#asdflkjasdlfkj sorry for the long response

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☕ + anything you're feeling salty about 👀

i think a lot of sequels and just fandom content lately has a kind of....narrative revisionism that's very knee-jerk and basic and comes back around to reactionary imo.

like -- i do get the impulse. often i even agree with the impulse!! when the only queer coded or textually queer characters in a narrative are villains, it's very easy to be like, well what if THEY'RE not the villain, the HERO of that narrative is ACTUALLY the villain, and the hero is actually OPPRESSING the villain. you see this a lot with disney hot takes -- Ursula didn't do anything wrong, Scar maybe had a point, etc, etc. I think most of those are fairly harmless (lack of understanding of tortious interference w/r/t Ursula aside).

and sometimes this is can be done well, even beyond queer coded narratives, by really going AFTER what society usually considers a HERO and whether their traits are actually that heroic -- GDT did this explicitly with Michael Shannon's character in The Shape of Water, where he took what would've been the main protagonist in the 60s movies it's based on (upstanding straight white family man w kids and a beautiful wife at home, an apparently very successful government agent) and makes him the antagonist to the marginalized characters that we're rooting for. Not to be cheesy but that's real #Commentary, on society, on the way White Men have been treated as de facto heroes for doing very unheroic things like y'know. Imperialism and the founding & upholding of racist/sexist/homophobic/ableist institutions.

So that's narrative revisionism done well. (see also, loathe as i am to praise star wars on anything, how they're doing all they can to ruin Boba Fett for the portion of fandom that was alllll about idolizing a cool (presumed white) bounty hunter dude.)

But then you have like -- Cobra Kai. Where in the process of trying to broaden the scope of the Karate Kid movies and tell the story from the bully's POV, the show seems to have (unintentionally or not) convinced a BUNCH of people that Daniel Larusso is and was California's Greatest Monster for, idk, fighting back and getting a little mouthy toward a bunch of kids who were older, bigger, and stronger than him. All of which is kicked off by him defending a girl who was single at the time and flirting with him. Like this idea about the "illegal crane kick" (you see other people in that tournament kick their opponents in the face, it's either not illegal or it's not exclusive to Daniel who ~thinks the rules don't apply to him~ or w/e) seems like something that came from fanboys who saw themselves more in the Cobra Kai badasses (how DARE daniel come in and win against these HIGHLY TRAINED fighters when all he did was fuck around w a random japanese man for a few weeks!!! THEY DESERVED IT MORE!!!).

but the villains (or at least, antagonists) of TKK were chosen VERY intentionally: a white vietnam war veteran. a bunch of big, blond, preppy boys. like it's ABOUT the unjustified force!! it's ABOUT the violence inherent in privilege!!! it's ABOUT the othering and mistreatment of people with the most MINOR of deviations (i mean Daniel is white Italian, but the mere fact that he's smaller and like A LITTLE darker than the most popular his preppy California school mates marks him instantly as an outsider & therefore weak and vulnerable). like these are all highly specific critiques of 80s culture and politics, and esp pointed for being in a karate movie of all things.

so going into cobra kai w the presumption of, 'well the cobras worked hard and deserved to win and were kids and didn't do anything that bad really after all daniel fought back and mouthed off to JOHNNY despite the truce and and--' kind of defeats the point? like being revisionist toward a villain who's a villain for their white privilege is.....like coming out Beauty and the Beast going like, that Gaston had some points tho, the Beast WAS kinda rude!!!!

which to be sure is probably disney's next live action reboot plot but like. come on.