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Join Kieran and his friends as they are pulled into another reality that may or may not be real and are forced to confront their own identities, the nature of simulated universes and reality itself.
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could easily be like how Walmart in my hometown was AMAZING (open 24h!) and Target was middling, but where I live now it’s reversed, and Target is high end while Walmart is… pretty trash
(I wanted to be clear, before replies get locked, I didn’t mean to try to dox you if that guess is correct (or not), just that the one we went to was a grand opening and also they had the Aggretsuko stuff so HEY COINCIDENCE)
Let’s see… Elsa’s father does his best to teach her how to keep her powers under control… He bends over backwards, virtually shutting down the country to accommodate his daughter’s needs… They only leave once Elsa is a mature adult… later, Elsa gives Anna sound parental advice (don’t marry someone you just met)… later, we meet Kristoff’s “unique” family who have bizarre but loving attitudes towards their boy… and at the end, we learn about how Hans’ parents are going to deal with his poor behavior in Arendele.
To be fair… the issue was that Elsa’s father was teaching her to suppress them as opposed to controlling them. The whole “conceal, don’t feel” thing? Which was the problem because ultimately the powers weren’t going to just go away and trying to cram them inside to never be used proved to only do more harm than good.
People generally demonize that part because they didn’t try to help her learn how to use the powers. They freaked out about Anna and just decided her powers were objectively bad and needed to be contained.
Also making her think she needed to avoid all contact with her sister. Like, maybe some of that was just internalized fear that she might hurt Anna again, but seems like something that a better parent might help her work through.
It’s almost as if Frozen is a movie about parents trying to deny something about their child. “Oh, you’re a lesbian? You better hide that @%@#$ away otherwise people won’t treat you nicely and they’ll fear you, and I’m kinda scared of that too…” Yeah, nothing for Ross to be worried about at all
It’d be giving Ross way too much credit to think that he got that about the movie and suspected Becky’s feelings for Joyce, wouldn’t it? Yeah, he’s not that smart.
One-note, too.
Billie was chronically under the influence during that phase, and still was able to rant in detailed sentences, without sounding like he was reading from a limited list of mental cue-cards. What’s his excuse?
I don’t think they ever decided that her powers were bad, just too dangerous for her to control. She appears to be an omega level mutant, after all.
The trolls did give her parents the advice on how to guide her and they didn’t follow it, so that’s why they’re criticized. Her father could have easily taken her to a secluded spot in the mountains for her to practice as she was growing up, with only him as a witness/potential victim. So yeah, they deserve their blame.
That said, the power suppression is a metaphor for LGBTQ+/not fitting in/being different/etc. type situations many people find themselves in where they have to hide something important about themselves. THAT is the message secondary message Ross is objecting to here, with his primary objection being that the movie clearly makes her parents being in the wrong with their advice.
Exactly.
Can we have something between Frozen’s “No! BAD Powers! Suppress them!“ and Hogwarts’ “why, sure we put children in life-threatening magical situations in school!“ ?!
I also see Frozen as a metaphor for how in my adolescence under fundie-christian influence, i was taught that sexuality is mostly morally wrong, basically. It left me with a lot of internalized sex-negativity instead of, um, using my powers for good.
(the “great“ thing about it is that “no sex until marriage“ / “sex is evil and dangerous“ was so strongly focused on that no one had time to plant solid homophobia in me. i still sometimes have to deal with my brain shaming me for wanting sex, but not shaming me for the gender of my partners…)
When i watched Frozen for the first time, i totally felt with Elsa, metaphorically.
Haven’t dared to watch the sequel yet, the first film was great and I wasn’t sure if the sequel would be, too. Do you recommend it?
Re shitty parenting: Not telling Anna what happened and letting her suffer from rejection is very high up on the list, too.
„Demonizing“ is something else, this was showing poor choices leading to near disastrous results.
I heartily recommend it, and I don’t like anything. It looks absolutely phenomenal at all times and you can safely use the bathroom when Moose Guy’s song starts.
Yes.
I mean… HELLO they literally mind-wiped Anna and then left he with no explanation of why her sister suddenly pushes her away.
Dude, it was an accident. They could have used it as a teachable moment of “we have to take better care so this does not happen again“, WITH the kids instead of pretending it never happened. Which has never stopped things from happening again?!
Yes.
I mean… HELLO they literally mind-wiped Anna and then left he[r] with no explanation of why her sister suddenly pushes her away.
Uh, isn’t that sort of the definition of a religious fundamental upbringing? So why should Ross consider that bad?
Elsa was perfectly capable of controlling her powers all along.
She wasn’t an adult when he left, or she would have been coronated sooner (actually, where was the regent?).
And calling “don’t marry someone you just met” “sound parental advice” is a little strong. I mean I guess, but it’s not exactly massively insightful.
If I recall, there was going to be a regent character in the film, but he kind of fell by the wayside with rewrites and was ultimately left out of the final draft – the finished film sort-of implied that the role of regent during the year(s) of Elsa’s minority fell to the bishop who served at her coronation.
There’s alt text now, but now that’s you mention it I vaguely remember reading a dinosaur comics alt text bongoing about how a different webcomic sometimes didn’t have alt text, and it may have been this one
I don’t know. I read this every day, and can’t remember there ever not being alt text (can’t say it didn’t happen once, but not enough for someone to bongo about.
But for the first few years, the alt text was just the strip title, so maybe that’s what they meant.
This site did not have alt text for about the first two and a half years. It wasn’t until sometime in February 2013 when Willis ‘discovered’ how to do it. Fittingly, the hovertext for that strip was “what i can add HOVERTEXT???”
Also Elsa has magical powers and creates sentient life thus putting her on the level of God, tries to kill a few guys, sings the lyrics “no right, no wrong, no rules for me”, and her character arc has numerous parallels to a coming out story.
Yeah, no. Ross doesn’t strike me as the type. I’d say he’s never seen it. In fact, he might not even have gotten his disapproval from a website but rather the folk at his church.
Most likely the church – though they probably get their advice from one of the approved Christian movie sites.
This has come up before and we know Joyce also wasn’t allowed to see it, so it was a broader community thing, not just Ross being a jerk on his own.
This. I mean in the sequel she goes racing off into nowhere because of a pretty girl voice, that’s pretty homoromantic to me, but she’s also more clearly shown as ace in flashbacks to her childhood.
Elsa’s songs in the second movie are the gayest thing I have heard, and in a good way. Fashionable ice queen that sings and creates life out of non organic matter? She is a living god!
What I needed the whole time to fill this gaping hole of yearning in my heart was self-acceptance? Metamorphosing into my best self? And earlier on, the little hints like saying “ew” to the idea of kissing (admittedly as a child, but hey, Disney was trying VERY hard to be referential and silent on the matter at the same time) and totally ignoring potential crushes of all genders as the film spooled on.
But then, I’m ace, and I think some of the lesbian-Elsa commentors are indeed probably gay. Maybe we can all agree she is le Queer Queen?
Doctor_Who, I believe I detect sarcasm, but I don’t quite get your point. Is the problem that Elsa tried to kill some guys (who were trying to kill her)? That she sang “no rules for me” (about the rules that had been imposed on her expression of herself)? Or is your problem with coming out?
Seems like the point is that, with all those easy targets right out in the open, it’s weird that Joyce and Becky’s parents chose to focus their objections where they did. Usually, Those Sorts go for the real obvious “problems”, like violence, rebellion, and queer people. Instead, these bozos decided that any portrayal of parental imperfection was some sort of anti-parent propaganda.
Most fathers would take the “win” of their daughter being a good shot with an arcade rifle. Then, on top of that, an IP-savvy kid at her age is just a bonus.
Nah, even the wimminfolk need to be able to exercise their 2nd Amendment rights when the atheists come to put all the oppressed Christians in the FEMA concentration camps under sharia law.
Remember when the backwoods conspiracy kooks weren’t the loudest voice in every room on Earth, and you could say a bunch of nonsense as a joke? God, I miss that.
It’s possible she is left-handed, but not necessarily. I am right-handed but I’ve learned that my left eye is my dominant eye, so I shoot a rifle “left-handed”.
She held the pen in her right hand when she took orders at Galasso’s. Then again, would Ross try to force her to learn to do everything right-handed if she was a lefty? Or maybe she just doesn’t know how to hold a rifle and just saw an opportunity to play out the “win a carnival prize for someone” trope.
I remember Becky mentioning around the visit home/documents heist that she only was able to get her hair cut that short because she ‘accidentally’ got something stuck in it. Maybe either Joyce got the same style in solidarity, or Becky deliberately went with a similar one to what Joyce already had because she’s nice and safe and conformist?
Hm. Yeah, looking it up, Becky’s hair in the first strip is distinctly shorter (about chin-length I think?) than it is here, so I think this is Ross’s ‘acceptable’ level and that specific shorter ‘whoops stuck my head in a vat of glue!’ haircut came later.
I’m not 100% on whether the Browns are particularly fussed about long hair – Carol’s is certainly relatively short compared to Bonnie’s, and we know they’re denomination-hoppers besides – but I also guarantee Carol would flip out at Joyce having as dramatically short hair as Becky’s undercut. I think they allow for some length leeway if it’s still suitably feminine.
