…But not in the way you might think.
I’m no conspiracy theorist, so before I get into any of this, I just want to point out that there are way more factors at play than just the media kids consume. That being said, I still think this is worth listening to. (Or reading, as it were.)
Humans love sorting things into categories.
That’s no secret. If I handed you a box of big wooden alphabet letters and two bins labelled “even” and “odd”, I guarantee you’d start sorting them. I bet you even started formulating opinions about what letters are even and odd even as you were reading this.
And while being able to sort literally anything into categories can be very useful (especially in terms of categories like “eat” and “do not eat”, or “friend” and “enemy”), there is a serious crisis at hand about people sorting themselves into categories.
I bet you’ve seen it. How many social media bios have information like Myers-Briggs results, occupations, or hogwarts house? (We’ll get back to that last one.) How many people introduce themselves as introverts or extroverts, cat people or dog people, or any one of the insane social media trends going around right now?
Pre-Packaged Identities
The reason humans are so drawn to labels for ourselves is that it can act as a handy shortcut for relationships. Labels come with some ideas about a person pre-attached. If someone says they’re extroverted, you probably feel fine inviting them to parties or introducing them to new people. If someone says they’re a cat person, you probably immediately get the mental image of a more introverted soul, probably someone who spends a lot of time online and posts things like “I hate people”.
Almost like a TV rating guide but for friendships, labels and categories help us sort everyone into neat boxes that help us understand them faster and simpler.
Labels are Limiting
The problem, of course, is that labels are extremely limited in what they can convey. Like the classic extrovert example: no one is exactly a picture-perfect extrovert image all the time. Everyone has different levels and moods of wanting to socialize that vary on a day-to-day basis; one word simply can’t cover it all.
Then there’s the classic problem of “that’s not my thing.” How many times have you heard someone say something like “oh, videogames just aren’t my thing.” or “I want to start wearing more hats, but I think everyone can tell I’m not a hat person,” or “I’m not outdoorsy.”
What on earth is a hat person? Your birth certificate doesn’t come pre-stamped with all of the things you’re allowed to do. It doesn’t say “Sex, Name, Allowed to Go Hiking” on it.
This is also extremely prevalent in sexuality. The queer community is obsessed with trying to build a flag, name, and identity for every possible combination under the sun. There’s the more common and broader labels like Lesbian or Trans, for example, but then there’s niche micro-labels like Genderdoe or Demisexual. (Fluid and vague gender that is never masculine and only experiencing sexual attraction after building a relationship with someone, if you were wondering.)
Those don’t sound like actual labels to me, they sound like personal preferences. I don’t think you need to come out as “looking for a relationship”, or “whatever I am definitely isn’t a man,” if you ask me. (No hate to people who rally behind these flags. You’ll see where I’m going with this.)
Ah, So Children’s Media Is Making Everyone Gay!
Nope. That’s not where I’m going with this. I know that there are a hundred angry internet parents ranting about how seeing a gay couple on TV is going to ruin their precious straight child. I can tell you right now that I grew up watching exclusively straight couples on TV, and somehow I still turned out as straight as a corkscrew.
This isn’t a post about queer identities specifically. This is a post about every form of identity, and how children’s media (especially in my generation) has influenced this rabid desire to define and label every single part of a personality.
Children’s Media is Obsessed With Categories
I’m going to get into the specifics, but for the sake of this post, I’ll list what media I’ll be talking about right now.
- Harry Potter
- Avatar the Last Airbender
- My Little Pony
- Wings of Fire
- Warrior Cats
- Divergent
- DC Superhero Girls
- Percy Jackson
There’s probably hundreds of other examples that could be dug up, but this is all media that I grew up either consuming directly or that my peers were really into. Let’s talk about them!
Harry Potter
This is the classic example. The surefire way to get any conversation going for a long time was to ask “what’s your Hogwarts house?”
And that’s because the series revolves around the idea that everyone is sorted into a house based on their personality by the time they’re 11. This house never changes, informs who a kid’s peers are, and influences how they treat each other. This is never framed as wrong in the narrative, just the way things go.
You have Gryffindor: the brave ones. They’re where all the main characters are, of course. Bold, courageous, sporty, extroverted, legendary. Then there’s Hufflepuff, a sort of nothing-category where all the nice but weak people are. They’re kind, not choosy about their friends, meek, and overall a quiet presence in the book. Ravenclaw is your stereotypical smart kids: quick studies, less prone to friendship, brilliant but strange. And then there’s Slytherin, whose main character trait seems to be “evil”. The book defines it as ambition, but the only characters who are ever in Slytherin are sleazy, greasy bullies who use any means at their disposal to get what they want. They just never happen to want something nice.
You can see why this is appealing to kids: the idea of a magic hat telling you where you belong and then setting you into a group of friends with similar interests is exactly why the idea of a hogwarts houses made it off the pages and onto the playground. You could even take “what’s your hogwarts house?” quizzes, which were definitely true to who you were and not at all easy to rig your answers to.
That was sarcastic, of course. Your average harry potter quiz looked something like this:
What do you like to do in your free time?
