#these are all half baked bullshit i had mulling on my brain don't pay me any mind

[androgynousblackbox]

Seeing so many people railing against the netflix show Dahmer because it hurts victims and exploits their suffering got me thinking some kind of way about the way America in general portrays themselves on movies, more those that either want to attribute to America especial kind of values that apparently no one else has (”freedom”) or directly reference war or militaristic actions as somehow good. This is an idea I have been cooking for a while when I saw a review, that otherwise was fine, in which the youtuber said that the Iron Giant is “anti-military” and I was so patently confused because no, it’s not. The military is literally portrayed as the good guys who did the right thing and reacted to a credible threat, rejecting the actual bad guy of the movie because they are too good to ever even think about hurting a white american child. The Iron Giant himself is a weapon of mass destruction that has the capacity of killing everyone but chooses not to because Superman, a symbol of American Exceptionalism if I ever saw one, inspires him to heroically take on a dangerous mission for the sake of saving everyone and if that isn’t metaphorically bringing to mind the way that the USA is the owner of some of the most destructive weapons in the entire Earth, but it’s fine because they are the USA and they are the good guys, then I don’t know what to tell you because it sure looks like that to me. And, like, that got me thinking... there are people out there to whom that can be traumatizing. There are people who have died on wars, or almost did, because of america exceptionalism, because of their “freedom”, because they tried to get an american taste and end up dying on a cage without knowing what happened to their children. Colonialism has a body count, slavery has a body counts, America and the military  have body counts, and those can cause traumas that will probably remain on some cases with an entire family, entire communities. If you all felt something about the generational trauma on Encanto, but still argued more about Latine characters never being queer or neurodivergent, then just try to imagine for one second how it feels for the people to whom America meant pain and suffering to constantly being gaslighted into believing that they are a force of good, sometimes the only force of good that keeps the rest of the world safe from certain evil and that evil happened to be your home. Why is that trauma not talked about more? Why is that pain the one that has us stopping for a moment and consider “wait, is this right? Is this truthful? Is this something worth repreating even though we are literally rewriting history and putting on a bright smile over the dead bodies of these people”? I don’t even want to say those narrative shouldn’t exist, I mean that kinda of discussion is just never there on the first place when it comes to certain kind of victims. Why we treat “true crime” as this precious thing that has to be handled carefully because “the family of the victims could be listening” but there is never that type of care about history, especially that one that happened to affect to the “losers” of it? Pain is pain and unnecesary suffering is bad, so why it’s okay on one context in which it happened to one person or a group of person by the actions of one or more individuals but not when it’s an entire country on an entire demographic?  Rationally I know why. Because that is the foundation of American Exceptionalism and to believe that they could be the bad guys for someone else, someone that is just as valuable and good as they believe themselves to be, is asking to tear down the entire fabric of what being american even means. Not to mention that it’s hard to see an statistic about the many fucks up of the CIA on Latinoamérica and realize that there were people behind those numbers, sons and daughters and everything else, a victim that didn’t deserve shit. I get that, but at the same time it kinda underwhelming when I see leftist going all out about how this or that show shouldn’t exist or it’s especially bad because it had this effect on the victims, which are valid feelings to have, don’t get me wrong, but there is still a clear distinction between who even brings those ethical questions and who doesn’t. Anyway, I don’t mean to invalidate anyone affected for the crimes of a person or the people who care about them because pain is pain and unnecesary suffering is bad, but the whole talk about how ethical or unethical true crime content can or has to be got me thinking about this. Also Iron Giant sucks. There, I said it.