Living the Illusion

I once thought my husband was falling out of bed, so I grabbed him tenderly, cuddled into him and sweetly said “It’s okay darling, I’ve got you…”

That’s what half-asleep-me thought I was doing, anyway. In reality, I threw my palm onto his face like the Facehugger alien and screamed incoherently into his ear.

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.

I HATE the way they portray Meg. Their character development is mediocre and I have absolutely nothing to pick at with the above comments that go into depth on the subject. It’s bad enough that because of this show, I’m always being made the butt of Meg jokes because we happen to share the same name. But what they do to her is horrific.

What they don’t realize is that there are young girls out there going through the exact thing that Meg faces every time we see her. And it’s possible that because of the influence of this show that it happens. It influenced my siblings into normalizing abusive languages and behaviors that we weren’t only experiencing at home, but were seeing as normal on TV. I grew up watching this show in an environment where I was made fun of every day and everyone would stand behind my stepdad while he made fun of me. They think it’s harmless comedy, but this shit happens to kids everywhere and is a very real issue. It happened to me and continues to happen because men like my former stepdad and men like Peter Griffin really do exist.

They normalize this abusive behavior in such a way that it is seen as okay and part of normal life.

Posting again, because more commentary has been added, which makes it even more relevant.

The worst part is that MacFarlane is fully aware of how serious Meg’s abuse is. In the aforementioned “Seahorse Seashell Party” episode, alot of the plot circulates around Meg finally snapping and lashing out at her family for the years of abuse that they’ve put her through. She calls them out on exactly the same things that we, the audience, are criticizing “Family Guy” for, effectively making Peter, Lois, and Chris come to terms with their utter moral ineptitude.

Finally, right?

Wrong.

Instead of taking this empowering moment and having it be a turning point for Meg, the show quickly gets steered back into more familiar waters by having Meg “realize” that her abuse is a positive thing, and that she is the “lightening rod” meant to absorb her family’s dysfunction lest it be deployed against the rest of the Griffins. By the end of the episode, Meg -the victim- has apologized to her family and gone back to being treated like scum.

Which is so wrong. “Family Guy” has surpassed the whole “funny yet morally inept show that doesn’t understand its actions” trope; MacFarlane displays an understanding of what abuse is, and shows support of it. In “Seahorse Seashell Party”, the audience is shown that extreme emotional and physical abuse isn’t only wonderfully comic- it’s right. Victims of abuse are taught to view their abuse as something to be not fought against, but embraced, as acceptance of abuse will help protect the one inflicting it. Which is a good thing. And not at all a symptom of Stockholm Syndrome. Though that’s probably positive too.

I’m sorry for inflicting upon you all my poor writing skills and stupid opinions, but this show is awful on so many levels

"Dating preferences" that exclude entire groups of diverse people (ie "I don’t date Black girls" / "I’m just not attracted to Mexican guys") = blatant racism.