Quite The Discourse Oddity: Le Threshold, or How I Realized That Too Many Discussions Lacked A Sense of Scale
As someone who has come to appreciate the art of animation, it’s really common to see discourse that has to stress that the medium isn’t just for children. Over my time online, however, I’ve felt that there tended to be an obsession with creating an image of self-righteousness or entitlement with select projects that were able to appeal just as much for adults as children. Whether it’d be due to insecurities or genuine ego, so often I’ve felt too much animation discourse (especially from the late-2000s to early 2010s) would seemingly rely more on the image of SOUNDING smart rather than the ability to engage the subject with depth, how their artistic lens or media literacy developed overtime, or even if they have any real sense of scale. Sometimes to the point that the idea of whether one’s actually calling a work a job well done can be questionable. Welcome to......QUITE THE DISCOURSE ODDITY!
It’s quite ironic....in a frustrating sense. For how obviously important in-betweens are to the very structure of animation, it’s been WAY too easy for me to find animation discourse that lacks any clear idea of an in-between. Just....some incredibly unclear, sometimes non-existent sense of scale. Like, you wouldn’t BELIEVE how frequent I’ve seen such oddly warped thresholds of what was “too much” (Mr. Enter has entered the chat). One minute, Gaston is being called one of the worst Disney villains because “as a feminist, I hate his advances at Belle,” yet the next, Frollo’s getting a pass and there’s even a joke about wishing that they could be Jafar after seeing what slave outfit Jasmine got put in.
Broadly speaking, this has been the cornerstone of the issues I’ve recognized with animation discourse online, but I still wanted to highlight some key examples of how this could get in the way. Going back to the last part of Quite The Discourse Oddity, the central problem I had there was how, often, the discussion surrounding mature content or more adult-leaning jokes in children’s animation tended to come down to the mere audacity to incorporate the thing. Frequently, that same (deceptively) generalizing emphasis would be treated as the be-all of why any couple of cartoons were placed as cream of the crop material, despite the lack of any clear scaling of how much better of a job one work may have done compared to another. It may be cool to see, but....it’s clear there was something more structurally that allowed one kids’ cartoon to catch on more than another. This can get even weirder when, frequently, those same discussions seem to forget the potential issue of getting gratuitous with the degree of edginess there is. Even with just general comedy, there tends to be this implication. Sure, that tends to be the problem with adult-skewing works that have vaguely Family Guy style faces, but it’s not like that’s the ONLY place you can call something gratuitously edgy (or especially just plain offensive). If anything, keeping such a complaint exclusively to those works can make such discourse more lacking in nuance or depth. Even during the select occasion where the “sexual innuendo in kids’ works” discussion actually does bring up the possibility of going too far or otherwise being awkward as hell, where the line’s drawn is usually kept rather hazy anyway.
You wouldn’t BELIEVE how frequently I’ve seen such oddly warped thresholds of what was “too much” (Mr. Enter has entered the chat). With one of many anti-SJW Tubers that ragged on Turning Red, they were complaining about the film’s allusion to menstruation by saying “sure, it’ll fly over kids’ heads, but the parents that know would be shocked,” suggesting THAT is enough to argue that what the movie did was too much or that it lacked tact. In practice, however, the argument was going no further than using an example with a banana being used to showcase male puberty…..in a manner that’s clearly seeing an extreme that wasn’t there. Hell, much of the disdain going into that portion of the film came down to laser-focusing on that one part of what the transformation was supposed to mean thematically. That’s the keyword here: PART. Not the only thing going on! Within the comments of that same YouTuber’s Turning Red video, one of them was basically going “oh look, women get to be the leading writers, and all they can think is periods.” Y’know that is something that GIRLS have to know about when they reach their teens, right? If you WERE to write about girls coming of age and becoming a teenager, it’d only make sense to WANT to have a menstruations discussion, even if the execs. ultimately prevent that. That same video was even concluding with this statement about how telling it is that these parental reactions toward the film could still happen in a post-Shrek world........but how is this ‘telling’? What is that supposed to say? What about a parent reacting negatively toward Pokémon because ‘eVoLuTiOn’? Or even just fighting, due to seeing it as “killing”? Ever thought that, maybe, it’s just another overreaction of that nature?
