Firstly, thanks everyone for your comments, crits and support for Madland. I was unsure when I started doing this comic if it would be something I could handle in the long term, but I think now that I can. 6 pages took a ridiculous amount of effort but I'm finally getting into the "groove" now. The comic's in a boring-plot-setup phase, but soon I'm going to be introducing some new (and evil!) characters and getting the real plot rolling, so please bear with me

Secondly, I am hugely grateful for the recent deluge of watchers. (Before, it was more like a slow, intermittent trickle.) I'm trying to thank everyone, even though in the past I didn't do that (I thought it might be annoying). You guys rock ;_;

Thirdly, I just saw Wall-E. Consensus: adorable. I did not cry, but at least 10 times I felt tears banging at my eye-doors with a battering ram and twelve tricked-out rhinoceroses.



--rant--

A lot of people, mainly bloggers, feel the movie is "pro-environmental" (since when did that become such a bad thing?) and "anti-fat." Part of the premise is that the world became so lazy and pampered from living in space that they evolved into fat blobs that can't even walk, and they just talked into their video screens instead of interacting, and drank food in liquid format from "big gulp" cups. To me, this isn't anti-fat so much as it is anti-lazy.

Guess what - a sedentary lifestyle coupled with fatty food and no obligations whatsoever probably WILL make someone a fat blob, and having a future chair tote you around all day will probably result in an inability to walk. (They had a baby nursery in the movie. Wonder who's making all those babies?) I actually thought it was funny how an instructional video tried to explain the fatness as "bone loss" caused by no gravity (especially when the ship has artificial gravity). Clearly, the people on this ship didn't ever exercise - on a few occasions they remarked "we have a pool??" and "we have a jogging track??" when clued in to the existence of these things. It is TOTALLY PLAUSIBLE that everyone would become fat given these circumstances.

For the "fat community" (god I feel stupider just for having typed that) to assume that Pixar hates fat people is ludicrous. Pixar is making a movie about a hypothetical situation and a logical conclusion about the fate of humanity given the circumstances. They are not saying that ALL fat people are fat because of this kind of lifestyle; they are saying that IF this lifestyle were to be adopted, THIS would be the result.

Self-made victims seem to always take this backwards logic and apply it to anything they don't like. Pixar has fat characters who are fat because of a certain thing, therefore Pixar believes ALL fat people are fat because of said thing. What the heck? How does this even begin to make sense? What happened to creative license? What happened to "not everything is about YOU"? It's like saying that any movie with a black villain is racist.

The fat people in Wall-E aren't even portrayed as evil or reprehensible...in fact, the only three fat people who get lines are nice, decent people who want to change the world for the better. Their fatness, in the end, doesn't get in the way.

Hollywood seems to be out of ideas sometimes, and then a really unique movie comes along, and suddenly everyone's all up in arms because it says some controversial things - and people wonder why no good movies are made anymore.


An update: I am finally able to update my mood icon, and I find that I'm still content, so there's no need to change it.