Safe Nerdy and the Early Adopter Problem
Photo by dronepicr, CC BY 2.0
Those of us who are terminally online are aware of using the adjective “safe” to describe something with the less conformist part sanded off. The two that come up the most are “safe horny” (like The Last of Us Part II and Baldur’s Gate 3) and “safe edgy” (like Babes.) The point of both is they don’t gore any liberal sacred cows. That’s what makes them safe. That’s what it means in practice. That which is “controversial” without actually truly being controversial, since no liberals, those with the most institutional power in America, are upset about it. Ya squares. The point being is that it isn’t truly safe nor is it truly edgy or horny. Safe as an adjective in this case is much like the adjective “social.” It undermines the term it is being used to adjective-isize to the point where it isn’t that thing anymore. Hayek’s whole lecture against social justice is the most common example of this dichotomy.
I wish to enshrine a new term: Safe Nerdy. That which purports to be for nerds, but is truly for normies. Take any franchise and make it “safe” for general audiences, which will inevitably lose the hardcore fans of said franchise. Who won’t show up or, worse still, tell other people not to see it. They might hate watch it, being the early adopters that they are, but they will mostly do so in order to give examples as to why the show or movie or video game is trash. The most common example in recent times I can give for this is The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, a show that is based on the works of Tolkien but is clearly not for fans of Tolkien. I am not the biggest Tolkien fan, but I understand how that is not what they were looking for in a pre-The Hobbit universe.
The Big Bang Theory might be the most pervasive example of this for something not adapted from something else. A show that is about nerds, but mostly makes fun of them. So, it isn’t actually for nerds. You can claim it is pandering, but the stuff brought up in most episodes makes the nerds at the core of the cast out to be horrible people or morons or just plain targets of mockery. When my anti-nerd father loved the show, I kind of realized he mostly liked to make fun of Sheldon. And he also loves Young Sheldon. I don’t really get why, but that’s neither here nor there.
When a Safe Nerdy adaptation does poorly, especially among the hardcore fans of the franchise it was adapted from, the entertainment media cracks open the GamerGate Playbook to call those fans one of many things. “Fake fans,” fair-weather fans, or, the most hypocritical of horse manure, fans the franchise no longer needs. The hardcore fans’ love of the franchise got that adaptation greenlit in the first place. Fake fans is rich, mostly because hardcore fans being upset about the franchise is par for the course. Hardcore fans rarely agree on what they dislike about a franchise, but every hardcore fan dislikes something. There is a difference between a hardcore fan and a fanboy. A fanboy will eat any slop he or she is given if it has the sticker of the thing they’re a fanboy of on it. Hardcore fans are the fans that stick by when a franchise sucks, but it doesn’t mean they show up for everything. Fake fans are normies, especially of the fair-weather varietal. This has a No True Scotsman logical fallacy smell to it, but it makes sense to me. But that last one, fans the franchise no longer needs, is where I point my ire most severely.
“The franchise is not for you anymore” is a common problem people with power, money, and influence like to use against those without any of those three things. The entertainment media loves this stuff. Seen with GamerGate, Star Wars, DC Comics, the MCU, Warhammer 40K, The Rings of Power, and any number of other franchises. Asking hardcore fans to not consume the media they love anymore doesn’t exactly sound like a long-term success strategy to me. The problem is that without the hardcore fans, a franchise loses its early adopters.
The Early Adopter Problem is seen in every industry. If the consumers who tend to show up first for something stop showing up, the new product can explode on the launchpad and fall into the swamp. Without the early adopters, the new product or service or fried chicken sandwich doesn’t get much positive buzz, as early adopters tend to be the most engaged consumers within a product line. So, it doesn’t spill over into the normies and is a product line failure, which is true for five of every six new products or so. Escapism and consumer products and everything are vying for finite resources, money and time most especially. Apple loves its early adopters. As does Tesla. And Nintendo. And Taco Bell. Treating those people well, not just the media mouthpieces who will write positive things about your product after any measure of special treatment, is how you build hardcore fanbases by generating positive fan goodwill.
Any profitable venture can squander any amount of goodwill with bad product. Disney is dealing with that right now. Wish alone lost Disney over $100 million. Steep is the price of failure when fan goodwill is in the toilet. As it currently is. Deadpool & Wolverine is the only MCU movie releasing this year. Even if it does well (and it may very well crack a billion worldwide,) the health of the MCU is on life support. Even with one of the most respected character actors in all of Hollywood as the lead, the studio is fumbling the Blade movie. Every single Disney+ MCU show lost the studio money except for maybe Loki season one, largely due to their gargantuan budgets. Secret Invasion somehow cost about $250 million.
