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I’ve sometimes heard that the left wing takeover of corporate America is a hollow one - they don’t REALLY cars about minorities, just look at umm their Middle East twitter accounts! They care about $$$ and aren’t true believers
I found an interesting counter point recently.
https://upstreamreviews.substack.com/p/high-republic-low-sales
This is what a corporation that has no idea what their audience is about, but does in fact know clearly what it’s ideology is about.
I’ll summarize the link but you really should read it for yourself, it’s astounding how bad Disney gets the Star Wars franchise: for instance, the books need to be (in addition to all the old touchstones of diversity etc) ANTI WAR. And then there’s the characters, who are somehow all androgynous.
The sales figures reflect an enormous lack of interest of enthusiasm. But it doesn’t matter for Disney - they get to spread the Good Word of gender ideology and anti fascism/anti traditionalism.
You know, the idiocy of Disney's "The Force is Female" push doesn't take a genius to figure out. I was talking to my wife about it, and I just asked:
"When we were kids, how many little boys did you know who liked Star Wars?"
"Tons."
"Did you know a single girl who liked Star Wars?"
"No."
It's the absolute height of fart huffing retardation to literally jettison your entire built in audience for an IP, and try to replace it with an audience that never cared about it one iota. Like I get the typical neoliberal line of "They're just trying to expand their market". Except now the experiment has been run, and they've wound up appealing to less people than before.
It was literally inconceivable to me, if you'd asked me 10 years ago, that I could stop loving Star Wars. I dragged my poor not-yet-wife to a midnight screen of The Force Awakens, well past her bed time. And she went with me because she knew how much it meant to me, god bless her.
And yet here I am. I fucking hate Star Wars now.
The ways they've seemingly purposely spit in the eye of every fan of the original Trilogy and EU is insane. Between turning all the legacy characters into beaten down pieces of shit, killing them off ignominiously and denying fans the reunions they desperately wanted. Putting aside all the glaring technical issues with the craftsmanship of the films, like poor writing, poor characterization, completely nonsensical plot contortions, etc. I forget where I heard it, but someone joked that all new Lucas Films are made for an audience of one, Kathleen Kennedy. Every film has to be about a stand in for how Kathleen Kennedy views herself, replacing a character that is a stand in for how Kathleen Kennedy views George Lucas. Once I heard that, suddenly it all made sense.
God I hope Disney sells it all back to Lucas at half the price.
I can't quite hate Star Trek, it meant too much to me for too long, but I'm at the same point now with it. I thought Enterprise was awful and bailed on it about midway into the second season. I had no idea how awful they could go. Disco. Oh dear God, DISCOVERY. The epitome of "girlboss" and stupid crap. So effin' stupid, they had to introduce the Mirror Universe from the start in the first season. You don't do that! You wait a couple of seasons so you have your original characters established and familiar to the audience, then go Mirror!
They went so bad they had to drag Spock and then Pike in to save the thing, even though their initial boasting was that this would be all new Trek with no old favourites. But I couldn't even make it past the pilot episode, I hated Michael so much.
So I haven't watched anything since, no matter how good the reviews: not Lower Decks, not Picard, not Strange New Worlds, nuffin'. And I'm someone who, as a seven year old, cut out a picture of Spock from a magazine and brought it into school.
I watched most of Season one of Strange New Worlds. It's bad. Mostly in that it contradicts original Star Trek while depending on it -- no, Spock and Christine Chapel and Uhura are NOT those characters, nor will those characters plausibly become the ones we see later (well, MAYBE Uhura, but I don't think so). Also in the TOS Season 3 sense of "Boy is this a stupid problem, and why are all those smart people carrying the idiot ball around?". Also borrowing some elements from "The Orville" doesn't help. Annoying wokeness is there too, but not the worst of the problems.
I particularly despise the “quippy” dialogue of Strange New Worlds.
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