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.
Is that real?
Is he?
Heh. Oh yes. He’s a Professor of Philosophy at Yale.
If you poke through the thread linked above, you’ll see his followers are aghast that some women aren’t thrilled by the prospect of taking on that kind of baggage. (In his case, it’s hypothetical baggage, of course: “I do not have any trans kids but would have had no problem if I had.”) Others are scandalised by the fact that some potential suitors aren’t interested in people with imaginary pronouns.
It’s quite the hot house for delicate flowers.
Could appear in an even creepier Sprockets.
I’d forgotten about Sprockets – what first came to mind was some kind of dystopian WWII era style cartoon that Pink Floyd might have done, with giant crows stalking or goosestepping. He’s got the vulture/crow thing down pretty good – great beak, mangy head feathers, puffed out chest on top of scrawny bird legs.
Between that one and the Lizzo link, we got the old nursery rhyme about Jack Sprat and the missus.
Professor of Philosophy is itself a red flag.
But note how dishonest and hyperbolic he is–the opposite of the scholarly ideal. (If you scan through his posts, you will see that he comes down on the “woke” side of numerous issues, including seeing disagreement as “fascist”.
On a certain, temporary McDonald’s employee.
Geez, what kind of loser kid were you? You never would have been invited over to play with GI Joes at my lair in the hollowed out volcano.
Escape From New York wasn’t a film, it was a how-to manual!
That thread seems like a magnet for all the dumbest people on Reddit (which is saying something).
I wasn’t always the radiant, sophisticated being you see before you.
Was it a vigilante, or a grudge between criminals?
I’m way more concerned about what supposed adults model on.
I’ll be the first to agree that humanity is very much a “monkey see; monkey do” sort of affair. We’re mimicry machines; the things you saw modeled before you for “how to behave” as a child are the same things you’ll do as an adult.
I’m convinced that there’s a mechanism somewhere back in the hindbrain that’s responsible for all this, taking careful and copious notes, filtering them through inadequate understandings of the actual events, and then when the child-that-becomes runs into that same set of circumstances, that hindbrain mechanism offers up “Well, this is how your mother and father did it…” as an automatic go-to option.
The visceral nature of the lived experience leaves those models far stronger than the ones you might be picking up from story and second-hand narrative. You saw it, you lived it…? You’ll very likely do it, yourself.
If you grew up, as I did, in something of a multi-generational family unit? If you paid attention, you’ll have seen this in your younger siblings. I watch my youngest brother and his wife act out their dramas, and it’s like I’m stepping back in time to be the kid watching my mom and stepdad do the same damn dance. Again. If I live long enough, I’ll probably watch my nieces and nephews work through the steps, as well.
The reason “story” is so damn important is that we use these things, these scripts, whenever we run into situations that our personal lived experience never ran into.
A case in point is observing the young NCO in the military: While they may model on specific leaders from their past experiences, what I’ve often observed is that they’re unnaturally modeling on movies or television they’ve seen, taking surface cues from the popular stereotypes expressed therein. It’s bizarre to observe; I’ve spoken with old-timers from the 1960s who noticed the same thing, and back then it was all “John Wayne” being used as a model. Which led to some really bad side-effects, because Hollywood back then, as now, never got it right.
If you pay attention to people, and you’ve got a wide enough frame of reference through knowing their parents intimately or catching where they’re modeling on popular media, you can’t unsee this crap. It’s there, right in front of you, if you pay close enough attention.
Which is why I suspect that there really aren’t any such things as innocuous media; the various immersive video games like Grand Theft Auto? I don’t want to blame them for the rise in petty criminality, but… There’s an alarming and obvious correlation between those games and what happens with certain impressionable minds out in the real world. How many bodycam videos from cops have you seen, where the subject of a traffic stop seems to think they’re in a GTA game scenario?
And I would like to make a connection for all of you who’ve waded through my other diatribes of late: Remember when I spoke of “gamification” and “simulation fidelity”? These are real things; pay attention to the world around you, and note the disturbing congruencies between real-world behavior and the imperfectly-simulated world of the games and media: How many idjits are there in the UK who insist on their “Constitutional rights” when being arrested, ‘cos that’s what they’ve seen on the telly, with the US television shows they’re both consciously and unconsciously modeling their behavior on?
