There’s an extra thousand words extending this essay on the topic of the text’s sympathies available for paid supporters of every tier. Here’s the Patreon link! www.patreon.com/posts/endnote-birchum-107754978?Link& (RU-vid Members, check the community tab)
Your mr birtrum analisys was pretty fun, so i wouldnt mind you failing to meet the promice that you wont touch it 😅 This one in particular i feel like has a lot of value in reguards to what can be done against far right propaganda in order to effectivelly subvert it. Becauae as it becomes more prevelent and more resourcefull, we need better strategies to fight back, and i feel we have kindof missed the mark in a lot of ways here on the opposing team when it comes to this. Have a great day
Also, im new here as of a few days ago, and i love your work! Its fun, interesting, and always educational❤ You have the kind of chanel that i know ill be subscribed to probably for life ☺️
The show accidentally being kinda gay wouldn’t be surprising if you listened to Ben Shapiro. He is literally an effeminate man who hates women and is obsessed with the trappings of masculinity. Like he claims to be a straight man but all he can think about women is how disgusting it is when you can see their bodies. Yet he LOVES athletes and body builders. Ben is gay y’all
@PillarofGarbage ⚠️More context for you⚠️ Having listened to The original Birtchum from the 1990 radio call-in bits, to Loveline, to The Man Show, to crank yankers… Almost ALL of those are OLD 20yr+ old bits at the expense of ‘the Gays’ as the Vietnam War Vet would put it. And because they are all out of context and smushed in to a modern storyline your take is not wrong. The true character, as originally intended, was the definition of a homophobe of today. What was missing was what the editors and animators took out for time or convince or to change the joke was the overt objection to anything gay. Making it funny when Birtchum would describe things in almost explicitly gay way, while insisting anything gay was wretched and vile… the irony So without the irony of the old gay jokes (from when they were socially acceptable) it like you said becomes just gay. Modern script supervisors and directors who weren’t even alive when Birtchum was created completely changed this character 💯. I do not recognize him, just the shells of his deeply neutered jokes about gay sounding construction terms. The DW+ K;//ed Birtchum, they never should have made this if they were going to be so Politically Correct about it. On the other hand let the queer fan base have him, with no new material in 30years I was less than interested to begin with. Good read on the situation though 👍
It's also hilarious how anti "Art" he is. Bro, Woodworking IS ART. Have you seen any beautifully curved cabinets, luxuriously crafted old chairs, chain-saw-made photo-realistic statues, ludicrously expensive stair-case end pieces, shiny lacquered cherry wood tables, and just fucking Mahogany in general?! He needs to get out of his closet and embrace the true beauty of woodworking.
This is because in a conservative mind, anything that expresses beauty but also has functionality is given another name. It doesn't need to be called art if it has functional or talent-based merits on which it can be assessed. The word "Art" covers everything that's left over when artistic disciplines they view as useful and/or skill-expressive have been given other names. Art is inherently negative to a conservative not because they hate beauty, but because when they hear the word "art", they only think of the kinds of art and artists that don't fit into any valuable other category.
Being anti art is a whole handful of red flags in itself, signaling various far right neurosis. Double if they think the only good art is marble statues and oil paintings more than 500 years old. Quadruple if they call newer art 'degenerate'
@@yurisei6732 Art is inherently political/radical and conservatives fundamentally refuse to engage with complex politics and sociology. With this in mind, one should concur that conservatives are fundamentally anti-art (minus the 'non-taboo' art they're allowed to express). They seek to limit/extinguish the individual's expression (what 'art' is) and force them to conform to the collective. Conservatives create art in an ironic self-congratulatory way. "Yay, you've created something that's almost the exact same as what your ancestors did." Maybe they should try creating something that challenges the perception of the world and explores the phenomena of human experience in a refreshing way instead of rehashing what was done already thousands of years prior. Too bad conservatism lacks innovation.
