At 3/9/25 05:25 AM, KittyhawkMontrose wrote:At 3/8/25 11:41 PM, jthrash wrote:This entire thread kind of confuses me because WB supposedly put this project on ice before it could officially air (probably one of the few times I'm glad modern WB-Discovery cancelled a project well into production). Yet people seem to be reacting to it as if it's a rage-bait show that WB-Discovery still plans to shove in our faces, "Velma"-style.
I am well aware of what they did to my favorite character of the OG Powerpuff Girls, Buttercup, in this failed pilot, though. Between this, Velma, and other woefully-misguided attempts at even understanding left-leaning audiences like Dustborn, it is easy to see why the United States is in the absolute STATE it is in today. This stuff not only fails to reach its target audience, they make easy LOLcow content for right-wing grifters on YouTube to point to and say "See?! They are trying to replace us/kill masculinity!" or "THIS is why angry women can't write good stories!" Sadly, I think it's gotten to the point where even the original Powerpuff Girls would be subjected to culture wars if it had came out today (it is true that the original show allowed impressionable young boys like me to become at least more open-minded to more feminine-looking action shows like Cardcaptor Sakura and Totally Spies), so at least we can rest easy that, outside of this leaked script and pilot episode, this newer bastardization of a classic, admittedly-violent children's cartoon never saw the light of day to add fuel to that annoying fire.
Man, it’s been a hard time these last 10 years. People are reactionary because it’s a learned response, like being in prison and punching anytime something comes near your face. It’s gonna take a long time before people can trust again. It’s gonna take a lot of good will from these corporations, or just wait for them to be replaced.
It really is sort of a dangerous rabbit hole to fall down to, following reactionary content all the time until it literally affects how you vote (and, in the US's case at least, even affects the price of groceries). The only solution I've found for now is to, as best as each website allows me to, block and ignore what I deem to be "culture war" content, and avoid websites that reward political rancor with their algorithms in the first place, which unfortunately means I have to avoid ALL mainstream social media sites (even BlueSky) for the sake of my sanity, limiting myself to mostly just looking at fun art and animations on Newgrounds and niche art forum sites. So far, all this really means that I am still absolutely blindsided whenever someone brings up some weird conspiracy theory they heard on X or Facebook, and make sure it affects my life in some way even though I personally left those websites years ago and SHOULD be blissfully unaware of the constant drama of the terminally online.
Describing reacting to content you don't agree with (or at least were told not to agree with) like some sort of Pavlovian response is honestly a good way to put it.
There is good content out there. It’s coming out slowly. Sonic 3, Hundreds of Beavers, and Frankie Freako make me hopeful, as well as a lot of content here on Newgrounds, that there’s a new happy horizon of content out there.
I should check Hundreds of Beavers and Frankie Freako, but of course I have already watched Sonic (movie) 3 due to that particular entry being based on my first childhood Sonic game, Sonic Adventure 2. If I haven't mentioned it enough here already, also check out the Oscar-Award-winning Flow and In the Shadow of the Cypress, both of which managed to beat the likes of Pixar and Dreamworks for the Best Animated Feature and Best Animated Short, respectively. The animation industry may, in fact, be healing if even the Academy Awards (notorious up until recently for being heavily biased towards Disney in particular and seeing animation as a "kiddie" genre) demands more good storytelling that actually moves the art form forward.
I think it has always been mostly the case, though, that the best, most creative stuff of each year seems to come out of nowhere and blows us away, while stuff that does get a ton of advertising ends up being overhyped and inevitably disappointing, even it certainly doesn't disappoint the parent company's shareholders in box office sales.
But yeah, this could’ve happened, and we hate that it could’ve happened.
Understandable. We already have the mixed-up 2016 reboot of PPG, and the fact that we almost got an even more controversial and misguided reboot, and the only reason it likely didn't happen was because WB-Discovery sold off CW are something, really emphasizes how little WB has always understood the appeal of the original show and how unfair it is that people who seem to hate both the original show and its generation of fans hold the exclusive IP rights.
As for the "reactionary" stuff, I also think for those that have not gone full-on "xenophobe" (yet), they're dealing with a cognitive dissonance with companies like WB and Disney that, in their early childhood at least, seemed reliable at giving us entertainment that finds a perfect balance between artistic merit and actually being marketable, but nowadays seem to be failing at making something that people find entertaining OR makes any practical business sense while no-budget indies are making the really good stuff, throwing off everything we ever knew about the supposed upsides of capitalism, or naive beliefs that artistic visions can survive executive meddling and risk aversion. As a result, we have to learn to actively seek more genuine and well-written entertainment after getting so used to being spoon-fed quality by the big companies in the past.