This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Giving that this is CW, it is probably about Star Wars being too woke?
I find this a bit of a strange objection. "Oh, I am fine with Disney pimping out the rotting corpse of a once beloved, childhood-defining franchise for as long as there is anyone still wanting to pay for it, but I draw the line at politics I disagree with."
New Star Wars sucks independently of being too woke, but it also sucks because it is too woke.
More options
Context Copy link
This but unironically. I will absolutely not tolerate a single drop of progressive preaching in my media ever again, I'm just so god damned sick of it. It makes me want to throw up in my mouth. You and every other baffled liberal who participates in this discourse can just continue being confused over the ongoing funeral pyres of every Western male-centered IP. It's just entertainment, there's always more and we don't owe anyone anything.
More options
Context Copy link
Are you making a general observation or are you saying you got that vibe from my post? I agree that Star Wars hype was peak when it used to be "events". But hype can only exist when you're waiting for something, that is why neither Star Wars nor Marvel are as bulletproof anymore.
But also yes, I do draw the line there. Why wouldn't I object to something that I was the target audience for being turned into someone's ideological mouthpiece ragging me about all the things wrong with me, all the reasons why my supposed privileges hurt women and minorities, and that I should step back for my betters?
It's rather ironic catering to the demographic most invested in an IP is treated as a moral failing, while displacing that audience is framed as progress. Male heroism can no longer be celebrated without extensive ideological throat clearing to reassure female empowerment, even as young men continue to shoulder the bulk of society’s dangerous, sacrificial labor in the real world.
More options
Context Copy link
Most people are only seeing that message because they're not reading the second level meaning.
Star wars isn't particularly woke. The problem is that they, and Disney more broadley, continuously try to reskin movies and franchises. Literal reskinning, like The Little Mermaid. But also reskinning entire movies to appeal to demographics they didn't previously appeal to.
This pisses off people who liked the previous movie, and generally doesn't do well at attracting new fans. Because the source material is nearly always better than the next generation of content. Nobody is reskinning box office flops from the 80s.
So the business model is to take a massive box office hit or mass cultural impact, e.g. star wars (LoTR, Star Trek), pivot away from the target demographic, make a worse movie that appeals to different people, and then wait and see what happens.
This results in mostly misses. The aim is to be more inclusive, but the reskinning process is invariably decreasing their appeal to ~25% of the population (white men) to appeal to 6% of the population (black women). Unsurprisingly, most black women didn't grow up loving star wars, so the heightened interest in reigniting an old IP is totally wasted.
Again, this isn't particularly woke. Making a movie for a black demographic is literally uncontroversial. What's controversial is deliberately taking away that movie from a white demographic.
The obvious solution is to make more disney movies that appeal to blacks or asians. Not to reskin ones that don't appeal to them. If there is an IP that appeals to white men, you probably don't need to consider it literal fascism, and can just make it for them.
More options
Context Copy link
Art isn't like people, it doesn't have a fixed expiry date of seven-score years and ten. The difference between rejuvenation and 'using the rotten corpse as a finger-puppet' is whether it holds true to the original spirit and people still like it. Politics is very relevant to that.
In theory it doesn’t. But how many properties remain really popular longer than fifty years? Sherlock Holmes and Dracula maybe, but for every one of those there’s a thousand things that died.
In music we've recently had blockbuster biopics of Queen and Elton John and Black Sabbath's farewell gig last summer was the highest grossing benefit concert of all time (third highest when adjusted for inflation), so I'd say quite a few. The Rolling Stones's tour two years ago also grossed $235 million but that might be considered too "oldies" to really count as popular.
Music tends to age better because it relies on fewer background cultural assumptions. War Pigs will still be stirring in a hundred years for the same reason Ride of the Valkyries is.
If any album can be said to have birthed an entire new music genre, it would have to be Paranoid. Black Sabbath were fairly unique in that they could have played their 50 year old material at any modern metal festival without sounding one bit stylistically dated or "oldies".
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The difference between Star Wars and Dracula is partly that Dracula long ago passed through the public domain middle ground, where Dracula fans have to be able to distinguish what they think of as "Dracula" from what they ignore. There is no canonical Dracula lore. Or consider the Trojan War: Homer is pretty much required, but the vast amount of material in the Matter of Troy isn't considered equal, or even sorted through. Every author and every reader picks and chooses how they want the story to go.
Star Wars has for a long time maintained that everything that appeared on screen is the business of Star Wars fans. Sure the novellas or the comics or whatever might be iffy or unimportant, but if it was on the big screen it was legit. Now we're breaking that boundary, you can be a "real" star wars fan without caring about any of that.
This in turn leaves the fan to build their own universe. Which is rapidly going to become the case for everything as AI makes it increasingly possible to churn out infinite content.
More options
Context Copy link
Just off the top of my head Shakespeare / Wuthering Heights / Jane Austen / Tolkein / Dickens esp. A Christmas Carol / arguably Kipling / Lovecraft.
Yes, there's a fierce winnowing process, in part because public attention is a limited resource. But look at Lovecraft, for example. Lovecraftian horror became a genre, there are lots of parodies and cutesy anime Narth???tep and Lovecraft-lite stuff, and the racial elements are toned way down, but broadly there are works which play it straight released every year and the genre is in rude health precisely because works are still being released which respect its spirit.
(Reminds me that I want to play Still Wakes the Deep).
But there’s a very strong survivorship bias here. Weird Fiction was an entire commercial genre, and very popular. And now out of that whole genre you are left with maybe two authors who still have name recognition, Lovecraft and Burroughs. Jane Austen is still popular but the PCU (Pamela Cinematic Universe) doesn’t seem to have materialized. I’m saying that there was a very good chance that Star Wars was going to eventually fall into obscurity anyway, with or without Kennedy’s idiocy. Although she probably did speed the process up by about ten or fifteen years.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link