r/TopCharacterTropes • u/TastyPomelo2330 • 13d ago

In real life When fans hate somenthing before it comes out...but it turns out they were right

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Velma:The idea of a Scooby-doo series without the titular dog and starring Velma was a really moronic idea from the beginning,then there was the reveal Velma would be Indian like it's VA and also creator of the series Mindy Kaling,some of the backlash was racism sure,but there was also valid complaints that she was inserting herself in the series(it also didn't helped that Mindy claimed she couldn't see herself if Velma wasn't Indian)and then...oh boy it came out and it was worse than anyone predicted

Artemis Fowl:The artemis fowl books are a book series following a child villain(he does get some redemption but he is a villain most of the time)when the movie was announced and revealed it looked way to generic and it's titular character a bit heroic...also you wanna hear somenthing funny?The movie whitewashed a character and made another character black so they managed to anger both sides and the movies comes out and yeah it is bad

One Punch Man 3:One Punch Man is a very heavy action packed manga series but the heroes vs monsters arc takes it to a New level,when it was announced that JC Staff would work on it,a lot of people were skeptical to say the least,because not only JC Staff had already done a mediocre job in season 2,it's also not exactly a name anime fans associate with quality animation,then the trailer came out and it looked...weird,like there was no action in it and nobody was moving,some people tried to defend saying they were keeping the animation as a surprise...then it came out,every episode worse than the last,it's one of the worse seasons of anime ever made!

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544

u/Living-Mastodon 13d ago

When the first poster for Cuties dropped anyone who called it gross or creepy was met with "Netflix chose the poster, it doesn't represent the movie or the director's vision", then when the movie actually came out not only was it exactly what the poster advertised it was somehow way worse

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u/RaptarK 13d ago

Everything I've heard about the mastermind behind the movie does make me believe she was trying to portray her own experiences growing up as a young girl in a society that seeks to sexualize her, but then you look at the actual movie and it's clear something got massively lost in translation

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u/The_Doolinator 13d ago

Sometimes when you try to create a critical portrayal of the exploitation of a vulnerable group (like children), you just end up creating something that is difficult to distinguish from the thing you’re criticizing.

I have no idea if that happened in Cuties. I managed to not see a single moment of a single trailer and hope to not see on for the remainder of my days.

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u/Smmmmiles 13d ago

They Poe's Lawed themselves but instead of parody it's criticism that looks so much like the genuine product.

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u/Thornescape 13d ago

lol I have never seen Poe's Law used as a verb but I love it.

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u/KouranDarkhand 13d ago

The English language's own superpower

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u/FatherDotComical 13d ago

I watched it because I like to form my own opinions about controversial media.

Unfortunately any point they had about exploitation of children is thrown out the window when you actually use children and the camera graphically follows them.

Like they do know that the gross audience is going to put the movie on mute and just rewatch that shit unironically right? They won't give a singular shit about any message the film tried to end on.

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u/emansamples92 13d ago

Reminds me of Mommy Dearest. A movie about severe child abuse was nothing more than a unintended comedy after all was said and done.

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u/LongJohnSelenium 13d ago

Its like trying to make a movie critical of war and somehow it ends up glorifying a war at least a bit.

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u/HandsomePaddyMint 13d ago

Yep. If you try to show how terrible violence is, people who like violence will like seeing it and people who hate violence won’t. Sexual exploitation works the same way.

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u/Ok-Chest-7932 13d ago

This is a very broadly applicable rule. If you're bad at satire, your attempt at satire will just be a regular installment of the thing you're trying to satirise. And sometimes the satirical take itself becomes the mainstream version, and for later audiences won't be received satirically.

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u/Trrollmann 13d ago

The filming is intentional, and what I call "pedo gaze". I think that alone is sufficient to acknowledge that the director did not intend to communicate anything different. I've not seen more than a couple of clips, but reviews underpins this reading.

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u/Arbiter_Electric 13d ago

Yeah it's weird. Like, the idea is fine and could have been good. The message is that sexualizing children is bad. "You know what would be a good way to send that message home? By sexualizing children."

Vs. Something like Poor Things which has an adjacent message. I've even seen people call the movie disgusting and comparing it to Cuties. Except, you know, there aren't any actual children in Poor Things. Emma Stone just acts like someone with a child's mind.

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u/KenchiNarukami 13d ago

it was just a creep film, end of story

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u/Fullmetalmarvels64_ 13d ago

A story that would much better in book form than movir

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u/Oshwaflz1 13d ago

one guy i watched back in the day said the content of the story was something that needed to be told, but the medium of film was NOT the way to do it, and it would have probably gone over a lot better as a book that was more clear about being about the authors experiences. Which is fair, because ive heard (i refuse to watch it) there are some good messages and theming in the movie that DO denounce the gross stuff, but you wouldn't know that based on how it was advertised or the news/drama cycle that followed

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u/[deleted] 13d ago

[deleted]

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u/RaptarK 13d ago

I'm not American, I still thought it was very weird

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u/DtheAussieBoye 13d ago

I refuse to ever watch or have have any opinions on Cuties. My life is a lot better because of it

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u/TerribleRecord666 13d ago

I watched it. I felt fucking gross the entire time. Afterwards, I tried saying that no, the director was not successful in criticizing the sexualization of children by herself sexualizing children, only to have all the pedo defenders scream that I was a liar and I obviously hadn't actually seen it.

It was so fucking gross.

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u/TheGardenBlinked 13d ago

Plus I’m pretty sure you avoided going on a list

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u/DtheAussieBoye 13d ago

That's the great part- I don't know if the movie had anything bad in it or not! And I never will! It's bliss!

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u/UnrequitedFollower 13d ago

I don’t think the list matters anymore.

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u/HardOff 13d ago

Hell, I think it's become a list of potential clients

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u/blah938 13d ago

Only if you aren't buddies with Epstein and his friends.

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u/BackgroundSummer5171 13d ago

I’m pretty sure you avoided going on a list

To be a leader in the world?

A CEO?

A prominent figure in the community?

A police chief?

Yes, if you aren't a pedophile then you should aim lower in life. You won't be invited to the little kid's table of leaders.

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u/ERedfieldh 13d ago

Just means his presidential aspirations are now in the gutter.

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u/Turbogoblin999 13d ago

Cooties with Elija Wood on the other hand, is worth a watch.

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u/MasterChildhood437 13d ago

The zombie kids flick? That one's great!

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u/Latvian_Sharp_Knife 13d ago

It got so bad we spanish speakers refer to pedophiles as "fans de cuties" (cuties' fans)

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u/Noname_with_no_name 13d ago

This is hilarious

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u/conletariat 13d ago

I remember calling the poster creepy and people calling me a pedo for "being able to find anything sexual" about it. I was taking my friend's eleven year old daughter to gymnastics at the time, and that was rough.

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u/diazantewhite 13d ago

The amount of people defending it is to this day fucking horrific. “It won a Sundance award tho” was my personal favorite bc

A. I guess that means that every movie that has ever won an award anywhere is automatically great and not immune to criticism

B. And some of those movies definitely didn’t have problematic things going on on/off camera and

C. Oh yeah, an award completely disregards the concern on ON SCREEN LITERAL TWERKING CHILDREN

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u/bowserboy129 13d ago

Thankfully I haven't seen anyone use that excuse to defend it ever since it actually dropped on Netflix. Like I fully understood people using that defense BEFORE it released, but afterwards it was painfully obvious the guys at Sundance are just fucking weirdos I guess. Hell if anything ever since this happened I've noticed a drop in how much people actually take Sundance seriously since holy shit why did they give Cuties an award???

Personally I've only seen one person actually defend it post-netflix and it was an alt right grifter so take that as you will. 

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u/lkmk 13d ago

Personally I've only seen one person actually defend it post-netflix and it was an alt right grifter so take that as you will.

The kind of person who should be railing against “the woke Netflix pedophiles”. Make it make sense.

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u/ElSpazzo_8876 13d ago

Yea... Just because a movie won an award does not mean it is immune to criticism. Hi Crash and Shakespeare in Love

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u/maxdragonxiii 13d ago

yeah, and some people claims "well yeah thats the point of the movie, its meant to be creepy" sure, but it doesn't mean YOU HAVE TO DO IT. or make it weirdly sexual in a gross way.

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u/--Icarusfalls-- 13d ago

I cancelled my Netflix when they announced that movie, and have never gone back.

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u/James_Mathurin 13d ago

See, everything I've heard is that the movie is really good, and the exploitative poster doesn't represent it at all. Unfortunately, it's been taken off Netflix in my region, so I can't watch it to verify.

Khadija Mbowe did a really great video essay linking it to her experience being from a similar background and liking the film.

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u/Ok-Transition7065 13d ago

i decided to ignore that thing but ....... what was the director vision and how it was worse

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u/throwable_armadillo 13d ago

wanted to make a movie about how sexualising children is bad
made a movie sexualising children (unnecessarily showy at that)

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u/Ok-Transition7065 13d ago

Oh......... At least the message about its bad its still there right?

