EDIT: fwiw I hunted down this thread and it turns out that OP actually did some self-crit, which was more positive than I was expecting https://www.reddit.com/r/TheDigitalCircus/comments/1ucu9hl/jax_being_trans_and_my_opinion_as_a_cis_straight/
this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2026
85 points (100.0% liked)
traaaaaaannnnnnnnnns
1478 readers
119 users here now
Welcome to /c/traaaaaaannnnnnnnnns, an anti-capitalist meme community for transgender and gender diverse people.
-
Please follow the Hexbear Code of Conduct
-
Selfies are not permitted for the personal safety of users.
-
No personal identifying information may be posted or commented.
-
Stay on topic (trans/gender stuff).
-
Bring a trans friend!
-
Any image post that gets 200 upvotes with "banner" or "rule 6" in the title becomes the new banner.
-
Posts about dysphoria/trauma/transphobia should be NSFW tagged for community health purposes.
-
When made outside of NSFW tagged posts, comments about dysphoria/traumatic/transphobic material should be spoiler tagged.
-
Arguing in favor of transmedicalism is unacceptable. This is an inclusive and intersectional community.
-
While this is mostly a meme community, we allow most trans related posts as we grow the trans community on the fediverse.
If you need your neopronouns added to the list, please contact the site admins.
Remember to report rulebreaking posts, don't assume someone else has already done it!
Matrix Group Chat:
Suggested Matrix Client: Cinny
https://rentry.co/tracha (Includes rules and invite link)
WEBRINGS:
🏳️⚧️ Transmasculine Pride Ring 🏳️⚧️
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
There's a difference between "everything must be serious at all times" and "people need to nurture the ability to be serious". My contention is that a specific internet show has really obvious, on the nose writing, and that if that's still your benchmark for good writing by the time you hit your thirties then you have failed as a critical consumer of media.
I have taken a few hours to do some fun things and hopefully calm myself down a bit, lest I get unnecessarily fired up about a cartoon I haven't even seen more than a few minutes of and didn't particularly like from that limited experience. What I'll say is that there is a valid point that you're trying to make, which is that people shouldn't be reading only YA until they're 35. I would agree that people need to challenge themselves and "nurture the ability to be serious." But your actually valid point here is just getting completely muddied by this whole condescending superiority complex you have, the brainworms around age making you unnecessarily hostile, and also that you assume what other people mean instead of letting them explain themselves. I did actually click like on your first comment: I thought you were being very unnecessarily condescending, and the person you were replying to was in their right to tell you to fuck off for that, but if you'd just left your comment at you finding the writing in TADC to be too on the nose with the characters always spelling out their feelings, then that would've been a perfectly valid critique of the work. I mean, I've heard people say that Moby Dick is on the nose with its symbolism, and it is! All the symbolism in that book is spelled out for you, yet it's still considered a classic and I've enjoyed it. I also find House, MD to have very on the nose writing with the characters' emotions being constantly spelled out for you, but that doesn't mean I don't like House, it just means that that aspect of it does irritate me a bit. And I thought at first that when you said "baby's first", you were referring to the writers, not the viewers — because the writing in TADC is going to suffer a bit from the fact that it's an independent production, right? My understanding is that projects like TADC are made at least partially to build portfolios for the people who work on them, so the most masterful episodic writing won't be found in independent animation of any kind, writers in independent animation are still finding their footing and honing their skills. But no, you were referring to the viewers as babies!
All that Doubtingtammy said was "the overall plot explores cartesian skepticism/dualism, much like the Matrix (and I Have No Mouth...)" — which is a very different claim from saying that TADC is a "benchmark for good writing": that claim is entirely your own invention pulled from thin air. Doubtingtammy didn't even assert that they thought that TADC explored those themes well or even intentionally, just that they thought that the themes were there, and likely inspired by those previous works, and a reason why they found it surprising that young people liked the show. We can maybe infer that Doubtingtammy thought that those themes were explored "well" in TADC, but "well" in what sense? "Well" for a work of contemporary independent animation, or "well" for any work of fiction in any genre or medium, ever? Doubtingtammy didn't specify, but I would've assumed the former, and I guess you must've assumed the latter and just run with your interpretation. The least you could've done is asked why Doubtingtammy had that reading of the work instead of jumping right to calling them an emotionally stunted adult baby. Isn't critical consumption of media all about backing up your analysis using the text?!
