[ SECRET POST #3193 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #3193 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

01.


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02.
[Da Vinci's Demons]


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03. tb - please check sizes when using tinypic
[Harry Potter, general]


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04.
[Raffles by E.W. Hornung]


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05.
[Avengers: Age of Ultron]


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06.
[Star Trek: The Next Generation]


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07.
[Wreck It Ralph]


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08.
[Steven Universe]


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09.
[David Bowie]












Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 009 secrets from Secret Submission Post #456.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[fscom]

01. http://i.imgur.com/U0t9lbd.png

[(Anonymous)]

I have no idea. I've also seen "don't be so obsessed!" Well... but isn't that the whole point?

[iceyred]

There's having fun with something, and then there's trying to find deep, meaningful life lessons in, IDK, Jem or Thundercats. There's discussing something, and then there's people who getting butthurt and using tumblr-lingo when their revelations about the lacking feminism in The Little Mermaid.

[elialshadowpine]

I can't believe I'm actually going to defend this. Sometimes meaning can be found in something as simple as a single piece of dialogue or narration. For instance, Angel isn't considered usually to be a deep meaningful show, but there's a line from one of the characters, "Serve no master but your ambition," that really clicked with me and meant a lot -- because it made me realize that what I'd been doing was denying my own ambitions and career goals in order to fit in with what other people wanted me to do and please them. One. Single. Line, and it made a HUGE difference in my outlook.

Now, if someone's going on about how ~deep and ~meaningful the ENTIRE show is, that's another thing, but I don't think it's impossible for people to find meaning in parts of it. If people find personal meaning that helps them in a place that others might find ridiculous, well, good for them. How they behave about it is an entirely different matter.

[(Anonymous)]

See, now I would argue that there's tons available to discuss with The Little Mermaid, like how it's essentially the exact same story as Aladdin, but no one talks about how the meaning of Aladdin is needing to leave your old life behind and change everything about yourself to land a spouse and that's a terrible message.

Teen is unhappy with life and encounters someone of the opposite sex and wants to get with that, villain steps in, there's a magic pact that gets them into the palace (Prince Ali, turning human), romantic montage (Kiss the Girl/Magic Carpet Ride) sudden reveal (She's a mermaid! He's a street rat!) and then teen is willing to give up the love of their life and as a reward the father figure steps in and changes the rules so they can get what they really want.

And people react so very differently to both stories, and interpret them differently and I think that's interesting.

[(Anonymous)]

As someone who never watched the Disney version of the little mermaid and only read the H. C. Andersen version, I went wut?
Doesn't she jump into the sea to become mindless foam at the end of the story (and end up ascending to be a spirit due to her good deeds), when she can't make herself kill the prince as he is lying there with his new bride, the other woman whom he thinks saved him?

[(Anonymous)]

Yup, that's the fairy tale's ending. But this is Disney. No dying in the end unless you're a villain. :p

(They did the same with "Hunchback of Notre Dame".)

[(Anonymous)]

That's one of the cool things about fairy tales and stories, they get retold and details changed to fit the time and the teller and you can learn a lot studying the changes.

Like most of the stories the Brothers Grimm collected had evil mothers, not evil step mothers, but they changed it for better appeal. They also tended to be gender fluid, with the protagonist being the gender of the child they were told to and any others switched appropriately to fit. The Brothers tended to chose male protagonist for publication

Basically, the very nature of fairy tales is that they're perfect for studying creative changes that happen over time and what sticks and what's dropped. Like the lotus-feet tiny shoes importance staying with Cinderella long after she left Chinese tellings instead of being commonly replaced with something like a corset or gloves or anything else.

[(Anonymous)]

But how seriously, though? To the point it's affecting your relationships with real people, that's probably time to dial it back a notch.

[solticisekf]

don't take life so seriously! It's a laugh fest, really.

The Realists
Hope that you may understand!
What can books of men that wive
In a dragon-guarded land,
Paintings of the dolphin-drawn
Sea-nymphs in their pearly wagons
Do, but awake a hope to live
That had gone
With the dragons?
- Yeats

[(Anonymous)]

There's a difference between wanting to express your feelings about something because it sparked your imagination.
And harping on the consequences of something because you assume others can't separate fiction from reality. "GUYS DON'T LIKE THE THING BECAUSE THIS CHARACTER IS A BAD PERSON"

[(Anonymous)]

man I hear you, anon. I thought of this yesterday when the muppet secret was met with "but they're just scraps of felt!!" This knee-jerk reaction to reduce every work of fiction to its component atoms, and claim it's "nothing but" words on a page, or brushstrokes on a canvas, lines uttered by an actor, line drawings with word balloons over the characters, etc sort of flies in the face of that which fiction is.

