Were you watching TV on Christmas Day? Then you probably saw Stick Man. Yes, Stick Man, that nice heartwarming TV film about the man made from a bit of branch who gets separated from his twiggy family. Or, as the BBC put it: “a happy-go-lucky father’s epic journey to make it home in time for Christmas”. Cute, right?
Wrong. For Stick Man, friends, is a portrait of a dystopian society in which conservative, heteronormative family values are upheld at all costs, and that sees personhood only fully granted to a self-absorbed patriarch: Stick Man himself.
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