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.
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.
Tried to remember where I’d seen this, and finally did:
https://youtu.be/Aa-DmSeGaVY?si=7X9kzZauaEmPvEKT
There are some profound points encountered here.
I’ve seen a few items online claiming from personal classroom experience that many black kids have zero interest in learning anything that isn’t specifically about blacks.
I don’t know if those claims are true, but given the degraded state of our culture it seems plausible. On the other hand, plausible lies are the most insidious….
Lizzo: the woke praise her but don’t you dare say that someone looks like her. If not for double standards, they wouldn’t have any standards at all.
@pst314, who said:
I have no idea, about the intrinsic truth of this, but… I have heard similar things from inner-city teachers who were fully indoctrinated members of the “woke world” and who changed their minds utterly after actually having the real-world experience of teaching in a majority-black school.
My own personal experience with a lot of blacks is that there are those that conform to this theory, and those that don’t. I do not know why there’s a difference.
I do not believe in a lot of the bullshit, however, about “intelligence”. Whatever the hell it is, the quality we lay out and find in an IQ test is at least somewhat valid, for a limited use-case, that of ascertaining potential for success in a civilized environment. Past that? I have my doubts.
It’s my opinion that the real “thing” being measured by IQ tests would better be described as “adaptation to civilization”. Were you to take the average member of MENSA and dump them naked onto the African savannah, odds are pretty good that said MENSA member ain’t going to do all that well. Their adaptations are not effective aids to survival in that environment…
As an alternative, dump your average uneducated country-boy backwards type into that same environment, and they are probably going to survive, if not thrive.
What you’re seeing with black American failure in the modern world isn’t a measure of their virtue or lack thereof; it’s more the demonstration of a lack of adaptation to the environment they find themselves in.
It’s also an artifact of the ineffective methods of pedagogy we’re using with a lot of black children: You wonder why they don’t respond to what works so well with, say Ashkenazi Jewry? It’s because they’re not adapted for that sort of rarefied abstract sort of instruction. Blacks do not generally do well with “classroom instruction”; that’s something I learned the hard way in the military, when doing instruction. You look out over a classroom full of blacks? You’ve fundamentally screwed up with your choice of instructional technique. You need to get those guys out on the ground, and instead of introducing the equipment with a bunch of background reading, you need to do it hands-on with practical exercise.
It is my opinion that nine-tenths of the problems you find in the inner-city schools stem from inappropriate pedagogy. You want to take kids from a culture where elders are respected, and supplant those elders with smart-ass young white women who “just know better”? Ain’t going to work. If you were to replace those young white women with respected elder males that did the “physical dominance” thing with those young black males? You’re going to get much better results. It’s a lot like the deal with those juvenile delinquent young male elephants in that reserve in Africa; they introduced a bunch of elder males, and they quite literally beat those young males into submission and conformity with social needs.
We’re largely ignoring the need to inculcate social standards and codes of conduct, and then wondering why they don’t behave like civilized people?
You have to work within the cultural/biological imperatives, and we simply are not. Abstract thought is not necessarily a “natural thing”, except for those adapted to it.
Would someone please reset Shapiro’s playback speed to normal.
Besides, I prefer my fairy tales fractured.
you’re just a biological LLM, spewing the same garbage outputs that you got as garbage inputs
A human being is only ten thousand lines of code.
Some passing notes:
Gene W. Roddenberry’s middle name is Wesley. George Lucas’ last name is, well, the long form of “Luke”. Those characters weren’t hamfisted Poochie-esque characters by clueless writers, they were straight up Marty Sue author self-inserts. Wheaton and Hamill have said this repeatedly in interviews.
As for the emulation of childhood heroes, much can be explained by the Lego sex preferences study. When presented with a protagonist and a narrative, boys want to be like the protagonist. Girls want the protagonist to be like them.
Starting in the 1990s, children’s entertainment started leaning into the child protagonist instead of the child supporting character, and making the children smarter, more competent and sassier than the adults. This is also the beginning of the era of “saintly mom, stupid/beastly Dad” family-coms. It is not at all coincidental that this corresponds with the meteoric rise in the divorce rate and children being raised by single mothers.
let’s endanger children by taking them into unexplored space, where we’re almost certain to be attacked by alien battleships
Rewatching S01 of Star Trek: The Next Generation is instructive because you can see Roddenberry’s utopian, condescending vision of the future warring directly with the writers trying to write a story that had some kind of conflict, any kind of conflict, so they could get a functional script. Trek has always been metaphorical to the point of devolving into complete nonsense if that’s what was necessary to pull off the Very Important Message.
