The Orville. Anyone loving it?

Love it! A spiritual successor for Trek, embracing optimism and hope for the future, along with some good old fashioned exploring and dealing with real world issues, with some great actors and solid writing.

 

One note about the pedophile in Family Guy, for context. They get away with it because the character in question is so feeble he’s not capable of acting on it.

Yeah, kids are influenced by TV. When I was a kid I made inappropriate sarcastic remarks because I saw them do it on Full House, should we ban Full House?

If you got rid of all art that bothered anyone or is capable of causing bad behavior in anyone, you’d be left with bland generic nothing. And worse than that, you make hatred from a public subject under discussion to a forbidden fruit that angry people will mistake for subversive honesty.

One thing I saw on my Facebook feed a lot in 2016. “Trump isn’t politically correct, he’s just correct”. Take away the political correctness, they wouldn’t think he’s correct either. Political correctness is responsible for his popularity, by making him from an angry hateful narcissist into “Subversively honest”.

I agree it’s a dicey subject assigning responsibility when an unreasonable person emulates a TV show by interpreting it in a way it’s not intended.

But in the end intent is what’s most important. You have to treat adults like adults and hold them responsible for their own behavior.

Another note about context and intent. South Park did an episode where the N word was said repeatedly. Randy incorrectly tried to solve a Wheel of Fortune puzzle with it when the answer was Naggers. The episode was then about the cultural impact of the N word and how white people can never really understand how a black person feels when it comes up. The NAACP said that it was okay that they said the N word because of context and intent.

It’s no different with Cartman’s Anti-Semitism.

 

Since South Park was brought up, remember the first Christmas episode where everyone thought of something that was offensive about the Christmas school play so to please everyone they made it incredibly lame? That feels like real life these days, especially when it comes to TV.

 

It's the same for characters like Tony Montana in Scarface. He's not meant to be a role model. The film is structured to be a cautionary tale on engaging in a life of crime. A warning against crime, the fast life, the drug game, and the excesses of Capitalism. Cuban refugee Tony Montana poisoned his own Cuban-American community with drugs, became hooked to the same drugs he was selling, corrupted his sister so she was a coke head getting screwed by random guys in bathroom stalls, murdered his best friend Manny, got his sister killed, and ended up being killed by his Bolivian drug partner.

And yet because of the charismatic portrayal of villainous sociopath Tony Montana and the stylized action sequences he teens and young men found the character incredibly appealing. So much so that when the re-released the anniversary DVD they included a hip-hop documentary with it, featuring interviews with rappers like Snoop Dogg, P. Diddy, Nas, Pusha T, Fat Joes, who talk about how "inspirational" the character was for them, describing him as a "ghetto superhero." Scarface had a resurgence in the culture and merchandise was everywhere. I remember during high school virtually everyone was wearing Scarface t-shirts and had posters on their walls.

It's not surprise then that kids, who aren't as discriminating when it comes to right and wrong, would find the character of Cartman appealing.

That doesn't mean much, and the license holders are not doing their best considering how poorly enforced those labels are. They're priority is on financial profit. Not social responsibility. Look at the creation of the Parental Advisory label on music. And yet minors are the main consumer/listener of albums that have that label and the industry is very aware of that.

It's not a one or the other binary approach. You can both be critical of the show and its producers AND complain to the store.

Robocop and Rambo were made into kids cartoons around the time that their toylines were released. And you're actually helping my argument by citing that studios licensing R-rated properties to toy manufactures in order to market them specifically to kids. If these companies and media conglomerates are aware that adult, live-action R-rated films have a kids market that they can exploit, how unreasonable is it that a cartoon featuring foul mouthed kids is NOT going to resonate even more with kids.