(My great-grandmother NEVER cut her hair and apparently cried about how her daughter was going to hell when my grandmother came home from college with a haircut, so my standards for ‘religiously mandated long hair’ are way more like Bonnie’s than Joyce’s or even flashback Becky’s. Then again, this was the side of the family that’s just shy of Amish. For the record, they did get over it.)
Yeah, same! When the comic started I was the same age as the cast, which would’ve put this comic straight into the early aughts and the hot Disney IP would’ve been like, Lilo and Stitch or Finding Nemo or something. Now the cast is a whole nother generation and it’s odd.
The Sliding Timescale was my first thought. My first reaction-thought was “oh jeez Frozen is now old enough to be from their childhood instead of a recent movie like it is for me”.
Then I looked up dates. DoA started in 2010 and Frozen came out in 2013. It’s worse than I realized.I’m old. (oh wait I knew that already)
That was my first thought too — “Ha! The DoA strip started before the movie we are referencing here was even released. The sliding time-scale rules!!!”
The sliding timescale makes me wonder just how long Willis plans to keep this webcomic going. I mean, if it gets to the point where he’s too old to keep working on it, will he hire someone else to draw the comics for him?
Of course at that point this really will become those newspaper comics he made fun of in Shortpacked.
I just had a flashback to a blog post I read by some homeschool types about how Rapunzel was wrong to disobey Gothel. Even though it’s *technically* not breaking the commandment because Gothel wasn’t actually her mother, Rapunzel didn’t know that at the time and thus she should not have left the tower.
the thing is, it wasn’t a post made by controlling parents but by girls raised in this mindset who were . . . well, basically Joyce except without the freedom of going to college and being exposed to different viewpoints.
I don’t remember any details of the blog, but it haunts me. I hope that someday, somewhere, they are discussing that blog post with their therapist.
ok so I found the posts and posted a link (comment awaiting moderation) but apparently they felt that if she does report Gothel to the proper authorities she also has to turn in Flynn, even if that means he’ll have his hands cut off.
I know that! But they feel hands cut off is more biblical. gah, expected the post to be approved by now ’cause it’s pretty on-topic — google “botkin sisters response to rapunzel” if you want to know what I’m talking about.
Yep. I can 100% see how a zealot’s child being smarter than them would push them over the edge. Then again, we haven’t really seen much of Ross in this flashback, and I doubt that Willis would try to humanize him after what we’ve seen happen.
I always thought of Link as being blonde – it comes up most often in the character design – but then again, there have been rather a lot of Links over time.
She’s not on the canonical list of left-handers (Sal, Joe, Ruth, Dorothy), but then that list was drawn up before she entered into main-character-dom. Time for a dive through the archives looking for evidence, I suppose — or we could just wait for Word of Willis.
The handedness of cartoon characters shifts around to suit the scene. The artist needs ways to keep the characters facing the reader. Except in Fastrack. Everybody in Fastrack is left-handed.
Becky and Joyce are 18 now, meaning they were about 12 when Frozen was released as of this point in the time scale. So this is still normal sliding rate
Thankfully only part of my family was this insane when I was a child, although they never did it with any Disney movies. Except for Bambi which you might not expect.
Because as a family we ate a lot of deer meat(my family is full of hunters and fishermen especially due to budget restrictions) so they didn’t want me to suddenly refuse to eat venison because of Bambi.
Hate to be “that guy,” but Six Flags isn’t a Time Warner IP anymore (hasn’t been since 1998 though there are numerous Warner Bros and DC IPs present at the park. And Time Warner’s now WarnerMedia. Pointless facts, I know.
These IP shifts are confusing me. I’m old enough to remember when Warner Communications owned the New York Cosmos and Bugs Bunny was a mascot at their games.
Movies I grew up with now have someone else’s name on them. MGM made The Wizard of Oz, Turner later owned it, and now?
Now, Warners, the studio of Humphrey Bogart, Jimmy Cagney, and all those brassy Busby Berkeley musicals has its name on this extravagant, sumptuous musical fantasy.
so serious question here–who else sees the Frozen movies as a Depression metaphor?
Maybe there’s more than a little projection going on, considering that Frozen came out at just the right time to help me through my darkest hours.
but…..I mean….I can’t be the only one to see it, right?
Ice powers shorting out in Frozen being a major depressive episode, Frozen 2 she has to learn to deal with it long-term–and Next Right Thing? Granted that’s not Elsa.
Though my theory is that it’s all about one person. Elsa the bad days, Anna the good, Olaf childhood innocence….
(And Hans’ turn to the dark side can be easily explained as a relationship that turns sour. He’s nice and kind in the beginning, even tries to help Elsa while she’s in the ice palace…..but by the end they’re through and all she has is bad memories of him so he’s the villain)
Yeah, no, maybe because I first heard the song literally in the middle of a depression/anxiety breakdown, but I’ve never been able to read Let It Go as anything but ‘I’ve fucked up everything forever! I’m gonna pretend I don’t care while isolating myself from anyone who can judge me! This is totally fine!’
Yeah, in context it really is. It makes everyone trying to push it as a Big Empowerment And Coming Out Anthem pretty confusing, though, because… this is not Defying Gravity’s ‘I am taking a stand against oppression and if I have to do this alone, I accept this’ bit. It just isn’t.
Its because although she’s isolating herself she is actually doing things active positive things she couldn’t do before because she feared she would be judged or hurt someone.
I intensely associate ice and snow with REpression thanks to The Last Herald Mage, so you would not believe how mind blowing it was for me to see ice powers being the ultimate expression of freedom.
I broke down crying in the theater during both frozen movies.
*plays the Theme from Law and Order on the hacked park PA* Double damn you, Willis, you did update your buffer for more than 5 days this time… It’s now 14!!
Go hunt down Bugs instead, TimeWarner won’t mind THAT
Now you see that’s your problem Ross. Parental concern isn’t the issue, trying to solve something you see as a problem with an over the top and nonsensical solution and excusing it do to parental concern is the issue. Especially since the problem would have been solved if you learned to live with it.
Originally Marriott’s Great America, opened in 1976. My family and I went there that year. It had one of the first inverted roller coasters ever seen, called “The Turn of the Century”, featuring a double spiral-type section that took riders inverted in a kind of ‘barrel-roll’ section.
Interestingly enough, at the same approximate time there was another amusement park called “Old Chicago” in the Chicago area that was located INSIDE a shopping mall in Bolingbrook, IL which ALSO featured a similar style of inverted roller coaster. It was long gone before Joyce and Becky’s time frame, however.
Idea being that eventually the webcomic will take so long another religion entirely will have replaced Christianity, with Christianity being lost to time
Hopefully this is going to reply to the correct comment. There have been lots of studies that speculate that the US is about two decades behind Europe in regards to the decline of Christianity. Churches all across the US are getting smaller, and in Europe a lot of churches are museums or some other type of facility now. I would assume that if the trend continues, Christianity wouldn’t be too large outside of the Bible Belt. There are some really neat studies if you are curious
Becky surely is through… but I wouldn’t be surprised if growing up learned all the rules and with them each an every loophole, not that they mostly worked but it would have been a way for her to claim her agency.
This reminds me of my friend who grew up with super controlling Christian parents. She wasn’t even allowed to watch Sesame Street because of Burt and Ernie.
Who would go to such bigoted extremes over a bootleg Elsa? Granted, I remember when Dragonball Z and Pokemon were accused of Satanism in Mexican newspapers, and that SpongeBob was gay.
Nah, it was that she thought that some of the Pokemon represented demons too closely. It didn’t really help when she saw Ghost types for the first time either.
It took me way too long to catch on to the joke in the alt-text. Which means one of these days I should probably re-watch Frozen. And then I’ll have to see the sequel eventually as well.
I caught on right away, but then, when I first discovered that song, I went to YouTube and listened to it every day for three months. Greatest song ever.
I saw Frozen once. I was massively underwhelmed by it. Seemed to me to be a story that needed at least one more pass through the word processor. Will have to see the sequel at some point.
The movie was kind of slapdash. It was completely rewritten in the middle of production. Elsa was going to be the heel until the songwriters came up with “Let It Go.” For all the faults with the plot, I absolutely loved the character of Elsa. I can’t tell you how deeply she spoke to me.
Yeah, “Let it Go” just doesn’t feel the same as “Shiny” or “World’s Greatest Criminal Mind”. Though Elsa being the villain would have probably convinced me to see Frozen, honestly.
They made her a protagonist because “Let It Go” was too positive, but then made that the thing she was doing wrong? And also she wasn’t really doing it, because her confidence was easily shattered?
I doubt he even knows how they actually acted. He’s just parroting people criticizing the film and thinks that films should always enforce the idea that parents can do what they want and should never be doubted.
Do step-parents count? Coz umm Snow White? If she had been obedient to her stepmother’s wishes the story would have basically ended with the huntsman taking her to the woods, pulling a knife, her expressing shock and horror, him explaining her stepmother had ordered it, and her meekly offering her throat to his dagger, coz challenging parents – even horrifically abusive ones – is bad, mmkay?
And Hansel and Gretel? “Oh, our stepmother wants to lose us in the woods so they don’t need to feed us any more? Cool, this seems like a random, pathless direction to head off into! We better not trouble our parents again.”