@Daniel Ream, who said:
The way I interpreted those studies when I looked at them after they came out was that it jived with my take on how civilization actually works, to some extent: Young men are essentially barbarians, akin to wild horses. They have to be broken to the saddle and the plow, and an essential part of that work is performed by women.
It’s a dichotomy that works; men want to emulate their heroes, while women want their men to emulate them. In the intra-familial dynamic, this creates a working scheme for civilizing those young men, and making them toe the line.
In large part, a huge reason that this isn’t working any more is that the girls decided they wanted to be boys, rather than tamers of boys. So, we have what we have in terms of “gender conflict”; civilization has been betrayed, as per usual, by the women making it up: They decided that what they had and what they were doing wasn’t “good enough” for them.
There are reasons that Eve is an archetype, along with Lilith.
The same dynamic purportedly played out with the Star Trek movies. Heaven knows the first was a snooze-fest.
I’ll just go ahead and say it… Both Star Trek and Star Wars are utter crap, as science fiction.
The world-building in both is just plain horrible. None of the canon makes sense, and when better writers than Roddenberry and Lucas tried to fix things, they were subsequently forced out of the faith as heretics.
I mean, Lucas has said he was trying to write Star Wars as being “Empire=United States/Rebels=Viet Cong”, and he was proud of that. As if he’d have lived two minutes under a North Vietnamese regime, or that the Viet Cong/NVA were the “good guys”.
Roddenberry’s idiotic take on economics and how a military would work “in spaaaace” are simply delusional. In his original “vision”, there weren’t any enlisted types; it was all officers. Very much an ideological equivalent of the Pilgrims, who didn’t bother to take any actual, y’know… Tradesmen with them to Plymouth. No hewers of wood or drawers of water, they were all the “enlightened elite” of the time. Ask how that worked out, and contemplate the wonders unearthed by archaeology: They were eating their little servant girls, by the middle of the first winter.
I don’t have much in the way of respect for either “creator” or their creations. They ripped off so many other, far superior writers. And, what they stole? They managed to get totally wrong.
I loved Star Wars when it came out, but… It was a visual feast, with nothing there for the mind to engage with. Even as a thirteen-year-old, I could tell there wasn’t much actual “meat” there. The world-building was wildly inconsistent and totally incoherent, which turned me off. It took until Lucas started reworking things, and doing the prequels for me to lose my appetite, however: No amount of scenery-porn could bring back the willing suspension of disbelief. None of that world seemed at all real, any more…
Star Wars was never meant to be science-fiction, but fantasy. George Lucas said that: “Some people call it science fiction. I don’t even consider it science fiction. I consider it a fairy tale.”
I believe that, but I also believe (which is never spoken) that women are equally barbaric and need to be broken to be mothers and support workers.
If you look at “Manosphere” videos on YouTube, you find plenty of young women who think much too much of themselves. They say out loud that their presence is all they need to bring “to the table.” They demand that men pay their bills, buy expensive meals, perform “acts of service” (e.g., cash and jewelry). The Dating Delusions channel is particularly good at quoting women’s profiles on dating sites to back this up.
Now, I think a lot of these profiles and vids come from influencers, particularly on the West Coast, where narcissism runs rampant. But it’s common to see women buy into the idea that they should live life like on Sex and the City, enjoy the attentions of men, enjoy the sex, then in their 30s settle down, marry the stable guy (frequently to take care of Chad’s kid), and start a family.
All of which goes against the natural procedure of having your kids in your 20s.
What especially eye-opening was seeing the popularity of female cornography in the form of fiction. “50 Shades” was just the start of it. My wife and I went to a book show held at our local convention center. It was expensive to get in (twenty bucks a head), and that gave you access to the book room where authors stood behind tables and handsold their erotica.
On the whole, they were nice people (we’re authors too, but not of that genre). We talked about shows, advertising, marketing, at tables where authors sold books featuring daddy kink, baby kink, doctor kink, and what I like to call “restraining order romances,” whether it’s biker clubs, mafias, Russian mafias or narcos.
