#and im still doing it in order to procrastinate my bachelors thesis which would be on the topic of copaganda

[doomdoomofdoom]

Ah fuck now I have to go on a tangent

Okay so on top of joking about Paw Patrol being a fascist state, we do also do academic analysis of the thing. Unfortunately, both children's media and copaganda are fairly new fields of study. While we don't have a lot of specifics in either field, we do know that entertainment influences our perceptions of reality, and we know that kids are particularly susceptible to this.

That's generally why we should keep a close eye on what values our kids' media represents and how well they're executed. Even a well-meaning piece of fiction could perpetuate harmful narratives (which I'm sure anyone on this hellsite has discussed at length).

And when it comes to those narratives, Paw Patrol,,, sucks. Like, it really shits the bed. (At this point we need to briefly acknowledge that Paw Patrol's primary function is to sell merch; they didn't set out to make a morally valuable children's show. Ideally it could do both, but it was never meant to.)

It does hit the surface level beats of "be nice to others" and "work as a team" and "believe in yourself" etc. As a bonus, it brings up conservation and recycling, which is nice.

Aaaaand that's where it ends. If you even marginally scrape past the surface, it gets shockingly regressive. Like, there are 7 central cast members (1 kid, 6 dogs) and only one of them is female. That's an abysmal split in gender representation for a show aimed at all audiences. Despite a roughly 1:1 split in real life children, media often opts for a 2:1 ratio of male and female characters. Paw Patrol's discrepancy is three times as high. (For the sake of comparison, that's the same ratio as in My Little Pony, which specifically targets young girls and still worse than Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, which is targeted at young boys.) It goes without saying that The Girl wears all pink and has an implied love interest in the main character.

But let's talk actual societal structure and lessons, because that's where it gets weird.

As mentioned above, there are no prisons in Paw Patrol. That's because generally, the town where it takes place has no crime. There are no criminals in Adventure Bay. But there is Police: Our privatized Cop Dog and central character has by far the most screen time and missions. Which is odd, when most of these missions do not require police presence. Lots of them are rescue missions, either due to accidents or natural catastrophes, and could in fact be solved through airlifting or bulldozing alone. Yet cop dog is there all the time. His main contributions to the group are leadership and high-tech gear. I shit you not, this dog has a surveillance drone. Drawing a parallel to the increased presence and militarization of police forces is really not that far-fetched.

It's important to acknowledge here that a lot of media for young children carries pro-police messaging, and I'm hesitant to call it copaganda by default, despite its explicit purpose to foster trust in the police force. The reason I hesitate is that it falls in the general category of "trustworthy adult" representation, which helps young kids navigate their world. Lessons like "If you have [problem], [authority figure] will help you" are pretty par for the course in entertainment for young kids. Cop Dog stands out because he's not a trusted adult, he's a main character. He's always there and seemingly holds authority over the other dogs, despite being technically equal.

There are some episodes that include actual crimes, which would justify police presence. This may sound contradictory to earlier when I said there were no criminals in Adventure Bay (good job paying attention, btw) but there's a very simple explanation: Crime in Paw Patrol is committed by people (and/or animals) from the outside. Yeah, that's about as obvious of a xenophobic narrative as it gets. This does go hand-in-hand with the ways we generally portray "bad people" in kids media as inherently different to the "good guys", like they have some sort of intrinsic quality (eg lack of self control) that makes them do the evil bad thing. They're evil because they're evil. When it comes to punishment, Paw Patrol (in lack of prisons) usually relies on either karmic retribution and/or labor. If your crime was to break something, you have to fix it, etc. I personally find that the least problematic part of the overall messaging, but it does obviously combine with the above "All wrongdoers are outsiders" thing.

Quickfire round: Elected Officials are all portrayed as incompetent. In fairness, there are only two of them, but one of them is the recurring antagonist mayor of the neighboring town and the sympathetic mayor of Adventure Town itself is often frantic and helpless; after all she needs to contract a private organization to resolve pretty much any problem in her town. She also happens to be a black woman, so make of that what you will.

Even though the government doesn't provide seemingly any services to its town, it remains a 'neoliberal utopia' thanks to the entirely privatized services of our main characters. That's technically a massive systemic failure as Adventure Bay would collapse as soon as the dogs take their business elsewhere, but I do not think flawed public infrastructure is what's gonna harm your toddlers mind. You can make a point about how it fosters trust in private entities vs public ones, but I think that requires more critical thinking than the average Paw Patrol viewer supplies.

There were a couple of more or less infamous publications scrutinizing Paw Patrol in early 2020 (you may recall the whole "The woke left wants to cancel Paw Patrol" nonsense), but in general even the strongly worded academic papers that compare Cop Dogs spy gear to the Iraq war aren't taking it too seriously.

As an example, I leave you with “Whenever there’s trouble, just yelp for help”: Crime, conservation, and corporatization in Paw Patrol by Liam Kennedy.

My journey thru my kid’s Paw Patrol phase via posts from my Bluesky account.