there's a tumblr post i remembered the other day that went something like
"the new cruella movie kills me because they're trying to turn her into a "i am woman, hear me roar" character as though her issue is societal and not because her primary motivation is skinning puppies"
i also just remembered that one villain musical (i really wish i remembered the name) where a whole bunch of the disney villains were singing about their true goals and how they got twisted in a sort of "history is written by the winners" fashion, and then cruella comes on screen singing "i only wished to have a coat made out of puppies" and the other villains are all just "bro wtf"
Clicking that link and getting a popup with "sent by Gummya, would you like to open a chat" aswell replacing the comment section with a button to direct message you.
You gotta clean the link. Around the middle, there’s a part that says ?is=. Everything after this is just a tracker. If you ‘clean’ the link by only keeping the parts before the question mark, it doesn’t do the tracking while still working
God damn, suddenly I am massively pro Jafar. Poor dude just wants to protect his kingdom while the boss's frat brother's alcoholic son gets to take over the organization
Except for the whole “raping Jasmine” thing, I’m with you.
Actually I think I’m misremembering. I thought he’d mind-controlled her, but I think just the Sultan. Still, a little awkward he had her dad as a thrall while he thought she was seducing him, but not as clean-cut.
He wanted to marry Jasmine, so he couldn’t “rape” her under shari’a. That movie was so Islamophobic, Jasmine’s hand could not have been cut off because the fruit doesn’t meet the minimum value (nisab).
Which is hilarious because you could easily replace Cruella with any other Disney villain. Honestly, I want a take on all this “waaaah, Disney villains are just misunderstood!!!” bs where our unambiguously evil villains are just lying about their stories to grift off of the morally grey/misunderstood villain trend
I never watched the movie so I might’ve been misinformed but I thought they also pulled a “Guys! Come on! She wasn’t ACTUALLY going to skin puppies! She just said that because reasons we thought would be reasonable!” No. Don’t do this. That’s like her entire thing that she was gonna skin puppies, like the entire anchor point of her whole characterization. It’s okay to write evil villains that skin puppies, they’re villains, I don’t want to humanize them and see they’re actually so girlboss for that.
In the Emma Stone movie iirc she says she’s going to skin the puppies because she’s getting revenge on the evil lady that killed her mom, and I think she makes a coat that looks like it’s made of puppies, but she didn’t actually kill the puppies. Also the evil lady was secretly her actual mom and used a dog whistle to make the Dalmatians kill the adoptive mom that raised Cruella.
I dunno man, I watched that movie, and she walked around with her ciggy emitting a fog bank of noxious bullshit in a ham-fisted visual metaphor for how awful she is, and she *really* wanted to make a coat out of puppies, to the extent of kidnapping multiple litters to have it done on the black market.
I really really hope we don’t see a movie that turns Mother Gothel into a misunderstood victim of circumstance who actually meant well for Rapunzel.
Tangled was a pretty powerful movie in showing how seemingly loving parents can actually be highly controlling and abusive under the guise of kind acts and affection, and how subtle yet devastating and insidious those acts of abuse can be. Such parents, especially mothers already get enough of a pass in society, and discounting their victims with platitudes like “oh she’s your mother, you’re just taking it the wrong way, she took the whole little league out for pizza didn’t she? You’re just spoilt and ungrateful” is an extremely common form of toxic positivity.
Yeah, part of feminism and equality isnt supporting women's wrongs so much as acknowledging that there are terrible people being terrible people regardless of gender. Putting women on a pedestal is just as bad as treating women like house slaves.
I think it was just a fun different story using a familiar fun villain. Her issues weren’t societal in the movie at all. The owner of the Dalmatians in the movie is a rich baroness who murdered Cruella’s mom, but actually secretly was her real bio mom and killed the adoptive mom because she (the baroness) ordered a servant to kill Cruella when she was born but the servant gave the baby to the adoptive mom.
Cruella drives a cool car and has cool hair and cool fashion and the movie is just about enjoying her being cool while getting revenge on a different cartoonishly evil woman.