Can’t wait for the 75th Anniversary re-re-re-release, with an alternate ending where Snow White just lets the guy kill her. What changes, even? The queen continues to be an asshole unchallenged, the dwarves keep mining those delicious-looking gemstones, and the hunter has clout as a political assassin.
I think the point isn’t that what the parents did in the stories was right and needed to be obeyed, but that by portraying the parents as wrong and doing bad things the movies encourage children to rebel.
“stole food they didn’t need” uh, not sure which version you read, but there’s other version in which they very much needed the food because Rapunzel’s mother was pregnant and they didn’t have enough nutritious food for her.
No, they’re not. Gothel didn’t own the flower, it was wild. She selfishly kept it’s power to herself, which lead directly to it’s destruction since if she’d let others know how it worked they wouldn’t have needed to turn it into tea.
I have watched that movie and thought “So what was her crime,exactly? Wanting to not die? Not turning over her rightful flower property to the monarchy when they demanded it and sent their military forces out across the land?” Her narcissism does her no favors, but her core thesis of “why should I die when this technology exists?” Has merit.
Humanity is going to struggle with life extension as long as we shrug and accept that stem cell depletion and death are somehow noble and beautiful and part of nature’s wonderful plan for us all. That sort of naïveté is for the peasants.
Example: yes it’s noble that Eugene and Rapunzel were both willing to sacrifice their lives for each other, the very trait Mother Gothel lacked. But Eugene’s errors were multiple. He knew Rapunzel is in the tower because “the Old Lady has her”, and doesn’t even consider the possibility the old lady is still there and might have set a trap? Even failing that, there’s no reason why he couldn’t have effectively put his plan of “cut Rapunzel’s hair” (5e movie has been out for years, if that’s spoilers for anyone too bad) works just as well if he pulls it immediately AFTER she magically saves his life. And he is making the heroine’s decision for her by making that call without her knowledge and consent, robbing her of agency and murdering an old woman (who isn’t herself a murderer, attempted murderer maybe, if he’s healed and could arguably Be said to Be acting in a messed up form of self defense, like if he was coming to turn off her life support or steal her insulin).
Everyone is at fault for not working as hard as they can to learn a song that will make the magical flower bear seeds.
She literally kidnapped a baby, and the flower didn’t belong to her, the Sundrop was a mythical plant that belonged to no-one, though they do fully go into how wrong her father was in the series.
Also, self-defence doesn’t apply here, because Eugene was trying to stop her from committing a felony (in this case kidnapping). Also, y’know, she didn’t JUST kidnap a baby. She kidnapped the frigging heir to the throne. That probably is some sort of treason.
It’s definitely treason. I haven’t even seen any of these movies, but kidnapping the heir to the throne in just about any circumstances would count as treason in any monarchy.
Stabbing the condemned death row inmate who escaped his execution and then invaded her home doesn’t weigh in as evil as we want it to.
Eugene isn’t trained or certified as lawful law enforcement (hence him blundering into a trap like a chump). His lawful move was to turn himself in and attempt to send law enforcement to save the princess. Granted, they weren’t listening, but “I know where the princess is but only if you get there RIGHT NOW” will probably get their attention and maybe even lead toward clemency.
Kidnapping a baby wasn’t Gothel’s first plan. She cut off a single small lock of hair. If that had worked, she would have vanished off their radar forever troubling them no more forever. But then we wouldn’t have a movie.
Also, did the Royals REALLY need to kill the whole flower to make a potion? It seems pretty strong, maybe they could have at least TRIED making a potion from a single petal first?
Then again, if Gothel had just shared what she knew about the flower song with them (how did she learn that?), maybe she could have just sung the song next to the Queen and healed her that way, then they wouldn’t have had to grind up the flower like idiots. She probably could have worked out a deal where she shows them how the flower works and gets to sing to it once a day forever. But then again, no movie.
Yeah, no, it’s still pretty damn evil to try to kill someone to prevent them from freeing your daughter from emotional abuse. Because that is why she stabbed him. Eugene’s acting under defence of a third party. Gothel has no legal move.
And since we don’t see the actual recipe for the potion, I think it is fair to assume they did in fact need the whole flower, but even if they didn’t ‘it wasn’t her first plan’ is in no way a defence for kidnapping the future Queen Regnant and holding her prisoner for 18 years while emotionally abusing her the entire time.
The fact that you think that as long as kidnapping a baby is not being the first plan somehow excuses kidnapping a baby at all pretty much says it all, doesn’t it.
Not wanting to die at the expense of other people is different from not wanting to die. You saw what the destruction of the ring did to poor old Sauron. This does not make Frodo a villain for trying to destroy it.
An additional thing that occurred to me: by this logic, the worst villain in all of Disney is Belle. The servants turned into inanimate objects were still capable of moving and doing things, and as we see from Chip remaining a child were apparently ageless.
But no, Belle had to restore them with love. So she is both beauty and the beast. I mean, sure, they all seem really happy about being humans again at the moment, but now they will all start losing stem cells and eventually die.
Which is something we should reserve for peasants, who are inferior to the rest of humanity, apparently.
Morally you ask them what they want more, immortality or human bodies, ideally you can release them selectively. If it’s an all or nothing batch thing, then I guess you put it to a majority vote.
You misunderstand my meaning when I refer to “the peasants”, I am satirizing that group as seen by the 1%. The same group of billionaires who lobby against people having health care while having enough to afford millions of years of healthcare for themselves. The only way I can imagine a human justifying that level of wealth inequality is to frame it is the 99% below them are somehow a different class who fundamentally don’t deserve it.
If the 1% or 10% pooled their resources and made it a priority, they could probably work out serious life extension for everybody. I am interested in the mental arguments against that. The “it’s natural to die” argument is part of the software package in place for the 99%. Maybe Mother Gothel personifies when The Flower isn’t being cultivated and shared- but maybe she came closer to understanding its value than anyone else in the kingdom.
Except “Not turning over her rightful flower property to the monarchy when they demanded it and sent their military forces out across the land” didn’t happen in the movie, but kidnapping, enslaving, and abusing the princess did.
Did you maybe watch an entirely different movie that had zero plot similarity?
Also “robbing her of agency and murdering an old woman”? I see now we suddenly care about Rapunzel’s agency. But he definitely didn’t murder her as he never harmed her in any way and he was defending Rapunzel’s life so he was entirely entitled to harm her in every way. And he hadn’t died yet, but he was still expecting to die at the time so “attempted murder” wasn’t accurate (also, “You can’t kill somebody in self-defense because then you survive and therefore they only attempted to murder you!” is definitely not how that works).
It absolutely happened, did you not watch the first few minutes of the movie? Soldiers are scouring the land for the flower. Gothel clearly sees the soldiers and know they are looking for “her” flower. Does she run and tell them where it is? No, she hides it under a basket (which she accidentally knocks over in haste). It’s exactly as I described.
And as for the “not murder” thing, giving someone a non-instantly fatal wound when you have the means to magically heal any wound guaranteed weighs in differently than anything weighs in differently than anything our legal system has since we don’t have perfect magical healing in our universes.
No, it’s not exactly as you described because it’s not her flower. She thinks of it as such, but it isn’t. It’s a wild flower.
And it is absolutely still attempted murder if you intend to let them bleed out without healing or use it to coerce someone else into being imprisoned indefinitely.
Our universe does let you put someone in a device that will kill them unless you choose to release them, and any jury would find that attempted murder or something very close to it – I promise you, very very different from the “not a crime” you opened up with.
I get that you can sympathize with not wanting to die. But you’re letting that shared motive blind you to everything the character does to achieve that, and trust me, it means you’re excusing pretty despicable stuff. I don’t particularly want to die, either, but if the only cure for my mortality involves stealing a baby and taking their whole life away from them…well, that’s already the sort of thing I’d be willing to die to prevent, so.
Also – if you give someone what would be a fatal wound and they survive with treatment, you’ve still committed attempted murder. If Tangled took place today and Gothel stabbed him but he got to the hospital in time and survived, we wouldn’t be saying ‘Oh, no harm no foul’.
I still find it weird the crux of your argument really seems to be “But he didn’t DIE though so it’s not THAT bad” “But she didn’t WANT to ORIGINALLY kidnap Rapunzel, just sneak into her room, cut hair off of her, and then leave!”
‘That EVILLL king and his dying wife and child, using the whole flower instead of taking time to figure out the scientific method for the flower to be used indefinitely!”
Fun devils advocate stuff, but otherwise kinda red-flagy
Yeah tbh people who uncritically support Gothel in Tangled tend to be the people who at best pressure abuse victims to resume contact and give up their boundaries because FAMILY
On the one hand, he in some way wants what he thinks is best. On the other, that thought appears to have metastasized into “if I apply complete and total thought control over you to the level of controlling your thoughts about dolls at a fair loosely based on a movie with tangential references to parenting, I can force you to be a correct person.”
Ironically his harmfully overbearing parenting is upset at the portrayal of harmfully overbearing parenting.
An authoritarian’s attempts at control aren’t about the effects of the control. Making someone a correct person isn’t the endgame. Control is the endgame.
