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Cartoon/Comic Morality
Now, I'm on-and-offish about toons and comics. Sometimes I like them, sometimes I don't. But when I don't, one thing that annoys the fuck out of me is the morality. Especially cartoons.
Some common morals I've heard cartoons spout that I have a problem with:
"Friendship is important. Stand by your friends." - Even if they start drug-dealing or breaking into stores?
"Don't try to solve problems yourself. Call an authority." - And if the authority is an asshole or is in on it, or is otherwise useless? This teaches people to be professional victims and shouldn't be taught.
"Violence never solves anything." - Bullshit. Violence sure solved that Nazi problem now didn't it?
"Killing is bad. All life is precious." - Even the people who become hobos, gang members and drug dealers? Okay, I can kind of see this one in certain contexts, but my real problem is that it often comes off as just a tepid excuse to let the villain live so you can recycle him later, rather than something the writers and artists actually believe in.
"Teamwork is important." - Technically true but forgets to inform you that most people on Earth are chronic fuck-ups who wouldn't be able to manage a project half as well as your favorite G.I. Joe characters.
"Winners don't use drugs." - Keep in mind that things like Tylenol are technically drugs too. But even if just referring to things like steroids, alcohol and weed, keep in mind that these things made a lot of modern civilization possible. We probably wouldn't have any concept of higher thinking if our ancestors hadn't gotten high on damn near everything.
"You can be anything you want to be." - Again, technically true but it omits the fact that everyone is born with certain genetic predispositions, cultural pressures, and zodiac signs that incline them in certain ways. All these things can be fought, but its harder than the arcade version of Gradius III.
"You can do anything you want if you set your mind to it." - The thing is, "mind over matter" only works with a fucking great deal of discipline. Which is why nobody has discovered real-life functional magic yet.
"You must learn to tolerate people different from yourself." - I'm sure everyone can think of the "would you tolerate a Neo-Nazi?" example, but another unseen issue is that too much tolerance can backfire and leave you basically without an identity of your own. You have to fight for the things you believe in if only to remind yourself that you are there.
"Science can't explain everything." - Actually, I like this moral. What I don't like is that cartoons often don't deliver it properly and use it as an excuse to say that some old woman's bad guess might be psychic powers... and also that its always used in cartoons that have de facto paranormal elements, so this shouldn't even be a question.
None of these morals would be so bad, if it weren't that Cartoons also usually have such a black-and-white, good vs. evil view of the world which gets very tiring after awhile. You know that in any hero villain team-up situation, the villain is predictably going to try to backstab the heroes even if it makes absolutely no sense to do so. You know that politicians are always going to be written as greedy petty guys who are intentionally trying to screw over everyone else (why can't they ever simply be people trying to do the best they can but being hampered by either ignorance or simply having a skewered perspective of the situation?) and that, if given a chance to kill the villain, the hero is going to turn it down because "this isn't right."
I won't lie: a lot of anime and manga are just as bad about that, which is probably why I haven't been watching a lot of them lately either. Still, it tells you one thing: a lot of cartoons really are for kids, and not just because they're obviously meant as an indoctrination device, but also because kids are too dumb to be bothered by it. Least, that's what I think.
Comments
wat
Though just about all of those are you reading too much into the moral.
You should stand by your friends. Maybe not through murder and stuff, but still.
Violence is bad in most situations.
Killing is bad in most situations.
Most people are worthy of tolerence.
They're valid morals. There are very few lessons like that that can be applied to every single situation.
hobos, gang members and drug dealers
One of these is not like the others.
In that case though, it was probably not a very good story in the first place.
Which reminds me, sometimes the problem isn't the moral, but the context. Like there was an episode of Ben 10 where the moral was "you shouldn't expect rewards for everything and you shouldn't focus exclusively on rewards." It was totally stupid though, because Ben was risking his life and all he asked for in exchange was a cheap baseball card the owner could've easily replaced.
An episode of Batman Beyond had a very similar moral, except in this case it was everyone else trying to convince Terry not to do something because he wouldn't be rewarded for it, and at the end he points out that being Batman was never about rewards or gratitude. I honestly thought that was one of the better episodes.
It kind of is, yes.
Not solely, but its a large part.
Most of the points he brings up are from interpreting these way too literarly and acting as if these are unbreakable commandments.
I'm not advocating that we should all go out and slaughter the homeless, if that's what you're thinking.
The "life is precious" argument tends to go hand-in-hand with the idea that any random person on the street could make a great contribution to someone else's life and maybe even society at large. Could. It's a probability, and you have to weigh that against absolute certainty. Given that, it's hard to argue that the life of a homeless person is just as precious as, say, the life of a scientist who is on the verge of curing cancer.
I agree, but sadly most people do get their entire moral compass from the media.
Western writers should learn:
1. Pick morals not based on convenience, but on credibility and honesty.
2. Allow for more nuanced understandings of the way things work instead of arbitrarily casting things as good or bad.
3. If you can't send the message without preaching, then maybe you don't need to send the message.
>>Western
You said yourself that it happens in anime too.
Your America hateboner is getting kind of tiresome.
And I honestly believe you're just looking too hard at this. Almost all those morals you list are good guidelines to live by. Just not strict rules.
Yeah, but I highly doubt anyone whose reading this forum is going to go into anime.
There is a chance that someone here will go into cartoons one day though.
As in, go into the anime industry. Actually make an anime.
Though, if someone does, there's no reason they can't carry whatever ideas they gleaned from this topic into that too. But, it seems like anime doesn't need the lesson--the better writers already use the kind of more nebulous morality I prefer.
@Bob
Are you saying all anime writers are equally good so there are no "better" writers? Or are you saying there is no good writing in anime?
Doesn't need to be my job for me to do it.
Which, considering I never said they were (and in fact, said upfront that they weren't), is a completely pointless thing to point out.
Which is why I dropped that two months ago. You and Forzare are nitpicking a completely understandible choice of words to try and make it an issue again.
Really the whole OP is just you projecting your own issues onto everyone and everything.