Lindsay Ellis "Cancelled" Controversy Rant

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I just found out that YouTuber Lindsay Ellis has been “cancelled” over a tweet comparing the plot of Disney's “Raya and the Last Dragon” to “Avatar: The Last Airbender.” I have a somewhat odd perspective on this.

Ironically, I recently unsubscribed from Ellis on YouTube because I felt she got too political. And now, this criticism of her is coming from the same general direction as her own politics. (It's the Left. I hesitate to even mention that because I don't want to get into a Left vs. Right discussion. If it was Right-leaning politics in her videos, I would have unsubbed just the same.)

I had been a fan of hers for years. She's very funny and has great insight into film, except when politics comes into it. Then, she flat out makes stuff up about the material. (I find that politics does this kind of thing.) This goes back to when she was known as The Nostalgia Chick and did a video on the 1980s “My Little Pony” cartoon. She claimed there was no conflict in the plot and used this to make a larger commentary on media for boys vs. girls. There was only one problem: it wasn't true at all. “My Little Pony” G1 had villains and even multi-part episodes with cliffhangers. (Ellis herself later described episode as her "laziest.") A while back, I wrote on this forum regarding her video essay on “Rent” called “Look Pretty and Do As Little As Possible,” in which her argument basically amounts to “It doesn't explicitly promote my politics, therefore bad.” And I was on a facebook Broadway group where her arguments about the show were parroted constantly by people of the same political persuasion.

My unsubbing wasn't even because of any specific thing Ellis did. It actually had more to do with me just becoming fed up with the constant barrage of politics on social media and in other YouTube movie review shows. (Not talking about here. This is a politics forum. .)

So now, here I am, defending her on this one point. Can we movie geeks not even make geeky little comments about plot similarities anymore? Apparently, it doesn't even help if the movie geek in question regularly voices her passionate devotion to the very same type of politics.

I haven't seen “Raya and the Last Dragon” yet, however, just from the premise, I can already see the similarities she's talking about. Here we have a fictional magical world divided into a small number of countries that used to live in harmony but something went wrong, leading to war. Now, many years later, our heroine must find the long-lost legendary figure who is destined to restore peace, but said individual turns out to be a naive goofball who must learn to master their powers. “But I truly believe that Sisu can save the world!”

Ellis has posted a lengthy apology/explanation video and despite apparently caring enough to type all this out, I don't care enough to watch it. I already saw someone on Twitter complaining she didn't admit she was wrong enough to satisfy them.

After writing this, I made the mistake of reading some of the comments on her recent tweets. I recommend not doing the same. These are scary, scary people.

Yeah some of these extremists don't listen to apologies.

All I can think is that they are very young.

I remember I subscribed when I watched a very long video of hers with a very interesting analysis of a thoroughly uninteresting movie (some Disney crap, it's all the same to me ). I thought "wow, I'm impressed". Her condescending snark was always a bit annoying, but she always seemed very insightful and went into a lot of nuance where practically no one else would. I unsubscribed after she uploaded a video discussing the "proper" and "correct" way to cancel the villainous JK Rowling. Not whether or not it was justified, or why, only how exactly to do it. It seemed uncharacteristically dogmatic. I was like "wait, what's this even about?" I still don't understand what crime JK Rowling committed other than tactlessness.

I remember I thought "well whatever, I'll just ignore this and keep watching the channel for the actually interesting stuff", but "ideology wars" now seemed to be what the channel was about. She specifically said she didn't care if anybody was disappointed by the direction she had taken. I don't remember what exactly she said, but it was like something implying "good riddance, go join your other bigot friends elsewhere". Now that's disappointing.

This all reminds me of a quote by a prominent feminist that I came across the other day when I was reading about squabbles and schisms within old-school feminism: "Sisterhood is powerful. It kills. Mostly sisters." Well there you go... No honor among zealots.

As Lindsay explained in her cancelled video, the complaints against her were a whole lot on nothing, and mostly of criticism of people imagining opinions where there were none, and that those on the Right had been trying to cancel her for years. You can see her in her video explain how a video she made when trying to come to terms with the fact that she was raped and was posted online without her permission when it would not be healthy without context, was being sent by those on the right for years to publishers and other people she did business with to try and get her fired and such.

Her video on being cancelled has a pretty high like to dislike video for someone supposedly cancelled, so it only goes to show that the majority are still on Lindsay's side, and that the crazy cancellers are a small minority.

The situation of Rowling is different, since she continued to use her platform to push hurtful points of view.

Holy s**t, the video is a hundred minutes long, what the f**k...

Anyways...

When I googled to see what the hell the whole JKR controversy was about, what I saw was someone apparently incapable of admitting that she had gone out of touch with the loyal fanbase she had been actively cultivating for years, and incapable of accepting the consequences of her mistake.

Either way, their "canceling" cases are completely different, no doubt about that, but that's not really what I'm talking about. The thing is, if someone turns social media drama into their shtick, well... it becomes their shtick. There's a point where it gets so "meta" that what's being said or argued simply makes absolutely no difference. That's the nature of the beast, and it's predictable.

I hope that if this is the case, they'll grow out of it.

What bothers me is the idea that defending yourself in any way is only "making things worse," something that was expressed in the Twitter replies. It reminds me of a couple of emotionally abusive people in my life. Both of them, separately, informed me that when they got angry and started screaming at me, my job was to not argue, because then their anger would just escalate and that would be my fault.



I love Disney movies and I love snark, if it's witty. However, I recognize that everybody has different taste. What the angry Twitter people are doing is demanding that everyone have the same reaction to a movie that they do, for the same reasons.

