[ SECRET POST #5641 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #5641 ⌋

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


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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 10 secrets from Secret Submission Post #807.
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]

04. https://i.imgur.com/ANCLM8U.jpg

[greghousesgf]

I've told people I'm not good with kids and they look at me like I'm from Mars.

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah, I think a lot of people just assume women must know about/want to spend time with kids. Personally, I don't dislike kids, but I don't really get them and I don't want to be responsible for them. On the other hand I know men who are great with kids.

[tabaqui]

Huh.
I tell people often that I only liked/like my daughter, and other people's kids are snotty and sticky and keep them away.
It's only the truth, and usually people just kind of laugh and that's that.

[(Anonymous)]

Eh, I haven't seen Annie, but I don't really agree about Trunchbull. Her potential reasons for being a psychotic child abuser don't ultimately make much difference to me. However, I have become a lot more skeptical of unnuanced depictions of villainous female characters.

So like, the old example of Nurse Ratched. Am I remotely sympathetic to the character as she's written? No. But am I critical of how the character was written? Yup.

IDK if Trunchbull is a good example of this, either, though. Maybe? I'm not sure how exactly she was described in the book, but the movie certainly went out of its way to depict her in about as wildly "unfeminine" of terms as possible--and also a psychotic child abuser. Which gets a bit of a brow-raise from me on a feminist level, and a bigger brow raise from me on an LGBT level because it definitely doesn't feel unreasonable to say she feels a bit queer-coded (a term I use extremely rarely, but I feel like it's thoroughly earned in this case)-- in which case fucking yikes.

But OTOH, the whole story is just so wacky and wild and for children that it feels a little bit "person who isn't any fun at parties" to insist on critiquing the "deeper implications" of how the cartoonishly OTT villain in a wildly OTT children's movie was depicted. Like, are there deeper implications? Or is she just a cartoonishly OTT villain that seven-year-olds will immediately recognize and find scary?

[(Anonymous)]

... isn't recognizing a "queer-coded" person and finding them scary a bit of an unfortunate implication anyway?

I don't remember any of these movies clearly enough to talk about it, but I do know they did this a lot in the past century. Oh well. The old association between "looking feminine, being motherly and nurturing" vs "not looking feminine, being unmotherly" etc

[(Anonymous)]

I do think it's unfortunate, but I'm also someone who cares about authorial intent (I'm a dinosaur in that way), and I genuinely don't know if there was any intent to queer-code Trunchbull. Like, from a modern adult perspective it's kind of hard to imagine they weren't aware of what making her a thoroughly unfeminine "spinster" would suggest--and they definitely may have been doing it on purpose. But also, maybe they just wanted her to be heavily unfeminine, and too misanthropic to have any close relationships of any kind, and there was no intent for the character to evoke or suggest anything beyond exactly that. Am I probably giving them too much benefit of the doubt? Yeah, probably, I have no idea.

Also, I haven't read the book, which adds another layer of complication. What was Trunchbull like in the book? Was she like she is in the movie, or did they change her for the movie?

[(Anonymous)]

AYRT - Yeah, doubt it was done *on purpose* and I never read the book either, but I do think that, sometimes, in the oldens, unfortunate implications happened because creators didn't care enough to avoid them and just rolled with their bad personal biases. Nowadays that kind of implication can cause a huge backlash, so they care because they don't want to lose a profit. And I think it's a positive change.

(As a feminine, seemingly-mild-mannered woman who in fact HATES "care" jobs and traded a kindergarten teacher job for unemployment in a week, I laugh at the implication.)

[(Anonymous)]

Whether or not Trunchbull was deliberately coded queer, she was a deliberate stereotype of a big butch woman (commonly a sports teacher) who can be fun and jolly or brutal and terrifying, and that is second-hand queer coding. She was exactly the same in the book as in the movie.

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah, Ms. Hannigan is a good example of what OP is describing, but Trunchbull is just...not. She's a whole different can of worms, female-character-trope-wise.

[(Anonymous)]

Oh I kind of get this.

After I got my Eng lit degree, the one job advice has been to go into teaching. And because there's currently less people going into teaching at the moment, its been generally easier to apply for it (despite personally that I don't want to do it because as much I don't mind kids, I'm more likely to hit 'fuck it' and let them do whatever they want rather than tell any what to do - so you can imagine how far that would go in a class room).

When I was younger I use to think teachers who hated kids were baffling, but now it makes more sense why they would go into that job now.

[(Anonymous)]

Carol Burnett is a treasure, but damn, Miss Hannigan is just a big ball of problematic stereotypes isn't she? Drunk Irish money-grubber, desperate aging flapper, villain who hates kids and dogs, et cetera and so on.

[(Anonymous)]

Needing to have a career that deals with kids when you hate them doesn't justify being cruel to them for funsies or to blow off steam. I could be sympathetic to a woman who scraped up a bare minimum of giving the kids their meals and other material needs without being able to be sweet and nurturing, and hating the kids in her private time. I'm somewhat sympathetic to Miss Hannigan because she seemed to have attempted that, it was just that hating kids in her free time involved drinking to forget and eventually that bled into how she did her job. Miss Trunchbull is too much of a caricature for me to hate, but there's no way I can read her as sympathetic.

[(Anonymous)]

Hate to break it to you OP, but Matilda was written in 1988, not 1948. The Trunchbull had plenty of opportunities for other jobs, she was just a sadistic bully who liked having fresh and weak meat around her to torture. She was an Olympic medalist for fs sake.