I work as a teacher, so I wanna know what world does the Daily Wire live in where shop classes are getting their budgets slashed while art classes get more budget. In reality, if anything, both get their budgets cut, while sports is either untouched or gets more funding.
@@musclestruts5032 and its usually the conservatives fault! They're the types to continually insist on/support slashing funding for schools, leading to the schools to cut programs, and sports is untouched probably because if kids play sports they're more likely to suffer brain injuries that leave them as adults more susceptible to the conservative "slash the school budget" ideology
Sorry son, according to Marxists masculine homosexuals are actually pickmes and therefore and not part of the LGBTQ community. There's also the fact that y'all have literally spent years trying to equate effeminacy with homosexuality, you don't get to change the rules all of the sudden.
The thing I love most about the engayening of Mr Birchum is Ben Shapiro now faces an incredibly painful decision; either follow the free market, make Mr Birchum an explicitly queer show and rake in the big bucks, or stand his ground and go bankrupt in the process. Quite literally, he either has to go woke, or go broke. Fucking priceless.
Their funding is very much behind the scenes which is kind of ironic that conservatives tend to have all these "they" conspiracies held as fundamental tenants of how Hollywood and the media work.
Now that you mention it, "unfortunately" implies that he wishes that his fortune was different, so yeah, probably he's interested in a gay relationship but he has to keep the acting of a white heterosexual male or there will be social consecuences on him. Truly a show that shows the struggle of a gay male that has to fit in a society that doesn't want him to be gay.
the other funny part is that outside these circles the show isn't popular so a lot of peoples only interaction with this piece of media is literally the gay art and response to it
The curse of the Christian family model - What do you do when every relationship you're able to form relies on the context of family, but you hate your wife or kids? They don't leave because unless they can prove that their wife is unfaithful, they get ostracised for divorcing her.
I actually really enjoy it when straight dudes aren't using this cliched sitcom routine. It's cool, heterosexual person, to have healthy adult relationships and like your wife.
Having never seen the show, I'm guessing Birchum is in a passionless marriage with a wife he doesn't like. And he shares more scenes with the gay character than he does with his wife.
Not knowing the context nor the plot of this show, the idea that an ultra conservative group made the most unironically accurate representation of a closeted homosexual by complete accident whilst shining a light at the absurdity of their idea of masculinity is very funny to me.
@@Frommerman It's really, really sad because it seems like the whole show is based on the delusion that their dad was the perfect man. I bet Corolla really misses his dad and this is the only way he can deal with it.
@@Frommermanultra conservatives somehow always want to reach a collective where everyone is miserable and hates everyone else. The women are miserable from lack of rights and education, the children are miserable from lack of freedom and critical-thinking, mjnorities and any other disliked group are miserable from just existing in that scenario. Even the men-especially the ones wielding power-are miserable from being forced into a role this dystopian society forces them into despite having the means to just... not do that. Why?! Like, I at least get it with greedy, corrupt office boards; they wanna hoard all wealth like a dragon because they LOVE money. Money makes them happy, and thus they will get more no matter what ethics they have to tear away. Sure, short-sighted and incredibly selfish, but our survival instinct DOES come from selfishness. Ultra conservative or nationalist people/other hate groups, meanwhile, want to rule the world because... they wanna enforce misery to everyone including themselves??? Like look at Iran, Russia, or NK. Even while sitting at the throne are they incredibly miserable. What's the point of being at the top and exerting that much control when you yourself are more miserable than an average citizen in a free country?! Why do they wanna do this to themselves???
@@Frommerman Ultra conservatives somehow always want to reach a collective where everyone is miserable and hates everyone else. The women are miserable from lack of rights and education, the children are miserable from lack of freedom and critical-thinking, minorities and any other non-mainstream group are miserable from just existing in that scenario. Even the men-especially the ones wielding power-are miserable from being forced into a role this dystopian society forces them into despite having the means to just... not do that. Why?! Like, I at least get it with greedy, corrupt office boards; they wanna hoard all wealth because they LOVE money. Money makes them happy, and thus they will get more no matter what morality they have to tear away. Sure, short-sighted and incredibly selfish, but our survival instinct DOES come from selfishness. Ultra conservative or other hate groups, meanwhile, want to rule the world because... they wanna enforce misery to everyone including themselves??? Like look at countries where those ideology won. Even while sitting at the throne are they incredibly suffering. What's the point of being at the top and exerting that much control when you yourself are more miserable than an average citizen in a free country?! Why do they wanna do this to themselves???
@@Frommerman ultra conservatives somehow always want to reach a collective where everyone is suffering and hates everyone else. The women are miserable from lack of rights and education, the children are miserable from lack of freedom and being shoved harmful behavior, minorities and any other group are miserable from just existing in that scenario. Even the men-especially the ones wielding power-are miserable from a certain mold this dystopian society forces them into despite having the means to just... not do that. Why?! Like, I at least get it with billionnaires; they wanna hoard all wealth because they LOVE money. Money makes them happy, and thus they will get more no matter what gets in the way. Sure, short-sighted and incredibly selfish, but our survival instinct DOES come from selfishness. It makes sense in a way. Ultra conservative, meanwhile, want to rule the world because... they wanna enforce misery to everyone including themselves??? Look at the rulers of where this idea won. Even while sitting at the throne are they incredibly suffering. What's the point of being at the top and exerting that much control when you yourself are more miserable than an average citizen in a free country?! Why do they wanna do this to themselves???
"I'm a deeply closeted gay man" "you're a gay man?" "I'm not gay! I said deeply closeted! I'm as straight as an arrow!" That Norm Macdonald joke just came to mind
?? I am suddenly reminded of a moment in the film PECKER, where some guy dancing on a bar is suddenly confronted by his shocked mother... something like "Mom, I'M not gay, gay guys blow ME!". I might be a little off, but it was something like that. Or a sketch long ago on Second City TV (?) where a drunk sports fan is being strenuously proposition by a gay man. The drunk says something like "But I'm not gay, eh?", and his new friend reassures him "Oh, no, no... that's MY job!", and they stagger off arm in arm. I think both of these are relevant here, but I've had a quiet life and can't really judge. To some extent I want to watch this show because I'm a cranky old shop teacher, and also because I live in a college town "where everyone has their own diet, gender and religion", and sometimes it's funny and annoying as it stands! Surrounded as I am by artists, writers, musicians and hopeless alcoholics... it does sometimes seem like I'm living in a cartoon! This cartoon we're seeing glimpses of... it might not be trying that hard. None of this is to say that it's any good! I THINK with little evidence that they might show us something that's in plain sight that we don't see. In my own life I never noticed that white people were funny until I saw a few episodes of Living Color, and a generation later on RU-vid the Chen Brothers doing little sketches where one brother puts on a blonde wig and does the part of typical white guy (in the context of cooking or eating in a restaurant mostly), and it's really on the nose! I DO and SAY a lot of the white guy stuff that they are laughing about! I DO have five or six whisks to mix stuff instead of just a pair of chopsticks. GOING FORWARD if I'm in STEM Instruction environment, (a SHOP I want to say, but no... MakerSpace? Yeah, it's like that every day) and everyone starts laughing, now I'll know why!
@@red-rr3isI think it’s pretty obvious that jotaros main sexuality was “I must kill Dio” and after he had fulfilled his sexual desire he was just swinging that thing to see if he could get the same reaction
This show is, inadvertently, a perfect demonstration of how a rugged, manly conservative often belies a deeply, *deeply* closeted person, someone so lost in the closet they have no idea they're in one.
The circumstances and the ideology play off of each other in a feedback loop. The generic conservative man is forced to spend their life with a woman they hate and have negative chemistry with, doing whatever's necessary to spend more time with men. He's only okay with this because he's predetermined (by religion, generational trauma, etc.) that this is normal and that everyone else must be wrong. He must not be gay because there's no room in his headcanon for that.
