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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34513 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 6, 2023

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I'll add another shoutout to Community, great show if anyone hasn't seen it. It has some pretty hilarious takes on early wokeism.

What I love about the show is that it has complex characters, which really isn't a high bar but seems to be one which many cultural products no longer meet. Jeff, Britta and Annie all have well developed flaws, which is expected as the attractive white stars. But the shocking thing is even the minority characters have flaws! Troy, Abed, and Shirley are all well-rounded people who have good sides and bad, and don't blame all their problems on vague instances of racism. It's truly refrishing in this day and age.

I really enjoyed the first three seasons. Season 4 and the online seasons were significantly weaker.

They also managed to have a well-rounded gay character (the 'pansexual imp' Dean) without getting all preachy.

I think the show's strength was that it simply assumed it's audience was on board with the modern liberal package, and so didn't have to convert them. Dan Harmon assumed his audience would be fine with the Dean being gay or whatever, so he was able to focus on funny plotlines that derive from that fact, rather than making his sexuality the point.

To bring it back to the original post about Britta, the finale actually had her imagine the Dean coming out as trans rather than continuing with the vague 'whatever this is' that he was doing before. It can be read as a criticism of the restrictiveness of the trans lobby's ideology if one were so inclined.

I think the show's strength was that it simply assumed it's audience was on board with the modern liberal package, and so didn't have to convert them.

Most preachy shows also assume that - otherwise they wouldn't count on the audience to shell out dollars for watching woke tropes - but still preach like crazy. I think the difference is not that. There's two ways of promoting certain ideas in cinema. One is to have human attractive characters to act in accordance with these ideas and make the audience draw their own conclusions. So, if you wanted to promote racial integration, you just feature a diverse cast (hopefully avoiding blunders like casting a black person to play Bjorn Ironside) and make them act like it's normal, without mentioning it. The audience gets the message "racial integration is the normal thing". The other way is to draw attention to this fact constantly, lampshade it mercilessly and have the characters to pronounce wooden monologues about how happy they are that they have racial integration and how it's long about time they had it and how eager they are to have more of it, because nothing could be better than more racial integration. The audience gets the message "they really want to push racial integration on me, at the cost of sacrificing everything that makes movies fun". The Community manages to do the former, while most woke content past about 2016 do the latter with gusto.

hopefully avoiding blunders like casting a black person to play Bjorn Ironside

What do you mean Anne Boleyn wasn't Afro-Caribbean? 😂

When British broadcaster Channel 5 announced the cast of its “Anne Boleyn” miniseries last October, the show’s eponymous star — Black actress Jodie Turner-Smith — faced immediate backlash from critics who objected to a woman of color portraying the white Tudor queen.

The racist overtones of this outcry weren’t lost on Turner-Smith, who tells Glamour’s Abigail Blackburn that she knew “it would be something that people felt very passionately about, either in a positive or a negative way, because Anne is a human in history who people feel very strongly about.” As the actress adds, she responded to the criticism by focusing on the story she and the series’ creators wanted to tell — a “human story” of Anne as a mother.

So objecting to the casting of Bjorn ironside or Anne Boleyn on the grounds that "but they weren't black" is racist, you bigot!

In addition to Turner-Smith, the show features Black actors Paapa Essiedu as Anne’s brother and Thalissa Teixeira as the queen’s cousin.

But Henry was white and, what amused me most, so was their daughter, Elizabeth. I suppose even for Channel 5 casting a biracial baby for an iconic historical figure would have been that one step too far?

What do you mean Anne Boleyn wasn't Afro-Caribbean? 😂

I would love to live in a society where that actually would work - i.e. we don't fret about eye color or foot size of the actor not matching the same of the role. Maybe one day all the race stuff would be so trivialized that it would sound like complaining "we know from this obscure portrait that Anne had green eyes but this actor has brown eyes!" - but we're very far from it right now, unfortunately. Moreover, we're so far from it that the mere access to this idea is now gated by the wokes - you can only do race switches in a particular woke-approved manner with an explicitly stated woke goals, otherwise it's "blackface" or "whitewashing" or some other thoughtcrime.

If they'd just called it "Anne Boleyn, Vampire Hunter", nobody would care that she was black.

Good moment about wokeism is the college mascot on season 1, an 'ethnic free' person. The main character remarking how not being racist is the new racism.

Also reminds me about south park "took our jobs" episode, where people of the future is a mix of all races together.

Community has a lot of politically incorrect jokes, specially from the Chevy Chase character. Really funny.

Troy, Abed, and Shirley are all well-rounded people who have good sides and bad, and don't blame all their problems on vague instances of racism.

It happens once when Chang tries to get them to "bear down for midterms" but he's also insane

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