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Britta Perry: a Culture War time capsule
One of the fun things about reading old books or watching old movies is how you can be reminded of the way society changes. Obviously this is a somewhat trite observation, but it doesn't really make it any less jarring when something very casually conflicts with the subtle messaging you get every day in the present. Community is one of my favourite TV shows; it ran from 2009-2015 which isn't that far in the past, but I saw a Reddit post the other day that made an interesting observation about the zeitgeist it represented and how quickly we've moved on from it.
The female lead of the series is Britta Perry (played by the wonderful Gillian Jacobs), and in the first dozenish or so episodes of the show she's very much a conventional sitcom love interest: responsible, compassionate, earnest, striver for social justice, the Better Eventual Half of our morally listless protagonist, etc. This of course was bland and boring, so the writers ended juking things up and turning her into a much more interesting character. Rather than being the noble (and unfunny) stock liberal progressive, she became the annoying and semi-incompetent stock liberal progressive. She continues to be smug and overbearing about the same subjects, but she's flipped as a killjoy instead of righteous.
And it's interesting to see what the writers of the time considered to be the most annoying tendencies of white, urban, female, bourgeois progressivism. Yes, of course she complains about the patriarchy, thinks all her media consumption is about making a statement, she has to work her pet causes into every conversation, and she hates cops. But she's also a crusader for civil liberties, a big fan of Julian Assange, outspoken in favour of free speech, and paranoid about government surveillance. Even her evangelical vegetarianism seems notably out of place in 2023.
And of course perhaps what's most glaringly obvious is the subjects she DOESN'T care about: there's barely a mention of race (except for once suggesting they include an Asian member for more diversity!), she famously cares more about animal cruelty than racism, and not only does she never dip her toe into anything resembling bisexuality or gender experimentation, she's even portrayed as mildly homophobic. Until the last episode there's nary a mention of transgender people except for the transfer dance being referred to as the "tranny dance" in season 1 (in 2009, any idea of transgender people being anything other than a punchline was not even dawning in the minds of progressive Hollywood writers).
So this was the stereotypical annoying liberal progressive circa 2010. No mentions of black bodies and trans spaces, a lot of worrying about civil liberties. I guess we never knew how good we had it. I'll leave you with a link to an illicit streaming website which is one of the few places you can watch one of the show's best episodes, which got erased from existence after George Floyd for the crime of adjacent-blackface and features annoying Britta at her best.
Making a character a vegan or an animal rights activist has been a very typical TV way of conveying that they're an annoying, priggish fanatical progressive. I'm not a vegan or any sorts of an animal-rights type myself, but I've noted this for some time now. Lindsay in Arrested Development comes to mind. Or having veganism being used to convey being a killjoy in general; Angela in Office (US) was no progressive, but still had somewhat incongruous veganism tacked on her to accentuate her being a stuck-up bore.
Of course, you also get progressive characters who are alternatively written as noble and annoying; some of Lisa Simpson's more annoying moments involve her veganism, and I hold that Hermione Granger's SPEW (which, today, seems to mostly be interpreted as some sort of a dis of antiracist activism, and thus brought up as evidence of Rowling's racism) is intended to rather be a parody of animal rights activism ("what if the animals actually WANT to be oppressed, huh?")
I've seen people on this forum and elsewhere bring to attention that Hollywood and TV shows often portray fundamentalist Christians as fanatics and bigots, but the equivalent treatment of animal rights activists (see eg. Straw Vegetarian page on TVTropes) gets less attention. I would guess most would just go "Well, but the vegans actually ARE that annoying!", though that view is probably also mediated by seeing examples of annoying vegans and animal rights activists being mocked on various types of media.
I've had one annoying evangelical vegan in my life, though as time went on they mellowed out a bit and I've become accustomed to working around their requirements (it helps to think of it as a religious belief; I'd try to do my best to accommodate someone with kosher or halal requirements, so why not treat vegans like that).
It is very annoying, though, when you're trying to provide something to eat or even give as a gift, to have the list of ingredients scrutinised and then rejected for one nit-pick reason (e.g. honey - I don't believe bees are being oppressed and it's certainly a long way from the reasoning behind objecting to slaughtering animals for meat).
Most of the annoying types are online, and I agree that the Very Online are a different breed. You get really stupid takes being passed around like objecting to shearing sheep for wool (I don't know if it was a deliberate troll or not, but there was one post on social media about how sheep were killed for wool) and sentimentality about farm animals in particular, where if you've had any contact with them you know it's not like that - chickens, man: the descendants of dinosaurs. Chickens would happily eat you if they got the chance. That's man versus beast on equal terms and respect the struggle. There was recently a sad but also sort of funny case about a man being killed by a chicken - a Brahma chicken which can be massive creatures, not your ordinary Rhode Island Red.
Real or photoshopped, "you have a fundamental misunderstanding of how yarn is made" remains one of my favorite internet punchlines ever created.
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We have pet chickens at my house. They are extremely loving animals if you get to know them. They'll roost with you, cuddle, ride on your shoulder... sure, they're the descendants of dinosaurs, and I'm sure you could befriend those too if we still had them.
Sure, the roosters can be insecure bastards. Sure, befriending animals can get you killed.. to say nothing of messing with them...
But seriously. Where are you getting this? Have you ever mothered a chick from an egg?
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