aenramsden:

quecksilvereyes:

quecksilvereyes:

quecksilvereyes:

anyone wanna hear my rant about how marvel basically destroyed media literacy

ok so. little anecdote before i start

back when guardians of the galaxy came out i went and watched it. bear in mind this was the first marvel movie i watched since thor. the first one. so naturally, when the credits rolled, i got up. immediately, the entire theatre started laughing at me and taunting me for missing the post credits scene. which was. you know. very fun for an autistic kid with massive social anxiety but i digress

my point is that, in order to consume marvel content, you have to have watched literally everything that came before the film you want to watch. there are lists and arguments and timelines consisting of i don’t know how many movies so the barrier of entry is *massive*. it’s so self selecting because literally only people who are committed will sit down to watch all of this stuff and god forbid you’re a casual who just wants to watch the one movie.

now i don’t have a problem with movie franchises or even movies that lean on other previous movies for an overarching narrative. but the marvel movies are exhausting mainly for these reasons:

1) they are blatantly a money making scheme. on a certain level, all movies are, naturally, but the marvel movies have such a disdain for their audience, for the people these characters are for and for the characters themselves that they will completely kill any given character’s arc - thor ragnarok did so much character development for thor and it was immediately undone the very next movie. characters are not allowed to have a consistent narrative or a satisfying ending and god forbid you’re someone who is invested in a character

2) marvel doesn’t trust its audience to put things together. everything is explained and explained again, we are on movie #4567 of collect the action hero without thought nor care for their arcs or their feelings or the things that make them themselves - the blatant whitewashing, the ableism in the treatment of characters like hawkeye, to name a few. it feels like most of the writers consider their average audience to be too stupid to follow a narrative thread without having their hand held

3) their spoiler culture. i don’t know if marvel introduced the idea that spoilers are a unique evil but GOD can it go die in a fire. not giving your actors full scripts, costumes, sets or context to play off of and then laughing at those *stupid* actors for being upset about that? the notion that the only reason to watch a movie is for the plot?
i don’t know about you, but if a spoiler can ruin your movie, it’s a fucking shit movie. even movies like gone girl or rebecca, which hinge upon their plot twists, are enjoyable EVEN IF YOU HAVE BEEN SPOILED. this enables marvel to withhold pay from actors because they are not aware how big a role they’re playing.
A PLOT TWIST SHOULD BE HINTED AT! if a few of your viewers figure it out that’s a good thing!!! a plot twist is not something that hits you out of nowhere with no hints or no possibility to figure it out by yourself! there is no merit whatsoever in punishing your audience for figuring out your plot twist (cough wandavision cough)

4) the way marvel has monopolised superhero movies. it’s not a strict monopoly, but marvel has managed to become synonymous with superhero movies and sets the standard for the way they are consumed. there are so many people whose media diet consists almost exclusively of marvel movies or movies like them, which teaches them to just accept what is thrown at them in disdain. so when they are shown a movie that doesn’t spell everything out, that is artistic or queer or up for interpretation, they get angry at the movie for not holding their hand. when you only know a very specific sort of media that never lets you think for yourself and that just keeps churning out more and more derivative content (i watched the last spiderman movie when my bf was here. not only did you need to watch ALL THE MARVEL MOVIES BEFORE, you also had to watch BOTH SPIDERMAN FRANCHISES in order to understand what the fuck is going on) that gatekeeps people who are NOT ENTERTAINED BY THIS BULLSHIT and creates a self reinforcing bubble

5) the way the movies broke apart and sanitised so many of their characters under the guise of expanding their appeal - in the most blatant example i can think of, they made PETER PARKER AT LEAST MIDDLE CLASS AND TIED HIS ORIGIN EXPLICITLY TO TONY STARK. like that is not the point. the people who write the characters don’t care about them and it shows and it is so, so exhausting.

marvel paved the way for massive, long series that get more and more difficult to enter as you go, unneccesary plot twists that literally gut punch you because you cannot have seen them coming, spoiler culture as it exists today while teaching their viewers that it’s okay to never ever have to think critically about media, just buy the next ticket for iron man 545 and no matter what we show you in it, you’re gonna be happy because it’s MARVEL

as a writer it legitimately makes me want to CRY

to the people in the notes saying i didn’t bring up capitalism i have a whole point on the money aspect. but yes, this is in outgrowth of capitalism and profit maximisation. fuck capitalism

Yeah, I pretty much dropped the series after Civil War turned out to be a colossal disappointment.

