what's your take on the gay themes explored in Spongebob Squarepants? what do they say about our current society?

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That's probably not the right way to answer this, but for the record I don't think the cartoon Spongebob is trying to say anything about our current society. It has little to say about reality except in the most tangential of ways, and what it says is basically "we are all weird, we are in this together, it will be okay, don't worry."

What it's about is childhood. The kids are always acting on their own and going into danger because it is childhood and that is fun. The adults talk as if these kids were grown up and responsible for their own actions, but they have to have the adults there to enforce the rules. The kids are constantly acting on their own – getting into "adult" trouble -- because that's what children do. It's not that "adult" trouble is any worse (indeed it might be better – you're out of control so you get to enjoy the experience), but adults tell you "oh no, this is too much like childhood" and they are always telling you what you can and cannot do.

In this sense, the show's world is "more childish" (in the pejorative sense) than ours, and perhaps in a sense "less adult" too, because all the rules are different. It's more about what you can and can't do and the consequences of the consequences. This is all very obvious in that one episode where they play baseball, because a ball going out of bounds (as they do) means it goes over a fence, but a ball going into the fence means it comes back out of the fence. They literally have a different "world" for adults and for children, but you can "move" freely between them because you can just hop on a ride and be instantly transported. Adults have adult rules in this world and children don't, but adults have adult trouble and children don't, so when an adult tells a child to do something, the child has to do it.

"Oh no," say the grown ups, "the children don't understand these rules and thus we have to be there to teach them, but then the children won't obey us if they don't have to obey us."

I feel like Spongebob can be read as saying something like: "we are all weird. it's normal to be weird. we are in this together. let's enjoy being weird in each other's company."

This is not the message they say. They say "this is how things are. this is how it is. everyone does this because everyone does that. no one does anything that is not about doing something else that is."

If we can't say what the message of a show is, that is not the fault of the show.

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