some-triangles:

some-triangles:

That is a really complicated question.

This is a clip from Bart Vs. Thanksgiving, which aired in 1990.  There was a lot of crying in the first couple seasons of the Simpsons, which is something people forget.   Unlike basically everything else in pop culture, the show actually got less dark over the course of the 90s – the recurring gag where Homer strangles Bart (which I think they dropped somewhere in the mid-aughts anyway) was a really different gesture when the show was trying to be relatively realistic in its depiction of a dysfunctional

working-class

family.

From the same season, here’s Lisa responding to her aunts trash-talking her father in front of her: “Well, I wish that you wouldn’t. Because, aside from the fact that he has the same frailties as all human beings, he’s the only father I have. Therefore, he is my model of manhood, and my estimation of him will govern the prospects of my adult relationships. So I hope you bear in mind that any knock at him is a knock at me. And I am far too young to defend myself against such onslaughts.”

So, we have an eight-year-old character who acts like she’s eight years old, but also comes out with stuff like that, stuff that isn’t just the ‘look, I have a thesaurus’ patter that lazy writers use to indicate that a character is supposed to be smart.  It’s left-field insightful, strange, oracular.  When she first appeared, Lisa was: smart, volatile, spiritual, lonely, interested in capital-A Art, sometimes violent, sometimes a troublemaker, sometimes stupid in very specific ways, a kid who made friends with adults more easily than she made friends with other kids, whose family loved her but didn’t really know what to make of her.  She was the closest thing on TV to what childhood had been like for me.  

(I should mention that I was too young to watch this stuff when it first aired, but I was still a young enough teenager to feel Recognized

when I caught up with it.)

This stuff is pre-”golden age” Simpsons, and as the show got funnier, it got simpler.  I don’t know if people still use the term “flanderization”, but it was an acknowledged thing that as Springfield got bigger, its characters got smaller, boiled down to a few essential traits for the sake of comedic efficiency. Originally, the point of Ned Flanders was that he was just a nice, normal guy with a nice, normal family – the resentment and rage this normalcy brought out in Homer was the joke. Flanders became a pathologically upbeat evangelical as the show moved past character comedy and started taking broader cultural swipes.  Homer, originally well-meaning and loyal but kind of selfish and dim, became a sociopathic idiot – Marge became every sitcom wife and mother at once – and Lisa, whose character had been the most complicated, became whatever it was the writers needed her to be at any given moment.  This was acknowledged on-screen as far back as Season 5, twenty years ago.

So this is the other big deal about Lisa Simpson: she is eight forever, she is trapped with her continuously-degenerating idiot family forever, and because she gets to break the fourth wall occasionally, she is intermittently aware of all of this.  Even as she continues to play the scold, the nerd, the voice of reason, the vapid tween, or, increasingly, the walk-on pop culture punchline delivery system, as and when each is required of her, she knows.  And it’s all still happening – she’s been eight for 25 years now. This blew my meta-hungry young mind when I first figured it out.  What a tragedy!  And a tragedy I could relate to, weirdly enough.  It struck a chord with my anxieties around arrested development, failing to launch, being a cartoon-loving child forever (the latter of which, at least, proved to be well-founded.)   Plus the feeling of being stuck in a world with alien priorities and a culture that was mostly terrible and getting worse. And the fear of being essentially alone forever.  Hoo boy!

Bringing this back re: my complaining about that simpsons article

powerlesbo:

powerlesbo:

powerlesbo:

WAKEUP (WAKE UP)

HDHSJHDUSJSNSHDHSJSJS THE SHAKE UP

WHDYLVTKUPONTHETABE

there are two types of tags on this post 

this:

and, much funnier, this:

sadvegeta:

Me: sends a snap containing snow to my australian friends
my australian friends, every time: SNOOOWWWW

I like how you translate the temperatures into Celsius for us too it’s very thoughtful