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Zootopia review part 2: what about scalies?
9 years ago
This is part 2 of my Zootopia review, which ended up being really long, so I split it up into parts.
***SPOILER WARNING - YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED***
***SPOILER WARNING - YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED***
***SPOILER WARNING - YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED***
(Also warning: this journal might have ended up being kind of dark, idk)
Now that we've seen the movie, we know for a fact that it features just mammals. So yeah, no reptiles. Like I said in my previous journal, some scalies really hated that.
Funny enough, I actually didn't really care. In fact, I found it rather relieving. I must be one of few scalies who would prefer their species not to appear at all than to be represented negatively or stereotypically. This opinion goes against what seems to be the more popular one: most scalies seem to put more value in whether or not their species appear at all than in what role they carry.
I think what this implies is that different opinions about this topic can be distinguished by different ordering of the same priorities. In the popular case, the evil of omitting reptiles from an animal film outweighs the evil of presenting reptiles negatively. In my case, the latter evil outweighs the former one instead.
I wonder why this is the case. What causes us to value these things differently? They can both manifest as strong enough opinions to be cause for boycotting a film, hence the scalies' journal I posted earlier.
In my case, I've boycotted material like Skyrim before in the past, not on the grounds that dragons were negatively represented wholesale, since that's false (as I understand it Paarthunax is some kind of "philosophical" or "supporting" character), but rather on the grounds that the collective of dragons were as a general rule represented negatively.
This is the same reason why I dropped out of the MLP fandom - its treatment of dragons in the "teen dragons" episode was so insulting that I chose to disown the fandom, and now I perceive its "friendship" message as hollow, superficial, meaningless, and dangerous because of its hollowness, superficiality, and meaninglessness.
I'll admit my opinions have had even stronger manifestations: I generally have an extremely low opinion of just about anything connected to Tolkien, because so far as I've found there is precisely zero redemption in his material for any living thing that has reptilian features. Tracing it farther back, I have low opinions of the Book of Revelations, even as a Christian fur, and I have an extremely low opinion of Germanic mythology, since just about every dragon in Germanic mythology exists for the sole purpose of being killed by some other character.
The hard truth is that I've gone as far as to speculate from having taken Nazi studies as part of my philosophy major that the cruelty of the Nazi party is precisely because they have appropriated the cruelty inherent in Germanic mythology (c.f. Blut und Boden, Volksgemeinschaft, and misappropriations of Nietzsche, who in turn had a rather awful habit of praising mythology for its brutality) - they demonized Jews, Communists, "deviants," etc. on precisely the same principle on which their ancestors (by false tautology) demonized dragons. I've taken that even further, and suggested that first world culture has such a deeply-rooted habit of polluting the environment precisely because they have been taught by their ancestors to do so - because the outside world needs "fixing," and "undesirables" destroyed, according to heritage material like Beowulf.
So now the question becomes, why do I feel this way? Especially since other fans of the same thing - other scalies - have expressed very different opinions, that it doesn't matter to them if they're taking antagonistic roles so long as they "look good," even though it matters so much to me.
This is my best theory as far as I know. My own opinions basically boil down to the fact that I hate seeing a thing I like in pain without just artistic cause. It's one thing for a character to suffer and other characters react, saying "oh god, this character is suffering, we need to help them," which to me can be a very beautiful form of storytelling; it's a different thing entirely for a character to suffer and other characters celebrate, laugh at, or ignore that suffering, which, to me, is painful to experience when I find myself attracted to the character.
Maybe, ultimately, by principle of sympathy, it boils down to the fact that I myself have a low pain tolerance, and would rather not exist than be in pain, and, by principle of sympathy, value the same in characters I find myself attracted to - that if the pain doesn't in some way contribute to their being valued by the characters around them, that it would be better if the character I'm attracted to never existed in the first place, and I'd never got to know about them.
Whereas, for those other scalies with higher pain tolerance levels, they don't register unjust pain quite as strongly, and the pleasure of having this antagonistic character exist at all outweighs the pain of their existential suffering by being confined to the antagonistic role. Thus, inversely, the pain of having such characters not exist in a story outweighs the pleasure of knowing that there won't be any unjust suffering on their part. Then, in the end, differences in pain tolerance levels can be attributed quite simply to biology, and ultimately these differences in opinion can ultimately be traced back to biology (not the kind of "biology" Judy mentioned in the movie of course, but individual biology, which is a very different thing).