Hollywood outside of Jason Blum (and horror in general) seemingly can’t make a cheap movie that makes money. A24 being the biggest example of this. Even the A24 movie that won Best Picture, Everything Everywhere All at Once (a movie I love to death,) didn’t even crack $150 million at the worldwide box office. And that’s A24’s highest grossing movie! Their other two are Civil War and Talk to Me, which is their only out-and-out runaway hit other than Everything Everywhere All at Once, as Civil War cost $50 million to make. (Talk to Me cost about $4.5 million to make and grossed over $90 million at the worldwide box office.)
What is the solution here? My call to action, as it were? Ask the hardcore fans what they want. Do focus groups if you have to. Free ideas are free ideas. And then put out trial balloons to see if fans in general would like something. And then make said thing with as small a budget as you can if the fans are receptive. Step 3: Profit.
I’m puzzled as to if this is really related to a fan connection/woke idea or if it’s more indicative of a fundamental writing problem. Sure, Rings of Power had a LOT of fan angst and it had a lot of wokeness in it too but what really makes it so excrescent is that it’s horribly horribly written. Plot lines make little sense; the main villains’ schemes are incoherent or dependent on raw chance; people teleport around the vast world in the blink of an eye and dialogue is splinter in the eye bad. RoP itself had some very interesting ideas and some very good scenes but those jewels were strung together on wires of offal. The MCU properties weren’t particularly bad because they were woke; they were bad because they were stupid and shoddily written with the woke ideas just sort of bejeweled onto the surface to try and distract from it.
In contrast there are some properties that can be extremely progressive in ideology which are also well written and do great both artistically and commercially. The Spiderverse series of films, for instance, are beautifully written, ascend to remarkable feats of artistry and are also “woke as fish” to name just one example.
What I personally suspect is that the nepotism of hiring in Hollywood has reached new heights and woke catchphrases and themes are being used to try and paper over the glaring failures of writing and show making craft. I’m not sure if this is a new phenomenon or not- assuredly there were plenty of poorly written non-woke films in the past. It may also be part of the current entertainment media paradigm crisis.Report
A good film will transcendent its politics, a bad film cannot be made good by virtue of its politics, whether genuinely held or a hamfisted attempt to cash in on the zeitgeist.Report
…or if it’s more indicative of a fundamental writing problem.
I’ll take this side of the bet. A random group of a half-dozen regular commenters from this blog could have written three or four different versions of the last season of Game of Thrones, all of them superior to the screenplay that was actually used.Report
This is where I fall as well and emphatically agreed on the last few seasons of Game of Thrones. I can only image the HBO execs wanted to burn B&W at the stake for that malpractice.Report
always funny to me how they rushed the ending of Game Of Thrones because they were really hot to start working on Star Wars for Disney, and then the ending of Game Of Thrones flopped so hard Disney fired them from Star Wars before they’d startedReport
They had 3 or 4 REALLY GOOD endings that they could have stolen from Reddit arguments about what was going to happen! They didn’t even have to give u/redditGOTguy credit! They could have just said “yeah, you were so right on with your theory!” and u/redditGOTguy would have gotten an endorphin kick for the next decade.Report
Yes! I laughed and laughed and then paused and seriously pondered if karma was real. But then I noted that the firing decision was incredibly logical for Disney: “If you are going to do such a crap job with your current employers creative property costing the uncountable millions in lost seasons, viewers and reputation; why on earth would we hire you to work on our creative property???”Report
“We already have people who will do that for us, thanks.”Report
Woof! Ain’t that the truth!Report
There’s a difference between a piece of art having a message or theme that fits an ideology or party, and a piece of art being ideological. I haven’t seen Rings of Power because duh, but from what I understand it was ideological.
Not all bad narrative art is ideological, but all ideological narrative art is bad. I distinguish the narrative art because you can make good Soviet ballet or Muslim tapestry, but I don’t think you can make good narrative art when every narrative choice would favor the ideology. The RedLetterMedia guys say, a good bad movie will keep finding new ways of being bad. Ideological movies find the same way of being bad in every respect. I saw the first Spiderverse movie, and I didn’t love it, but I didn’t find it woke. I think it was too chaotic.Report
I agree to a degree and, as with all things identarian/woke, the very definition itself is squirrelly and hard to nail down.
That said I did watch Rings of Power and it was, assuredly, no more ideological than Spiderverse was. It was, unlike Spiderverse, an absolute trainwreck in terms of writing whereas, for another example, Mad Max Fury Road was easily as much “girl power” as RoP was but was a very successful piece of film art. ssfulReport
I think the limitations that the Tolkien estate placed on the Ring of Power team in what they could and could not use made bad writing all but guaranteed. If I am remembering correctly, they couldn’t use anything from Tolkien’s notes but had to base Rings of Power on things said in the text of LOTR novels themselves.Report
That explains certain elements and kludges they had to use but not the overarching problems. To name just a couple egregious ones: the forging of the titular rings are a literal afterthought in the first season; one villains big bad plan involves activating some kind of massive hidden infrastructure to set off a volcano and the other villains big bad plan hinged on them happening to encounter a marooned elf warrior general on a raft in the sea.
