Thread by @AlexandraErin

I don't know who needs to hear this but if someone doesn't want to watch a movie with a ton of over-the-top ordinance-based violence in it, "But it's satirical!" would only be relevant if their objection was about what is moral to put in a movie and not what is palatable to them.

And I would swear that there's already been enough "Movies that show one good hero cop fighting against the corrupt copacracy is still copaganda." discourse.

Like, Robocop had a lot of things to say about bad cops, but it didn't actually posit the cops themselves as the problem?

My recollection is that he ended the movie by defeating the main evil corporate guy who was responsible for bad stuff then went back to being a cop with superpowers for a sequel or two and maybe a couple of TV spin-offs. Is that not copaganda?

The movie had some incisive things to say about Reagan-era politics, media stuff, and basically US culture in the 1980s and a predicted future trajectory onward, sure.

And Brooklyn 99 had a lot of stuff to say, too. Doesn't make it not copaganda.

I mean, it was a plot point in the movie that Alex Murphy drove his car out of the vehicle pool in the most "Look at me, I'm a cowboy cop!" way imaginable, and imitates TV cops for his son. His innate status as an 80s police action hero was immune to corporate reprogramming.

I'm not trying to "cancel" a three-decade old movie here. But neither was the person who said she couldn't finish watching it and who elaborated upon her reasons when people pushed her on it.

TL;DR - You don't have to finish a piece of media to be allowed to decide you don't want to finish it. Obviously. And if other people want to engage with you on your reasons, it's hypocritical in the extreme for them to criticize you for continuing to opine about it.

Like, I could not finish Stephen King's IT until well into my adulthood because as a closeted queer teenager in a small town I bounced off the gaybashing near the beginning of the book. Too scary! And sometimes when I say this online, people reply, "But it was sympathetic."

They tell me that the gaybashers were presented as being in the wrong, that Stephen King based it on real events that emotionally affected him, and that it's supposed to be scary because it's a horror story and we the audience are supposed to sympathize with the gay men.

And this is the brain rot that comes from assuming that other people are making their media engagement choices based on performative morality and not what they enjoy engaging with.

Because Teen Alexandra was not making a moral judgment on Stephen King's creative choices.

Teen Alexandra was scared of being queer in a small town and was scared by a vivid fictional depiction of gaybashing in a "small town" markedly larger than the one she lived in. And not in an enjoyable "ooh, good horror story" way.

I didn't want to keep reading the book with the gaybashing in it. I did not mistake the author's intent. It just didn't change my experience.

If somebody doesn't want to watch a movie with guns in it... a satire on guns isn't necessarily going to land any differently.