Hot take: Bluey became such a massive hit because it's one of the few currently-running TV shows where parents and children are both treated as valuable people with rich inner lives.
After the death of the family sitcom, most shows are either: 1) aimed at children and show the parents as idiots who get in the way of the children's plans; 2) aimed at adults and show only childless single people; or (rarely) 3) family sitcoms where the parents and children are horrible people who hate their lives and yell a lot. So a show that portrays the children and the parents as people with interesting personalities who are doing their best and like spending time with each other filled a gap in the culture and people went crazy for it.
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"the lunatic fringe on my opponents' side fundamentally taints their entire movement, which is therefore obviously morally bankrupt and should be ignored. the lunatic fringe on my side is an unrepresentative minority and anybody paying attention to them is a fool/bigot/liar." <- depressingly common pattern. you can't have it both ways!
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(Disclaimer: this is a vent post)
Jiang Cheng discourse is frustrating because I feel like it always boils down to a debate on whether he's a good or bad person when like-
Such a central idea throughout all her books is that everyone has the capacity for good and evil. The cannibal who's been sewing political discourse for centuries is also a halfway decent dad, the prince who once tried to save all the common people ended up turning on them and releasing a plague, the guy who schemed and killed his way to chief of cultivation sacrificed himself to keep his best friend safe, the world's most dedicated internet hater also improves the lives of almost everyone around him... trying to force this narrow frame of good and bad people on her stories just doesn't work.
When it comes to Jiang Cheng in particular, I feel like the context for his actions gets completely thrown out the window in favor of focusing on the ways in which he was an asshole, but Jiang Cheng isn't really in a position where he can afford to be kind to everyone. The man has a whole clan to watch out for- as a kid, he couldn't just stand up to the Wens because every action he took would be interpreted as a reflection of the Jiang Clan's stance (and they were not in a position to go to war with the Wens). As an adult, he thought he couldn't afford to stand up for either wwx or the remaining Wens because it would risk putting his very freshly reformed clan who just finished a war in conflict with 3 other major clans. He is shown to have the capacity for love and the capacity for kindness (ex: getting all the hiers out of the cave and running all the way back to Yunmeng for help, putting himself in danger to draw the Wen scouts away from wwx, co-parenting Jin Ling with Jin Guangyao, being an attack dog against anyone who hurts his family, guarding wwx from dogs as a kid, standing up to his mom and asking her to stop when she berates wwx), but he rarely has opportunities where he can just follow all of his own values without it putting his clan at risk. I also feel like the ways in which he's kind get dismissed because he doesn't act nice. Like, he's not willing to put on a smile or be chatty like either Lan Xichen or Jin Guangyao. He's an anxious, rage-filled, asshole who hates losing, and that is on display at all times.
And ya- he's absolutely done some awful shit. He's fallen for propaganda, he's hurt and killed both wwx and potentially hundreds of innocent people, he doubles down on his mistakes instead of reflecting, and he votes with the leapords eating your face party, and he'll be spending a lot of time alone and filled with rage and regret because of it. I do not deny that all that shit is true about him, but what I'll argue against is the idea that it's all he ever was and all he'll ever be
Normally, I believe in death of the author, but in this case mxtx's comments from a 2016 interview support my stance on him, so I'm gonna bring it up (Link to full interview. It's a fun read)
But ya: shout out to my fellow Jiang Cheng fans who like him, but think he's an asshole and want to push him down a flight of stairs
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thoughts on thistle and yaad's dynamic that i vomited in the tags of another post but will now try to articulate here: they're not actually family, or at least they shouldn't be. not in a conventional sense anyway. framing them as uncle and nephew (even in a non-literal, silly fantasy world way) rides more on technicality than anything concrete.
what i mean by this is yaad calls thistle by name and says he and delgal were raised "like" brothers. he talks about thistle like he's an outsider imposing himself into the melinis' space, and it's clear that thistle was never legitimized as a member of the family. for thistle's part, though we don't know how he would treat yaad pre-demon brainrot, it's safe to assume based on the way he punishes him—turning him into a doll—and how little is shown in the way of any sort of relationship between them that thistle only cares* about yaad as an extension of delgal (otherwise i'd expect something like kabru and milsiril, because it's not like another complicated interspecies family dynamic would be out of place, yet there's next to nothing on them even in bonus content, just their scant interactions in the main story).
in essence, they're strangers to one another. thistle's desperation to preserve the illusion of a family, a model where he doesn't even fit, was the snare they were caught in for the past thousand years of stasis. yaad-as-nephew is a prop to uphold that illusion, and thistle is playing a role he's unfit to play. in the context of post-canon interactions, attempting to reconstruct that facade would only be a reenactment of trauma for them both (in a deeply compelling way i'd love to watch unfold, tbh), as that "uncle and nephew" framing places thistle in an implicit position of power over someone he's already traumatized through misuse of authority in the past, a role which also perpetuates his adultification and yaad's infantilization in turn. it'd mostly be an obstacle to any real connection.
best to burn the melini family bridge, i think, and if there's still anything salvageable left in the rubble, let something different supplant it.
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exclusionists really love to tell other queer people to die bc of [checks notes] they dont fact check and just believe that bi lesbian has been coined (it hasnt) and the coiner was a terf (it wasnt) just bc they heard it from other exclusionists. and for some fucking reason believe that bi lesbian is a terf term despite a ton of the other people telling me to kill myself over being a bi lesbian have also been terfs.
"who cares to hear out fellow queers who are just using an unconventional label. i overheard an Unsourced Bad Thing so they must all die, obviously."
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Would anyone want hear my honest unfiltered opinion(s) or breakdown about what I liked/ didn’t liked/ wished the writers had done differently for The Boys season 4, now that the season is complete and all 8 episodes are out?
Because, spoiler alert:
(Click here for the detailed episodic breakdown)
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DPXDC Prompt #91
Danny was dimension hopping, his original dimension was still there but after his parents disowned him when they found out it wasn’t safe anymore especially with the GIW stepping up their game. Danny just wanted to find a dimension where he could live peacefully after all he was part human and while he loves the infinite realms it wasn’t sustainable in the long run to his human half. He finally finds one where the GIW doesn’t exist at all, but the weird part is there are actual superheroes here. The weirder part is his counterpart in this dimension is part of the Justice League! The bad part is it seems in this dimension the portal fully killed him so how was he supposed to explain to his counterpart that he was half dead.
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