None of those were necessitated by the fact that the Tolkien estate didn’t sell them the rights to any Silmarillion material.Report
Hit “Report” by accident.Report
Is this what you did or an invitation?Report
This is similar to the Bad Robot version of the Star Trek universe, which is contractually obligated to be different from the original. The contract doesn’t require it to be terrible, but it requires it to be different from something that was beloved while carrying the same name.Report
“…all ideological narrative is bad…”? Atlas Shrugged? All Quiet…? For Whom…? High Noon? Death of a…? 12 Angry Men? 100 Years…? Americanization of Emily? Life of Christ (multiple media)? Life of Bryan? Sorry, Pinky, can’t possibly go along with this one.Report
I remember watching High Noon in the early 2000’s and thinking “this is about George W. Bush”. Unless the author thought the same, I can’t call it ideological. Does that make sense? I’ve seen 12 Angry Men as a play, and yeah, it’s pretty ideological, and it’s not very good. I’ve read Death of a Salesman, and ditto. Both of them are more intent on making you agree with them than telling a story, and both are made weaker because of it. The Life of Christ, depending on the version, is non-fiction.
I was just recently thinking about Gurren Lagann. Everything in it exists to heighten a particular emotional beat: the moment when the hero, despite facing enormous odds, reaches inward and wills himself forward. Every note of music, every plot point, it’s all there to heighten that moment in each episode, and every episode aims an order of magnitude higher. It’s hilarious once you realize what they’re doing, and there’s some actual decent work in it, but if they could have pulled out a piece of quality and replaced it something worse but more heightening, they would have. If quality isn’t your highest priority, it’s going to show.
And I think that goes back around to the definition that North is looking for. A work is ideological to the extent that buttressing the ideology is prioritized over the quality of the work.Report
Who is the GWB character in High Noon?Report
I think that definition is about as good and concise a one as I’ve ever read. Well done.Report
Sorry, I’m not familiar with Gurren Langann, but your first paragraph seems to be saying pretty plainly that the more ideological a piece is, the less you like it. Fair enough. But all of the pieces I alluded to (many of them not particular favorites of my own) are big time, popular, well-respected works of art with a lot of ideological thrust. They are well-established quality works. Your aversion to being preached to is understandable, but that doesn’t negate the value of the works. “Richard III” had a very ahistorical ideological point to make. Still a pretty decent piece of Shakespeare. And, just to set a few ears on fire, all versions of Christ’s Life are fiction. (I need to insert a “Happy Face” emoji there so I don’t sound so crabby.) Cheers!Report
No problem about Gurren Lagann; it was just an example. Romantic comedies work just as well. There’s the moment when the likeable man and likeable woman look at each other and realize they’re in love. Anything you can do to make them more likeable helps that moment. Plot complications, or realism, can detract from that moment. It’s not about the particular kind of moment that a movie works towards; what interests me is that you’d fire anyone who isn’t as cute as Reese Witherspoon in order to perfect that moment.
The same holds true for a message. Dirty Harry movies have an irritating do-gooder telling Harry to obey the rules, while Harry brings justice the way only he can. But the bad guys, often enough, are renegade cops. There’s an ambiguous message. To Kill a Mockingbird is about a hero telling the truth in the face of adversity, and ends with the hero accepting a lie. Ambiguity. Reality. The original Matrix has great monologues from Morpheus, but also from Mr. Smith and Cypher, and a very open ending.
Let’s say there’s a 2% chance of an element of a narrative work being top quality when you’re willing to sacrifice art for the message. Say, in The Hunger Games, the amazing costuming in the capital actually supported the message. But by the time you bring together all the elements, it’s nearly impossible to make a great work if the artistry wasn’t the top priority.
Comment too long. Shutting up now.Report
2%! Yay! I’ll take that. I have no idea how much art that I consume is overly or underly or just rightly ideological. Here’s an anecdote that I (at this moment anyway) seems to have a bit of connection: Recently, in a conversation with an uncle…really cool guy; kind, giving soul…he said: “I’ve got nothing against gay, I just don’t want it pushed on me.” I didn’t respond, but my immediate thought was, “How many movies have you seen where it is completely taken for granted that Male Lead and Female Lead are gonna fall in love? Almost all of them? Does that mean that throughout our lives heterosexuality has been pushed on us?” Well, yeah, I suppose so. Does that mean that any flick where Rock and Doris or George and Nicole get together is waving its ideology around, and is less good because of that? Maybe. Are some things better when that trope just doesn’t happen? Like “The Station Agent”? Or even “Dirty Harry”? On the other hand, how often does that heterosexual ideology actually reduce the artistic worth? Would the end of “Casablanca” be better if Claude and Humphrey kissed before walking off? Ideologically, I’d be for it. Artistically? Hmmm…Report
Propaganda is like plot holes, where it only exists if its noticeable.