While I dion't agree with everything in Lindsay's "Hercules" video, I thought it was pretty balanced, funny and interesting. Then you have her "Pocahontas Was a Mistake" video, where she starts out with a clever comparison between "Pocahontas" and "Moana," but then segues into:

-- Trying to link Glen Keane's "sexy" design of Pocahontas to a disturbing sexual assault statistic, because "these things don't happen in a vacuum."

-- Mocking the idea that there is one nice, non-racist white man depicted in "Princess and the Frog," a fairy tale musical with talking animals.

-- Praising Nani from "Lilo and Stitch" as a good role model because she's "sexually unavailable to white men," because if she had a white boyfriend, I guess she'd be a bad role model?

But then she finishes up with a very funny song parody about Disney heroines always looking at water (something which was later joked about by Disney themselves in "Ralph Breaks the Internet").



I couldn't even sit through that one. I just found it boring.




I'm glad to hear that. The comments on the YouTube video (I did take a look at those) seemed to be mostly supportive. The angry Twitter comments just seemed so extreme.



I don't really know enough about the Rowling situation to comment much. What gets me is the idea that anyone who continues to enjoy Harry Potter is "supporting" everything Rowling says and does, even though she's already a world-famous billionaire. And yet when everyone liked Rowling, I don't remember anyone saying to me, "You bought her a castle just by liking her work!"

Also, I just read a Quora discussion about the flashback of Snape getting bullied (SPOILERS?) People were interpreting the scene as pro-bullying, because James Potter isn't punished in-universe and other people were like, well *of course* the terrible J.K. Rowling is pro-bullying. The thing is, regardless of what Rowling has said since, that's one of the most blatantly ANTI-bullying scenes I've ever read in my life. Like, it's not subtle about it at all. But because the author didn't punish a fictional character for his actions, they believe readers will come away thinking it's okay to do what he did and that's somehow the author's fault.

Last edited by vividgroovy on 22 Apr 2021, 3:56 am, edited 1 time in total.

Can anyone distill what the fuss is about because Ive read three articles on how she's cancelled but nobody actually explains how she "transgressed"??

From what I understand, she compared the plot structure of Disney's new animated movie "Raya and the Last Dragon" to the TV series "Avatar: The Last Airbender." People were upset because those are both American entertainment properties that were influenced by Asian culture, so they thought she was saying all Asian-based things are alike. She explained she not saying that at all and also that the comparison was not a criticism. If you Google "Lindsay Ellis tweet," the original (now deleted) tweet should come up.

I also ran across one tweet that complained about Ellis saying "Zuko's a girl in this" in reference to the villainess from "Raya." (Zuko being a male character from "Avatar: TLA.") To me, this means that the character is written so similarly to Zuko that the only major difference is the character's gender. Now, I'm not absolutely sure about this, but I think the Twitter person was trying to make this comment out to be somehow transphobic.

Avatar the Last Airbender is technically a mish-mash of a north-east Asian (Chinese and Japanese) story-line plot mixed with futuristic off world scenarios/monsters, with characters who look like a mix of Indian, middle eastern and caucasian. While I get the Asian fusion its not technically Asia.

Raya on the hand (while also set in a mythical place) is distinctly south-east Asian which is distinct from north-east Asia in that the cultures were heavily influenced by India. For example Kamundra is actually a sanskrit Indian name. Interestingly the actors for Raya don't appear to be south-east Asian but rather Chinese which is not particularly representative of south0east Asia. Even the music is performed by Jhene Aiko who is Japanese/black which has nothing to do with south-east Asia.

So ironically the people trying to cancel Lindsay Ellis are also ignorant of the cultural milieu of both story lines which really just borrow from everywhere and aren't really Asian (except for the fact Asians are trying to claim both stories which is silly).

The Raya-Avatar comparison is such an insane reason to cancel someone that I question whether they really care or if they were just looking for an excuse to punish her for being friends with Contrapoints. They're acting more like conservative straw-SJWs than like real people and I worry about what could happen if they become the public face of the left.

This is disturbing to me only because I have never seen "Avatar: The Last Airbender" or "Raya and the Last Dragon", and I have never heard of Lindsay Ellis (maybe because I do not let the people making YouTube videos do my thinking for me), so I have no idea what the fuss is all about.

Is it important enough that I should spend the better part of a day watching the movies and constructing a biographic profile of Ms. Ellis?

^ You really don't like Youtube, do you?

It's just TV with a different production style. There's lots and lots of bad stuff, and some good stuff. It's entertainment either way.

Two-hour-long sorry-not-sorry videos in response to manufactured drama over non-controversies are by definition part of the "bad stuff" in my opinion though. That's just not entertaining.

No, I do not.

While some of it may be "entertaining", it is like digging through a landfill to find something good to eat.

Even though most YouTube videos look good, most of them are just garbage; filthy, maggoty garbage.

At first it really is. My father asked me "how do you find good stuff on Youtube" because he was looking for something other than news to pass the time, and I really had no idea where to start, because their generic recommendations are just horrendously awful for the most part, and I only ever watch English-language channels.

I don't remember anymore how exactly it was that I started watching Youtube regularly, but the "trick" is to already be subscribed to a few good channels that post new videos regularly. From then on it's like meeting friends of friends. Most of the channels I'm subscribed to are "edutainment". Nature, science, fun facts, that kind of thing. Either way, the vast majority of videos I watch are from channels I'm already subscribed to, like this one: https://www.youtube.com/c/RealEngineering/videos

See, it's not all bad on Youtube.

I never said it was all bad; only that the bad vastly outweighs the good.

Never let YouTube do your thinking for you.

That's a pretty fair description of everything though, innit?