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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Heck, yeah! “My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic” was 9 seasons of pretty liberal equines loving and tolerating the beep out of everyone. But I don’t know what the right wing wanted from it. Bad guys being tortured and executed? Ponies starving because other ponies wouldn’t share hay and sugar lumps? Or, worst of all, no rainbow imagery??
Here are some of the messages to be found in the movie: Prejudice is bad. Segregation is bad. Fanatics are bad. Making friends with those who are different from you is good. Cooperation is good. Trying to understand others is good.
It’s no wonder the right-wingers hate it.
@Ms Vanilla Rose: Something to masturbate to, probably.
I mean, the one generation most of them “love” had a bunch of episodes where the moral was “don’t be a racist”, and took place in a matriarchal socialist society where every pony was able to discover what their personal talents are and what they were best suited to instead of forcing them into a role to best serve the richest 1%, and preached equality and diversity.
Dollars to donuts these chuckleclucks think that Star Wars/Trek were never political either.
The lack of critical thinking skills, it BURNS.
This also makes me interested in watching it, but I don’t have Netflix.
Anyway, you go on with your rainbow selves, Ponies.
To be fair, there is a song that’s basically Beauty And The Beast’s Mob Song as filtered through Alex Jones
It really saddens me how many former bronies went full fash in the years that followed… doesn’t fully SURPRISE me, because a lot of these guys also wanted to take it away from the little girls that it was originally MADE FOR, but it does make me sad. They really never did learn anything from it.
@Seth S: I’m only vaguely familiar with MLP and not at all with its fandom, but I’m going to take a stab in the dark and suggest that maybe it was only ever the superficial aspects that they we’re interested in.
Take just about any sci-fi TV or Movie series, for example; most of them have military trappings (if not being about actual military). Even for the ones which didn’t/don’t, there’s still some sort of clear hierarchy among the main characters, with a father figure on top. The bad guys are nearly always quite obviously bad, even if they’re not (usually) generic mustache-twirling villains, and the good guys are quite obviously good. Until very recently, cisheteronormativity and traditional family values ruled, except in heavy-handed “very special episodes” which offended both sides of the political spectrum.
Why wouldn’t conservatives, especially fascist-leaning ones, love it? While most sci-fi series have rather liberal social underpinnings, until recently this was usually subtle and/or “inoffensive” enough be glossed over. This is the side effect of needing to cater to as wide of an audience as possible to justify the big budgets of sci-fi, before it became reasonable to cater big-budget shows to narrower audiences thanks to Netflix and similar services.
I would not expect the exact same dynamics to be involved with the MLP fandom, but possibly similar ones.
I only watched the first 20 minutes because it turns out it was a bit too old for my 3 year old, but I was extremely surprised and impressed to find out that the heroine is a political activist against anti-unicorn racism. She stickers and leaflets, grafittis over anti-unicorn ads, disrupts events by companies that profit from anti-unicorn hysteria and is in trouble with the police.
There was no way that would have made it into a mainstream kids film when I was the target age.
Mindsets like ‘buy all our toys’, I take it?
@Mogwitch
I’m not a parent but I really love my niece and “what things are too old for kids” is a question I’m super bad at, because my own childhood in that respect was… non-ideal. I read the Gor books when I was less than ten years old because my librarian was I don’t even know levels of horrific. As a serious question, how old is the minimum appropriate audience for this movie, do you think?
@Mogwitch, a movie for kids which teaches that the police are not your friends? That’s awesome in itself!
When you’re dumber than a bag of hammers, you might as well call everything a nail.
Perhaps it’s overly cynical of me, but I wasn’t a fan of how the film simplified racism as a misunderstanding that can be cleared up with a little of logical arguments.
All children’s media do this, and I wish they treated it a little more realistically; I wouldn’t have been so shocked when I grew up.
But whatever. Clearly, the portrayal was realistic enough to tick off some actual racists, so props for that.
@Moggie
It doesn’t really say that, it defaults to individuals being the problem.
I really do hate to do this, and hope that discussion of MLP goes on apace, but I feel compelled to point out that The Guardian has just published a piece in which their columnist uses the murder of a cis woman by a cis cop to call trans people terrorists who are responsible for violence against women and girls.
I just can’t even with this shit today.
I should add the columnist gets her salary from The Observer, but I saw it in the Guardian where it is being crosspublished.
It really amazes me when these doofuses complain about franchises like Star Trek or Masters of the Universe being “taken over by the SJWs” because, my dudes, have you ever SEEN the originals? They were ALWAYS like that. Star Trek was very unsubtle morality plays and He-Man and the Masters of the Universe would have its heroes directly tell the audience things like “Don’t judge someone because they are different from you.”
I especially love when they accuse Star Wars of “suddenly turning political.” The franchise that from its inception was about a civil war between a clearly fascist, militaristic Empire and a rebellion trying to restore democracy was NEVER political before, sure thing.
It’s only political if they disagree with it. If it reflects their politics, it’s not political, duh. And since Star Trek came out in the 60s, they are, more than likely, willing to agree now with what was progressive then.
It’s another “Free speech for me, not for thee” argument.
@Allandrel: A rebellion that started with a dispute over taxation of trade routes, no less, and whose enemies almost all have British accents. Now why might that be, I wonder?
I’d pay good money to see one of these chuds define Cultural Marxism. I suspect it would be anything they don’t like or makes them feel uncomfortable.
@Vannla Rose, I suspect they won’t be happy until the ponies are having orgies.
@ Allandrel
Well, the original Star Trek could go either way. As I recall, quite a few, such as A Private Little War, were outright jingoistic and in that particular case, implied the US was correct to intervene in Vietnam.
Of course, also if I remember correctly, there is the McVeigh case, where I believe he quoted Captain Picard’s actions in The High Ground as inspiration and believed Picard would support his bombing. People are capable of rationalizing anything if they like it.
Hah. Incidentally, I once saw Finnish essayist Esko Valtaoja argue that Star Wars oversells the potential of a revolution/democratic movement to actually improve the lives of the people. Just before reading Surplus’s comment, I thought a parallel to US historical mythology.
Since I haven’t seen a single whole Star War, I can’t say how accurate Valtaoja’s assessment is. He claims there aren’t any concrete examples for why the Imperial government is bad, in ways that a new government could drastically change. Then again, his main argument was that historically science and technology have made a bigger difference to human wellbeing than democracy and politics.
@Ninja Socialist
I am reminded of early news coverage of the Tea Party, where a reporter was interviewing a lady who kept going on about how scary and bad “all this socialism” was. (This was before Obama had even taken office.)
The reporter asked her to “please define socialism.” She hemmed and hawed with “if you just look around” and “do your research” and the like. He repeated the question several times, and it was clear that not only was she incapable of defining “socialism” beyond “a bad thing,” she was confused by the very question.
I recently saw someone say that right-wingers do not use words as communication, but as verbal components for the D&D spell Cause Fear.
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.