"Woke" Franchises

[CarlManvers2019]

It takes an open mind to enjoy fiction that promotes or disagrees with your world veiw. It also helps if yuh ou can separate real life form fiction and take in entire works instead of just one part.

It is something that conservatives deal with more the liberals. Most of the Mass media from T.V. to Music is left leaning. This bleeds into their works like Quantico making the bad guys thing veiled Trump supporters. Even Marvel jumped on the bandwagon by having Hydra spout Trump lines. You also get shows like Amercian Gods with has to insert it poltical veiws on immigration and other current issues.

You either tune it out or enjoy very little entertainment. I have a level that I can ignore so I like shows like Amercian Gods unneeded sex scenes and all. But others like Designated Survivor are just to much and it ruins the show for me.

Thanks, you got a point there, though I think it’s only gotten really annoying this past decade
to even impact the viewership

As you said, most entertainment already leaned Left wing, that said even youtube critics enjoyed that stuff before the 2010s

I think it may have had to do with the perception that the Left were the only guys really so tolerant of sex and violence in fiction and enjoyed it.....before they decided to “mature” and start viewing this “fun” as secondary to trying to go on about society

That said, still mostly cutting back on the stuff I watch/read/play, mostly due to me having a HUGE backload of stuff already published

And there being things I already consider finished, like Hack/Slash

Won’t be reading the new Witchblade after the first few tries, gonna read and complete the old one first

 

[Cyan Saiyajin]

The immortal Hulk is good even though its jumped full on the woke train especially with the new issue coming out. It repeats the 12 years till climate change kills us all prophecy so its going to date itself really fast. But its Hulk meets body/cosmic horror, and really good.

 

[Husky_Khan]

This kind of stood out to me actually....



About 1:04 in when it talks about Amazon's TV series, Jack Ryan and how they flipped reality in regards to Venezuela.

 

[Captain X]

Keven Sorbo has some good points, but his movies are still pretty stupid. Another one of those cases where I really feel stuck in the middle.

 

[Husky_Khan]

Keven Sorbo has some good points, but his movies are still pretty stupid. Another one of those cases where I really feel stuck in the middle.

Well in all honesty they are Christian movies and their quality tends to be pretty hit or miss because basically their primary point isn't storytelling but the religious version of cinematic pretension in that they aren't there to focus on storytelling as the primary, but some other message. Plus they lack subtlety oftentimes as well, like a Hallmark movie.

We're not talking Charlton Heston style biblical epics or even a Mel Gibson film like Apocalypto or Passion of the Christ here where you can do both. They sacrifice storytelling for their message.

 

[ShadowsOfParadox]

I miss when storytellers knew how to preach at you with good stories
see: Almost everything by Mercedes Lackey, everything by Anne McCaffery, the Redwall books by Brian Jacques, Tolkien, C.S. Lewis.

Personally I think it says alot that most of the authors whose names I remember for how good their stories are have preachy stories.

 

[Arch Dornan]

Ghostbusters have went 180. Heard 2016 is erased from the new trailer and got reees.

 

[CarlManvers2019]

Ghostbusters have went 180. Heard 2016 is erased from the new trailer and got reees.

TvTropea YMMV will unironically like it and say its anti-SJWs instead that are the problem, not SJWs accusing everybody else of something in regards to iy

 

[Arch Dornan]

TvTropea YMMV will unironically like it and say its anti-SJWs instead that are the problem, not SJWs accusing everybody else of something in regards to iy

It's not very hard. You don't give what a consumer wants and isn't happy you don't get money.

Maybe if they had reliable brainwashing technology but if anyone had it they'll rule the world.

 

[Cyan Saiyajin]

It's not very hard. You don't give what a consumer wants and isn't happy you don't get money.

Maybe if they had reliable brainwashing technology but if anyone had it they'll rule the world.

You kinda joke but that's actually the issue they are walking into. The basis of the more extreme leftist theory is that culture media itself is, if not the main, a major influence on people and that if you control what people see, you will control what people think. That doesn't leave much room for the idea that the consumer ultimately controls what is made because they vote with their wallet.

A good example of this is the newer LOTR "controversy" where a female Asian author was complaining on twitter about "dead guys" owning so much space on the shelves of book stores like Tolkien and Robert Jordan. People were trying to defend this argument with the idea that these books are popular because book sellers push them, not the other way around. Although sales data shows that these book series and others are still incredibly successful today, both in physical and electronic book sales.

 

[Arch Dornan]

You kinda joke but that's actually the issue they are walking into. The basis of the more extreme leftist theory is that culture media itself is, if not the main, a major influence on people and that if you control what people see, you will control what people think. That doesn't leave much room for the idea that the consumer ultimately controls what is made because they vote with their wallet.

I'll believe that when they manage to control porn.

A good example of this is the newer LOTR "controversy" where a female Asian author was complaining on twitter about "dead guys" owning so much space on the shelves of book stores like Tolkien and Robert Jordan. People were trying to defend this argument with the idea that these books are popular because book sellers push them, not the other way around. Although sales data shows that these book series and others are still incredibly successful today, both in physical and electronic book sales.

Classics are classics for a reason.

 

[Cyan Saiyajin]

I'll believe that when they manage to control porn.

