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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.
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.
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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.
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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...
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