As expected, Sia's film about autism has received negative reviews · 2:07pm Mar 3rd, 2021
Here's the blog post where I talked about it ICYMI.
Sia's film, Music, didn't sit well with critics as it has a rating of 9% on Rotten Tomatoes and 23/100 on Metacritic. Aside from its inaccurate portrayal of autism, Music was criticized even more because of its racial stereotyping. More specifically, the scene where Maddie Ziegler wore makeup to make her titular character's skin look darker. Additionally, there were a couple of scenes where her character was held in a harmful restraint whilst having a meltdown, which angered the autism community even more.
Sia acknowledged the criticism and issued an apology on Twitter, "I'm sorry. MUSIC in no way condones or recommends the use of restraint on autistic people. There are autistic occupational therapists that specialize in sensory processing who can be consulted to explain safe ways to provide proprioceptive, deep-pressure feedback to help w meltdown safety. I plan to remove the restraint scenes from all future printings. I listened to the wrong people and that is my responsibility, my research was clearly not thorough enough, not wide enough."
Still, the damage was already done.
Feel free to listen to some people's honest thoughts on Music and oh boy, they did not like it at all.
Safe to say, I can no longer see the Rainbow. I'm boycotting Sia's work from now on.
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Understandable move. I have unsubbed from her YouTube channel, unliked her Facebook page, and blocked her on Spotify. I'm really disappointed in her. Her obsession with Maddie Ziegler is downright disturbing.
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Speaking as an autistic person, for her to be spreading such harmful stereotypes is very irresponsible.
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Louder for the people in the back!
Speaking of which, there's a Sesame Street character named Julia who has autism. What are your thoughts on the series' representation of autism?
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I've never seen Sesame Street, so I can't really comment. However, Thomas and Friends, a show aimed at a similar demographic, does have a positive represention in the form of Theo.
static.wikia.nocookie.net/ttte/images/7/74/MainTheoCGI.png/revision/latest?cb=20171103213249
Theo is what is called a geared locomotive, which means he often doesn't do or react in the way you'd expect.