That video of Alex Hirsch reading S&P notes for Gravity Falls conveys a few things to me:
1) the U.S. entertainment industry (especially animation) is run by older conservative types who make up offensive terms and get really mad about them.
2) the people who run Disney would be the first to fall in line with a fascist regime.
3) most of the media we consume is tailor-made and watered-down to appeal to the tastes of older, deeply religious conservative audiences.
4) conservatism, not the left, is and always has been the biggest voice of censorship in American culture.
J. Michael Straczynski, creator of Babylon 5, was before that a producer and writer for a number of cartoons in the late β80s/early β90s (The Real Ghostbusters and the original She-Ra, most notably). After a few years of dealing with the censors and their obsession with finding Satanism (or at least looking for Satanism to further political agendas) he wrote an article about the whole corrupt and bullshit system.
And published it in Penthouse, to force those same censors to buy a skin mag. The editor there asked, why Penthouse?
That one is from his autobiography, Becoming Superman. See also:
(As he goes on to say, heβs never worked in animation againβheβs effectively been blacklisted by the cartoon industry.)
Every time something like this comes up, I remember two stories about making media. The first is about movies, and comes from Quentin βFeet Manβ Tarantino.
When he was making Pulp Fiction, he was worried that the MPAA would object to the high level of violence in the film, so he shot a bunch of extra-gory stuff that he didnβt actually want in the film, and added it in before submitting it to the MPAA. Predictibly, they asked him to cut most of it (without even commenting on some of the things that had him worried, like the bits of Marvinβs skull that lodge in Samuel L. Jacksonβs hairpiece). The resultant cuts were actually more permissive than heβd expected, so he cut a little more and submitted it, and it got passed with an R.
The second story is about that artist on Morrowind whose name escapes me (Iβm not a big ES fan tbh) who figured out that if he made two creature designs, one weird and what he wanted, and one even weirder, he could get Todd Howard to agree to just about anything by showing him the whopper first, then going back and βworkingβ for another few hours on a second, βtoned-downβ version, and it worked every time.
The reason I bring these up is that the thing that drives censors isnβt some extant physical rubrick of what is and isnβt acceptable, itβs the idea that they can have absolute power over someone elseβs creative work. Itβs about the social dominance of the interaction.
There is nothing so innocent, so clean, that a censor will not find some fault with it. Because they must find something wrong with it to justify their existence, and because it makes them feel powerful.
This is true of all censorship.