My favorite part about Mr. Birchum is that he's a Vietnam vet and even if he was like 18 and got drafted, he'd be pushing 80 at the time of the series. This is the level of care that went into the writing of a character that has been trying to get off the ground since like the early 90s. Karponzi clearly likes the silver foxes is what I'm getting at here.
The 'early 90's part if what explain it - he'd only have had to be in his 50's to have served in 'Nam in the 90's, so they did the maths then and simply never updated his lore.
@@trianglemoebiusAmerica left Vietnam in 1975 which saw Vietnam reunify under the Communist government, ending what we in the US call the “Vietnam War”, so that still doesn’t make sense, unless Mr. Birchum volunteered to join the People’s Liberation Army and fight against Vietnam under the flag of China in the year 1990 and/or 1991 (and I don’t get the feeling he would do that)
Unironically the story of a conservative dad slowly developing feelings for his gay coworker and rethinking his ideas of masculinity would have been a wayyy better story than whatever the actual show is trying to push.
I'd be down for that cartoon. Kind of like a more serialized, slow burn King of the Hill where the MC is more conservative and less likely to rethink his positions by the end of one episode. Sounds like it'd be great for streaming if any platform would be willing to greenlight more than 8 episodes a season. Only slight snag I see is that you'd need to establish early on the MC has endearing and redeeming qualities the audience wants to watch even before they start changing their minds. If he was just a bigoted conservative, I don't know if people would stick around for the shift since we all know and see bigoted conservatives and what they're like and we're sick of them. Maybe it could try to nail the tricky angle of sympathy for conservatives where it's recognized they truly believe they're well intentioned and that the culture was bs is a prison, of their own design yes, but one a lot of conservatives are slow to realize they can just leave (and in some cases, they can't just leave. Family, friends, work culture, wife, etc. can make rejecting the surrounding conformity tricky.)
Nah, it ain’t ironic. You can tell cause they seethe about gays when they aren’t being gay themselves. Making gay jokes is funny, but they tell on themselves when they get super defensive about them being gay
*Gestures broadly at the USMC* Just a little joke, but I swear everybody I know who went into. The Marines was either the gayest straight person ever or the straightest gay person ever.
@scratch7971 seriously. god forbid you _dont_ openly mock gay people infront of them... aftet they just mooned their friend on facetime whilst drunk. yeah , _suuuuure_ you're straight...
Reminds me of that one guy (Crowder, I think) saying that if we were to allow people to be gay, no new children would be born - implying that he thinks all straight people are just closeted gay people
Also I think the irony here of conservatives being entirely unable to stand a piece of media simply for having a gay character at all, while leftists are finding a level of enjoyment in this conservative main character that is intended to be against them really shows some fundamental difference in the perspectives and attitudes of left and right wing people.
I just want to know what bizarro universe this show takes place in where schools are increasing art funding, because it sure as shit isn't this universe.
The same one where a middle school in this, the year of Our Lord 2024, has a dedicated wood shop class. Seriously, I was in middle school in the late 90's and we didn't even have one of those.
To quote Matteo Lane: "It's so hard to describe gay icons to straight people. They just don't get it. Like, 'Wait, Maleficent, Miss Piggy, and the Barefoot Contessa are all gay icons? [...] Why Maleficent?' 'Uh, she's got horns and she's a cxnt, I don't know."'
I saw a comment on another video that sums it up: “Nothing says conservative, Christian values like a man who loves wood and avoiding his wife and being around big hard wood and being in the navy with his fellow seamen where he ignores his wife and thinks about wood and sometimes he tells a bunch of little kids to come round to his house and touch his wood and not tell their parents about getting their hands on his tools and… they *really* didn’t put any thought into how any of this would sound, did they?”
@@manfredrichtoften8848 both the directors of the matrox are trans women and the film is a trans allegory! i would look it up simce other people have talked about it way more eloquently than i could
A bunch of bad writers who were rejected by the actual media industry, because they are such bad writers, writing a show to make fun about gay people and because they are so bad at writing it, they accidentally make the main character a closeted gay person is just absolutely hilarious
not the first time someone wanted to make a character Ultra masculine and accidently made them super gay. It's almost as if masculinity and masculine expression is very popular in gay culture.