In conclusion, I want to say that there doesn't need to be a dichotomy between enjoying "mature" and "immature" things. I'm assuming that Doubtingtammy has read a lot more books and seen a lot more shows and movies than just the ones mentioned in their first comment, and many of those unmentioned works probably are things you'd consider much more well-written than TADC. People should learn to read more than just YA, but that doesn't mean losing the ability to enjoy YA! YA doesn't have to become boring just because there are other things you can read, you just need to be able to appreciate YA for what it is. You know? Like, I like Ante (1975) for what it is — a groundbreaking representation of Sámi issues in the popular culture of Norway — but that doesn't mean I think a 70s live action kids' show is the best thing since sliced bread, it really isn't.
It's just a good thing that some people are able to like things that other people can't.
Revisiting this after reading through a few hours ago. Really good points made here.
As a tangent it feels like this debate over YA versus “mature” art echoes the Socialist Realism era in which art was intentionally pushed to be relatable and intelligible to the average working person. This was in response to centuries of high-brow and inaccessible art being the only admissible art, an emblem of class barriers and the intentional obfuscation and gatekeeping. The thought was, no, art doesn’t have to be inscrutable and “nuanced”, it can and maybe should be direct. I would love for an actual art historian to add more to this since it’s just my basic understanding.
Quite beside these points about realism, I think there are other reasons that adults today might reach for (apparently) children’s media that has less to do with an adult’s individual arrested development, and more to do with their daily alienation and social invalidation of their emotions and struggle within capitalism. Kids shows usually do a lot of emotional validation which makes them alluring for alienated adults also.
Don’t want to dox my age, but I am very much an adult and I’ve recently got into One Piece and Pokémon, so these ideas have been on my mind anyway. I feel happier since starting these shows, so I don’t care if they’re not adult shows
My perspective of art these days is that everyone, by virtue of being a human with an inner world, has a creative spark and that creative spark can be cultivated through artistic pursuits. Capitalist realism pushes people to only accept a selected class of artisans as artists (who all ideologically reproduce capitalist ideology of course) while the rest of us proles form the unwashed hoi polloi masses who know nothing but rolling around in our own filth consooming various forms of slop. By attempting to snuff out the creative spark that resides within all of us, it also divorces us from our own subjectivity, which among other things dreams of a better world or at least a world that's less shitty as this neoliberal hellworld.
Trying to be a better or more "sophisticated" consoomer is a distraction from what should be the goal of rediscovering and cultivating that creative spark. The deception is thinking consooming shitty Sonic fanfic is somehow completely different from consooming the entire work of Goethe in the original German. Consooming shitty Sonic fanfic is perfectly fine if it leads to something like doing Sonic cosplay or drawing Sonic fanart or creating Sonic ytp or even writing your own shitty Sonic fanfic because those are all acts of creation, expressions of that creative spark, unsophisticated as they may be. While few 13 year olds aren't going to create anything of value, if that 13 year old doesn't give up and continues to hone their craft, they can go on to create great things in their 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, and so on.
Cultivating the creative spark through creative works prepares us for the most important creation of all: the creation of a better world.
Bringing this back to my own first comment in this thread: This is precisely why out of all the forms of independent animation out there, I love fanime specifically so much. A work like Tokyo Crystal Mew is particularly illustrative and interesting to look at from this perspective: the way it was never finished, but later videos by the creator indicate that a lot more of the series was planned/made than was released; the way that the first two episodes were remade as the artist honed her skills; the way the visuals go from storyboards to very rough MS Paint drawings to very well-done black and white line animation to very well-done full-color animation, often in the same episode; and the knowledge in the back of your mind that the creator started the series I believe as a preteen and posted the last episode in her late teens, and you can see this in how the quality of the whole show tends to improve as it goes on. Something like Tokyo Crystal Mew is basically a celebration of imperfection and incompleteness, of creativity for creativity's sake; and it basically challenges anyone who sees it to try making their own animation, even if it looks rough, or the writing isn't all there, or you never finish it, making something is still better than nothing. You know?
I dunno if this makes sense, but it's like fanime is Kamina telling you the viewer/Simon to believe in the Kamina that believes in you, to do the impossible see the invisible, row row fight the power. And that's what I like about it: the unbridled human creativity, the unabashed reflections of pedestrian subjectivities.
