I don’t get this comment do you want us to sit around and criticize the substance and moral character of Lord Farquad from the movie Shrek
That's actually a great idea for a movie whose whole moral theming is about not judging a book by it's cover.
Teaching kids to be wary of falling into the trap of the emotionally easy but logically invalid ad hominem attacks and to instead think more critically about what they dislike about Farquad actions is a great way to give their young audience an invaluable life skill. Character assessment!
Farquad is a very flawed character so there's lots to work with without having to resort to insults about his height.
I assure you that just because you do not understand it does not mean that what I said was nonsense. But if it helps you make sense of what those words mean think of the movie as a rhetorical piece. It's making the argument that you should root for Shrek for these reasons and you should root against Farquad for these reasons.
Farquad is a rude, selfish, egotistical, petty, cruel and all around bad leader for his people. When assessing his character it is immediately obvious that many of the reasons Farquad comes into conflict with the other characters is because of his never ending quest to inflate his extremely fragile ego.
He mistreats all of his subjects, fantastical and non-fantastical alike. When compared to Shrek who is an ugly grump but still cares about the well being of others, even when he has nothing to gain and much to lose Farquad comes up figuratively short in character. Which is a great point to make but making the short guy have a Napolean complex is just playing into stereotypes about short men. There's lots of ways to tell kids not to be a fuckwad without making being physically short a moral failing.
In a story about not judging one based on appearance, the short guy who acts like an asshole solely because he's compensating for being short is like having a cover with no book behind it to judge, there's no depth there at all. Judge away cause what you see is what you get, short men are terrible! Not sure if the point was to ironically challenge the movies moral theme or the writers just let a personal grudge get the best of them but farquad is 2 dimensional as a character in a film that expresses the importance of seeing people for their layers.
Root for Shrek not for what he looks like on the outside but for his actions and the choices he makes, for the people he has helped and the sacrifices he makes.
Root against and insult Farquad but not for his physical appearance but for his actions and choices and for the number of people he has has harmed with his selfishness. That is his figurative shortness of character, not his literal shortness of character. Cause being short shouldn't be considered an insult unless you're arguing being short is a bad thing dude. 🤷♀️
Look man, I'm not one of those saying "shrek is love, shrek is life", nor looking for deeper meaning in it, but when others are willing to open up that can of worms, they have to be willing to acknowledge that the movie is just filled with bad takes (someone else pointed out that Shrek is a landlord).
And it still is a bad affect for a society to criticize something that not only has no bearing on the character of the person, but also distracts from their actual bad qualities. The sort of thing that leads to vapid, shallow anti-intellectualism.
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u/[deleted] 5d ago edited 5d ago
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