All Your Bases Are Belong 2 Me

Felicity’s story was set in the beginnings of the American Revolution, and addressed the conflict that she faced when her loved ones were split between patriots and loyalists. It also covered the effects of animal abuse, and forgiving those who are unforgivable.

Samantha’s stories centered around the growth of industrial America, women’s suffrage, child abuse, and corruption in places of power. Also, it emphasises how dramatically adoption into a caring family can turn a life around.

Kit’s story is one of my favorites. Her family is hit hard by the Great Depression, and they begin taking in boarders and raise chickens to help make ends meet. Her books include themes of poverty, police brutality, homelessness, prejudice, and the importance of unity in difficult times.

Molly’s father, a doctor, is drafted during the Second World War. Throughout her story, friends of hers suffer the loss of their husbands, sons, and brothers overseas. Her mother leaves the traditional housewife position and works full-time to help with the war effort. They also take in an English refugee child, who learns to open up after a life of traumatic experience.

And then there are the later dolls, that kids younger than me would have grown up with (I was just outgrowing American Girl as these came out), like Rebecca, the Jewish girl who dreams of becoming an actress in the budding film industry, or  Julie, who fights against her school’s gender policy surrounding sports in the 70s, or  Nanea, the Hawaiian girl whose father worked at Pearl Harbor.

Nah.

OP (of the tweet thread) was either a actively trying to start shit or is just a huge fucking moron. Probably both.

I’d like to point out that the company that makes American Girl dolls actually doesn’t skimp when doing their research and they don’t make the dolls with the intent to be offensive in any way:

i think back on this & realize that as third graders we were talking about how awful slavery was & because we were simply innocent kids without any societal or institutional influence yet, all of us could kept saying “why would you treat a HUMAN like that ?!” this one girl for her birthday invited all of us for her party & she got the Addy doll - every single one of us (boys included) held her & was in awe of this doll - it was such a touching experience.

i went back home about a year ago & ran into my third grade teacher in the grocery store. she said that year opened up a whole new teaching structure for her. she now reads american girl stories to her students starting day one of class every day to calm them down after recess & she’ll get through maybe four or five sets of books a year. she has the dolls in the room with packets on information from the doll’s time period that her students can “check out” to take home for weekends to care for them.

we oftentimes overlook how powerful toys can be in influencing young children & american girl honestly knew that kids could read intense moments in history & synthesize the issues to learn how to be a better person. my grandma bought me my first doll, molly, when i was only six & the dolls became a huge part of my childhood. when i turned 21 a couple years ago - we were living in minneapolis - she took me to have lunch for my birthday at the american doll place in the mall of america & bought me the Addy doll for my birthday. it was such a powerful moment i hasn’t expected.

I learned a lot of my core beliefs from these girls.

These are from one of their latest books, A Smart Girl’s Guide to Body Image:

They got a lot of flak from conservative parents for this and they did. not. back. down.

Their newest historical doll, Claudie, is a black girl growing up in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. Her story is about Black artists thriving, and making a safe, beautiful place for themselves in a society that tries to reject them. It teaches about the NAACP’s protests against lynchings, in ways kids can understand, but there’s also so much Black joy and creativity showcased in her story.

Another historical doll, Melody, is growing up in the 1960s during the Civil Rights movement. She faces the struggles and triumphs of attending a newly integrated school, and learns about the bombing of a Black church in Alabama that killed four little girls her age. Her stories show how black people found support and community within the church, as well as music— she loves to sing! If you have a free hour, I highly recommend watching her special on Amazon (free with prime). It stars Caila Marsai Martin from Blackish and it will make you weep.

The girl of the year for 2022, Corinne, is Asian, and her story touches on the issues of anti-Asian hate in the wake of covid. When conservative parents threw a fit about this, American Girl went ahead and made the girl of the year for 2023 Asian, too.

Any of their dolls can be customized with assistive devices like hearing aids, service dogs, and wheelchairs. They also have bald dolls, to include stories about girls battling cancer or alopecia. And it’s not just girl dolls— they have boy dolls now, too! And dolls with no gender assigned to them! People complained that they couldn’t find any dolls in the Just Like Me line that looked like them, so they now give people the ability to create their own custom doll, with tons of different options.

1) they reproduce asexually and the children are clones of each parent OR

2) Kermit and Miss Piggy are members of the same sexually dimorphic species, hence the split between their male and female children

In which Captain Amelia (left), an extra terrestrial anthropomorphic cat, had hybrid babies with Doctor Doppler (middle), an extra terrestrial anthropomorphic dog, whom also gave birth to the babies

So, Glumshoe and @sailor-lady asked if there was a ritual where they invited a hand to animate their children.

Muppet Babies is canon.

and i dont see any fucking hands.

The muppets are a form of life, perhaps not quite like our own, but one with its own orders and genuses and the like. Robin goes from tadpole to frog stage on Muppet Babies, after all, that’s a biological life process. Note that muppets keep sewing/stitching/hand jokes to a minimum, that’s because they aren’t puppets, they just resemble them. 