This made me think about the repeated notion that old European capitals are “Disneyland for adults”, how while there is a kernel of insightful criticism, it betrays a lack of imagination on the part of the speaker; because, having lived in a very adult, very serious, very sober world of capitalist America, where the urban districts are built for the exclusive satisfaction of capital and the rejection of human residents — this person already cannot imagine a city that is designed for the pleasure of its residents, designed for use-value instead of exchange-value, except to the extent that pleasure is transactional as in an amusement park.
The thing about alienation driving people to kids' media has been on my mind too lately, as a long-term fan of kids' cartoons who recently read The Catcher in the Rye. — I mean, becoming an adult means being thrown into this whole alienating machine that is being a worker under capitalism, right? And this fact practically gives working class adults a pathological fixation on the people who haven't yet been thrown into the capitalist machine, namely children, and by extent children's things. The form this fixation takes varies between adults based on their individual circumstance and disposition, like some people might proudly be fans of children's media, some people might bitterly despise children out of envy, whatever it may be; but the fixation is always there and cut from the same cloth in any case, because being an adult necessarily means existing in relationship to children as an individual actor in the social institution of age, no different from how men are pathologically fixated on women, cis people on trans people, the unracialized on the racialized, et cetera.
"Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around―nobody big, I mean―except me. And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff―I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I'd do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be. I know it's crazy." —Holden Caulfield
Like you said, there is a spectrum of psychology depending on the person. Though, in general I wouldn’t think of it as pathology or fixation, and the temptation to do so reflects the depth of the stigmas which say, tautologically, that: men cannot be feminine, adults cannot be children, cis cannot toy with gender expression, and so on. That a cishetero man who paints his nails might be perceived as fixated on femininity — in my opinion, this says something about the observer and not about the man per se, as the observer would be projecting a boundary that the man might not perceive. Likewise, we shouldn’t construct a framework of pathology to contemplate adults behaving “like children” unless there is a clear, well, pathology i.e. there is genuine dysfunction. (Not saying you are doing this, I’m sure you understand)
On the reverse of the medal from “childlike” adults, many adults — particularly parents — exaggerate the difference of children from adults. It’s normal in society to think of children almost as a different species entirely, until they pupate and finally metamorphosize into an adult in discrete transitions. Hence for example, the concern about kids degrading their attention spans on social media does not apply also to adults, despite more or less having the same brain structures and reward pathways, albeit more developed. I think this is a similar reasoning to the notion that kids need emotional validation and should receive it from media, but adults do not.
I’m getting sleepy so kind of lost my train of thought, but close enough.
Edit: oh I was going to say something about the strong separation between child and adult having to do with the requirements of capital, having a clear separation between human beings according to their working status (which of course also includes gender). This has historical roots/baggage in the old feudal understanding of age which was different because labor was different, but inheritance was a lot more important so people had to “come of age” for political-economic reasons. Also there is the instutution of marriage which, in feudal times especially, needed clear (and gross) definitions of when girls as property could be legally sold off to another “commodity owner” which also has Inheritance implications.
Yes, very well said! I'm glad that we can have this sort of frank and enlightening discussion, I always appreciate your comments specifically.
It was a provoked "fuck off"
I said that I like a show, and then provided some context for why other people around my age find it appealing. Then you barged in to tell me I'm immature because you don't find the character development or writing (aspects I didn't even mention) is up to your Mature Adult standards.
that's not even something I'd disagree with. It's a high-concept cartoon, not a novel.
I didn't say that I hold the show up as a benchmark for good writing. You are hallucinating more than chatgpt
lmao. You take consooming very seriously
You went at them for talking about a cartoon on the assumption that cartoons are the only media they consume. That's pretty fucking provocative. Also rude and uncalled for.
you suck
It is really funny to me to call an independent animation production made by a trans woman that is more than anything else about how many trans women engage in incredibly toxic repression that ends up hurting themselves and everyone around them, and the permanent, fatal consequences of doubling down on that repression, a 'treat'.
Do you think TADC is just a 'treat' simply because it had the good luck to become incredibly popular? Because I strongly disagree. I find it one of the most compelling and relatable depictions of a trans woman in fiction, period, and I honestly believe that TADC is probably going to play a role in cracking many eggs and preventing many suicides because of that fact.
