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.
Anytime the moral is to not get angry about something that’s perfectly reasonable to be angry about
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.
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.
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.
when the “villain” is objectively correct, pointing out the failure of the establishment and that change is necessary, and then also skins puppies alive for no reason, and then the points they bring up are never addressed again
“I can’t believe you convinced me that we shouldn’t be letting corporations pollute the planet! I’m never falling for that again!”
Literally this:
“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
Rudolph’s Nose trope.
Exactly. HATED that and the Clifford books as a kid for that reason.
It’s also kinda harmful to disabled people. The implication is they can only be accepted if they prove themselves exceptional
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.
The power of love saves the day
I may be biased since im ace
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.
The moral of every Hollywood Racism Movie^TM ends up boiling down to “We could eliminate racism if only every racist met a person of [RACE] that they actually liked.”
I mean, that is actually the most successful way of countering racism in real life. Not 100% successful, but better than just trying to talk someone out of racist views.
They’re correct that this creates cognitive dissonance. The racist, upon meeting a minority member that doesn’t uphold the stereotype, has two contradictory facts in their head:
-
All members of a minority group are bad.
-
This member of that minority group isn’t bad.
This is cognitive dissonance. Both of these cannot be true at the same time. One of these premises must be wrong.
Hollywood imagines the bigot will treat this like a physicist disproving a theory by finding a counterexample. But bigotry is anyhing but scientific. You can’t reason your way out of a place reason did not lead you to. Instead, they adjust their premises to:
-
Most members of a minority group are bad.
-
This member of that minority group is one of the few good ones.
-
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 hate when media tells us that men should always agree with their wives even when the wife is clearly wrong and irrational. And I’m a woman. If I ever get married, I want a husband who will tell me when I’m wrong. Nobody should have to just put up with their partner behaving like an irrational lunatic without saying something.
I legitimately want to see a movie about a husband/wife couple that gets along the whole movie. It’s not that there can’t be conflict, just have it come from outside the relationship.
The villian being actualy some misunderstood broken character and that from their perspective they aren’t doing anything wrong.
Remember when in Hollywood the bad guy was the bad guy because they wanted to do bad things, and the hero was the hero because they wanted to do good things. And at the end the good guy defeats the bad guy and saves the day. Now every bad guy must have this complex back story of abuse or some wrong doing against then, and now their evil actions are just some justified misguided revenge against the world. FUCK THAT.
I am 90% sure that the last 20 years of this being normalized by mainstream media has let to us not properly punishing literal real life pedophiles and power hungry sociopaths, because “Well we don’t know their side of the story… there has to be due process.” Yeah, not long ago the due process was that people got linched for doing a fraction behind closed doors of what degenrate billionaires do in the open today.
Moral of the story is that there’s a side to everything… NO there isn’t, there’s pretty definitve bad and pretty definitive good. Sure there are morally ambiguous topics, but Hollywood has been bluring the line on literal genocide, rape and murder just for the sake of not wanting to write an actual interesting story.
Edit: I just want to drive home how much I despise that shit.
I agree but I also disagree. I think it depends on the story. Lots of stories work on a simple level of “these values are good” and “these values are bad”, and that’s cool from Jungian perspective, but I also don’t want to live in a world where nobody makes life better for anyone else because it’s just pre-ordained that who is going to be a rapist and who is going to be feeding homeless people.
Like do I want to read the Lord of the Rings as imperialist propaganda against orcs and Southrons and wildlings, who actually have valid political objections to the axis of Human-Elf-Dwarf hegemony? Hell yeah I do because I’m a leftist freak, but I recognize that I am fundamentally misreading the moral context the story is presented in–it’s about archetypes, about human values, about that nature of evil, not as an independent entity in itself, but how it can manifests in each one of us.
It just depends on the story.
Probably the WORST thing a story can do is mix and match “people are only evil because of we misunderstand them” and "people are purely evil.¨ I don´t see it often, but I think How to Train Your Dragon does it.
You’ll find some friends on the writing staff of Puss in Boots: The Last Wish. Big Jack Horner is very obviously written as a glorious return to characters who are simply bad.
Like do I want to read the Lord of the Rings as imperialist propaganda against orcs and Southrons and wildlings, who actually have valid political objections to the axis of Human-Elf-Dwarf hegemony? Hell yeah I do because I’m a leftist freak, but I recognize that I am fundamentally misreading the moral context the story is presented in–it’s about archetypes, about human values, about that nature of evil, not as an independent entity in itself, but how it can manifests in each one of us.
Funnily enough, I think Tolkein might have also enjoyed that. He was long-conflicted about the nature of orcs, being that his religious beliefs maintained that evil could not create from nothing, but only twist, and even then, it could not corrupt someone past possibility of redemption.
So orcs were stuck between being elves corrupted past redemption, or something sauron created.
Probably the WORST thing a story can do is mix and match “people are only evil because of we misunderstand them” and "people are purely evil.¨ I don´t see it often, but I think How to Train Your Dragon does it.
Or change it on the fly for the same character.
Cruella de Ville going from someone so single-mindedly obsessed with the idea of the perfect coat, that she didn’t care for how she got there, even if she had to skin a hundred puppies, to someone who developed a lifelong phobia and hatred of Dalmatians after they scared her mother off a cliff, weakened her character a bit, I feel.
If she had been one of the other from the get-go, that would have been fine, but it was switching between that wasn’t.
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.