Overthinking ToddWorld

I caught an episode of ToddWorld today and it made me frown a bit.

Pickle had been given a guitar and was determined to become a rockstar that day. He started a band straight away and played a horrendous din to his friends. Todd and another character said encouraging things, while the black-haired girl, whose name escapes me, said it was awful, which upset Pickle


and was disapproved of by her peers.

The episode followed her coming round to the idea that she should "respect" Pickle's musical choices. In the end, they watched him perform again and she applauded encouragingly, having learnt to "respect" his rotten music.

I'm not against encouraging people, but there is such a thing as merit. Of course, I don't condone meanness, and the character was meaner in her comments than necessary, but it irritated me that the character of Pickle wasn't undergoing a learning journey as well. After all, becoming a guitarist is not an instant thing and surely a worthy moral would have been - getting good at something takes practice and effort. Not make a fucking awful racket, we'll all humour you and some poor sap is bound to like it.

I could go along with the storyline if it had been Pickle playing, say, his new music CD and she didn't like it and was horrid about it. We're all entitled to our musical preferences and tastes and in that case, she'd have been entirely unjustified. But to have Pickle entitled to make a terrible noise, having had no musical tuition, and expect applause and "respect" for it seems nonsensical. There has to be room for constructive criticism: shouldn't one wait to perform live to an audience until one has learnt one's instrument and rehearsed with one's band? Ideally?

Certainly the meanness of the girl character should have been addressed, but Pickle needed to learn about deferred gratification. Dagnamit.