What's something you used to like as a kid that you now, as an adult, realize had some pretty fucked up messaging?
What's something you used to like as a kid that you now, as an adult, realize had some pretty fucked up messaging?
For me it's Dragon Ball Z, that was a pretty fucked up show tbh.
Like holy shit, all the characters are terrible people except maybe Gohan and Trunks.
Disney's Aladdin is pretty racist in that ”if you steal, we'll cut off your hand” depiction of Middle Eastern society, and it never questions whether having a monarch who lives in a massive palace and forces his daughter to get married is actually bad.
Plus, when Aladdin becomes Prince Ali, the song says he has slaves
This is a weird one but the nihilism of Robot Chicken used to really get to me. Just vignettes of characters dying horrible ironic deaths. Its funny I guess in a group setting but alone and stoned in my room, not so much. I think the elephant in the room is South Park. Especially around 2013/14 when they helped bring the term "PC" back into the political zeitgeist, which was the buzz word the right loved before "woke".
1980s GI Joe is the most glaring example I can instantly think of.
I am still baffled by the fact that decades later some blue curtain bazinga in my guild in one of the games I played insisted that the good old days of cartoons had zero political messaging, unlike today, and his example was... GI Joe.
After I gave exhaustive examples of the political messaging of that show (everything from the plain as day glorification of the US military, the OPEC oil crisis being simplified as being backed and perpetuated by a bunch of terror-loving puppet governments... puppets of Cobra of course) and what I got back was, verbatim, "did anyone ever tell you... the curtains are fucking blue?"
It's a low bar, but all the copaganda shows (CSI, Castle, Brooklyn 99, Bones, etc) for obvious reasons. Even the heckin' wholesome funny NYPD detectives in B99 talk about defense lawyers being scum, all suspects being guilty (otherwise they wouldn't be suspects, would they?) and of course even when they did touch on the rampant racism in the NYPD the solution was "be a better pig and change from the inside!" (Don't laugh!). I could go on about the others too, but it's a topic that's already been covered better by other people
Long post short, even light-hearted cop shows where Malcolm Reynolds plays a goofy man-child writer have dogshit politics
Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, which takes place in colonial India, and is about a mongoose defending a white settler family against evil indigenous cobras. The mongoose kills all 3 snakes and squashes the mother cobra's eggs, then a bird sings about how that is good actually, and all the snakes never dare enter the white colonist family's garden again, the end
Stickdeath.com, although I was already a teenager at that point. Stuff like ”Crackhouse Clean-Up” where the bad guy green stickmen were obviously supposed to be black stereotypes, but back then I didn't know enough about
racial politics to realize.After 9/11, the guy started doing cartoons of racist Middle Eastern caricatures being killed by US soldiers while Korn played and racist caricatures being tortured in Gitmo, and the fucked up messaging was no longer hidden
Worst one is I thought Jeff Dunham was hilarious up until I was like 10. Glad I was done with that before middle school lol
Donalc Duck. It has a status where I live, it "teaches kids to read". One of our brainwormed metal music artists who is a fan even did the whole "woke-mind virus" outrage in the media after it was suggested we remove the most obviously racist and colonial images from it.
Tbh I have noticed and known how problematic it is from the start, as a girl reading the way women are framed in these comics was eternally annoying to me as a kid. So was the way it Others anyone who isn't Western.
But it took me longer to notice how incredibly white it is, how it frames people who do crime and how Scrooge McDuck is a settler colonialist image that worships billionaireism/getting rich. Pretty sure most of my age group also were in a Scrooge McDuck Club where the comic would send you tips on making money, saving money and essentially idolizing the figure by making sure we think he got that rich by wit, by being smart with his money and by courage alone.
Another offshoot of this here is the Italian versions of it where the incredible meanness and kind of violent framing of life always bothered me a lot as a kid, the way Donald got put into basically slave labor for lols and such.
I read it on the toilet sometimes still, mostly to re-educate myself on the framing in it. Just the other day read a story with Mickey Mouse and the Goofy Indiana Jones where language like "the savages" is just casually used. It has been an effective tool for Othering here for sure.
The comic was brought to this country by a right-wing capitalist and framed as project to get the kids to read. I get it now.
Tintin. It took me until I read "tintin in the Congo" to realise something was up. It really hit a second time when I found out Hergé was Belgian.
Then of course the whole cowboy stuff that was sooooo popular. Karl May, Lucky Luke etc.
