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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.
Image you lived in a society that forgot how electricity worked. You still have all this stuff that uses electricity, and you have some memorized rituals around how to get the lights to turn on. But the rituals are... weird. They've drifted away from the mechanical acts of completing circuits, and become quasi-religious as to the spiritual significance of bringing light into this world. And nobody understands any longer which parts of the "turn on the lights" ritual are load barring or not. They mostly just blame the person for being immoral if the lights don't turn on for them.
This is more or less how I perceive the state of the media right now. They have no concept of the human condition. Of theming. Of universal human truths. They have no capacity to actually imagine a character's inner world. These are dead and hollow things writing about other dead and hollow things. What does an NPC know of the human condition? They aren't human.
So these projects lose money. Everyone hates them. The non-creative executives want to fix it. But they can't. We're 2, maybe 3 generations into the wanton destruction of our culture. It's dead and hollow things all the way down!
Every now and again they can rustle out a boomer to churn out one last, heartfelt, comprehensible script. Apparently the Top Gun sequel wasn't totally shit? And Tom Cruise actually cared about it a lot, worked really hard to have it made, and infused a ton of heart and sincerity into it? Plus real planes, really flying, giving the movie a feeling of, I donno, being real?
As an aside, Tom Cruise might be weird as fuck, but that mother fucker knows how to make a fucking movie. Sure, he's no Stanly Kubrick. But in a world of complete and utter drek, someone autistically repeating the steps movies used to take to be good, whether he understands what he's doing or not, comes off like a savant.
From time to time you'd read about some college stripping more and more of the western canon out of their liberal arts programs. And where they lead, everything else followed. It's dead and hollow things, studying the narcissistic pabulum written by dead and hollow things, churning out their own shallow nonsensical dead and hollow scripts. There is no path back anymore. It could take 30 or 40 years to reverse course if we began seriously focusing on rebuilding our culture today. We won't.
Yes, you are touching on the worst aspect of modern media in general. Everything is being desconstructed and reconstructed on a flawed model on how humans work. It is inauthentic in the attempt to entertain, it is a lecture instead.
My personal pet hypothesis is that postmodern thinking has come to the conclusion is that no one can escape Plato's cave https://yale.learningu.org/download/ca778ca3-7e93-4fa6-a03f-471e6f15028f/H2664_Allegory%20of%20the%20Cave%20.pdf or enough people can escape to create change. So to change the power dynamics of the world we must reform the shadows and what we name shadows to make change in the world. The more I look into Focault, Derrida, Horkheimer and Baudrillard. It gives the impression that the human perception of reality is only programmed by the powers that run society and it has an unwavering belief that it can perception can be reprogrammed somehow to affect reality. It is the ultimate in the blank slate since it is not only the human mind but also reality is a blank slate. We can redefine reality by controlling the shadow puppeteers and what we name the shadows in the cave from the allegory. Like western canon is what defines the modern power structures in the postmodern view of the world, so if we redefine the canon we redefine how power works in the world.
To pick nits, everything is being deconstructed, and it's not being reconstructed at all more often than not.
I mean, lets take an old movie Halloween as a point of comparison. Supposedly Mike Meyers is terrifying because he has no motive. He just kills and kills and kills without any reason what so ever. Not revenge, greed, lust. He doesn't even seem angry when he does it. This is supposed to be terrifying.
Now it's hard to think of a main character in a modern series that isn't some variety of rebel without a cause. Every single fucking show is miles up it's own ass about how important it is to destroy society. What replaces it? Don't think too hard about that. Nothing as far as we know.
It actually reminds me of an episode of The Orville from this last season. The episode picks up after the MacGuffin has saved the day, which would have been the climax of any other episode of a Trek-alike. Then it goes into all the ways everything gets fucked after they used the MacGuffin. I sincerely fucking loved how bold of a choice that was. That is how you "subvert" expectations. Not by staring the audience directly in their dead and glassy eyes, sneering, and doing the opposite of what makes sense because "fuck you" that's why.
I wish a single one of these "We must destroy society root and stem" shows spent one single second on the hard work and overcoming disagreement it would take to forge their new utopia. There is plenty of history in this regard to draw on from the founding of my own nation, the United States. But I don't think any of these shitheads know history, or at least not anymore than nonsense the 1619 Project preaches about "muh slavery".
What about the Expanse? There is a rebel with a cause in that?
Altered Carbon? I don't think the deconstruction managed to wreak the story in my opionon. But they tried mightily hard but they didn't manage to do it.
But you are right. They don't know what their utopia looks like and they can't paint a picture and us with some kind of foresight knows that those who lecture leads us down a primrose path to a Huxlean dystopia.
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