All stories have plot holes and gaps of logic, but a good storyteller makes you not care about them. And all stories have a point of view to them, but its only when the POV is dissonant from our expectations of the right ordering of reality that it becomes propaganda.Report
I didn’t find Rings of Power particularly woke besides diversifying the cast and having more active female characters than Tolkien did. A lot of Tolkien’s fan base in the early 21st century are women and this is because Tolkien’s Catholic chastity means a lack of women as fan service and sex appeal. Naturally, not being subjected to fan service or sex appeal needs let alone sexual assault a la GOT is attractive to many women.Report
I wouldn’t call Rings of Power wildly woke- the term is, itself, pretty hard to nail down. But I’d say it’s as “Woke” as, say, Mad Max Fury Road or the Spiderverse flicks, both of which are quite strongly progressive/woke.
Where it differs from them is that it’s incoherent and poorly written in ways they aren’t and in ways that are entirely divorced from the “wokeness”. You could strip out every “woke” element of Rings of Power and replace it with older conventions and it’d still be entirely drek. The drekitude operated entirely independently of the wokeness.Report
Here’s what I consider woke when it comes to entertainments: “Eat Your Vegetables”.
Is the scene fun? Does it have a good payoff? Do the characters end up doing things that the characters would probably do? Yay! Good!
Is it an opportunity for the writer to put a rant into the mouth of his pet character? Do the characters act stupidly in ways that don’t make sense for how their characters *OUGHT* to be stupid? Most importantly, does it *FEEL* like Children’s Christian Television from the 1970’s?
Is it obviously telling you to “eat your vegetables”?
There’s more to it than just poor writing of characters! It has to be poor writing of characters in service to an ideology.
When whatshisname, the potato chip guy, in Three Body Problem told the hot chick with the video game helmet that he wasn’t on board with aliens?
That was just not setting the character up properly if it was essential that he turn her down. (Seriously. I’ve known guys like that. They’d be on board with aliens.) That wasn’t a good character setup but it wasn’t woke.
Moreover, it’s possible to do “woke” the right way! Fury Road, which you mentioned, is a good example of dancing close to it (the patriarchy, the warboys shooting out like sperm trying to get the eggs back, so on and so forth) but even with Sarkeesian advising the flick, the story was good! The characters were good! The stuff paid off! It was fun!
It’s just… well, not often that woke is done the right way. It’s far more likely that they make something that reminds you more of Dragonraid than Mad Max.Report
It’s not an implausible definition but I feel it’s rather narrow.Report
It’s also got something like a shelf life. Sometimes, something “woke” back then turns into something pretty good in the current year because the “woke” was something worth adopting. Sometimes something “woke” back then turns into something horrifying.
Let’s compare Joss Whedon’s Buffy stuff to Glee.
Remember this quote from Joss Whedon?
‘Why do you write strong female characters? Because you’re still asking me that question.’
YASS QUEEN! GO JOSS!
And you know what? Buffy holds up, for the most part. The show isn’t bad, for the most part. There’s some stuff in there that is, erm, “problematic” as the kidz say but the show does a good job of getting from here to there and dragging the viewer along despite being written by a guy going out of his way to write Strong Female Characters.
And Glee? OMG, Glee. Hee hee. Hee hee hee. I can’t wait until the Zoomers discover Glee.Report
It’s funny you mention older works, I was thinking about that too. There’s a lot of well regarded genre fair, including many of my favorites that have woke aspects to them. I think about Alien with a strong, competent female protagonist, the underlying anti-corporate and anti militaristic ideas thrown around, the somewhat sexless future aesthetics, etc. Even where it turns slasher and/or machine gun porn violent there’s a lot of what would now arguably be called wokery floating around in it.
To North’s point, I think it’s not just eat your vegetables, even though eat your vegetables is very much a part of it. It’s also a set of plot and character development constraints. Certain characters can never show weakness or be defeated. Certain characters can never be bad, or if they are bad, they were made bad by a just-so backstory that we are supposed to believe makes it tragic or justified. No one can ever grow or learn anything that isn’t ersatz to the point of approaching self parody, and all our heroes are cynical about everything except cynicism. The result is clumsy story telling with no excitement or payoff. Oh and by the way be a better person wouldn’t you?
To riff on North’s example of Fury Road, it still works despite some arguably woke trappings around identity because at heart it’s a story about a disparate group of people who come together, grow, and win a conflict with real stakes. This is why I think it’s important to understand that while diverse casting can be a part of woke that is not it in itself. A truly woke version would have been very different in terms of plot and character development, and much less enjoyable.Report
Verisimilitude is the difference between raw kale and brussell sprouts sauteed in butter with some bacon, shredded romano, and finishing salt.
I think that a lot of the complaints about “politics” in this or that work isn’t a complaint about “politics”, per se, it’s a complaint about the plot being in service to the politics rather than the politics being in service to the plot.
Joss Whedon is, by no means, a Libertarian (or particularly libertarian, for that matter) but when he wrote Firefly, he let the story go where it went instead of where he personally wanted it to go.
