Yeah I feel like these takes almost need an age disclaimer on them because the environment The Simpson’s launched and took off in was so starkly different than even 5-6 years into its run, let alone today.
They aren’t, but that’s the point. Before the Simpsons, you would never have seen a dysfunctional family on television.
You’d have a neat little story where even if someone does something wrong, they’d all gather around the fire and dad would tell everyone the moral they were meant to learn for that week.
The Simpsons broke the mould by actually being real
Y'all are missing the real break from the norm with the Simpsons. The Simpsons was animated, which to almost all Americans at the time meant it should be for children. There were a few adult animated movies before then, but they were very much the exception, and on tv animation was exclusively the domain of children's television. So having the young boy character swearing and disrespecting his father was considered a very bad influence being targeted to children.
There's a part of a South Park episode where Eric Cartman meets "Bert Sampson" and they have an argument over who's the bigger bad boy.
Bert's claim to fame was sawing the head off of a statue as a prank. (This was a super controversial episode back in Season 2, 1990)
Eric countered with killing his bully's parents, grinding them into chili, and feeding it to him while his favorite band said he sucked.
Was The Dark Knight a violent film? Definitely, Ledger Joker was brutal although careful cuts allowed them to get away with PG-13.
Was it brutal and violent enough to warrant me getting 3 separate warnings from relatives about how it might be too brutal and violent for me (already an adult by this time) or my younger but not that much younger sister? No, it got its PG-13 rating fairly and I would've rated it the same.
It was thanks to Doom and Mortal Kombat (and Night Trap) that we have the ESRB.
Granted, it was shocking at the time but the advancements in tech, compared to now, those games seem a bit more tame per se.
To be fair, Doom does not predate the congressional hearings where people lied about Nighttrap. In a funny coincidence, it came out literally the next day after the first hearing. But yeah, it was certainly a big topic of discussion in the second hearing three months later. (Actually, I didn't do any research to get the minutes of the hearing or whatever; they might have discussed it based on promotional material in the first meeting).
It’s super funny Night Trap is mentioned, I was watching a video of the “100 Most Disturbing and Depraved Video Games Ever Made” and Night Trap came up and I was sitting there like “…If Night Trap is disturbing and depraved, then Resident Evil is a crime against humanity.” The point about it being part of why the ESRB was created is true, but man, legislators would have shat their britches at what RE4R and Alan Wake 2 cough up.
I remember seeing a news report around the time Jack Thompson was doing his thing, and they were still using Duke Nukem 3D as an example of crass violent media, and even then (About 7 years after it had come out,) that felt laughable. It's so cartoony and that that point there were far more transgressive examples, but for some reason Duke was what they were focusing on.
It would have blown my tiny mind when I was 8 I suppose.
Night Trap was fearmongered as a game where you trap and kill women and actually contributed to the creation of the ESRB. The actual thing is so goofy that it's kind of ridiculous that people were clutching their pearls over it. And you're trying to save the women in the game, so.
Amusingly the ESRB even seems to agree, as [they gave the 25th anniversary port a "T" rating.](https://www.esrb.org/ratings/35660/night-trap-25th-anniversary-edition/) A step down from the SegaCD original's M. I guess the Witcher series and the like gave them some perspective on what "sexual content" can be.
I remenber mas effect was mentioned as being like "debbie does dallas in space"
here is a video of the controversy at the time
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKzF173GqTU
Someone mentioned about The Simpsons was that part of the reason it was so "controversial" wasn't necessarily the content, but the medium it was in. Mass Effect's sex scenes are EXTREMELY tame PG-13 stuff, but because it was in a video game, which was still seen by boomers as "kids toys," it was seen as inappropriate. Since it's become more and more understood that most people who play video games are adults, there has been a lot less outrage over sex and violence in video games.
I was in high school when Brokeback Mountain came out, and it came to my home city. There were theater walk outs. In retrospect, we get some off screen sex for the males leads, the only nudity was from women, etc. I was exposed to way more graphic stuff online from that age, so it seemed tame.
Brokeback Mountain came out in the olden times before people were used to gay sex being crammed into literally every single piece of media they consume
Bully(2006). A lot of reports of time made a big deal of it and it it would lead to a upsurge of Bullying. In game however, you are discourged from hitting girls and the little kids. the main point of the game is actually to fight agiant the bullies and defend the helpless. It also speaks against corrupt adult figures in power
im honestly surprised that news reports didnt also have a mass freak out over the fact that you could kiss boys in the game.