It's stories. Stories told in a hundred different ways, through different mediums (media?), but they're still stories. Stories to entertain but also communicate, to convey the human condition. To evoke empathy and sympathy as much as amusement, hatred and anger, joy, sorrow, nostalgia, and so on. To inform, also, which isn't a bad thing. To both reflect humanity as it was or is and to encourage humanity to what it will be or could be. To say that a character, whether well-rounded and complex or reduced to a stereotype, isn't meant to communicate something in some way, and evoke a reaction to the person seeing/hearing the story, is disingenuous. It's a way of shutting down any and all discussion of what the character, or the story, could mean, or what it's trying to communicate. Whether it's communicating accurately or could have been handled better.

Sure, above comments have hinted at the people who get hyper-invested in characters or story or tumblritis and can't see the forest for the trees, but this whole notion of saying "it's nothing but...!" is the complete opposite end. I'm kind of surprised that the pendulum swinging all the way back to the opposite side took so long, in terms of the history of fandom, and it's rather disturbing, but I suppose if we point this out now we can swing back into the middle ground sooner rather than later.

[(Anonymous)]

Why won't someone call the ASPCA about how cruelly those dragons are being treated on Game of Thrones?? Animal cruelty is a really important issue and it's not okay!

See, you can take something fictional seriously if you want to. Go ahead, have fun! But you can't insist that everyone treat it as seriously as you do, or claim that they're doing it wrong if they don't.

[(Anonymous)]

See, to me the "They're just felt!" was showing why they didn't take slapstick violence as seriously. The medium insisted that these were characters who couldn't feel pain, and so it's hard to go "But if they were real and they could feel pain... that would be bad."

In an interview about doing Moulin Rouge I remember someone saying that it was so much easier to do musicals with cartoon characters because there was already a built in suspension of disbelief. Of course everyone can randomly burst into song and choreography, it's a cartoon. So they tried hard to add in some over the top elements in the movie to generate the same sort of unreality where characters bursting into song wasn't so out of place.

So freaking out over Piggy karate-chopping people in a world where the characters can't be hurt is a bit like freaking out over how scared the people in Beauty in the Beast must be when all of a sudden someone starts singing and then everyone's singing along and you're singing too and how terrifying would that be?

[(Anonymous)]

Yep, this. The Muppets were pretty much cartoonish in nature. We see them regularly take abuse with no real or lasting harm (Beaker and Dr. Bunsen Honeydew, anyone?) which is exactly why people don't get upset when something that would ordinarily be considered bad happens to a muppet. It's kind of like suspension of disbelief. If a bear appeared without warning onstage at a comedy club, people would freak the hell out because HOLY SHIT IT'S A BEAR.

But when it's Fozzie, we understand the rules are different, and therefore the standards and expectations of behavior are different as well.

[(Anonymous)]

And a big part of it (and what can be played around with) is how the characters react in universe. in LOTR Sauron doesn't do that much, but you have badass characters being terrified of him so he comes across as a menacing bad guy.

If Fozzie did appear and people were going "eek a bear!" in the show, it would be playing around with that because we expect the muppets to be treated as cartoon characters, not real animals.

And another example of the rules are different I forgot to list, The Grinch. One of the things that sucked about the live action was a cartoon Grinch being cruel to a cartoon dog was funny and non-threatening. A man in a mascot suit being cruel to a real dog was just sad and depressing.

[(Anonymous)]

Dunno about you, but I'm here to funpost.

[tcex28]

Props for typing Death's subtitles in all caps.

Well...

[(Anonymous)]

But isn't that often in response to the way overly-invested or the hugely judgmental? Like the people who hound creators/actors or the ones who decide things about you based your taste in shows/movies/anime/books/fic. Yes, sometimes it seems to come in reply to comments that are neither, but part of that is, I think, a kneejerk defensive response because people read an implied criticism into the comment that may or may not be there. If someone says, "I think this thing is problematic because A, B, and C. I don't understand why I ever liked it.", some may think that it is an implied, "I don't understand why anyone ever liked it." and, to be fair, some people actually do kind of mean that. I think that the "Don't take it so seriously!" often means either "Don't harass or verbally abuse people because they don't agree with you about this fictional thing!" or "Don't be so freaking judgmental about people who like this fictional thing because of your issues with it!" Of course, sometimes it just someone who's being condescending and superior, in which case, I agree with you.

[(Anonymous)]

But... surely it's possible to discuss fiction without going overboard with it, right? If people are telling you that even in a fandom context you're taking it too seriously, then maybe it's time to take a step back and calm down.

[(Anonymous)]

Depends on what you are talking about.

[(Anonymous)]

Agreed, OP. I made several secrets about being disturbed or unhappy with something in canon or fandom, and inevitably the smug anon brigade told me to stop being such an obsessed loser, and don't like, don't read. It's like no shit, but I'm here because I am a fan, and I'm on fandom secrets because I want to complain/talk about my fandom.