men should always agree with their wives even when the wife is clearly wrong and irrational. And I’m a woman. If I ever get married, I want a husband who will tell me when I’m wrong. Nobody should have to just put up with their partner behaving like an irrational lunatic without saying something.
social media largely disagrees with you and is even more crazy about this type of thing than mass media is.
what is the most wild to me is when a professional comes on and talks about your perspective, they get mobbed and mass reported as being misogynistic.
a lot of egotistical nutbags, man or woman, seem to think they can never be wrong any partner who would confront them is evil and hateful for doing so. or it’s a form of partner abuse. i had a couple of exes who basically told me I was abusive and hateful when I pointed out their financial problems were entirely of their own making…
It’s so frustrating. A healthy relationship should consist of both partners being able to tell the other when they’re wrong. Also, it shows that in general, not just in relationships, society has a lot of people with no sense of personal accountability who think anyone who tries to hold them accountable is toxic
I legitimately want to see a movie about a husband/wife couple that gets along the whole movie. It’s not that there can’t be conflict, just have it come from outside the relationship.
Give Undercover Blues a try. Sort of a mid plot, but the acting elevates it. The main characters are a loving married couple that continues to love and respect each other throughout the movie.
There might be one somewhere, but I’m having trouble thinking of one
It’s even harder when you’re gay
Jon Stewart. He’s full of jokes and fallacies.
They encourage you to “want to” laugh at something you probably should “want to” kill somebody over. These aren’t Martin Luther King’s. These are Charlie Kirks with a democratic base.
Maybe they’re peace bringers. Maybe they’re just fire starters. Maybe they’re complicit. The way I look at it is classes. All warfare is class warfare. And I’m perfectly okay with putting all their millionaire/billionaire asses on a rocket to Mars.
“We are not so different, you and I,” soliloquies the villain.
Love/friendship/family/moral high ground/any virtue/you name it always wins and is the solution for all your problems.
Reality is never that simple. So there’s nothing to take away from such a lesson except for false hopes.
The moral of every Hollywood Racism Movie^TM ends up boiling down to “We could eliminate racism if only every racist met a person of [RACE] that they actually liked.”
Or conversely, racism will be eliminated once the head racist is defeated.
I mean, that is actually the most successful way of countering racism in real life. Not 100% successful, but better than just trying to talk someone out of racist views.
They’re correct that this creates cognitive dissonance. The racist, upon meeting a minority member that doesn’t uphold the stereotype, has two contradictory facts in their head:
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All members of a minority group are bad.
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This member of that minority group isn’t bad.
This is cognitive dissonance. Both of these cannot be true at the same time. One of these premises must be wrong.
Hollywood imagines the bigot will treat this like a physicist disproving a theory by finding a counterexample. But bigotry is anyhing but scientific. You can’t reason your way out of a place reason did not lead you to. Instead, they adjust their premises to:
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Most members of a minority group are bad.
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This member of that minority group is one of the few good ones.
Exactly.
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The “We know this is a silly action movie, we’re not taking it seriously ourselves, wink wink!” thing that some action movies do. If I thought action movies were cringe, I wouldn’t be watching the movie in the first place. Can the folks making it please make a movie that they aren’t themselves embarrassed of?
They fly now!?