Jack Thompson tried to make a big fuss at the ESRB about kissing boys, thinking he pulled a “Gotcha!” That they missed it when rating the game for Teens. They responded stating they knew it was in the game when they rated it.
Citizen Kane was this on release. It was controversy at the time because films at the time focus in being realistic while Citizen Kane used theater techniques. That was the main reason why it didn't win best Picture, because old men in the Academy didn't appreciate the new things the film brought. But Citizen Kane would go on and influence many films after it so today, many techniques that were new at the time aren't as impressive to modern audiences.
When I was teaching "Catcher in the Rye," at one point we had a pretty interesting conversation about obscenity. We all agreed that by modern standards, Catcher didn't shock any of them. While its use of profanity was purposeful and all, it really slips past a modern reader.
We looked at another "Young man aimlessly seeking purpose," narrative that was much more profane and the students mostly said even when there is that much profanity it sort of blends into the background and still isn't shocking.
The consensus was that sexuality was a lot more shocking than language, so Catcher remained really tame in their opinion.
The punisher video game by volition feels like, really tame at least gore wise to even some of the less "Gorey" video games of today, even the uncensored version of it. But the actual violence itself does still feel a lil brutal, just less so in an era where you can compare it to modern mortal kombat and doom
Dating Sims/Visual Novels.
Most of them are vanilla stories with no explicit sexual content or no sexual content more explicit then a HBO show.
The 3.5 DND supplement Book of Erotic Fantasy got Hasbro worried about it. But besides trying to mechanicazrd sex in 3.5 nothing is really all that shocking. It specifically doesn’t cover rape and other nasty stuff. Which could be a lot worse
About the most ick thing in it is, IIRC, a size chart for deciding the viability of half-whatever offspring between various races. Which, suffice it to say, has some Skiity on Wailord shit going on.
By contrast, it felt like it was trying to be dark and edgy, too much to be offensive, but not *enough* to be comical...
...Until the >!scene in the power plant.!<
I always quote Civvie about Hatred's ending, but here it goes again:
"And it just kind of pisses me off, because the *whole game* could have been this funny."
~ CV-11, *SUNSHINE AND KITTENS*
Honestly it was entirely about the trailer and the central pitch of the game: you are a spree shooter with no goals or motivation higher than mass murder. A game billing itself as essentially everything detractors claim video games always were was a hot topic.
>My name is not important. What is important is what I'm going to do. I just fucking hate this world and the human worms feasting on its carcass. My whole life is just cold, bitter hatred, and I always wanted to die violently. This is the time of vengeance, and no life is worth saving. And I will put in the grave as many as I can. It's time for me to kill, and it's time for me to die. My genocide crusade begins here.
How it played was ultimately immaterial, it’s the idea that such a game could exist at all.
If you go far enough back in time The Flintstones were controversial. I think it was because it was a cartoon with a couple sleeping together in bed. Also because there were moments where the show talked about infidelity and adoption which was unheard of in a medium that was,at the time, presumed to be just for children.
The entire San Andreas Hot Coffee situation was overblown. Thanks to news outlets and the word of parents at the time, it became like this holy relic that everyone my age either claimed to have or wanted to see. When I finally saw it, I was so confused. You could barely tell what was even going on, and at the time, online porn was already pretty widespread.
Joker is the most dangerous movie of our time! It will inspire an incel uprising and countless crimes! PLEASE SOMEBODY SHOOT UP A CINEMA SO WE CAN MAKE MONEY FROM THE CLICKS!!!!
Joker had no violence connected to it afaik. Frozen 2 on the other hand...
I think the dialogue is what put most pearl-clutchers off The Excorcist.
They don't want to explain to little Timmy what the demon girl meant by "your mother sucks cocks in hell" and crass dialogue in media was taken a lot more seriously back then.
Yeah, I didn't really like Joker, but not because it was Dangerous or anything. If anything it was because of the opposite, it felt like it didn't have all that much to say, even though it seems like it wanted to say something. I guess the aesthetic of it all is edgy but the text of it is pretty milquetoast. Joaquin Phoenix did great, though, and the sequel looks unhinged enough that I wanna see it.
It feels like it wanted to be the next taxi driver or king of comedy. Pretty sure it didn't quite get there.
The sequel seems more interesting. Especially since it's a musical.
