Zrevqn yrneaf… gung fur ybirf ure zbz rabhtu gb abg jnag ure gb or ghearq vagb n orne?
Meridia learned to value her relationship with her mother, which I think a lot of kids need to hear going into adolescence. When you put it this way it doesn’t seem nearly as trite as your phrasing makes it sound.
Merida wants to live a life where she’s free to pursue her love of archery and riding, and get married when and to whom she wants? Well she’d be screwed if she were a peasant etc.
Well yeah, but the answer to “society sucks and how can I fix it” isn’t “oh it sucks for everyone and even more for others, I’ll just sit down and shut up”. (Not that you argue it is.)
From TV Tropes:
If she’s not the hero, quite often she’s the hero’s love interest. This will sometimes invoke Marry for Love not only as another way for her to rebel, but to also get out of an Arranged Marriage
This is exactly why I thought Brave was good—it moved away from this trope. It wasn’t “I don’t love this person, I love this other person!”, it was “I don’t have to love/marry someone to be a competent and awesome person”. She was the hero of her own story, and didn’t need anyone else to complete her. That doesn’t have to be true for everyone, but the counterpoint needs to be more present in society.
And I said it ranked up there. Not that it passed Mulan. :) And it gets that honor by being literally one of the two movies I can think of that has a positive message in this respect. Although I will concede that I’m not very familiar with a particularly high number of kids movies.
I edited my comment to rot13 the ending spoilers; I left in the stuff that’s more or less advertised as the premise of the movie. You might want to edit your reply so that it doesn’t quote the uncyphered text.
Meridia learned to value her relationship with her mother, which I think a lot of kids need to hear going into adolescence. When you put it this way it doesn’t seem nearly as trite as your phrasing makes it sound.
I think that’s a valuable lesson, but I felt like Brave’s presentation of it suffered for the fact that Merida and her mother really only reconcile after Merida essentially gets her way about everything. Teenagers who feel aggrieved in their relationships with their parents and think that they’re subject to pointless unfairness are likely to come away with the lesson “I could get along so much better with my parents if they’d stop being pointlessly unfair to me!” rather than “Maybe I should be more open to the idea that my parents have legitimate reasons for not being accommodating of all my wishes, and be prepared to cut them some slack.”
A more well rounded version of the movie’s approximate message might have been something like “Some burdensome social expectations and life restrictions have good reasons behind them and others don’t, learn to distinguish between them so you can focus your effort on solving the right ones.” But instead, it came off more like “Kids, you should love and appreciate your parents, at least when you work past their inclination to arbitrarily oppress you.”
Now that I think about it, very few movies or TV shows actually teach that lesson. There are plenty of works of fiction that portray the whiney teenager in a negative light, and there are plenty that portray the unreasonable parent in a negative light, but nothing seems to change. It all plays out with the boring inevitability of a Greek tragedy.
That’s a very fair critique. A few things though:
First, you might want to put that in ROT13 or add a [SPOILER](http://lh5.ggpht.com/_VZewGVtB3pE/S5C8VF3AgJI/AAAAAAAAAYk/5LJdTCRCb8k/eliezer_yudkowskyjpg_small.jpg) tag or something.
Meridia learned to value her relationship with her mother, which I think a lot of kids need to hear going into adolescence. When you put it this way it doesn’t seem nearly as trite as your phrasing makes it sound.
Well yeah, but the answer to “society sucks and how can I fix it” isn’t “oh it sucks for everyone and even more for others, I’ll just sit down and shut up”. (Not that you argue it is.)
From TV Tropes:
This is exactly why I thought Brave was good—it moved away from this trope. It wasn’t “I don’t love this person, I love this other person!”, it was “I don’t have to love/marry someone to be a competent and awesome person”. She was the hero of her own story, and didn’t need anyone else to complete her. That doesn’t have to be true for everyone, but the counterpoint needs to be more present in society.
And I said it ranked up there. Not that it passed Mulan. :) And it gets that honor by being literally one of the two movies I can think of that has a positive message in this respect. Although I will concede that I’m not very familiar with a particularly high number of kids movies.
I edited my comment to rot13 the ending spoilers; I left in the stuff that’s more or less advertised as the premise of the movie. You might want to edit your reply so that it doesn’t quote the uncyphered text.
I think that’s a valuable lesson, but I felt like Brave’s presentation of it suffered for the fact that Merida and her mother really only reconcile after Merida essentially gets her way about everything. Teenagers who feel aggrieved in their relationships with their parents and think that they’re subject to pointless unfairness are likely to come away with the lesson “I could get along so much better with my parents if they’d stop being pointlessly unfair to me!” rather than “Maybe I should be more open to the idea that my parents have legitimate reasons for not being accommodating of all my wishes, and be prepared to cut them some slack.”
A more well rounded version of the movie’s approximate message might have been something like “Some burdensome social expectations and life restrictions have good reasons behind them and others don’t, learn to distinguish between them so you can focus your effort on solving the right ones.” But instead, it came off more like “Kids, you should love and appreciate your parents, at least when you work past their inclination to arbitrarily oppress you.”
Now that I think about it, very few movies or TV shows actually teach that lesson. There are plenty of works of fiction that portray the whiney teenager in a negative light, and there are plenty that portray the unreasonable parent in a negative light, but nothing seems to change. It all plays out with the boring inevitability of a Greek tragedy.