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 -
Culture war refresh. Many people are familiar with the Bud Light and Dylan Mulvaney controversy. About a week afterwards people on this website noted there wasn’t a large impact on the stock price of InBev, Bud’s parent company,
Well, InBev is now down about 10% from when the whole Bud Light - Dylan Mulvaney sponsorship. Bud light revenue is still down materially. At the same time, other major alcohol companies appear flat or up materially. Therefore, it seems the boycott has had real negative impact on InBev.
Does this mark the start of the right finding it’s muscle or is this a dead cat bounce?
The boycott worked this time because Bud Light is completely interchangeable with other products and they attacked their core audience. For the same reasons, the Gillette boycott had a real impact.
Other companies, like Disney or Apple, can get away with woke signalling because their business has a moat.
I wonder about Disney. I have no idea how many people are like me, but all they've done is motivate me to stop watching TV and movies, period. They've motivated me to not let my kid watch TV, period. If they own all the media, I stop consuming all the media.
Instead I've been woodworking. My wife has been gardening. My daughter has been getting super creative with art supplies, crafts, playing pretend and running around outside. We're probably all better off with less consoomer media, regardless of the fact that Disney has been pushing an odious agenda. If anything I should thank Disney for becoming so awful it finally got me to touch grass more.
To be clear, the Disney boycott is also hurting them, they just haven’t acknowledged it.
Is it a boycott, or is it just that they're putting out shitty products that people are wising up to and no longer want to pay for? Though wokeness plays a (significant) part in them being awful, many of their recent works would have still been completely awful regardless of the messaging.
This is a reasonable counterpoint, but it seems like they’d been making terrible products for years and only started suffering with the boycotts.
Or it takes a while to degrade a brand.
The MCU had a lot of good will to burn through post-Endgame. The Sequel Trilogy...not as much but even then it started at $2 billion with an incredibly unoriginal work and still ended up at $1 billion for an awful final installment in a cursed trilogy.
More options
Context Copy link
The MCU was legitimately great. The problem is that the main story ended with Endgame.
Problem? I'm thankful every day Endgame gave me a perfect place to get off the consoomer train I'd found myself trapped on since my early 20's when Robert Downy Jr swept us off our feet.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Are they severable? if you remove the girlbossing, male dumbification, mary sueisms, "deconstruction" and forced diversity, you don't get quantitively, but qualitatively different products.
It's hard to sever, that's for sure. But there are aspects of many modern Disney films that are bad regardless of those stuff. Rise of Skywalker wasn't helped by Rey continuing to be a Mary Sue, but the entire plot point of Palpatine somehow returning and bizarre plot contrivances like the dagger shape matching up to the Death Star ruins (just one example among many) by themselves were enough to make the film awful. Doctor Strange 2 wasn't helped by Doctor Strange being a supporting character to his own film, but the utter lack of internal logic and bizarre plot contrivances by themselves were enough to make the film awful. I've heard Peter Pan and Wendy is quite woke, but also it's been heavily criticized for awful acting, awful color grading and set design for Neverland, and awful combat choreography. Perhaps a lack of focus on the messaging would have allowed Disney to put some more focus on these other technical and fundamental script writing aspects, so I agree that it's hard to sever, but at the least, these films didn't seem to have some salvageable, worthy core that would have been fine but for the woke messaging.
Their films with less woke messaging don't seem to be particularly better, either. The Lion King remake did make a lot of money, but arguably that was riding the coattails of the original masterpiece, and it did turn off a lot of fans for being a near-shot-for-shot remake but with a lot of the soul ripped out due to the hyperrealistic style and bad voice acting. We'll see with the upcoming prequel CGI film about Mufasa if this was a one of those "fool me once/fool me twice" situations, I suppose. The Pinocchio remake has been criticized for missing the point of the original story, making the titular puppet a complete goody two-shoes from the beginning who is passively pushed into bad situations rather than making bad decisions, along with the lying-causing-nose-to-grow being used to help him get out of a sticky situation rather than punishing him. I heard that film had some woke messaging with some casting choices, but those weren't the downfall of the film, from what I understand.
deleted
And they didn't really establish how they could be sure he was really gone, either! What's to stop Palpatine showing up again? In the EU series the heroes used various tactics to establish how he was capable of resurrecting and then how they could defeat him.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Yeah, but several of those things aren’t gendered. Mary Sues, despite the name, are universal, as is deconstruction. I have faith in Disney’s ability to dumb down a story using those two alone.
Mary Sues aren't gendered at the core, but end up gendered in woke works because writing the female characters as having few limits and as being stopped by external oppression rather than internal flaws is encouraged by wokeness.
the term does have gendered forms (Mary Sue/Gary Stu), and one might argue that some of the specific tendencies are also gendered...
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I mean, on the one hand you're quibbling over the different between the product being terrible, or being terrible and offensive.
On the other hand, we're all being gaslit about the product being terrible or offensive, and everyone who doesn't like the product is accused of being all the "-ists". They keep trying to guilt us into continuing to consoom.
I keep imagining it like some terrible MLM pitch, where some awkward, kind of aggressive, and frankly desperate salesman is making his pitch. He puts his foot in his mouth about men, so a few men get up to leave. Maybe he says something bafflingly retarded as a persuasive speech. Like "Women have always been the primary victims of war." As they walk out the door, he starts shouting at them angrily that they are missing the opportunity of a lifetime. They'll be on the wrong side of history! But it's so aggressive the a bunch more men are off put by it and leave too, and maybe a few women. When the last one leaves, he turns to the women, and the men with little enough self respect to stay, and doubles down instead, going "Fucking men, am I right?"
I think this phenomenon happens because many marketers take their ideology seriously. Based on my own experience as a believer in its predecessor ideology, woke ideology is both moralizing and totalizing (AFAICT, it's only gotten worse since I quit around a decade ago), so it has answers to questions of "right" and "wrong" in every possible context. The point of making a film isn't to convince the audience to give you money in exchange for entertainment, it's to make the world a better place by subtly manipulating the audience through social messaging (if they did otherwise, since everything is political, their works would, by default, have messaging that reinforces and upholds the current oppressive status quo). And if the audience dislikes that, that means that they are morally wrong, and it isn't our job to convince them, it's their job to see the rightness of our ideology and come around to it. And we'll bully and verbally abuse them until they do so.
I think a lot of the decision makers in media, likely including in Disney, have experience in seeing this work very well - very very well - in sociopolitical contexts. Often they might have been subject to such "marketing" themselves which led them to becoming true believers. I've seen and experienced this directly plenty, again, for the predecessor ideology. And they might be inferring that they can use similar "marketing" in a commercial context. I don't think I've seen it have much actual success there, though; in sociopolitical contexts, bullying and coercion is the norm and can get good results; in commercial ones, people tend to just walk away instead of handing you money in the face of bullying, and you can't legally coerce them.
deleted
3rd wave feminism/identity politics/SJW. Arguably it's just the same ideology just with less time in the oven and less widespread acceptance.
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
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link