@acavatica #‘it’s better on the isms because it doesn’t discuss them’ might be the whole thing here#‘it doesn’t make me uncomfortable’ isn’t necessarily better than ‘dated thing had an awkward discussion but they tried’
Yes, yes, YES! Starting a new post, because this sums up so many of my frustrations with fan crit. Like, Animorphs clumsily attempts to tackle AIDS and slavery reparations and environmentalism and disability justice, and sometimes it works but sometimes it doesn't. But at least it tries. AniTV strips all of that out in favor of a far blander "yeerks bad, humans good, we ignore race here" story.
There's this fallacy, where it's easier to criticize a failed attempt than it is a total lack of trying. In the Heights (2021) got smacked up, down, and sideways by critics and fans for its failure to include more dark-skinned characters; meanwhile A Quiet Place II (2021), Venom II (2021), Free Guy (2021), and Black Widow (2021) get no such critiques because they each include Exactly One Black Actor. Scholomance gets review-bombed for "fake" "forced" "diversity" (X) for featuring kids from all over the world, while Mortal Instruments gets a total lack of criticism for its cast having Exactly One Asian Guy (who is half-white).
I vividly recall a media professor ca. 2013 mansplaining to me that, actually, Orange is the New Black is sexist because it shows male characters having power over female ones, and there's no onscreen sex between the Black lesbians. Somehow he didn't feel the need to say this about Breaking Bad, Supernatural, Peaky Blinders, or any other series that went entire YEARS without passing the Bechdel test. No wonder TV shows have again embraced colorblind racism.
It's like when a series tries to tackle the big issues, there's enough there there for critics to get their teeth into; better to blandly replicate the status quo. And studios notice: Better to avoid all controversy by having the Animorphs inhabit a world where no one ever notices Jake and Cassie being an interracial couple, where Marco lives in a McMansion and Tobias's home life is never mentioned at all, where the closest we ever get to discussion of gender is Marco saying Rachel "throws like a girl" only to get belted with a baseball. That way no one can ever find enough examples of sexism to edit into a clever 60-second video montage of "12 most sexist moments of AniTV you've definitely forgotten!"
