charlotwolf

I point it out a ton, but Hoagie and Kuki are punching bags that don't react unless the reaction is apart of the joke. With Hoagie in particular it's really bad because they specifically built his character to be anxious and somewhat self conscious (at least in secret; they don't say it directly but it's obvious). Not that them writing Kuki the way they did wasn't absolute crap and clearly a product-of-time viewpoint of Asian girls, but to specifically rid an anxious and self conscious character of their reactions to blatant bullying and make it seem like they don't care whenever the bullying was intending to be "funny" is essentially telling the kids in the audience, "hey, you can make fun of people! It won't hurt their feelings, I promise! They don't care!". It also makes it obvious that, to an extent, this writing was deliberate and had a certain amount of hostility behind it.

On top of that, other characters act much more cruelly to the punching bags. The threshold for what other characters perceive as wrong is dramatically lowered with these characters, to the point where completely mundane things are being picked at or criticized just because the punching bag did it. They were even willing to mischaracterize their own characters to do this. Yet, another character will do something genuinely harmful, and the same characters that were getting on the punching bag character for breathing too loud are either ignoring the situation or severely underreacting.

Yes, they're kids. And realistically, kids would probably not be capable of appropriately handling situations or being able to realize when they're unfairly singling people out. We, as an older audience, acknowledge this. Unfortunately, the younger audience doesn't come close to having enough of a grasp to understand intricacies like that, and they can and they DO interpret these things at face value. They barely understand themselves as a person, for crying out loud. Those kids aren't thinking "oh, Abby wasn't trying to single out Hoagie, she's just a kid and she has problems with regulating her emotions just like everyone else!" what THEY see is a role model/emotionally smart character tearing the punching bag character to absolute shreds over some mild annoyance, which (to them) means that this behavior must be okay. When you're writing things like characters who have flaws, you gotta make sure your audience understands that it's a flaw. The show messed up each time they decided to have other characters look away, or have the punching bag fail to react in a reasonable way, because all that tells the audience is that this behavior is normal, and nobody is saying anything because there's nothing wrong.

CLOWN is probably the best example of both of these things. I kind of brought it up subtly already, but the entire first half of OP. CLOWN was an absolute mess. First off, Abby is crashing the hell out over Hoagie being mildly annoying to the point of assault. Given that other scenes from the show make it obvious that Abby is an empathetic person who tries to be reasonable, her smacking the crap out of the only kid getting his ass beat at home because he was corny is insane mischaracterization meant to make Hoagie look bad as the base of the entire joke for something OUTRAGEOUSLY petty. Abby reached the point of lashing out in DOGHOUSE but 1; she lashed out because she was bottling up a very serious thing, 2; she IMMEDIATELY realized she did something wrong and apologized, and 3; she never smacked Wally for it. She yelled at him, but she didn't smack him around aggressively. Smacking is never an appropriate thing to do, but this was at least somewhat justified with scenes where Hoagie was doing something wrong. She would smack Hoagie whenever he said something teetering on misogyny/objectification of girls, and that's understandable. It's kind of playing back into what I said about making it obvious when a character doing something is a flaw, because the kids know from Abby's response that his comment was inappropriate. There was absolutely zero reason for her to smack him for making mildly annoying jokes for a bit too long, and she even admits herself that the anger was for being forced to listen to him be mildly annoying. And nothing happens that suggests that Abby is wrong; in fact, it KEEPS HAPPENING, and they kind of nudge you to believe Hoagie had done something wrong. Something I noticed is that she's actually way more aggressive with Hoagie in this episode than she is when Wally makes blatantly misogynistic comments in other episodes, which goes to show that they were making her react in much more severe ways to much less serious situations than she does with other characters.

And Hoagie just... Doesn't react. Not properly, at least. His mental breakdowns (I refuse to play them off as fits, because those were clearly mental breakdowns) were played off as jokes with exaggerated delivery or animation and everyone around him kind of just shrugged. Abby watched him bawl his eyes out and her response was to make a joke, which she COULD'VE done alongside showing empathy, but she just left without the tiniest shift in emotion towards HIM. She was kind of diminishing his reaction by turning the reaction into a joke. If that wasn't bad enough, he wasn't even crying because he had been repeatedly attacked and bullied. He was crying because he couldn't make puns, which... I guess is still fair, and a real kid would probably cry over that, but it kind of undermines the severity of how some of the kids reacted to his presence before. Hoagie walks away from being smacked around by Abby like nothing even happened. They didn't need to have this whole breakdown about how he's beat at home and have him experience some kind of C-PTSD flashback on screen, nobody is asking you to lore dump onto the audience each time he's bullied, but at LEAST make him react like a regular kid, and preferably make him react like self conscious kids tend to. They could've gotten away with that easily because they built his character to be one that bottles his feelings up, and all they needed to do was make him sulk, make him go quiet, or make it clear he's trying to get away from the situation. There's a million ways to depict his character type, and they couldn't even depict it in a way that's realistic for kids his age. And if the joke here was that he's used to it, shouldn't THAT be a point? That maybe him being used to being tossed around is kind of messed up?

Abby wasn't a good character to use for the first half of this episode to counter him. That entire first half would've been improved immediately if they swapped Abby out with Wally. They wouldn't even need to change much dialogue because it already sounds like something that'd come out of Wally's mouth. And yeah, it's still not great because the mockery was unfair, but at least Wally's character was built to be one that is somewhat cruel and unfair at times, and they criticize Wally... Most of the time. Unfortunately they use him to try to enforce a genuine belief in something bad in some episodes but for the most part other characters criticize him for his behavior and associate him with a label that kids already know isn't positive when it comes to this behavior.

I also can't help but feel like the bullying over his puns was... Not great. Bullying isn't great in general but humor is a coping mechanism. To break down a character for using what is meant to be a coping mechanism for many people out there INCLUDING CHILDREN is just not a good idea. Kids watching that episode who use humor to cope probably don't come out of that episode feeling very good about themselves.

You should care about how you write kids shows. In fact, you should care even MORE. Kids are easily influenced and if you're going to make them the target audience, you need to consider how certain things can come across or affect their ways of thinking. Sesame Street did this, and their target audience is probably so young that half of them don't remember what they watched. The target audience for KND was a bit older and absolutely remembered the episodes, or at least had developed enough to carry whatever they picked up from the show into other areas of their life.

Call me dramatic, but seriously. I don't think some of you guys understand how bad the bias of the writers was with certain characters. It was nearly non stop when you factor in smaller but still impactful things like what I just discussed, and this is by no means the only way they influenced their audience into bad ways of thinking, intentionally or not. It was probably the latter, in all fairness to the writers, but I've heard more than enough from veteran fans to know that the vast majority of people who have commented on the writing in this area that also grew up with the show have said that they picked up bad behaviors from the show and remember acting in certain ways specifically because they saw it normalized in the show, or the people commenting on it and denying the show did any wrong have multiple misogynistic, racist, fatphobic, etc. posts on their page, proving they never left the 2000s themselves and might've been subtly influenced by the show.