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I'm still wondering what got Amazon hooked to a billion dollar disaster. After all initial (imo misplaced) optimism, analysts are finally coming out and saying the quiet part out loud: it is not the ground breaking masterpiece they need it to be. Even HoD is performing better and is better received. Both are prequels to very popular IPs, but Rings of Power should be pulling enormous numbers given how expensive it is, and how extensive its marketing was. Despite worsening performance with every episode, they just renewed it for season 2. This wasn't a small and calculated risk, they literally staked the future of their whole studio on this show. What made them think hiring subpar writers, rewriting lore, rewriting characters of one of the most popular fantasy IPs while simultaneously drafting off of the brand was a good idea? It feels like the motive isn't even to make money but solely to push an agenda, but who would do that? Given the sheer scale of the project, I just cannot believe any studio would be so careless as to commit such a serious misfire.
This just seems like the adage go woke go broke. And it’s not just Amazon it’s a universal issue.
I think it comes back to the Italian Prime Minister Meloni speech that was in the headlines that basically summed up to people having an identity and not being a consumption machine. If people don’t have a family relations, religion, a background then there’s nothing interesting to tell a story about them. They are empty people.
HBO has a similar issue with their dragon show. Corlys Velaryon had a quote, “History does not remember blood it remembers names.” The character no longer cared if his house seat had a Velaryon sitting on it. The origional GOT was obsessed with their bloodlines. Historically all societies have been obsessed with their ancestors. It’s basic evolutionary biology. We are programmed to not be the end of our line. The only close to political similiarity is Julius Caeser adopting Octavian (not sure if he was nephew in law or shared some blood).
HBO use to dominate at character creation. I haven’t been able to watch anything new on HBO and find myself constantly wanting to rewatch old things.
Of course I posted a reply to people on Reddit saying they loved the quote. And of course I got downvoted.
The old communists we hated who made movies still understood the human condition and identity. Modern writers write as if everyone is the same on the inside with no background but on the outside are different.
Amazon is at no risk of going broke. How many companies went woke and actually went broke as a result. I cannot think of any. Mailchimp went woke and got bought out.
Yeah, sadly wishful thinking on many people’s part. A lot of alleged examples are really cases where companies were going broke (or failing with a product) and attempted to hide under the skirts of wokism (“our shitty product isn’t selling because our critics are transphobes”).
At the end of the day most people don’t notice this shit, they just like the explosions and dragons. How many people who watched Game of Thrones all the way through could even tell you who Jon Snow’s parents were? Most stuff in media in shit, and we’re coming out of a TV golden age in the early 2000s and a silver age in the 2010s, regressing back towards the mean. On top of that, wokism is trendy, especially among media circles, so they weave it in. But I don’t think the shitty state of entertainment would be significantly better just by virtue of trimming away the woke stuff.
Woke stuff isn't just jamming minorities into things or ostentatiously displaying your acceptance though. It's the blank slate philosophy which says that everyone is the same inside with only cosmetic differences on the surface. It's pretending a black guy could be nobility in a white majority place and nobody would even bat an eye, let alone raise objections. It is assuming a 5"4 girl can beat up half a dozen 7" monster men without breaking a sweat. And it's going out of your way to ensure only white men are villains, while treating women and minorities as flawless angels who are in the right even when they do monstrous shit for terrible reasons. It is privileging ideology over storytelling, and the woke seem incapable of doing otherwise. Removing woke from the equation would have a huge impact on the quality of current year entertainment.
Amusingly, I can think of a major space opera that does exactly this (ok, black girl as queen) and the author is 100% not woke or blank-slatist. The difference is that it's explained in plot and supports larger themes in the story. It's the opposite of "this village hasn't seen an outsider in generations, but might as well be a United Colors of Benetton ad."
Similarly, waif-fu occasionally works--Buffy the Vampire Slayer and River Tam, IMO--but Whedon did the work to explain his special cases. I think this points out one of the central problems with woke in a creative context--all too often, it's intellectually lazy. The blank slate means you don't have to justify casting choices in terms of logic, genetics, population dynamics, etc. So for an audience with even an instinctual grasp of all that--"people who are related to each other tend to look more like each other!"--you lose verisimilitude and immersion in the story.
Sometimes the impression I get from a lot of "content" is that the writers are deeply disinterested in the subject matter of what they're working on. The people involved who are into wokeness insert wokeness, no one else cares enough to stop them.
You don't have to be particularly technically skilled in order to make something be woke; you just need familiarity with wokeness, so it's a great way for unskilled writers to pretend to contribute.
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