[ SECRET POST #2177 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #2177 ⌋

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

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 03 pages, 058 secrets from Secret Submission Post #311.
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

Episode morals that make you mad?

[(Anonymous)]

Have you ever seen an episode of a show you usually like that had a moral or message that made you angry? Like, you were supposed to find some action to be a big no-no and a sign that the character was going off the deep end, even though it was a perfectly logical and justified thing to do? Stuff like that?

(Doesn't count for morals that were intentionally meant to be ambiguous though - it has to at least seem that the writers meant for you to think 'X is right, Y is wrong').

Re: Episode morals that make you mad?

[(Anonymous)]

All the time in Glee. I'll think they're going somewhere and agreeing with their message and then at the very end they turn it around and I get pissed off at their stupid little messages.

Re: Episode morals that make you mad?

[(Anonymous)]

I have three words for you:

Arthur's Big Hit

Re: Episode morals that make you mad?

[ill_omened]

Choose any random episode of South Park, and there's about a ninety percent chance the moral will be enough to tank the humour in just the extent to which its faux middleground incoherent libertarian nonsense rubbed in the audiences face.

Re: Episode morals that make you mad?

[forgottenjester]

The movie The Devil Wears Prada really bothered me.

Re: Episode morals that make you mad?

[(Anonymous)]

Doctor Who, "Journey's End". WTF how is TenToo blowing up all the new Daleks before they go off to, y'know exterminate everyone supposed to show that he's dangerous and unstable and needs to be "made better"? What the fracking fuck, Ten? And you too, RTD? Since when is it supposed to be a bad thing if your revulsion at the idea of getting blood on your hands gets outweighed by your concern for innocent life?

I mean, obviously the Doctor eventually decided that was dumb of him because Eleven was totally horrified when he found that some of them survived and was willing to wipe out all the remaining Daleks again before they repopulated and resumed killing people, but at the time it still really annoyed me because of the way it was framed as "well duh this was wrong and totally proves TenToo is wrong and messed up!" Other dickery, like Donna thing, didn't annoy me (well, not for the same reasons) because that was portrayed as Ten simply not wanting Donna to die, not as a question of him being morally correct, but the TenToo thing really did.

Re: Episode morals that make you mad?

[(Anonymous)]

so many times but it's been years and I can't remember the specifics

sorry :c

just

know it's not just you

Re: Episode morals that make you mad?

[inkmage]

Feeling Pinkie Keen, which is sort of an interesting case for me. If they hadn't quantified the lesson, I'd probably have been okay with it.

The lesson was supposed to be something like, "Even though you can't explain it, sometimes you just have to know that it works, and that's enough," which - just - ugh. No. That is Bad Science. That is Bad Life Skills. "Stop asking questions" is not a valuable lesson and a good thing to teach to small children.

Actually, if they'd just changed the wording, I'd have been happier. "Just because you don't know how a thing works doesn't mean that it isn't working." It was just the implicit (or maybe explicit - it's been a while) message that if you don't know how it works, you should give up and go home that really bugged me.

But a much better moral would have been, "If you want to get reasonable answers, don't spend your time being unreasonable." Twilight spends a fair portion of the episode denying the Pinkie Sense exists, and then gets impatient testing Pinkie to see how it works, without pausing to consider other factors. She's so set in the idea that there's nothing else to magic but what unicorns can do that she can't see anything else but that. Now, if that's a law of physics in Equestria, that's great, and Twilight's incredulity is a bit more justified. But the way it's presented is as though someone who has never seen an airplane before is looking at one zooming around and expressing disbelief that the thing actually stays up in the air.

That was a lot more wordy than I thought it would be.

Re: Episode morals that make you mad?

[crazed_delusion]

Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer. Everyone can bully and be a bastard to someone different(even Santa) but that's ok cause in the end he'll forgive your half assed apology and be the hero for you.

Re: Episode morals that make you mad?

[ryttu3k]

Not an episode, but rewatching Grease as an adult made me feel very uncomfortable.

Never mind that you're slowly developing a relationship based on mutual respect for one another! Completely change how you look and act, and then you'll get your man! What the fuck.

Re: Episode morals that make you mad?

[yeahscience]

This is incredibly dumb, but I was watching Dragons: Riders of Berk (the HTTYD TV series) yesterday and I was incredibly annoyed that they had an episode where the moral seemed to be, "Being competitive is bad! You're a better person if you let the other guy win." Especially because it was Astrid saying it.

I think I'm less mad about the moral itself and more mad about the character butchery that had to occur for that.

Re: Episode morals that make you mad?

[velvet_mace]

Not an episode but a children's book of all things. The Rainbow fish. The moral of the story seems to be that you have to buy your friends and no one will like you if you have something different from them, and strangers are free to come up and ask you for your stuff and you should give it to them. Fuck that. You are allowed to be unique and special.

Re: Episode morals that make you mad?

