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.
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 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.
Or worse only love them after they proved helpful
Almost as bad is if they get treated worse for saving the town, with the townspeople blaming them for any collateral damage.
It’s so gross.
It’s also kinda harmful to disabled people. The implication is they can only be accepted if they prove themselves exceptional
Right???
Rudolph’s Nose trope.
Exactly. HATED that and the Clifford books as a kid for that reason.
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.
I don’t know if this counts but I hate when they do male makeovers and cut the guy’s hair.
Diane Keaton was once in a movie where she gets cancer. Meryl Streep is her hairstylist sister. She makes her this wig. Marvin’s Room (1996)
Before makeover: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0116999/mediaviewer/rm1756714240/
After makeover: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0116999/mediaviewer/rm991533057/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0116999/mediaviewer/rm303667201/
I laughed so fucking hard when they put on that wig and all acted like it was great.
So tired of seeing revenge killing movies in Hollywood. As long as someone is truly evil and does something unforgivable in the 1st act, the “hero” is then justified in slaughtering like 100+ random people in a dark hallway in the 2nd act. I think it’s the only sort of violence we’re okay with anymore. Any other type of violence people might have a problem, but because it’s done in the name of revenge for a dead wife/dog/kidnapped daughter, that’s now been whitewashed as “good wholesome revenge killing.” Or something.
Kind of related, the stories where the protagonist slaughters dozens of people just to get to the antagonist and then let them live because they had a change of heart.
Like bro, you just killed 50 people to get to this guy and now you’re just gonna change your mind at the last minute?!? The proles can’t even catch a break in hero stories.
Is it better when the hero decides at the last minute to spare the life of the villain so they “don’t become like them” or is it worse?
If the hero also spares the life of the 100+ randoms, it’s better.
But killing them and sparing the life of the super evil villain, is much much worse.
At least in my opinion.
I wouldn’t mind seeing a take on it, where the 100+ are at least arguably spared and the villain is actually killed at the end, completing the revenge. At least once.
Thank you! Henching is an undeservedly maligned profession.
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.
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.
They’ve got money for war, but can’t feed the poor. Best they can do is spend ten times what they would spend to feed them to torture the poor more.
I mean the worst thing you could do with poor people is feed them. Why would you want to perpetuate their suffering?
Now unless you’re ALSO talking about housing them, giving them healthcare and education? Okay, let’s do it.
Let’s not be like a guy named Dennis or Fadi on the YouTube who go out and exploit homeless for clicks and merch sales by giving them 10 star buffets y’all… maybe once a week.
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 don’t mind specific morals I think I mind the way they’re told or if they’re pushed down our throats in ways that don’t feel genuine.
But any time media portrays war as good or cool or badass or necessary. Basically every movie from the 2000s carries a secret pro War message.
From the 2000s
Wait till you get to movies from the 50a
I feel as though most war movies, especially the famous ones, the moral is always “war is horrible.” The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) is about how hard it is to come back from war and resume life.
With the exceptions of Top Gun, Act of Valor (2012), Lone Survivor (2013), etc. Sands of Iwo Jima (1949) sticks out as propaganda-ish.
The ones I would actually call “war movies” and not propaganda. Like The Longest Day (1962), Tora Tora Tora (1970) are obsessed with their historical accuracy. Hard to call those pro-war.
There are a lot of movies in the 50s and 60s that werent so much war propaganda as they were soldier’s experience. Since their audience was people who’d been through war already. You see a certain style of humor of soldiers not heroically leaping into battle, but desperatwly trying to avoid fighting entirely, and when their is fighting trying as hard as they can to survive more than amything else. Certainly there were propaganda films then that did treat soldiers as heroes, also fuck john wayne, but its in the 70s and 80s that those types of movies disappeared and all war movies became heroic, and even non-war action movies became pro-war.
There’s an argument that there’s no such thing as an anti war movie. Basically, movies are a recreative art medium. As such, any movie that intends to hold the attention of the audience all the way through, will make aesthetic or narrative concessions that will accidentally glorify war in turn. Some even go as far as claiming that any portrayal of war, even if negative, is promoting war.
It reminds me of Come and See (1985), which is a great horrible movie. But often some of the things being portrayed are so well framed and filmed that it is truly beautiful at times. Even if the subject material is extremely horrifying. And the hook to keep the audience watching wanders into morbidity.
In contrast with 20 days in Mariupol (2023), which I almost didn’t finish. Because it was true documented horror without any sort of grand narrative. A documentary doesn’t have to tell you war is hell. Movies, however, tend to wax poetic about it and end up romanticizing even the worst parts.
There’s an argument that there’s no such thing as an anti war movie.
Some arguments are stupid and that certainly is one of them. It can be difficult to make a movie about war that involves combat not lean into glorifying the violence, but there are movies that only show the horrible side of war without even risking the chance of glorifying violence.
Grave of the Fireflies just off the top of my head.
I don’t know if this is still a thing, but I feel there was a surge of media in the 90s and 00s telling us:
If you’re not popular at school, all you have to do is cut your hair, get contacts, and buy the same expensive clothes as everyone else, THEN you’ll finally be happy.
She’s soooo ugly, she has glasses and a pony tail!
She has paint on her overalls!
Character who hates being X suddenly realizes being X is helpful actually when something very contrived and unlikely happens.
Anytime the moral is to not get angry about something that’s perfectly reasonable to be angry about
The inciting incident in Elmo in Grouchland will forever be scarred into my brain.
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.
