#family guy
Peter Griffin:ARCHERS?!
Movie store clerk:yeah?
Peter: oh right he’s that guy too.
Inktober Day #11 of Darkly-Inclined characters is Debbie from American Dad. Debbie is a pretty underrated character in the show and it’s a shame she’s not a daily recurring character with Steve even if they could’ve just been friends since they broke up so many times lol.
I was also pleasantly surprised that in the episode where Steve and his friends are trying to escape their school and run into the Goth group that Debbie is a part of, they actually played a Joy Division song, it was such a pleasant surprise as I was initially thinking they were going to play some Emo or Metal type music which always happens with these “Goth” characters and obviously, it’s just false since those are not Goth music.
So the fact they actually got it right was just awesome and it made me like Debbie even more. Hopefully we see more of her in later episodes. :)
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Debbie © American Dad
Artwork © Myself ~Ratchetjak
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Bobby Lashley stopping Roman Reigns from going to the ring
Kevin Owens at the end of RAW
I’m passionate about cartoons, especially adult animation, so I decided to examine another cartoon trope.
Unlike the previous post, I don’t think the problems of this trope solely belong to the fans. The problem I have with Rick and Morty, BoJack Horseman, and Mad Men was with the fans, I thought the writing and characters was sophisticated and had an important and subversive message. Not so with the three above.
To be clear: it’s okay to enjoy these shows. I enjoy these shows and still watch them all the time. Family Guy least of all, but that’s because of how much it’s declined in quality, not because it’s offensive to me.
That being said, the trope we’re examining is the careless, selfish, bumbling patriarch. This usually comes along with the attractive, nagging, neglected, wife character.
The three characters listed above, Peter Griffin, Homer Simpson, and Stan Smith are all examples of this. The Simpsons is one of the first animated tv shows to use this trope, and Family Guy was largely based on the model of the Simpsons. American Dad, another similar Seth MacFarlane show came shortly after.
The problem with this trope is it does a massive disservice to both women and men.
The male characters in all three shows are consistently portrayed as being incapable of doing basic things like simple household tasks, they’re also stupid and reckless, unless the plot demands otherwise. The nagging wife is usually portrayed as smarter, although Francine Smith alternates between being smarter than Stan and so stupid she’s almost comatose as the plot dictates.
The problem with this is it persists in the idea that men need to be taken care of by women, that men go out and have adventures and work and do crazy things and in most episodes the women mind the home and clean up after their husband’s antics.
Granted part of this is a commentary on the problems with the nuclear family, but unlike many other subversive animated shows, the themes are not central to the story telling in a way that makes the message clear. The only character that significantly grows and changes for the better of these three is Stan. From season one to present he’s changed significantly and become less openly selfish and reckless than Peter or Homer.
If you watch season one of family guy or the Simpsons, you find a much more understated version of the character than in current episodes, they’ve gotten worse over time, likely because the writers have gotten bored, and because to keep the shock value going, the characters have to be more and more outlandish. Although don’t get me wrong, Stan constantly does appalling things.
The characters are also more believably connected to their families earlier on, as the shows progress, both Peter and Homer treat their wives and children worse and worse, but are still portrayed as lovable. At the end of every episode, all is forgiven, and the following week the abuse continues.
In family guy especially, in some episodes there’s straight up domestic violence from one party or the other, and the emotional abuse Peter directs towards Lois makes it clear it’s a show that hates its characters. Something similar happens in later episodes of the Simpsons.
In the current season Marge and Homer’s marriage is more in shambles than ever before and yet it drags on. They even tease us with divorce and rather than follow through, similar to the plot for Brian’s death in family guy, it was a bait and switch to make us think the show would change, significantly, permanently, only for them to go back on it so they can keep their tired formula as it is. And it gives us the same message about the characters. People can’t change.
This doesn’t work well with the formula of ending each episode on lovable buffoon learning a lesson, because the forgiveness at the end of the episode feels increasingly hollow, and the lesson learned, immediately forgotten.
While for some, these are “just” TV shows that shouldn’t be analyzed too closely, I personally think it’s important to be critical of the things we like and the media we consume.
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Beyoncé & Nicki Minaj “Feeling Myself” Music Video
This perfectly summarizes why I love the Simpsons and hate Family Guy.
Yup.
So this.
I watched that episode with my family and I could just feel how uncomfortable everyone was. Honestly, it was a really jarring, unpleasant episode.
Homer is a terrible dad. So is Peter. But Homer’s saving grace has always been that he tries—he’s bad at it and he fucks it up a lot, but he loves his family and he wants to be better than he is.
One of my favorite Homer moments is in “Diatribe of a Mad Housewife.” Tl;dr Marge writes a steamy romance novel starring herself and Ned, and when Homer finds out, he chases down Ned and, rather than attack him, asks him to teach him how to be a better husband.
