ParaNorman and Bullying

[punkgrl5]

Last year, I won a livejournal contest for my journal on bullying. I thought I should revisit the subject a bit and the connection I felt when I saw the film ParaNorman. I probably should have wrote this back in August when I first saw the film. Since it's been over two months since then, my memory of it is probably a little fuzzy. Also if you

Comments

[pleasure_past]

(Belated) Congratulations on winning that contest!

I was lucky enough to have a pretty strong support network of friends when I was bullied, so I never felt a very strong impulse to shut down, but I definitely understand why other people would, and I'm sorry you went through that. It's good to hear that you're starting to regain faith in people.

I haven't seen ParaNorman (I just had to look up whether or not it has even been released in this country! Apparently was released last week.) but if it gets people talking seriously about the damage that bullying does to people--and, like you said, not even just to the direct victims--that's great. Unfortunately, it seems like so far it's just gotten people talking about how ~horrible~ it is to have one line about how a character is gay in a children's movie. :(

[punkgrl5]

I give even more props to the movie for revealing he is gay. Mitch is a dumb jock so he's far from the stereotypical gay.

[pleasure_past]

Oh yeah. I think it could have been done a bit better, but I didn't mean to imply that Mitch shouldn't have been gay. I'm just frustrated by the fact that conservatives are overlooking the messages about bullying to shame gay people--which is especially messed up when you consider how many people are bullied horribly because of their sexuality. :(