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Is this the beginning of a popular rebellion against woke Hollywood garbage?
Like (I imagine) a lot of you, I got fed up with mainstream Hollywood movies and TV a long time ago. For various reasons, but a big part of it was how they insisted on inserting heavy-handed woke propaganda into everything, even where it made no sense. I'm hardly the first to complain about that, but it seemed to be mostly anonymous online reactionaries complaining, while mainstream critics and everyone "respectable" still lapped it up. The Star Wars sequels, Nu-Trek, and all Marvel movies made $$$$$$$ while also gathering rave critical reviews, even though it became something of a joke when the "audience score" on rotten tomatoes was always so much lower than the "critic reviews" score.
And to be clear, I'm not (just) mad at those things because I disagree with their politics. I genuinely think those are terrible movies. They have bad plots, bad characters, bad dialogue, and often even bad at basic filmmaking stuff like editing, camera angles, and sound mixing. One theory I like is that, for quite a while, Hollywood was so focused on exporting big famous brands to foreign countries that they didn't care how it sounded in English. They'd all be watching it dubbed or with subtitles anyway, and then (hopefully) buying merch. But for a long time I felt like I couldn't say these things without getting labelled as a deranged culture warrior.
But now? I dunno. I'm seeing more and more open criticism of big hollywood brands, and some of it is coming from people who are not easily dismissed. Examples:
The last one was what inspired me to write this post. Lots have people have already criticized Star Trek over the years, most notably the RedLetterMedia guys who kinda got famous from it. But I associate most of them with the online right. This is a 4 hour review from someone who doesn't normally do movie reviews, and she felt compelled to keep saying how she normally loves seeing pro-diversity left wing messages in Star Trek. But it's such an amazingly bad series that even its target audience can't defend it. I'm not woke, but I used to love Star Trek as a kid. Picard season 1 was so terrible I refused to watching anything after that, and it made me completely hate the franchise as a whole. I know that "some people say" that it got better, or that some other new Star Trek shows are good, or whatever. I don't care, I hate that pile of garbage so much that I'm never giving them another dollar or view unless they publically apologize for it. It felt like someone (maybe Patrick Stewart? Maybe Alex Kurtzman? Maybe all the Star Trek actors who have been stuck doing silly conventions with crazy fans for decades?) genuily hated their fanbase and wanted to give them the finger.
I don't know. Maybe I'm being too optimistic here. But I feel like we've finally crossed the threshold where everyone is fed up with Hollywood's crap. They've taken pretty much every bit of pop culture we loved as children, and burned it all down to make a quick buck. They kept recycling the same crap in their little clique of Jewish Hollywood elites and refused to listen to any criticism. You can only keep doing that for so long before the audience gets sick of it.
And at long last, we can finally agree that the new Star Trek movies are bad, right?
The backlash won't just be criticism, it will be creation. It won't just be negation, it will be renaissance. It won't just be tearing down, it will be building up.
I'm not going to be really optimistic about backlash until I see actually good anti-woke art being made. Stuff like BAM or the collected works of Yarvin are a start, but I want to see a creative imaginary.
what is BAM? google search is failing me on that one.
Bronze Age Mindset, Bronze Age Pervert's book. A fun little read on PDF. I'm sorta using it as a stand-in for all the 4chan philosophy majors out there, who have scribbled fun little weirdo screeds and incredible credos. But they're the background, not the immortal art itself. Yarvin and Scott Alexander aren't the thing itself, they're the kind of guys who are background to background, your favorite author's favorite author.
IF the anti-woke backlash hits for real, people will read stuff like that when they get deep into studying the masterpieces that come out of it and they want to see the thinker that inspired the intellectual atmosphere. The White Panther Party to understanding Kick Out the Jams. Some of them might make it.
Ah OK. I've heard of it but I would never think of it from just the acronym.
Bear in mind, it can take time for aesthetic taste to change. So many artists who are now famous died poverished and unknown during their own life. And others who were popular in their time are now mostly forgotten.
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