 

Do you have examples of this? Because while television and film is made to be more inclusive these days by featuring more black, Asian, Latino, LGBTQ, Muslim, etc characters and stories, I don't see everything offensive being censored or off limits. Every era, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, '00s, and now has their own cultural taboos and own PC self-censoring. But considering the political and cultural climate these days, I find it hard to believe that we live in a PC culture any different from before. If anything, more things are permitted. Racist language and racist signaling for example seems to be more mainstream in politics than previous times.

 

I was halfway through writing another response to @Thomas Elliot , when I realized something: complaining about the dangers of the idolization of fictional antiheroes rings a bit hollow coming from a person using the name of a Batman villain as their handle. WtF?!

 

That's an odd reason not to finish a response. I didn't even like the villain of Hush back then, let alone now, and I just wanted to pick a generic-sounding name. I'm surprised someone even recognized it here.

And you're really comparing South Park and Scarface to someone using a minor Batman character's name on a Star Trek forum? I don't think anyone I know in real life would know who "Thomas Elliot" is except for maybe a handful of my comic reading friends who are in their 30s. But virtually everyone I know knows Cartman, Scarface/Tony Montana and/or the Joker.

Instead of addressing the argument I made, you resort to using a tu quoque fallacy. Maybe it's best you didn't finish that response.

 

Have you been on twitter recently? You can find something that offends someone and twitter is absolutely full of it. I can't really get specific examples right now but I was speaking generally.

 

I agree with you on Twitter and that aspect of society in general. But seemingly there's just as many people be absolutely horrible to each other as well. So on one hand you have people being "cancelled" or trying to be cancelled by Twitter mobs for the smallest of things at times.
And yet, you also have Twitter mobs that harass and humiliate people, even celebrities, for nothing, and yes, doing it in the most offensive way possible.

When it was revealed that Drake secretly fathered a child with a stripper, people were sending him countless memes and comments that were offensive and would be considered as harassment. I would describe some of the offensive memes I saw on his Twitter page but they were pretty disgusting. It got so bad he turned off comments for his Twitter and Instagram at the time.

If anything it seems like there's two extremes in society right now. The overly sensitive crowd, and the overly offensive crowd. One wants to be insulated from anything they interpret to be even remotely challenging to their beliefs and opinions, and the other wants to be homophobic, racist shitlord assholes and then justify it as comedy/free speech.

To put it crudely, you have Social Justice Warriors vs Free Speech Warriors.

 

It's the name of the titular villain of the most popular Batman graphic novel since the turn of the century, the story that made Batman the dominant figure in DC's comics lineup, which was just last year turned into an animated movie.

But you only wanted a generic-sounding name, and after all, your intent is all that counts. Oh, wait ...

I stopped my previous response because I was going to write a longer post on the role of antiheroes in popular culture, when I noticed your handle. I personally believe you to be a hypocrite arguing in bad faith, and therefore not worth the effort.

 

"Hush" is mostly notable for Jim Lee and even then, you're overstating its significance in mainstream culture, not to attack my argument, but to attack me personally.

Batman has been the dominant figure in DC's comic lineup way before that. It was around the time Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns came out in 1986 that Batman comics were consistently outselling Superman comics. And by the time the Superman films stopped being successful, Batmania was resurrected with the 1989 Tim Burton movie which started a successful film franchise.

And Christopher Noaln's Batman Begins, and more importantly, The Dark Knight is what really continued to cement Batman's status as DC's dominant figure.

And they also made Batman: Gotham by Gaslight, and Batman/Superman: Public Enemies, based on stories which were virtually unknown to the general public. Lego Batman is probably more well known than "Thomas Elliot" or Hush.

Well, yeah. Thomas Elliot sounds pretty generic, like Bob Jones, or Jack Paul.
Especially compared to a username like "Silver St. Cloud," "Hugo Strange," or "Jean-Paul Valley." Those are somewhat exotic sounding names.