There’s some part of his stupid self that wants to do better.
I never got that impression with Peter. Instead, the family has gotten more and more abusive towards Meg. It’s really unsettling for me when I started realizing that’s what happens sometimes in abusive families. Abusers sometimes single out one child to abuse, and quite often the other family members take the abuser’s side. After all, it’s easier to side with an abuser than to run the risk of becoming the target yourself.
There’s never really a point where it seems like Peter cares at all that his shitty behavior impacts his family. It actually seems to have gotten worse over the years. He expects everyone to clean up his messes because that’s always what happens; there’s really no reason for him not to be shitty.
And it’s easy to see how Meg is affected. She doesn’t have much of a character, really, because so much her screen time is devoted to being abused. The bits of character development all seem to hinge on her being this sad, neglected person who’s trying her best but never really gets any help from anyone. Quite the opposite; there have been a lot of episodes where her family sabotages any attempts to be herself.
It can be easy to forget how awful this behavior is when the only context is the show itself (frankly, everyone on Family Guy is kind of terrible). Seeing it played against the Simpsons, who are a flawed and dysfunctional but ultimately loving family, was painful to watch.
Omg it was a funny episode -_- if you don’t like it, don’t watch. Yes, you have a valid point, but holy crap.
HAHA OKAY NO
“If you don’t like it shut up and don’t watch it” has its place. This is not it. Allow me to educate you on why you’re wrong.
Family Guy is a detriment. Plain and simple. Vox wasn’t too far off when they called this show “a blight on humanity”. Yeah, it has its moments where a couple of the quips they make get a laugh out of the audience. The show having long since lost its funniness isn’t the issue.
Everything this show stands for is absolutely sickening, and its more prominent in this episode than it has been in years.
Literally everything wrong with Family guy is jam packed into this episode. Here’s a list of just some of the things I can rattle off the top of my head.
It’s generally just unpleasant. There are a lot of moments that stood out in this episode as being really fucking awful, even by Family Guy standards (Stewie kidnapping/torturing people and telling Moe his daughter is being raped as a “prank call”, Meg carving Lisa’s name into her arm, etc). Family Guy has a nasty habit of thinking shocking/disturbing = funny. It doesn’t. It’s just unpleasant and not fun to watch.
The gags are unfunny/drag on for too long. This happens in almost every modern FG episode, but it’s really bad in this one. (The car wash scene, Homer and Peter’s fight, and just the majority of the episode really).
MacFarlane is using this series as a means to jerk himself off. The amount of self gratifying bullshit that Seth threw into Simpsons Guy was nausea inducing. The entire first—what, ten minutes of the episode was about how everyone calling out MacFarlane on his racist, sexist, and generally awful bullshit are, in his eyes, a load of oversensitive braindead idiots with no senses of humor. There are ways to respectfully make jokes about awful subjects. South Park does it all the time. Family Guy does not. Not only that, but MacFarlane plugs his other shows left and right and even goes so far as to shit on Bob’s Burgers—an INFINITELY superior show—in order to fuel his own ego. He’s a LITERAL MANCHILD.
Now, let’s get to the big issue. Family Guy’s messages are absolute trash, and the fact that it still makes money means that PEOPLE ARE BUYING IT. This show’s morals are just horrific. “Sexism is what makes men men” (I Am Peter, Hear Me Roar), “Abuse victims should stay in abusive relationships for their abusers’ benefits (Seahorse Seashell Party), and that’s definitely not the worst of it. This show is teaching its primary audience everything that is wrong with society. It doesn’t matter that these ass backwards lessons are being told in the form of jokes, they’re still normalizing and enforcing ideas that NEED TO STOP.
And the only way they’re gonna stop is if we raise fucking hell about it.
Also, no. It was not a funny episode.
I happened to catch part of this episode the night that it premiered, and I was horrified at what I saw. It was uncomfortable to watch. When they put the Griffins in Springfield, everything that was Family Guy related stood out 100000x more, giving us the ability to be more visually horrified by what MacFarlane’s characters portray. His messages and the way he sells his work makes me sick to my stomach. I used to nearly worship the man when I was younger, but fortunately, now that I see it, I see how shitty his work has become and how negatively the messages from his shows impact us.
IHATEthe way they portray Meg. Their character development is mediocre and I have absolutely nothing to pick at with the above comments that go into depth on the subject. It’s bad enough that because of this show, I’m always being made the butt of Meg jokes because we happen to share the same name. But what they do to her is horrific.
What they don’t realize is that there are young girls out there going through the exact thing that Meg faces every time we see her. And it’s possible that because of the influence of this show that it happens. It influenced my siblings into normalizing abusive languages and behaviors that we weren’t only experiencing at home, but were seeing as normal on TV. I grew up watching this show in an environment where I was made fun of every day and everyone would stand behind my stepdad while he made fun of me. They think it’s harmless comedy, but this shit happens to kids everywhere and is a very real issue. It happened to me and continues to happen because men like my former stepdad and men like Peter Griffin really do exist.