I agree. But there is plenty of evidence all over the place that proves that kind of idea wrong. Its not that media can't potentially influence people it certainly can, but I feel these types of theories over state its ability to influence.

Classics are classics for a reason.

Yep.

 

[Navarro]

I agree. But there is plenty of evidence all over the place that proves that kind of idea wrong. Its not that media can't potentially influence people it certainly can, but I feel these types of theories over state its ability to influence.

Insofar as it treats people as sponges who do nothing but passively absorb the first ideas they're presented with, yes.

 

[Husky_Khan]

Insofar as it treats people as sponges who passively absorb the first ideas they're presented with, yes.

There's a term for that isn't there? Because I know it affects a lot of people, me included.

 

[ShadowsOfParadox]

There's a term for that isn't there? Because I know it affects a lot of people, me included.

the thing is, if I just absorbed a random idea, it's not hard to knock it out.

 

[Arch Dornan]

Yep.

It does also go with what people like.

I can repeat classics a lot but to go deeper into it requires more explaining which I'm not sure where to go.

 

[PsihoKekec]

Thoughts about entertainment today from some other forum. Not by me, but I thought it would be relevant.

The water they swim in is negativity. How do I explain? Suppose your girlfriend cheated on you and now you're lonely and miserable. You wouldn't want to watch a movie or a tv show about a person getting heartbroken right? It would just open up the old wounds.

That's them all the time. Ever since Trump got elected these people have felt like reality itself was betraying them. Look what he said, "climate change is going to kill us all. Fascism is on the rise." Their assumptions are all unraveling.

They assumed Hillary would win and the world would get a little more leftist every year forever. They would happily consoom neoliberal woke shows that reinforced all their biases (the way The Daily Show did during the Obama administration) and pat them on the back for being on the right side of history. The Earth would cool down, the ice caps would refreeze, and gay marriage would gradually spread until it was the law of the land in virtually every country. Resistance would be futile. Francis Fukuyama's End of History would arrive at last and liberal democracy would have its thousand year reich.

Doesn't look like it's happening, or at least not smoothly. Authoritarian (or authoritarian by their standards) countries like Russia and China are waxing powerful. Liberal lands they thought safely theirs are electing bad guys like Donald Trump and Boris Johnson. It's all such a drag.

So they're losing their tolerance for negativity in media. They can't stomach anything that might remind them of reality in their escapism. This is actually one of the reasons tv shows and movies are declining in quality. The audience doesn't want nuance or any conflict other than unambiguous good vs. evil. They don't want to think. They want a hugbox of goodfeels.

Another major reason scripts are getting worse is due to superwhite nepotism and regression to the mean. The "hustler generation" superwhites are all dead or incredibly old and their spoiled grandkids just can't crack out the same level of material. Their screenwriters are all fucking hacks whose uncle used to work for the studio, that kind of thing. Add to that their extreme risk aversion (must not do anything daring that might threaten the Chinabux) and you've got the recipe for the complete death of creativity in Hollywood.

This is exactly what happened with Game of Thrones for example. You had some genuinely good material written by an outsider and as soon as the superwhite showrunners ran out of book the quality absolutely tanked. Gone was subtlety, in came a heavy handed series of set pieces without any plot or characterization to make it fit together and make you care or understand why these action set pieces mattered in an overall narrative with thematic consistency.

That's basically what your reduced to. Either they are going to have extremely predictable lame stories (black super woman beats up evil racists in Watchmen) or "action without context" attractions where the star of the show is the spectacle and special effects and the story and characters are secondary background noise.

 

[Basileus_Komnenos]

Speaking for myself, as a person of color (though I detest that label since people should only be viewed by the sum total of their merits rather than by any immutable/innate characteristics, and not all people of color are the same) I look at woke shows and media with skepticism. To me it feels like pandering and tokenism as these shoe-horned characters tend to be poorly written or are inflated in terms of capability and skill with all the other characters nerfed to prop them up (a more modern example is Rey knowing more about the Millennium Falcon than Han Solo who flew the the thing for decades).

Simply making a remake of film that switches the race or sex of the characters demonstrates a lack of creativity. If the writer wants to have a story about Black characters or gay/lesbian ones they should actually craft a proper narrative story that makes sense rather than just flipping the sexual orientation/race of already existing characters within established franchises/stories.

I grew up reading the Harry Potter Books for example with my friends. I generally had the understanding that all the characters were British. But then years out of the book came out, the author simply decides to make Dumbeldore gay, Hermoine Black, Wizards not using toilets, etc which have nothing to do with her previously written story's themes or established characterizations. This comes off as cheap and as though Rowling is pandering, so that she can say that her books were ahead of the times in terms of "progressiveness" and "wokeness." This just seems very patronizing to me. What do you guys think?

 

[Urabrask Revealed]

Wizards not using toilets,

I hate that post-canon statement. They had plumping around the time Slytherin hid his basilisk. She's retconning her story.

 

[ShadowsOfParadox]

Dumbeldore gay, Hermoine Black

The first one made sense within the story itself and explained some of the weirdness in the Grindelwald timeline, I'm pretty sure it was already fanon in at least a good chunk of the fanfic community at the time. The second one was a silly casting choice and they SHOULD have just gone "well, she auditioned the best sooooo" instead of making a big deal of it.