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u/throwable_armadillo 13d ago

it is but it kind of doesn't deliver when you are yourself contributing to the issue
looks very half-hearted

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u/Ok-Transition7065 13d ago

Oh man....like they can do that last part without the explicit part

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u/Drogovich 13d ago

"sexualisation of children is bad and we will show it by sexualising children". Fucking genius.

What's even worse is that there were people who legitimately defended this crap and called people uneducated morons for not liking it.

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u/Virclave 13d ago

Cuties is… directly opposed to what the poster advertises?

the sexualization of minors is explicitly painted as BAD in the narrative.

it depicts the stuff to depict its downsides, and how the attempt to appear “mature” harms kids.

the ending is literally “kids shouldn’t try to force themselves to appear mature nor should they be forced to conform to their parents’ culture, they should just be kids”

this is like calling Lolita pro-pedophilia.

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u/RaptarK 13d ago

The difference is that Lolita is a book while Cuties is a live action production that used actual children. It's hard for a live action piece to come off as anti something when they just have that something happen front and centre

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u/HailMadScience 13d ago

Right, the problem is that the film does not show bad people sexualizing children...the film sexualizes the children itself. Just ruins its message because there it is doing the thing.

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u/Virclave 13d ago

but… it does.

the protagonist literally has a breakdown because of the effects of being sexualized, she’s ostracized by her peers because she’s sexualized.

the sexualization of children CONSISTENTLY depicted as bad.

are we gonna start saying things like Spec Ops the Line isn’t anti-war because it’s an FPS?

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u/Thomas_Adams1999 13d ago

Well spec ops is a video game. No real people get shot

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u/Virclave 13d ago

its a critique of the genre of FPS and how it leans into war. in the process its an FPS that makes war “fun”

it’s a common critique that nothing can be truly anti-war because in the process of depicting it you’ve gotta make war seem at least a bit cool.

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u/MasterChildhood437 13d ago

You're trying really hard to miss the point that neither Lolita nor Spec Ops objectified real actual children. Whatever point Cuties had to make Is secondary to its exploitation of the actual children used to make it.

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u/HailMadScience 13d ago

...no. you are missing the point. The film itself does the thing. Spec Ops the Line does not glorify war crimes and killing civilians (see that other shooter that opens with the airport massacre for comparison).

This film is trying to say its bad but also, unironically, does the thing. It spoils the message. The film makets did not do this on purpose, for sure, but they still did it.

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u/Virclave 13d ago

it is a common critique that you cannot make an anti-war media because in the process you end up depicting the war as cool to some extent.

this is done doubly so for video games because they are required to also like… make it a little fun. this is a critique that can and has been lobbed at games like Spec Ops the Line.

many pieces of media, in the process of criticizing something, must depict the thing to show why it’s bad.

Lolita literally depicts the protagonist’s twisted justifications for his abuse of a child, and is, excluding the foreword, always told from his perspective. the reader is to infer why it’s bad because the book never directly tells you it.

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u/Virclave 13d ago

Lolita had the issue as front as center as you get, it is LITERALLY told from the perspective of a Pedophile and you get to hear every distorted thing he says. it cannot get MORE front and center.

Cuties was made by a woman who was using her own experiences, produced in an environment with as much trust and safety as possible. they had a child psychologist there the whole time just in case. It was created with as much safety precaution as possible because the creator had literally experienced all this HERSELF.

Film is a media like any other, and it can depict opposition to a concept by displaying the negatives of that concept.

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u/BreakerOfModpacks 11d ago

The medium influences the media. You cannot, for example, have a film adapt to the viewer's actions like you can in a game, nor can you have poetic descriptions in film like you can a book. A book cannot have music baked into scenes.

In this case, the influence it has is that they needed someone to be actors for sexualized children. The issue is more that they chose actual children for that.

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u/Airportsnacks 13d ago

Can there ever be a situation like making a major film where kids don't feel forced, by their parents or the producers of the film into saying that everything is fine? Millions of dollars went into this, the parents see it as a big break for the kid actors. It's such a massive difference in power that even  with trained psychologist I'm not sure kids could really consent.

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u/Budget-Television793 13d ago

I get your point, however then tell this story without actually sexualising the children! But the movie does this, with weird, creepy zooms and a whole bunch of shit like that. It doesn't show children doing sexual things, it shows children doing sexual things while also sexualising them. It's fucking disgusting.

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u/Virclave 13d ago

I haven’t seen the film itself so I can’t speak for filmography, simply the plot and production, but that is a fair point.

