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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?"
Sorry but how is that "ironic?" It's like you're saying that I'm "ironic" for hating new Star Trek for being something 100% against the core themes that it started with. That's not ironic that's just... natural? If anything I just want to acknowledge what a weird state we've arrived at, where these huge popular media franchises have been perverted into something that seems designed to antagonize all of its original fans, and we're not allowed to criticize them for it. I guess you could say it's our fault, as nerds, for not paying attention during high school English class- we were all so focused on the plot and worldbuilding that we missed what the teacher was saying how it's the theme and tones that really matter, so we let our ideological enemies take control of "our own" beloved media.
Like you said, it seems as though the writers hate optimism, hate fun, and genuinely hate anything good in life. I wouldn't mind so much if they just had a bunch of stupid plot holes. But these new sci-fi writers seem to genuinely want to inflict pain on their audience. I don't even know where they can go from here. Will the next season just be a long, extended, graphic scene of Patrick Stewart being raped? Because that seems to be the tone that they're going for.
Also like you said, "but what if the bad guys aren't really all bad?" is not really the innovative question that some writers think it is. It basically just marks the boundary between entertainment and literary fiction. But if you're going the literary route, you need to know that it's a tough road that will not be fun to follow, and you'll lose most of your audience along the way. Putting that into a normal genre fiction piece will destroy it.
The irony is in thinking it's progressivism that is making Star Trek grimdark. Of course I know some people think all liberality (even going all the way back to the Enlightenment) is an inevitable path to the grimdark authoritarianism we see today, but Star Trek was originally a very liberal vision. I guess technically it still is, unless you are one of us liberals who have become by modern progressive standards fascists. Though to be honest I haven't seen the last few shows or movies, so I only know what it's like from cultural osmosis and memes.
Strongly disagree with this. You can have complex, three-dimensional characters, like villains who have sympathetic motives or heroes who are flawed, in genre fiction. It doesn't all have to be black hats vs. white hats. "What if the bad guys aren't really all bad?" "What if Orcs aren't all evil?" "What if the Jedi fucked up?" Those are perfectly fine questions to introduce even into a genre set piece with bright lines between good and evil. The problem is not with introducing moral complication and nuance, the problem is with fundamentally rejecting the idea that "good" or "evil" exist, even within the context of a universe that was built on the premise of a conflict between Good vs. Evil. Deconstructing that and saying "Well, actually they're all just the same; Sauron vs. the Fellowship is like the Republicans vs. the Democrats, the Rebel Alliance vs. the Empire is like rooting for the Packers or the Cowboys... at the end of the day it doesn't matter who wins," that destroys the narrative unless you are just that level of cynical.
Was it though...? It was set onboard a military ship, with a strict hierarchy, and the characters all strongly demonstrating classical virtues. It had some worldbuilding that could be seen as liberal, like the replicators that made everything free, but that's just sci-fi plot stuff. It certainly had some moments that would have been considered liberal for the 60s, like the famous "first interracial kiss on TV," but that was also, you know, a captain kissing his secretary. The themes of the show were classic western/hero's journey stuff, "wagon train to the stars." Most of the plots were along the lines of "a big bad Other shows up, and the heroic Captian Kirk must punch it to death."
The problem is, we get all that in real life. We look to entertainment to simplify and escape that sort of thing. If you want to write a story where the orcs aren't evil, it just ends up being a grimdark slog where Aragorn was ruthlessly genociding a sentient people and "we all need to feel sad, man, because that's just like what happened with the Native Americans, you know?" You can just read actual history for that. Or, perhaps, an avant-garde literary novel that assumes you've already read thousands of pages of both popular entertainment and criticism. It's not going to work for a normal human who just wants to experience the feeling of being heroic for once in their life, without having to feel guilt and shame for it.
Same thing with "what if the Jedi fucked up..." you mean like all politicians do? Just go watch the news for that. The Jedi were awesome as this mystical fictional ideal. We don't need to see that perverted into something corrupt. Surely you can find some other example of a corrupt politician, if that's what you're interested in.
edit: to me, that sort of criticism is like saying "what if the unobtanium is not really unobtainable?" It's not some profound insight, just poking at something that the writers used to tell an entertaining story in a simple way. Maybe that could be the basis for a great story, but you'd have to really think about why you want to tell that story, and make sure it's not just "because I want to depress the hell out of the audience."
Those were not seen as incompatible with liberalism at the time.
Harlan Ellison famously denigrated Uhura as a telephone operator, but she was not Kirk's secretary. The "secretary" position was filled by Yeoman Rand, who had a thing for Kirk (at least until "wolf" Kirk tried to rape her). Further, I don't think the idea that a power imbalance was inherently rape entered the mainstream until the 1970s. The past remains a foreign country.
I think thats really the crux of it. I wouldnt argue that TOS star trek is some sort of alt-right bedrock, but it's hardly modern woke either. Even the existence of a heroic straight white male main character would invalidate that. It's... its own weird thing. A weird mix of ww2 nostalgia, 60s california hippies, and Gene Roddenberry just being weird.
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