There’s no bit. Strip away the poorly-written conservative propaganda and you’re left with an animated sitcom about a man who just…ya know…really loves ‘wood’. 😏
You're not wrong. At least on an individual basis, some articles and coverage noted people saying that it ['triggering the libs'] wasn't fun if [their targets] weren't responding and getting mad. That is, they're more interested in the feeling of winning and the adrenaline of hating/getting a reaction from the other than engaging and enjoying with their own politics and beliefs.
@@dieucondorimperial2509 I think there's also an aspect where art, for the right, must have a practical tangible purpose in the same way that 'hard work' like Birchum's woodworking is a practical skill and outcome. Art as experience, art as creation, art as expression, art as exploration isn't necessarily acceptable. Thus much of their art is far more explicitly propaganda - extolling their own views as well as demonizing their current targets - over saying something broader or attempting to carry a conversation of persuasion. I doubt we would really ever see a conservative show that was a true slice of life or character journey in the same vein as, say, Steven Universe. If we did, it would likely be co-opted from something else such as American History X.
@@dieucondorimperial2509 Building off of the previous comment, art’s freedom of expression often clashes with conservative’s ideal of conformity. Conservatives art has the priority of preserving/ idealizing the status quo which in turn restricts what can actually be made.
It’s the Rob Liefeld problem. When everyone is theoretically as straight as possible, the most heightened version of their gender as possible, no one is. It all becomes camp. Rob Liefeld was cursed to never make a fictional straight man and so was Bircham.
My favorite tid bit about Adam Carolla is he had a show where they would go do repairs on peoples houses who had been screwed by bad repairmen, the show ended because they got sued for being bad repairmen themselves
Yeah, this show and the DW seem to be saying "we are ok with minorities as long as they don't accuse us or financial structures of taking away their rights," but the actual people who follow the DW tend to be far more racist and homophobic.
If the writers behind this show were actually artists they'd lean into the queerness in a hypothetical season 2. You can still have Birchum be a conservative Ron Swanson type, but you could have him learn to be a more compassionate man through Karponzi. Likewise you could have Karponzi grow to be less insufferable and more aware of things like optics and bad faith actors. Have them learn from each other and grow, y'know? But their politics demand that art bend the knee to the culture war.
That's the thing though, right? From their perspective, he's already arrived and everyone else needs to get there. There is little space for something like 'optics' and 'bad faith actors'.
If anything they’re going to go harder on the culture war claptrap given the negative response a lot of hardcore evangelicals and other super conservatives have had about the show being “too gay”.
Oh I would laugh so f*cking hard at the future where this show doesn't get a season 2 because of abysmal streaming numbers, Adult Swim buys it out for peanuts, and gives it a few more seasons where they take the much better ironic fans proposed idea of Birchum being a Ron Swanson type with a heart and willing to change his mind about a changing, more progressive world and running with it. That probably won't happen but I'd do a hell of a lot to see the alternate universe where it does. Maybe they could go all in on Birchum/Karponzi having something going on and use that as an in to have a respectful depiction and arc about consensual open relationships while also tackling the topic of older people realizing they're queer and what that means for their lives.
Conservatives: hah! whiny liberal queer people are gonna be so mad when they see this show we made to make fun of them queer people: he's such a gay icon
7:40 - Now, I'm not saying this guy is definitely a closeted Gay Republican, I'm just saying that if I were asked to draw the most obvious closeted Gay Republican, this is exactly how the character would look.
He do love wood though. It says it right on his mugs. God damn, the fact they are making gay fanart is fucking amazing. Media is truly out of the hands of the author and in the audiences now.
IDK how they didnt catch this, but wood is slang for p*nis in some cultures, so it can be interpreted as "I love p*nis" for the creators of the show who hate gay & trans, this is very ironic!
