>>24699523
>Peppa Pig
I really see it as a kind of mirror reflecting the petty bourgeois Weltenschauung of Western liberal society. You can see it in the diversity of animal kingdoms, where culture, biology, and identity only represent a trivial cosmetic change of one over the other. I remember one episode where the The Lion (don't ask for a source, I was a child) meets Peppa for the first time. Now, at that time I was enamoured of lions and the strength they represented; I had a lion pattern blanket, a safari book with stories about lions, a bookmark slotted into my encyclopedia with sensational facts about the killing power of the lion—the λέων as I liked to call it—and a stuffed Simba toy that I thought would imbue me with the strength to lash out against my father's nightly beatings.
To see the Lion, bared of his fangs, his Will a mere joke before the cast of nonsense animals, pigs, rabbits, mice and all reflected in my little eyes filled me with disgust even then. To this day, I remember the first joke:
>Roar!
Says the lion.
>Oh no! A wild animal has escaped!
The joke, of course, being cleverer than the writers had intended. Where could this 'wild' animal have escaped from? The prison of the Zoo. And where might he have escaped to? The very same one that strips him of his pride and Will. That indeed, no freedom exists for Lions was the sharpest contact my young mind had with the failings of Western liberalism. I remember shutting off the TV in a fit of rage, tears bursting from my eyelids as I buried my face in my striped Lion blanket. Not even the Lion could escape his humiliation.
Evidently, I was not Peppa. Daddy Pig did not beat Peppa. Mommy Pig did not tell Peppa he shouldn't have been born. If I was not among the happy, smiling faces of the zoo animals, I was the lion oppressed by pigs who ought to be dashed upon the mesas, flesh rent from their bones and eyes plucked by vultures. At the very least, I was spawned by predators and felt myself to be one.
My disgust for the show boiled over, and I designed never again to let Daddy Lion hurt me. That night, during a rather mundane beating, I threatened to call the police if he continued; That was my first visit to the hospital, where out of abounding fear I told the nurse I had fallen from a tree and broke both arms, several ribs, and my ankle.
After that, I threw away all of my lion related paraphernalia. Whenever Granny Lion would visit, smiling and hands full of Safari books and Kings of the Jungle, I would joyfully, farcically, accept them. After she left, the toys would retire to the darkest pits of my closet, to be thrown out with the garbage when the guilt of betraying her kindness receded.
It was precisely then that I saw liberalism for the farce that it was. I realized that only those who had the power to crush—to destroy—could survive. The lion had to bare its fangs and not be bared if it was to become King.
I never did like lions again.