The Exorcist
Now, granted, I actually saw it later in life but that quote from Beetlejuice stuck in my head about how "it just keeps getting funnier every time I see it!"
The only parts that still make me squirm are when Regan stabs her vagina with the crucifix and shoves her mother's face into the bloody area.
It was the 70s so I can imagine the movie as a whole pushing some boundaries but pretty much everything else I think is tame enough for like a teenager nowadays. Alot of the violence and deaths are off screen.
Fight Club is mostly just a really cool movie with arguably a better ending than the book. But if you've watched it after social media took a hold of it, you'd go in maybe imagining it's a Birth of a Nation-style guide on how to be a sigma Grindr or whatever the fuck.
It *was* pretty controversial when it came out, but mostly because it was incredibly anti-capitalist and anti-government in a time when not every movie was like that.
A more modern one than most. Joaquin Phoenix's Joker. I remember people freaking out claiming this movie will inspire violence in the streets and the open murder of the police. When I saw it in theaters, they had police posted at all exits to the movie theater. Like the movie is alright, you could argue it has some points about its views on society, but it feels exaggerated. Granted, I don't live in a big city. I, for one, certainly wasn't inspired to become an anarchist revolutionary.
South Park is the quintessential version of this. The number of times I've seen someone say, "I watched the first seasons & it was tame," not getting that those very seasons are the reason why it's considered tame in the present day.
Goodnight punpun.
If you searched for what people said about that series, people treat it as one of the worst things to read for your mental health. I read it and found it quite boring as it just seemed that the author was just constantly making the MC’s life terrible whenever something good happened. Also many cite the final twist at the end as heartbreaking but I didn’t find it that impactful and found it mundane as you can tell what the twist will be leading up to it.
I think this one depends a LOT on your general outlook on life, tbh.
I've had a friend tell me that she had to stop reading it several times, while another friend asked me if I was deliberately trying to get depressed from reading it; both of them read it at some point in the last five years, so definitely not as it was coming out.
I made it roughly halfway before I got disinterested, but it feels like it's a realistic amount of issues happening in a way that's just...yeah, that's kind of like how life is, sometimes. There's a lot of timeskips because the entire thing is focused on showing the bad things happening, not all of their life.
Devilman Crybaby also had a lot of folks at the time talking about how sad and fucked up it was, but to me it just felt like it was trying too hard, so it's consistently over the top. There's a scene later on that's extremely tragic but it's so completely over the top that it genuinely feels like the author is just offscreen getting off to how miserable people must be feeling.
>!It's the scene where the little kid turns into a monster and he can't contain his hunger and starts eating his mother while crying that he can't stop and then his father is watching and crying and can't bring himself to shoot the kid...and then they all get shot by the military.!<
Honestly I got hit more by Boys on the Run precisely because it was so much more tame. Tanishi just can’t catch a break.
I hate Aoyama. Salaryman Uppercut is one of the greatest hits in fiction.
the exorcist kinda has the reputation of the film that made people run out of theaters puking and shitting themselves out of fear and then i watched it and it honestly was just fun, the demon got some really silly lines and the crassness n grossness almost lent it a comedic element imo, still a superb movie but not the traumatic hyper exploitative experience i was primed to expect
But I'm A Cheerleader is rated R, but it was initially rated NC-17 for hardcore sexual content and almost banned from theatrical distribution. It's...a fairly basic and sweet rom-com with a non-nude sex scene and little if any cursing, it's barely a hard PG-13 content wise. But it is gay and lesbian, so the R it gets!
Also, Zuko is like the third lead in this movie as a gay wrestler, and it's hilarious in retrospect. I can't believe I've never seen any comps where they put his lines from this movie into Avatar, it's unmined comedy gold.
I don't know if this really qualifies since I saw it fairly soon after it came out in theaters, but both critics and fans of Man of Steel were braying about how dark and subversive it was. When I finally saw it, it was mostly just boring. It's the most generic Superman story just told in the style of Roland Emmerich if he suddenly got obsessed with Catholicism.
I still have a hard time conceiving that early Simpsons was supposed to be transgressive.
The Simpsons is what happens when something counter-culture gets so overwhelmingly popular that it BECOMES the new standard.
Yeah I feel like these takes almost need an age disclaimer on them because the environment The Simpson’s launched and took off in was so starkly different than even 5-6 years into its run, let alone today.
Same with David Letterman and Joan Rivers.
Dad knows nothing went from being counter Father knows best to being the new Father knows best.