The show is that much stronger for it.
He learned a *LOT* by working on Roseanne a million years ago. A lot of the “woke” authors would benefit from watching his stuff and dispassionately…
Wait, I think I see the problem.Report
Whedon is really an interesting figure in the way genre work has evolved. Putting my personal feelings about him aside (namely that he should be taken out and shot for the script of Alien Resurrection) my sense is that his work has always remained at least minimally grounded in traditional story and structure. However the Whedon-ification of dialogue and screenwriting is as responsible as anything for the phenomena we’re discussing. It’s like everything is written by an AI from a prompt that says ‘now re-write the story for my fanfic Tumblr in the style of Joss Whedon.’Report
Yeah, that’s a good point.
“You should watch Joss Whedon’s stuff and write like he does.”
*writer furiously writes down ‘include ironic quips like “well, *THAT* just happened!”‘*
“NO NOT LIKE THAT”Report
Yes you and InMD’s exchange got both to my original concern and what would have been my follow up critique. Some parts of what we call “woke” are worthy and will be adopted. They have in the past and they assuredly will be again in the future.Report
“This is why I think it’s important to understand that while diverse casting can be a part of woke that is not it in itself.”
Yup. A two-hour lecture from white men is as boring as a two-hour lecture from a cast that looks like America.Report
Eating your vegetables is part of being woke but it is not the sum total of what makes entertainment woke. Evangelical entertainment as an eating your vegetables aspect and nobody is going to call that woke. Woke revolves around the morality of 21st century Western and mainly boogie and educated liberals. I’m not sure that a production from Japan, South Korea, India, or even a Latin American country can be woke because the cultural concerns are too different.Report
I’ve been using the broader term “ideological” and I don’t think I’m losing anything in terms of how it functions.Report
Evangelical entertainment as an eating your vegetables aspect and nobody is going to call that woke.
Yeah.
But you absolutely and totally recognize it when Evangelicals do it, right? The whiff of Veggietales?
That. That thing. That phenomenon right there. That’s what “woke” is.Report
I recognize it when people I agree with do it as well.Report
Hold on a second… I’m gonna start a Veggie Tales internet feud with you.
OG Veggie Tales (before Big Idea went bankrupt in 2003?) made veggies delightful — literally and metaphorically. People (grown-ups) could watch a Veggie Tale movie or short and think, ‘man… if I’d had veggies like this when I was a kid, maybe I’d like veggies now.’ A comp might be Shrek the original.
After about 2004, I’ll agree that Veggie Tales(TM) without the creators was simply unfunny and mostly terrible. So sure, I’ll grant your point with that caveat.
Phil Vischer wrote a really long article about his failure at business which was a great read; I tried to find it again, but it looks like he pulled it and instead has a book out. Which I’m guessing will be worse for the polish that’s now been put into it.Report
Much like “woke”, “veggietales” doesn’t mean “bad”.
Some of the early stuff is as good as you’re going to find, in that particular genre.
Heck, maybe compare to the stuff that I had in the 80’s like the Candle storybook tapes.
Nathaniel the Grublet! (Yes! That *IS* Dean Jones!) Antshillvania! (A retelling of The Prodigal Son!) Sir Oliver’s Song! (Learn the 10 Commandments!) BULLFROGS AND BUTTERFLIES!!! (We’ve both been Born Again!)
Some of it is really good and tells some really good stories and, let’s face it, the OT is *FULL* of really good childrens’ stories that only need to be lightly redacted until they’re older.
But… vegetables, man. You can tell that they’re vegetables.
Veggietales just lampshades it exceptionally well.Report
Sure, but it becomes a defeater to the argument that it’s impossible to have good ‘ideological’ art.
What if you can have good ideological art, but most art that is ideological is terrible. We’re looking for causal action that’s separate from simply ‘ideological’.
Like, why is post Big Idea Veggie Tales so much worse? That, to me is the question.Report
Okay. Half-baked idea coming through.
It has to do with Deontology vs. Utilitarianism vs. Virtue Ethics.
Deontological art is fine, so long as you share some fairly large percentage of priors with the artist. To enjoy the preacher preaching to the choir, it helps to be a member of the choir.
If you’re just visiting? It’ll come across as some weird insular thing.
Major exception: If we’re talking about something nigh-universal, it’s *SAFE*. Perhaps even comfy. But it ain’t edgy.
Utilitarian art? Well, the problem with it is that it is vulgar at worst and transactional at best. Good art for the jaded and the cynical. “Yep, I don’t like the message but you can’t help but notice that it’s accurate.” Easily misread as nihilistic by pretty much everybody else. (Except, of course, when it’s accurately read as nihilistic.)
VIRTUE ETHICS! This is where the art is good. The person goes through a wringer, wrestles with his ideas, discards the ones that don’t work, tenderly cultivates that ones that do, learns that he was too eager to discard some of the earlier ones, wrestles with demons, becomes better. Maybe even becomes good.
