2501 Isn’t the hypercompetent superspy assassin lady also given like equal interiority and agency to the guy because they’re seen from the mind-reading “daughter’s” point of view?
I would ask you, since I really haven’t watched it. Or, rather, I’ll trust that you would put that interpretation forth because it’s supported by the text. At least in general, though, I would expect a whole lot of well balanced and self aware characterization to be compelled by a portrayal of a character who feels both fleshed out in their interiority and motivations and such, as well as whose thought processes and/or behaviour and/or motivations seem to result in conforming to tropes employed in the act of pandering to a certain demographic.
2501 Dwelling on the fact that “trad” shitwads might see it as validating to them is kind of a trap because reactionary assholes will claim just about any cultural artifact they can get their grubby mitts on
I’m not generally self conscious about the idea of liking something that alt-right pukes also like, even when they try to make a point of it having qualities which they want to claim as being ideologically relevant to them. I think if there is an issue, the issue tends to lie more in the content itself, if and when it does. It’s fair to say that they can and will attempt to project their ideology on to something and will magnify or exaggerate qualities to make an argument for liking it or for trying to put their stink on it to confuse others. However, there’s a remedy to this, and even if I can’t exactly fault something for not doing this, I think at least in this global cultural moment it’s not a big ask. The ideal is not just to put out or foster appreciation for things things which don’t contain even accidental or innocuous qualities that appeal to or can be used by the far right, the ideal is to put out or appreciate things that are actively repellant to the far right.
2501 After all, the entire problem with “trads” isn’t them wanting to like get heterosexually married in a religious institution and raise kids with a working dad and homemaker mom or whatever, it’s their barely hidden contempt for anyone who doesn’t want what they want and their implicit desire to ostracize and punish such people
I guess this is veering into political and cultural analysis, but I definitely disagree with this assessment. They absolutely want this because it’s an institution that was both promised to them by preceding generations, it’s one which they feel entitled to have, and it’s one in which they have an assured and inherent position of dominance. The contempt is real, but I take them at their word when they say bullshit like “reject modernity, embrace tradition.”
2501 I guess I just don’t buy into like the notion that nuclear families and traditional gender roles are inherently abusive constructions of capital or w/e so much as the critique that capital/conservatives exploit The Family for propagandistic purposes, e.g. to atomize and distract from basic social/community services.
I don’t agree with this either, actually, but only if you’re specifically talking about the nuclear family, as in, specifically a married heterosexual couple and their children, two generations max and only siblings within the younger generation. The concept of the nuclear family is really only a handful of generations old at this point and by all conceivable metrics it’s been a catastrophic failure. The ideal of the nuclear family has generally been made practical without rampant neglect of children by exploiting the labor of and fracturing the family structures of others, as in, by supplementing domestic labor of one family by hiring outside domestic labor (or at some point through retail format services that don’t necessarily come to your home, and I guess more recently gig economy bullshit is a lot of this). I mean, shit, it used to be normal at one point for a middle class man’s wage could support an entire family, but that also included in-home childcare and cleaning services, performed by people who surely also had families of their own, who were doing things the (ironically) more traditional way by living within multi-generational extended family homes.
One of my hottest takes on gender and domestic labor is that the invention of the baby monitor is just an admission that leaving a newborn infant to sleep alone in its own room is insane and unnatural, but at some point because wages stopped growing at the rate of productivity/inflation, it became a necessity, because people used to hire human beings to do that for them (and some of them before that used to own human beings to do that for them, but I digress).