Even a lot of lullabies or play songs are so plainly racist its mindboggling. I was worried about having to check what media my kid is consuming when he gets older what with all the copaganda and other korra-like liberal messaging but the overt racism in songs for babies really blindsided me.
And then others look at us like "why are white people so racist?" My friend, we've been fed this shit before we could even understand speech.
007 spy shit, along with stuff like Mission Impossible and MacGyver being used to romanticize US imperialism and anti-communism.
There's also Tomb Raider's Lara Croft engaging in plunder of other nation's indigenous artifacts and outright killing delicate, endangered wildlife.
There's also the trend of rock, metal, and various other similar type bands showcasing nazi and white supremacist symbolism and rhetoric (Pantera's lead singer comes to mind) (from nazi salutes to iron crosses (Lemmy's guitar from Motorhead had these on them), to brown shirts and nazbol flags (Combichrist), to more subtle dogwhistles), stuff like confederate flags (Combichrist), and a few instances of members turning out to be perpetrators of SA (Tool's lead singer), and even things like vulgar misogyny and anti-LGBTQ+ themes (also Combichrist).
There's a lot of insidious far-right influences in a lot of shit, and it's quite sad.
As a kid I played a game called Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe, a flight sim by LucasArts designed by the guy who would later do X-Wing and TIE Fighter (I guess the latter was also bad because you fought with the space fascists). You could fly all kinds of Nazi planes that never saw action in real life like jet fighters, and it wasn't until much later whenI realized that glorifying cool Nazi superweapons was bad, actually.
Same with Panzer General, which was a fun lite strategy game otherwise, but you literally played as Nazi Germany. I can't believe that actually wasn't considered a big deal at the time.
Upon introspeecetion, I didn't like that Goku spared Freiza. Goku was clearly told by Vegeta that Freiza's a genocidal space tyrant responsible for annihilating the Saiyans, Goku believed Vegeta, but spared Frieza anyway. Because Frieza put up a good fight or was pathetically groveling.
Also the Saiyans inhibiting Bulma from finding Gero & The Androids/Cell before they were supposed to show up. The TeamFourStar joke about Piccolo being more of a father to Gohan rings really true.
For me though:
Attack on Titan, but during Season 1/2.
Eren's "kill or be killed" mantra was a red flag. Then the government being controlled by a secret leader/conspiracy stuff. Whole series was a fascist dog siren.
I absolutely love the movie hackers but it has a surprisingly homophobic/transphobic scene considering how queer coded many of the main characters are. Maybe to appease the censors. It was the 90s after all.
It also packs a lot of patriarchy and misogyny despite also making Acid Burn the most bad-ass character.
Bleach. Well I still like the new Bleach as well
Author inserts Nazi imagery and parallels for apologia everywhere. Average anime lmao
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that bit from one piece where sanji gets forcefemmed by all the drag queens who it keeps going out of its way to remind us are manly and ugly fucked me up in ways i didn't realize until a lot later
also, though i always thought it was bad, the real extent of eva's misogyny didn't sink in until later
Chapo.chat
So glad that I like hexbear.net now
Happy Tree Friends. I first want to say I never enjoyed this shit, but in college I went to this dude's apartment with my roommate to smoke weed, and we're just sitting there sort of fucked up, and he goes "wanna watch Happy Tree Friends?" Neither me nor my roommate had heard of it, so he puts it on, and goddamn why the fuck anyone would want to watch that shit, much less watch that shit stoned, is beyond me. Immediate vibe killer.
Of course my roommate and our friend were literally laughing out loud, and I'm sitting there stoned reevaluating my friendship with these people (probably a good thing in hindsight). And these were dudes in college, I think we were sophomores and he was a senior. The humor is like kindergarten-tier, like those are the "kill Barney" jokes an obnoxious 5 year old boy makes. I never thought those jokes were funny then, but it's one thing for an immature child to make an edgy joke like that, it's another thing for a graduating senior to consider the same edgy non-joke that only exists for shock value and nothing else, made over and over ad infinitum across numerous videos, is the height of humor. "Oh you guys are gonna like this one, he dies in a crazy way in a second. Oh! Did you see that?" Dude was rewatching videos he had already seen.
Needless to say I stopped hanging out with these people.
jules verne.
i didnt notice the absolute hilarity of arguing for anticolonialism AND colonialism in the same fucking book (nemo).
and the mysterious island is a fucking parody of the west and he never realized.