A: Go on adventures
B: Read a book
C: knit a sweater
D: kick puppies
And then somehow the world was filled with Gryffindors. Shocker.
Avatar the Last Airbender
This show had categories be a central theme: people are born with the power to use martial arts to “bend” (psychically control) one of the four elements: fire, water, earth, or air.
Earthbenders are the most common, and are almost always strong, brash, loud, and stubborn. Waterbenders are more fluid and calm, go-with-the-flow types who use their heads to work around problems. Airbenders are the energetic fun ones (there’s only one in the show, as the title gives away) who are bright, happy, and peace-loving. Firebenders are evil. Technically they’re impulsive, angry, powerful, and power-hungry, but for the sake of brevity they’re evil. They serve as the show’s antagonists.
You can start to see the problem forming. Once again, offering a grab-bag of traits under a cool title was very appealing to kids. Earthbenders are Gryffindors, Waterbenders are Ravenclaws, and so forth.
(Not to mention we once again see the emergence of the red/green/blue/yellow color scheme.)
Your average “what element could you bend?” quiz tended to look almost identical to the harry potter ones.
Not to mention the difficulty of the concept of the “avatar,” which is the in-show character who is so special and magical that he alone can bend all four elements. Having traits and abilities from all four personalities—I mean elements—is a rare and special thing outside of the norm.
Surely there are no consequences there.
My Little Pony
One of the biggest offenders on this list by far. I was a 6-year-old in kindergarten when this show came out, meaning that I was the target demographic. So of course I’ve seen the whole thing, and will demonstrate to you that MLP is insidious in terms of feeding the Identity Machine, because this show manages to do it on three separate levels at once.
The first level is the most obvious: there are three (technically four) species of pony living in this world.
There are the strong, stubborn, brave and extroverted Earth Ponies, the cool, sporty and carefree Pegasi, and the wise and more subdued Unicorns. There is also (similar to avatar) the rare Alicorn, which is a pony with the traits of all three personaliti—I mean, species.
Are you seeing a pattern?
The second level is the characters themselves: each of the six main characters is more or less one character trait that kids can project themselves onto. You have the smart one, the energetic silly one, the cool sporty one, the feminine drama queen, the shy one, and…well, actually one of them is more of a random working-class adult thrown in there for flavor.
(No, seriously. While every other character has episodes centering around things like “I have to take a scary test and I hope I’m smart enough!” or “I’m happy and energetic and I’m going to throw a party!”, Applejack has episodes like “I need to figure out how to keep my family business afloat amidst competition” and “how long can a grandmother live with you before it’s best to put her in a home?” It’s bizarre and frankly hilarious.)
The characters even get sorted into further categories within the show: they each get a single label that defines their number one trait: honestly, loyalty, kindness, laughter, generosity, and um, magic. I don’t really know how that last one is part of friendship, but we’ll go with it. 6-year-old me certainly did.
But it doesn’t stop there! Oh, no. There is a third level to the Identity Jenga Tower, and it has a terrible name: Cutie Marks.
You see, every character in the show has a magical brand/tattoo/tramp stamp that appears on their flank when they’re young. This mark is a picture that depicts their life’s purpose. Yup! That’s right. Their entire reason for existence, boiled down into an image.
For some of the characters this is vague enough to not cause an existential crisis: more of an abstract artwork like a star or a cloud that represents a myriad of traits. But some of them have like, REALLY specific ones. One of the characters has a passion for writing haikus, and gets a mark that is literally just a haiku. I don’t even know how to spin this.
This show was created by Lauren Faust, and trust me. You’ll be hearing about her later. (She is my enemy.)
Wings of Fire
A book series about dragons! You’d better believe middle-school Anna devoured every single one. I sure hope there aren’t any easily-defined traits that are represented as categories for kids to project themselves onto!
Anyway, it does.
There are seven species of dragon: Mudwings (the strong, brash, stubborn, you-get-the-idea ones), Seawings (the cool, warlike, adaptable ones), Skywings (the loyal, grumpy, violent ones), Icewings (cold, smart, distant ones), Nightwings (mysterious, leading, powerful ones), Rainwings (fun-loving, chill, silly ones) and Sandwings (evil ones).
As you can imagine, plenty of “what tribe are you?” quizzes popped up, and as you can imagine, a LOT of rainwings followed.
Warrior Cats
I didn’t read this series as a kid, (although I’ve heard legends of the war crimes kept within its pages), but as you can guess, there are definitely personality-based categories to sort yourself into.
This time, it’s “Clans”. Thunderclan, Shadowclan, Windclan, Skyclan, and Riverclan. No guesses as to who is what.
The theme of categories simply continues, this time in one of the most prevalent forms of media for kids and middle schoolers: unending, strange book series that will run as long as they live.
My understanding is that Warrior Cats was the series for kids who later got into anime, and Wings of Fire was for kids who later got into cartoons. (Just kidding! That’s an arbitrary category that I made up apropos of nothing. See how easy it is?)
