"Wait… Is that an UFO?!"

Name: Derek

Zodiac: Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer, Leo, Virgo, Libra, Scorpio, Sagittarius, Capricorn, Aquarius, Pisces

Myers-Briggs:  istj, isfj, infj, intj, istp, isfp, infp, intp, estp, esfp, enfp, enfj, esfj, estj, esfj, enfj, entj, entp

The Four Temperaments:  Melancholic, Phlegmatic, Choleric, Sanguine

Enneagram:  Type One (4), Type Two (4), Type Three (1), Type Four (5), Type Five (4), Type Six (8), Type Seven (1), Type Eight (2), Type Nine (7)

I watched that episode with my family and I could just feel how uncomfortable everyone was. Honestly, it was a really jarring, unpleasant episode.

Homer is a terrible dad. So is Peter. But Homer’s saving grace has always been that he tries—he’s bad at it and he fucks it up a lot, but he loves his family and he wants to be better than he is.

One of my favorite Homer moments is in “Diatribe of a Mad Housewife.” Tl;dr Marge writes a steamy romance novel starring herself and Ned, and when Homer finds out, he chases down Ned and, rather than attack him, asks him to teach him how to be a better husband.

There’s some part of his stupid self that wants to do better.

I never got that impression with Peter. Instead, the family has gotten more and more abusive towards Meg. It’s really unsettling for me when I started realizing that’s what happens sometimes in abusive families. Abusers sometimes single out one child to abuse, and quite often the other family members take the abuser’s side. After all, it’s easier to side with an abuser than to run the risk of becoming the target yourself.

There’s never really a point where it seems like Peter cares at all that his shitty behavior impacts his family. It actually seems to have gotten worse over the years. He expects everyone to clean up his messes because that’s always what happens; there’s really no reason for him not to be shitty.

And it’s easy to see how Meg is affected. She doesn’t have much of a character, really, because so much her screen time is devoted to being abused. The bits of character development all seem to hinge on her being this sad, neglected person who’s trying her best but never really gets any help from anyone. Quite the opposite; there have been a lot of episodes where her family sabotages any attempts to be herself.

"If you don’t like it shut up and don’t watch it" has its place. This is not it. Allow me to educate you on why you’re wrong.

Family Guy is a detriment. Plain and simple. Vox wasn’t too far off when they called this show “a blight on humanity”. Yeah, it has its moments where a couple of the quips they make get a laugh out of the audience. The show having long since lost its funniness isn’t the issue.

Everything this show stands for is absolutely sickening, and its more prominent in this episode than it has been in years. 

Literally everything wrong with Family guy is jam packed into this episode. Here’s a list of just some of the things I can rattle off the top of my head.

It’s generally just unpleasant. There are a lot of moments that stood out in this episode as being really fucking awful, even by Family Guy standards (Stewie kidnapping/torturing people and telling Moe his daughter is being raped as a “prank call”, Meg carving Lisa’s name into her arm, etc). Family Guy has a nasty habit of thinking shocking/disturbing = funny. It doesn’t. It’s just unpleasant and not fun to watch.

The gags are unfunny/drag on for too long. This happens in almost every modern FG episode, but it’s really bad in this one. (The car wash scene, Homer and Peter’s fight, and just the majority of the episode really).

MacFarlane is using this series as a means to jerk himself off. The amount of self gratifying bullshit that Seth threw into Simpsons Guy was nausea inducing. The entire first—what, ten minutes of the episode was about how everyone calling out MacFarlane on his racist, sexist, and generally awful bullshit are, in his eyes, a load of oversensitive braindead idiots with no senses of humor. There are ways to respectfully make jokes about awful subjects. South Park does it all the time. Family Guy does not. Not only that, but MacFarlane plugs his other shows left and right and even goes so far as to shit on Bob’s Burgers—an INFINITELY superior show—in order to fuel his own ego. He’s a LITERAL MANCHILD.

Now, let’s get to the big issue. Family Guy’s messages are absolute trash, and the fact that it still makes money means that PEOPLE ARE BUYING IT. This show’s morals are just horrific. “Sexism is what makes men men” (I Am Peter, Hear Me Roar), “Abuse victims should stay in abusive relationships for their abusers’ benefits (Seahorse Seashell Party), and that’s definitely not the worst of it. This show is teaching its primary audience everything that is wrong with society. It doesn’t matter that these ass backwards lessons are being told in the form of jokes, they’re still normalizing and enforcing ideas that NEED TO STOP.

And the only way they’re gonna stop is if we raise fucking hell about it.

30 days of Delain

Day five | Favourite track from We Are The Others Mother Machine