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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 last new star Trek movie came out, what, 10 years ago, and they weren't particularly woke anyways (by Star Trek metrics). The beef with them was they were shallow James Abrams action-fests, not that they were too woke. Star Trek has always been progressive. It just wasn't always so #CurrentYear.
My beef is with Star Wars, anyways. I very specifically got accused of "being against strong role models for girls" when I said The Last Jedi wasn't very good, and I've kinda never forgiven the world for that.
There's still a set of critics and influencers who will clap like circus seals at anything that vaguely alludes to capitalism bad or hwiteness bad,
I don't really hate the new Star Trek movies, they were stupid but at least kinda fun. it's the new TV shows I can't stand. Like you said, they went all in on the "strong female role models" angle and it became impossible to criticize them. But they were also this joyless slog through a grimdark universe of unrelenting misery. I do think some critics are finally waking up to that, or at least new critics are appearing who have noticed that the core audience is fed up.
I really do think it's becoming a more "normie" opinion that the Star Wars sequels were bad. If anything I hear more praise for the prequels now, people appreciate them for at least trying to be fun and being their own weird quirky thing.
It's ironic that you resent the latest Star Trek shows being unrelentlessly grimdark, which is true, because Star Trek was originally a very optimistic view of the future, but as @haroldbkny says above, that was largely a progressive worldview. Star Trek has always been very explicitly leftist, albeit center-leftist (the original premise being that progressive multicultural politics would transcend all and the Federation was basically a future United Nations, as the UN was supposed to operate and not as it really does). You are no doubt aware that it's famous for featuring the first interracial kiss on broadcast television, and many, many episodes from the various series have been essentially liberal talking points turned into sci-fi thought exercises (sometimes poignantly and sometimes in a very ham-handed fashion).
Gene Roddenberry was extremely liberal and very much "woke" by 60s standards. Deep Space Nine was not the first time that writers took a somewhat more critical view of the Federation and suggested maybe it wasn't the post-scarcity utopia that early series sunnily portrayed it as, but Star Trek was still supposed to represent a future that is positive and optimistic. Humanity will eventually get its shit together and work together as a species, and we will face external threats and have moral conflicts, but we'll resolve them rationally and humanely, and we'll be able to include other races as well, grant civil rights to androids, recognize the self-determination rights of less technologically advanced people, etc... All very liberal and woke, no?
The more recent series have felt like they were written by writers who resent this optimistic view of the future - specifically, the idea that a largely Western, liberal democratic society could actually produce something good. And so they have painfully deconstructed it, so now the Federation is shit, all the characters we knew and loved are dead or assholes, and there is certainly no "fun" to be had in a universe where Western Enlightenment still holds sway.
The path with Star Wars is similar though not as obvious because Star Wars was always less nuanced. It was a children's story of good vs. evil space wizards. The Jedi were never supposed to be perfect, but they were fundamentally good guys. But unproblemetized good guys (especially white men) are not in vogue any more, and must be deconstructed.
Thus we arrive at Rings of Power and the laughable "Orcs just want to raise their families in peace." The problem with this is not that the idea in itself is laughable. It's that the writers actually think they are doing something new and subversive here.
Look, way back in the 70s, D&D players were raising questions about the "Always Chaotic Evil" trope. Just why should every single Orc be born evil? Yes, in Tolkien they're "fallen" elves and basically a sort of artificial race, but in D&D and its many spin-offs, they were just another humanoid species and thus presumably had agency and free will, so.... Half-orcs were a playable race since the very early days, and they weren't required to be evil, so clearly Orcs don't necessarily have an "evil gene." Most explanations were something like "They're naturally brutish and stupid and live in a violent society" (raising all kinds of Implications that have become Discourse today), but even very non-woke D&D players in the 70s didn't find the idea of an Orc raised in a more civilized environment turning out to be a Paladin or something outrageous. And later games (Shadowrun, 1st edition published in 1988) and Orkworld (published by the insufferable John Wick in 2000) took an explicitly critical lens to the "always evil" trope and made all the races, if still archetypical, less stereotypical.
These "woke" writers everyone complains about aren't inventing anything new, is the problem, but they think they are the first people ever to have mind-blowing thoughts like "What if the Jedi got too arrogant?" or "What if Orcs aren't just mindless killing machines?"
I imagine this is a large part of why lower decks was so well received. Unlike the other shows it sticks with the original positive premise, even if it's modern, progressive and deconstructing star trek.
did it though? From the (two) episodes I watched, it seemed to be constantly taking the piss out of the optimistic naive male character that wanted to do good, while propping up the #girlboss# female character as a queen who could do know wrong, no matter how insufferable she was. Most of the jokes were just taking little bits of what the older shows did for convenience (eg, making a teleporter because filming a shuttlecraft was too expensive) and trying to seem "smart" by pointing out minor inconsistencies.
In star trek tradition the first episodes (and by extension the first season) were the worst of the series and things get better from there on. The female character doesn't get to just be an uncriticised girl boss that does no wrong and the male character isn't just a pathetic punching bag. I watched the first episode and though it was a bit shit but pushed on because there seemed to be such widespread praise of the series even from places that were kind of primed to shit on new Trek.
Even after the first season, there were standout stinker episodes to the point where one in three was good, another one in three was serviceable or had something redeeming, and a 3rd was offensively bland and pointless garbage.
I do love Landlord Cops, though. And Big Strong City, Capital of Pakled Planet.
That may be but it's hard to overstate how much of an improvement these metrics are to the rest of new Trek.
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