Musings Of A Bubblegum Glitter Girl

I love Aladin. It has its issues but Robin Williams does such a good job I love it all the same. Of of the problems that grinds my gears is its use of the Liar Revealed trope. This trope usually involves a character who has lied for the first two acts being found out and humiliated leading to their lowest point and eventual change of heart. Aladin is told throughout the movie to be honest with Jasmine and eventually he apologizes and comes clean—but only after the liar revealed trope has run its course. You could argue that the movie more wants him not to lie to Jasmine since being honest to Jafar or the guards would be very bad for his health. But the tone of the movie is simple: lying is bad.

Disney movies didn’t really evolve for a while but eventually we got Coco. The main character Miguel spends most of the movie lying to people about his love of music. There is also the layer of him balancing his own dreams with standing by his family but they do absolutely tell him to conform. By the end he comes clean and decides to be a better more obedient boy. By happenstance they do begin supporting his music but that isn’t part of the bargain. And frankly no one in the family apologizes for their treatment of him that led him to his actions. No one apologizes for his grandma breaking his guitar.

It gets better with Encanto, a movie about family pressures to conform and perform while struggling to express yourself. The least realistic fantasy in this movie about a magic house is that her Abuela does apologize in the end—a noticeable shift from Coco. You could argue that this movie is less about lying and more about learning to be yourself, but Mirabel is explicitly told to hide the truth about who she is. She may not be told to tell mistruths but she is absolutely told to mislead.

Her family is telling her to lie.

Aaaand now Kpop Demon Hunters. I love this movie and you should stop reading to go watch it if you haven’t. I’ve been thinking of it in this context of the Liar Revealed and how it subverts it. To be clear, lying in this movie has bad consequences. Jinu and Rumi suffer for lying and both of them would have a much easier time if they had been honest. This is not even to cover Mira and Zoe who tie themselves up into anxiety knots knowing that something is going on with Rumi that she isn’t telling them.

But Mira and Zoe tell her to lie, they just don’t want her to lie to them. Early in the movie when Rumi admits her voice is struggling, they do tell her to hide it from her mother figure Celine.

And Celine. Now for Celine. She teachesRumi from childhood not to tell anyone about her patterns and not to confide in her friends. She explicitly tells Rumi at one point to actively lie and pretend that her patterns are a demonic trick. Rumi lies to Mira and Zoe because she has been repeatedly told to do it. The movie doesn’t fully resolve this subplot but it is very clearly condemning Celine in the end. We’ve gone from Encanto’s apology from Abuela to flat out condemning a parental figure. We’re not even asked as an audience to sympathize.

In the end, the movie is telling us that honesty is an easier way to live. Rumi does open up to her friends but the important line isn’t “I don’t know why I lied to you” but “I don’t know why I didn’t trust you to be on my side.”

And that’s hard. Whether we’re talking about being queer in a homophobic society or wanting to wear makeup as a boy. Being honest does sometimes have punishing consequences but hopefully we can build a support system for ourselves and a society at large that is more loving and accepting. I’m not going to tell an abuse victim to be honest with their abuser.

Now, it isn’t always like this in kids media. The Little Mermaid (1989) does have some semblance of the liar revealed trope where Ariel is confronted and punished for hiding her boy band—er—human collection from her dad. But noticeably this happens at the end of the first act and the movie is very clear that her dad is the one who was wrong and needed to change.

Honesty is just better most of the time. It has fewer consequences and hurt feelings but we need to stop pretending it is always easy or even a good idea in a particular moment.

But hopefully we can find people who are on our side enough to build an environment where it is safe to just be ourselves.

So, back in the late teens, about half of my classmates were students from China. And the topic would frequently come up of Chinese censorship and the Great Firewall of China. None of these students would ever deny it and a few savvy ones would point out that America has always had its own priorities on censorship.

Case in point child porn. I’m not saying we shouldn’t, but I am saying it definitely happens.

You might be aware that the Great Firewall of China is so fine tuned that it can identify dissenting trends in real time and censor within 20 minutes images. It’s wild how good their ai identification is. China is able to go packet by packet for data traffic going in and out of the country to find this stuff.

Another related issue is the access of the American government to social media data. This isn’t anything new and I’ve commented on it before, but this is why American social media companies are largely banned or strictly regulated in countries like China: the US gov has access to an enormous amount of data. (I did point out a while ago the humor and outright hypocrisy relating to TikTok)

Also, we’d often highlight countries like Iran that are largely cut off from the rest of the world’s internet traffic. If there are only a handful of hard lines connecting your network to the broader network, it is very easy to censor and control the flow of data.

To be clear, I’m pointing out countries like China and Iran because there are topical. I am not ignorant to the US human rights record that is growing darker by the hour.

Since I graduated, topics like TikTok, Starlink, Russian internet trolls, and astroturfing have become important parts of the conversation as well. Keep those in mind.

Now, fast forward to now and consider the US government’s plans to use Palantir or the push to support EU created technology. There’s been a shift from Chrome to DuckDuckGo to improve privacy and avoid ai. I’m loving the stop killing games petition.

Starlink was this promising tech to allow people in all corners of the world to have access to the internet but we all know how a company run by Elon Musk turned out. Anyone else remember that time Musk didn’t like Ukraine destroying Russian tankers so he just turned Starlink off on them?

Back to the point. We have a US regime that is demonstrably becoming more and more reliant on AI to understand trends to identify perceived threats and control sentiment of the broader public. This is explicitly being done with the cooperation of American social media and other tech companies. And while it’s funny at this stage of incompetence, it’ll be a lot less funny when it gets implemented on a broad scale.

China has known for years: if you want to avoid the US having enormous information on and control of your populace, you need your own social media. We need social media and tech in general produced outside the US. We need EU created social media. Canadian made. Latin American, Asian, African, Australian.

We need enthusiastic teens the world over writing software. We need open source projects. We need the EU and Canada supporting non profits. We need to fill that gap.

Because let’s be real: even if the US has a regime change with the next few elections, the model of corporate sponsored tech will always be dangerous for privacy and freedom of speech. If profits are more important than justice, this is where we get.

It’s not fair that we need to depend on the EU for the right to be forgotten or for dumb things like Apple abandoning the lightning cable. Its not fair to depend on the EU to save games made five years ago. It’s not fair that liberal Americans like me are looking elsewhere for someone to help.