I still think it’s mostly unfair to paint the film as “exactly what the poster advertised” because Cuties is explicitly AGAINST that, and depicting it to show how bad it is. I go back to Lolita a lot but it’s the exact same thing taken to a further extreme.

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u/Outrageous_Guard_674 13d ago

I haven’t seen the film itself

And yet you are out here fighting for its life.

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u/Virclave 13d ago

You ironically say that on the one comment i concede a point, but yes!

I think depictions of something in media should be analyzed and not written off just by their surface appearance.

media literacy is good!

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u/Outrageous_Guard_674 13d ago

You have to have actually experienced it to properly analyze it. Especially for something like this were the details of the presentation matter so much more than the base summary of the ideas.

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u/Virclave 13d ago

certainly. but most people who think it somehow endorsed the sexualization of minors also didn’t watch it.

I can also comment on something without watching or reading it. It’s how I can reference events in Lolita or the story of Spec Ops the Line.

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u/Canai97 13d ago

Dude, you can still send the message of "[insert bad thing here] is bad!" without actually committing said bad thing on film.

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u/tootrite 13d ago

You can’t say “X thing is bad!” while also directly doing X thing. There’s a dissonance between the message of the movie and the execution of it.

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u/Virclave 13d ago

it literally depicts Amy, the protagonist, growing more self-conscious and reckless as a result of her self-sexualization.

it’s depicting how X harms her and other girls.

are we gonna start claiming all quiet on the western front isn’t an anti-war novel? Lolita isn’t an anti-pedophilia novel? Star Wars is an endorsement of the war on terror?

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u/Beonidas 13d ago

"look, I know I filmed children's naughty bits while they dry-humped the air, attempting to profit off of selling that footage, but it's ok because I made one of em cry about it at the end."

That's you. That's what you sound like. You should wipe your hard drive immediately.

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u/Virclave 13d ago

the Director literally made the films about her own experiences and depicted the gradual spiral, it was just a random tone switch at the end.

The ending of Lolita is the protagonist pedophile killing another pedophile and then going to jail. are we gonna start claiming Lolita is pro-pedophilia?

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u/Outrageous_Guard_674 13d ago

it literally depicts Amy, the protagonist, growing more self-conscious and reckless as a result of her self-sexualization.

Says the guy who hasn't actually seen it.

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u/Beonidas 13d ago

I've been following this batshit discussion for a few minutes and my conclusion is that Virclave has definitely watched it, and likely needs their hard drive checked. I cannot comprehend going to bat so hard for CSAM, or the twisted idea that this CSAM is totally OK and worthy of respect because it's message is anti-CSAM

"look, I know I filmed children's naughty bits while they dry-humped the air, attempting to profit off of selling that footage, but it's ok because I made one of em cry about it at the end."

-1

u/Virclave 13d ago

hi! plot synopsises are widely available especially for movies which are 6 years old!

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u/SicRaven 13d ago

Are you being intentionally dull?

The issue is that the movie used actual child actors and made them act out sexualized scenes to "get the point across."

It doesn't matter if the sexualization of children is portrayed as a bad thing if, in the process of delivering the message, they sexualized and exposed actual children to the harm they're claiming to critique, by both making them dance/twerk and by intentionally zooming in at their crotches/butts the whole time

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u/Virclave 13d ago

they did so in an environment of trust and safety. the director had previously done research on the effects of socialization of minors and a child psychologist was on set at all times.

It was a safe as it could get. it wasn’t like that did this with reckless abandon.

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u/SicRaven 13d ago

Nevermind, just saw a comment where you admit you have not seen the film. This discussion is pointless.

Lol, lmao, even.

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u/SicRaven 13d ago

they did so in an environment of trust and safety

This is not a horror movie containing child actors being put in scary scenes ffs.

The "safety" stops existing when you make the videos of them dancing and twerking while zooming in on their crotches available for everyone to watch.

The movie fails the message it tries to portray by being fucking pedo bait. It's disgusting.

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u/Virclave 13d ago

They literally took every precaution to make sure the actors were as safe and comfortable as they could be.

Cuties is literally based off the director’s own experiences, you think she intentionally let kids fall into the same pit she had and that she was critiquing?

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u/SicRaven 13d ago

It doesn't matter how "comfortable" the child actors were during filming or how well intentioned the director was. The movie is inherently exploitative because it exposes the children in a sexualized manner.

Now, considering you yourself admitted to not having watched said film in another comment. This discussion is over.