They normalize this abusive behavior in such a way that it is seen as okay and part of normal life.
This photoset is a clear view into everythingwrong with Family Guy and yes, something does need to be done about it, because 1.) I am personally tired of becoming the joke because of normalized abusive behavior 2.) teaching this to the viewers is only going to make the current situations we face socially significantly worse. Hopefully now with a full visual comparison between what is smart humor and what is the “Urban Outfitters” of animated comedy, we’ll be able to really take a look at what we watch when we sit in front of a television.
Posting again, because more commentary has been added, which makes it even more relevant.
Not to mention that in every episode of FG I’ve seen, which, unfortunately, is quite a few, there’s at least one rape joke. At least.
Seth MCFarlane is a racist, sexist, lesbophobic, homophobic, transphobic misogynistic sack of SHIT who has literally got absolutely zero fucking talent or skill
His writing is fucking ABYSMAL, as evidenced by the fact that the man has never come up with a single original idea in his entire worthless life…every animated show this cretin has ever created is a rip off of the Simpsons, but lacking any of the things that made the Simpsons remotely funny, memorable or enjoyable for an audience
His characters are two dimensional grotesque abominations who exist only to be what he perceives as ‘Shocking’ in the hope that if they’re awful enough maybe that will compensate for the fact that their not actually funny and we’ll all just laugh out of embarassment over what a disgusting menagerie of repulsive creatures they all are
But the WORST thing about this smug, ugly, bigoted, self satisfied horse fucker?
He’s just NOT FUNNY
He’s so convinced that he’s oh so talented and witty and clever…he forces excuses to make people endure the nightmarish noise that is his ‘Singing voice’ in random episodes by inserting pointless musical numbers that his shitty little Mary Sue character Brian can perform, all of which sound like a drunk at a shitty karaoke bar doing the worlds worst Sinatra impression
The ‘Jokes’ he comes up with himself are clumsy, poorly written and so painfully unfunny that it’s no surprise that he decides to steal most of his material from other people…when your original material is THAT fucking lousy, plagarising the more talented people out there in the world is probably your only hope of success
The show already got cancelled once before enough college aged stoners whined about it on the internet enough to get it brought back by Fox and now we’ve had to endure a dozen more seasons of this shit, each one worse than the last
Family Guy isn’t just a bad show Family Guy is, to quote a character from the show they’ve spent about a decade ripping off: The WORST CARTOON EVER
OMG YES to all of the above. I have been talking about this for a while myself and one of my own posts was quoted in this very post here. And here’s the actual quote (bc I think it’s important):
Interesting read, but I don’t think the author spent enough time analyzing the extremely gendered dynamics of this crossover episode. One aspect in particular that got to me was Meg and Lisa’s story and how they were really the only female characters to GET a story this episode. And I think their story is SO INTERESTING because it compares and contrasts how both shows deal with the social construct of girls and girlhood.
While in “The Simpsons” girls are encouraged to educate themselves, be independent, strong, and really to ask questions (through the character of Lisa), the “Family Guy” will throw girls’ attempts to develop themselves as human beings in the trash (like when Peter throws the Saxophone Lisa gives Meg in the trash).
MacFarlane demonstrates here for the zillionth time that Meg’s utility in the show is purely as the (unfunny) punchline of a sexist joke; someone to make fun of, call ugly, physically assault, abuse, and so on. This, I think, is really definitive of how MacFarlane views girls and women in general: An unfunny, sexualized, usable, abusable, disposable, joke. (source, edited)
I’ve also argued elsewhere that:
[MacFarlane’s] trying to use “reductio ad-absurdum” to make his points. This “is a common form of argument which seeks to demonstrate that a statement is true by showing that a false, untenable, or absurdresultfollows from its denial,[1] or in turn to demonstrate that a statement is false by showing that a false, untenable, or absurd result follows from its acceptance” (source). While this sometimes works very well, he’s not doing it right AT ALL!!! He is relying on the individual viewer to understand his humour but really, they (for the most part) would already have to know it was wrong in the first place to really get the supposed “lesson”.
This is because this type of humour ignores (or perhaps exploits?) the very real problem of “confirmation bias.” Which is “also called myside bias, [and] is the tendency to search for, interpret, or prioritize information in a way that confirms one’s beliefs or hypotheses” (source). So, it’s pretty ridiculous to assume that people will simply UNDERSTAND what he’s trying to say. He has to be VERY FUCKING CLEAR and he isn’t. And I think it’s on purpose. I think he knows exactly what he’s doing (playing both sides for profit) and it’s disgusting. (source, edited)
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