#just because steven universe did a miniseries on how the gems and greg were bad parents doesnt mean every show needs to nowadays

[pandoratheprocrasticreator]

yes there are more and more childrens works nowadays that do talk about the moral implications of putting children in dangerous situations but it’s usually like. really clear if that’s what the work wants to talk about. otherwise children’s media have child protagonists get up to funky adventures and save the world because it’s children’s media. targeted towards children. who have rich internal lives outside of their interactions with adults. who want to see people like themselves be the hero of a story same as adults do.

like as a fan of childrens shows myself im certainly not going to scoff at adults who like children’s shows bc some of them are genuinely good but. if youre not part of the target audience then it’s expected that you go into children’s media with some suspension of disbelief? like no a plucky 12 year old irl probably can’t fight god no matter how much they love their friends and if a creepy old man beams out of the sky to tell them to then you should probably call the police. but if the show is positing the plucky 12 year old as the protag and the creepy old man as their mentor then just. go with it?

there is media that shows how a child protagonists’s adventures could be traumatizing and how the adults around the protag have failed them by letting them go on an adventure in the first place. that kind of story can resonate with kids too. but your takeaway from that kind of story should be “sometimes adults put kids in unfair situations and this is a fantastical representation of an irl situation.” your takaway shouldn’t be “the adults in this story suck for letting a 10 year old fight a dragon therefore every single story where a 10 year old fights a dragon should also talk about why all the adults involved suck and if they don’t then it’s a bad story” like. the dragon is not the point here!

frankly if you look at children’s media and cannot bring yourself to do the one bit of suspension of disbelief needed to keep the story going then. what are you doing here? if you want to explore how adults put children in dangerous situations and use an adventure style story as a backdrop then there are many works, both for children and adults, that explore this. but just because a piece of children’s media has the same vibes as another piece that explores something doesn’t make the first piece bad if it doesn’t explore it.

what you want is just a different story at that point. possibly one targeted at older audiences. or you’re just trying to be edgy. either way if you’re complaining about something like that then you need to understand that there are some stories that you’ll only be satisfied with if you rewrite the entire plot itself. at that point just reread/rewatch the thing you actually like instead of rewriting the whole book/show/movie to be a clone of it.