…Alright, so I agree that it’s ridiculous for modern MCU movies to basically require homework, but I find pretty much every other complaint here to be excessive. They’re all problems that exist in Marvel movies, but they are also all problems that have existed in varying degrees across media for ages - the fact that you act like Marvel invented “spoiler culture” tells me you probably weren’t around for “Snape Kills Dumbledore,” for example.

Before I get into it, I want to be clear: you’re allowed to dislike what you want to dislike. Criticism of media is not only valid, but essential. If you disagree with anything I say, that’s totally fine! A lot of this is subjective. But I happen to enjoy Marvel movies and TV shows (in general), and it’s frustrating to me that people can practically say “it’s Stan Lee’s fault that the Cuban Missile Crisis happened” and everyone will applaud because popular thing bad.

So.

1) “It’s a money making scheme!”

Most movies are. I don’t think this is actually your argument for this paragraph, but it’s the first sentence, so I’ll use it as a header here.

What I suspect is that your frustration is with some perceived lack of soul - the characters you like change between iterations, like they’re puppets instead of people, gears turning in some grand money machine. And it’s particularly galling because sometimes those characters ARE used by one person with a particularly strong vision, and then when they show up in someone else’s work they’re completely different. And as much as it’s okay to be frustrated like that… isn’t it kind of unreasonable to expect a character to be written exactly the same by 5 or 6 different people?

If your problem is the fact that a character is being written by 5 or 6 different people at all then that’s a different issue, and I don’t think it’s one that can be solved in the bounds of a connected media setting. And subjectively, I think that having that sort of connected cinematic universe is better than not having it - it allows for stories to be told that we wouldn’t be able to pull off otherwise. Outside the medium of film, Brandon Sanderson is doing something similar with his Cosmere setting, and even he needs to branch out and let other authors in to fill the space. The validity of connected media is its own discussion (I think it’s a very good thing) but

2) “Marvel doesn’t trust its audience to understand plotlines!”

I don’t actually know what you’re getting at here, because you didn’t give any examples…? Also in the very next paragraph you complain that Wandavision didn’t foreshadow its twists, which tells me maybe you… didn’t understand the plotline?

Later in the paragraph you complain about ableism and whitewashing… neither of which are really connected to plotlines at all, but I do think they’re more valid criticisms, especially of earlier Marvel properties. I’m a straight, white, cis man with no visible and/or restrictive disabilities so I’m not the right person to talk about this issue - I like that they’re able to make movies that aren’t targeted toward me in particular, with an extra emphasis on lived experiences in cultures I’m not part of, and I like that they put some effort into things like the Hawkeye TV series with the protagonist’s developing deafness and his interactions with a fully-deaf antagonist, but (and I’m saying this unironically) it also means I’m not correct to judge whether they are enough.

Either way, not sure what it has to do with the writers “considering their audience too stupid to follow a narrative thread without having their hand held.” And at the risk of whataboutism… Marvel is one of the only groups in this space that seems to even be trying to improve.

3) “Marvel’s spoiler culture has gone too far!”

I agree that it was insane for them to go to those lengths in Infinity War/Endgame, though I’d argue that in those cases they were trying to do something new - it was a cultural event, a full year where Infinity War’s shocking ending was in the social consciousness, a full year where people were waiting to see how it would resolve, and if someone had come out 6 months in and said “they win but Tony Stark dies for real,” it would have taken the impact out of that experience.

