The movie where a whole sequence is dedicated to a joke where two young women’s eyes morph into abs and they drool over a shirtless young man?
That’s the movie you love?
That’s the movie you think is so great? The movie where it’s made for kids, and kids are being shown that the funniest thing you can see is a girl salivating over the body of a boy?
You want to own that? You want to reblog fanart of that? You want to sing the Soda-Pop song and learn the dances?
You just willfully adore the movie where over-sexualization of a boy is okay?
No, don’t tell me “you missed it, those boys are demons, just like the “Your Idol” song, the movie is telling you the dangers of oversexualizing boys and idolizing demonic pop songs, it’s doing it in a clever and funny way, but it actually is condemning lust and idolatry!”
No it’s not, don’t be ridiculous. It’s doing what Turning Red did.
It’s showing a really accurate depiction of what teenage girls feel when a sexy boy flashing his muscles goes by. And then it’s telling you how to feel about that feeling. And what it’s telling you is, “laugh at it. It’s funny.”
The girls feel that way before they know the boys are demons. They feel that way at the press conference after they know the boys are demons. They feel that way and “resist temptation” when they cut the demons in half in the climax, but it’s a funny “resist temptation.”
It’s not genuine. It’s soft, pleasant, “there’s nothing really wrong with this, it’s how you are, laugh at it.”
What the movie says is wrong is one thing and one thing only: feeling shame and hiding your brokenness instead of embracing it.
You can tell that it condemns that because there is gravity in the way it is handled. When “shame and hiding who you are” is the “sin” the movie is focusing on, it’s doing so with somber music, no jokes, shaking and crying characters, no anime facial expressions. When “lust” is the sin the movie is focusing on, it’s doing so with funny music, cartoon facial expressions, and characters who have turned into caricatures.
That’s your movie? You think any good or “potential” it had justifies what’s bad in it?
Come over here where I’m watching girls who struggle with oversexualizing themselves learn the soda-Pop dance and giggle at the joke they’ve made out of lust that can ruin their lives and relationships. Come over here and tell me that. If you can get people to laugh at the pudgy hippo and get closer and closer to take a selfie with it, they won’t be expecting it to crush them. They won’t even have time to run.
And that’s your movie. The movie where you make it funny to treat the male body like a popcorn-munching commodity for you to buy and sell and entertain yourself with.