[(Anonymous)]

Not an episode, but the movie Timer. It had a cool concept and was decent up until about the last 20 minutes, when it decided that its message was basically going to be that "fate" trumps all and that it's totally cool to let what outside forces dictate your decisions because it's inevitably where you'll end up anyway. Frustrating.

Re: Episode morals that make you mad?

[(Anonymous)]

I can't really remember what the episodes were, but....

I started watching Doctor Who last year, and watched all of Nine's season/s. And I loved the shit out of it. He was kind of a jerk, but he seemed conflicted and I never felt like I was supposed to agree with the more fucked up things he did. He was just an anti-hero who fucks up sometimes.

Then he died and Ten popped up and holy shit. The first three episodes he was such an asshole. And the moral was like... "Be an asshole, kids!" and I had to quit watching the show because I was like, "Nope, not sitting through more episodes of this bullshit."

Re: Episode morals that make you mad?

[calaidi]

I feel like there's been a couple episodes of FiM that rubbed me the wrong when when I was watching them, but the one that really stands out in my mind is A Friend in Deed.

jfc that fucking episode. I was cringing the whole time and praying the moral would actually be something like "sometimes you can't make friends with everyone and that's okay" but no, Pinkie was rewarded for her behavior and it made me really uncomfortable.

Re: Episode morals that make you mad?

[(Anonymous)]

Ten from Doctor Who.

Every. Single. Episode. Where he tried to enforce his morals and talked about how shitty mankind was and how great he was and such a ~martyr~ and all this shit while all the human characters licked his shoes.

Um. No.

He committed genocide MULTIPLE times. The Daleks. The Time Lords. The crab-things from Donna's first episode. Sure it was to save others, but when humans blew up the fleeing spaceship in the Christmas episode because they were frightened. He decided to punish Britain by manipulating them into getting rid of a leader that would have led them to a Golden Age? Thanks alot! I'm sure the world can live without whatever boom in industry/culture/science etc that a Golden Age from any country provides. Also THANKS FOR RESPECTING THE TIME STREAM AND SHIT.

He was a hypocrite. He was an asshole. He treated Martha like shit and mind-raped Donna without her consent. That massive whine he had at the old guy for making him save his life? STFU! You're regenerating! So you can go on and kill a bunch of other races! Be happy! At least Nine and Eleven seem conflicted- Ten was just so fucking righteous about everyone. Pissed me off.

Fuck he was annoying, and I was SO glad to see him go.

Re: Episode morals that make you mad?

[(Anonymous)]

The Giving Tree.

It basically says [to me] that you should give everything you have and are to someone you care about asks, never mind how much it hurts you.

Re: Episode morals that make you mad?

[morieris]

It's weird, because it it legitimately my favorite movie, but the first time I saw Kung Fu Panda I comprehended the moral as "You are not special" when Po first opens the Dragon Scroll.

I understood it later to be "You are special just the way you are.", but somehow there was a disconnect.

Re: Episode morals that make you mad?

[(Anonymous)]

I never like how at the end of The Breakfast Club the Ally Sheedy character (the "Basket Case") had to change the way she looked. It's one thing for a loner to learn to open up, let other people in, and make friends - and the ability to be friends with people they percieved as being of different "tribes" was a lesson all the characters had to learn - but quite another for her and her alone to get a makeover and wear a different top, as if the problem was that she was just ignorant about how to present herself. None of the others had to change that way. The "Criminal" didn't have to change his appearance for the "Princess" or vice-versa. The "Brain" didn't have to change his look to be accepted. I don't expect the "Jock" to have necessarily been attracted to her without the change because we can't help what we find attractive, but I wish they'd let her stay her semi-goth self.

Neither an episode nor a show, but...

[(Anonymous)]

The comic series xxxHOLiC is filled with morally-ambiguous "lessons" at the ends of its story arcs (e.g., "Not taking other people's advice seriously will get you killed," "The food you cook bares your soul to the people who eat it," "Don't eat processed foods or else your body won't decompose after you die," "Abused women are beyond help," "Abused children need supernatural intervention in order to save themselves," etc.).

The real kicker, though, and the one lesson that wasn't apparently meant to be ambiguous, was the moral at the very end. The protagonist spends the entire series learning that he has a life worth living and that other people deeply care about him. Due to an unexpected tragedy near the end of the series, however, he shuts himself away from the world and never goes beyond his front yard again. It's strongly implied that his close friends are deeply upset by this, but can't do anything to help him beyond making sure that he's safe and well-fed.

The main writer of the series stated that her intention was to show that there are all different kinds of happiness, and that the protagonist was finding happiness in his own way.

On top of that, the series ending also strongly suggested that the only way to "get over" the death of a loved one is to forget about them completely.

Re: Episode morals that make you mad?

[(Anonymous)]

I'm....not sure if this is a moral per se, but I hated that the audience was supposed to be touched and saddened and sympathetic at the part in "The Last Of The Time Lords" where the Doctor cries over the Master and begs him to regenerate and come have buttsex with him for all eternity travel with him and be forgiven for all the shit he did and the billions of people he killed because the Doctor will be so ~lonely~ without him otherwise because them lowly human apes can't compare to a Time Lord even if he's an evil shitstain excuse for a Time Lord, and then cradles the Master's dead body and sobs over it like it's a huge personal tragedy crafted just to make him suffer while right in front of the people the Master tortured and enslaved for the past year.

