#(well i'd argue that most of what i like is for *general* audiences but nonetheless i exist in spaces with a lot of kids)

[gamebunny-advance]

Sus.

I just need to get this story off my chest because it's been bothering me since it happened. It's nothing really relevant to what I usually post or anything that's happened here, so feel free to skip this "story" if the subject matter offends you.

Content Warning for minors in implied sexual situations.

So, Youtube likes to recommend cartoon review/analysis videos to me, even of shows I've never watched. Sometimes I watch them because I like watching people be passionate about any given subject.

But other times they can be a little cringe because it's still grown adults yelling about cartoons, ya know? I'm happy that they've got something they're passionate enough about to sink so much time and effort into a video, but that doesn't automatically make me share their enthusiasm, especially if it's coming from a place of a bad faith criticism.

For the most part, I just move on from videos that give that vibe, but I recently came across one that disturbed me in a way that no one in the comments was really pointing out because they were too busy agreeing with the sentiment that the cartoon in question was bad.

The video was about some reboot for Tiny Toon Adventures (I literally know nothing about it other than what the video told me, and at this point I'd rather not learn anything more about it).

The video had pretty high production values all things considered, with a lot of original animation and art, like actual lip-synching on the avatar and detailed backgrounds as opposed to the static sprites on single colored/patterned backgrounds I usually see among cartoon critics.

I didn't stay long enough for the credits or check the description, but presumably all the art was done by the speaker/creator. Due to this, I was impressed enough to stick around to see what he had to say. Generally speaking, you just don't put that amount of effort into something that you're not passionate about, and I'm here for the passion first and opinions second.

The first talking point was about how the show apparently changed the relationship between the lead characters, Babs and Buster Bunny, from friends/lovers to siblings. This was gotten across in the usual way of the speaker overacting how angry/shocked they are about what is honestly a mundane change in the grand scheme of things. This was turn-off number 1 because I don't find the "caustic critic" to be that funny, especially when it's in service to bad faith criticisms. But, that wasn't what really disturbed me.

What set off a red flag to me, was the "skit" that followed.

The speaker detailed a situation where children, illustrated as a young girl and young boy, who were fans of the new reboot would eventually go back and watch the original show and be corrupted due to them misunderstanding the characters' relationship as being incestuous. I thought that this point was heavily exaggerated (as bits of this nature tend to be), but it's still not what disturbed me.

What disturbed me was how one of the sight gags to illustrate this point was to show the children wearing character themed underwear.

I'm not saying the underwear was drawn as a separate prop that they were implied to be wearing. I mean that as a part of the gag, I was forced to briefly look at two children standing in their underwear for no good reason. And to get to that gag, the characters were first fully dressed in merch before revealing their underwear underneath.

So not only was I forced to look at two children standing in their underwear, but they were literally undressed in front of me to make that "joke".

And immediately following that, I'm also forced to look at the girl child wrapped up in a spiderweb about to be eaten by a giant spider to illustrate the point that the kids are now trapped in some sort of "mindweb" from the confusion.

So me, knowing that tying people in spiderwebs is an uncommon but real fetish, felt deeply uncomfortable by this scene occurring right after the children were shown half naked.

Like, I'm not accusing that creator of anything because none of this is proof of any wrongdoing or bad intention outside of the bad faith criticism of the show. But I will say that I was so disturbed by this that I literally couldn't watch the rest of the video, so I don't know if it got worse from there.

But to try and prove that I'm not trying to say this in bad faith, I'll grant a couple of "outs":

The children weren't drawn particularly realistically: they were stick figure-esque in comparison to the more detailed art in the rest of the video that I saw. If the artist really wanted to detail these children, they probably would have, so I don't believe the drawings were meant to be especially gratifying.

I also know that cartoon print underwear is a shorthand for the character wearing them to be obsessed with the cartoon on the underwear. It's literally a joke from the Spongebob Movie, so if this guy was old enough to have been a fan of the original Tiny Toons, then he probably would have been in the age range to watch that movie and internalize that joke (or seen it elsewhere in a different cartoon). So it's possible that he might not have considered the implications of showing a child in a similar situation.

Additionally, while I don't recall much of Tiny Toons, I know that it's one of those shows that while it's made for children/general audiences, has a lot of mature humor, so maybe he thought he was doing the same thing without considering the implications of what he'd done.

Which is basically the same justification as the last point, but really the only way I can imagine someone thinking any of that was okay is ignorance.

But your dear ol'Sammy has been around the block a few times. Even though I can easily make up reasons why all this could be completely innocent/accidental, I feel like I can tell the difference between someone who made an honest mistake, and someone that is incapable of hiding what they really are. And this is sadly falling under the latter.

I always hope that I'm wrong in situations like this. I hope that I'm just paranoid and there's no malice at play here because my goal is not to punish wrongdoing, it's to make sure that other people are safe. But I can't ignore a red flag once I see it, and it was driving me crazy that no one seemed to be acknowledging it.

I won't link the video here because I don't want it to spread around, but if you really want to seek it out, then I've probably given enough information for you to find it on your own and make your own judgement about it.