Well, at some point as a parent you need to decide what's more important. I need my daughter to listen to me when it's important, but you have to pick your battles. I ultimately decided I don't want to send the message to her that I don't care about her feelings, and that I'm never going to listen to her preferences. I have the feeling that my parents may have been more like your parents to some degree, and I'm not certain I'm personally happy with the results, and how it has impacted my long-term mental health.
haroldbkny
1d ago
Nagging is one thing. What about just becoming really sad?
haroldbkny
1d ago
Definitely. That's what I mean by saying that he thought he was better than he was, and that it would have been solved with a normal script revision process. By the 90s, he was untouchable, and no one would have dared give notes to the man who made Star wars, but that's exactly what it needed. Everyone needs an editor
haroldbkny
1d ago
Well, it's possible you were not as strong minded a child as mine. How much were you willing to really push for what you wanted, and make your parents miserable until you got it?
haroldbkny
1d ago
Definitely agree, but it's very different. The prequels were not a problem of vision, but of execution (for the most part). They failed because Lucas was old and thought he was better then he was, not because he tried to please too many people.
And that failure mode was such that they kind of ended up really weird and quirky, though really bad. I kind of believe that if the prequels had a normal script revision process, and actual directors, they might not have been completely terrible. This is in contrast to the Disney ones which failed because they're bland and corporateized.
haroldbkny
1d ago
In addition to what @roystgnr says, I feel like Rowling suffered from a syndrome many authors do, which is that she ended up loving her characters and as such didn't want to kill as many of them as would have made sense. Who really died in the final battle, that we actually care about? One half of an identical duo, Lupin, and Tonks. That's not that much, and many more would have been warranted if the Death Eaters were actually a real threat.
haroldbkny
1d ago
I was thinking about Star wars recently, and one conclusion I came to is that it's really strange that these are films that:
- Were originally driven by a creative vision
- Were so beloved by fans, who knew them inside and out and just positively worshipped them
- And somehow, stewardship of them were handed over to corporations. People just doing their bare-minimum job, trying to get good numbers to please the board of directors and not offend anyone, but who don't really give a shit about anything.
Like, I wouldn't trust my corporate self to write and produce the continuations of beloved franchises. When you're at work, if you're not a visionary, you just care about not getting fired and keeping people happy.
It's just bizarre. Of course they failed so hard.
No, we played the original, not switch.
My daughter liked it a lot, but probably didn't fully grasp the implications. Also, I showed her the secret ending, where Marin gets her wish granted and becomes a seagull, so a little less sad. She also gets hung up on small details like "what is link going to do now that he's in the ocean?", and others like this, which makes sense, but it's not the point of the story. She may be a bit too young, but maybe it will stick with her and come back to it, like I did.
haroldbkny
2d ago
And also, something about the eight instruments of the Wind Fish and the Noble Eightfold Path?
Haha, I like that and I'd kinda buy it. The first Zelda game has 8 pieces of the triforce of wisdom, second has the 6 crystals for the palaces, third has the 3 pendants and 7 maidens, and this has 8 again.
haroldbkny
2d ago
Oh, i definitely plan to show her lots of anime. But the ones I know are mostly for teenagers. FMA, Cowboy Bebop, The Big O, Trigun, Evangelion. Probably Avatar The Last Airbender is something I can show her when she's just a little older.
haroldbkny
2d ago
Interesting. What do you think is Buddhist about it? To be fair, I am Western, so I will always end up imposing some sort of a lens on that. There's a lot of western media and philosophy about dreams too, though.
I don't have time to read all of the cited stuff now, but I should ask, do you have kids? My experience is that they will want what they want, and you can't really fight against it too hard, because that makes them want it more. It all ends up being a negotiation, whether you want it to or not, unless you're willing to run your household like Captain Von Trap (and even he couldn't control his kids despite his efforts). I do show them all the things from my childhood and things I love, but you can't make them just like you, forcibly - it doesn't work. They know of the modern media from school and friends, and want that, hard. And in order to be a part of their life, you need to allow them to partake in it at least sometimes, or else they will be really unhappy.