I hope the Daily Wire heads realize that absolutely no one respects them as creatives. Given how many of them are Hollywood failures I doubt it’s a new experience
@@antediluvianatheist5262 Daily wire are controlled opposition, they rarely talk about the actual problems and instead focus on culture war drivel that just divides the country even more
Some elements I caught while watching as well: - The schools mascot is the "rough riders" okay come on now - Before watching the burly men outside as a boy, he was watching a show about space rockets (very common phallus joke on literally any TV show ever) - The character was partially based on Nick Offerman's performance as Ron Swanson and Offerman himself is a noted progressive who supported Elizabeth Warren in the 2020 democratic primary. Offerman is also a supporter of LGBT rights and recently played a gay man in the Last of Us TV adaptation - Another background element is the "save the dolphins" sticky note, dolphins are notably yet another famously gay animal when it comes to TV writers' perception of them at least. - His thermos is made by "staley", clearly an attempt at parodying the Stanley brand which has a large following of predominantly straight women and queer men - Ain't no way the man's name is also Dick, they're not even trying to hide it - There's also an inherent homo-eroticism about woodwork, sort of like there is with pottery. Drilling some wood until the shrapnel comes off? Was it possible to give him an even more gay job?
According to my mom who was alive when this show was written (the 90s) Stanley used to be a masculine man construction worker brand. They just didn't bother to update their show that didn't go live for 30 years
@@jamiejam9976 interesting, though given how many "culture war" specific talking points do get brought up in the show... like clearly they did re-write or update certain elements prior to releasing it but didn't bother to look up details like this even though the Stanley hype has been one of the most annoyingly persistent online trends for like a year now? not being aware of that but claiming to do any kind of cultural analysis with your show is wilder than doing 30-years-ago analysis to begin with...
The funniest thing to me about this is the fact thay they've been trying to get this show off the ground over two to three decades. It's like carrying a flag up Everest and a bird snatches it away right before you reach the summit.
They might as well be straight, the thing is, they are fed and perpetuate an impossible, incoherent idea of manliness. For one it leaves them frustrated as they fail to live up to it, while it also stands in the way of them exploring why they feel that way. One way or the other, they are certainly traped in some kind of closet.
Thank you so much for crediting all the artists btw! I saw another video that reviewed several of the pieces but put some in completely uncredited, which was disappointing. Appreciate that you did your due diligence!
They wrote what they imagine to be a clear and uncontroversially masculine character. They would consider that totally mutually exclusive woth queerness. Mr birchum could easily be a straightforwardly straight man. He could just as easily be a repressed bear. The fact that those realities look exactly the same is precisely the kind of nuance that the writers aren't capable of noticing, so things like this will keep happening.
I think most people see that a lot of gay men are quite feminine and assume that straight is the masculine option. I'd argue being gay has always been more masculine, there's literally twice as many men involved, and it's because of this that a lot of gay men are feminine in other ways to balance out the homosexually. Masc gays are therefore the most manly people in existence so it makes sense that a character made to be as masculine as possible would read as gay.
Simultaneously being effeminate is gay culture but the second people call you emasculate you immediately start pointing out masculine gays to save face. Honestly if y'all were as half as masculine as you wished you were, people would respect you a lot more.
@@SaberSin-mu4ktbecause both masculine and feminine gay people can exist? Heck multiple types of people exist, you can have a personality without having to stick strictly to being masc or fem
It's amazing how much Mr. Birchum failed at what it was meant to achieve. On one had you got its right-wing target audience rejecting the show for not being outwardly bigoted enough, and on the other you got the left-wing audience the show tried so hard to offend turning its characters into queer icons out of sheer spite.
@@nerag7459 Fair enough. It's VERY easy to read as a closeted gay man hiding under a fragile idea of masculinity, which makes this whole thing even funnier.
That’s the amazing part. They successfully appealed to those it was supposed to anger. There’s genuinely no spite behind the yaoi, they are enjoying themselves
Looking back on Birchum's and Karponzi's dynamic throughout the show, it is indistinguishable from that of countless mid-2000s romcoms with hetero couples so it really doesn't surprise me that this was the result.
