Musk is defunding the EPA. Giving 100 grand to that turtlesack doesn’t count as “polluting less” in my book.

Well I respected the hippie chick as soon as she explained her spiritual system, before all that plot stuff happened. And that respect is what stuck with me over the years. Also she’s really pretty.

Marx was pretty anarchist compared to most people these days who call themselves marxists.

But she already did wiccan rituals without knowing magic is real, and she’s valid for that. I respect her even if magic isn’t real.

Didn’t she not know she was capable of that to begin with? Been years since I saw it.

There’s a specific impetus in 99% of little boys that makes them want to run a lot.

Yup.

Superhero movie good. Rich man bad. Rich man say superheroes bad. Rich man wrong. Leftists watch movie, agree with rich man. Silly.

Kari had Jack Jack handled better than Syndrome. Why? Because she’s a good babysitter. Babysitting is a more useful skill when looking after a baby than engineering. Syndrome is better at building gadgets, Kari is better at looking after a baby.

It’s not an absolute idea of specialness or universal competence. Not the Randian idea of Prime Movers. What we see in this movie is that EVERYONE has useful skills. Even an awkward teenage girl in braces. Syndrome doesn’t have the awkward teenage girl’s skills, and it gets him killed. Even for all his intellect, money, and power, he doesn’t have what she has. Everyone’s special.

Yeah, the patriarchy is bad for everyone. Misogynistic men rail against their own liberation because the women are gaining slightly more than they’re gaining. Enlightened men welcome the fact that being sensitive, caring, thoughtful, and in love with your partner is now socially acceptable. It’s the 21st century and men are now allowed to cry when they feel sad. This is great news. Way better than strip clubs.

Jack Jack is the most powerful character in the movie, and he can be handled by a teenager with a fire extinguisher. Is Kari more special than Syndrome?

She then goes on to describe how many of her “gods” were killed by their capes. The same thing that happened to Syndrome.

Syndrome is special. He built himself rocket boots as a ten year old. I’m a grown adult and I can’t do that! He doesn’t get his ass beat by the Omnidroid due to a specialness deficiency. He gets his ass beat because he invented an AI specifically designed to learn how to fight supers, and then had it fight him. He did a bad thing and the bad thing hurt him. He got leopard face’d. “I didn’t think leopards would eat MY face, says supervillain who trained leopards to eat faces.” There’s nobody in the movie who can solo the Omnidroid. Not Bob, not Frozone, not Syndrome. The Incredibles beat it with teamwork, love, and trust. Syndrome tells his teammate that love makes you weak and he can’t be trusted.

The counter to Syndrome’s argument is that power didn’t make him a superhero. Syndrome says “Oh, I’m real. Real enough to defeat you! And I did it without your oh-so-special powers.” Syndrome thinks being a “real hero” is about being strong. Selling his technology to rich people isn’t going to turn everyone into a hero. Syndrome, and all other billionaires, are unheroic because of their awful personalities. Powers aren’t what makes the difference.

You know who doesn’t have powers and is awesome? Edna. Edna Mode is most certifiably, 100% special. And it’s all in her personality.

You know what does more for a trans person’s mental health and suicide risk than any amount of talk therapy? Being themself.

Besides that, it’s a movie. There isn’t any time for a therapy scene in a 115 minute family movie about superheroes with everything else going on. The core theme of the movie is family, and family is what helps Dash and Violet. Helen accepts them for who they are instead of telling them to repress, and Bob gets on Helen’s side and encourages restraint. That’s actually kind of accurate - children’s mental health issues are so often caused by a bad family environment. Bob and Helen weren’t on the same page for most of the movie, and they were giving their kids conflicted messaging. When they reconcile and agree on how to parent the kids, the kids are able to reconcile too. Dash stops parroting Dad’s supremacist views and Violet stops internalising Mum’s conformist views. Good parenting is the very best thing for a child’s development.

And when I say plus size, I don’t mean fat. Plus size men’s clothing stores are called “big and tall”. Mr Incredible is big, and he’s tall. His size is plus compared to the body type the world is built for. It’s giving him back problems and poor activity levels because he doesn’t fit.

I addressed the Dash everyone super idea in another comment - https://lemmy.zip/comment/18650684

I’m running low on time and think we’re getting away from the core issues, so I’ll reply with a meme.

“The movie is Objectivist propaganda!”

The villain is a self made billionaire who’s bad because he thinks his power exists for his own amusement and not to help others

Here the supes are suppressed by the government, not a societal issue. They are presented as being accepted in the past, in a world without intervention

Not true. The government shut down the superhero program because of public pressure. The catalyst was the suicide jumper that Bob saved. But around that time there were a lot of incidents of property damage and lawsuits that made it too expensive for the government to have superheroes, because of what the people were doing.

