(no subject)

[sigmaleph]

i sometimes think about people worried about Disney transmitting The Wrong Values to our kids (and the general 'what are the effects of reading/watching/etc certain kinds of fiction?' question)

it seems like most Disney classics have a mostly unquestioned pro-monarchy stance as a background assumption. At worst it's 'if you get the bad king it's bad but with a good king it's good'. yet 'let's bring back the monarchy' is way outside of the overton window of societies whose kids more or less universally grew up on Disney classics.

it'd be odd if fiction had zero effect on the opinions and values of people who consume it. people become aware of lots of aspects of their world via fiction first and stuff. but apparently disney's implicit pro-monarchy stance is not the kind of thing that has a measurable effect, or it's not enough to overcome the pro-democracy memes in the rest of the relevant cultures. Maybe it's just that they have pro-monarchy messages but not anti-democracy ones.

if violent video games don't make us violent and monarchist movies don't make us monarchist, what effects of fiction on personality or ideology or whatever have we actually observed?

Comments

[lunartulip]

The only one I can think of is that, when a bit of fiction presents me with a character whose approaches to problem-solving strike me as better than my own, I try to emulate them. But that's very much a conscious "I want to become more like Character in such-and-such fashion, so I put self-modificatory effort into doing so" thing, rather than the sort of Subconscious Corruption that I tend to see invoked in discussions of media-affecting-people's-personalities-or-whatever, so it might not be precisely what you're after.

[feotakahari]

I always assumed monarchists on the Internet were inspired by their love of fiction about monarchs. If that’s not the case, then I have no idea how they became monarchists.

Edit: if you felt like it, you could probably make the argument that Disney trains children to believe in a single strong hero who saves the day, and therefore Disney is to blame for Donald Trump. I don’t want to make that argument, though, because I think there are much bigger issues that led to Trump.