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Here's my opinion on how to defuse many aspects of culture war: reduce copyright length to at most 40-50 years.
Consider. Lots of people were upset when Rian Johnson deliberately made the Last Jedi to be about fighting "toxic masculinity" and "fan entitlement". But he is not the problem. I am not here to criticize RJ. His interpretation actually had some interesting ideas even if it was badly executed and inconsistent with my general concept of what SW movie "should" be.
The problem is that Disney anointed him to be the one to save Star Wars from smelly nerds. And there's nothing you could do unless you had a billion dollars to buy SW from Disney. Except in the end this didn't work out for "woke" cause either, because TLJ did poorly at the box office so Disney hired Abrams who overrode every RJs decision. Everyone loses.
I think part of the reason why "culture wars" are so bitter is that all sides are essentially reduced to pressuring (or begging) large, faceless corporations into reflecting their values. This creates mutual distrust because both sides know that corporations will drop your values the second they stop being profitable. It is fundamentally toxic.
But if noone owns IP then we can have both "based" and "woke" version of every franchise. Fans will rise to the occasion to make both. Hence, less bitter culture wars.
Of course, there's zero chance Disney ever allows erosion of copyright, but it is fun to speculate.
Alternately, just don't build culture around proprietary intellectual property. Having your cultural identity as an American tied to the whims of corporate interests is a recipe for disaster. See: Disney's Black mermaid. Millions of white Americans grew up identifying with Ariel and Disney World as part of their core identity, and now when the globalist interests of Disney shareholders decide that white America is a liability and not an asset, white America's cultural heritage is in the crosshairs.
At least when white American identity was more closely tied to Christianity you didn't have this problem. It actually really bothers me as a white middle American to think about how much of my own childhood and shared culture is owned by corporations or even just by people who wrote and published books or created something of their own. I envy European and Asian cultures who in many cases have many thousands of years of folk tales and traditions to draw from when American culture is locked behind IP protection laws from decades ago.
Your proposed solution is to end copyright protection sooner, but to me the ideal solution is to avoid building identity on anything proprietary to begin with. Admittedly I find Marvel and mass market films kind of gauche to begin with and the idea of people rallying around these properties as cultural entities worth tying identity to makes me uneasy.
Currently being displaced and destroyed by the American commercially-produced folk-culture substitute. It's really sad to me, but that's a culture war that has already been lost. The American mass-produced substitute not only is several billion-dollar industries, but it's also designed to reflect the current social and material conditions. Meanwhile, the conditions that sustained actual folk cultures around the world, such as peasant life in most of Southern Europe, have disappeared or are disappearing, leaving the original traditions void of most of their former meaning. We are left, for example, with American neo-traditions which are usually centered around spending money. But the local traditions have lost their original meaning, so even where they are still practiced, they only can be either a tourist attraction or a LARP (or both).
To give you an idea of how pervasive this is, even traditions that don't depend so much on their meaning, such as tales for children, have been displaced by mass culture substitutes. For example, where I live most of the traditional tales have been completely forgotten, displaced by the Grimm Brothers in the best case (at least still based on a tradition from somewhere) and Disney or books like "X has two daddies" in the worst and more common one.
Absolutely. My grandfather knew most of Goethe and Schiller by heart. Dropping a line out of their works in an appropriate context both got a laugh out of everyone and it fostered a shared understanding of belonging to the same culture. Of belonging to the in-group.
That has first been replaced by sit-com catchphrases ("Bazinga", "true story") and now by memes. Which, to channel my inner old man yelling at clouds (itself a cringey Simpsons reference), is just really lame.
And you Yanks are the worst. You wouldn't recognise a Shakespeare quote if it bit you in your very Cs, your Us and your Ts.
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