This art *HITS*. (It’s a good formula for video games too, for that matter.)
The woke and the later veggietale art is deontological in the bad sense.
The good art? That tells a story.
There, that’s my best attempt with 5 minutes’ thought behind it.Report
You had me at Virtue Ethics.
/end feud.Report
I think the “eat your vegetables” aspect is a key part of what puts people off a political work. It’s not so much that people dislike politics in their media, it’s that dislike being lectured by their media.Report
Yeah. I occasionally remember this one and giggle for a second before getting really depressed:
So I’m the only one that thinks that the original idea of the media (news) was to report the facts? I don’t need bias in the media I consume. Just the facts man. If I want bias, I can watch a opinion/commentary piece.Report
I ain’t talking about the news.
I’m talking about the video games and the movies and the television show entertainment products.Report
Okies….let me change some words….
“So I’m the only one that thinks that the entertainment media should be about entertaining people and not preaching to them about politics or some such?”Report
Eh… you can sneak veggies into the meal between bites of mashed potato.
Look at most of Norman Lear’s sitcoms.Report
But bias is everywhere.
Both in what is covered as much as what isn’t covered.Report
Precisely!Report
So here’s an ad for tonight’s “Just the Facts News”: “99.9% of Americans today were not murdered. And now over to Jamie with footage of several towns where tornados didn’t touch down.” All facts. Are you ever going to watch that show? “News” isn’t just “Facts.” “News” is really pretty much what is interesting or unusual. How to determine, from a wide array of choices, which facts and unusual occurrences will be viewed and thus sell ad time? Whoops. Gonna be some human fallibility/bias in that selection. Nothing that is delivered to you by any human source, personal contact, paper, or through a screen has no bias. You can choose (as much as it is possible) to not consume “News,” and then the only bias you will have to deal with is your own.Report
That, and they don’t like politics they don’t like. The politics they do like they often don’t acknowledge to be politics at all.Report
Adding to much wokeness into Tolkien will make it obviously not Tolkien. They needed to thread the needle to allow for more female actors to do things beyond be maidens but also keep it Tolkien.Report
But females do in fact do things in Tolkien beyond being maidens. What they do not tend to do is morph into cold eyed, remorseless, female versions of Arnold Schwarzenegger in commando. To the extent there are cold eyed, remorseless violence machines* in Tolkien they are not on the good team.
*Even this misses the essence of what evil is in Tolkien, but you get the idea.Report
It has been a long time since I’ve read Tolkien but one of the requirements of modern fantasy or really action media in general is that it is sexist unless the female character kick as much ass and are as badass as the male characters. Fantasy literature that does not have it gets labelled sexist.Report
The gatekeepers of sexism have lost the plot. Increasingly, people don’t see them as reliable gatekeepers.Report
Have they looked under the coach for the plot?Report
If the only way to make women strong is to make them men, then maybe the problem is bad/lazy writing.Report
It’s like the WNBA, my man.
The problem isn’t that people don’t like the idea of women playing basketball.
The problem is that people really enjoy men’s basketball so much more.
Wait. I think I started writing this comment as a joke and now I don’t think I’m joking anymore.Report
I had an idea for making the WNBA more popular, but I get in trouble every time I mention it. All I’ll say is that it involved the WNBA adopting a common playground basketball practice.Report
Let me guess. Shirts versus skins.Report
If it was good enough for the Ancient Greeks, it is good enough for me.Report
I neither confirm nor deny….Report
I think that matters what you mean by make them men. I think comics, video games, and movies show that there is a big audience for female action stars that kick ass. People, men and women, also want the female action stars to look feminine rather than more butch. Men because of the fanservice and women because it fits into their self-image.Report
I think a lot of this is where the eat your vegetables part comes in. For example, I never heard of anyone complain about, say, all the Mila Jovovich movies where she is going around kicking ass in ways that stretch plausibility (and not just for a petite model) while still looking hot doing it.
I think what creates problems for these films from a narrative and characterization perspective isn’t the idea of the ass kicking woman. It’s the idea that there can be no women other than the ass kicking woman, and the ass kicking woman must not merely kick ass but adopt all of the characteristics of the most retrograde male heroes, which for some reason are now laundered and OK in this one context. Add to that a bunch of executives that say the movie isn’t for men, and, well… I guess I would just say it amazes me that these companies don’t understand why their core customer demographic no shows and a lot of these things bomb.Report
I guess I would just say it amazes me that these companies don’t understand why their core customer demographic no shows
This is what is absolutely *NUTS*.
“We want stuff that is made for *US*! Not made for you!”
“Okay.”