Remove the puppies altogether and you'll get a cool movie about a girlboss fashion designer. Trying to tie Estella to Disney Cruella just detracted from her character. Instead of being an ambitious careerist she's now doing weird things like kidnapping dogs? Why is she suddenly treating her rogue friends like scum? It was too contrived.
I feel you get the point that so many have missed. The character in Cruella is literally the younger version of Cruella from the live-action 101 Dalmatians. Even in Cruella, she seems to embrace that she was "born bad" and is portrayed as such, rather than being retconned as always good but driven to villianhood or misunderstood like Maleficent was. I feel like the storyline you described should be the actual worst part of the film for being so convoluted and weird, but the acting from the Emma's is just so good that it's easy to look past it.
Lmfao its so funny cuz i enjoyed that movie but my take away was that it was her slowly descending more into "evil" by following the model designed by the system (patriarchy, capitalism, etc) like she dipped in and out of doing bad shit for money all her life for survival and now she was slowly developing her cruelty the deeper she got into the fashion industry and eventually becoming apart of the owning class again. I walked away from the theaters, thinking to myself damn man she went from that to being that lmao??
The movie would work if they abandoned the whole puppy theme and made an original movie about fashion designer drama. The attempt to tie the plot to the original Cruella character makes the story really weird and contrived.
Tbf it doesn't go for the whole "this is the true story, different from that fake fairytale that you have been told before" bullshit that Maleficent did. So you can easily just see them as different continuities rather than a reconnecting anything.
That's the theory that fits the transition between the live action films the best. There's even a theory that Cruella is having severe side effects from going through menopause.
And I do. I just found that part of the intro in Maleficent annoying. it doesn't even make that much sense in universe, its kind of alluding to the whole "History is written by the victors" thing. which would make sense if they went for a sadder ending where the more sympathetic Maleficent dies and the Crown rewrites history books and depicts Maleficent as a one dimensional villain like in the animated movie.
The movie was actually pretty good, it just didn't really need to be tied in with an existing property since they basically slapped old names onto new characters and it didn't match up
As someone from a country with a high crime rate, I used to hate this trend of making villains sympathetic. But now I understand that it teaches that unfortunate circumstances turn regular people "evil", even though most people often don't learn the messages of the media they watch.
That’s fine, but maybe someone whose name is literally “Cruel Devil” and wants to kill puppies in the name of fashion isn’t the person we should be using for that message.
So you want the character stay exactly the same in the second movie and do the same thing again? It may not always be done very well, but it's the best you can do with a one dimensional character.
All I remember is that I thought her "motivations" were bullshit and that the movie was straight to VHS for good reason. I just can't see her be anything other than evil, so a drastic change to the character would have been preferable. Or just not make the movie at all.
Well as a reminder: She becomes obsessed with an artist who makes a spot painting. She makes him paint the same painting over and over in an attempt to get back the feeling she had when viewing his first painting for the first time. She tortures him and tires him out until she realizes that the artistic rendering of the abstract ideal is impossible and she may as well go back to killing puppies. In the end she gets chucked into a padded room in the back of a crazy wagon, with "spots" where the linings meet. Here, she finds a profound manic happiness at this new arrangement. She laughs insanely as they take her away.
Her motivation is what it has always been; to capture an intangible aesthetic perfection. She attempts this now through an artist and ultimately she settled for the imperfect rendering of natural spots, and then fell into the clutches of mania as aesthetic obsession subsumed her rational mind.
To make a character like that sympathetic, you have to make the audience understand why the thing they're doing has morally complex motivations. There's no complexity in the ethical question of slaughtering puppies to wear their skins. The character's one-dimensionality, and explicit singular purpose of generating sympathy for the puppies kinda serves as a full-stop barrier to her development into an interesting, humanized character. That, IMO, is why the premise just doesn't work.
Could it be done? Maybe. Similar characters have been successfully expanded on, but to do so requires innovative writing that builds on the themes, character motivations, etc of the original (usually in a way that subverts those themes via revelation of new information that adds context) rather than just retconning the character's whole context in the story.
Honestly yeah. I don’t want every character to develop and change. I think expecting that is dumb as shit. I want to stay mad at cruel puppy abusers. I do not want to go “oh but actually she had some tragic motivation” like I do with real life criminals, I want to have someone it’s reasonable to be mad at in my fiction.
