#Hector Morales and Hector Rivera my beloveds

[alainas-sims]

two Hectors who deserved better

#thinking about Hec tonight. miss him #might just play my modern save so i can have him in-game #but i do gotta play my legacy #Hector Morales and Hector Rivera my beloveds #delete later

[babycharmander]

okay I’m gonna rant for a minute about something that keeps coming up in Coco reviews (and general ranting about the movie) because this is bugging me a lot:

The movie Coco does not promote tolerance toward abuse, nor does it condone abusive behavior.

Yes, the main moral of the movie is that “family comes first.” But for some reason, I keep seeing reviewers expand that to mean, “Miguel should have agreed with his family from the beginning, even when they were destroying his most beloved possession right in front of him.”

That is not the case.

To start with, if you pay attention to the scene, the rest of the Rivera family is not necessarily in favor of what Abuelita is doing. I can’t get screenshots at the moment to show their expressions, but Miguel’s dad calls out to Abuelita to stop right before she smashes the guitar. Even with the family’s ban on music, at least some of them realized Abuelita was going too far--her behavior is clearly not shown to be in the right, even though she clearly believes she’s doing it for the good of her family. Which brings me to my next point...

Imelda started the ban on music as a means of protecting her family, hoping that it would keep them from being split apart, like how Hector had seemingly left her for music before. But the ban became so deeply ingrained that no-one in the family (openly) questioned it--they merely rolled with it. (Aside from maybe Coco, given how she hid the letters Hector sent her. I believe the novel goes into this more, but it’ll still be a few days before I get to read that.)

By the time we get to Miguel’s generation, the ban is so deeply set within the family that none of them will listen to any explanation Miguel has for his love of music, or how much it means to him. He is frequently shushed and pulled away from sources of music--never given the chance to defend himself...

...until this scene with Imelda:

(screenshots taken from the movie’s screenplay)

“That’s what family’s supposed to do--support you. But you never will.” Miguel says this as he wipes a tear from his eye, and Imelda is shocked at his reaction.

This is important, because this is the movie’s theme at work--”family comes first” is a lesson Miguel has to learn... as does the rest of his family.

The Rivera family reached a point where their ban on music was becoming more important than the family it was made to protect. Imelda and Abuelita both eventually realize this, which is why the ban is finally lifted by the end of the film.

While the lesson on the surface may appear to just be to not put selfish ambitions before family, it goes deeper than that. The lesson is to realize how your actions will affect your family, whether those actions were made in selfishness (abandoning family for music) or protection (banning family from music).

Coco does not condone abusive behavior. It promotes analyzing your behavior to see how it can become harmful.

#coco #pixar coco #coco spoilers #long post #I'm sorry I've seen this more than a few times in reviews and general posts about the movie and it bothers me a lot #(honestly unfair reviews toward my favorite movies bother me a lot in general >__>;;)