What you’re dealing with here is the effect of the human mimicry machinery failing to differentiate between “correct” and “incorrect” inputs. Say your mom and dad are dysfunctional alcoholics; they fight, they rage, they abuse family members. Odds are, having lived all through your childhood in that toxic environment, you’re going to demonstrate that exact same set of behaviors: Why? Because that’s what you saw, what you heard, and what you lived. Your hindbrain thinks that’s how you deal with these situations, which is why you’ll find yourself repeating them, right down to the same words, when you’re involved in them as an adult.
The effect of “story” and “narrative” aren’t as emphatic as lived experience, but they’re still there: If your hindbrain does not reject the things you’re told in either story or narrative, then your hindbrain will likely throw those up as acceptable behaviors when you run into situations akin to the ones Mr. Lizard-brain recorded.
You have to watch out for this. I do it myself, under stress. It’s ugly to recognize, after the fact, that you did precisely that which you swore never to do, under duress. Yet, because that’s what you know… You did it. You really have to work on that crap, throughout your life, or you’re just a biological LLM, spewing the same garbage outputs that you got as garbage inputs, somewhere in the long ago of your mostly forgotten childhood nightmares.
Vis-a-vis the “Wesley Crusher” thing…
The reason these characters don’t actually resonate with kids is that these characters are more often than not the result of an adult story-teller coming up with the bullshit idea that they need a kid in the story for children to relate to. Sometimes, these sorts of characters can be useful, because they serve as a story feature to use as a natural way to relate exposition of the world or situation that the story is set in; the kid-character is ignorant and needs to learn, precisely as the audience member does.
So, it can work, it can be done “naturally”, and it isn’t always a bad thing.
Where Wesley Crusher went wrong as a character was that he wasn’t used in the way a real storyteller would use such a character. He was a living affectation, an artificiality; something deliberately introduced “for the kids”. Kids being kids, they all immediately sensed the falsity and condescension that the character represented, and then comprehensively loathed him. They knew they were being pandered to, and did not like it one damn bit.
The same sort of thing goes on with every such “creation”. Wonder why so many minority or gendered characters fail? It’s because they aren’t organic, really real, in the sense that they fully inhabit the story-space. They’re not there because they’re needed for the story, they’re all there to check a box on someone’s form.
I had to make this same point with a lot of the younger officers I was supposedly “training” when I was a senior NCO. The theory is, I’m there as the “guy with experience” to coach, teach, and mentor those overeducated dolts, but the reality is that without a bit of actual power over them, I was about as effective as spraying a hungry tiger with a water bottle. They were gonna do what they were gonna do, and usually only paid attention after screwing something up by the numbers.
The thing is, with regards to this? Your subordinates are like an audience: They actually pay attention to you. Any falsity, any bullshit you attempt? They’ll recognize it, take it for the very real and actual contempt you’re demonstrating, and then turn against you.
I had one young idjit try to make “buddies” with the troops by talking about what he thought they’d all be “interested in”, namely NASCAR and professional wrestling. He’d stereotyped them, and even though he knew nothing of those two things, he did a bit of surface study, and started peppering his conversations with things from those milieus and striking up conversations. The troops picked up on that immediately, recognized the pandering going on, and then proceeded to make fun of him via using those same things. In the end, it did nothing to enhance his relationships with the troops, and actually created a lot of disrespect where there was none. People in general are very good at picking out falsity; you may think you are getting away with the false camaraderie, but when the moment comes? You’re going to find out that you did rather more damage to yourself than anything else.
I had another young officer that took the opposite tack; he knew nothing of what his troops were interested in and did as hobbies. He asked questions, engaged with them as a real human being of vastly different background, and it all worked out. The troops actually respected him, worked hard for him, and gave him their all. They were also amazingly protective of his socially-inept ass, and did a lot to help him grow up, which was bizarre to observe. It never got to the point of actual fraternization, but a couple of his soldier’s girlfriends did take action to cut him away from gold-digger types that were eying his social ineptitude as potential prey… It’s amazing to observe some of that sort of thing happening, and recognize karma at work.
Jason Stanley’s page is now gone. Taken private or deleted. I guess the criticisms of the proles were too much for his highly developed mind to deal with.
On available evidence, Wheaton is even more insufferable than the character he played.
The Homeless Industrial Complex.
Those whose salaries depend on the continued existence of a problem will never solve it. On the contrary–they will expand the problem.
Why, it’s almost as if those pushing for representation assume that their would-be beneficiaries wholly lack the capability to imagine themselves in the circumstances, lives, settings, minds, etc. of anyone else but themselves.
Might be true. But solipsism is hardly something to be encouraged.