In fairness, I can't remember the last time I saw a heterosexual romance in western media that actually felt romantic. It's always just "There is a man and a woman, so obviously they bang". Americans tend to end up putting more romantic subtext into relationships they're trying to depict as friendships or rivalries than they do into relationships they're trying to depict as romantic, because "and then they had sex" is the only thing you need to do to show the nature of a romantic relationship.
It's honestly kind of funny how a conservative show managed to be more queer then Heartstopper. It has major gay characters, a major character who uses neopronouns (They are there to be made fun of, but they're major characters), and a main character that, if this show was made by anyone else, I would expect to have the relatable plotline of 'Super conservative teacher realizes he's gay with the help of a new teacher at his school'.
Daily Wire- “We’re gonna make this super anti-woke, offensive cartoon. That’ll rile those libs up!” The rest of the internet- “And so you’ve crafted the tools of your own destruction”
It's not about the actual content, it's just that they exist, is there any actual viewership numbers for any of their stuff? They just need to show that they're making something to grift their audience's and investors' money. Is it resonating with its demographic is it messaging conveyed who cares and none of these things go past the season anyways, except for my boy Bendejo, because it's his tree fort
What's funny is that it's clearly meant to be a homophobic joke, like "oh, see, he's saying he likes a euphemism for dicks, but he's just saying it ironically because he's not really a (slur slur slur)" without realizing that just reinforces the idea of Birchum as a closeted gay man.
I think this is because the western image of masculinity is already inherently homoerotic, and that only escapes our notice because we're not commonly talking about homosexuality. Talking about homosexuality inevitably causes you to start thinking about the homoeroticism of masculinity. Mr Birchum doesn't have any more homoeroticism than anything that depicts men catering to the male gaze, it just makes you notice it more.
Not just homos, it's in everything. You try to make craft out of pure spite for something, and then you inadvertently glorify and glamourize the thing you swore to destroy. Just look at the "Piracy It's a crime" PSA.
The way I found out this show was a video of somebody ranking Mr Birchum yaoi fanart, and I was so disappointed when I found out what it actually was...
Incoming: Incredibly devisive, uncomfortable and controversial hottake: As a trans guy, I have realised that most of what defines "Masculinity" is just insecurity or lack of confidence.
I think it's so funny when someone make a show supposedly hating on the LGBTQ community, and then the LGBTQ community takes it and makes it queer. It's extra funny if some ship art is in the first batch of Google images when you Google a character from the show. 🌈
I think the biggest sin of this show is that there is a decent premise hidden inside, but by nature of who made it, it can never achieve that potential. A show about a conservative shop teacher in a failing marriage learning to be a better person because he falls in love with the new openly queer teacher is a fantastic premise. Instead they made the worst possible King of the Hill knockoff. Proof positive that conservatives cannot succeed in the creative arts.
There's even a functional premise if you're insistent on telling a story that adheres to conservative beliefs - a story focused on Mr Birchum's mancrush moving to this small town from a city and learning that following Birchum's way of life is the solution to his many problems. Or a story from the perspective of one of the children, who is being bullied and is taught by Birchum how to be strong and independent. These are still clearly very conservative premises, but they would have the structure of a real story about character development. But conservatives can't have that, because the stories they tell need to be about people who are already perfect conservatives going around pointlessly criticising everyone else. Conservatives would tell a story about Jesus and make Jesus the protagonist.
Yeah, because if this was written by someone not pushing a agenda, we could have had king of the hill 2.0 He learns he likes something that's not totally and completely masculine, like baking or cooking or gardening. He learns that people he disagrees with he can just live and let live. He becomes actually good friends with the gay teacher, learns to be a better husband and father and his son actually makes some money by being a streamer and gets a girlfriend. We can dream can't we
Like it would be great if they just made fun of both political sides and had some depth and actually make good jokes, but I don’t think we will ever get it. Instead of clever jokes we get people making fun of pronouns over and over again. Like that gets old after a long time, it becomes boring, not good comedy.