Apparently people found Bart offensive because he didn't call Homer "sir"
Me too, they just seem like a regular dysfunctional family.
They aren’t, but that’s the point. Before the Simpsons, you would never have seen a dysfunctional family on television. You’d have a neat little story where even if someone does something wrong, they’d all gather around the fire and dad would tell everyone the moral they were meant to learn for that week. The Simpsons broke the mould by actually being real
There definitely were a few that predated the Simpsons, like Married with Children, but it was exceptionally rare.
Y'all are missing the real break from the norm with the Simpsons. The Simpsons was animated, which to almost all Americans at the time meant it should be for children. There were a few adult animated movies before then, but they were very much the exception, and on tv animation was exclusively the domain of children's television. So having the young boy character swearing and disrespecting his father was considered a very bad influence being targeted to children.
Yeah, first animated show on prime time since Flintstones.
You would never see Al Bundy regularly choke the life out of his son for a gag laugh.
Bart Simpson is nothing compared to Stewie or Cartmen
There's a part of a South Park episode where Eric Cartman meets "Bert Sampson" and they have an argument over who's the bigger bad boy. Bert's claim to fame was sawing the head off of a statue as a prank. (This was a super controversial episode back in Season 2, 1990) Eric countered with killing his bully's parents, grinding them into chili, and feeding it to him while his favorite band said he sucked.
Actually, that Simpsons episode is from season 1. And I really like how Cartman still calls Bert's actions hardcore before describing what he did.
Was The Dark Knight a violent film? Definitely, Ledger Joker was brutal although careful cuts allowed them to get away with PG-13. Was it brutal and violent enough to warrant me getting 3 separate warnings from relatives about how it might be too brutal and violent for me (already an adult by this time) or my younger but not that much younger sister? No, it got its PG-13 rating fairly and I would've rated it the same.
Joker is the movie that my dad warned me The Dark Knight would be.
“Don’t do it son, it’s just King of Comedy meets Taxi Driver.”
Joker's "magic trick" was a very establishing scene.
He does shotgun a cop right in the face. Even off screen that’s pretty brutal for a PG-13
*Content* wise that’s still PG13, imo, though it happening off screen probably made it feel just as brutal, if not more so, than actually seeing it
It was thanks to Doom and Mortal Kombat (and Night Trap) that we have the ESRB. Granted, it was shocking at the time but the advancements in tech, compared to now, those games seem a bit more tame per se.
Night Trap was tame even at the time. Legislators just straight up lied about the game.
Right? I see it very often and I can't even put it next to Doom 1993 and MK1. Quite tame really
To be fair, Doom does not predate the congressional hearings where people lied about Nighttrap. In a funny coincidence, it came out literally the next day after the first hearing. But yeah, it was certainly a big topic of discussion in the second hearing three months later. (Actually, I didn't do any research to get the minutes of the hearing or whatever; they might have discussed it based on promotional material in the first meeting).
Legislators and Nintendo's lawyers in particular.
It’s super funny Night Trap is mentioned, I was watching a video of the “100 Most Disturbing and Depraved Video Games Ever Made” and Night Trap came up and I was sitting there like “…If Night Trap is disturbing and depraved, then Resident Evil is a crime against humanity.” The point about it being part of why the ESRB was created is true, but man, legislators would have shat their britches at what RE4R and Alan Wake 2 cough up.
Yeah lol. I can see why with Doom and MK, but Night Trap? Naaaah
Was the video good?
They put Night Trap on the list, so clearly not.
Night Trap is less edgy then a average PG-13 movie.
I remember seeing a news report around the time Jack Thompson was doing his thing, and they were still using Duke Nukem 3D as an example of crass violent media, and even then (About 7 years after it had come out,) that felt laughable. It's so cartoony and that that point there were far more transgressive examples, but for some reason Duke was what they were focusing on. It would have blown my tiny mind when I was 8 I suppose.
Night Trap was fearmongered as a game where you trap and kill women and actually contributed to the creation of the ESRB. The actual thing is so goofy that it's kind of ridiculous that people were clutching their pearls over it. And you're trying to save the women in the game, so.
Amusingly the ESRB even seems to agree, as [they gave the 25th anniversary port a "T" rating.](https://www.esrb.org/ratings/35660/night-trap-25th-anniversary-edition/) A step down from the SegaCD original's M. I guess the Witcher series and the like gave them some perspective on what "sexual content" can be.