This single extenuating circumstance aside, I agree that it would be crazy to keep up that spoiler paranoia… but they aren’t. Spiderman 3 had its Garfield/Macguire cameos spoiled years in advance. The full plot of Dr Strange 2 is available online. Hell, we know there have recently been test screenings of Thor 4, which means it’s probably not hard to find someone out there who could go into detail about how that’s going to look.

And as I said, spoiler culture is nothing new. I agree that a good movie is still good even if you know what’s going to happen, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t craft a movie to be enjoyed a certain way on that first viewing. When the last few Harry Potter books came out, they were full of major character deaths, and at midnight releases you’d occasionally have people buying the book, skipping to the end, and ruining it for everyone in line. When Game of Thrones was airing, people who read the books knew the Red Wedding was about to happen, and I guarantee that the experience was different for TV-only viewers. Hell, there’s a niche example with Ocarina of Time, which released in the 90s, and yet somehow Dan Avidan of Game Grumps didn’t know Sheik was Zelda… and his live, for-real reaction was caught on video here. There is value in allowing people to experience things spoiler-free, and it gets harder and harder in the age of social media.

4) “Marvel has monopolized superhero movies!”

Yeah.Because they’re the only people who seem to know how to make them good.

Sony recently released a movie about Morbius, a villain from the Spider-Man franchise. It was a complete fucking mess. None of the characters have realistic motivations. Stuff just happens for plot convenience. There are entire action scenes where you can’t tell what’s happening because the CGI obscures the characters’ actions and decisions. Previously they made two Venom movies, which were better-received, but I don’t think I’ve ever met someone who said Venom was their favorite superhero movie.

On the DC side of things, you have a bunch of Superman stuff where the focus is on how haaaard it is to be the only person in the world who matters, how you can’t let yourself help people because then they’ll relyyyy on you… and then you have 3 or 4 different Batman series, which tend to be stronger movies but also incidentally tend not to be part of cinematic universes. As far as the DCEU goes, the only stuff that was well-received almost across the board was James Gunn’s Suicide Squad, James Gunn’s Peacemaker series, and the Justice League Snyder Cut - the first two being basically Marvel properties in DC clothing, and the latter being practically an Auteur piece by a guy who finally managed to convince Sony execs that his movie would be better without their input. To rephrase, the best DC movies are the ones that were made without DC execs having much say in the matter; they hired James Gunn to do the James Gunn things he demonstrated at Marvel, and they caved under pressure from fans to let Zack Snyder throw money at his Ayn Rand wish-fulfillment magnum opus (which, admittedly, was beautiful to look at even if I took issue with a lot of the subject matter).

The reason Marvel has monopolized superhero movies is because they have a pattern that works - treat the character like a human being who happens to have special talents and/or a higher calling, allow your directors to express themselves, and then once all’s said and done sprinkle in some cameos and promises that there’s this other thing that the audience should get excited about. It’s formulaic, it produces a lot of stuff that is just acceptable, but it’s reliable - not every MCU movie is a world-shaking hit, but it’s been a while since there was one that was actively bad.

5) “They made their characters bland under the guise of expanding their appeal!”

Okay, but literally the only character you mention is Spider-Man, who was kind of a special case. In his own stories, he’s a normal guy who occasionally gets involved in things that are way bigger than he is, but in the MCU he showed up in Civil War - he literally started out by being defined by a guy who gets involved in big things, subbing in Tony Stark for Uncle Ben (because his introduction to the MCU didn’t allow for an Uncle Ben arc), and then they… realized they’d made a mistake, and at the end of his most recent movie he ended up with no money, no connections, no safety net, just a desire to do good and a set of superpowers that gave him the ability to accomplish it. Which is to say, Spider-Man in the MCU is now Spider-Man from the comics.

Other than that, the characters have - at least in their introductions - been pretty loyal to their source material, as far as I can tell. Tony Stark was an irresponsible alcoholic playboy, driven to superheroism by a need to redeem himself. Steve Rogers was a good-hearted kid who was granted the power to stand up to bullies. Thor was a larger-than-life braggart who needed a dose of humility from time to time.

