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https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2025/11/dungeons-and-dragons-elon-musk/684828/
In This Thread, 2D3D Wonders Why Race Concern Shit In Pop Culture Still Matters
So, Elon Musk apparently had a spergout over WOTC because WOTC apparently did a faerun land acknowledgment and apologized for racially essentializing... well, anything (or everything, I can't tell).
Per the article,
And that made Musk tweet an implied consideration to buy out Hasbro, owner of WOTC. Perhaps he should keep away from napkins and lawyers for a few weeks, but WOTC staff and progressives have more to lose from a Musk takeover than Musks does if he accidentally commits to the sale.
My questiob is WHY do progressives still want to fight dead battlegrounds either lost permanently to the enemy or scorched to irrelevance.
I trust this forum understands the broad strokes enough to make a culture war summary unnecessary. Anything white nerds love must have more women and minorities and it must explicitly come at the expense of the white nerd favourites. Duke out details in the comments if necessary, the battle itself isn't the point.
The progressives won the previous round already. They got the victory lap of defeating racial essentialism by incorporating noble blacks, I mean orcs, in the rulebook a few years back. Vice, Kotaku, Polygon spammed articles about how this proves the rejection of white supremacy by the powers that be. Hooray for the Resistance, we are now the New Republic. Did I mix my factions? It doesn't matter, and apparently neither did the battle. Because WOTC still saw fit to dig up ancient corpses and put them on trial for heresy.
Except it is patently clear that the audience for this public shaming doesn't exist anymore. The volume of pop media culture wars has deflated in the face of victory, and perhaps Sydney Sweeney deadeyeing a millennial journo hoping for self abasement to atone for even being proximate to white advocacy is emblematic of how irrelevant this public opinion war is. You can, in fact, yeschad someone trying to make you feel guilty for not grovelling for zillenial approval.
But what exactly is the battlefield now? Racial/sexual/gender/whateverfuck representation? Moral ambiguity of 'bad' people unless the bad guy is generational trauma/white supremacy? Sinecures for adherents via "narrative consultancy"? Is the objective to win a battle or just to make noise.
Theres a destructive incentive structure here that I can't parse out fully. The unwoke are perfectly happy to sit back and be gradually edged out, as seen from the ready faggification of media starting with Will and Grace and reaching a high point (maybe) in Bridgerton where intraracial relationships are the enemy (maybe, I don't watch Shondaland slop). Or maybe the ongoing media projects where you can't have minorities be bad guys anymore - its always a white guy somewhere at the end pulling strings. Except if its Giancarlo Esposito.
Back to topic. The unwoke are silent dragged along consumers, the woke think they can accelerate the slide or celebrate the slide, suddenly reactionaries Notice and generate backlash, and the woke get smacked in. Retreating in confusion, they conclude that the issue is the message not being made clear enough, and the message is doubled down despite vocal opposition.
Rinse and repeat, but always back into defeat. Social justice went fucking nuts in 2016 because Trump descended from his golden staircase to snatch victory from Hilary Clintons anointed hands, and without the popular vote it seemed that this was merely a technical mistake, one that needed to be message disciplined to ensure the course of history is maintained. Biden won as a moderate but governed as a progressive because his brain turned to soup about a year in and the entire white house was Jill roleplaying Eleanor except without enough balls to lead a relatively competent cabinet, so the progressive staffers wrote every communique and channeled The Groups. Opposition was simply the last gasp of straight white men (and blacks and gays and women and asians and latinos and....)
Then Trump won, the illusion shattered for about a year. But now the same dead fights are being rehashed.
I don't really have a concrete point to interrogate in this culture war. My stance that any media featuring a minority front and center being likely to suck because it always means the writers room can't have room to criticize stupidity is enough for me to optimize my consumption because I'm an old moron and nostalgia for old shows from my youth gives me enough tinglies. Yet the strength of reactionary pushback to culture war attempts clearly shows that this is a conflict progressives seem intent on reigniting, and it should be clear that they not only lost the previous rounds but the upcoming battlefield is likely lost. The Dispatch sold a million copies and none of their characters were "body positive" in any way. Contrast that with Concord that literally was dead on arrival with their fat ugly minorities, making me wonder if the skirmishes being reignited are just masochists indulging in a public humiliation/victimization kink.
I claim a better model is that you aren't allowed to make minority characters embody (real-life) negative group-level traits.
There are more counterexamples to your theory than just Gus Fring:
I think my explanation makes more sense: you are allowed to show members of protected groups being villains (this is not contrary to standard progressive ideology), but you cannot show them being villanous in a way that reinforces pre-existing "stereotypes" (according to progressive ideology, the stereotypes are totally socially constructed without basis in reality, so they only exist due to media)
And actually I think it has nothing to do with villainy at all. You also cannot show them fulfilling stereotypes as good guys. In the good place, the main 4 were essentially inversions of their respective stereotypes:
The usual Who? Whom? applies when it comes to minority stereotypes and Hollywood depictions. South or East Asian American men can be depicted as dorky and effete with little fear of blowback, in contrast to depicting blacks or latinos as low-IQ high-crime net-tax consumers.
The introduction of a second axis can indeed be value-add here. That is, we can imagine a graph and map characters onto a horizontal dimension, with increasingly dumb as you move farther toward the left side and increasingly intelligent toward the right side. The vertical dimension would be increasingly "good guy" as you move farther toward the top, increasingly "bad guy" farther toward the bottom.
There would be far more black characters (as a percentage of black characters) on the right than white characters (as a percentage of white characters) relative to what one would expect based upon the average IQs of blacks and whites (perhaps even in the absolute sense), and far fewer on the left. There also would be far more black characters (as a percentage of black characters) on the top than white characters (as a percentage of white characters) relative to say, their crime statistics (especially violent crime statistics, or perhaps even in the absolute sense), and far fewer on the bottom.
The most disproportionate quadrant in terms of blacks being overrepresented relative to whites would be the top right quadrant: intelligent good guy. However, I posit the second most disproportionate quadrant would be bottom right, intelligent bad guy—and not top left, dumb good guy (which would be third). The most disproportionate quadrant in terms of blacks being underrepresented relative to whites would be the bottom left quadrant: dumb bad guy (like the aforementioned Neo-Nazis from Breaking Bad).
That is, the black/white disproportionality is greater along the intelligence dimension than the good guy/bad guy dimension when it comes to media portrayals.
This makes sense since a staple of American culture is prioritizing the status, feelings, and well-being of blacks over that of whites. And for most people, being viewed as stupid feels worse than being viewed as bad. Ask someone to think of an intelligent bad guy and they probably think of some cool edgy intimidating badass like Lalo Salamanca (if we're sticking with the BB/BCS universe). Ask someone to think of a dumb good guy and they probably think of some lame goofy doofus like the TravelWire employee who Lalo nonchalantly murders.
Much has been said by many about the glorification of violence and criminality in US black culture, where many blacks celebrate blacks behaving badly in a "das rite" manner. In contrast, while things such as trying hard in school may be mocked as "acting white," stupidity per se is not celebrated. If anything, the opposite: variations of "u stupid" as an insult between blacks can be readily found in online exchanges or fightporn, WorldStarHipHop, or publicfreakout-type videos (with little sense of irony or self-awareness).
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