Children’s cartoons can be really entertaining even if you’re an adult. Well, a kind of nerdy adult, but still an adult. As an example, Avatar: The Last Airbender and Trollhunters: Tales of Arcadia were both intelligently written action shows with impressive character development and all-star voice casts. Adventure Time, the smash hit cartoon from Cartoon Network, isn’t even really classified as a children’s show having the same TV-PG rating as family sitcoms like Everybody Loves Raymond and The Simpsons.
The problem is that even though are a number of well-written and smart cartoons today, there’s also just as many reboots and rehashes in cartoons as there are in any other medium, and like fans of any other medium, fans get pretty mad when anything about the thing they liked changes. And of course, we’re also living in an age where not liking anything produced by a major entertainment company is presumed to be a sign that you’re a misogyhomophobo.
I’m not sure when the war among adults about children’s cartoons began, but I first noticed it when Thundercats Roar was announced. It looked terrible. I can’t express to you how bad this looked, and people who watched Thundercats as children weren’t very happy about it. I honestly don’t think anyone actually liked it. I’m pretty sure that the people defending it just didn’t like the people who vocally didn’t like it and so had to pretend to like it.
Once that died down I thought we might be done with this sort of thing, but then Noelle Stevenson tweeted a preview of She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, the Dreamworks/Netflix reboot of the 1980s-era He-Man spin-off She-Ra: Princess of Power.
There’s not a lot you can actually tell from four still frames. She-Ra looks significantly younger than she looked in her previous iteration and the animation appears to lack detail. But the same could be said of the popular Dreamworks/Netflix Voltron reboot. I would have to see a clip of the show that’s actually animated before I decide if I like it or not.
But that didn’t stop groups of people from forming on the internet and calling each other SJWs and pedophiles and whatever because they do or don’t like the redesigned She-Ra. Personally, I can’t stand either of these groups of people anymore. You’re adults arguing about a children’s cartoon on the internet. Sure, you might like the cartoon, or not, and that’s fine. It’s actually months away from being released so you don’t know if it’s good or not yet.
But here’s the thing: It’s always the same groups of people in these dumb arguments about nerd culture. The same people who were arguing about whether or not the Paul Feig Ghostbusters was good (it wasn’t) are now arguing about if the new She-Ra design is good (it’s basically fine). Just admit your actual hobby is fighting on Twitter.
“misogyhomophobo” is being added to my vocabulary lmao