The scary thing is the movie doesn’t actually demonize parental concern. This is scary because if your dad recognizes that what Elsa’s parents did is seriously wrong and then decides that doing wrong is right that is so many red flags.
Right? “By the way, your kid has nuclear missiles in her fingers that could easily kill everyone if she gets mad. “Ok sweety, mommy and daddy need you to work VERY HARD at being calm all the time, can you do that for mommy and daddy?”
That’s probably what the trolls meant when they said “fear will be your enemy”. But it would take superhuman cool not to stress about your daughter’s world ending powers. I don’t fault her parents for not handling it well.
I remember more than a few comments complaining about Dumbing of Age demonizing parental concerns (and Christianity in general). I wonder how ironic they would be if we knew more about the people making them.
The sequel kind of redeemed the parents, showing the reason they died at sea was because they were trying to find out the secret to Elsa’s powers so they could help her manage them. Of course even without that I still put the parents from Frozen in the 80th percentile at least. You know, when you’re comparing them to people that destroy their kids’ collections, attempt to murder them, kidnapping, imprisonment, etc, not being the most effective at dealing with a special needs kid around the 1830’s isn’t that bad a sin at all. (BTW, the 2 Frozen movies must take place in the mid 1800’s based on the introduction of photography to the Netherlands.)
Parents who love you and are only trying to help can F up sometimes. While it clear that the way they responded to the incedent made everything worse. Its clear they suffered from making bad choices when scared, thy were not malicious, or stupid, or uncaring they were just wrong. And as much as you might complain about how they handled things, I can see trying to teach Elsa to shut her powers off, and calm down might have felt like a good first step.
Except they knew Elsa could control her powers perfectly well.
She never even lost control before she tried restraining herself. The accident happened when she [i]missed[/i], not when she couldn’t control her powers.
Moana’s father is a solid parent; overprotective, but when it’s framed as “I wanted to sail the ocean when I was your age. My attempt killed my friend and nearly killed me, so I am now going to freak out at the thought of you trying the same thing.” it seems way more understandable.
Something about this is bringing back memories of Christian childhood. Maybe it’s the semi-identical best friend girls who have totally different personalities…
It’s fun how this comic exists in a constant “now-ish”, this flashback happening in a past where Frozen is understandably in its heyday (so ca. 2014, five years ago).
>Back in the day of Frozen i had a terrible argument with my uncle who isn’t religious at all ( he, in fact, has been a terrible Godfather to me) because I dared criticize the parents in front of her young daughter
listen i was a teenager when i started reading the original roomies and its comletely jarring to see some of the cast (even though its an au) trying to win an off-brand elsa doll as kids
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I’m always disappointed after going to like a Dave & Busters and the crane machines are stocked full of those knockoffs
especially after a friend dragged us to a Round1, which has REAL prizes
(though also, uh, real WEIRD prizes)
Your roasted turkey plush confuses and infuriates me.
I read this comment before clicking the link and somehow I was still surprised.
Someone heard of babies with cold turkey and considered it a cute idea.
Is that the “Chicken Little” merchandise?
I didn’t know Disney’s Chicken Little was worth knocking off. Then again, I have seen plushies from Food Fight!
Huh, I get real prizes at Dave and Busters. Only been to Round1 once, but I wasn’t much of a fan.
could easily be like how Walmart in my hometown was AMAZING (open 24h!) and Target was middling, but where I live now it’s reversed, and Target is high end while Walmart is… pretty trash
We just got a Round 1 in our mall. I managed to snag two Aggretsukos, one normal and one doing the “metal face”.
Way better than usual crane prizes.
Towson?
(I wanted to be clear, before replies get locked, I didn’t mean to try to dox you if that guess is correct (or not), just that the one we went to was a grand opening and also they had the Aggretsuko stuff so HEY COINCIDENCE)
What town?
sounds like someone needs to let it go
… Did he not SEE Frozen?
Like, that movie didn’t demonize parental concern ENOUGH.
Considering his preferred reading material says a parent can kill a child for disobedience….
Let’s see… Elsa’s father does his best to teach her how to keep her powers under control… He bends over backwards, virtually shutting down the country to accommodate his daughter’s needs… They only leave once Elsa is a mature adult… later, Elsa gives Anna sound parental advice (don’t marry someone you just met)… later, we meet Kristoff’s “unique” family who have bizarre but loving attitudes towards their boy… and at the end, we learn about how Hans’ parents are going to deal with his poor behavior in Arendele.
Yup, really bad messages about parental concern.
To be fair… the issue was that Elsa’s father was teaching her to suppress them as opposed to controlling them. The whole “conceal, don’t feel” thing? Which was the problem because ultimately the powers weren’t going to just go away and trying to cram them inside to never be used proved to only do more harm than good.
People generally demonize that part because they didn’t try to help her learn how to use the powers. They freaked out about Anna and just decided her powers were objectively bad and needed to be contained.
Also making her think she needed to avoid all contact with her sister. Like, maybe some of that was just internalized fear that she might hurt Anna again, but seems like something that a better parent might help her work through.
It’s almost as if Frozen is a movie about parents trying to deny something about their child. “Oh, you’re a lesbian? You better hide that @%@#$ away otherwise people won’t treat you nicely and they’ll fear you, and I’m kinda scared of that too…” Yeah, nothing for Ross to be worried about at all
It’d be giving Ross way too much credit to think that he got that about the movie and suspected Becky’s feelings for Joyce, wouldn’t it? Yeah, he’s not that smart.
It’d be giving Ross too much credit to assume that he even watched the film. He probably just knew that it was on his church’s black list or whatever.
One-note, too.
Billie was chronically under the influence during that phase, and still was able to rant in detailed sentences, without sounding like he was reading from a limited list of mental cue-cards. What’s his excuse?
I can’t imagine Ross being worried about as a parent not being able to make their child concel their true nature. Not at all…
Fudge you, Ross.
Fudge you in the apse, Ross.
I don’t think they ever decided that her powers were bad, just too dangerous for her to control. She appears to be an omega level mutant, after all.
The trolls did give her parents the advice on how to guide her and they didn’t follow it, so that’s why they’re criticized. Her father could have easily taken her to a secluded spot in the mountains for her to practice as she was growing up, with only him as a witness/potential victim. So yeah, they deserve their blame.
That said, the power suppression is a metaphor for LGBTQ+/not fitting in/being different/etc. type situations many people find themselves in where they have to hide something important about themselves. THAT is the message secondary message Ross is objecting to here, with his primary objection being that the movie clearly makes her parents being in the wrong with their advice.
I’m legally obliged to post this here. Don’t blame me, I don’t make the rules.
I don’t know what law this is from but i want it in the human rights
Exactly.
Can we have something between Frozen’s “No! BAD Powers! Suppress them!“ and Hogwarts’ “why, sure we put children in life-threatening magical situations in school!“ ?!
I also see Frozen as a metaphor for how in my adolescence under fundie-christian influence, i was taught that sexuality is mostly morally wrong, basically. It left me with a lot of internalized sex-negativity instead of, um, using my powers for good.
(the “great“ thing about it is that “no sex until marriage“ / “sex is evil and dangerous“ was so strongly focused on that no one had time to plant solid homophobia in me. i still sometimes have to deal with my brain shaming me for wanting sex, but not shaming me for the gender of my partners…)
When i watched Frozen for the first time, i totally felt with Elsa, metaphorically.
Pretty sure “snow powers” are a thinly veiled metaphor for gay powers.
Were-gay…. if that’s not a thing, i WANT it to be a thing!!
All of this and a bag of chips. And Roiss looks even dumber, now that we’ve all seen the sequel.
Haven’t dared to watch the sequel yet, the first film was great and I wasn’t sure if the sequel would be, too. Do you recommend it?
Re shitty parenting: Not telling Anna what happened and letting her suffer from rejection is very high up on the list, too.
„Demonizing“ is something else, this was showing poor choices leading to near disastrous results.
No spoilers, but I honestly really enjoyed it myself. Wasn’t sure if I would like it going in, but I’d recommend it.
Maybe a better movie but the songs are less catchy.
I heartily recommend it, and I don’t like anything. It looks absolutely phenomenal at all times and you can safely use the bathroom when Moose Guy’s song starts.
Yes.
I mean… HELLO they literally mind-wiped Anna and then left he with no explanation of why her sister suddenly pushes her away.
Dude, it was an accident. They could have used it as a teachable moment of “we have to take better care so this does not happen again“, WITH the kids instead of pretending it never happened. Which has never stopped things from happening again?!
Uh, isn’t that sort of the definition of a religious fundamental upbringing? So why should Ross consider that bad?
Elsa was perfectly capable of controlling her powers all along.
She wasn’t an adult when he left, or she would have been coronated sooner (actually, where was the regent?).
And calling “don’t marry someone you just met” “sound parental advice” is a little strong. I mean I guess, but it’s not exactly massively insightful.
If I recall, there was going to be a regent character in the film, but he kind of fell by the wayside with rewrites and was ultimately left out of the final draft – the finished film sort-of implied that the role of regent during the year(s) of Elsa’s minority fell to the bishop who served at her coronation.
When I read panel two my first thought was that Becky was going for a Rapunzel doll, and I fully accepted that was Ross’s take on Gothel.