Dude, I'm all for second chances and mercy, and I get that it sucks for your old bff and the only other living member of your species to die, but it. Is. Not. About. You. Go wait until you can cry in private, and acknowledge that hurt people > your grief and threat to the universe > your desires and loneliness.

Re: Episode morals that make you mad?

[(Anonymous)]

Danny Phantom. "King Tuck". Hey kids, don't you know that having a perfectly reasonable ambition and expecting your friends to listen to you and take your feelings into consideration makes you an evil, selfish monster? You should just never ever be angry with your friends ever, and if you are, bottle it up and let it fester until you finally snap! Oh, and make sure you don't try to draw too much attention to yourself, you might overshadow your more important and cooler friends!

(I may be reading slightly too much into it, but eh.)

Re: Episode morals that make you mad?

[eaten_by_bears]

Feeling Pinkie Keen. I'll c/p my blargh about it from the secret 17 thread.

The lesson isn't that you should be respectful of people even if you think they're incorrect? The lesson is that if one day of observation with no control group doesn't reveal the mechanism behind a strange phenomenon, you should accept the improbable folk explanation without question? Really?

I think teaching kids to respect people they disagree with is important, but that doesn't mean skeptics always have to roll over for believers.

Re: Episode morals that make you mad? (tw: suicide)

[(Anonymous)]

Dunno if anyone's still around, but I forgot this one the first time. Was gonna make a secret out of it, but... this is so much easier.

My English class watched It's a Wonderful Life a few days ago. I hated it. Not because I thought it was narmy, or because I'm not religious (though I'm not). But it was too... easy.

Like, when George is staring down at the water and contemplating jumping in, right before Clarence saves him - I've been there. I know what that's like. It hit so hard for me that I actually started crying, though luckily no one noticed (I think), as did the line, "You're more use dead than alive!" It was awful but I identified with him so, so much right there, because I know how easy it is to get there and how hard it is to get back.

And then George's problems are solved in the next fifteen minutes and all I could do was sit there numbly and think, "But that wasn't even his problem."

His reason for feeling so awful had nothing to do with what he'd done in the past forty years. "I wish I'd never been born" sounded like an idle comment, a way to emphasize, "Yes, I feel that my life has gone so badly that there is no way it could get better." "I wish the last day hadn't happened," might have been more accurate.

Likewise, everyone banding together to raise 8,000 dollars had nothing to do with George's epiphany, and that was what actually solved the problem. Clarence was a selfish, reckless idiot who only cared about getting promoted, not actually about George Bailey. The one thing he did right was stopping George from jumping.

I just... it felt cheap. It felt as though the narrative had suddenly become a stereotypical teenager, wild hyperbole and all. I get that it's a Christmas movie and it's not supposed to be too heartbreaking, but fuck it, the guy got this close to committing suicide and there's no fallout whatsoever? At the very least, after the euphoria of being safe and free has died down, he has to explain everything to Mary. He has to confront the fact that he almost did kill himself and he would have been wrong in his reasons for doing so.

From a more dryly narrative point of view, it's been my experience that a good story swings back and forth between happy and sad, light and dark, triumph and failure. Like a pendulum, and in the same vein, the harder the swing to the dark, the more potent and fierce the swing back the other way. When those two things don't match up - the story just keeps on getting darker, with no swing back or very little lightness going on for the protagonists, for instance - then the overall effect is that the viewer has been cheated out of something.

George's euphoria, to me, is a very hard swing to happiness after a relatively milder swing to despair. Based on how he acted before he appealed to God, I would have expected quiet relief and joy on realizing that everything is better now, maybe wonder as he walks through the town. Based on how he acted in the last five minutes of the movie, however, I would have expected him to be almost completely broken just before the climax. His joy is frenzied and rapturous and too shiningly bright to have not come from a darker place.

TLDR: George Bailey's revelation that his life is wonderful felt cheap and hollow to me and his emotions felt unbalanced from a storytelling point of view.

Re: Episode morals that make you mad?

[vicfrankenstein]

I have two off the top of my head. MLP:FiM and M*A*S*H.

MLP: The surprise party episode. I've been lied to and ditched by friends a LOT in the past, so "LOL JUST TRUST THEM" bothers me. I think the ponies should have told Pinkie as soon as it became clear she knew and was bothered by them keeping secrets. That'd be a better lesson.

M*A*S*H: That episode where Hawkeye gets drunk and can't operate, so Radar gets all pissy and disappointed in him. Hawkeye yells at Radar for holding him to such a high standard, and everyone berates Hawkeye all episode. I love Radar, but I hated this. Hawkeye was right: Radar put too much into what Hawkeye could do. It's because Radar is immature. He needed to grow up, but instead everyone attacked Hawkeye for getting upset at being treated like an infallible god.