Maybe investigate the thing you're talking about before writing it off because it has bright colors or whatever. The success of TADC has been a breath of fresh air for a lot of trans women I know, because most of them have NEVER seen a popular depiction of a trans woman that actually reflected our reality, that actually reflects the consequences of the cisheteronormative society we live in, that actually reflects many modern trans women in a realistic way instead of being some cis persons misunderstood, idealized image.
And all that at a time of increasing oppression of transgender people.
I guess you didn't pick up on all that. Maybe Gooseworx should've made the characters state their emotions even more clearly, it seems like the show was a little too mature for where you're at right now.
you are seriously insufferable man the reddit bro is coming from inside the house here why are you like this
Ai-yai-yai. Some people pick the absolute strangest hills to die on. In cases like this, my first thought after Carl started going on about how "the 'fuck off' was unprovoked" was "Is this guy autistic? Is this why he can't understand how he comes across to others? Does he really not see how he was being condescending in that first comment?" — but as the comments kept continuing, and continuing, and continuing, and people angrily yet patiently explained over and over again what the problem was… no, he was just being a dick! I mean, not that there's a dichotomy between being autistic and being a dick, but you know what I mean.
My second thought then went to that viral video of the middle aged man on the Tokyo Metro yelling to complete strangers about how "THE FACULTY OF MEDICINE AT THE UNIVERSITY OF TOKYO IS FULL OF IDIOTS!!! WHY DON'T YOU THINK THEY ARE?!? GIVE ME PROOF!!!" — which was obviously a public disturbance that wasn't right to do, but obviously there's a reason why he did that, right? Explanations I've heard being that he was either fired from UTokyo earlier that day, or more dramatically that his daughter had been killed by surgical error earlier that day and he was blaming it on the surgeons' education. These are just unsubstantiated rumors, but either way there was something that made a lot of anger build up inside that man until he ended up having a public outburst that was unfortunate enough to be filmed, and unfortunate enough to make it past the general noise of the Internet to become an enduring meme.
It's going to be similar in cases like this, surely. I've remarked before on how I think a lot of Hexbears live in materially challenging, stressful life situations, and that can make people emotionally volatile and prone to die on random hills like this. At the same time, there is probably some element of wanting or being used to power in Carl's case — I don't know — but there's definitely a lot of ageist/ableist/elitist brainworms he has stubbornly refused to acknowledge, much less confront. Hopefully this will be a learning experience for him.
suck shit out of my ass
This sneering derision you hold for the notion of people liking a piece of media that you don't (fed by some unexamined ableism, judging by your moderation history and comments about "emotionally stunted adult children") and that they might find some emotional resonance in it indicates a chasm of emotional maturity far greater than the 30something YA readers you've made into your personal specter.
And I say this as someone who also holds a dislike of the show for their own reasons, so find a different reason to write me off. At least I actually investigated it rather than parading around and shouting to the high heavens what a terribly smart and above it all boy I am.
Your comments are public. I am not naive enough to believe that is only what you were saying. Attempting to paint over backhanded smug garbage about media taste not being on a high enough level as being just "expressing your opinion" on it, especially since you took the mask off and allowed the ableism fueling it to show (modlogs are public too remember), is really gross. There's a reason you kept getting modsniped.
Also let the irony escape no one that you also said all this wearing an Aqua Teen avatar, a show with such lofty mature writing as "what if a banana sexually assaulted people for twelve minutes" or "what if Hitler was a balloon and stopped the Holocaust because he liked Adam Sandler movies".
Never underestimate internet forum's ability to make you spend an obscene amount of time defending something you don't even like because the haters dislike it for the wrong reasons.
Sure let's check that.
Hmm. And then as for "After that, people started swearing at me, which is when I asserted that people shouldn't limit themselves to just watching simplistic media", someone very justifiably told you to fuck off for that very backhanded sanctimonious bit about "if your media taste is still at that level", you responded with "idk how old you are, but a millennial should be consuming media more challenging than TADC. Tell me I'm wrong." which is very much NOT just saying people shouldn't limit themselves to simplistic media, and is entirely rendering judgement.
and THAT is where the ableism comes in. This has nothing to do with "exclusively consuming children's media" or "limiting themselves to just watching simplistic media". I frankly do not care how frustrated you are at someone for committing the high crime of telling you to fuck off, you don't get to pull a Vaush and start spewing reactionary dogwater just because you deem the other person bad.
Someone offered their opinion of a cartoon and you responded on the assumption that that was all they watched. Very insulting.