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[1:09:56 AM] DarkShadows: So apparently "Don't Hug Me I'm Scared" is a political satire about stupid ideas of what the US education system thinks creativity is. ... I... don't think I got that from that video when I first watched it. However, here's some info from Wikipedia about it:
"The videos parody children's television shows such as Sesame Street by ironically juxtaposing puppetry and musical numbers against psychedelic content and disturbing imagery. Both videos begin with a light-hearted song about the subject at hand before slowly exploring darker themes and ideas such as conformity, mortality, and death.
"Despite the unexpected evolution of the video’s mood, it intends to spread a message of the frivolity of creativity in the contemporary way that we define it."
"Joseph Pelling, when asked about how the film came about, said that the purpose was, ironically, “how not to teach something” and “how an abstract concept like creativity is kind of stupid when people try to teach it in a limited way that [they] do.” In addition, Pelling comments on how the video is open for interpretation, and how, when different people reach different conclusions about the video, they may all be valid in their own right."
[1:14:41 AM] DarkShadows: Think about it. The creepy stuff the puppets do with the internal organs and stuff is pretty creative. It's just disturbing. But that's not the kind of creativity the Notepad wanted to spread. That interpretation makes total sense.
[1:16:25 AM] A. R. : The Notepad bent the puppets own natural creativity to her own idea so at that point they weren't actually being creative they were doing what she, the higher power, told them to do.
[1:19:55 AM] DarkShadows: Yes. I think the video's message is this: "Creativity comes in more forms than just one, but there's a limited range of what society finds acceptable for creativity." And that's exactly what we teach our kids. We teach them that "creative" is doing pointless things with pointless objects, and then when they *really* get creative we find it frightening. We teach kids that "getting creative" means drawing art or drawing or playing pretend. But when kids draw creepy pictures or play pretend about creepy stuff, we say "no, that's bad". So how are kids supposed to be creative if we tell them to get creative, then stifle their creativity because we don't like their way of being creative? Therefore... we stifle kids' creativity by telling them that it's okay to be creative... but only in a certain way.
As a kid, I remember playing horrifying games where people died brutally, where there were monsters that wanted to eat us, where scary shit happened. Anyone would look at that and think "this child's disturbed", but i wasn't. I was just a normal kid being creative.
[1:28:24 AM] S. J. : Pffft. I was disturbing as a kid. I shot things and killed bugs and painted with their blood. And my mom wasn't around to stop me, sooo... Yeah.
[1:29:42 AM] DarkShadows: Yeah. I remember when I was a kid, I had plastic dinos. I would take my plastic dinos and give them lives and families... and then brutally murder them. Dinos ate each other. Dinos got smothered in clay and buried alive. Then I would play paleontologist and dig up their "perfectly preserved fossils". I would make them scream when they died, too. I would draw creepy pictures, I would make traps with legos and trap lego people and they'd never, ever get out. I played villain often, and had gullible, too-innocent characters be killed or hurt for being too gullible or innocent. Even as a kid I knew the world wasn't a super-nice place. I think most kids do. I remember playing Jurassic Park as a kid, and I'd be a velociraptor that ate people. I'd pretend to lick the blood off my "jaws" and "claws" and everything.
[1:32:39 AM | Edited 1:32:55 AM] K. M. : child you was a psychopath
[1:32:46 AM] DarkShadows: It gets better. I had a stuffed t-rex named Alice that I dressed up and had tea with. She still ate other dinosaurs though, because she's a carnivore, you see.
[1:33:19 AM] S. J. : I'm sorry, but that's pretty cool in my honest opinion. Even as a kid, I would've been amazed at the creativity and honesty of that.
[1:33:21 AM] DarkShadows: I mounted a beetle carcass on a piece of bark once, I still have it somewhere I think. I also collected dead wasps when I was in middle school.
[1:33:31 AM] K. M. : that's an odd hobby...
[1:33:50 AM] S. J. : I shaved Barbie dolls and buried them in my yard in various spots.
[1:34:02 AM] DarkShadows: And I had a skeleton I named "Skully" that I dragged around as a doll. It was a plastic skeleton, I believe I still have him somewhere. Flexible rubber... My little sister had a rubber fake coral snake, and my little brother collected everything bat in his younger days.
[1:35:22 AM] DarkShadows: I once even scared my mom by fake-limping so well she thought I was actually hurt. I was a messed up little kid in some of my play, but I don't think anyone thought I was an abnormal kid. I had a good childhood and I don't remember anyone ever questioning my play as being odd.
[1:24:38 AM] DarkShadows: Now let's bring this back to DHMIS. In the video, the Notepad tells the puppets "Let's get creative!" over and over, and showing them how to be creative... but then also tells them things like "Green is not a creative color" and "Woah there, friend, you might need to slow down" when one of them decides to actually be creative (by drawing a picture of a clown). At the end, after the puppets get creative in their own unique way, the Notepad is horrified at what their idea of creativity is actually like, and says "Now let's all agree to never be creative again". In essence... the Notepad wants these puppets to color in the lines, but the second they color outside those lines (that is, behave like normal kids), she's disturbed.
But the thing is this: kids are disturbing! When kids get creative, they sometimes do so in disturbing ways! And outside of just children, some of the best creative works of art, literature, film and media are disturbing. Applying the same logic to great authors as we do to our children, that means that people like H. P. Lovecraft, Edgar Allen Poe, and H. R. Giger aren't creative, because their work deals with disturbing, horrific things. By this logic, Mary Shelly's classic novel "Frankenstein" should not be a classic, Salvador Dali's eerie and surreal paintings are not art, and "Halloween" is not a classic of the Slasher Horror genre.
[1:26:20 AM] DarkShadows: Of course, nobody in their right mind would say that any of these things are bad or unacceptable, or even uncreative (whether or not the themes used later became cliched is irrelevant here), because that would be ridiculous. Somehow though, we've decided as a society that kids being creative in ways that might cause unpleasant emotional responses in ourselves is not acceptable. We're totally okay with adults creating things that disturb us, but kids can only ever be nice and happyhappyhappy when they get creative, or we think there's something very, deeply wrong with them.
And that's what DHMIS is about - the fact that we don't actually let kids be kids anymore. We don't let them explore things that they're naturally curious about as human beings (the body, death, etc.) because, well, they're kids. We see them as perfect little innocent happy angels that can never, ever grow up and never, ever should be tarnished or soiled by unpleasent aspects of life, even when they know those aspects exist. So now, here's the big take-away question: There's no doubt that kids have enough confidence to explore the disturbing and scary... so then how come we, as adults, are now so afraid of it that we won't let our children even explore it? Why do we hold our children to a standard that even we, as adults, can never obtain?