Values Dissonance/Resonance Cleanup

Well, Unfortunate Implications are unfortunate for a reason, being unintended and all. And at least it does have a source.

We have a separate cleanup for Unfortunate Implications BTW.

I'm thinking of adding some examples for The Cookie Carnival, and I thought I would use this as a sounding board. The first idea I had definitely fits, not yo sure about other two though.

• Values Dissonance:
  • The infamous Miss Liquorice, a racist caricature of African-Americans. Thankfully she only appears for a few seconds, though it's safe to assume her sence would get cut if they were to show the short again.
  • The Jolly Rum Cookies. Despite the short being made for children, these three characters are clearly drunk and are even holding beer bottles. These days Moral Guardians would never allow such overt alcohol references in a children's cartoon, unless it was A Very Special Episode teaching kids about the dangers of alcohol.
  • The fact that the two main characters appear to be strangers, yet get married at the end, even before that, Miss Bon Bon was expected to choose who she wants to marry between several compete strangers. This is especially noteworthy with modern media like Frozen (2013) cautioning against marrying someone you've only just met.

First 2 are valid, last one probably isn’t.

From Spider-Man

• Values Dissonance: Small example, but nowadays, post Me Too, the film's signature "upside down kiss" scene can feel a little bit iffy. Mary Jane wants to thank Spider-Man for saving her by giving him a deep romantic kiss; it all works because we know Peter is Spider-Man and has feelings for MJ, but from MJ's perspective she has no idea who this man actually is, and whether he might have a relationship with someone out of costume. Imagine a similar situation of a woman offering to thank a police officer or fireman for saving her with a make-out session, and you could see where the situation is kind of wonky. Not to mention the idea of a super hero "taking advantage" of his popularity with a citizen to get a kiss (which at least does come back to bite him in the third movie when he tries to brush off kissing Gwen as being no big deal), as well as the possible implication that men who rescue women should be "rewarded" with intimacy of some kind.

Doesn't this feel like a stretch? She asked him for a kiss and he accepted (he didn't at all do it because he expected to get one.....). I'm not sure what the issue is. So I'm not sure the me too comparison is correct.

Cut. The Me Too mention feels like a shoehorn.

I agree. If Mary Jane was the one to offer the kiss on her own free will without Peter expecting her too, then it's okay for him to accept it.

It's not like Spidey said "I did you a favour, you owe me sex now".

Also the whole "the idea of a super hero "taking advantage" of his popularity with a citizen to get a kiss" isn't realy fair, cause as said before, he wasn't expecting to be kissed, Mary Jane decided to offer a kiss by herself.

Edited by LapisLazuliisthebest on Jan 2nd 2022 at 5:33:08 PM

Yeah, that's a massive stretch.

some month back, the entry in Mass Effect was deleted.

to clarify, this entry was the following:

• Values Dissonance: The release of the Legendary edition revealed some of this. Without getting too deep, let's just say that Garrus' complaints about C-Sec forcing him to follow proper police procedures and Ashley's (and serveral other characters', but Ashley's is the most jarring) casual speciesism hit very differently in 2021 than they did in 2007.

and i'm not sure whether it should be here or in Harsher in Hindsight, but from comments i've seen online Garrus's character, while remaining generally well-liked by fans, did take a hit in popularity with his "bad cops who think rules are dumb" stick beign more criticized nowadays.

Whether or not it's a valid example, the games came out too recently to list it.

It's also a borderline ZCE.

Do people think on this site that US police brutality is a new concept?

Like theirs so many of these entries when stuff like Rodney King happened in the 90's.

Only games existing before 2002 can be included for temporal reasons (such as change in culture).

Games existing in 2002 or later can only be included if it's between cultures in the same time (such as between Japan and the West).

Edited by Nen_desharu on Jan 5th 2022 at 5:33:40 AM

I found this on the main page for Barry Lyndon:

• Villain Protagonist: Some viewers take Barry's opportunist side and grant him the benefit of redemption during the final duel while others identify with the Lyndons' pejorative view of the "upstart Irishman". He has, without a doubt, the Values Dissonance of his times, but is he really any more villainous than the remainder of the cast?

Yes.

It's legitimately possible that there actually is more discussion out there, if only because the people discussing it are plain younger, but as I've said before I'm really sick of these "Police Brutality was invented in 2020" examples.

Especially when Black Lives Matter dates back to at least 2014. I only count such examples treating it as recent if the creators also do.

Gonna do some sweeping on some Rugrats examples.

• Values Dissonance:
  • It's difficult to imagine a show with a character like Angelica, who is a bully but is sometimes depicted sympathetically, airing in The New '10s when an increasing awareness of the negative effects of bullying, especially when a twelve-year-old tries taking extreme measures to escape it, has led to Angelica's more heinous behavior, especially in Season 1, coming off as Harsher in Hindsight. It doesn't help that she's overall a very unflattering depiction of a three-year-old and that she was originally intended to be a Karma Houdini.

