twitter is making me insane. everyone repeat after me: rocky horror was, moreso and before all else, a parody movie. a spoof. a direct, satirical reference to the sci-fi and creature feature canon of the golden age of hollywood. the opening song literally lists a huge chunk of the movies that it is directly spoofing. rocky horror was a parody flick like..... fucking,, "epic movie" of the '00s except 1) nobody had beaten the concept to death yet 2) it had bangers 3) it was written by some gay weirdo theater kids back when that was edgier and chiefly 4) this was the era when gay weirdo theater kids were writing bangers. it was so popular because it was funny and full of popular references to movies everyone had seen and was excitingly weird because gay weirdo theater kids had not yet penetrated culture and it had bangers, and also meat loaf was in it. it was not just some gay mecca of a film because straight people of that generation fucking love rocky horror, but the fact that straight people of that age fucking love rocky horror allowed their kids to see rocky horror and go to screenings way younger than they'd be allowed to see media made by gay weirdos normally so you then got a generation of shadow casts that did have a ton of gay kids running and attending them and who by and large didn't get the references in the movie. which is fine because the way we engage with and interact with media changes over time and it can exist both in the context of its origin and the context of the present. but my g-d some of you people have both lost the thread of history and are acting very stupid about this. the writer of rocky horror has been on estrogen longer than half of you people have been alive. genderqueer people of a certain age often don't have 100% perfect progressive politics. have i covered everything yet, what am i missing. someday we will be free of this discourse and i will ascend perfectly into the sky.
realized i didn't make this explicitly clear but every single one of the ""problematic"" scenes and tropes people love to go on about in rocky horror are explicit parodies of extant and nearly inescapable pulp sci fi/horror tropes of the time, like they were referencing movies and comics and media that the viewer base grew up with, the sex scenes and frank n furter as a character, etc are so over the top because they are parodies
#and the joke is not 'sexual assault is funny' the joke is like#bela lugosi as dracula! the joke is the concept of like#this ~disgusting monster~ who is so ~sexually compelling~ that ~somehow~ the dashing protagonist is simply helpless to resist#the joke is THE PULP the joke is that there were a lot of BAD MOVIES out there with BAD SCRIPTS and DUMB CONCEPTS#the joke is bad acting!!!! the joke is that a lot of movies sucked and were silly!!!!!!#the joke is that being ~compelled~ is a silly excuse to get some weird sex on screen!!!!
