So the new CGI “My Little Pony” movie is out on Netflix and the reviews are trickling in.
The movie is apparently just a teensy bit political. As the New York Times explains:
This “My Little Pony” movie takes a contemporary spin on the franchise’s tot-friendly tenets of love and friendship by staging a political awakening about tolerance, prejudice, even fascism — sweetened, of course, with musical numbers, cutesy gags, and pastel vistas.
“Even fascism,” huh? I guess the ponies and their allies are antifa?
Well, this didn’t go over so well with the folks at the Liberty Daily.
“Children’s shows have always been a tool for indoctrination,” the Liberty Daily’s J.D. Rucker begins.
There was a time when they were used to instill certain mindsets that were relatively harmless, but over the last decade or so they have turned into perverse drivers of anti-American, anti-Biblical sentiment. Then, there are the social justice warriors among the indoctrinators that attempt to paint society as flawed because it isn’t “woke” enough. …
As usual, it sounds harmless on the surface, especially to unsuspecting parents. But the indoctrination is geared towards Cultural Marxism with a tilt towards normalizing Critical Race Theory. The tenets of the destructive ideology are present throughout the show.
If someone wants to watch Netflix, that’s fine. But they should know that the goals of the company are to promote “entertainment” that is woke to brainwash those who aren’t discerning about what they or their children watch.
Huh. I’m no brony but this almost makes me watch to watch it.
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@Crip Dyke:
I saw that, and was duly horrified. It took me maybe the first paragraph to start thinking “Wait, you’re going to bring trans people into this somehow, aren’t you?” but I was amazed at how she did it all the same. Making it all about trans women in women’s bathrooms was not expected. (I haven’t followed the murder case, but was a bathroom involved in any way?) Once again all about trans women, of course: apparently trans men don’t exist. I don’t get it: in TERFworld, trans men are women, right? So surely they deserve the support of the sisterhood when they bravely invade male bathrooms and thus strike a blow against the patriarchy? Or do they deserve anything they get for not staying in their place? Or are they all just confused lesbians?
It would be nice to see shows aimed at boys where girls are the heroes.
“…Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.”
(For those who can conjugate Latin, substitute reference about Romans seeking to conquer Transalpine Gaul.)
It’s not that bad a film. Definitely a good starting place for a new franchise to grow from, and the villain’s song where he raises an angry mob is both hilarious and catchy (“this is not the time for sober thinking!” is a line). Overall the racism is of course the fantastic type between multiple different types of ponies (earth ponies, unicorns, and pegusai) but it does a good job of setting up realistic style prejudices and stereotyping.
@rabid rabbit
It was not. The offender – whose name I see no reason to repeat – was a serving officer of the Metropolitan Police who ‘arrested’ his victim using Met-issued equipment and all of the appropriate formal words to get her restrained in the back of a rented vehicle.
What then followed culminated in her murder, and if you want the details – content warning for bald details of a vile crime delivered in dry judicial language – the judge’s sentencing remarks are online here.
@Ninja Socialist:
It would be nice to see shows aimed at boys where girls are the heroes.
What age boys are we talking about? There are anime shows galore with predominantly female casts, but with panty shots and jiggle out the kazoo.
The most efficient way to accomplish such a goal, I think, would be to make a show For Whom It Might Concern; that’s what Rebecca Sugar did with Steven Universe, whose male hero embodied a lot of classic Magical Girl tropes and was surrounded by a largely feminine-voiced supporting cast, representing a wide spectrum of gender, racial, and neurotype coding.
(Excuse me for pausing for a moment to squee about Connie Maheswaran: not only is she a standout Badass Normal [alert viewers have noticed that she’s studying a <a href=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalaripayattu>martial art deriving from her heritage</a>] and an awesome model for allyship, but she’s doing so while dark-complected, heavy-browed, aquiline-featured, and—if you do the math in “Steven’s Birthday“—a Scorpio: a whole cluster of traits that Western media have villain-coded for centuries, belonging to a hero!)
I hate to shame anyone for their fandom but Bronies strike me as odd. I remember reading that they had to have a special showing for Bronies so they didn’t terrify the children who wanted to watch the show. Now they’ve grown so entitled they expect the show to conform to their creepy standards.
And this is what happens among people who have never had occasion to regard anyone besides themselves as a primary target audience—you can’t expect
(A while back, there were some male Steven Universe fans who attempted to establish the self-label “Gemtlemen”—to get roundly smacked down by the rest of the fandom; they were twice shy after having seen the precedent of the Bronies.)
@rabid rabbit:
I don’t get it: in TERFworld, trans men are women, right? So surely they deserve the support of the sisterhood when they bravely invade male bathrooms and thus strike a blow against the patriarchy? Or do they deserve anything they get for not staying in their place? Or are they all just confused lesbians?
