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This perfectly summarizes why I love the Simpsons and hate Family Guy.
Yup.
So this.
I watched that episode with my family and I could just feel how uncomfortable everyone was. Honestly, it was a really jarring, unpleasant episode.
Homer is a terrible dad. So is Peter. But Homer’s saving grace has always been that he tries—he’s bad at it and he fucks it up a lot, but he loves his family and he wants to be better than he is.
One of my favorite Homer moments is in “Diatribe of a Mad Housewife.” Tl;dr Marge writes a steamy romance novel starring herself and Ned, and when Homer finds out, he chases down Ned and, rather than attack him, asks him to teach him how to be a better husband.
There’s some part of his stupid self that wants to do better.
I never got that impression with Peter. Instead, the family has gotten more and more abusive towards Meg. It’s really unsettling for me when I started realizing that’s what happens sometimes in abusive families. Abusers sometimes single out one child to abuse, and quite often the other family members take the abuser’s side. After all, it’s easier to side with an abuser than to run the risk of becoming the target yourself.
There’s never really a point where it seems like Peter cares at all that his shitty behavior impacts his family. It actually seems to have gotten worse over the years. He expects everyone to clean up his messes because that’s always what happens; there’s really no reason for him not to be shitty.
And it’s easy to see how Meg is affected. She doesn’t have much of a character, really, because so much her screen time is devoted to being abused. The bits of character development all seem to hinge on her being this sad, neglected person who’s trying her best but never really gets any help from anyone. Quite the opposite; there have been a lot of episodes where her family sabotages any attempts to be herself.
It can be easy to forget how awful this behavior is when the only context is the show itself (frankly, everyone on Family Guy is kind of terrible). Seeing it played against the Simpsons, who are a flawed and dysfunctional but ultimately loving family, was painful to watch.
Omg it was a funny episode -_- if you don’t like it, don’t watch. Yes, you have a valid point, but holy crap.
HAHA OKAY NO
“If you don’t like it shut up and don’t watch it” has its place. This is not it. Allow me to educate you on why you’re wrong.
Family Guy is a detriment. Plain and simple. Vox wasn’t too far off when they called this show “a blight on humanity”. Yeah, it has its moments where a couple of the quips they make get a laugh out of the audience. The show having long since lost its funniness isn’t the issue.
Everything this show stands for is absolutely sickening, and its more prominent in this episode than it has been in years.
Literally everything wrong with Family guy is jam packed into this episode. Here’s a list of just some of the things I can rattle off the top of my head.
It’s generally just unpleasant. There are a lot of moments that stood out in this episode as being really fucking awful, even by Family Guy standards (Stewie kidnapping/torturing people and telling Moe his daughter is being raped as a “prank call”, Meg carving Lisa’s name into her arm, etc). Family Guy has a nasty habit of thinking shocking/disturbing = funny. It doesn’t. It’s just unpleasant and not fun to watch.
The gags are unfunny/drag on for too long. This happens in almost every modern FG episode, but it’s really bad in this one. (The car wash scene, Homer and Peter’s fight, and just the majority of the episode really).
MacFarlane is using this series as a means to jerk himself off. The amount of self gratifying bullshit that Seth threw into Simpsons Guy was nausea inducing. The entire first—what, ten minutes of the episode was about how everyone calling out MacFarlane on his racist, sexist, and generally awful bullshit are, in his eyes, a load of oversensitive braindead idiots with no senses of humor. There are ways to respectfully make jokes about awful subjects. South Park does it all the time. Family Guy does not. Not only that, but MacFarlane plugs his other shows left and right and even goes so far as to shit on Bob’s Burgers—an INFINITELY superior show—in order to fuel his own ego. He’s a LITERAL MANCHILD.
Now, let’s get to the big issue. Family Guy’s messages are absolute trash, and the fact that it still makes money means that PEOPLE ARE BUYING IT. This show’s morals are just horrific. “Sexism is what makes men men” (I Am Peter, Hear Me Roar), “Abuse victims should stay in abusive relationships for their abusers’ benefits (Seahorse Seashell Party), and that’s definitely not the worst of it. This show is teaching its primary audience everything that is wrong with society. It doesn’t matter that these ass backwards lessons are being told in the form of jokes, they’re still normalizing and enforcing ideas that NEED TO STOP.
And the only way they’re gonna stop is if we raise fucking hell about it.
Also, no. It was not a funny episode.
I happened to catch part of this episode the night that it premiered, and I was horrified at what I saw. It was uncomfortable to watch. When they put the Griffins in Springfield, everything that was Family Guy related stood out 100000x more, giving us the ability to be more visually horrified by what MacFarlane’s characters portray. His messages and the way he sells his work makes me sick to my stomach. I used to nearly worship the man when I was younger, but fortunately, now that I see it, I see how shitty his work has become and how negatively the messages from his shows impact us.
I HATE the way they portray Meg. Their character development is mediocre and I have absolutely nothing to pick at with the above comments that go into depth on the subject. It’s bad enough that because of this show, I’m always being made the butt of Meg jokes because we happen to share the same name. But what they do to her is horrific.
What they don’t realize is that there are young girls out there going through the exact thing that Meg faces every time we see her. And it’s possible that because of the influence of this show that it happens. It influenced my siblings into normalizing abusive languages and behaviors that we weren’t only experiencing at home, but were seeing as normal on TV. I grew up watching this show in an environment where I was made fun of every day and everyone would stand behind my stepdad while he made fun of me. They think it’s harmless comedy, but this shit happens to kids everywhere and is a very real issue. It happened to me and continues to happen because men like my former stepdad and men like Peter Griffin really do exist.
They normalize this abusive behavior in such a way that it is seen as okay and part of normal life.
This photoset is a clear view into everything wrong with Family Guy and yes, something does need to be done about it, because 1.) I am personally tired of becoming the joke because of normalized abusive behavior 2.) teaching this to the viewers is only going to make the current situations we face socially significantly worse. Hopefully now with a full visual comparison between what is smart humor and what is the “Urban Outfitters” of animated comedy, we’ll be able to really take a look at what we watch when we sit in front of a television.
Posting again, because more commentary has been added, which makes it even more relevant.
read the whole damn post
And after realizing all of this stuff and more, this is why after being a decade long fan of Family Guy, I literally cold-turkey stopped watching and haven’t seen an episode in two years.
There is more merit in watching something and publicly criticizing it than letting people think nobody objects to objectionable content.
I don’t really watch either shows, but reblogging just because.
Also, the meg is worthless joke is there because she wasn’t a part of the original cast. Just throwing that out there.
I don’t know if anyone would care, but there WAS a fan club for Meg on Deviantart. I don’t know if it’s still active, but feel free to bring it to Tumblr. I always HATED how she was treated.
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