You can believe what you want, but you'd be wrong in this case, and the accusation of bad faith doesn't even make sense in regards to my posting history in this thread, let alone at this site.
I like The Orville but when I found out about the so-called "rape episode" I took issue with it, along with the show's creator Seth MacFarlane making light of rape and sex crimes in his other shows.
You've been condescending ("Does the concept of the anti-hero really need to be explained again?") and then you go after me personally, calling me a hypocrite, which, even if I were, wouldn't invalidate my argument.

But whatever. If you have to resort to fallacies like "looks who's talking," false equivalences, along with reaches and false accusations, then I'm not missing out on your unfinished response.

 

Cartman is a 4th grader on a satirical show.... I don't know what this has to do with a spaceship show.

 

I totally see spaceships.

You don't see spaceships?

 

Whether all this is correct is actually beside the point. The point is, YOU know who Thomas Elliot is, and YOU chose the name regardless as your handle. It can therefore be viewed as YOU idolizing a Batman villain. And yet you complain about teenagers having Scarface posters on their walls. Oh, but you just chose the name because it was generic?! Big deal. You think these kids' reasons for quoting Cartman go any deeper than that? No, they quote him because it's funny, they have Scarface posters because it looks cool, none of these kids actually adopt Cartman's antisemitism beyond making a joke they don't really mean, and if there are antisemitic Cartman fans, you can bet they didn't get it from him.

Look, I didn't bring fucking Cartman toys into this. You were arguing the creators of these shows were responsible for corrupting kids.

As for MacFarlane making jokes about rape, I refer to Ricky Gervais on the subject of making jokes about bad things (including rape):

Well, what did you expect. Here you are, using the name of a Batman villain, one who among other things killed his own parents, and complain about teenagers idolizing Cartman. How do you expect me to do a serious debate like this?

 

By this argument all the kids wearing Deadpool everything are destined to be sarcastic mercenaries who kill people!

 

True.

And we've seen this before... "The 1950s" tried to set up shows based on how everyone should act. It didn't work and even by the mid-1970s shows and movies were pointing out how haughty the 1950s shows were.

Of course, have a kid in real life admonished by some old person in public for acting uncivilized and it's far more likely that the old person will likely be vilified by said parent, "YOU HAVE NO RIGHT TO ________!!!!!!" with everyone else cheering on said parent in a hilarious display of unintentional double-irony since those cheering on could be thinking any number of things, especially on how society has allegedly gone downhill since... the 1950s. But correlation vs causation, other factors that might be the cause aren't talked about and those that are likely not the cause are more often tended to be, but before I really digress...

It gets way too easy to put in politics at times... whether or not PC was the issue or the only issue, I'm not sure this is the time or place. Given "The Orville" of all shows managed to not do trite allegory as well, it's quite shocking.

Which brings up that old sci-fi trope, "Your goods is my evil". How is what's acceptable defined, and locally vs across the board?

They were just doing it for cheap ratings, controversy often does that because it's the easiest way to do something different regardless of script refinement used. Like the S-word episode, completely with South Parkian soppy moral tale at the end that makes Doctor Who's example of "Orphan 55" look positively benign by comparison. Or the same thing when critics derided "Vengeance on Varos" by saying it's like telling us porn is bad while showing the hardest core stuff.

 

My opinion on the whole topic of kids idolizing and acting like characters like Cartman or Tony Montana, is that it's on the parents for not teaching their kids right from wrong, and/or not monitoring their influences. I know parents can't observe their kids 24/7, but they can at least make sure that their kids know how to behave, so if they are exposed to things like South Park or Scarface they know that's not how you are supposed to behave.

 

It's very simple-kids learn what they are modeled and reinforced. If a parent is laughing at their kid's Cartman impression then guess what? That reinforced the behavior. Parents don't need to be helicopter parents but 30% of the time you want to be emotionally available and more often be modelling those values you want them to emulate.

 

According to Johnathan Frakes, all of the Season 3 episodes will only be directed by Seth McFarlane or John Cassar. The quote from Frakes is in the 11th entry in the linked article.