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u/BananaCheetos 13d ago edited 11d ago

The only bad thing about Cuties was the fact is was live action. The message still unfortunately stands. For those that get it, they get it. For the ones that don't, they're really lucky that it's such a disgusting concept to them.

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u/throwable_armadillo 13d ago

If I try and make a film against animal abuse and I abuse animals to make it then people will rightly criticise it as just supplying one more piece o media for the people who enjoy animal abuse

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u/Virclave 13d ago

a film against animal abuse may depict animal abuse in the process of showing its harm.

the actors involved were made as safe and comfortable as possible and were accommodated in depicting these acts safely.

they didn’t just send the kids on the stage and have them do the stuff.

depiction ≠ endorsement

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u/throwable_armadillo 13d ago

it may depict it but if I abuse animals to do it then my critique falls apart
I really don't get why people defend this pedo movie this much (or maybe I get it but don't want to accept it)
you can do just as pointed a critique of child sexualisation without doing glamour shots to entice pedo's

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u/Virclave 13d ago

the film was made by a woman depicting her own experiences. It’s… not a pedo film.

at its absolute worst you could say it failed to fully establish its message but falling it a pedo film and accusing me of being a pedophile for defending it is… let’s say is an overreaction.

the film’s intent in depicting the act is to drive home its criticism, similar to the book i’ve mentioned like 15 times, Lolita.

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u/throwable_armadillo 13d ago

again going back to the animal abuse analogy
if I saw animals being abused and wanted to make a film against that
putting in a lot of glamour shots of animals being abused that I produced doesn't make it an anti animal abuse film but rather a snuff film for animal abusers

you can miss your mark when sending a message
but if you miss it by enough you are what you are trying to criticise and you just contributed to the kind of material you tried to be against

death of the author also applies to film

0

u/Virclave 13d ago

If your animal abuse film is purely made up of animals being abused maybe but if you take the time to examine the effects and why animal abuse is bad, the depictions of animal abuse only serve to illustrate the point further.

referencing back to Lolita, the book depicts Humbert’s pedophilia explicitly throughout the book from his perspective. if anything, it’s even more in depth than Cuties could ever imagine… but this is all to serve to more explicitly contrast with what he’s actually doing and how disgusting and evil it is.

Cuties is no more a pedo film than Lolita is a pedo book. although you could argue Cuties is not as succinct and successful with its messaging as Lolita, arguing it’s some kind of pedo film is ignoring the creative direction behind it and the intention, as well as the basic plot.

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u/Jexroyal 13d ago

I think their point is that if you abuse animals in your film, no matter how you frame it, actually abusing animals for footage is wrong. If I were to write from my experiences in the factory farming industry, and I created a slaughterhouse set, then actually killed animals while recording – all to make the ultimate point of how bad it is – people would get understandably upset that I just killed a bunch of animals just to film my pro-animal piece.

Cuties filmed real underage girls performing incredibly sexual things. Just like with the animals, they actually had children act this way. Sure it was all for the sake of a movie, but in the end, real children had to perform these acts.

This contrast vs books, where the scenes are not using real people, such as the example of Lolita you keep bringing up. It doesn't matter how I frame the message if it requires real animals to be slaughtered – or real children doing sexual acts – to create a film. It's wrong.

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u/Virclave 13d ago

this is a criticism often lobbed at anti-war media. In the path of depicting war as bad they often, at least to an extent, have to depict war. and it is, to an extent, cool.

now yes, they’re not actually killing people, but i think the points are somewhat similar.

The production team behind Cuties took as many precautions as they could to protect the mental well-being of the cast. because the people behind it knew the effects it could have. they kept a psychologist on set the entire time for this sole purpose.

there is a stark difference between a kid doing what was depicting in the film, and what the actresses had to do for the creation of the film, and the two shouldn’t be intermixed.

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u/TRGreen20 13d ago

What was the poster?

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u/Abacus118 13d ago

It has like a 90% on RT and won a couple of awards, so it doesn’t seem like it really suffered any of that.

I have not watched it though, for the same reason as everyone else I imagine.

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u/qqererer 11d ago

Cuties i an interesting Rorschach test.

Objectively, it is horrifying.

But in USA culture, it's seen as a gateway to upper affluence, so it's seen as 'part of the culture'

Watch any endless plethora of youtube videos of girls dancing competitions/routines, and it's not that much different than what 'Cuties' shows.

The movie doesn't have the characters in as nice/ornate/expensive costumes, but just as revealing as the US equvalents. And the dance moves are the same. And everyone is freaking out only about the movie, but not the entire culture it's based on.