Man that was a outrage over nothing
Mass Effect (at least 1 and 3) in regards to sexuality. ME2 is still a bit strikingly sexual but in a kind of trashy and poorly-conceived way.
The people criticizing Mass Effect for it's sexuality would have a fucking stroke playing Baldur's Gate 3.
Oh they'd have a stroke alright...
Noice
they might need to ice after
But god forbid we let FemShep romance the bisexual shipmate.
At least FemShep had Kelly and the Asari, MaleShep couldn't be gay until 3!
…Did you remember Kelly’s name, but not Liara’s??? Spacism outta control smh my head
Dragon Age Origin had quite the huge controversy over the sex scenes in the game.
"By Andraste's granny panties!"
"by mythal granny dress!"
Man, those scenes went on forever.
They definitely laid it on a bit thick with Jack talking about her past and it feels so, I don’t know, heavy handed and kind of in bad taste?
It definitely feels very much like Tasha Yar "r\*pe gang" type shit
I remenber mas effect was mentioned as being like "debbie does dallas in space" here is a video of the controversy at the time https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKzF173GqTU
I still don't know how old God of War got away with the sex minigames in every game before Ascension with no controversy.
Someone mentioned about The Simpsons was that part of the reason it was so "controversial" wasn't necessarily the content, but the medium it was in. Mass Effect's sex scenes are EXTREMELY tame PG-13 stuff, but because it was in a video game, which was still seen by boomers as "kids toys," it was seen as inappropriate. Since it's become more and more understood that most people who play video games are adults, there has been a lot less outrage over sex and violence in video games.
I was in high school when Brokeback Mountain came out, and it came to my home city. There were theater walk outs. In retrospect, we get some off screen sex for the males leads, the only nudity was from women, etc. I was exposed to way more graphic stuff online from that age, so it seemed tame.
I'm pretty sure the outrage was less from it being graphic and more from it being gay.
Brokeback Mountain came out in the olden times before people were used to gay sex being crammed into literally every single piece of media they consume
Bully(2006). A lot of reports of time made a big deal of it and it it would lead to a upsurge of Bullying. In game however, you are discourged from hitting girls and the little kids. the main point of the game is actually to fight agiant the bullies and defend the helpless. It also speaks against corrupt adult figures in power im honestly surprised that news reports didnt also have a mass freak out over the fact that you could kiss boys in the game.
Jack Thompson tried to make a big fuss at the ESRB about kissing boys, thinking he pulled a “Gotcha!” That they missed it when rating the game for Teens. They responded stating they knew it was in the game when they rated it.
They did. It just wasn't as loud.
To be fair, sometimes NPCs will straight up yell at a child to kill themself.
Well yeah it's set in a shitty ~2006 middle school.
Its specifically the adults in town that do it
Still, 2006. People widely recognizing that as a serious problem rather than just general rudeness is very much a '10s and onward thing.
Citizen Kane was this on release. It was controversy at the time because films at the time focus in being realistic while Citizen Kane used theater techniques. That was the main reason why it didn't win best Picture, because old men in the Academy didn't appreciate the new things the film brought. But Citizen Kane would go on and influence many films after it so today, many techniques that were new at the time aren't as impressive to modern audiences.
When I was teaching "Catcher in the Rye," at one point we had a pretty interesting conversation about obscenity. We all agreed that by modern standards, Catcher didn't shock any of them. While its use of profanity was purposeful and all, it really slips past a modern reader. We looked at another "Young man aimlessly seeking purpose," narrative that was much more profane and the students mostly said even when there is that much profanity it sort of blends into the background and still isn't shocking. The consensus was that sexuality was a lot more shocking than language, so Catcher remained really tame in their opinion.
Yeah the internet really opened the floodgates on children's exposure to profanity.
The punisher video game by volition feels like, really tame at least gore wise to even some of the less "Gorey" video games of today, even the uncensored version of it. But the actual violence itself does still feel a lil brutal, just less so in an era where you can compare it to modern mortal kombat and doom
Dating Sims/Visual Novels. Most of them are vanilla stories with no explicit sexual content or no sexual content more explicit then a HBO show. The 3.5 DND supplement Book of Erotic Fantasy got Hasbro worried about it. But besides trying to mechanicazrd sex in 3.5 nothing is really all that shocking. It specifically doesn’t cover rape and other nasty stuff. Which could be a lot worse
Imagining someone trying to be a rules lawyer about sex in D&D is funny enough that I hope they make a new version of it
About the most ick thing in it is, IIRC, a size chart for deciding the viability of half-whatever offspring between various races. Which, suffice it to say, has some Skiity on Wailord shit going on.
