No guys, I need to stop and talk about something in this story and how fucking revolutionary it was; something that I haven’t seen in a story before or since.
This is a story about a kid who leaves her birth family.
Not a kid who find that they have a secret lineage or something that allows them to find their ‘true family’ - this is a movie about a kid whose true birth family is made up of bad people. So she gets out. And that is played as the right thing to do. She isn’t punished for it or made to feel bad about ‘abandoning her family’. There isn’t an underlying ‘but they’re your family and you have to love them’ or ‘they’re your family and they love you even if they don’t show it well or do hurtful things’ message of the kind that I see OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER in media. Matilda gets out and lives happily ever after because of it.
We need a million more stories like this to counter the metric shit ton of movies that directly counter this message.
#sometimes the family you start with isn’t a good one #but you can find your own #family is not absolute #blood is not absolute