Ah, but trans men are gender traitors—who, if they pass, automagically enjoy advantages identical to those of cis male socialization.
ParadoxicalIntention:
You know that the Venn Diagram of all three of these groups is basically one big circle! ???
These things have only become “woke” (Jeebus I now hate that F*cking term whenever anybody white says it, which I suspect may have been the point of its misuse) because theses series and movies are now espousing opinions they don’t like, or don’t jive with their bigotries.
And this is also now the primary reason I no longer interact with or listen to any reviews or opinions coming from straight white guys between the ages of 15 and 40! I been burned too many times by bad actors to ever want to seek out their opinions on any form of popular media, especially if they’re not the audience for it (and most times even when they are.)
As someone who watched the movie, I can confirm this is true–and it’s great.
The level of revisionism is amazing. I remember when the original MLP: Friendship Is Magic came out and at that time the reactionaries were freaking out about it for being “politically correct” and undermining gender norms.
This also evinces a serious misunderstanding (whether deliberate or not) of the creation of childrens media, in that most children’s programming couldnt even get made unless it showed some sort of educational value, hence even in shows like the Transformers, He-Man, GI Joe, etc. which were mostly made to sell toys, there were social, environmental, and sometimes political messages, right out in the open. Sometimes the characters would simply give a speech after whatever animated carnage was over!
Most of the people who make children’s programming today, grew up watching that sort of programming, remember those cartoons fondly, care about kids, have kids of their own, and sometimes actually like their jobs, so yeah, they’re gonna put messages in it that they want their little middle class offspring to grow learning! Most of these creators are not white, misanthropic, disenfranchised edge lords who hate learning things (or just hate kids!)
@Full Metal
No, the current line among the British TERFs is that trans men are autistic butch lesbians who are being persuaded that they’re trans men in order to force them into line with conventional gender stereotypes.
@LondonKd S
Because OF COURSE they’re going to throw in some anti-autistic ableism along with their other bigotries. They really are committed to being as awful as possible, aren’t they?
At the risk of pissing off MLP fans, FiM was hardly “woke”. As a matter of fact they even had one episode dedicated to legitimizing Trump’s wall and conservative anti-immigration sentiments as “reasonable”. MLP was peak liberalism and that fandom is overrun by Nazis nowadays. Most of everyone I knew who was into the series left the fandom because it became a haven for nazis and pedophiles.
Prager University (PragerU) is not a university – nor a school – nor even a night school class that offers courses in Beginner Spanish or throwing pots. It isn’t even a diploma mill.
It is an American 501 non-profit media company that creates videos on various political, economic, sociological (& religious) topics from an American conservative viewpoint. The organization was co-founded by Allen Estrin and talk show host and writer Dennis Prager in 2009.
Yes, it is a right -wing media mill churning out propaganda videos, disguised as an institution of higher learning to give its opinions an air of authority & legitimacy.
@Hypathia’s Daughter
And not just any regular type of Right wing propaganda, but specifically Nazi propaganda. The concepts of “Cultural Marxism” is nothing more than a rebranding of Hitler’s “Cultural Bolchevism”, same goes for the “Great Replacement”. People like Prager should be in jail for spreading Nazi ideology.
What episode was that? I don’t remember seeing it unless it was after I stopped watching
@Fabe
It was in Season 7. Mind you the show started out progressive, but then went hardcore into appeasing right wing extremists and taking a centrist approach.
The episode in question presents the Changelings as mostly liberal, with one asshole obsessed with border security and antagonizing everyone for what he perceives as weakness. Finally, when he is rightfully chased out for behaving like an asshole, they get invaded as he had been prediciting all along. They fight off the invasion and he is invited back in and his whole discourse about strengthening the borders is entirely legitimized, along with his xenophobia and blatant displays of toxic masculinity.
The fact that that shit aired whilst Trump was chucking brown children into concentration camps is disgusting.
This reminds me or people that say the new Star Trek shows are too woke. Have they never seen Star Trek or the MLP:FIM? Because the themes really haven’t changed at all. Maybe the new movie touched a sour spot because it was pretty anti spreading bigotry and fear.
I finally watched it! 10/10 adooorable?
Although I felt it lacked a connection with the Friendship is Magic story besides being set in the same world in a distant future.
There are winks to that here and there, but they never shed light into why the ponies divided in the first place or what was the fate of their protagonists. Even though there are literally toy versions of them! And especially for the transformation at the end….
I found it slightly unsettling, that’s all.
The rest, I loved. Nice pony ensamble, and I’m obviously Zipp
https://images.app.goo.gl/QwPsQDHo2NGAZXZBA