I do think there are times where the work can, indeed, be too much for the kid(s) despite being under the “Family” umbrella, like perhaps The Incredibles being shown to a 5-year-old (something Brad Bird himself would’ve discouraged. Looking back, I was probably close to his perfect recommended age when that came out). I can sure as hell get not wanting to show a little kid the original Tom & Jerry completely uncensored due to a certain racial stereotype of a side character. But often, there just seems to be a problem with arbitrary, usually over-generalizing thresholds based on shaky anecdotal evidence or of-the-moment emotions. For example, one blog review I found for Toy Story (which I could not find again after a while) gave it a negative score, but the review essentially just equated to “this scared me especially as a kid due to creepy living toys,” as if that’s enough to say it’d be too much for them. I can get the cartoon being a bit of a turn-off as a kid due to some elements that frightened you, but that doesn’t tell us much about how solid of a film or show the cartoon even was. There are plenty of family/kids’ television works have those strange moments that could easily scare one as a kid (Courage the Cowardly Dog basically being that as a full series). What about those? What about Mufasa’s death? Another odd example can be found in this “western europe vs eastern europe animation” video from the previous post. Throughout the comment section, you’ll see various users implying that children ARE capable of handling genuinely violent battles and the type of content that the older versions of fairy tales provided, yet also acting like showcasing LGBT-related stuff is just too much. Several of them do emphasize that it has more to do with HOW the message is spread, yet their idea of drawing the line only really amounted to “tons of flags everywhere make it look like cult shit.” For all the discussion about kids being able to handle heavy topics, along with how much animation has proven that it can offer deeper story-telling within the last 15 years, there’s a weird habit of arbitrarily deciding what’s too far without any clear nuance.
Even without the notion of children being able to handle darker themes, this kind of strange flip-flopping can get in the way of whether some element should be critiqued in the family/kids’ product (or even in general). In one Discord I’m in, there were a couple of conversations relating to Pokémon. They were about how much (or little) the games were able to change up gameplay-wise with things such as the Physical/Special split in Generation 4 (Diamond & Pearl). One of them brought up how that and some other changes that the series did make over the years weren’t really necessary or substantial since the kids playing or some casual folks wouldn’t be able to notice. A while after that, I started noticing that, while technically not wrong.....doesn’t feel all that informative of any sort of quality, or more specifically, whether you had this major issue or major change in how a piece of media pans out. There are just tons of areas where some kid or even someone who’s on the more casual side has a great chance of not noticing an element of so many pieces of media. PLENTY of takes from “more casual” folks are gonna have their clearly under-informed standpoints, such as a misconstrued idea of a project’s contents; some of the same inner depths found in some video games; full-blown stigma; or just taking stuff at face-value in general. In turn, there are plenty of elements, whether actual flaws or additional merits found within a narrative, that kids may not actually pick up until they get older. But now we’re saying that not noticing due to age or being casual means that the respective element wasn’t substantial or a big deal? How so? Where’s the determination? This is just putting it in such broadly speaking terms, that, at best, the line being drawn is blurry. Especially since you can’t necessarily count on every show, film or video game that was enjoyed or at least experienced as a kid to hold up (though that doesn’t mean you can’t still enjoy it while acknowledging such stuff). There clearly had to be some sort of deeper detail within the scenario, even if that depth is only by a moderate extent.