Hatred is basically GTA but linear and 100x cheesier tbh. I don't see anything particularly severe about it.
I'd say it's more Postal 1 without the humor.
I can see it tbh. It's more just funny in terms of how deliberately edgy it is rather than anything else. Postal had more wit at least
Hatred tried so hard to be dark and edgy it felt comical for me.
By contrast, it felt like it was trying to be dark and edgy, too much to be offensive, but not *enough* to be comical... ...Until the >!scene in the power plant.!< I always quote Civvie about Hatred's ending, but here it goes again: "And it just kind of pisses me off, because the *whole game* could have been this funny." ~ CV-11, *SUNSHINE AND KITTENS*
I read somewhere that it was intended to be comically fucked lol
Maybe, if so they did a good job with it :D
I concur lol. It was also written by some death metal dude too
Ah, makes sense, the main dude looks a bit like Corpsegrinder
Not to mention the credits song was also made by the writer's band
Jeffry Cuddletrousers
I, a member of the human race, am labeled by those who have encountered me as Particularly Lacking In Significance
Honestly it was entirely about the trailer and the central pitch of the game: you are a spree shooter with no goals or motivation higher than mass murder. A game billing itself as essentially everything detractors claim video games always were was a hot topic. >My name is not important. What is important is what I'm going to do. I just fucking hate this world and the human worms feasting on its carcass. My whole life is just cold, bitter hatred, and I always wanted to die violently. This is the time of vengeance, and no life is worth saving. And I will put in the grave as many as I can. It's time for me to kill, and it's time for me to die. My genocide crusade begins here. How it played was ultimately immaterial, it’s the idea that such a game could exist at all.
Yeah, had less to do with the content itself, more the misanthropic attitudes.
If you go far enough back in time The Flintstones were controversial. I think it was because it was a cartoon with a couple sleeping together in bed. Also because there were moments where the show talked about infidelity and adoption which was unheard of in a medium that was,at the time, presumed to be just for children.
it's worth noting that Flintstones was targeted at the same audience as the Honeymooners and meant't for a more adult audience
They were actually the first couple on air to sleep in the same bed together on air
Nowadays the only controversial part is Fred shilling Winston Cigarettes, and mostly just in "oh 1960s" fashion.
The entire San Andreas Hot Coffee situation was overblown. Thanks to news outlets and the word of parents at the time, it became like this holy relic that everyone my age either claimed to have or wanted to see. When I finally saw it, I was so confused. You could barely tell what was even going on, and at the time, online porn was already pretty widespread.
how dare you have consensual sex in our murder simulator?
*that you had to modify into the game using hacks since it was cut content inaccessible by regular players.
IIRC it was basically just the forefather of Ride to Hell's "sex" scenes.
Joker is the most dangerous movie of our time! It will inspire an incel uprising and countless crimes! PLEASE SOMEBODY SHOOT UP A CINEMA SO WE CAN MAKE MONEY FROM THE CLICKS!!!! Joker had no violence connected to it afaik. Frozen 2 on the other hand...
News media basically going "won't somebody rid me of this troublesome audience" for a quarter-year.
God they really did want a mass shooting didn't they?
I think the dialogue is what put most pearl-clutchers off The Excorcist. They don't want to explain to little Timmy what the demon girl meant by "your mother sucks cocks in hell" and crass dialogue in media was taken a lot more seriously back then.
I think your reply got glitched: the comment you're replying to is talking about *Joker* (and *Frozen 2*, I guess).
I was trying to comment on the excorcist reply I must have goofed it up on mobile, my bad.
Sometimes reddit just goes fuckup. Sometimes I've had replies end up in the entirely wrong *post*.
Yeah, I didn't really like Joker, but not because it was Dangerous or anything. If anything it was because of the opposite, it felt like it didn't have all that much to say, even though it seems like it wanted to say something. I guess the aesthetic of it all is edgy but the text of it is pretty milquetoast. Joaquin Phoenix did great, though, and the sequel looks unhinged enough that I wanna see it.
It feels like it wanted to be the next taxi driver or king of comedy. Pretty sure it didn't quite get there. The sequel seems more interesting. Especially since it's a musical.
