Children's franchises like to put up a front that's all lollipops and rainbows, but scratch the surface and you find that those lollipops are produced by child slave labor, while all those rainbows are the offal resulting from a mass unicorn slaughter. All it takes is to look at these stories and characters through the cold, analytical eye of an adult with an enormous amount of spare time on his hands.

5 The Care Bears Are a Cult of Mind Rapists

Via Losangelesstory

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The Care Bears are definitive proof that the writers of '80s kids' shows were still stoned from the '60s and '70s. This 32-year-old franchise, originally developed for greeting cards, features messages about caring and love set against diabetic backdrops and contrasted with pants-shittingly terrifying villains. As with Dora the Explorer, the audience was frequently encouraged to interact with the screen, except that instead of solving puzzles, they were supposed to think positive thoughts at the TV. In the second feature-length movie, there was even a scene in which the audience beamed happy thoughts at the screen to help bring a dead character back to life. You know, just your standard '80s little girl cartoon slash necromancy primer.

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Like most possessed children's toys, the Care Bears were on a mission: to ensure that children everywhere were developing into productive and happy members of society ... with specific emphasis on the "happy." Whenever a child was unhappy, misbehaving, or developing a bad habit, the Caring Meter alerted the bears, who would wait until the brat was alone and then magically appear to correct the error of her ways with a lecture and an unsatisfyingly maul-free bear hug.

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"Which one of you fucking turds is sad?!"

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The Atrocity:

First off, the Care Bears are surveying everything every single kid does, 24 hours a day. Look, we know it's the 21st century and we all traded away our personal privacy years ago, but unlike Facebook and its innocent goal of exposing your scat clown fetish to the world for the sake of a few advertising cents, the Care Bears want to forcibly mold your psyche to match their preconceived notions of how you should feel. And you have precisely zero personal choice in the matter. They're like Fuzzy Wuzzy, if instead of a bear Fuzzy Wuzzy was the Thought Police.

Nobody ever questions the Care Bears' authority to decide how individuals should feel or behave. And considering that the Care Bears alter not only bad habits, but also feelings that they consider bad, like sadness and worry -- otherwise known as essential elements of the human experience that help us grow as people -- the whole concept starts looking downright sinister.