The hand-thing presumes muppets work like toons from Roger Rabbit or toys from Toy Story, where they’re made by people an incarnated. I propose they are like Pokemon, a separate, parallel classification of life that exists alongside what we would call natural life. As with Pokemon, these lifeforms are not the result of a parallel evolution. Rather, their various kinds were created by some manner of God. We know these exist in the Muppet canon, as Big Bird argued the Egyptian Pantheon into letting a child ghost into the afterlife that one time. 

Personally, as the essence of being a muppet is your greatest motivation being your greatest weakness, I blame the demiurge. 

But you can blame Gonzo’s people or the aholes that are made of a Skexis and a Mystic, but not the Goblin King (he is a rogue memetic construct, what some might wrongly label a ‘tulpa’).  It’s also possible they crossed over from the Gorg world. (but that does not preclude them from also being the creations of the demiurge)

This is not to say that muppets are inherently magic, any more than say, a hobbit or a goblin is “magic” in Lord of the Rings. They are simply created beings that thereafter reproduce after their own kind. Emmit Otter and his Ma, the fact that “Monster” and “grouch” are explicitly races in Sesame Street, etc. 

Now, I hear you saying, “but [email protected], you handsome madman, we just pointed out that Fozzie and Kermit have a green half-bear/half-frog father!”

Yes. In a movie.

Because the Muppets are actors. 

Muppets (the order of life) and the Muppets (the comedy/acting troupe), are different things. The former contains the latter but the latter does not contain all of the former. In essence, Kermit named his endeavor “The People’s Theater”. 

Breaks down like this: You have our, real world universe. Within that is nested a universe that is much like ours, except it is sillier, and Muppets are creatures and not special effects. Within that are nested the fictional worlds of all the various muppet productions. 

For further proof, I present these bloopers from Emmet Otter’s Jugband Christmas:

It is uncertain how much of the Muppet ouvre is canonical ‘behind the scenes’ and how much is constructed entertainment provided by the Muppet organization, because of one deep wrinkle we haven’t touched on…

Kayfabe.

Kermit is hard-core about Kayfabe. He comes from a Vaudeville theater background, the 4th wall does not exist in his performance ethos, the show must go on, and the rubes getting a peek behind the curtain doesn’t get you off that hook.

All your Muppet-troupe core performers stick close to this ethos, ensuring you can never be quite certain on what level of reality the scene you’re being presented with is intended to be.Any specific example that conflicts with the others cannot be shown not to just be another straight-faced performance. 

It’s not an unreliable narrator, everyone is unreliable, from the producer on down to the go-fer.

Don’t blame me, blame the Demiurge.

I’m not talking simple, one-level Wrasslin’ type kayfabe. Shamus can’t be used as evidence, because we don’t know how the levels of Kayfabe align. This is also true of arguments that Walter is Jason Segal’s cousin outside the film-verse. 

Breaks down like this:

Shamus is a character within the Wrassleverse. In this universe, he has been presented as Beaker’s cousin. In the next level of reality up, Shamus is a professional wrestler playing a role wherein Beaker is his cousin.

But we don’t know if that universe is the one where the Muppets are sapient creatures who are actors, or if it is the reality where they are puppets performed by actors. Remember Emmit Otter and his ma. 

Are we seeing one man perform kayfabe, or are we seeing two?

The answer cannot be locked down, because the essence of Muppet is the futile struggle of Sisyphus by way of Willy Loman, with a chaser of “No Exit.” Never succeeding, never failing enough to invalidate the effort. This is why I blame the demiurge.

We all have our burgers boulders to heft.

Inconclusive.

There are Muppet “humans” in the same sense that there are muppet dogs (both sapient and otherwise). Dave the human is no more an issue than the Swedish Chef or Statler and Waldorf. (If the Animal Show can be considered a part of this)

The Muppets, with Walter, is just like all the other muppet movies, the conceit is that these are productions starring muppets (the creatures) put on by the Muppets (the acting troupe/production company). As stated above, in-our-universe promotionals present Segal and Walter as cousins, as opposed to brothers in the film. However, that’s still got Kermit’s hand on it, so we don’t now if that can be taken at face value.

And lets diagram out the Shamus problem. We’ve got the following possibilities, and no way of telling them apart, except for the last one, which is out of bounds for the nature of the exercise:

Wrasslin and Muppets are both real. - Beaker and Shamus are cousins, whether by blood or marriage unknown, though blood is implied.

Muppets are fake in a world where Wrasslin’ is real. - Shamus is the character, but Beaker’s still being worked as a puppet as part of a cross-promotion tie-in.

Muppets are real in a world where Wrasslin’ is fake. - Both Shamus and Beaker are Actors.

Both Muppets and Wrasslin’ are Fake - Presumed state of our universe.

Anyone else know that one cutscene from the new tomodachi life game?