[ SECRET POST #2179 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #2179 ⌋

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

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 020 secrets from Secret Submission Post #311.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 1 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

If she's so great, why does your praise of her depend on insulting fans of an entirely different, unrelated character?

(I mean no defense of Merida with that question. She's a petulant, spoiled brat who would have been better off had her bear-mother never returned to normal and instead eaten her.)

[diet_poison]

lol wow. Not sure if you meant to start wank over that...

but what??? How exactly is she a spoiled brat? Not wanting to get married and be used as a peace cow does not a spoiled brat make

[(Anonymous)]

It helps if one drop one's contemporary mindset and think about the time period. A princess refusing to marry a prince from a rival clan and forge a peace pact in medieval Scotland, just because she didn't want to give up her free lifestyle? Who the heck did Merida think she was?!

[diet_poison]

So you actually think it's ok for a woman - no, a girl - to be forced into an emotional and sexual relationship she doesn't want with a total stranger, forced to move to a new place, give up all her freedoms, and basically become someone's prize? Like, you really do not think it would be natural and right for a child to rebel against that fate? I sure as fuck would. And maybe I'd give your position some consideration if they had actually TRIED to find a way to get around the whole marriage thing - actually tried to reason with the neighbors, and fucking TALKED to Merida about it and explained WHY it was important rather than saying "you're gonna get married now, suck it up".

If grown ass men want to go to war over not getting to fuck a pretty girl then that's their own damn fault. That may have been the status quo at the time, but that doesn't make it OKAY. It was an extremely backwards practice.

And this isn't exactly deep historical fiction. It's a Pixar movie. Meant to be seen by CHILDREN. It really bothered me the way Merida's conflict was portrayed, with her not wanting to get married depicted as a FAULT. The creators knew we'd be seeing it through a contemporary lens and it was DESIGNED to have a message that would apply to us today. The message was basically "don't be a dick to your mom" and that made it look like it was all Merida's fault.

/soapbox

[(Anonymous)]

Whoa, whoa, calm down. Nobody's forcing you to get married.

Anyway -- yes, Merida had absolutely no free will in that situation. She had to do what her mother presumably was forced to do before her. It's incredibly unfair and backwards, and anybody with a brain in the 21st century would hate it, but that's Merida's society for you. And to be honest, I think Pixar made the wrong decision to set a film with contemporary morals in a medieval society.

[(Anonymous)]

Whoa. And I thought I had high standards when it comes to historical accuracy... But honestly, I think you are not applying them to the right context.

This is a children cartoon. Look back on Disney's previous works (disclaimer: yes, I know this is a Pixar movie, however Disney is older): they were all supposed to appeal to contemporary audiences. Do you honestly think that if Disney had started with "The Frog Prince" instead of "Snow White", the movie would have been even remotedly similar to the one we got in 2009?

And the bad news is, there aren't a lot of people who'll care about complete historical accuracy or who are even likely to notice.

[(Anonymous)]

and people who care for historical accuracy aren't necessarily going to watch an animated movie to get it.

[(Anonymous)]

AYRT:

You're right in that one shouldn't expect historical accuracy in children's films, and that's why I didn't like the plot of Brave that much. Why did the source of Merida and Elinor's conflict have to be a forced marriage, of all things? The clash between what we as a modern audience expected ("Merida deserves to make her own choices") and what would have been typical in a similar situation ("Merida is being selfish, and needs to put her clan first") was pretty much inevitable.

Most of the kids watching the film wouldn't have cared, but it was weird seeing that feel-good ending where Merida got everybody to believe that children should marry whom they choose. It was like watching Cinderella end with Cinderella and Prince Charming starting a constitutional democracy.

[(Anonymous)]

But the same thing happened in Aladin. Jasmine didn't want to be forced to marry someone she didn't choose on her own. In the end she got her father to change the law so she could marry someone she truly loved regardless of social standing.

Totally off topic but it would have been interesting if Disney would delve more into how Aladin was going to handle being Sultan considering he had no education whatsoever and would more than likely utterly fail at trying to run a nation. But it is Disney.

[(Anonymous)]

nayrt

I always figured Jasmine would be ruling Sultana and Aladdin would be her consort

[(Anonymous)]

This is a really terrible comment

[(Anonymous)]

Actually, yeah, sentencing a lot of people to ongoing warfare and the possibility of bloody deaths does make one a spoiled brat.

[(Anonymous)]

Consider her age, though, and the fact that her father has clearly shielded her from understanding the potential repercussions of her actions. Yeah, she's being wilfully oblivious, but she doesn't actually /realize/ the magnitude of the potential consequences of her actions. She's a child who doesn't understand what she's doing. I hardly find that grounds for dismissing her as a hero (see: all the fucking growth she did over the course of the movie).

[diet_poison]

Just because that was the status quo of society at the time, doesn't make it okay. She's not a brat for not fucking wanting to be confined, controlled, and literally fucked against her will for the rest of her life. When she said she didn't want it nobody tried to look for another solution, and they didn't even really show her any sympathy, they just yelled at her. I'd quite possibly rebel too - at least I'd try to directly communicate with my would-be husbands' families or fucking SOMETHING.

At risk of being extremely redundant, I'll just refer you to the comment I made to the other anon who replied to me, because I'd basically just say the same thing here.

[(Anonymous)]

Not okay, no, of COURSE not. But if you have the choice of either get married off or watch your entire society descend into a bloody hell of violence and warfare, then you, like pretty much all princesses/high-ranking young ladies in medieval society who were born into troubled times, would HAVE to go through with it, because otherwise you just might have to watch everyone you love die, and possibly end up forced into marriage/slavery anyway if your side lost. Honestly, I kinda have to wonder if you've ever studied the Middle Ages, or politics before the era of modern democracy, if you dont' understand this.

[diet_poison]

Ok, but do you really, HONESTLY, think Merida actually understood all that from where she was standing?

Really?

Also, I'm still uncomfortable with putting so much blame and responsibility on the unwilling bride's shoulder's in a case like this. It's like implying that if everything goes wrong it's ALL HER FAULT. No, it's the fault of the shitty society she grew up in. I don't know why all the people hating on her don't take two seconds to recognize that

[(Anonymous)]

You... missed that the whole theme of the film was about compromise and empathy and changing your destiny through understanding, didn't you?

I mean, that was the point. Literally the point. The big speech that calms the clans down? Is explicitly about changing destiny. And in this case, it's changing destiny to not involve, you know, forced marriage against someone's will.

Merida wasn't completely opposed to getting married in concept, which is why the solution was to give them time and allow love to develop. What she didn't want was to be a prize, since that was all she literally was considered to be, and she didn't want it to be now. When she was talking to Angus, she quite plainly stated, "I'm just not ready" - which is completely fair enough!

The whole point of the movie was about reaching compromises, seeing things from someone else's perspective (Merida sees the repercussions of her earlier, impulsive, and yes, selfish behavior, and Elinor gets to see why Merida is so opposed to the idea) and making social change in that way.

Sure, it doesn't run concurrent to the real Scotland in that period, but I doubt Scotland in that period also had people cursed into being bears...

[(Anonymous)]

OP didn't insult Merida fans at all. But you probably just did LOL

[(Anonymous)]

Yup, she's a spoiled brat...who learns that she's a spoiled brat and that being so causes problems for other people, and so who decides to stop being a spoiled brat.

I guess you're one of those people who thinks that no one can ever grow or change, even when they grow and change right in front of your eyes.

[(Anonymous)]

I always wondered if the people who say Merida is a 'spoiled brat who never learned anything, trolololo' ever actually watched the last half of the movie.