as someone who was neither exposed to paw patrol nor is frequently around children who could offer insight into this apparently despicable show - i get why peppa pig is on probation - what did paw patrol do to you, is it just the pawpaganda copaganda? opportunity to soapbox presented
Copaganda is enough! it's also quite an irritating show generally. I dislike the privatisation of services and the fact that the conflicts are all so screamingly stupid. Adult characters are always shown doing incredibly stupid things and flying into a panic.
I hate how there is precisely one Girl Dog in the main crew (Skye) and she's got the most useful vehicle (helicopter) but the show dicks around with idiotic premises that Skye could solve quickly and afficiently but can't because they're all thick as pigshit and spend an entire episode and endless resources rescuing the same cat from the same predicament with slightly-wrong tools so all the boy dogs get airtime. Dislike the voice acting even in the UK regionalisation (a lot of these cartoons get redubbed with UK voice actors and accents, as parents otherwise complain about their children adopting 'unattractive' USA accents).
Overall, it creates a frustratingly stupid and low-quality show that mostly attracts children because of its stimulating qualities, but irritates adults for being awful.
Because it's so unattractive and distracting to have on - very noisy and sharp-edged, with piercing voices, bursts of shouting and panic, and constant blasting around - it's impossible for adults to do much, or take much pleasure in your activities, if the kids are watching it nearby. It's like being constantly interrupted. A useful parenting use case of television is to have the kids watch it when you're trying to do something else - cook dinner or finish off a piece of work or simple have a fucking moment to rotate your OCs. Paw Patrol sucks the pleasure from making dinner, reduces you to a frazzled mess at the laptop, and pellets your brain with scraps of idiotic noise that puncture your daydreams. It's hard to blank out, and worse than a nagging toddler. And not even your OWN toddler! someone else's nagging toddler.
Parents who want to use TV as a tool tend to like "quieter" cartoons - Sarah and Duck, Puffin Rock, Bluey - as they're either more pleasant to watch with the kids, or easier to mentally block out. They also have some lesson around nature, emotional regulation, or a pleasant reflection on the absurdity of life. Even Spongebob (which my parents considered unpleasantly frenetic) is somewhat funny to watch and somehat easy to ignore.
Paw Patrol has no nutritive content. While supporters pretend that it has lessons like "the power of friendship," that's actualy a pointlessly obscure lesson for small children, who do not think or interact in those terms. Worse, to generate interpersonal conflict that they can later heal with "friendship" and forgiveneness, the dogs usually spark this off by acting like insufferable little shits to each other in the first place. In order to solve the issue, they have to create it - which usually means being little bastards and making each other cry.
I can't remember where I first saw it, but I recall a criticism of the "my little pony: friendship is magic" cartoon being that the cartoon frequently depicts bullying and hurtful behaviour. The idea is that the True Friends resolve it with friendship, right? and the watching child absorbs the message that Bullying is Bad? But the criticism pointed out that very young children don't follow that plotline like that; instead, they pick up on the snotty tone and shitty behaviour of the bullies, because that's shown as normal behaviour. The twenty-minute-later resolution in which the bully stalks off in a huff does not in any way create a message in a child's head about the "power of friendship." A lot of the parents I've spoken to have echoed that their children never spoke in a "bullying" tone or used those phrases until picking them up from cartoons that are supposed to be about "the power of friendship", but there you have it - early experience in "how to bully" and "how to use a snotty tone" and "how to piss off your friends" are modelled on stupid cartoons that show nothing else, because it's cheap conflict for a friendship-resolution. And that's irritating to watch.
In conclusion, the kids aren’t allowed to watch it - I learned my lesson early on!