If that's the case, then, funnily enough, it's precisely because I'm more sensitive to the feeling of pain than other people that I'm less butthurt about the fact that my favorite kinds of animals don't feature in Zootopia. So be it. c:
***SPOILER WARNING - YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED***
***SPOILER WARNING - YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED***
***SPOILER WARNING - YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED***
(Also warning: this journal might have ended up being kind of dark, idk)
Now that we've seen the movie, we know for a fact that it features just mammals. So yeah, no reptiles. Like I said in my previous journal, some scalies really hated that.
Funny enough, I actually didn't really care. In fact, I found it rather relieving. I must be one of few scalies who would prefer their species not to appear at all than to be represented negatively or stereotypically. This opinion goes against what seems to be the more popular one: most scalies seem to put more value in whether or not their species appear at all than in what role they carry.
I think what this implies is that different opinions about this topic can be distinguished by different ordering of the same priorities. In the popular case, the evil of omitting reptiles from an animal film outweighs the evil of presenting reptiles negatively. In my case, the latter evil outweighs the former one instead.
I wonder why this is the case. What causes us to value these things differently? They can both manifest as strong enough opinions to be cause for boycotting a film, hence the scalies' journal I posted earlier.
In my case, I've boycotted material like Skyrim before in the past, not on the grounds that dragons were negatively represented wholesale, since that's false (as I understand it Paarthunax is some kind of "philosophical" or "supporting" character), but rather on the grounds that the collective of dragons were as a general rule represented negatively.
This is the same reason why I dropped out of the MLP fandom - its treatment of dragons in the "teen dragons" episode was so insulting that I chose to disown the fandom, and now I perceive its "friendship" message as hollow, superficial, meaningless, and dangerous because of its hollowness, superficiality, and meaninglessness.
I'll admit my opinions have had even stronger manifestations: I generally have an extremely low opinion of just about anything connected to Tolkien, because so far as I've found there is precisely zero redemption in his material for any living thing that has reptilian features. Tracing it farther back, I have low opinions of the Book of Revelations, even as a Christian fur, and I have an extremely low opinion of Germanic mythology, since just about every dragon in Germanic mythology exists for the sole purpose of being killed by some other character.
The hard truth is that I've gone as far as to speculate from having taken Nazi studies as part of my philosophy major that the cruelty of the Nazi party is precisely because they have appropriated the cruelty inherent in Germanic mythology (c.f. Blut und Boden, Volksgemeinschaft, and misappropriations of Nietzsche, who in turn had a rather awful habit of praising mythology for its brutality) - they demonized Jews, Communists, "deviants," etc. on precisely the same principle on which their ancestors (by false tautology) demonized dragons. I've taken that even further, and suggested that first world culture has such a deeply-rooted habit of polluting the environment precisely because they have been taught by their ancestors to do so - because the outside world needs "fixing," and "undesirables" destroyed, according to heritage material like Beowulf.
So now the question becomes, why do I feel this way? Especially since other fans of the same thing - other scalies - have expressed very different opinions, that it doesn't matter to them if they're taking antagonistic roles so long as they "look good," even though it matters so much to me.
This is my best theory as far as I know. My own opinions basically boil down to the fact that I hate seeing a thing I like in pain without just artistic cause. It's one thing for a character to suffer and other characters react, saying "oh god, this character is suffering, we need to help them," which to me can be a very beautiful form of storytelling; it's a different thing entirely for a character to suffer and other characters celebrate, laugh at, or ignore that suffering, which, to me, is painful to experience when I find myself attracted to the character.
Maybe, ultimately, by principle of sympathy, it boils down to the fact that I myself have a low pain tolerance, and would rather not exist than be in pain, and, by principle of sympathy, value the same in characters I find myself attracted to - that if the pain doesn't in some way contribute to their being valued by the characters around them, that it would be better if the character I'm attracted to never existed in the first place, and I'd never got to know about them.
Whereas, for those other scalies with higher pain tolerance levels, they don't register unjust pain quite as strongly, and the pleasure of having this antagonistic character exist at all outweighs the pain of their existential suffering by being confined to the antagonistic role. Thus, inversely, the pain of having such characters not exist in a story outweighs the pleasure of knowing that there won't be any unjust suffering on their part. Then, in the end, differences in pain tolerance levels can be attributed quite simply to biology, and ultimately these differences in opinion can ultimately be traced back to biology (not the kind of "biology" Judy mentioned in the movie of course, but individual biology, which is a very different thing).
If that's the case, then, funnily enough, it's precisely because I'm more sensitive to the feeling of pain than other people that I'm less butthurt about the fact that my favorite kinds of animals don't feature in Zootopia. So be it. c:
