Text version and youtube description:
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2. Troubled – Shoji Meguro
Text version:
One of my friends in high school needed permission to leave the house at seventeen years old. He only came over to my house every few months, and only if my mom called his mom to confirm that it was okay. His mom wouldn’t let him keep his job as a bagger at Farm Fresh, and constantly demoralized him to the idea that he could do anything on his own. On his eighteenth birthday, he left the house without saying a word, signed up for the marines, and stayed with friends up until it was time for him to leave for boot camp. Even now, after his time in the marines is over, he doesn’t have a good relationship with his mom.
Overprotectiveness is dangerous in more ways than one. It won’t only stunt a child’s growth, but it will breed resentment, which is possibly even worse. It’s difficult for a child to listen to anything an adult says when they don’t feel the adult respects them and their will. All the people I’ve known who’s parents were overprotective have made a point to be as different from their parents as possible.
On a less extreme level, I know that many families have little tests and definitive moments when a child comes of age and can be trusted with new things. Personally, my family never had rigidly defined rules. My brothers and I kind of implicitly understood our limits, and when we were ready to start doing things on our own, it just kind of happened. I never had my parents telling me that I was now big enough to be home alone, it was more like I said one day that I wanted to stay home alone, and my dad said, “are you sure?” and I said, “yes,” and then I stayed home alone.
My ability to relate with this episode comes more from anecdotal understanding of other families, either through the stories of my friends, or from watching so many other cartoons in my life that deal with the same kinds of issues. If the goal of Friendship is Magic is to be a show that adults can watch with their children and not want to kill themselves, I don’t know if this episode succeeded, since the ludicrously repetitive dialog felt like drilling a hole through my skull, but I want to think that there are probably kids who will be okay with, and maybe connect with, the moral of this episode, if nothing else. Having said that, I wonder if it suggests to those kids that they should just disobey their parents and do risky things to prove that they’re ready. While an unsafe message, I can’t say I’d be at ends with that, even if I should be.
Regardless of how a family structures the incremental increase of rights to their children, it’s also true that readiness varies completely from person to person, and that there is no hardline bar for what readiness actually is. Many people become ready for something when it becomes necessary for them to be. When both of my parents were working, and my brother and I were in middle school, our youngest brother was always going to have an hour at home alone after returning from elementary school. He was ready because he had to be. I finally got my driver’s license at nineteen when my mom’s cancer went into remission, and someone had to drive her between frequent doctor’s appointments. I swallowed my fear immediately and took responsibility.
Applebloom is at that point. It’s a necessity for her to handle being home alone, because the circumstances have come to that. Or at least, it would seem that way, if Applejack didn’t give up on her time-sensitive journey immediately to baby Applebloom. Yeah, I don’t wanna get too much into how this episode worked or didn’t cause I think the other reviewers are gonna cover that handily, but it’s kind of weird to talk about the themes of the episode when they’re presented in a sort of careless way. Like, apparently AJ has never heard of a babysitter, to say nothing of how many times we’ve seen AB on her own already. I digress.
In the end, AJ is impressed with what Applebloom is capable of. I think it’s right to be impressed–personally, I’m constantly impressed when any young person tells me about how much they can do on their own. We’re all raised differently though, so our benchmarks for what’s normal and what’s actually really cool can vary wildly.
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Today on the Random Ass Shit channel, we’ll be guiding you through a brief exploration of boots in modern fashion.
Classically, the boot is considered the most utilitarian of footwear, worn largely by sodliers, hazard workers, and hikers. As such, due to the traditional gender coding of these activities, boots were seen as a very masculine footwear for many years.
However, in the 1960s and 70s, there was a boom in boots as a fashion statement, largely propogated by female boot-wearers. This liberation of the boot’s linear purpose could be seen as part of the late millennia’s break with traditional gender coding, as men’s fashion staples trickled into normalcy within the female wardrobe.
Nowadays, if you search the word “boots” on google, you will find only listing of women’s boots, mostly in modern fashion forms. I can say from experience as well that while I don’t own any boots at all, every woman I’ve known has owned at least a pair or two. Though it helps of course that most of those women dress in gothic style, if only on occassion.
The popularity of boots in gothic and other subcultures is largely tied to their reputation as the single most fetishized article of clothing in existence. The fetish of boots worn by women is tied to male masochism and female empowerment, as they suggest a refusal to adhere to traditional feminine ideas of fragility. Boots are a staple of the BDSM subculture, which has a lot of influence on the gothic counterculture of empowerment via self-expression and refusal to adhere to the mainstream or traditional ideas of society.
Boots are hot. That’s what I’m getting at. That’s the point of this section. Applejack looks hot in boots. I’m literally just trying to look for an excuse to talk about Applejack’s hot boots because that was like, by far the best thing about this episode. I’m sorry.
This has been, the Random Ass Shit channel’s brief exploration of boots in modern fashion. We hope you enjoyed this special presentation.
My Sword Is Unbelievably Dull 