@@yurisei6732 The worst thing is that it wouldn't even be Bible-accurate or even Bible-adjacent Jesus either, but it would instead be the Reagonomics Jesus of the Evangelicals who hates the poor and loves the rich and is actively malicious to anyone who doesn't already agree with him.
I feel like another aspect to the response is probably that, while conservatives generally aren't in touch with actual queer culture and are so caught up in heteronormativity that they often dont realize when something looks queer, queer people are increasingly used to looking for queer coding. Very often queer people grow up without media to represent them, and so you just get used to looking for characters that could be interpreted as queer and claiming them because you don't have anything else.
It would never happen, but it would be so awesome if the show was actually building towards Birchum coming out. Imagine it: a show that presents itself as conservative horseshit, little by little tears away at those ideas. birchum starts to learn about the flaws in his ideology, starts to question his queer tendencies, and starts opening up to new ideas. would be an incredible arc. too good for a show like this.
I love how these guys thought nothing of having the male fantasy dude ride in on a bear and a shimmering sunbeam...which is very close to a rainbow. How are you supposed to read that without thinking that he totally wants to get boned by that guy?
The animation was actually outsourced to a studio in I believe Spain? They were given barely any budget which is why they had to reuse a lot of assets and animate on fours in some scenes. Also a lot of the people on the team were queer themselves and hated having to work on it. Basically, don't blame the animators who were forced to make this slop to pay rent, blame the wealthy people at the DW for being cheap and then lying about it claiming the show is "100% made in America"
@@Sootielove LMAO YEAH ME TOO Honestly considering the post about most of the animation crew being queer… it would not surprise me if they put extra effort in that scene for a reason.
Archie Bunker was not right wing media. He was more a straw man to show how ridiculous the views are but also written with depth to show where those views come from. In the end, he learned to embrace the new and move, begrudgingly with the times. Maybe worth a video essay!
@@ehfoss The RU-vid channel Jose (accent on the e, profile pic is a blue bird) does longform sitcom retrospectives and he has one about All in the Family if you wanted to check it out. They do tend to be long, so if hour+ videos aren't your thing, understandable, but they are great listens for doing another task like gaming or cleaning.
Interesting thoughts in this video, but I think the issue is, Daily Wire's vision of the ideal culture is so contrived that even they're having a hard time portraying it in a way that doesn't look like parody.
It’s so crazy how they frame masculinity as like this horrible thing, but the best guys in the show are the ones that actually are kind and helpful: Birchum’s son, the former criminal, etc
@@Metaphysicistprotecting and being helpful are two different things. Ideally being a decent human being is helpful rather than protecting people have to be hurt to learn and grow and helping them grow at their own pace is the ideal form of masculinity as you protect them from recession into less smarter times while helping them grow. Being just protective is going to lead to a gap between you and that person
@@Metaphysicist that isn’t a burden. That’s like the literal bare minimum for caring about someone? If you think of that as a burden i don’t think you care about them😭☠️
The very premise of Mr. Birchum seems so unrealistic to me because the government itself has defunded schools to the point of not having woodshop classes for a large portion of the nation.
Well... since DW's fanbase declared Mr Birchum "Woke" for having a stereotypically gay side character and boycotted the show over this, it kinda makes sense the Wokies -appropriate- adopt the show as their own, after being disowned by its original target audience.
@xhantTheFirst Yep, and they're friends with the main character. Truly, such dangerous ideas in an adult cartoon will be the definitive cause of Western Civilization collapsing beneath the ocean surface just like Atlantis
Unironically this would be a fire show if season 2 was about Birchum accepting queer identity even despite the fact that its different from what he knew
Yes but growth isn't allowed to happen in the current conservative landscape as it means you concede a point and you were WRONG. Which can't be because you picked the correct side or something and correctness is inherent to the "good"