“WAIT WHY DIDN’T YOU BUY IT TOO?!?!?”Report
Jovovich can’t act. I’m not going to watch her (or Van Damme who also can’t act). I also don’t find her attractive. Kate Beckinsale looks great and can act. I should watch the rest of the Underworld movies. I liked movies like Hanna and First Blood, because they had action but also made it clear that you don’t end up like the lead without a really messed-up past. Good action and good acting. I think the modern action chick is more annoying than the 80’s action dude because people talk like the current films are important.Report
In reverse order, I agree that acting as if these films are somehow important is a major part of what makes them so insufferable. That probably benefits Mila Jovovich type movies. No one was ever making the case that the latest Resident Evil movie was a watershed. I also thought Hanna was good.
But… I also love Mila and her stupid movies, acting ability be damned, and don’t care what anyone else thinks about it.Report
Fine by me. The one amendment I’d make to my earlier comment is that Beckinsale *can* act, but she wasn’t in Underworld. It was funny though, Bill Nighy hit it out of the park in that movie. He was maybe on screen for two minutes, but they were the most contemptuous two minutes in film history. The Matrix’s Mr. Smith was a humanitarian compared to that guy.
I really should go back and watch those movies.Report
Kate is a favorite of mine too. I’m pretty sure I saw the Underworld movies back when but don’t remember a lot about them. Maybe next time I’m scrolling endlessly through the million streaming services that mysteriously end up on my credit card I’ll land on it, or one of the series.Report
I just always think of the Underworld and Resident Evil series together when we’re talking about female action movies. Just like Alias and Buffy have been on my mind throughout this thread.Report
Ass kicking woman: If it’s not sci fi or fantasy where you can bend the rules, ain’t no female (in general) gonna ass kick men. It just doesn’t make sense. Some good writing and scenes of how she uses intelligence, or the environment to aide her? Nope. Acts just like Rambo. Sure.
But what’s worse, is that there is no “journey” of the character. Rey knows how to pilot the millennium falcon? She innate knows how to do all this stuff? There is no struggle, no failure or flaw to overcome? Nope.Report
Yeah, it’s been too long since you read Tolkien. Tolkien may not have had, say, a female warrior character in the original Fellowship of the Ring but he had Eowyn and she was a thousand times more capable than the shambling idiot Galadriel zombie that Rings of Power foisted on us. There just doesn’t seem to be much of a defense of RoP to me. What is important, though, is that it is fundamentally that RoP is badly badly written and construed. The wokeness is just flavor and something they gesture at as an excuse. The Wokeness isn’t the cause of the shows drekitude- it’s just a distraction.Report
It’s also an excellent example of the red flag mentioned below. Early criticisms of the show were waved away with counter-criticisms that toxic men just hated the idea of black women in their fantasy show. Thin-skinned incels upset that they weren’t the target audience anymore.
$465 million to make the first season.
Remember this story? Rings Of Power Season 2 Will Be More Canonical, Says LOTR Showrunners.
The wokeness isn’t just behind some of the bad writing. It’s behind the immediate response to criticism.Report
I think you’re missing the explanatory power of the wokeness. I mean, if something is bad art, and we’re ok with just labelling it as such, that’s fine. If we want to understand what makes it bad, though, wokeness is a good place to start. If they create an invincible female warrior whose only error is trusting a white man, that’s bad but it’s also woke. If viewers can’t keep track of settings because every crowd shot has the same mix of heights and colors, that’s more subtle, but it’s also bad and woke.
A second point: woke is also bad behind the camera, and in the writing room in particular. It doesn’t have to be, but ideologues are less likely to be creative, and employing people on the basis of looks or ideology rather than proven skill is a really bad idea. I guess I should have added in front of the camera too. Rachel Zegler may be a great actress for all I know, but her first four project were increasingly grand and unsuccessful (except I guess Hunger Games eked out a profit).Report
She was pretty good in West Side Story…Report
At this point the only people I hear use the word woke anymore are white guys who think anything even slightly giving acknowledgement to human diversity is rampant communism and about a second away from putting against the wall and applying bolt cutters to their privates.Report
Well maybe if the identarians/woke/social justice whatever picked a name for their ideology then we’d have a concrete one to use for them. As they haven’t there isn’t. I don’t consider this a big problem since the bailey versions of whatever “Woke” is seem to be increasingly in retreat across multiple axis.Report
I’ve seen the Big Bang Theory described as a Nerd Mistral Show. The description does not seem inaccurate.Report
Big Bang Theory was about social misfits. It wasn’t written by social misfits.
Or, at the very least, it was written by theater kid social misfits instead of math/compsci social misfits.Report
I did not, and do not now in syndication, watch Big Bang Theory. Summarize it as “These are my people.” And I don’t care to watch them made fun of.
Of course, I’m the person who was asked “Who are your people, Mike?” at a party where I wasn’t paying much attention to the conversation, and answered “The applied mathematicians.”Report
I’ve heard that Community was actually for “our people”.
I dunno. I never watched it. But I’ve heard a great many good things.Report
Community was so… odd. It was very funny and good but so… odd. Especially once it was successful and they tried to string out a few more seasons. Just… odd.Report
You should watch community.