And the room was all female, except myself and one author’s buff male model.
Now, not all women are like this, just as not all men are like that. But there’s a significant percentage who are, and civilizations are formed to tame and redirect impulses that, left unleashed, brings untold harm to the men and women and children who are not like that, and in general brings down the tone of society.
In other words, garbage in, garbage out.
@Uma Thurman’s Feet said:
Yeah… No.
I was there at the time, when it came out. Lucas very much said it was science fiction at the time, and that’s what they sold it as. Not fantasy; science fiction. It was only when people started questioning the premises and all the rest that anyone began doing the hand-wavey Jedi mind-trick of saying “It’s fantasy! Don’t look for logic or consistency!! We can do whatever we like, for the plot!!!”
It was a visual feast, but it was all empty calories, story and narrative junk food.
I can’t remember the first actual science fiction that I read. I imagine it was something by Andre Norton or Robert Heinlein, starting around 1970 or so. By the time Star Wars hit the scene, I was probably on about my sixth reading of Lord of the Rings; I knew my genres pretty well. Star Wars was clearly poorly conceived and written science fiction, created with a visual panache that you didn’t see in movies of the era. Star Wars was, visually, everything that I’d wanted Silent Running and Dark Star to be… But the story? The underpinnings? LOL… The “Force”, for example? It sounds a little OK today, after decades of hearing it, but at the time it was a cheap and shoddy shortcut, as if someone had lifted the idea out of a physics textbook: Why not call it “the Vector”?
The real problem with both Star Wars and Star Trek is that both of the auteurs who were behind them really weren’t all that well-educated in science. They were both fakesters, with no really deep knowledge of the genre. The crap that David Gerrold and Harlan Ellison had to go through in order to get some of their scripts approved for Star Trek, most of which became classics? You read the accounts they had, and it’s very clear that Roddenberry literally believed he was working on “Wagon Train to the Stars” instead of an actual science fiction show. Lucas thought he was doing an homage to the old Buck Rogers serials, and their craptastic science fiction that was filtered through a 1930s movie understanding of things.
I’ll give Lucas credit for getting the visuals so dead-on believable, but the rest of it all? Oi. I just can’t. Same with Roddenberry; Star Trek is good not because of him, but in spite of him. All the elements present that make for pulling you away from a “willing suspension of disbelief” are there because of him and his delusional simplistic take on “Ideal socialism”. Which far too many have bought into, without actually asking any questions about whether such things are at all realistic.
Amen and amen.
From TV Tropes:
Wesley had no plausible flaws most of the time. He was so freaking earnest and perfect and such an obvious product of Roddenberry’s ego.
He only got interesting later in the series when he made mistakes, such as when he and his squad lied about a teammate’s death or when he decided to leave Starfleet and help some Native Americans get a home planet, because he snapped at his mom finally.
[request to spring comment from spam lockup]
I hadn’t really thought about this until now but while I greatly enjoyed children’s movies and tv shows and especially any western involving children, I cannot recall reading many books featuring children, aside from those that were kinda forced on me. I did greatly enjoy the Narnia books but a 6th grade English teacher had sent me down that path by reading the first book to us. When I think of books that I made an effort to read on my own, they generally involved sports, sports biographies, Civil War stuff (we were just in Gettysburg yesterday), sea stories, spy novels, etc. Though I do recall reading a few dog stories Call of the Wild is the only one I specifically remember. Re-read that a couple years ago.
The thing about child characters is that you know going in that they’re transitional; you’re going to be an actual adult one day, and they’ll still be sitting there entombed in amber within the book, children forever.
The only “child protagonist” I ever remember identifying with was the youth from Lloyd Alexander’s Prydain series, Taran. But, the arc of his development took him from child to man, and was very well-executed. Or, so I thought… Haven’t read those books in years, not since adulthood. Not sure I want to; they’re probably better in memory than reality, just like everything else I really loved from those years.
Bicycle Karen gets a ticket: the cop’s bodycam footage.
That. Even by the standards of the show at the time, he was reliably grating.
Absolutely. Again, affectation, all the way down.
And again, every breath is a lie. How terribly progressive.
For those who missed the preceding events, see the seventeenth item here.
The cop so totally had that guy’s number, I guess because he saw the video. Handled it perfectly.
