No guys, I need to stop and talk about something in this movie and how fucking revolutionary it was; something that I haven’t seen in a movie before or since.
This is a movie about a kid who leaves her birth family.
Not a kid who find that they have a secret lineage or something that allows them to find their ‘true family’ - this is a movie about a kid whose true birth family is made up of bad people. So she gets out. And that is played as the right thing to do. She isn’t punished for it or made to feel bad about ‘abandoning her family’. There isn’t an underlying ‘but they’re your family and you have to love them’ or ‘they’re your family and they love you even if they don’t show it well or do hurtful things’ message of the kind that I see OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER in media. Matilda gets out and lives happily ever after because of it.
We need a million more movies like this to counter the metric shit ton of movies that directly counter this message.
Today, I was visiting my parents and we went to the park to relax because of the nice weather.
As it turns out, a wedding was going on in the area, which isn’t uncommon for that park.
I had my camera and was taking pictures of things and two little boys run over from the wedding ceremony, hand in hand and sit on the bench in front of me. I took a picture because it was just too adorable.
Next, they come closer to me, see my camera, and the one with the red hair says “Take a picture of me and my boyfriend!” and tries to get the other one to pose with him. I smile at the term, but don’t say anything, and take the picture.
I ask if they are with the wedding and they both nod, the redhead saying “Yes. And you know two boys can get married here now, too? Me and my boyfriend can get married.”
And I just thought it was so crazy and amazing that these two little boys were so open about themselves, even if it turns out later in their lives that they’re not gay, it’s still amazing.
The brown-haired one at one point took a pretty big spill on the pavement, and me and my parents ran over to see if he was okay, but had a scrape on his elbow. He said he was fine, and that his mom had a bandaid he could use, so his boyfriend kissed him on the mouth and held his hand, taking him over to where the adults in the wedding were.
It’s incredible how much things are changing and how open kids are able to be.
