What's something you used to like as a kid that you now, as an adult, realize had some pretty fucked up messaging?

Donalc Duck. It has a status where I live, it "teaches kids to read". One of our brainwormed metal music artists who is a fan even did the whole "woke-mind virus" outrage in the media after it was suggested we remove the most obviously racist and colonial images from it.

Tbh I have noticed and known how problematic it is from the start, as a girl reading the way women are framed in these comics was eternally annoying to me as a kid. So was the way it Others anyone who isn't Western.

But it took me longer to notice how incredibly white it is, how it frames people who do crime and how Scrooge McDuck is a settler colonialist image that worships billionaireism/getting rich. Pretty sure most of my age group also were in a Scrooge McDuck Club where the comic would send you tips on making money, saving money and essentially idolizing the figure by making sure we think he got that rich by wit, by being smart with his money and by courage alone.

Another offshoot of this here is the Italian versions of it where the incredible meanness and kind of violent framing of life always bothered me a lot as a kid, the way Donald got put into basically slave labor for lols and such.

I read it on the toilet sometimes still, mostly to re-educate myself on the framing in it. Just the other day read a story with Mickey Mouse and the Goofy Indiana Jones where language like "the savages" is just casually used. It has been an effective tool for Othering here for sure.

The comic was brought to this country by a right-wing capitalist and framed as project to get the kids to read. I get it now.