Watching Mr Head-Full-Of-Crazy-Beans insist on his fantasy version of events, I had to keep reminding myself that he knows what actually happened, the choices he made, and he knows that his behaviour was recorded, and he knows that the officer has seen the video.
And yet he keeps on lying, and inventing new ones. Like it’s second nature.
Cluster B. They lie, they aggress and then play victim, they gaslight.
I think we’ll give that one a post of its own. Comments that-a-way.
I’ve previously mentioned the detective series Bosch, which, for the most part, was very good, but which dropped in quality during the last two seasons, not least in terms of what to do with some supporting characters. Notably, Lieutenant Grace Billets, who was given nothing to do beyond be a lesbian. If almost every narrative reason for the character to be there involves the supposed woe and injustice of being female and gay, what you end up with is narratively monotonous, and a dull, rather miserable character.
They seem to have assumed that lesbian is a personality, and left it there.
The issue, @pst314, is that black kids are being actively taught that they should only take interest in “black stuff” …and that this would exclude nasty White behaviour like reading, learning about maths and the classics, behaving in school or being good fathers etc.
It’s unbelievable how much “black history” we get in my daughter’s school here in the UK, in a class with more Greeks / Turks, and more Indians, than blacks
And self-harm to those who are like that: I could point to men and women I once knew who harmed themselves that way–everything from wasted decades to psychological effects to financial and medical consequences.
Indeed. And empty calories can be awfully appealing, but eventually we noticed all that’s missing.
I enjoyed the Hornblower stories, in the first of which (Mr Midshipman Hornblower) he is 17 years old. That’s a bit old for “child protagonist” but furthermore the fun is not in identifying with a child but with watching a youth’s difficult* journey to manhood and competence.
* Internal and external difficulties to overcome.
Indeed.
And how about his insistence on sexy uniforms? Utterly incompatible with good discipline.
His imagined utopia included women wearing revealing clothing and being always available…all with no bad consequences.
To wit:
The items you link to suggest that it is a personality, for activist types.
I’ve had personal encounters with the producers and consumers of Mary Sue fiction. Very awkward. Even painfully unpleasant.
Wonder why so many minority or gendered characters fail? It’s because they aren’t organic, really real
The awkward thing is that the organic, really real ones often fail too. Lego sex preferences study and “muh repreezentayshun” aside, the fact is there needs to be some level of reader/viewer identification in most fiction. I’m thinking of Dwayne McDuffie’s Milestone comics which did exactly what the chuds insisted on: make your own minority characters instead of race swapping the originals.
Sank like a stone. They were well-written and one of the characters was moderately successful but all of the Milestone titles were aimed squarely at urban non-white kids. They tried to be Relevant, and most comics readers really couldn’t relate to the perils of gang activity at the municipal community centre.
The successful black characters – like Luther, Walter Moseby’s Easy Rawlins, or John Stewart – are not blackity-black. They tend towards the Everyman.
Also I am amused by how many modern black celebrities have adopted the “blickity black black blackity black” attitude unironically, as if they are unaware that CB4 was a satire.
Heh. Ah, generic moral squalor. You’d never tire of that.
All I can say is that the quote I quoted came from Lucas himself. But then, I remember when SW came out that there were going to be nine movies, three before, and three after, only later he denied saying that. So YMMV.
@Uma Thurman’s Feet, who said:
Lucas has been lying his ass off since before the movies even got made. He went to Hawaii when the original was released, expecting it to be a huge bomb. He was mourning his lost career when word came to him that it had turned out to be a huge hit, and everything after that was revisionism.
As I recall, the word was (and, I was a kid that read all the magazines like Fangoria and the rest of the “monster movie press”) that the movie was originally intended as a one-and-done homage to the old serials; he’d originally wanted to do Buck Rogers or Flash Gordon, couldn’t get the rights, and that he’d instead written his own script.
All the BS about a series and so forth only started coming out about the time everyone in Hollywood saw how much money he was making, and since the idiots had given him the rights to all the toys and other merchandize, Lucas had the money to be the 800lb gorilla about it all.
I remember being incredibly excited, seeing the writeups in all the magazines, going to see it, standing in line waiting there in Portland, Oregon, and then… Walking out still on a bit of a high from the visuals, but with a feeling of “Why does it seem so empty, so vacant…?”