Hell, if you want to see evidence that they’re willing to branch out with their characters, look no further than Moon Knight, which opens with an everyman struggling to live his life while being disrupted when an action hero takes over his body and then leaves him to pick up the pieces. (I’m not confident it will stay at this level of quality, as every single Marvel TV show so far has had a promising opening and a weak-ass ending, but that’s a different discussion!)

TL;DR: Your complaints are valid, but it’s totally unfair to say exclusively a Marvel problem. Most of your points are either wholly untrue or only point to exceptions-with-good-reasons within the MCU, and they all generally point to problems with media as a whole - there’s an inherent conflict between fan-loyalty and broad accessibility, between artistic merit and financial viability. Marvel is a big obvious target because they consistently make financial successes, but the problems you lay out are symptoms evident in Marvel properties, but not caused by Marvel in any capacity, and pretending it’s the case means people are going to be way less likely to address the problem effectively.

It isn’t Marvel. It is capitalism. Punishing Marvel somehow won’t make the problem go away, especially when your main complaint appears to be that they’re making the movies broadly appealing.

Ya know, in this day and age I’m extraglad to be going into a field that’s all about evidence-based decision making. Until now, I never really thought about my grad focus (business analytics / data science) in the context of current events, but now that I am, it seems fitting.

My first assignment in one of my classes is all about evaluating the quality/reliability of research — a skill I began to develop in high school but lost strength in over time. I’ve almost certainly been guilty of accidentally sharing misinformation via unfounded claims and weak research studies because social media makes it too darn easy to pass info along without a second thought. All this to say that I’m glad I’ll be more equipped to hold myself accountable for thinking critically about information before passing it along to others.

brazen-edventure:

blutterlie:

lenaluthorlover:

taraljc:

primeemeraldheiress:

When you’re angry at the characters, the story is well-written. When you’re angry at the writers, it is not.

the presumption here is that audiences can tell the difference.

presuming they’re not children, the audience can usually tell. ex: when a character does something you don’t like - but it feels like something the character would do - you get mad at the character. when a character does something you don’t like - and the history of that character makes it unbelievable that the character would do that thing - you get mad at the writers.

^^^^^^^^^^^THIS

The fact that you’re aware of the writer’s existence at all should be a clue. The writer should be invisible to you if they’ve done their job properly.

This Pride, I would like to bring up how fucking wild it is that the immediate response to “the anti-LGBT+ sentiments from this person is bad”? A weird number of people hit back that you are taking it out of context, and you weren’t exposed enough to their full work or comments, actually.

quecksilvereyes:

quecksilvereyes:

quecksilvereyes:

anyone wanna hear my rant about how marvel basically destroyed media literacy

ok so. little anecdote before i start

back when guardians of the galaxy came out i went and watched it. bear in mind this was the first marvel movie i watched since thor. the first one. so naturally, when the credits rolled, i got up. immediately, the entire theatre started laughing at me and taunting me for missing the post credits scene. which was. you know. very fun for an autistic kid with massive social anxiety but i digress

my point is that, in order to consume marvel content, you have to have watched literally everything that came before the film you want to watch. there are lists and arguments and timelines consisting of i don’t know how many movies so the barrier of entry is *massive*. it’s so self selecting because literally only people who are committed will sit down to watch all of this stuff and god forbid you’re a casual who just wants to watch the one movie.

now i don’t have a problem with movie franchises or even movies that lean on other previous movies for an overarching narrative. but the marvel movies are exhausting mainly for these reasons:

1) they are blatantly a money making scheme. on a certain level, all movies are, naturally, but the marvel movies have such a disdain for their audience, for the people these characters are for and for the characters themselves that they will completely kill any given character’s arc - thor ragnarok did so much character development for thor and it was immediately undone the very next movie. characters are not allowed to have a consistent narrative or a satisfying ending and god forbid you’re someone who is invested in a character

