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Just to add to that list, I was fairly excited for IT: Welcome to Derry because the IT TV special is one of my favorite horror movies, but Welcome to Derry is the most abysmal woke slop you could imagine. The theme of the show is that racism is scarier than Pennywise. We know this is the theme because the Rabbi told his son in the first episode- reality is scarier than fantasy and Jews know better than anyone the horror of reality, with the reality anecdote used by the father to demonstrate "reality as scarier than fantasy" to his son ironically being the lie that Jews were turned into lampshades at Buchenwald- pretty ironic the writers chose a fantasy and huge lie to drive home the theme of reality being scarier than fantasy. Then that night his son gets attacked by Pennywise in the form of a human-skin lampshade.
That just set the stage though- at least half the cast is black, and of course they are all the noble, intelligent, upstanding characters while all the white characters are evil, bumbling, and dysfunctional. The most unforgiveable part is that most of the drama is dedicated to rehashing "Black experience in American South" but just Copy + Pasting it to Derry Maine with all the memes, featuring a black woman with a heavy southern accent as the hero fighting Racism in Derry with absolutely no new angle or artistic interpretation.
What to make of it? Woke isn't dead because Hollywood changed its mind, it's dead because the spell was broken among a critical mass of the laity. So either Hollywood and gaming will change, or they won't change and there will just be this persistent conflict that ruins everything. I read the Reddit reviews of different episodes to get a feeling for how far off my take on the show is from the average Redditor, and it's miles away. Obviously there's a selection bias but the median redditor still eats this slop up- "omg I loved the scene where the Cuban kid played drums in the happy Black jazz club, it really set the stage for next episode when the white people come and kill them all."
Edit: Expedition 33 was not woke at all though. The cast featured a diverse crew, and then 99% of the diversity was killed off at the very beginning of the first act, and virtually the entire cast is white and the story centers on familial relations within an unambiguously ethnically French family, with sympathetic interpretations of each character and there is just no wokeness at all. And people loved it.
Yeah "Welcome to Derry" was awful. The military subplot was a narrative stop sign, the Indians were a time-consuming macguffin factory, we don't need another story based around horcruxes I mean infinity stones I mean magic shards or whatever dumb crap that was, completely unneccessary to the plot, there was like thirty characters too many, the monster was weirdly focused on horrific simulated childbirth scenes (somebody's fetish, obv). Just a disaster on every level.
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I was curious about Expedition 33, and watched a few Vtubers playing it, and I have no problems admitting that my interest in purchasing said game was killed when I saw the random black guy pop up out of nowhere.
Hearing that he gets killed off... Well, I dunno. Maybe I'll pick it up on a 90% off sale or something down the road in a few years.
It's a funny bait and switch. They check off the "diversity" box in the Prologue and pay it no mind whatsoever in the entire story itself. The story is about a white family and it's actually interesting.
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