I mean, no, he probably never saw Frozen. He probably read some skewed article about it cherry-picking elements to make a point.
when was the last time the alt text was just the strip title?
There’s alt text now, but now that’s you mention it I vaguely remember reading a dinosaur comics alt text bongoing about how a different webcomic sometimes didn’t have alt text, and it may have been this one
I don’t know. I read this every day, and can’t remember there ever not being alt text (can’t say it didn’t happen once, but not enough for someone to bongo about.
But for the first few years, the alt text was just the strip title, so maybe that’s what they meant.
This site did not have alt text for about the first two and a half years. It wasn’t until sometime in February 2013 when Willis ‘discovered’ how to do it. Fittingly, the hovertext for that strip was “what i can add HOVERTEXT???”
Sometime in 2013.
Also Elsa has magical powers and creates sentient life thus putting her on the level of God, tries to kill a few guys, sings the lyrics “no right, no wrong, no rules for me”, and her character arc has numerous parallels to a coming out story.
But yeah, the parent thing is the problem.
You’re expecting an awful lot of nuance from a man who can be convinced that Blaine is a Christian.
I just assumed he’s never seen the movie and got his talking points from some right-wing website.
Although I’d love to think he secretly goes out and sees this stuff for himself.
Yeah, no. Ross doesn’t strike me as the type. I’d say he’s never seen it. In fact, he might not even have gotten his disapproval from a website but rather the folk at his church.
Most likely the church – though they probably get their advice from one of the approved Christian movie sites.
This has come up before and we know Joyce also wasn’t allowed to see it, so it was a broader community thing, not just Ross being a jerk on his own.
Elsa’s 200% gay in that movie, and the sequel only makes her gayer.
She totally is. And it’s glorious.
Eh, I dunno. The subtext could have been textier.
Totally, no arguments there. Unfortunately, Disney is run by cowards.
Elsa is my ace Disney princess and I will never let her go.
Wait, was I supposed to get ice powers when I came out as ace? I think I missed the memo
Nope, just icing on your cake, sorry, you probably ate it already.
I mean, I convert alcohol into indestructibility, but I’m pretty sure that’s more an Irish thing than an ace thing.
Carla in this very webcomic is both ace and homoromantic. No reason Elsa can’t be both.
This. I mean in the sequel she goes racing off into nowhere because of a pretty girl voice, that’s pretty homoromantic to me, but she’s also more clearly shown as ace in flashbacks to her childhood.
That’s the ideal for me tbh.
I’m with you. It makes perfect sense for Elsa to be ace.
I dunno, “Perfect sense” is challenged a bit by the raging lust between Elsa and Honeymaren
http://www.youloveit.com/uploads/posts/2019-09/1567544347_youloveit_com_frozen_2_spoiler_images01.png
I see your gay Elsa and your ace Elsa, and I raise you a gay ace Elsa.
¿porque no los dos?
Have sex with Elsa and you’ll find yourself frozen solid on the down stroke.
Elsa’s songs in the second movie are the gayest thing I have heard, and in a good way. Fashionable ice queen that sings and creates life out of non organic matter? She is a living god!
See, I saw that last song as ace all the way!
[SPOILERS]
What I needed the whole time to fill this gaping hole of yearning in my heart was self-acceptance? Metamorphosing into my best self? And earlier on, the little hints like saying “ew” to the idea of kissing (admittedly as a child, but hey, Disney was trying VERY hard to be referential and silent on the matter at the same time) and totally ignoring potential crushes of all genders as the film spooled on.
But then, I’m ace, and I think some of the lesbian-Elsa commentors are indeed probably gay. Maybe we can all agree she is le Queer Queen?
Now that I write it, it’s also a trans anthem ^^’
You reminded me that I still have to see the sequel sometime.
Doctor_Who, I believe I detect sarcasm, but I don’t quite get your point. Is the problem that Elsa tried to kill some guys (who were trying to kill her)? That she sang “no rules for me” (about the rules that had been imposed on her expression of herself)? Or is your problem with coming out?
Seems like the point is that, with all those easy targets right out in the open, it’s weird that Joyce and Becky’s parents chose to focus their objections where they did. Usually, Those Sorts go for the real obvious “problems”, like violence, rebellion, and queer people. Instead, these bozos decided that any portrayal of parental imperfection was some sort of anti-parent propaganda.
the sarcasm is directed toward Toedad’s hypocritical take.
Most fathers would take the “win” of their daughter being a good shot with an arcade rifle. Then, on top of that, an IP-savvy kid at her age is just a bonus.
(PS Is Becky holding that rifle left-handed?)
The … flavor… of Christian that Ross is would likely think that Becky being good with a firearm is Becky stepping out of her place.
And yes.
Nah, even the wimminfolk need to be able to exercise their 2nd Amendment rights when the atheists come to put all the oppressed Christians in the FEMA concentration camps under sharia law.
I expect you think you’re joking.
Well, duh. Everybody knows FEMA camps are a hoax.
They’ll be put into Google SmARTcamps, obviously.
It’s frightening how hard it is to parody some people.
Remember when the backwoods conspiracy kooks weren’t the loudest voice in every room on Earth, and you could say a bunch of nonsense as a joke? God, I miss that.
Given some recent presidents in the US and GB, it’s increasingly hard to tell one person’s satire from another persons dream come true.
Poe’s Law. Any attempted parody of fundamentalism will turn out to be indistinguishable from the real thing.
Becky is remarkably savvy for a ten year old.
This suggests she is very intelligent. It also suggests she has practice at looking for loopholes.
She’d probably be 12. Frozen came out 6 years ago, and she’s 18 now.
It’s possible she is left-handed, but not necessarily. I am right-handed but I’ve learned that my left eye is my dominant eye, so I shoot a rifle “left-handed”.
She held the pen in her right hand when she took orders at Galasso’s. Then again, would Ross try to force her to learn to do everything right-handed if she was a lefty? Or maybe she just doesn’t know how to hold a rifle and just saw an opportunity to play out the “win a carnival prize for someone” trope.
She could just be ambidextrous
Yes, Ross probably would. I have known plenty of people who thought that being left-handed was the influence of Satan.
Ross might be proud that Becky can shoot. He would most likely be threatened by her intelligence, however.
“I do it because I love you.”, right up there with “Look at what you made me do.”
Well I guess we know what Taylor Swift’s next song is gonna be called.
Can’t believe T-Swizzle stole her music from Right Said Fred, but she made it work.
If there was an upvote capacity on this site…
And “this hurts me more than it hurts you”.
I mean, you wouldn’t be able to see it anyways, Becky. Disney cartoon movies show happiness without God’s love.
And also promotes a culture of thinking your parents can be wrong about what they think is best for you.
YUP.
Well now the not-so-sliding timescale is weirding me out.
And I’ve never thought of Joyce’s hair as a relic of her conforming to her upbringing before, but after seeing the identical styles here…
You went somewhere else with that than I did. I thought it was her and Becky shooting for the same hairstyle, as very close friends are wont to do.
I remember Becky mentioning around the visit home/documents heist that she only was able to get her hair cut that short because she ‘accidentally’ got something stuck in it. Maybe either Joyce got the same style in solidarity, or Becky deliberately went with a similar one to what Joyce already had because she’s nice and safe and conformist?
This sect considers their hair their womanhood. Toe dad wanted her to reclaim it.
Hm. Yeah, looking it up, Becky’s hair in the first strip is distinctly shorter (about chin-length I think?) than it is here, so I think this is Ross’s ‘acceptable’ level and that specific shorter ‘whoops stuck my head in a vat of glue!’ haircut came later.
I’m not 100% on whether the Browns are particularly fussed about long hair – Carol’s is certainly relatively short compared to Bonnie’s, and we know they’re denomination-hoppers besides – but I also guarantee Carol would flip out at Joyce having as dramatically short hair as Becky’s undercut. I think they allow for some length leeway if it’s still suitably feminine.
(My great-grandmother NEVER cut her hair and apparently cried about how her daughter was going to hell when my grandmother came home from college with a haircut, so my standards for ‘religiously mandated long hair’ are way more like Bonnie’s than Joyce’s or even flashback Becky’s. Then again, this was the side of the family that’s just shy of Amish. For the record, they did get over it.)
The short hair came a year ago, after her mom died.
Yeah, in the outline-flashback strip where Becky finds her mom passed out with a bottle of pills, her hair is about down to the middle of her back.
Yeah, same! When the comic started I was the same age as the cast, which would’ve put this comic straight into the early aughts and the hot Disney IP would’ve been like, Lilo and Stitch or Finding Nemo or something. Now the cast is a whole nother generation and it’s odd.
I think in this flashback they’re close to the age I was when I started reading
The Sliding Timescale was my first thought. My first reaction-thought was “oh jeez Frozen is now old enough to be from their childhood instead of a recent movie like it is for me”.
Then I looked up dates. DoA started in 2010 and Frozen came out in 2013. It’s worse than I realized.I’m old. (oh wait I knew that already)
That was my first thought too — “Ha! The DoA strip started before the movie we are referencing here was even released. The sliding time-scale rules!!!”
YOU’RE old? I saw “Star Wars – Chapter IV; A New Hope,” when it was just “Star Wars!” And I was an adult, then!