2) marvel doesn’t trust its audience to put things together. everything is explained and explained again, we are on movie #4567 of collect the action hero without thought nor care for their arcs or their feelings or the things that make them themselves - the blatant whitewashing, the ableism in the treatment of characters like hawkeye, to name a few. it feels like most of the writers consider their average audience to be too stupid to follow a narrative thread without having their hand held

3) their spoiler culture. i don’t know if marvel introduced the idea that spoilers are a unique evil but GOD can it go die in a fire. not giving your actors full scripts, costumes, sets or context to play off of and then laughing at those *stupid* actors for being upset about that? the notion that the only reason to watch a movie is for the plot?
i don’t know about you, but if a spoiler can ruin your movie, it’s a fucking shit movie. even movies like gone girl or rebecca, which hinge upon their plot twists, are enjoyable EVEN IF YOU HAVE BEEN SPOILED. this enables marvel to withhold pay from actors because they are not aware how big a role they’re playing.
A PLOT TWIST SHOULD BE HINTED AT! if a few of your viewers figure it out that’s a good thing!!! a plot twist is not something that hits you out of nowhere with no hints or no possibility to figure it out by yourself! there is no merit whatsoever in punishing your audience for figuring out your plot twist (cough wandavision cough)

4) the way marvel has monopolised superhero movies. it’s not a strict monopoly, but marvel has managed to become synonymous with superhero movies and sets the standard for the way they are consumed. there are so many people whose media diet consists almost exclusively of marvel movies or movies like them, which teaches them to just accept what is thrown at them in disdain. so when they are shown a movie that doesn’t spell everything out, that is artistic or queer or up for interpretation, they get angry at the movie for not holding their hand. when you only know a very specific sort of media that never lets you think for yourself and that just keeps churning out more and more derivative content (i watched the last spiderman movie when my bf was here. not only did you need to watch ALL THE MARVEL MOVIES BEFORE, you also had to watch BOTH SPIDERMAN FRANCHISES in order to understand what the fuck is going on) that gatekeeps people who are NOT ENTERTAINED BY THIS BULLSHIT and creates a self reinforcing bubble

5) the way the movies broke apart and sanitised so many of their characters under the guise of expanding their appeal - in the most blatant example i can think of, they made PETER PARKER AT LEAST MIDDLE CLASS AND TIED HIS ORIGIN EXPLICITLY TO TONY STARK. like that is not the point. the people who write the characters don’t care about them and it shows and it is so, so exhausting.

marvel paved the way for massive, long series that get more and more difficult to enter as you go, unneccesary plot twists that literally gut punch you because you cannot have seen them coming, spoiler culture as it exists today while teaching their viewers that it’s okay to never ever have to think critically about media, just buy the next ticket for iron man 545 and no matter what we show you in it, you’re gonna be happy because it’s MARVEL

as a writer it legitimately makes me want to CRY

also the sexism and the homophobia and the racism etc

the way that like. having one unnamed character from one scene utter the words my husband is considered representation to fawn over. retch.

theoutcastrogue:

“I have graded more than 500 undergraduate papers about why Plato is an idiot and no one would ever behave in the Republicthe way he has the people behave in the Republic. I have graded maybe 15 brilliant undergraduate papers about why Plato thoughtpeople would behave that way in the Republic, and the differences between Plato’s worldview and Plato’s psychology and our own, and whyhe thinks this thing that to us seems wrong.

That to me is the much harder kind of critical thinking, the empathetic kind of critical thinking that doesn’t criticize but reads carefully, critically, prudently and with empathy and connection to try to understand the other side, which I think is something that doesn’t just apply to the academic world, doesn’t just apply to how we write a paper in a class. It applies to how we read a blog post, how we judge a New York Times article, how we evaluate when someone has posted something on Twitter that they want us to hate or like to hate, as Twitter often is, whether the empathetic reading, which is the really challenging critical element, is there.”

– Ada Palmer [x]

witche-nerd:

A piece of media: This is a complex story where no one is evil and no one is a saint. People are a reflection of their world, their life experiences and trauma. Morality depends on context from which you view the character. You are not supposed to find every character good or even likable. You can take sides and find real life parallels but the biggest point is to make you think and maybe recognize the flaws in yourself as well as the goodness in those you hate.

