Current Events > C/D: edgy fan theories about childhood media are mostly garbage and need to stop

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Feel free to post your favorite/least favorite fan theories ITT if you want.

I'm sick of the dumbass edgy theories about kid's entertainment. It was tired and boring in 2012, and it's tired and boring now. What's the deal behind the Rugrats theory where all the babies are actually dead and figments of Angelica's imagination, or the Totoro theory that posits that the movie is based in a murder case where two young girls were murdered in the 1950's? It's like some dumb shits can't enjoy something made for a young audience unless it has some dumb, dipshit "deeper meaning" to it to excuse their enjoyment of it as an adult.

Similar case with like shitty creepypastas that go "I played Pokemon Red but there was a hyperrealistic ghost hand that was covered in blood and it made me throw up and the game said it was going to murder me in my sleep" - I don't mind creepypastas like Pokemon Black that's like "yeah this game felt like a romhack, I had a ghost Pokemon that kept killing other trainers before turning on me, I played it a good 6 or 7 times and it played the same the whole time", but the whole Sonic.exe level shit is just annoying and garbage.

Totoro is a character-driven movie with whimsical elements, with very little plot. It's a loosely structured adventure based in whimsy and imagination. And Rugrats is a cartoon about babies who can communicate with each other in their own baby language and who see the world through their own baby eyes, while the audience gets glimpses of the adult's vision of what's actually happening. You don't have to dress it up as "actually the characters were claimed by the god of death at the end, and were actually murdered or drowned like these two girls in real life" or "all the babies were dead and Angelica created personalities for them based on when and how they died". It's not that deep. Fucking stop it.

And of course - no, as much as the internet wants to break through and make this theory a reality, Chihiro from Spirited Away is not a child prostitute and the gold scene isn't an allegory for the fat, wealthy, anonymous elite having sex with children in bath houses. That dismisses the whole plotline with Chihiro and Haku's names, the fantastical elements like the train that operates in the shallows and the theme of growing up and adapting to change. It's lame, edgy shit that dismisses the merits of these pieces of media for the sake of cynicism, for the sake of making something about something it's not so some edgy dipshit can enjoy it on a "deeper" or "ironic" level.

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@MeltyAlert

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Eh, I don't know that I really agree. Some of them are incredibly stupid, sure, but I still find it interesting that people can see pretty much whatever they want in any form of media and even bring up (somewhat credible) "evidence" to support their case.

When you see an actual good example of it, it's usually some truly out of the box thinking.

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I know not of these theories of which you speak, but if it's similar to "the mandela effect" then yes it absolutely needs to stop

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Youre mad

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Ultima Dragon posted...

Eh, I don't know that I really agree. Some of them are incredibly stupid, sure, but I still find it interesting that people can see pretty much whatever they want in any form of media and even bring up (somewhat credible) "evidence" to support their case.

When you see an actual good example of it, it's usually some truly out of the box thinking.

I agree, actually. I don't mind people running media through different schools of thought, or if a theory makes a solid point about a work. Recently there was a hubbub about people viewing the original Matrix movie through a trans lens and finding a few things that lined up with the trans experience, despite both of its creators viewing themselves/presenting themselves as cisgender at the time. I found that process incredibly interesting.

There's also videos on YouTube arguing about death of the author and other literary concepts, and as I mentioned I don't mind creepypastas that don't cross the line into "the character seemed to be reading my mind and then they told me to cook myself in the oven, I only survived because my mom saw me climbing in and stopped me". I absolutely appreciate a good fan theory.

My beef is when the theory posits that the thing in question actually has a dark, cynical, adult side that none of us every thought about, and proceeds to list a bunch of shit about how everyone's dead or that a bunch of characters were being molested by the main adult figure in the show or something like that. Like the only way that a self-respecting adult can enjoy something is for it to be about death, mental illness or sexual themes.

I remember seeing a theory like "the Winnie the Pooh characters represent a different mental illness", and by the title alone I was gonna include it in this post I'm making. But I thought about it - Piglet represents anxiety, Tigger represents ADHD or mania, Eeyore is depression (obv), and while it doesn't represent every Winnie the Pooh character necessarily it does make a couple of inspired points. I'm still tempted to say that it falls in with the Dead Rugrats theory, but given that it doesn't go all "they're all personifications of these concepts in the mind of a disturbed little boy with no future" - which it might, if Pooh and the gang are meant to be concepts imagined by Christopher Robin based on his plush toys, which might be a canonical interpretation of the Winnie the Pooh franchise - I haven't minded that theory in the past, on a basic surface level. Could still be a bunch of shit, but it didn't outright repulse me.

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I think I agree but also don't think it deserves several paragraphs

BlockAddition posted...

I know not of these theories of which you speak, but if it's similar to "the mandela effect" then yes it absolutely needs to stop

The Mandela Effect is its own can of worms. If it's some dumb jokey shit, fine, but if it's the fartbrains who use terms like "predictive programming" to explain how the Simpsons "predicts the future" and/or who subscribe to like Flat Earth levels of dogshit theories, then it's a plague on pop culture. I hate serious Mandela Effect posters.

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I think this would be part of my wider dislike of internet era fan theory culture tbh

Thats not what predictive programming theory means
predictive programming is a conspiracy theory that says the government does all those bad things the Simpsons predicts and they put it on TV to subliminally make people more accepting of the traumatic events

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damn.

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