Ha. Me too. And in the theaters, too.
The sliding timescale makes me wonder just how long Willis plans to keep this webcomic going. I mean, if it gets to the point where he’s too old to keep working on it, will he hire someone else to draw the comics for him?
Of course at that point this really will become those newspaper comics he made fun of in Shortpacked.
I just had a flashback to a blog post I read by some homeschool types about how Rapunzel was wrong to disobey Gothel. Even though it’s *technically* not breaking the commandment because Gothel wasn’t actually her mother, Rapunzel didn’t know that at the time and thus she should not have left the tower.
(Long, slow hiss through teeth) Wow.
the thing is, it wasn’t a post made by controlling parents but by girls raised in this mindset who were . . . well, basically Joyce except without the freedom of going to college and being exposed to different viewpoints.
I don’t remember any details of the blog, but it haunts me. I hope that someday, somewhere, they are discussing that blog post with their therapist.
They . . . they do realize that Gothel broke a commandment (and a few laws) first, right?
ok so I found the posts and posted a link (comment awaiting moderation) but apparently they felt that if she does report Gothel to the proper authorities she also has to turn in Flynn, even if that means he’ll have his hands cut off.
Hands cut off? No. He was going to be hanged.
I know that! But they feel hands cut off is more biblical. gah, expected the post to be approved by now ’cause it’s pretty on-topic — google “botkin sisters response to rapunzel” if you want to know what I’m talking about.
Oh god where’s the alt-text?
It’s there. It says, “the scold never bothered me anyway.”
The alt-text was different for about the first hour.
Yep. I can 100% see how a zealot’s child being smarter than them would push them over the edge. Then again, we haven’t really seen much of Ross in this flashback, and I doubt that Willis would try to humanize him after what we’ve seen happen.
Becky’s a southpaw?
Just like Commander Shepard and Link, among other badass redheads.
I always thought of Link as being blonde – it comes up most often in the character design – but then again, there have been rather a lot of Links over time.
She’s not on the canonical list of left-handers (Sal, Joe, Ruth, Dorothy), but then that list was drawn up before she entered into main-character-dom. Time for a dive through the archives looking for evidence, I suppose — or we could just wait for Word of Willis.
The handedness of cartoon characters shifts around to suit the scene. The artist needs ways to keep the characters facing the reader. Except in Fastrack. Everybody in Fastrack is left-handed.
Yes, but of course Evil Parallel Universe Becky is right-handed.
Is this sliding timescale sliding even further or am I just getting old?
If this strip runs long enough only Joyce and Becky’s grandparents will have been born when The Little Mermaid was released.
That’s making me think of Batman
https://shortpacked.com/comic/the-first-movie
In the jerk dimension Bruce Wayne just wears the bat on his face.
Becky and Joyce are 18 now, meaning they were about 12 when Frozen was released as of this point in the time scale. So this is still normal sliding rate
Thankfully only part of my family was this insane when I was a child, although they never did it with any Disney movies. Except for Bambi which you might not expect.
…why Bambi in particular ?
I’m guessing it’s because of Flower.
Anti-hunting stance?
Sympathetic portrayal of dinner animals.
Maybe someone had a bad day?
Because as a family we ate a lot of deer meat(my family is full of hunters and fishermen especially due to budget restrictions) so they didn’t want me to suddenly refuse to eat venison because of Bambi.
See, that actually makes sense. That’s a solid, practical reason, right there, unlike….well, anything Ross does, really.
Y’know, going by yesterday’s panel I wonder why Joyce was described as the functional one, rather than Becky.
We’ve known since Becky showed up, it was reversed.
Consider WHO it is thats judging, and what criteria.
Its about raw obedience to authority, only
heh. True.
Which means that while they were right about Becky, they were 100% wrong about Joyce.
Pastor: “Sweet little Joyce will never rebel against authoroty.”
(scene cut)
Joyce on a motorcycle: “I WILL EFF YOU UP, MOTHEREFFER!”
I can imagine her with a black Vespa to start with.
Maybe eventually she might work her way up to a Nighthawk or Rebel 250.
We don’t really need to speculate
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2015/comic/book-6/01-to-those-whod-ground-me/holdon/
Awwwh, baby gay Becky tryin to impress her crush. That’s actually extemely adorable.
D’awwwwww
Let It Go, Ross
Careful with those caps, you might Show Yourself as a fan of animated sinema.
Go too far, and we might find ourselves heading Into The Unknown with these references.
Hate to be “that guy,” but Six Flags isn’t a Time Warner IP anymore (hasn’t been since 1998 though there are numerous Warner Bros and DC IPs present at the park. And Time Warner’s now WarnerMedia. Pointless facts, I know.
I’ll shut up and be small now.
Six Flags still has Time Warner IP, even after the sale.
What does “IP” stand for? Google hasn’t been any help.
Intellectual property. Fancy lawyer-talk for “This is MY idea, and if you use it, I’ll sue you in law court.”
Thanks.
These IP shifts are confusing me. I’m old enough to remember when Warner Communications owned the New York Cosmos and Bugs Bunny was a mascot at their games.
Movies I grew up with now have someone else’s name on them. MGM made The Wizard of Oz, Turner later owned it, and now?
Now, Warners, the studio of Humphrey Bogart, Jimmy Cagney, and all those brassy Busby Berkeley musicals has its name on this extravagant, sumptuous musical fantasy.
The media industry is a complicated web of acquisitions, mergers, and divestitures. Just look at the histories of Universal, Viacom, and AT&T.
Fuck you, Toedad.
so serious question here–who else sees the Frozen movies as a Depression metaphor?
Maybe there’s more than a little projection going on, considering that Frozen came out at just the right time to help me through my darkest hours.
but…..I mean….I can’t be the only one to see it, right?
Ice powers shorting out in Frozen being a major depressive episode, Frozen 2 she has to learn to deal with it long-term–and Next Right Thing? Granted that’s not Elsa.
Though my theory is that it’s all about one person. Elsa the bad days, Anna the good, Olaf childhood innocence….
And, of course, Frozen as a depression metaphor doesn’t overwrite the gay subtext.
(And Hans’ turn to the dark side can be easily explained as a relationship that turns sour. He’s nice and kind in the beginning, even tries to help Elsa while she’s in the ice palace…..but by the end they’re through and all she has is bad memories of him so he’s the villain)
Oh, it’s definitely about depression. Hell, Kingdom Hearts 3 takes that theme and runs with it as the core premise of why you’re even in Arendelle.
Yeah, no, maybe because I first heard the song literally in the middle of a depression/anxiety breakdown, but I’ve never been able to read Let It Go as anything but ‘I’ve fucked up everything forever! I’m gonna pretend I don’t care while isolating myself from anyone who can judge me! This is totally fine!’
Honestly that’s actually kind of the point of the song
Yeah, in context it really is. It makes everyone trying to push it as a Big Empowerment And Coming Out Anthem pretty confusing, though, because… this is not Defying Gravity’s ‘I am taking a stand against oppression and if I have to do this alone, I accept this’ bit. It just isn’t.
Its because although she’s isolating herself she is actually doing things active positive things she couldn’t do before because she feared she would be judged or hurt someone.
I intensely associate ice and snow with REpression thanks to The Last Herald Mage, so you would not believe how mind blowing it was for me to see ice powers being the ultimate expression of freedom.
I broke down crying in the theater during both frozen movies.
Tonight, on Ana Chronism…
*plays the Theme from Law and Order on the hacked park PA*
Double damn you, Willis, you did update your buffer for more than 5 days this time… It’s now 14!!Go hunt down Bugs instead, TimeWarner won’t mind THAT
Now you see that’s your problem Ross. Parental concern isn’t the issue, trying to solve something you see as a problem with an over the top and nonsensical solution and excusing it do to parental concern is the issue. Especially since the problem would have been solved if you learned to live with it.
Is there even a Six Flags in Indiana?
Not since…. The Incident.
The incident?
We don’t talk about it.
Someone didn’t read the comments to yesterday’s comics.
The park has been ID’ed as the Six Flags in Gurnee, IL, a hundred miles or so from La Porte.
Originally Marriott’s Great America, opened in 1976. My family and I went there that year. It had one of the first inverted roller coasters ever seen, called “The Turn of the Century”, featuring a double spiral-type section that took riders inverted in a kind of ‘barrel-roll’ section.
Interestingly enough, at the same approximate time there was another amusement park called “Old Chicago” in the Chicago area that was located INSIDE a shopping mall in Bolingbrook, IL which ALSO featured a similar style of inverted roller coaster. It was long gone before Joyce and Becky’s time frame, however.
Not to be confused with the other Marriott’s Great America in CA, which was opened two months prior.
there’s the toedad we all know and hate
ArGHhh…the pun! It burns!
If the sliding timescale continues like this, eventually Becky’s parents aren’t even gonna be Christian
Okay, I’ve been sitting here for like 20 minutes, trying to figure out how. Please elaborate, because I’m extremely intrigued and puzzled.
Idea being that eventually the webcomic will take so long another religion entirely will have replaced Christianity, with Christianity being lost to time
I read it as a little closer to “in twenty years Toedad’s social niche will be full of fedoras.”
Hopefully this is going to reply to the correct comment. There have been lots of studies that speculate that the US is about two decades behind Europe in regards to the decline of Christianity. Churches all across the US are getting smaller, and in Europe a lot of churches are museums or some other type of facility now. I would assume that if the trend continues, Christianity wouldn’t be too large outside of the Bible Belt. There are some really neat studies if you are curious
Official answer: it’s a reference to those studies that predict religion will not be a thing in the future, since it’s been in decline so far
I look forward to seeing what religion is like in the future since I think of it as a fundamental part of humanity.
I didn’t know Time Warner owned the Asylum.
Becky tries loophole.
It’s not super acceptable.
ToeDad demonstratres why parental concerns are not always valied (jerk).
That it’s a knock-off is irrelevant to his position.
His position is bad and dumb, but Becky didn’t refute it. (Not that she could have.)
Becky surely is through… but I wouldn’t be surprised if growing up learned all the rules and with them each an every loophole, not that they mostly worked but it would have been a way for her to claim her agency.
a life under ToeDad has prepared her well for politics.
Yeah, whatever he was doing, don’t.
That’s a good general rule for life.
pretty much
This reminds me of my friend who grew up with super controlling Christian parents. She wasn’t even allowed to watch Sesame Street because of Burt and Ernie.
I think we’re missing the great puzzle of this strip.
…. how does a toe put an entire foot down?
Very carefully.
<3 <3 <3
Who would go to such bigoted extremes over a bootleg Elsa? Granted, I remember when Dragonball Z and Pokemon were accused of Satanism in Mexican newspapers, and that SpongeBob was gay.
A sapient toe would. This is why you should stomp on them regularly, so they don’t rise up
…Started to realize why my mom didn’t want me to watch or play Pokemon till I was 12.
Was it that the main character was 10 and not living with his parents.
Nah, it was that she thought that some of the Pokemon represented demons too closely. It didn’t really help when she saw Ghost types for the first time either.
Yea that seems like it would be the most common stupid complaint.
Don’t forget the flap over Tinky-Winky, the purple Teletubby.
It took me way too long to catch on to the joke in the alt-text. Which means one of these days I should probably re-watch Frozen. And then I’ll have to see the sequel eventually as well.
I caught on right away, but then, when I first discovered that song, I went to YouTube and listened to it every day for three months. Greatest song ever.
I saw Frozen once. I was massively underwhelmed by it. Seemed to me to be a story that needed at least one more pass through the word processor. Will have to see the sequel at some point.
The movie was kind of slapdash. It was completely rewritten in the middle of production. Elsa was going to be the heel until the songwriters came up with “Let It Go.” For all the faults with the plot, I absolutely loved the character of Elsa. I can’t tell you how deeply she spoke to me.
Yeah, “Let it Go” just doesn’t feel the same as “Shiny” or “World’s Greatest Criminal Mind”. Though Elsa being the villain would have probably convinced me to see Frozen, honestly.
They made her a protagonist because “Let It Go” was too positive, but then made that the thing she was doing wrong? And also she wasn’t really doing it, because her confidence was easily shattered?
Are you familiar with “The Snow Queen”?
It has literally nothing to do with “Frozen,” I was just curious.
If Ross thought that Elsa and Anna’s father was a good, misunderstood man, then it explains a terrifyingly large number of things about his behaviour.
I doubt he even knows how they actually acted. He’s just parroting people criticizing the film and thinks that films should always enforce the idea that parents can do what they want and should never be doubted.
Do step-parents count? Coz umm Snow White? If she had been obedient to her stepmother’s wishes the story would have basically ended with the huntsman taking her to the woods, pulling a knife, her expressing shock and horror, him explaining her stepmother had ordered it, and her meekly offering her throat to his dagger, coz challenging parents – even horrifically abusive ones – is bad, mmkay?
And Hansel and Gretel? “Oh, our stepmother wants to lose us in the woods so they don’t need to feed us any more? Cool, this seems like a random, pathless direction to head off into! We better not trouble our parents again.”
Can’t wait for the 75th Anniversary re-re-re-release, with an alternate ending where Snow White just lets the guy kill her. What changes, even? The queen continues to be an asshole unchallenged, the dwarves keep mining those delicious-looking gemstones, and the hunter has clout as a political assassin.
I think the point isn’t that what the parents did in the stories was right and needed to be obeyed, but that by portraying the parents as wrong and doing bad things the movies encourage children to rebel.
I didn’t know Comic Book Time could give someone whiplash, but OW! My neck!
Let it roll off your back. Like crap off a goose, or however that goes.
Little did they know that “ULSSA” was an anagram for “United Lesbian Soviet States of America”.
I am certain Ross thinks Mother Gothel is treated unfairly in Tangled, too
Honestly no but her parents are. They are as much the villains as Mother Gothel. They stole the flower.
In the original story Rapunzel was locked in a tower because her parents and herself stole food they didn’t need from an old woman.
Her parents suck too yes, but Gothel isn’t treated unfairly.
“stole food they didn’t need” uh, not sure which version you read, but there’s other version in which they very much needed the food because Rapunzel’s mother was pregnant and they didn’t have enough nutritious food for her.
No, they’re not. Gothel didn’t own the flower, it was wild. She selfishly kept it’s power to herself, which lead directly to it’s destruction since if she’d let others know how it worked they wouldn’t have needed to turn it into tea.
I have watched that movie and thought “So what was her crime,exactly? Wanting to not die? Not turning over her rightful flower property to the monarchy when they demanded it and sent their military forces out across the land?” Her narcissism does her no favors, but her core thesis of “why should I die when this technology exists?” Has merit.
Humanity is going to struggle with life extension as long as we shrug and accept that stem cell depletion and death are somehow noble and beautiful and part of nature’s wonderful plan for us all. That sort of naïveté is for the peasants.
Example: yes it’s noble that Eugene and Rapunzel were both willing to sacrifice their lives for each other, the very trait Mother Gothel lacked. But Eugene’s errors were multiple. He knew Rapunzel is in the tower because “the Old Lady has her”, and doesn’t even consider the possibility the old lady is still there and might have set a trap? Even failing that, there’s no reason why he couldn’t have effectively put his plan of “cut Rapunzel’s hair” (5e movie has been out for years, if that’s spoilers for anyone too bad) works just as well if he pulls it immediately AFTER she magically saves his life. And he is making the heroine’s decision for her by making that call without her knowledge and consent, robbing her of agency and murdering an old woman (who isn’t herself a murderer, attempted murderer maybe, if he’s healed and could arguably Be said to Be acting in a messed up form of self defense, like if he was coming to turn off her life support or steal her insulin).
Everyone is at fault for not working as hard as they can to learn a song that will make the magical flower bear seeds.
She literally kidnapped a baby, and the flower didn’t belong to her, the Sundrop was a mythical plant that belonged to no-one, though they do fully go into how wrong her father was in the series.
Abducting, imprisoning and emotionally abusing a child ring a bell?
Also…Yeah, I’m pretty comfortable calling STABBING SOMEONE attempted murder.
That “ouchie”? Hey, Gaston and Vader have done the same, and we know they are both regarded as upstanding members of their communities.
Also, self-defence doesn’t apply here, because Eugene was trying to stop her from committing a felony (in this case kidnapping). Also, y’know, she didn’t JUST kidnap a baby. She kidnapped the frigging heir to the throne. That probably is some sort of treason.
It’s definitely treason. I haven’t even seen any of these movies, but kidnapping the heir to the throne in just about any circumstances would count as treason in any monarchy.
Stabbing the condemned death row inmate who escaped his execution and then invaded her home doesn’t weigh in as evil as we want it to.
Eugene isn’t trained or certified as lawful law enforcement (hence him blundering into a trap like a chump). His lawful move was to turn himself in and attempt to send law enforcement to save the princess. Granted, they weren’t listening, but “I know where the princess is but only if you get there RIGHT NOW” will probably get their attention and maybe even lead toward clemency.
Kidnapping a baby wasn’t Gothel’s first plan. She cut off a single small lock of hair. If that had worked, she would have vanished off their radar forever troubling them no more forever. But then we wouldn’t have a movie.
Also, did the Royals REALLY need to kill the whole flower to make a potion? It seems pretty strong, maybe they could have at least TRIED making a potion from a single petal first?
Then again, if Gothel had just shared what she knew about the flower song with them (how did she learn that?), maybe she could have just sung the song next to the Queen and healed her that way, then they wouldn’t have had to grind up the flower like idiots. She probably could have worked out a deal where she shows them how the flower works and gets to sing to it once a day forever. But then again, no movie.
Yeah, no, it’s still pretty damn evil to try to kill someone to prevent them from freeing your daughter from emotional abuse. Because that is why she stabbed him. Eugene’s acting under defence of a third party. Gothel has no legal move.
And since we don’t see the actual recipe for the potion, I think it is fair to assume they did in fact need the whole flower, but even if they didn’t ‘it wasn’t her first plan’ is in no way a defence for kidnapping the future Queen Regnant and holding her prisoner for 18 years while emotionally abusing her the entire time.
The fact that you think that as long as kidnapping a baby is not being the first plan somehow excuses kidnapping a baby at all pretty much says it all, doesn’t it.
Not wanting to die at the expense of other people is different from not wanting to die. You saw what the destruction of the ring did to poor old Sauron. This does not make Frodo a villain for trying to destroy it.
An additional thing that occurred to me: by this logic, the worst villain in all of Disney is Belle. The servants turned into inanimate objects were still capable of moving and doing things, and as we see from Chip remaining a child were apparently ageless.
But no, Belle had to restore them with love. So she is both beauty and the beast. I mean, sure, they all seem really happy about being humans again at the moment, but now they will all start losing stem cells and eventually die.
Which is something we should reserve for peasants, who are inferior to the rest of humanity, apparently.
Also the Prince from Sleeping Beauty – the castle people would live forever if he hadn’t broken the curse, that bastard!
Morally you ask them what they want more, immortality or human bodies, ideally you can release them selectively. If it’s an all or nothing batch thing, then I guess you put it to a majority vote.
You misunderstand my meaning when I refer to “the peasants”, I am satirizing that group as seen by the 1%. The same group of billionaires who lobby against people having health care while having enough to afford millions of years of healthcare for themselves. The only way I can imagine a human justifying that level of wealth inequality is to frame it is the 99% below them are somehow a different class who fundamentally don’t deserve it.
If the 1% or 10% pooled their resources and made it a priority, they could probably work out serious life extension for everybody. I am interested in the mental arguments against that. The “it’s natural to die” argument is part of the software package in place for the 99%. Maybe Mother Gothel personifies when The Flower isn’t being cultivated and shared- but maybe she came closer to understanding its value than anyone else in the kingdom.
Except “Not turning over her rightful flower property to the monarchy when they demanded it and sent their military forces out across the land” didn’t happen in the movie, but kidnapping, enslaving, and abusing the princess did.
Did you maybe watch an entirely different movie that had zero plot similarity?
Also “robbing her of agency and murdering an old woman”? I see now we suddenly care about Rapunzel’s agency. But he definitely didn’t murder her as he never harmed her in any way and he was defending Rapunzel’s life so he was entirely entitled to harm her in every way. And he hadn’t died yet, but he was still expecting to die at the time so “attempted murder” wasn’t accurate (also, “You can’t kill somebody in self-defense because then you survive and therefore they only attempted to murder you!” is definitely not how that works).
“Attempted murder”, now honestly, what is that? Do they give a Nobel prize for “attempted” chemistry?
It absolutely happened, did you not watch the first few minutes of the movie? Soldiers are scouring the land for the flower. Gothel clearly sees the soldiers and know they are looking for “her” flower. Does she run and tell them where it is? No, she hides it under a basket (which she accidentally knocks over in haste). It’s exactly as I described.
And as for the “not murder” thing, giving someone a non-instantly fatal wound when you have the means to magically heal any wound guaranteed weighs in differently than anything weighs in differently than anything our legal system has since we don’t have perfect magical healing in our universes.
No, it’s not exactly as you described because it’s not her flower. She thinks of it as such, but it isn’t. It’s a wild flower.
And it is absolutely still attempted murder if you intend to let them bleed out without healing or use it to coerce someone else into being imprisoned indefinitely.
Our universe does let you put someone in a device that will kill them unless you choose to release them, and any jury would find that attempted murder or something very close to it – I promise you, very very different from the “not a crime” you opened up with.
I get that you can sympathize with not wanting to die. But you’re letting that shared motive blind you to everything the character does to achieve that, and trust me, it means you’re excusing pretty despicable stuff. I don’t particularly want to die, either, but if the only cure for my mortality involves stealing a baby and taking their whole life away from them…well, that’s already the sort of thing I’d be willing to die to prevent, so.
Also – if you give someone what would be a fatal wound and they survive with treatment, you’ve still committed attempted murder. If Tangled took place today and Gothel stabbed him but he got to the hospital in time and survived, we wouldn’t be saying ‘Oh, no harm no foul’.
I still find it weird the crux of your argument really seems to be “But he didn’t DIE though so it’s not THAT bad” “But she didn’t WANT to ORIGINALLY kidnap Rapunzel, just sneak into her room, cut hair off of her, and then leave!”
‘That EVILLL king and his dying wife and child, using the whole flower instead of taking time to figure out the scientific method for the flower to be used indefinitely!”
Fun devils advocate stuff, but otherwise kinda red-flagy
Yeah tbh people who uncritically support Gothel in Tangled tend to be the people who at best pressure abuse victims to resume contact and give up their boundaries because FAMILY
I wonder who is the one that is having this flashback. Ross, Joyce or Becky?
Wild card guess, it’s Dorothy.
Surprise twist! It’s the carny, randomly wondering how those plucky kids from the shooting game years ago turned out.
And her name is Wen . . .
“I don’t put my foot down because it’s fun. I do it because I’m a toe. It’s instinct.”
On the one hand, he in some way wants what he thinks is best. On the other, that thought appears to have metastasized into “if I apply complete and total thought control over you to the level of controlling your thoughts about dolls at a fair loosely based on a movie with tangential references to parenting, I can force you to be a correct person.”
Ironically his harmfully overbearing parenting is upset at the portrayal of harmfully overbearing parenting.
…loosely based on a movie that he has not seen and is parroting what he’s been told about it by someone who also has not seen it.
An authoritarian’s attempts at control aren’t about the effects of the control. Making someone a correct person isn’t the endgame. Control is the endgame.
The scary thing is the movie doesn’t actually demonize parental concern. This is scary because if your dad recognizes that what Elsa’s parents did is seriously wrong and then decides that doing wrong is right that is so many red flags.
Right? “By the way, your kid has nuclear missiles in her fingers that could easily kill everyone if she gets mad. “Ok sweety, mommy and daddy need you to work VERY HARD at being calm all the time, can you do that for mommy and daddy?”
Only if she were trying to kill everyone. Elsa never had any trouble controlling her powers before she was afraid of them.
That’s probably what the trolls meant when they said “fear will be your enemy”. But it would take superhuman cool not to stress about your daughter’s world ending powers. I don’t fault her parents for not handling it well.
Six of them. Over Texas.
As I said above, I think the problem is that the movie does make the parents wrong. That’s subversive enough in itself.
Frozen wasn’t even released when this comic started. Oh my aching back
What’s cool is Becky disputes Ross’s asserting that he’s doing it out of love, but then diverts to the doll. Becky already knew what was what.
He puts his foot down because as an anthropomorphic toe he is nothing but foot, and to do otherwise would require an anti-gravity device.
These flashbacks don’t seem to humanize him, they make him seem like he’s always been an abusive jerk.
“… I put my foot down because I love you. And I gaslight because that’s the most controlling method that will let me get my way for the longest.”
Jeebus… “demonizes parental concern”? So it’s “demonizing” to show that parents can be wrong. Right.
I remember more than a few comments complaining about Dumbing of Age demonizing parental concerns (and Christianity in general). I wonder how ironic they would be if we knew more about the people making them.
The sequel kind of redeemed the parents, showing the reason they died at sea was because they were trying to find out the secret to Elsa’s powers so they could help her manage them. Of course even without that I still put the parents from Frozen in the 80th percentile at least. You know, when you’re comparing them to people that destroy their kids’ collections, attempt to murder them, kidnapping, imprisonment, etc, not being the most effective at dealing with a special needs kid around the 1830’s isn’t that bad a sin at all. (BTW, the 2 Frozen movies must take place in the mid 1800’s based on the introduction of photography to the Netherlands.)
Parents who love you and are only trying to help can F up sometimes. While it clear that the way they responded to the incedent made everything worse. Its clear they suffered from making bad choices when scared, thy were not malicious, or stupid, or uncaring they were just wrong. And as much as you might complain about how they handled things, I can see trying to teach Elsa to shut her powers off, and calm down might have felt like a good first step.
It prevented her from endangering the world for several years, so there is that.
Except they knew Elsa could control her powers perfectly well.
She never even lost control before she tried restraining herself. The accident happened when she [i]missed[/i], not when she couldn’t control her powers.
Moana’s father is a solid parent; overprotective, but when it’s framed as “I wanted to sail the ocean when I was your age. My attempt killed my friend and nearly killed me, so I am now going to freak out at the thought of you trying the same thing.” it seems way more understandable.
Gahh, frickin’ Toedad.
Becky’s a southpaw.
Somehow I didn’t realize that.
Something about this is bringing back memories of Christian childhood. Maybe it’s the semi-identical best friend girls who have totally different personalities…
Also i’m impressed, toedad looks younger somehow
It’s fun how this comic exists in a constant “now-ish”, this flashback happening in a past where Frozen is understandably in its heyday (so ca. 2014, five years ago).
>Back in the day of Frozen i had a terrible argument with my uncle who isn’t religious at all ( he, in fact, has been a terrible Godfather to me) because I dared criticize the parents in front of her young daughter
You messed up the timeline. Assuming Joyce and Becky were 10 here, the current time for our characters would be around 2022 by now.
there’s no real reason to assume they’re 10 here.
That would make it worse
Why is 12 so much worse than 10?
listen i was a teenager when i started reading the original roomies and its comletely jarring to see some of the cast (even though its an au) trying to win an off-brand elsa doll as kids