Tumblr: okay so THIS is the bad person and THIS is the good person. This is the oppressor and this is the oppressed. This is the abuser and this is their victim. If you like this EVIL character you are clearly the same as my asshole dad who reminds me of this character. Not taking a moralistic stance on a fictional story means you are amoral. Analysis is actually about figuring out who the bad-est person is so you can disavow them and who the good-est person is so you can root for them. The media you consume reflects your values and the characters you find interesting are clearly the ones who are exactly the same as you.

monstermoviedean:

i saw a post today where someone stated that they often can’t tell real information from misinformation online. i am not here to make fun of that person. that being said, the ability to figure out if information is real or not is a critical skill for everyone who uses the internet. you need to be able to do that on your own. it’s great if you can get help or if people will tell you what’s real and what’s not, but you also need to be able to do it by yourself. simple, easy tips under the cut.

Keep reading

curriebelle:

I think “raising awareness” is actually an outdated concept.

It made sense in the past, when media outlets were more localized and our access to them more limited by time and technology. “Raising awareness” made sense in the context of the AIDS crisis or the Vietnam War, because those were active efforts of counter-propaganda — it was important for literally everybody, from doctors to landlords to employers to politicians, to have the other sides of those stories exposed. It also helps for things like disability — like, if people are aware that misophona exists, they’re more likely to accommodate for someone with sound sensitivity, and that’s something an average person could do in a regular daily interaction.

These days we are more aware in that we have more exposure to news stories, but the utility of that awareness is entirely variable. Awareness of COVID prevention techniques is good; awareness of COVID conspiracies is less so, if you are not able to discern conspiracy from verifiable medicine. Awareness of the Russian invasion is good in some sense, but paralyzing in others, because for a good chunk of us, we can’t do anything with it.

Whatshould be important now is media literacy. This doesn’t just mean being able to separate lies from propaganda — it also means identifying places where information and action are useful, where and how further information should be disseminated, and how to react to misinformation. It also means understanding things like algorithmic bias and doomscrolling, both of which are heavily exploited by social media platforms, and understanding your own role as a nexus of media information.

pussystigmata:

im pro children having privacy but if you think parents should give kids unrestricted internet access…its not 1999. in 2022 thats legitimately neglectful. do you know how many kids are out here like. watching gore and porn. its not normal or healthy. its traumatic.

matt-the-radar-techncian:

kragehund-again:

my theory is that reincarnation is real and that’s why everything is so fucked up. we got too many people on earth and their souls were supposed to spend a few more cycles as endangered animals or smthn but we fucked the environment and overpopulated. so we get guys who was SUPPOSED to be black-footed ferrets or whatever til their soul reached maturity but instead they’re like, influencers and politicians. this is also why furries exist.

This is just repackaged ecofascism, and it’s really important you recognise it when you see it and don’t uncritically share it

The dangers of eco-fascism and why it’s a ‘veneer for racist beliefs’

“Eco-fascism argues that humans are overburdening the planet and that some populations are more of a problem than others.”

-

“The ordinary person might be unaware that they’re partaking in it, all the while spreading views like the belief that immigration is the cause of the climate crisis, without realising that this theory has a history of eugenics and population control.”

-

“At the core of eco-fascism is an ideology that blames the demise of the environment on overpopulation, immigration and over industrialisation, problems that followers believe could be solved through the mass murder of people in the Global South. They use the climate crisis as a veneer for racist beliefs.”

What is Ecofascism and Why It Has No Place in Environmental Progress

“Although the wealthy minority is fuelling the climate crisis, marginalised communities suffer disproportionately, and eco-fascists place the blame almost entirely on poor people (particularly of colour).”