Divergent
Another series/movie I never got into, (I never cared for dystopias) Divergent is the be-all end-all of categorizable fiction. This time, instead of houses, tribes, species, or clans, we get…
FACTIONS! The best part is, I don’t even have to pick a word to describe them, because the official Divergent website does that for me. There’s Amity (the kind), Abnegation (the selfless), Erudite (the intelligent), Candor (the honest), and Dauntless (the brave.)
Once again, the main heroine is special because her superpower is being Divergent, meaning…she literally has more than one personality trait. I wish I was making this up.
Divergent luckily has already gotten a reputation as a bloated attempt at grabbing everything successful from other dystopias and trying to weave them into the ultimate dystopian novel, which ultimately killed the entire genre. (I’m not kidding. This series singlehandedly ousted dystopias from the public consciousness.)
DC Superhero Girls
Lauren Faust once again leapt into the public consciousness to spread her malignant ideas about what girls can be with the series DC Superhero Girls. Which, aside from being a very non-catchy title, is a thinly-veiled attempt at making the My Little Pony characters yet again.
There is, once again, the smart one, the energetic silly one, the cool sporty one, the feminine drama queen, the shy one, and a deeply moral and honest one. It’s practically a beat-for-beat reskinning of her old characters.
I don’t know why Lauren Faust thinks that there are only 6 traits girls can fit into, but it needs to stop.
Percy Jackson
The last offender on our list, Percy Jackson has the most options for personalities: the entire greek pantheon. For the sake of everyone’s tired eyes, I won’t be listing out that entire mess, but you can rest assured that the stereotypes still fly. To name a few, the Aphrodite kids are stuck up popular mean girls, the Ares kids are bullies, and the Apollo kids are theater kids. Just because there’s a wider variety of categorization doesn’t mean there still isn’t an Identity Stew waiting to come to the surface.
Great, What Do I Do With This Information?
Well, as you can imagine, it’s probably not good for all children’s media to have a category that comes labelled as “evil.” This lets people assume that there is such thing as natural and inherent evil, and worst of all, that some people fit into that category while everyone else fits into much friendlier ones. If you don’t like someone, you can just neatly sort them into the evil category. It’s not that you aren’t compatible as friends, it’s that they’re just…a Slytherin. A firebender. A sandwing. You get the idea.
The number one way that war breaks out is by dehumanizing the other side, and that starts with categorizing them as something other than you are.
I just want this to be a non-comprehensive list of all the ways media can influence where we get our ideas. I know that all of these books and shows were influential to my generation growing up, and it’s kind of alarming to take a step back and see how many of them were all about sorting people into categories.
There’s nothing wrong with some quick labels for small traits, but it’s blown out of proportion in the past few years. People are making snap judgements about others based on what ultimately amounts to nothing more than asking a warrior cat their clan. When you say it like that, it sounds pretty stupid.
People Want to Belong
That goes without saying. If you read this and thought “no one is that obsessed with identity.” I want you to take a step back and think about the last time you introduced yourself via your political party. Or the last time you dismissed an invite to try something new as “not your thing.”
We are hurtling towards the rallying of people behind factions more than ever before. Rabid patriotism, rabid anti-patriotism, a thousand pride flags for a thousand identities, a million social media trends that can make a special word for any trait under the sun and package it like there are only three ways to have it.
These labels persist because human beings are hardwired for belonging like no other animal on the planet. We are built for connections, programmed to chase acceptance, and driven to sort others into categories of friends and enemies. It’s not an evil instinct; but it’s been blown out of proportion to a dangerous degree. Even the smartest, most educated people can fall for conspiracies and echo chambers. Why? Because there’s a community there. I’ve seen nurses become anti-vaxxers and people with PhDs getting sucked into parasocial celebrity relationships. They’re not stupid people — they’re lonely.
So How Do We Fix This?
There are a few outlets for identity that I think are a relatively safe way to go about it.
The first and absolute best option will always be to go out there and make friends! Especially friends with a diverse set of interests and opinions. You can’t build an echo chamber if everyone you know doesn’t fit into one room.
Your second option will be to try and avoid using these labels for yourself and others as much as you can. Before you describe yourself as “not a hat person,” stop and realize how insane it is to think that some people innately have the ability to wear hats. Before you call yourself an introvert, stop and think about how maybe you just don’t feel like socializing right now, instead of always.
The third option is simple: find communities based on harmless identities. Root for a sports team! Join a book club. Heck, even start a club!
Whatever it takes for you to let go of the labels that children’s media have pushed so hard on in the past.
You aren’t a Gryffindor Earthbender Protagonist #6, you’re a person! Real people don’t fit into boxes quite so easily.
Conclusion
I don’t think that children’s media has some hidden agenda. I don’t think there was a plan to slowly herd everyone towards a lifetime of collecting labels and identities until no one feels like a real person anymore.
I think that creating categories is easy, and humans love sorting things into them. Not to mention, easily-marketable logos and categories are a great way to sell merchandise and build hype for a series. We just have to be more judicious about what we allow our subconscious to absorb. And while we’re at it, (coming from a former kid who devoured all media at alarming rates) maybe let your kids go outside a little more often. Playing games with other kids in real life won’t hurt them, I promise.
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