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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 10, 2022

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he still defended himself with a snide remark about 'he could have made more money with the haters' (where is all this free money, Eric? how do I turn my 'hate' into cash money?)

there is absolutely a section of youtube which is just people pumping out long-winded rants about contemporary "woke" media. Which whether or not the criticisms are correct (and they often are because much of it is dire), it's nevertheless just an endless sea of performative negativity, at its heart not much different from the ones who are playing the reverse game with the algorithm by endlessly fêting the newest Disney/Marvel/whatever product. It can't be mentally healthy to just watch an endless stream of videos bitching about the casting of The Little Mermaid

Sure, there are Youtubers etc. who churn out that kind of stuff, just as there are Youtubers etc. who churn out the opposite (see the Amazon 'superfans' hired on to do that trainwreck event video to market the show; turns out none of them have posted a single comment about this show that they are all allegedly 'superfans' of).

But Kain was making that remark in the context of everyone who had been critical of the show, and it's unfair. A lot of us were going by the teaser trailers, the already obvious inventions ("we can't have Hobbits, so we're going to have Harfoots who are ancestors of the Hobbits", "the Harfoots can be black because Tolkien said they were brown-skinned" (ignoring what that means in an English context of being fairer or darker, not meaning oh yeah these are black Britons) and the publicity about how wonderfully diverse and egalitarian they were.

Then the show aired, and it was poor. And yet people like Eric Kain wrote glowing reviews for the first two episodes.

And then when they realised that hey, it was trash, somehow those of us who all along had been pointing this out and backing it up with more than 'I hate black people which is why I hate this show' are still the bad guys, even when Kain himself is talking about how he gets criticised and insulted for watching the show if he's not going to give it rave reviews.