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Is wokeness really retreating from nerd culture? The political winds may be shifting in the west, but our cultural institutions are still run by woke activists.
Tomb Raider Catalyst looks "safe horny", the new Star Wars game is apparently another female lead.
Witcher 4 is going all in on feminism vs patriarchy, which was already a central theme in the previous titles and books (conveniently ignored by nostalgic "chuds").
Expedition 33 is touted as an industry rebel and yet, suspiciously, it sold 2 million copies in 2 weeks, was hyped up across games journalism, astroturfed online AND locked in a Hollywood film deal before it even launched.... all the makings of an industry plant, funded by an "indie publisher" with a paltry $120M investment from Netease, by a studio of teams and partners from diverse backgrounds, cultures and perspectives, that "suddenly" went woke with the sequel like the bait and switch Sony catalogues.
Where Winds Meet's character creation gives you "body types" in English, but the Chinese version says male and female.
Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 was going to be the chud GOTY made by a pro-GG studio lead, yet it pinkwashes its two male leads and crowbarred an ahistorical Malian man into the main campaign.
GTA 6 is already putting the female lead front and centre, while the male lead looks like the sub. His writing and appearance is oriented to the female gaze, he looks like a billboard model unlike the "average looking" male leads of previous titles.
There's been a concerted effort to create a female fandom for all the male oriented IPs to expand their TAM, especially in gaming where the average budgets keep ballooning every year. The rationale is that male gamers (existing fandom) will remain loyal to the IP and get incalculated into feminism. But females need to be interested. So do away with the fratboy culture! Let HR screen the environment, kick out the milquetoast Gen X techbros and onboard woke millennial women. Accommodate all of their favourite social justice causes (BLM, LGBTQ). Fight the male gaze!
But men consistently remain gaming's biggest consumers. Despite the marketing push for the female leads in RPGs like AC Odyssey, Mass Effect and Cyberpunk heavily pushing the female leads into the marketing, the actual buyer demographic heavily prefer the male lead in all the games. Yet, people's tolerance levels keep going up as games get increasingly woke. In other words, some "tepidly woke" themes are ok because even "beloved classics" like Cyberpunk featured LGBT themes. Anti woke influencers and "trusted friends" promise up and down that condescending Malian and ahistorical synagogue in 15th century Bohemia was totally a creative decision, not ideological corruption. In 20 years, they'll be telling us that black Samurai lead in Japan is also perfectly acceptable.
The structural nature of the industry and investors expectations necessitates an indefinitely expanding fanbase. And the so called anti-wokes silently gaslight themselves so studios realised they can just make them happy by grifting away like Daniel Vavra.
In fact, I believe wokeness had its antecedents decades ago. I'm watching Star Trek DS9 right now. And when it's good, which is far from always, it's not good because it's racially diverse. If Sisko was white, it would not make the show any worse. In fact it would probably save you from bad preachy episodes like "Far Beyond The Stars". Set aside the nostalgia and compare it to the "woke" standards of the time, the "woke" creators of yesteryear fully back the "woke" creators of today.
We might be at least 40 years too late to expect a return to form (whatever that is). Maybe we'll simply just live with it like an amputated limb, occasionally recalling the good old times.
PS: Apologies if my post reads like a brain dump, I'm returning to TheMotte after a long hiatus.
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.
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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