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.
Yeah, but that’s not what you said Dash stands in for. Being yourself is not how you treat ADHD.
The solution to not having enough time to cover that is to not make Dash stand-in for that. Which they don’t because that’s not what the movie is about.
The movie is about a stiffling system making the kids of a white middle class nuclear family struggle by forcing them to conform to a rigid (government-set) standard when they would thrive by self-expression and learning from their parents’ experience instead. Which neatly solves the problem of having to find a stand-in for mental health tratment by making the kids’ issues in the fictional universe be caused by the conformity, not by their superpowers.
Because the movie isn’t interested in the downsides of the powers. Dash getting bored because he’s fast isn’t presented as a struggle when he’s not forced to stay on the level of the normies. It’s not a day-to-day problem in the way The Thing being a monster made of rocks is a problem for him. It’s not caused by his powers, it’s caused by society trying to hold him back. Dash isn’t trans and he doesn’t have ADHD, he is a precocious kid being dragged back because the system is meant for people with less talent than he has.
That is what the movie is concerned with, and it overlaps with the ideology that it does. You are projecting what is at most a secondary concern (the feelings of otherness and isolation) onto the text because they are a more palatable interpretation.
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.
Yeah, but that’s not what you said Dash stands in for. Being yourself is not how you treat ADHD.
The solution to not having enough time to cover that is to not make Dash stand-in for that. Which they don’t because that’s not what the movie is about.
The movie is about a stiffling system making the kids of a white middle class nuclear family struggle by forcing them to conform to a rigid (government-set) standard when they would thrive by self-expression and learning from their parents’ experience instead. Which neatly solves the problem of having to find a stand-in for mental health tratment by making the kids’ issues in the fictional universe be caused by the conformity, not by their superpowers.
Because the movie isn’t interested in the downsides of the powers. Dash getting bored because he’s fast isn’t presented as a struggle when he’s not forced to stay on the level of the normies. It’s not a day-to-day problem in the way The Thing being a monster made of rocks is a problem for him. It’s not caused by his powers, it’s caused by society trying to hold him back. Dash isn’t trans and he doesn’t have ADHD, he is a precocious kid being dragged back because the system is meant for people with less talent than he has.
That is what the movie is concerned with, and it overlaps with the ideology that it does. You are projecting what is at most a secondary concern (the feelings of otherness and isolation) onto the text because they are a more palatable interpretation.
Which, hey, is the point of this entire thread.