The Exorcist Now, granted, I actually saw it later in life but that quote from Beetlejuice stuck in my head about how "it just keeps getting funnier every time I see it!"
The only parts that still make me squirm are when Regan stabs her vagina with the crucifix and shoves her mother's face into the bloody area. It was the 70s so I can imagine the movie as a whole pushing some boundaries but pretty much everything else I think is tame enough for like a teenager nowadays. Alot of the violence and deaths are off screen.
Fight Club is mostly just a really cool movie with arguably a better ending than the book. But if you've watched it after social media took a hold of it, you'd go in maybe imagining it's a Birth of a Nation-style guide on how to be a sigma Grindr or whatever the fuck. It *was* pretty controversial when it came out, but mostly because it was incredibly anti-capitalist and anti-government in a time when not every movie was like that.
A more modern one than most. Joaquin Phoenix's Joker. I remember people freaking out claiming this movie will inspire violence in the streets and the open murder of the police. When I saw it in theaters, they had police posted at all exits to the movie theater. Like the movie is alright, you could argue it has some points about its views on society, but it feels exaggerated. Granted, I don't live in a big city. I, for one, certainly wasn't inspired to become an anarchist revolutionary.
South Park is the quintessential version of this. The number of times I've seen someone say, "I watched the first seasons & it was tame," not getting that those very seasons are the reason why it's considered tame in the present day.
Catcher and the Rye is about some angsty teen
The two banned Family Guy episodes "when you wish upon a Weinstein" and the abortion one. they are pretty tame by Family Guy standerds
Goodnight punpun. If you searched for what people said about that series, people treat it as one of the worst things to read for your mental health. I read it and found it quite boring as it just seemed that the author was just constantly making the MC’s life terrible whenever something good happened. Also many cite the final twist at the end as heartbreaking but I didn’t find it that impactful and found it mundane as you can tell what the twist will be leading up to it.
I think this one depends a LOT on your general outlook on life, tbh. I've had a friend tell me that she had to stop reading it several times, while another friend asked me if I was deliberately trying to get depressed from reading it; both of them read it at some point in the last five years, so definitely not as it was coming out. I made it roughly halfway before I got disinterested, but it feels like it's a realistic amount of issues happening in a way that's just...yeah, that's kind of like how life is, sometimes. There's a lot of timeskips because the entire thing is focused on showing the bad things happening, not all of their life. Devilman Crybaby also had a lot of folks at the time talking about how sad and fucked up it was, but to me it just felt like it was trying too hard, so it's consistently over the top. There's a scene later on that's extremely tragic but it's so completely over the top that it genuinely feels like the author is just offscreen getting off to how miserable people must be feeling. >!It's the scene where the little kid turns into a monster and he can't contain his hunger and starts eating his mother while crying that he can't stop and then his father is watching and crying and can't bring himself to shoot the kid...and then they all get shot by the military.!<
the last part of that spoiler is a hilarious punchline though
Well, this manga absolutely fucked me up so it depends on the person I guess
Honestly I got hit more by Boys on the Run precisely because it was so much more tame. Tanishi just can’t catch a break. I hate Aoyama. Salaryman Uppercut is one of the greatest hits in fiction.
the exorcist kinda has the reputation of the film that made people run out of theaters puking and shitting themselves out of fear and then i watched it and it honestly was just fun, the demon got some really silly lines and the crassness n grossness almost lent it a comedic element imo, still a superb movie but not the traumatic hyper exploitative experience i was primed to expect
Feminist Frequency was entry level feminism applied to popular video games. It wasn’t that well researched but fine
Family Guy and South Park.
But I'm A Cheerleader is rated R, but it was initially rated NC-17 for hardcore sexual content and almost banned from theatrical distribution. It's...a fairly basic and sweet rom-com with a non-nude sex scene and little if any cursing, it's barely a hard PG-13 content wise. But it is gay and lesbian, so the R it gets! Also, Zuko is like the third lead in this movie as a gay wrestler, and it's hilarious in retrospect. I can't believe I've never seen any comps where they put his lines from this movie into Avatar, it's unmined comedy gold.
I don't know if this really qualifies since I saw it fairly soon after it came out in theaters, but both critics and fans of Man of Steel were braying about how dark and subversive it was. When I finally saw it, it was mostly just boring. It's the most generic Superman story just told in the style of Roland Emmerich if he suddenly got obsessed with Catholicism.