I mean, OK… Look at the villains and the villainy: Cardboard cutouts, mostly. In the prequels, he tried selling the audience on the idea that it was all “Trade negotiations…” What? WTF? You could see that trend going in the earlier movies he’d made… It was incoherent and just “winged”, from the beginning. With all the usual bullshit kiddie stuff thrown in for marketing. Jar-Jar Binks, anyone? The Ewoks?
I mean, OK… The f*cking Ewoks… Do you remember how they had everyone trussed up for eating, there at the beginning? Did nobody connect those scenes with what almost certainly happened to all the Imperial Stormtroopers? I mean, one minute the Ewoks are going to eat our hero protagonists out of a stewpot, and then the next, the implied fate of the Imperials is being glossed over?
In all of human history, where there’s been a couple of equivalent powers like the Rebellion and the Imperials going at it near some raging primitive cannibals, the “civilized” sorts have usually banded together and gone after the cannibal types together… Even the Australians and the US did their best in Papua New Guinea to avoid “knowing” what happened to the Japanese, and tried to get the New Guineans to at least pay lip service to the Geneva Conventions; they weren’t joining in cannibal feasts where you saw Japanese helmets being used as bongo drums.
Lucas has lied his ass off continuously, claiming it was all “planned”. Well, if it was “planned”, there was a truly masterful inclusion of obfuscation and misdirection in it all, because at no time before he makes all these revisionist claims did he indicate that there were such plans. I remember being really disappointed that there was just going to be this one movie, and thought I was getting ripped off, because I wanted me some modernized Buck Rogers.
Lucas literally stumbled into success, and then tried to make it look like he’d meant to do it, all along. I think he’d have been way better off if he’d just said “Wow, I got really lucky…” and tried to figure out how to repeat and improve on his luck.
Theodore Dalrymple (Anthony Daniels), author and former prison doctor, used to talk about sociopathy in the criminals under his care.
And Gary Saul Morson from Northwestern lectures about how Great Lecture is develops empathy–our ability to see out of other people’s eyes.
Without practicing this skill, we remain children who do not quite believe that other people are actually real, and we act accordingly. But students aren’t asked to read Big Books anymore, and thus won’t engage with uncurated viewpoints.
Maybe the 588(!) and counting entries in your “Progressive Retail Experience” reflect this rather awkward trend.
What exactly did you intend to write?
Still not sure about this tag thing. So I’ll try this too @Smallish Bees
Meh. I’d say the cannibalisms thing is all over the map. The Japanese did some cannibalism themselves. The Allies quasi-aligned with the (fine young?) cannibals of remote Burma. At least aligned well enough to get them to assist getting their ditched cargo plane pilots and passengers back to civilization. The right civilization.
@WTP,
I agree that WWII is probably sort of a bad example, which is down to Japanese bad conduct more than anything else. It’s a wonder to anyone of historical bent to compare/contrast the Russo-Japanese War and WWI with the 1930s and WWII; you might well be talking about two different countries.
The events I was thinking of where the two great empires worked together against barbarianism and the like were more like the Napoleonic War-era encounters that the French and English had in the South Pacific. There’s at least one case where the Europeans were going at it, noted that the cannibals were gathering to take advantage, and then both went about sinking all the tribal sorts who’d put to sea… Before going back to battering each other.
Swear to God, I read about that somewhere, it stuck in my head, and now that I need to make the cite, I cannot find it. Also remember something with the Dutch and English getting together to go after some mutual enemy in the East Indies, but again… The citations escape me.
We have this problem in video games right now. A whole lot of people think a protagonist just has to represent some vague underserved minority. Which wouldn’t be a big problem except the characters are more often than not awfully written and usually come off as sociopaths rather than anything even moderately relatable.
And when you point it out they get really shrill and accuse you have hating [/insert whatever group here].
Remember Doogie Howser, MD? I never watched it precisely because the idea of a show about a Brilliant 16 Year Old Doctor was too off-putting.
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I can’t imagine much that’s more tedious than blackity-blackness as a basis for entertainment. Or indeed gaiety-gayness, or Let Me List My Pronouns, or pretty much any identitarian pity-fest. It doesn’t strike me as an expansive and versatile basis for storytelling. Listening to other people’s problems, whether external or self-inflicted, and their identitarian self-absorption, gets old pretty quickly.
[ Tries to repress Blankety Blank theme tune now playing in head. ]