How My Octopus Teacher Depicts Healthy Masculinity
In My Octopus Teacher, documentary filmmaker Craig Foster models healthy masculinity by showing us a trusting, gentle, and emotionally fulfilling bond with an octopus.

Tasked with preventing the destruction of humanity, the Chaldea Security Organization observes an anomaly: the Near-Future Observation Lens: Sheba proved the extinction of humanity in 2019. Chaldea pinpoints space-time Singularities thought to be the cause of humanity’s extinction and executes a forbidden ceremony called Rayshifting, where mages are converted into Spiritrons and sent into the past to restore humanity. Under the command of Romani Archaman and with the aid of numerous Servants, Ritsuka Fujimaru and Mash Kyrielight begin by restoring Singularity F: Flame Contaminated City, Fuyuki. From there, they make their way through seven Singularities, resolving each of them. And now, the path to the Final Singularity, Grand Temple of Time: Solomon, lies open, and the final battle against the King of Mages is underway.
In My Octopus Teacher, documentary filmmaker Craig Foster models healthy masculinity by showing us a trusting, gentle, and emotionally fulfilling bond with an octopus.
"His Girl Friday" set the bar for romcoms and gave us a feminist heroine before feminism was cool.
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An aspect of She-Ra that I find refreshing is even though a large portion of the cast is on the LGBTQ+ Spectrum, being gay is never mentioned. While this might initially sound like a negative thing, in the show’s land of Etheria being on the gay spectrum is shown to be so common and normalized that straight isn’t the default. As much as there is to appreciate about narratives revolving around the obstacles that may come from being non-heteronormative, it’s nice to get immersed in a world where no one bats an eye at all to any sort of differing identity.
Few movies deal with aging (particularly aging women) with as much compassion as Relic does. Yet it’s not sickly sweet and not a soapbox rant against ageism. Relic simply is, allowing the horror to seep in quietly and carefully.
Dead Poets Society relies on patriarchal tropes such as overbearing fathers, contrived brotherhood, and faux-individuality in order to portray its straight white male characters as oppressed.