Bob is marginalised in a way invisible to the people around him, but it’s there. As a plus size person, he doesn’t fit in his cubicle or his car. When he stops paying attention, the world around him crumbles. World of cardboard. Being huge and super strong isn’t easy for him.

But what’s even harder is having Bob’s justice sensitivity. Justice sensitivity is a symptom of autism in which neurodivergent people are more sensitive to social problems. Bob gets fired because his sense of right and wrong is too strong to fit into the world around him.

Dash also struggles with the same problems as neurodivergent people. Dash’s allegory is ADHD. He’s not allowed to participate in the parts of school life that interest him; that he’s good at. He’s constantly holding himself back. I was a gifted kid too, and my giftedness has caused consequences for other students when I dominated a classroom discussion. When I was moved to a gifted school and surrounded by peers, life got better for me. I see myself in Dash.

Violet’s marginalisation is more of an immigrant/racialised/misogyny problem. She’s accepted the mainstream narrative that her powers make her a freak. That she’s different and that’s bad. That normality is an ideal to aspire to. She becomes confident in herself after she’s allowed to engage with her own native culture and see that it’s not bad. She gets a talk from Mum and forges a new relationship with her minority identity. The fighting is secondary. The story isn’t about it.

There are queer or disabled people in white middle class nuclear families, and they have problems. I think Brad chose to make the story relatable to everyone by using a cultural image we’re very familiar with. But then he showed problems that happen when someone, even someone in that social role, is different from what society expects.

The thing with Syndrome is that the movie doesn’t make him wanting to be a superhero a problem because he’s bad at it or doing it for the wrong reasons, they do it because he’s not superpowered. He seems genuinely keen on helping when he first shows up, in fact. He is just bad at it because his artifical replacements aren’t as good at getting it done as natural ability.

No. Buddy blows up a bridge and lets Bomb Voyage get away because he wore a cape and wouldn’t listen. Bob tried to tell him there was a bomb on the cape, and he flew off and told Bob to go away. You cannot have children volunteering to go into life or death situations who won’t listen to their responsible adults. We see the same thing later on when Helen tells Violet to put a force field around the plane, and Violet doesn’t listen. She says Helen told her not to. But then she starts listening, and while she doesn’t get it right away, Helen sits the kids down to have a talk and they get the hang of things.

Buddy and Violet both make fatal mistakes they would have died for, if an adult hadn’t helped them. Then, Helen becomes patient with Violet and Violet listens. Bob puts Buddy in a cop car and Buddy doesn’t listen. No kid is instantly great at superheroism. In order to live long enough to get good at it, they need a good role model who they’ll listen to.

Brad Bird has said many times the most important thing in The Incredibles is the family. Dash and Violet succeed because of their relationships with their family. Buddy and Bob don’t have a good relationship. That’s the story, coming straight from the authorial intent.

It’s not even a case of Buddy’s invented powers malfunctioning in the movie. He makes a simple mistake of bad judgement. His powers didn’t have anything to do with not listening to an adult.

You’re missing the line right before Helen says “everyone’s special, Dash” - “But Dad always told us our powers are nothing to be ashamed of; our powers make us special!”

That exchange is part of an ongoing argument between Bob and Helen about how to raise their children. Bob wants to teach the children a sense of superiority, Helen wants them to fit in. Bob’s desire to see himself as better than others is something he slowly overcomes over the course of the movie. He can’t defeat Syndrome until he gets over that mindset, stops trying to do everything alone, and accepts help from the people he loves. Helen directly says in the cake/rubble scene that Bob is projecting his ego onto Dash.

In that scene, Dash is showing us that Bob’s misunderstanding of heroism is tearing his family apart and affecting his children. He’s already hurt one child with his idea that heroism is about superiority, and now he’s hurting another. We see Syndrome say the same thing as Dash so that we understand Bob needs to overcome this thinking to prevent Dash from growing up like Syndrome.

It’s really good writing.

Superheroism isn’t about being better than everyone else, it’s about helping people. That’s Bob’s arc and it’s the message of the entire movie. Everyone who says the movie is about better people being told to be equal to everyone else is misunderstanding it as badly as Syndrome does. The movie is about kind people being told to let others suffer.

Look at the way our society treats climate activists, or Black Lives Matter, or communists. We’re told to sit down and shut up. Stop trying to help other people who are in danger. Just be a cog in the system and let the health insurance company sentence people to death. Don’t rock the boat. Don’t make waves. Don’t cause drama. Look what they’re doing to Luigi.

Superheroes are a metaphor for leftists.