Well that just doesn't make for good writing, but it's great for sitcoms where everyone stays the same person for 11 seasons. I guess there's an audience for that, but it's not for me.
So you want the character stay exactly the same in the second movie and do the same thing again? in a shitty remake that only served as a cash grab filled with ragebait to get viewers? Well frankly, in a remake I'd hope the characters maintained their original identity as much as possible, and that includes being a heartless, evil bitch.
I could count the good live-action adaptations across ALL franchises on one hand, because a majority are unnecessary at best, and genuinely offensive at worst.
it is one thing to give reason as to why someones evil, because not everyone whos evil was just a born psycopath, but the takeaway is hoe much the story tries to imply the villain doesnt deserve to be brought to justice or as if the heroes were wrong in trying to stop and punish him for his actions. no matter if you have asob story or were actually injusticed for myriads of things for longest of times, even if those would be legit and touching, if youre causing mass murder and destruction you must be punished for it.
They went through a phase of that. Any female antagonist suddenly got retconned so it was a man's fault. Cruella, Maleficent, The wicked witch of the east, the Queen in snow white....
I was so mad for that. I was looking forward to see what mental gymnastic they will have to do to justify skinning puppies and they its just some alternate universe where she’s a good guy who don’t skin puppies
I mean, the live action doesn’t justify her actions in the original though? It gives her a back story, shows that her life wasn’t great, that she had a predisposition to going over the top. And while at that point in her life she seemed to have calmed back down, that’s not stopping her from skinning Dalmatians 30 years down the road.
Genuinely though, I do love the joke of Barney from HiMYM always getting movies backwards… he thinks Darth Vader is a hardworking single father offering a great job opportunity to his son, he thinks Karate Kid is about a hard working athlete who gets unfairly beaten by a nerd who cheated with an illegal kick… etc.
It used to be really funny, but now we have actual people like that and it’s not as hilarious anymore. Morons who see very obvious cautionary tales and side with them honestly like Homelander… ugh…
I actually started that show because of Barney… when I saw the trailer I went “Billy Zabka! The REAL karate kid!” lol
I never got past season two or so, I might continue one day if it’s good and not cancelled.
My baby brother LOVES Cobra Kai, so I’ve seen way too much of it. It is SO corny.
Just a bunch of people taking karate class way too seriously, and basically having gang wars between dojos. There’s a fucking katana fight at one point, lol
It had a real ending, so it didn’t get cancelled. It turns into a Shonen anime with constant fighting and incredible leaps of logic, so I don’t know if you’ll enjoy that since it started off pretty grounded.
My favorite part of Cobra Kai was how they treat the different forms of karate as like pseudo super powers. Utterly silly and fantastic. No notes (many notes actually)
I think it's how the flat earth movement started. I remember the forum back in the 90s and early 2000s, people in on the joke would post goofy shit like:
If the earth is round and rotates at 1000mph how come when I jump the earth doesn't move out from under me? Hmmm? HMMMMMMM????
They satired so hard they created a whole movement.
Every time I see a blatantly evil character these days, I always think:
"People aren't going to like the character in the context of a good villain for a story, they're going to LIKE THE CHARACTER GENUINELY AS A PERSON."
It's so predictable these days after Rick Sanchez, Homelander, a bunch of the Viltrumites, and some video game villains I can't be bothered to remember.
Lacking empathy and wanting to rip the world apart is a pretty big feature of many men, I guess. Seems to be resonating with fucking everybody these days.
To be fair, Darth Vader IS a hardworking single father offering a great job opportunity to his son. There’s just, you know, all the negative aspects tied to that job and him as well.
Highly recommend people check out "Jedi Party" by the Auralnauts on YouTube.
It's a redub of each of the Star Wars movies, where the Jedi are just a bunch of stoner EDM kids and lightsabers are rave glow sticks. Obi Wan is a fuckboi and Annikan is a frustrated wannabe. They have trippy EDM dance battles against each other.
The first episode (beginning at Phantom Menace) is juts a short 13min gag, but by the time they got to the Original Series, there's actually a long, serious plot where Darth Vader is young dad and assistant manger who just wants to look after his party girl daughter who wants hang out on Laser Moon for her birthday.
