im afraid

this is making me have really vivid memories of watching teletubbies and I’m realizing how eerie and uncanny every single aspect of that show was, like, visually and also in general. Everything is just…off.

I remember it being comforting and not at all weird as a very young child but now the pictures of the sets and screencaps elicit a visceral “nope” response.

I don’t know how I feel about the fact that there is apparently a fandom of Teletubbies watchers who are invested enough in Teletubbies to carefully screencap and summarize hundreds of episodes of Teletubbies. I don’t think it’s a negative feeling. It’s just a distinct realization that we all could be doing Our Own Thing to a much greater extent than most people dare to.

You know, being a small child is really just a fascinating and deeply bizarre concept. You don’t come pre-loaded with understanding of how reality works. You are just here and hopefully your caretakers are patient and attentive enough to carefully guide you through the massive psychological trial of becoming accustomed to your own sentience.

I think Teletubbies is so creepy because it captures that state of being a very small and recent person so well. Teletubbies shares with many other small children’s shows a heavy reliance on routine activities the characters do, but the things that guide the Teletubbies through their weird daily lives don’t seem like analogs to…anything? There’s weird pipes with megaphones that ascend randomly out of the ground and have voices? The sun is a baby? There’s a magic windmill?

It is almost explicitly canon that the Teletubbies live under a Panopticon—all of their behavior is observed, by the above entities and by the Narrator, and compliance with rituals such as “Tubby Bye-Bye” is made inevitable by this fact. Teletubbyland is not a paradise where free will can roam as it pleases; it is characterized by an absence of choices and constant surveillance.

Of course this makes sense to toddlers, because they too live in an artificially constructed world where there are no choices, and where events are often predictable but have no underlying reasoning whatsoever. A three year old can’t understand why anything is the way it is. Just as the entities which observe and control the Teletubbies are ostensibly benevolent but arbitrary and inexplicable in motives or underlying logic to their existence, so too the rules and authority figures that govern the toddler’s world are arbitrary and inexplicable. Everything is like “This may as well just happen,” and you have no control anyway. Survival lies in learning to predict, not to understand.

i did like it. thank you. im saying it even without a gun to my head.