When I was an early teenager or preteen, can't remember which, I watched some anime called Love Hina, and holy shit, is it terrible. Both the main character's girlfriend constantly punching him (because domestic violence is so funny when it's female-on-male, right?) and the whole "Oops, I accidentally just sexually harassed you!" That's just what I remember. There's probably a lot more worse shit about it.
Though I consumed many pieces of fiction mentioned here, and admit they made they problematic assumptions, I want to disagree with the general vibe that it is the job of fiction to be perfect and unproblematic in every way.
I can absolutely see how bad messaging could make you not enjoy it, and bad messaging is always worthy of criticism, but it doesn't inherently make any fiction objectively 'bad'.
Krillin was my favorite Z fighter and they turned him into a cop
I don’t know if it was “fucked up,” but Misadventures of Flapjack is about an alcoholic step dad who’s neglectful of his kid’s life and safety, while his whale stepmother is overprotective (and rightfully so because everyone in the harbor is a psychopath)
Yeh ngl I still love Dragon Ball but Mr Popo is super suss and Master Roshi is incredibly wack. The portrayal of women in general is wack.
I don't think the characters in general are supposed to be morally perfect or anything like that, and I don't see why that detracts from the quality of a show, depending on how its presented (which is why the representation of Mr Popo and Roshi are big time criticizable). I mean technically Dragon Ball is basically space opera with its mix of East Asian mythological and sci-fi elements with soap and sit com elements for good measure, so evil dudes doing evil shit is expected.
The fights are still fucking awesome tho
hg wells' "the time machine", I recently went on the wikis because i thought of it and found:
"muh workers le ebil subhuman bad" (morlocks)
"muh leisure = gommunism = slipperly slope degeneration" (eloi)
"britain man good" (wrong)
Fascist garbage, as expected from the imagination of a man born and bred in Great Shitain, pea-munching colonial fucks.
Star Wars Episode 1, loved it as a tween didn't realize until I was an adult, kind of really racist.
Thats My Sonic, a Sonic sprite comic that i loved in middle school so much I bought a tshirt. I'm basically assuming the humor was probelmatic I can't clearly remember, but I do know Brian Beubin/Psyguy the author of it turned out to be one of the internet's most notorious sex pests.
also its odd that I was into this series because I was never really into the sonic games and never had a Sega system? I was just the start of a webcomics phase for me which SPEKAING OF
My favorite webcomic in highschool was called Least I Could Do. A comic thats basically about a gary stu author insert who manages to be both a massive fucking nerd (though doesnt look like one, but all his interests are standard geek fair like Star Wars and LOTR) but absurdly successful at sleeping around with women.
The comic was mysoginistic as fuck looking back. There's an early arc where Rayne, the main character, (CW: CSA)
spoiler
hooks up with a 16 year old . He didn't know she was 16 BUT when he's taken to court over it the judge lets him off because the girl was in a bar which means it "wasnt fair" or some bullshit. The punchline is that Rayne reacts with "oh so that means I can bang 16 year olds as long as they're in bars" while his lawyer and friends try to shut him up.
That was easily the worst arc but the comic is still very misogynistic and sexualizing of its female characters. The comic is actually still running and seems to have matured with Rayne having a steady GF now but its early days are still up there for anyone to read. Worse yet it very definitly did warp my perception of women.
Pokemon Black and White. It's basically just a "what if people trying to do good are the bad guys" plot targeted at animal rights activists. It hits all the classic plot points like "members of the team caught hurting Pokemon" and "the leader didn't actually believe in their stated ideals and was using it for power". It's even more shallow than an average plot of this type because "being captured and made to battle makes Pokemon happy" is emphasized in every other part of the game (and every other game in the series) and I don't think that an abused Pokemon is shown on screen even once.
Like obviously they're not going to allow the premise of the world's biggest cash cow to be criticized, but nobody forced the writers to bring up the topic in the first place. It's an incredible shame that there's a fair portion of the adult fanbase that considers it the best written Pokemon game (not that any of the others are particularly well written, but at least they're not slandering activists).
Dragon Ball Z is fucked up???? Its anti racist, frieza is a bad dude
I thoroughly enjoyed Harry Potter as a kid and read through the series a couple times. They stay on the bookshelf now and I don't plan on re-reading them.
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are allowed to be fully human characters, 
characters so often fall into shitty racial tropes or stereotypes, and there are lots of "casual racist jokes".
