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Notes -
It never needed an audience. It's always been a relatively small number of people doing it--these people just have a lot of power. It doesn't matter that, for instance, Disney refuses to make white men a big part of its audience most of the time. So they lose some money, they don't care. They aren't going to go out of business or get fired because of it.
Also, bear in mind that woke media can get popular. The audience is probably race blind and sex blind in the way that used to be considered good and now marks you as a fascist. They don't actually object to the media being woke at all unless it's very over the top (lectures about how straight men are evil, 100% female cast, etc.)--it's just that if the writers put a high priority on woke, they probably put a low priority on everything else such as good writing, so the odds are against woke things getting an audience. But it can still happen (Baldur's Gate 3 for instance).
I'd argue that's the difference between "woke" and "progressive/raceblind" media. Like, if you have a new superhero that you're going to launch, and you decide that it'll be a Latina woman and most of the story is going to revolve around a hispanic community in Texas - that's not a problem at all. I may not be interested in it, but I'm not going to say it's necessarily bad. If you're going to take a superhero who was "pale, male, and stale", and make them into a Latinx girlboss who don't need no man - then you've just made a garbage piece of media.
Baldur's Gate 3 is actually a great example of something I'd say isn't actually "woke" - it's just progressive. I'm going to compare it to the recently developed "Siege of Dragonspear" expansion for Baldur's Gate 1&2 - if you aren't familiar, one of the major characters in Siege of Dragonspear has a fairly big arc where it is revealed that they are transgendered, and it's considered to be a big deal that they're living their gender expression and they're so brave for doing so. However, if anyone here has played Baldur's Gate 1 - you'll recall that one of the first items you get in the game (literally in the third explorable area) is a belt of gender changing. In a world where there exists a magic item common enough that a random ogre can have one - being trans just doesn't make any sense. By comparison, Baldur's Gate 3 has progressiveness "in the water" so to speak - characters are gay, multicultural, etc. But from my recollection, it doesn't have any major plot points that rely on progressive shibboleths to make sense - there's no "ACAB" making it so you can never trust the guards, there's no situation where the only competent person is a female POC who is being shouted down by the bumbling men, and there's no plot point that relies on realizing all orcs are actually noble and that the orc opposing you must be a mind controlled victim.
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