However, you have to watch Season 1 as if it is the set-up to the joke… a long set-up that isn’t very funny. The show the network thought would be successful.
But, after Season 1… well that right there is some of the weirdest meta-farming sh*t ever aired on network TV. Some parts of which are funny in ways you’ve never seen funny coming.Report
The problem of Rings of Power is that it moved with a slower than molasses speed until the last two episodes. It wasn’t particularly woke as Lee notes besides a diverse cast.
Also Big Bang Theory was on network TV, of course it is going to be for the broadest audience possible.Report
Okay. Here’s the biggest red flag for me for “woke”.
Entertainment product is released.
Fans look at entertainment product and shrug.
Actors, producers, Megafans on social media all start screaming about the toxic fans who have shrugged.
Fingers start pointing at why a particular product has failed and, get this, THE FANS ARE BLAMED FOR PRODUCT FAILING.
Whenever I get even a *WHIFF* of this, I think “woke bullcrap” and wander away.Report
Isn’t this post hoc, though? No successful entertainment product can be woke?
While I, assuredly, agree the thing you do happens; Indeed, I think it’s probably the go-to excuse for these folks in the event of a failure; it still doesn’t matter. If the product fails, those yelps and excuses don’t save any careers or allow more iterations of the entertainment product to be made.Report
There are plenty of successful entertainment products that were woke and others that are woke.
For example: Glee. (Hee hee.)
But if I encounter a product that makes me shrug and the response is some variant of “Why don’t you want to consume this entertainment product? TRIGGERED?!?”, I think that the product is woke.
“Why don’t you want to eat these vegetables? HATE THE IDEA OF NOT BEING FAT?!?”
Maybe it’s not woke. Maybe it’s awesome.
But the number one thing that makes me think “woke”?
“You only don’t want to consume this content because you are morally inferior.”Report
Once critics deem something to be “important” …
That’s usually code for “it’s not very good but we agree with the ideology.”Report
“Wagner’s music is much better than it sounds.”Report
Impressive efficiency in proving Godwin’s Law. Well done.Report
I’ve been sitting on this video for a while, wondering how to introduce it (I was considering writing an essay on the whole Sweet Baby Inc brouhaha) and, well, I think it handles the whole “propaganda in video games” question as deftly as I’ve seen it handled.
One of the main points that I liked is how if an artist puts his theory into a story that isn’t true to how humanity actually is, the artist is lying. “Oh, you’re asking for truth in a story about aliens meeting bigfoot?” is a silly criticism of this position that doesn’t seem to understand the point of art.
Like, a good answer would be “YES. I AM LOOKING FOR TRUTH IN A STORY ABOUT ALIENS MEETING BIGFOOT.”
But, anyway, it’s a good video and it gave me a lot to chew on. (This is the guy who developed The Fall. The Fall was an *AWESOME* game that explored humanity via a robotic suit powered by AI. Check it out.)
Anyway, enjoy the video. It’s good.
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When I was a boy in upper elementary school, there was a rather infamous cartoon show called Captain Planet. I assume people on this blog heard of it even if they are older than me. Captain Planet was known for it’s rather heavy hitting environmental messages, which was the style of the time, and for it’s ability to occasionally get away with a level of violence and consequences that normal early 1990s kid’s entertainment could not do. When I hear the entertainment being described as too woke, I always imagine something where the ideological message is so freaking obvious that it over takes any other entertainment value in the work. The important thing is to deliver a message and that is it.
Personal politics probably play a role on whether a person considers something too ideological or not. People prone to be sympathetic to the beliefs of 21st century liberalism are going to be able to look over any ideological messaging more than other people because of said sympathy. Meanwhile, people hostile or indifferent to said messaging are going to notice it a lot more if a piece of media is trying to promote. Liberals are probably going to notice conservative ideological messaging more than conservatives in their media for the same reason. So liberals can watch Bridgerton and find the multiracial casting refreshing while conservatives and further left types find it enraging even if for different reasons. Meanwhile, liberals are going to be more keen on noticing the conservative ideological messaging in Yellowstone because it conflicts with their beliefs.Report
Remember when The Highwaymen came out in 2019? Kevin Costner and Woody Harrelson played the two Texas Rangers who caught Bonnie and Clyde.
This was coded “Conservative” because the two main characters were two white dudes.
We talked about this at the time, if I recall correctly.Report
That was a great discussion.
I remember seeing that movie when it came out, but I sure didn’t ascribe any political meaning to it. Who else would portray 1930s Texas Rangers but white guys?
The other night we went to see 12 Angry Men at the local art house. It came out in 1956 and if woke was a term back then I imagine it could have been applied to that movie. Local Hispanic thug goes on trial for murder and it looks like an open and shut case. Henry Fonda spends a couple of hours making a case for reasonable doubt, overcoming a lazy defense and bigoted jurors. In the end the kid walks. Conversely, it could be seen as a white savior movie. I guess it all depends on who’s doing the watching.Report