I had a rare moment today while I was watching my niece where I actually decided to watch something with her that wasn't Dragon Ball Z. She decided she wanted to watch Spongebob today, so I said sure. We decided to use Hulu, but for some reason, they didn't have any of the older seasons that I grew up with that I wanted to show her. Instead, they only had Season 9, which I have not watched any of. We watched the entire season and... Well... Spongebob Squarepants has become a cesspool of degenerate assholes who, in my opinion, feel like they have been made to legitimately piss people off while characters like Squidward and Plankton, who were pretty much the bad dudes at one point, are the people you feel sorry for now because they have to deal with these shitty people. Spongebob is literally the only character aside from those two who seem to have a shred of self-deprecation after they did something shitty, and that was only after they did shit that would have broken friendships were they to happen in real life. Sandy is a manipulating bully, Mister Krabs is now even more of a caricature of penny-pinching rich assholes, and Spongebob has somehow become stupider and literally is seen irritating Squidward just for the sake of -blam!-ing with him. Patrick is a goddamned sociopath... I'm not even going to go into that, just watch one episode from season 9, it becomes obvious in probably the first 3 minutes. And it's not only the characters that are irritating me, it's the fact that these situations are being written by a team of professionals and I am now seeing my favorite childhood characters in a whole new light for the worse. And no, this isn't a nostalgia trip of "oh, everything was so much better in the old days", I'm not like that. I'm actually somewhat concerned if this could have an impact on how kids watching this show now will grow up. But you know, I'm a highly anti-censorship person and one side of me thinks "this could be good if kids see these characters as what they are and know it's wrong to do these shitty things these characters are portraying" while the other side of me is saying "What if these kids are as impressionable as we think and they see their favorite character doing something incredibly reprehensible and want to imitate them". It's a highly subjective topic that I think has some potential for interesting conversations regarding it, so I'd like to see what you guys think. tl;dr Title