And then there are the times when those anti-SJW types have something to “say.” When basically foreshadowing a then-upcoming video, YouTuber Diregentleman made this comment about how Toph would’ve likely been called “woke” if Avatar TLA was released today, and one of those anti-SJW Anime YouTubers made this pointless video “responding” to the comment (as shown by the other screencap). In that same Anime YouTuber’s video, there were predictably numerous comments about how that wouldn’t be the case since you got yourself writers that knew not to do things like “shoving it down your throat” or “making it about character and not the agenda.” However, more often than not, when it comes to these outcries, there’s next to no clarity over when the line is drawn or what the threshold is other than face-value dismissal or otherwise vague accusation, likely basing things more on nostalgia than much else. That last part could especially be the case when plenty of those same people would inaccurately exclaim how “no one was demanding a strong female character back then.” I already alluded to him, but not too long after his fiasco with Turning Red, Mr. Enter actually made a video titled “Diversifying Diversity,” where he......tried?......to argue how cartoons from before the 2010s were better with diversity, mostly by being more diverse. Yet, throughout that video, the only ‘clear’ detail he really had to express why is that no one made a fuss about whether the diversity is there, once again seemingly going off of anecdotal evidence that isn’t very accurate. It didn’t help that (1). his point of how good of a job certain cartoons did literally amounted to “they had this ethnicity in the cast,” and (2). he randomly brought up how they were able to tackle serious subjects through metaphors, but said talking point also amounted to just highlighting that it was there. It was an ultimately confused, cherry-picky and even contradictory video that just furthers emphasizes how, looking back, he wasn’t necessarily that great at going into detail or having much of a critical sense of scale.
In fact, it frequently seems like one’s indicator of higher quality come from whatever extreme attitudes they’ve subconsciously developed for certain facets of media, as well as expecting oddly specific prerequisites based on the youthfully familiar media that was already consumed. In case of getting more oddly specific, it can feel like, even with some highly acclaimed cartoons, the set precedent that would proceed doesn’t necessarily come from the methods that led to making the project great, but rather just simply.....being that exact project. One example of this would be these writing tips Lily Orchard posted in late 2020, where on top of how apparent it was that she was merely venting about certain cartoons more (Steven Universe; She-Ra; Korra), she’d give out weirdly specific and arbitrary ‘tips’ in an attempt to combat against said cartoons. Ironically enough, however, one of her better tips (although clearly said to further rag on Korra), would help highlight this aforementioned issue the series of tips is guilty of. More specifically, the one about not trying to “do what Avatar did,” and primarily, the takeaway that was obtained from the commentators of the video linked above. They brought up how you’re just fundamentally doomed from the start if you try to approach a project like it’s going to be the “Next Avatar” or “Next Star Wars” or whatever. The reason I’m highlighting THAT part is because, in addition to how oddly specific in prerequisites one’s indicator of higher quality can feel with animated works, it has often felt like there’s a subconscious expectation of “The Next X, Y, or Z”. Whether it’d be Avatar, Lion King, Teen Titans 2003, whatever else is listed in the immediately above meme, or some other animation. And if the work isn’t giving this near-immediate reassurance that the vague and particular thresholds were met, then the guilty party will more likely than not dismiss the work as not worthwhile. Honestly, from what I can tell, this feels like a Nickelodeon executive to me. Of course, this isn’t to say they’re not all that great or anything, and it’s good to learn what makes the greats great. HOWEVER, a good chuck of the time, it’s felt to me that it’s based less on the content and more the recognition. Sure, one might show themselves as a fan of Avatar, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they have a good grasp of certain elements or even have a strong sense of media literacy (COUGH JUSTAROBOT COUGH).
In short, I would consider all this to be the largest factor behind the particularly poor animation related discourse I’ve seen online over the years. Too often, there just seemed to be this reliance on painted extremes or broadly speaking terms that fundamentally deny a lot of critical nuance within a discussion. This can be surprisingly common with material that provides a passionate degree of either respect or frustration. Hell, in case of the latter, it often reads more like a raging hate-boner (and/or hate wagon nonsense) more than analytical discussion. Every now and again, such a problem can also be quite telling of how limited of a media perspective one may actually have.