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 -
In more "get woke, go broke?" news, the entertaining if incredible rumours circulating about Disney.
Disney, like all the other companies with streaming services, is facing the sharp decline since the days of the pandemic and having many subscribers cancel so they are losing revenue. It's not necessarily "get woke go broke" at work here, but Disney have been shooting themselves in the foot with the forced diversity remakes and mishandling the Star Wars franchise which should have been a reliable cash cow. Meanwhile, Universal Studios is coining it with the Super Mario movie and theme parks rides.
They're also, apparently, in a bind with Comcast, their co-owners of Hulu, who are gearing up to demand Disney buy them out. Comcast is valuing it at around $70 billion, Disney values it way lower (around $20 billion by one report).
The Little Mermaid is not earning the overseas profits it needed to do, and seemingly on the second domestic weekend it also fell back (this is being blamed on the usual "racist backlash" but oh dear those racist East Asians who aren't going to see it, tsk tsk!). The fifth Indiana Jones movie is being re-cut, re-shot, scrapbooked and everything including the kitchen sink thrown at it because of the bad reception at Cannes and the vital need for it to make at least a billion when finally released.
Now the rumours begin:
(1) Disney only has $200 million in liquidity. Comcast is looking for way more, so they're looking at more layoffs, cancellation of projects, and even selling off IP and - rumoured - some of the parks?
(2) George Lucas rumoured to want to buy back Lucas Films?
It is all rumour and insider gossip at the moment and who knows how much is true at all, if any of it, but it's fun to watch in the context of Disney's fight with DeSantis and all the progressive chatter online about how DeathSantis is an idiot for taking on a company with such high-class expensive lawyers and deep pockets to fight court cases.
Looks like those pockets may not be so deep after all!
‘Go woke, go broke’ doesn’t seem true. More like ‘push out a lot of bad product and people stop buying your new ones’.
I mean you can certainly argue that Disney’s wokeness makes it hard for them to produce good products. I definitely think that’s part of the story. But they also seem to have not even tried to make a lot of their productions actually good, which I don’t think is because of wokeness. Sure, woke makes it hard to, say, write a classic princess story. But it seems like Disney just didn’t even try, they assumed that mouse ears or a lightsaber was a license to print money with any old Drek. As it turns out, they were too cynical.
I think you are radically underrating the "wokeness makes it hard for them to produce good products" angle. Making a good woke movie for kids or teens seems nearly impossible. It imposes too many restraints on you that are restraints against good storytelling.
I mean, Brave was kinda woke and generally well received. So were a few marvel films.
I agree with you that woke probably makes it harder to make a good story- and makes certain categories of story effectively off limits as actually good and coherent- but I think you’re underrating the fact that a lot of these woke flops are using wokeness to polish a turd to begin with.
Never seen Brave, but all the successful Marvel movies traverse a similar hero story path. Black Panther, for all its magic black people stuff, is pretty much a classic heroes journey with a shit ton of masculinity thrown in your face.
More options
Context Copy link
“Woke” is about intersectionality or power-critical narratives or character arcs, usually pedantically or with a lecturing tone, not just progressive / feminist heroic viewpoints. Brave was about a Scottish princess beloved by her kingdom and family who used her existing but unrealized privilege to make choices in her romantic life; that’s standard modernist feminism.
Moana, on the other hand, was marketed as woke: “here’s a brave, strong Brown woman, isn’t she brave and strong for being Brown and a woman?” I didn’t see it until it hit the second-run theater for that reason alone; when I did, I was surprised it was just a fun, well-made, coming-of-age Disney film. She saw a problem, had an adventure, fixed the problem, and was rewarded for her leadership with more leadership. Sure, she had no romantic co-star, but that’s not woke, just feminist. It had a flamboyant-coded treasure-grubbing giant crab, which edged into wokeness, but it was a minuscule part of the film, and it fit the story. Again, modernist progressive, not woke.
Lightyear was woke because it was power-critical: the white man protagonist was constantly wrong, not heroic, throughout the film. At the end, his heroism consisted of being an ally to the family he accidentally helped, against Zurg, another white man who wanted to turn back the clock to when things were good for him and hide his mistakes from the people who determine his societal status. Postmodern “power was wrong” narrative plus fecund Black lesbian equals the triumph of queer family over the success of a highly privileged white man’s career ambitions
The article then goes on to point out how Pixar’s meta-narrative made queer acceptance itself travel back in time to make the Toy Story universe retroactively gayer, and thus better, then ours. Lightyear is woke, it’s a political point masquerading as a story, and it’s not satisfying entertainment.
If anything this was edging into anti-woke, it was a simple play on stereotypes for laughs.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Yep.
I've adopted a rule of thumb regarding new media products: if the creators are heavily emphasizing the diversity, inclusion, and equality progressive bonafides of the product, they almost certainly are not prioritizing any factors that would lead to a high quality product. If quality were the goal, they'd emphasize other things.
If quality isn't a priority then they probably won't achieve high quality.
This rule has been at least 90% accurate since I implemented it.
Disney is by far the worst offender but it pops up just about everywhere else too.
More options
Context Copy link
It's akin to the restrictions created by Christianity: to some degree, they can make for a better story, but not when they become too tight. So C. S. Lewis could, operating within a fairly but not entirely stuffy kind of Christian ethos and worldview, produce great children's stories that appeal even to the unconverted, but hardcore fundamentalists are infamously bad story tellers.
This trend goes back about as far as human culture: Aristophanes was conservative in contrast to Socrates and Plato, but not entirely pious. He wouldn't mock Zeus, but he did mock Dionysus. Constraints, to some degree, are good for creativity - that's one of the secrets of good poetry - provided those constraints stay within constraints. Even great conservative films like Ben Hur or The Dark Knight have a pinch of deviancy in them, perhaps because it's hard for profoundly creative people to stay within orthodoxy in all respects. Also, even great children's stories make one think, and the compatibility of orthodoxy (whether conservative or progressive) with thinking is a matter of degree.
I think there’s a lot to that. Makes me think of Brandon Sanderson. The Mormonism gives him somewhere to stand and serious (now also vaguely countercultural) principles to conjure with, but aren’t so restrictive that they force him to be dour and po-faced.
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