Eco-fascism: The greenwashing of the far right | DW | 19.05.2022

Ecofascism: Lessons from the German Experience

The post may or may not be intended as a joke, but by accepting core concepts like overpopulation and the idea that there is a natural order being violated by certain humans being born, you are being desensitized to the language that ecofascism uses to justify violent, racist actions and beliefs. By normalising this language and these concepts you are (often even unintentionally) contributing to opening the doors for these people to slowly shift the online discourse around environmentalism towards their beliefs and making yourself vulnerable to falling down this rabbit hole of (eco-)fascist beliefs yourself.

Ignoring an issue is not the same as an issue being nonexistent

tumblr has a thriving radfem/TERF/transphobia scene like twitter

tumblr posts spread conspiracies and disinformation like tiktoks

tumblr users share fake news and misinformation like facebook users

Assuming these issues don’t exist on tumblr because you haven’t (to your knowledge) seen them does not mean they don’t exist. In fact it makes you more vulnerable to falling victim to believing misinformation and being radicalised because you’ve internalised a sense of security and superiority.

Tumblr is not an inherently better or smarter platform than any other. You can and inevitably will be exposed to these things even here.

Drop the superiority complex and learn about how to actually protect yourself from falling for misinformation, because being on tumblr does not automatically protect you.

Media Literacy Masterpost

monstermoviedean:

i saw a post today where someone stated that they often can’t tell real information from misinformation online. i am not here to make fun of that person. that being said, the ability to figure out if information is real or not is a critical skill for everyone who uses the internet. you need to be able to do that on your own. it’s great if you can get help or if people will tell you what’s real and what’s not, but you also need to be able to do it by yourself. simple, easy tips under the cut.

Keep reading

nurselofwyr:

rhythmic-idealist:

aleshakills:

If you are someone who likes to watch a lot of cop shows, I want you to ask yourself a few questions.

Why do all TV cops, even the good ones, hate Internal Affairs? Isn’t the job of Internal Affairs to root out the “bad cops”? Isn’t their job to make sure police follow the rules? Why is that presented as inherently evil or antagonistic? 

Why do all TV cops, even the good ones, hate defense attorneys? Isn’t the defense attorney’s job to protect the rights of all citizens? Isn’t it their job to make sure police follow the law? Isn’t it their job to make sure everyone is treated fairly under the system? Why is that presented as inherently evil or antagonistic? 

Why do all TV cops, even the good ones, get upset when citizens invoke their constitutional rights? Don’t those rights exist to ensure all citizens are treated fairly? Don’t they exist to ensure innocent people are not wrongfully incriminated? Why are citizens who invoke their rights presented as dishonest, untrustworthy, or antagonistic? 

To be clear, I’ve watched Brooklyn 99 and enjoyed it. I was watching Elementary the other day. But even when I watch shows I like, I make a mental note every time a cop lies, breaks the law, subverts someone’s basic rights, or just generally acts like an asshole to the people the are meant to serve and protect. 

How often are they called out on their behavior? How often are they punished for it? How often is it reinforced as correct by the narrative?

When I tell people to be critical of the media they consume that is what I mean. Not simply calling it terrible and moving on, but actually engaging thoughtfully, asking questions, and forming conclusions about what that media is trying to say to you. Then decide whether you want to keep listening, or if it will be better for you in the long run to move on.

Why do only the guilty people ever invoke their right to an attorney? I would invoke my right to an attorney.

Why are protections of innocent people’s rights only ever framed as “slowing the police down” and preventing them from really catching the bad guy? Why is it that every time an officer has an instinct to break the rules, they’re narratively vindicated?

It’s the same question as “but WHY do her superpowers require her to show so much skin?” A writer put that there.

angiebeagoodgirl:

shipping-isnt-morality:

the issue isn’t that some people think abuse is good but that many people don’t recognize abuse at all

It would help if we had more practical conversations about what constitutes abuse from an early age. It would also be fuckin super if it weren’t romanticized by the media

I mean, true. But most media that romanticizes abuse is able to do so because it doesn’t call it abuse, so I think a wider understanding of what abuse is - and, hell, why it sometimes makes a good story while still being a bad thing - would be really helpful.