Unfortunate Implications Citation Discussion

Change it Harsher in Hindsight or remove it.

It's not Harsher in Hindsight, it's referring to something that happened in the 1880s.

It's not Unfortunate Implications, it's unfortunate reality. There were plenty of horrible things that happened to Chinese immigrants at the time, trying to tie it to anyone individual one of them is kind of missing the point.

These are under the Live-Action films folder for Unfortunate Implications:

• In Bird Box, seeing the creatures makes people go crazy and suicidal; but somehow people with mental disorders are not affected by it and instead force everyone they encounter to see the creatures. Jeremy on CinemaSins pointed out how this helps to perpetuate the stigma of mental illnesses and the people who suffer from them.

• Daredevil: In his The Nostalgia Critic review of the film, Doug Walker took issue with Matt and Elektra's first meeting, which involves them fighting in an open playground when he won't stop trying to get her name.
  NC: Okay, so...where do I begin with this? First of all, I think she's making it pretty clear she's not interested in your stalker ass. If she wanted, she could call the cops on you for being a creeper and grabbing her. But, nah, it makes much more sense to fight him, which leads to the second and most obvious problem: she's fighting a blind guy! She doesn't know he has super senses and neither does anyone else, so, really, what is there to gain? If you lose, you got beaten by a blind guy. Pretty pathetic. But if you win, congrats, you beat the shit out of a fucking blind guy. How does anyone come out looking good in this scenario?

Do CinemaSins and The Nostalgia Critic count as reliable sources. Both mix comedy in their reviews, so it becomes tricky to tell if they're being sincere or not. CinemaSins has a running gag of calling things in the movie racist and I'm pretty sure The Nostalgia Critic example is a joke.

Edited by SharkToast on Sep 30th 2023 at 9:20:05 AM

Can't answer for the question of whether these are legitimate as citations, but the mental illness thing in Bird Box is a pretty common criticism (on blogs etc.) made in seriousness.

I'm unsure if they are good sources, but at the very least I think Doug is a better source then Cinemasins.

Edited by Bullman on Sep 30th 2023 at 1:09:13 PM

I wouldn't count Cinema Sins as a valid source because they don't do analysis with any kind of depth, they just pick out anything they can mock. But if others have said this, linking one that explains the problem should work.

As for the Daredevil one, it looks to me more like Unintentionally Unsympathetic.

Does anyone have a link to a credible article discussing the Unfortunate Implications of Bird Box?

So I just found this one under Film - Animation:

Coco: As this video points out, the film features a portrayal of a border control system in the afterlife that risks normalizing a militarized border. Notably, the border system in the film, while portrayed as an obstacle, is never outright condemned. And the film's happy ending contends with portraying the border as a simple fact of life, in contrast to how other corrupt systems like the Scream Factory in Monsters, Inc. are dismantled and replaced.

So apart from only linking to a single source, this entry is also factually incorrect - the "border" in the afterlife functions as a way to check if anyone's picture is on an ofrenda. This is because Magic A Is Magic A in the world of Coco; the marigold bridge simply won't work unless your picture is in place, something the dead have no control over. The border is not "militarized" either: there's nothing to stop anyone simply walking through the gates, no armed guards, no intrusive searches etc. and no-one is turned away based on class, gender, ethnicity etc. If anything it is closer to airport security/customs in real life.

The system is not "corrupt" like the other examples mentioned - the dead actually need this system to find out their options. No-one is exploiting it for power or gain. It doesn't need "condemning" because there is nothing to condemn. The only ones keeping the dead from crossing are the living, who don't even realise the effect their actions have.

Delete it. It's factually incorrect as you said, and that's on its own sufficient grounds for removal.

Edited by ShinyCottonCandy on Oct 17th 2023 at 12:32:15 PM

... common courtesy forbids me to state how I feel about that entry. Cut away.

• Digimon Adventure 02: The Beginning has faced criticism in its handling of Lui's backstory of being subject to Parental Abuse and the larger implication of conflating abuse with Digimon partnership. This review details the problems of the film's handling of abuse.