• Minor example. Didi in Season 1 is embarrassed to admit that she's afraid of clowns. In the early '90s, the concept of the Monster Clown hadn't really taken off yet (aside from a few forerunners like the Joker and Stephen King's IT). After years of evil clowns in horror movies and plenty of people on the internet sharing their coulrophobia... Didi may as well be admitting she's afraid of spiders or snakes.

• While the reboot does feature the babies escaping from their playpen there is no way episodes such as Tommy being kidnapped by criminals or having his life threatened in a post office would EVER be allowed to air, let alone be treated as humorous.

• Values Resonance:
  • "The Clan Of The Duck," where Chuckie and Phil wear Lil's dresses with a hugely positive message about not conforming to gender stereotypes. That was in 1997!

• Chuckie offering to be "Spike's other dad" with Tommy in the episode where the babies try to potty-train their dog. Granted, it's still a joke, but it otherwise doesn't say there's anything wrong with someone having two daddies.

• Lil is also quite unconventional for a female character in a 1990s cartoon. She enjoys doing gross boyish things like playing in the mud with her brother, while also happily playing with dolls and enjoying some girly things too. She's not pigeonholed into the Tomboy or Girly Girl box because of it.

• Lil's mother Betty is also refreshingly unconventional. She's The Lad-ette and the more masculine member of the De Villes, while Howard has more attributes associated with femininity. Betty however is treated with lots of respect in-universe, and shows that an unconventional woman can still be a loving wife and mother if she wants. This continues into the spin-off, where the boys talk up times that Betty has saved the day and it's clear that she and Howard have a very loving marriage.

• "The Shot" is about Tommy getting a booster shot. The importance of keeping children up to date with immunizations is still relevant today in light of the Anti-Vax movement that popped up in the mid-2010s. Also, boosters became available for COVID-19 starting in late 2021 during the pandemic (with the vaccines themselves now available for those aged 5-11 in the same timeframe), so it's still reasonable.

Edited by PlasmaPower on Jan 13th 2022 at 7:12:34 AM

If anything I see a lot more shows portraying bullies as 3-Dimensional characters nowadays rather than just one-note asshats because people are more aware of how upbringing and insecurity can make people lash out and hurt other people, and also because people want rounded characters. Angelica back then was more controversial than she would be nowadays because one of the creators outright hated her and she was the focal point of a war between the creatives in general.

Yeah, that entry is the exact opposite of how media has changed.

Nuance now is liked in cases like that.

Alright, then the first example is a goner.

How about the other examples here?

Regarding the Monster Clown example for Rugrats, the final boss of the 1994 video game Final Fantasy VI is also a monster clown.

Edited by Nen_desharu on Jan 13th 2022 at 9:47:18 AM

Plus, you know... Gacy existed... Evil clowns and clown paranoia was always a thing.

I swear, I keep seeing the "bullies are only taken seriously nowadays" thing and I assume it was added during the anti-bullying hype during the early 2010s, as if bullying in fiction wasn't always depicted as bad.

YMMV.Dexters Laboratory

• Values Dissonance:
  • There are an awful lot jokes that involve Dexter, who is implied to be prepubescent, ending up naked or in his underwear. He's also frequently seen flirting with or being flirted with by older women. Cable TV viewers from the 90s would have found this funny, but not general audiences today who are far more sensitive to potentially sexual depictions of children in media.

• An inoffensive example. In one episode, Dexter meets a bunch of doll collectors who freak out when a collector's box is opened. This viewpoint is not quite as common as it was in the 1990s, as many doll collectors now open their boxes.

• In the wake of regular mass shootings in The New '10s, the ending of "Dodgeball Dexter" (where Dexter uses a robot to fire dodgeballs with machine gun rapidity at his bullies) comes off less like a cathartic Bully Hunter fantasy and more like a disturbing glorification of school shooters. The actual, barely-exaggerated bullying Dexter endures is also a lot less darkly humorous in an age that's more enlightened about bullying.

• A cross-cultural example comes up during the Terrible Interviewees Montage in "Dee Dee and the Man" when one of the people Dexter interviews is a nun who refers to herself as a "spastic sister". While "spastic" isn't thought of as that offensive in North America, it very much is in the UK and Ireland, where it's considered an ableist slur with a reputation equally as negative as the word "retard" and its derivatives are in America and Canada.

• In an age of greater LGBTQ+ awareness, Mandark's parents trying their hardest to feminize him feels a lot more cruel. It's obvious that the joke is supposed to be that the evil Mandark was born to peace-loving flower child parents, but they also force him into a gender role he hates (and the fact he's biologically male) and give him a distinctly feminine name which he hates even more, both of which are common struggles for gay and transgender people. The modern progressive climate also makes it outright strange for hippie parents to aggressively gender their child and discourage an interest in science, two things which extremely left-leaning people in the 21st century are vehemently against.

Edited by PlasmaPower on Jan 14th 2022 at 5:04:15 AM

For the dodgeball one. I'm a bit confused how a dodgeball robot is similar to a school shooting.

But uh even then wasn't Coloumbine in the 90's before this episode aired ?

The only thing I always thought about the dodgeball robot scene is that I often bordered to add a shoehorned Hindsight example comparing it to a Grey Knights Nemesis Dreadknight.