And note: my daughter watches very little media, and doesn't control what she consumes directly, but rather by petitioning me for it. We basically have family movie night once per week, which is how she has taken in all the movies she has seen. We have no tv, and she has no iPad, and has never used one, and wouldn't know how to navigate kids YouTube.
haroldbkny
2d ago
Yeah, as mentioned in another response, maybe part of what I dislike is that there's so much fake out loss. Though I'm not certain exactly why that bothers me, and I need to think more about it.
And loss at the beginning vs loss at the end is a good distinction as well, and I'd also need to think about that more, too. At least loss at the beginning, vs no loss or fake out loss, affects the status quo, and shows kids that important things in life change: we really do lose people we love and they don't just come back.
Heh, and you're forgetting the most important loss in the neverending story - the horse! At the very least that was a scarring moment!
haroldbkny
2d ago
Well, they don't spell anything out for you, which is also something I like about it. But I don't think "it was all just a dream, and didn't really happen" is what was intended.
It was the dream of a deity, that link was caught up in. A god dreamed and by doing so created a realish place and realish people.
You can see that at the end, after link wakes up, he sits there thinking about whether it was all just his own dream, and is sad, but then sees the windfish flying overhead, and has some level of catharsis about the fact that it was real and worth it on some level. So the fact that the windfish comes to him at least shows that there was some magic going on, not just his own dream. Not to mention the secret ending showing that the windfish granted Marin's wish to live on in some way as a seagull.
haroldbkny
2d ago
Interesting. I guess I could say there are 3 things you can do in media:
- Have deaths and downer endings
- Not have deaths and downer endings
- Have fake out deaths so you can avoid the downer ending
I love 1, but I probably hate 3 more than 2, and 3 is everywhere. I'm not 100% sure I know why I think 3 is worse than 2 though, I'll have to think about it.
haroldbkny
2d ago
I played Link's Awakening with my wife and daughter. My wife was taken back at the ending (surprised, not disliking). I think she basically just assumed the whole time that it wouldn't end with everyone on Koholint basically dying, or vanishing from existence.
This got me thinking about how I played this, or watched my brother play it, when I was the same age as my daughter. None of the media she consumes challenges her with difficult endings. Everything HAS to return to the status quo at the end, because we can't risk anyone being unhappy. In Frozen, Anna is unfrozen. In Moana, even Maui gets his fucking hook back after it breaks. Fake out deaths and fake out status quo changes happen left and right, but it is really rare to see something that actually sticks.
I love downer endings, and I think it made me who I am. It makes me sad and disappointed and a little disgusted to see basically all of the media of my kids' day be bland and not challenging them to really feel something other than a vague blandly happy dance party ending. Dance party endings aren't new, but have been made ubiquitous in the past 20 years. Same with fake out deaths, and I blame Marvel for that. I guess I personally chalk this all up to the general trend towards never making anyone uncomfortable, which is tied in with the corporatization of media and corporate-memphization of media.
I don't think OP said they wanted to keep old fences. It's not a question of keep vs tear down, and I think that's what Chesterton and OP are saying. They're saying you can tear down the fence, but make sure you understand why it was actually there to begin with. Feminists refusing to acknowledge that there was a good historical reason for slut shaming seems like a good example of people promoting a false dichotomy instead. My life would be better if people respected the Chesterton parable, because if people said "slut shaming had a valid historical purpose" instead of "fuck the patriarchy", then runaway social justice movements would have less power.
haroldbkny
27d ago
I was talking about the practice of putting sexy women, typically in sexy clothing (or no clothing at all), into television and movies where from the context it seems that the main point (or a large part of the point) is to titillate viewers.