Nah, I'm with Cruella. The original movie was boring before she showed up.
I'm sitting there as a kid, falling asleep, and then...boom! This legend just decides she's gonna drunk drive over to her friend from school's place, burst into her house, and trash talk her friend's husband.
You just know she misses the party girl days with Anita, before she married that broke musician.
But before the day drinking can start again, Cruella's gotta tell her how sick she feels all the time, as she smokes that dank shi in Anita's house and rejects Anita's offer of baked goods - she's got a size double zero figure to maintain!
Wait...I always thought Cruella was her aunt or some kind of relative. I always thought evil relatives (step or biological) were a staple of Disney movies to teach kids the real evil is the ones we live with.
In the book, Cruella was an old school friend of Mrs Dearly (Anita in the film). I believe Mrs Dearly even talks about how she had one white braid and one black braid as a schoolgirl.
I honestly loved the fashion of the Cruella movie, too bad the storyline was trash. It’s hard to turn “hates puppies” into a relatable sentiment though 😆
They should have just leaned into her embracing her villainous self.
That they are objectively ruining perfectly good old villains for "cOmpLExiTY!" or "plOT twistS!" Instead of just creating new ones, yes I have said this already
We could all do with fewer remakes, but really, at least those reinterpret the source material instead of reproducing it. How that "ruins" a character is beyond me; it changes nothing about the old movie.
Reminds me of that stupid Jaffar musical trying to make Aladdin evil, nevermind that he prevented Jasmine getting her hand chopped off while Jaffar is a misogynist who thinks women should shut their mouths.
It's a parody musical, it's not even remotely comparable I feel. The promise is just "wouldn't it be kind of funny and fucked up if Alladin was the evil one and Jafar was good?", they were aware they would have to change literally everything that happens in the story for that to make any sense
I think the real problem is that they glorify business-men most of the time (except in Christmas movies)
Cruella is an extreme case of evil, but even women better than her get villainized, and they are, but holy shit all the business men that don't get villainized is so much worse.
I would love to believe this is a straw character, but some people- not many, thankfully -genuinely side with the Trunchbull or Miranda Priestley just because they're women with power. And like I get it, we could always use more fictional characters in that position because it was denied to real women for so long, but… They're genuinely evil, guys.
(the Trunchbull thing is bizarre because they're always like "oh, the movie is demonizing unmarried childfree women!" And I'm like. Show me where Miss Honey's husband is, then. She doesn't even have a love interest. And while she adopts a child at the end there's no indication that she was in a hurry to have one before that. Granted, per the book she's only 23 years old, but still.)
I think people misunderstand the arguments in these cases. It isn't that these women aren't villans, but that they were intentionally made villans. It sends a message to kids, that they internalize when the villan says "far more women are lost to marriage than war, famine and disease." and that's depicted as a bad thing.
Edit: it also sends a message when strong women are often made the villan and the subservient woman is the love interest.
This kinda misses the point..... the point isn't that Cruela isn't the villan, it's that they made the "strong entrepreneurially-minded female protaganist" the villan and comedically evil.
The word "protagonist" is the issue, there. She's not a protagonist in any reading of the movie. She's an antagonist. But still, the fact that she's more driven, childless and ostensibly single is notable.
And she's depicted as an older woman, to boot. Cruella is very much in the archetype of the evil crone character. That one is so prevalent, to a point where it's kind of caustic.
I agree for sure. I was referring to how the comics author missed the point, and subsequently strawmans the misunderstood argument. The word protagonist being added is a part of that strawman.
It's attributed to At Random Comics (by Ryan Mason) who has a history of posting none AI comics. And I can find reposts that date back at least 2 years
Can't find the original because I can't be bothered to check the full website. But it seems unlikely that it's AI
Eh, shes kind of right though. Especially since the live action 101 Dalmatians turns her into the poster child for the Boiling Kittens trope.
Then Cruella expands upon it, its no longer just an audience critique of the character writing, it becomes an actual part of the narrative and the way shes perceived.
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u/NobodyLikedThat1 6h ago
And then they made a whole live action movie retconning her into some misunderstood character