Not sure if FilmInk is reputable enough. But looking over the source, it is instead complaining the tonal inconsistency of handling the subject matter, but not any details of how it comes off badly or as "abuse apologia".

Yeah, I'm not getting what the implication there is supposed to be, as opposed to just not handling the matter with care.

Doesn't seem to be UI.

UnfortunateImplications.Live Action Film

• Around the release of The Phantom Menace, sci-fi author David Brin penned a series of essays detailing a large number of uncomfortable messages he felt the franchise sends, including "Violence Really Is the Answer," "Some people are just born better than others and the rest of us should defer to them for leadership," and "Absolutely any evil deed is forgivable." However, several of these claims are blatantly false, and a long list of his mistakes can be found here.

If the source for the Implications is inaccurate, should we just remove the entry as invalid?

Remove it.

Literature:

• When you think about it, Philip José Farmer's Wold-Newton Family, by saying that all great heroes and many villains of modern literature were descended from the fourteen people present at the Wold-Newton meteor landing, is also saying that any of those characters who aren't of English origin only achieved what they did because they had some English blood. Modern Newtonians have noticed this and identified other meteor crashes that could have had similar effects.

I read the link and it doesn't really imply racism. The objection is on practical grounds (that it's unlikely that all the world's heroes were descended from those fourteen people).

Edited by SharkToast on Jan 15th 2024 at 8:40:02 AM

This just got added:

• Mark Rober's "Glitterbomb" videos, where he constructs glitter/stink bombs and similar pranks for porch pirates and scam call centers and includes a camera to record their reactions, have rubbed a few folks the wrong way. While there's no denying that theft and con artistry are wrong, it's been noted that the people resorting to such measures are dirt-poor and trying to survive. And since Mark is a successful engineer and Youtuber who has never lost anything he couldn't afford to replace, his Glitterbomb videos have been criticized for serving no purpose beyond humiliating poor people for views and likes.

I looked at the second source and it doesn't appear reliable to me. For starters, it seems to just be someone's blog. Second, it uses a lot of, uhh, bombastic rhetoric - for instance this post calls glitter and stink bombs "biological warfare," and other posts on the site seem to defend Xi Jinping and allege that the hostages taken by Hamas, precipitating the current crisis in Israel/Palestine, were actually taken by the Israeli government to justify the war. Irrespective of any opinions on the conflict itself, I've literally never seen this belief before, which implies to me that the blog is run by someone with very fringe views. Thoughts?

Edited by HamburgerTime on Mar 24th 2024 at 11:35:54 AM

I'd cut it because this is a fringe opinion. There are very few people who believe "You should just let people rob you because they're probably down on their luck". It's disingenuous to act like this is a legitimate view that people in the audience have.

Edited by SharkToast on Mar 24th 2024 at 9:36:27 AM

I actually do think the example itself has potential - I for one think potentially outright injuring someone over scam phone calls etc. is Disproportionate Retribution - but the sources need to be replaced with, as mentioned, more objective ones.

Aside from maybe the version that uses some drones and ended up not working very well, the glitterbomb seems pretty innocuous to me. Also, this example basically insinuates that only poor people steal which... is not a very good thing to say.

Edited by SoyValdo7 on Mar 24th 2024 at 4:08:32 AM

This is in UnfortunateImplications.Live Action TV:

• De Nieuwe Orde lampshades in the second episode the problems that arise from All Germans Are Nazis, since one of the interviewees of that episode is clearly pro-Nazi Germany, saying that this trope is proof (among with many other reasons, such as the idea that people had more freedom there) that everyone was happy under the Nazi regime. Maurice De Wilde himself then answers back by saying that there was German resistance, but that the Nazis themselves hid it away from the public. The interviewed man promptly ignores it.

No citations and I'm not even sure what this is trying to say. Is it supposed to be an in-universe example?

Can I remove the Coco entry discussed above, or at least get more opinions?

Yeah, I agree that the Coco example should be cut. It is mostly a customs check than anything else. And as you say, there is no nothing to condemn.

I swear that Coco one was discussed before. Chop it.