I mean you have a point. But maybe my point was too narrow, too. I like seeing sexy women in sexy clothes in situations that don't involve them just banging. Actually, when I really feel bored with porn, anime porn is a good substitute, because the characters seem less like they're doing it for a paycheck, in part because they're not real, but also there's story involved. My definition of "normal" porn may be too narrow, but it basically always involves no story. But maybe my experience is not universal.
For example, a website which is devoted to showing pictures of women in short dresses and skirts
I can't really speak to that because I don't get it. Is there a parasocial effect where the intended audience are commenters that feel like they have a relationship with these girls posting the pictures? Like a cam girl?
Well would you say that what you have described (cute girls going through the early stages of romance) has become (to some extent) taboo due to the influence of feminism?
To some extent, inasmuch as they love to police anything that men like. I wouldn't really say taboo, at least not in 2026. Maybe in 2017 it was.
haroldbkny
27d ago
My wife is always showing me young adult fantasy books for women, ones that she loves because she grew up reading them. I'm like, for God's sake, why does every one of these books have to feature the protagonist getting her period? Almost no books about male protagonists feature them ejaculating for the first time.
It doesn't disgust me though, but I'm more irritated by the fact that women are so obsessed with their periods.
haroldbkny
27d ago
I disagree with your last point. Sometimes I get so tired of porn because it's so fake. I don't want to really see trashy sluts getting banged all the time, just sometimes. But I settle for that because that's the closest alternative. But I often want to see cute girls going through the early stages of romance, blushing, being cute and awkward, wrestling with really feelings. Sometimes I'll see a movie that features that and it grabs me.
haroldbkny
27d ago
That's interesting. For my wife, she's totally fine with that sort of sex fantasy being in shows. She's like "whatever, it's totally normal and wish fulfillment. Nbd". However, she gives me the look of disgust when I specifically make comments, or too many comments, that are sex fantasy-related. I have no clue why this is.
I've asked her many times and she can't explain it. Like for example, if I make sexual jokes to her about Anna from Frozen, she gives me the look. But when the actress in the Frozen Broadway musical takes the character in a totally sexual direction, and makes throaty murmers and feels up a suit of armor while singing "The First Time in Forever" (yes this actually happens in the taped produced movie of the Frozen musical that is currently on Disney+, go see for yourself), she gets annoyed if I think it's a little weird for a kids production to feature that.
haroldbkny
1mo ago
Definitely. And having worked in LLM training, myself, Reddit really is a large large corpus. Early LLMs at least could not have realistically gotten off the ground without it, but maybe that's changed.
Well, like I said I'm very sensitive to group judgement like that. And it really bugs me when people won't listen. And this seems to happen a lot there... At least I can confidently say that "don't post too much information" as someone told me years ago is clearly not the correct answer. People will seize on anything, gleefully, as I said before. And that seems to indicate that the problem may be with the venue, if no matter what you try, people will be like that.
More actual helpful answers came much later after a ton of sarcastic ones, and people refusing to listen. I'd say early on it was at least 50 percent people bitching or giving otherwise unhelpful answers (like "k custom sweet" is either them being stupid or more likely trying to trick me with a name that doesn't exist, and some people said it's obviously something like a k dark ride when it clearly wasn't. And people saying "k" are probably making a joke, but still, not helpful). But then the massive downvoting of anything I tried to say about the sleeve, and the doubling down or those people antagonizing me because of it, was what really got me down. And also, as I said, this isn't an isolated incident, just the latest. I don't know if you could see some of the earlier ones, because at least some of them were on my previous account, and I also deleted some retroactively to avoid more negative karma.
Edit: oh yeah, also one guy wrote a really nasty reply to my comment that it was from a community kit. He was saying something like "what are you wasting our time here for" etc. but it was only up for a few minutes because someone deleted it. I guess maybe he realized that obviously I was looking to find a similar cymbal. But the fact he even wrote that seemed like the behavior I hate. You see someone who's getting downvoted, therefore he's the villain, therefore pile on and make him feel even worse.
I didn't know that, that's interesting.
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