what is the point of oscar the grouch on sesame street?
It’s okay to not like things and it’s okay to be unhappy. He was created from the idea that “non-destructive deviance” would go over well with kids.
THANK YOU!
Basically, the point of Oscar the Grouch is so that kids know it’s okay to have fucking emotions and moods that aren’t all cheery. That’s the fucking point. And that’s even more important to the kids who are living in harsh realities. Realities where their families are falling apart or they’re not getting food every day or they’re getting abused. Telling them it’s okay to express that they are NOT HAPPY because they are HURTING is so fucking important I cannot even say it.
Big Bird is nice, but goddamn, when you’re a kid who’s hungry and you just got beat by your caretaker and all you wanna do is hole up somewhere and tell everyone else to go away because you don’t even have words for how bad things feel? Big Bird is not your dude. Cheery happy, “well, let’s play a happy game!” Big Bird ain’t cutting it for you. Oscar the Grouch is your dude. Oscar the Grouch is the dude who tells you it’s okay to put the lid on your garbage can and be alone and be upset.
Big Bird tries to talk you out of being upset (and maybe sometimes that’s okay). But Oscar the Grouch teaches you that, no, it’s okay to be upset and you have every right to stay upset and grouchy and unhappy until you’re at a point where that can change. Oscar the Grouch teaches you that you have a right to your emotions, whatever they are.
On a more advanced level, the point of Oscar is to start teaching kids that it’s okay to have boundaries, it’s okay to want to just go into your trash can (home/safe place) and not be bothered, it’s okay to defend those boundaries and say “go away!” when you want people to go the fuck away and that you can still have a place on Sesame Street. That not everyone has to be shiny, happy Big Bird.
That’s the point of Oscar the Grouch.
“what is the point of oscar the grouch” who even made you
Also Oscar the Grouch *likes* things that no one else likes and he’s completely unapologetic about it.
The fact that people tell you things you like are stupid doesn’t make it’s true. He loves trash. He loves it because it’s trash. That’s important too.
As is the fact that *even though everyone thinks his interests are stupid*, people don’t take his trash away and they don’t drag him out of his can.
Also he has *fantastic* body language. Boundary laden but also very emotional. And just the way he likes stuff and expresses interest…
…Oscar the Grouch = awesome.
This is a wonderful series of texts post that needs to be shared with all of you
I don’t need to know anything else about this man to know we would have been great friends. An absolute legend. I wonder if I can find the actual story about that conviction, cause you know there is a story there.
I can and did. He attended a protest against a poll tax, and when he saw a cop choking a protestor and objected, two other cops pinned him to a wall and choked him into unconsciousness. He woke up in jail charged with assault, and one of the cops claimed he’d bitten him on the hand.
The bite mark was proven not to match his teeth, and it’s presumed that the cop bit himself to frame Mitchell. But they convicted him anyway despite proof it wasn’t his teeth that bit the cop. Ergo, he was convicted of biting a cop with someone else’s teeth.
The experience led him to a lifetime of activism work and getting a law degree so he could fight injustices like the one he faced.
Several years ago I briefly worked in the warehouse of a nondescript extremely large e-commerce company. I had no other options for employment but desperately needed money. Turnover was like 150%. I worked from something like 7pm to 5am, my commute was 50 minutes each way and before I got paid I didn’t even have the cash for enough gas to get home one night and had to bum $10 off of my kid sibling (this is all to give you an idea of my abysmal mental state while employed here.) You’re not allowed to do anything besides your job, no music or anything and they track your movement on cameras so you can’t even take a breather. The job is real monotonous, you get sent boxes of items of random sizes and you have to put the items into shelves of varying sizes and the shelves come to you, you don’t walk to them. Because the company tracks the rate at which you put items on these shelves, many small items are desirable because you can put a lot of them in quickly. Everything about the place seems almost designed intentionally to break you mentally and turn you into a robot. So I’m about 6 or 7 hours into my shift, feeling on the verge of a mental collapse, and up comes a container with a bunch of small white boxes, bout half the size of a deck of cards. No labels. Great, I’m already happy about whatever these things are. So I go to scan them in, and it gives you the name of the item and a little picture. Sasuke Penis Costume. What? Sasuke Penis Costume. A picture of that red cloud robe from Naruto and one of the headbands with the metal plate on it. I’m thinking, there’s no way. What is a penis costume? Am I hallucinating this? And there’s so many of them, literally about a hundred, and I know I’m going to be spending at least an hour with Sasuke Penis Costume, there’s so many and they’re so small, I’m already excited about the potential efficiency of these, and then I see it’s Sasuke Penis Costume? So the entire shift I’m like, trying to not put these things away too quick, because honestly I’m starting to build a kind of kinship with them. This is quite literally the most exciting thing to happen to me during my whole 2 week employment at the warehouse. I started to see Sasuke Penis Costume as a friend, some reminder of the outside world, a reminder of the humanity I was becoming so unfamiliar with, a reminder the world contained comedy, art, anime, and penis. I really couldn’t tell you if I ended up putting all of them away, the last thing I remember is my desperate need to look these items up when I got home. I needed a link to send to my friends for when I told them this riveting story. I learned that the costume is called the Akatsuki cloak in my fervent search for the item, and wouldn’t you know it, absolutely zero trace of these things exists online. Not on the e-commerce website, not on any specialized penis-costume websites (whose existence I was not privvy to prior to this incident) and no third-party retailer has these. Not even Google images will show me the hypothetical existence of Sasuke Penis Costume. Every few months I look it up, trying to find evidence that it can be bought, that any of this was ever real. My bond, my friendship, and dare I say even love for Sasuke Penis Costume feels as tangible as the boxes they came in, and yet the universe will give me no closure of their fate. Less and less frequently I search for them, each time becoming more and more discouraged that I will ever find them, but unlike their substance on this earth, one thing is inarguably certain. Sasuke Penis Costume exists to me, and it will live on firmly and resolutely within my memory and within my heart.
Anti-revenge narrative this, anti-revenge narrative that, I personally think that Inigo Montoya had the right idea when he stabbed Count Rugen in the gut and said “I want my father back, you son of a bitch”
A lot of revenge arcs end with the hero saying “there’s nothing you can do to bring my loved one back, so me seeking revenge is pointless.” The Princess Bride’s revenge arc ends with Inigo Montoya saying “there’s nothing you can do to bring my loved one back, so there’s nothing that can save you.”
category of blorbo called “technically i like them but fanons obsession with them to the exclusion of other characters pavloved me into having a negative reaction whenever i see them”
Reblogging pretty fanart, squeeing over two-dimensional characters, posting bits of fic, sharing pictures of cats. She/her, unrepentant multishipper. If you're not 18, this is not the blog for you.
