The Much More Difficult Thing
A small point, but with a bigger point lurking behind it:
I think there’s obviously a lot of truth to the idea that kids benefit from having desirable behavior modeled for them, but the demand to have it appear in media is a cheap substitute for the much more difficult thing that actually works https://t.co/fsgKMLao5s
— wanye (@wanyeburkett) October 20, 2024
As a child, I wasn’t interested in books and TV programmes that centred on children my own age. In fact, juvenile characters, supposedly there to be identified with, were generally distracting and off-putting, if not downright annoying, a thing that broke the spell. A phenomenon known to some as The Wesley Crusher Effect.
I remember being interested in astronauts, adventurers, superheroes or whatever. But being represented, in the ham-fisted modern sense, wasn’t an obvious factor. As noted in the thread linked above, the whole point of the exercise was to inhabit the minds of people who aren’t you, and whose circumstances therefore seem much more exciting.
As to the larger point – the much more difficult thing – it does rather suggest a parental lapse of some significance.
Consider this an open thread. Share ye links and bicker.
That.
“Wesley Crusher DIE DIE DIE!”
It wasn’t one of their better ideas. The producers seemed to imagine that children would identify with the show’s most annoying character. Not the captain or the android, or the Klingon or whatever. But the insufferable Mr Crusher. The idea of having any children on the ship seemed bizarre and incongruous. “I know, let’s endanger children by taking them into unexplored space, where we’re almost certain to be attacked by alien battleships.”
I mean, you had to wonder if the children were taken as tribute for particularly sticky situations.
“Please stop firing those deadly torpedoes. Here, feed on our young.”
Our betters walk among us.
Our betters struggle with concepts.
Our betters walk among us.
I give up – is that some sort of body armor he’s got on under his shirt?
Were you not persuaded by his presence, his gravitas? Did you not feel that he was just the man to lead you to a brighter, more righteous tomorrow?
Speaking of our betters, I am enjoying the elevated level of political discourse from them.
Self loading baggage says what?
Morbidly curious, I scrolled down and saw more than I feel I should have.
Not a thread to pull at, I think.
Morbidly curious, I scrolled down and saw more than I feel I should have.
a) That was a self inflicted wound.
b) Now you know how the rest of us hos feel when we click on some of your links, German politicians, for instance.
However, the ones I feel for are the luckless bastards who had to clean the seats.
[ Indignant spluttering. ]
Still, at least all those other fat, trashy ghetto bitches will be feeling represented.
Agree strongly.
I had a similar reaction to Lost in Space, although I was only 10 when it premiered and my memory is thus very fuzzy. (A show best forgotten for many reasons.)
Also, the child characters were generally the dreariest parts of the shows.
The thrilling adventures of Jake Sisko and Naomi Wildman.
Woo-hoo.
Yes. I barely recall the child characters in The Rifleman and The Andy Griffith Show while the adults are still clear in my memory. The only exceptions I can recall are Leave it to Beaver and My Three Sons, but I was younger than those kids when those shows aired.
Perhaps the kids in Leave it to Beaver and My Three Sons were not so dreary because they were not mere tokens. But I was awfully young and so very naive and shallow in what I enjoyed.
Oh–another show: The Rifleman, in which widowed Chuck Conners is raising a son by himself. I don’t recall the son being annoying but I don’t recall him much at all.
It is curious and perhaps instructive that Hollywood makes such extreme mistakes: What does it reveal about how those writers and producers think?
And then there’s Jar Jar Binks. which was created to appeal to kids as I recall.
Well, as a six-year-old, I somehow managed to be entranced by the adventures of Doctor Strange and The Fantastic Four, despite not being a famous surgeon who masters the mystic arts and battles interdimensional monsters, and despite not being a super-genius scientist with a flying car and a skyscraper headquarters.
In fact, I think it’s safe to say that the not-like-me quality was very much the appeal.
FWIW, it’s considered a received wisdom in the publishing industry that kids like reading about characters older than they are. Like, 12- and 13-year-olds reading about high school kids, high school kids reading about college-age kids, and so on. They want some idea of what to expect.
Could appear in an even creepier Sprockets.
[ Drifts into reverie. ]
The more I see of such trash, the more I want ghettos with walls and checkpoints.
I’d venture to suggest that Ms, um, Lizzo’s shortcomings have very little to do with not seeing herself represented in fiction in a flattering light. In fact, seeing herself flattered may be precisely the problem.
Max Wall and Billy Dainty did it so much better. He (she?) has got the hairstyle right though.
See: The fallacious and pernicious self-esteem movement.
Let the beatings begin.
“Let’s seize Elon’s money so we don’t have to work”
As a child you did not spend the hours of a summer day imagining you were… another child? Pick up a stick and pretend it was a different stick? Swing it at a tree you imagined the other child you imagined was pretending to be a different tree?
[ Takes tin of Quality Street from Nate, passes it to Squires. ]
I see someone’s not too good at arithmetic.
Not too good at a lot of things.
You don’t learn by looking in a mirror.
Single quotation marks please.
This came to mind, by Heather Mac Donald:
From this.
I see numerous problems in his future.
Some very articulate, highly educated, economic morons in the comments.
Take everything Musk has & distribute it evenly across the country & it works out to $706.86 / person.
Is there nothing activists can’t improve?
Dating complications.
They can’t even improve nothing.