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What does the light at the end of the tunnel look like?
Look, every now and then I stop watching my footfalls and get pensive. And one of the things I've gotten pensive about the past few days is this: the Western culture war is not going to last forever, which means it's going to end. And when it does, how will we look back on this mad time?
Two of the answers are obvious:
But what I can't really put together is the third option, the narrative that will be told if SJ is indeed just a passing phase, either because Red/Grey defeated it or because it wins and then turns out to be unsustainable. Frankly, the Blue Tribe's been writing all the history books since before I was born, so it's hard for me to even picture it. And that troubles me; it's the scenario I think is most likely, and the one I'm to at least some extent trying to bring about, so if I don't have a good idea of what it even looks like that's kind of an HCF. "It is not enough to say that you do not like the way things are. You must say how you will change them, and to what."
So, how will the people in that scenario think of this time? What story will they tell?
(To the SJers here: feel free to answer, if you think you understand your opposition, or feel free to correct me if you think my #2 is uncharitable.)
I mean what do you actually think your side 'winning' looks like?
People stop thinking 'trans' is a thing and it's illegal to call someone by different pronouns than they were born with?
We go back to having white men be 70% of characters in all entertainment media, and another 25% are white women with zero character traits beyond 'sexy and horny for the main character'?
We all agree that actually women and minorities are genetically more stupid and incapable than white men, and stop giving them jobs that earn more than a subsistence wage?
Or just 'everyone thinks the leftists of that period in history were being kind of histrionic and weird and that the right from that period in history were less bad than everyone thought, and that's what history books say, but everything else about society is mostly the same'?
Because the latter is certainly possible, sure, but I wouldn't call it SJ's 'losing'. If everything they wanted to change about society stays changed but the future thinks that 'feminist fail compilation' videos are funny, then ok, that's an acceptable cost.
Sen. McCarthy is depicted as a villain today, but he won. 'Communist' is still an insult in 90% of American contexts, and capitalist realism is treated as a fundamental facet of reality rather than being a philosophy or ideology at all. Something like that could easily happen to the SJ/woke movement, and that's about what it would look like.
But if you think we're going to roll back the actual changes to society, most of that means taking away rights or privileges or respect or acknowledgement or etc. from people who have spent a long hard time and earning it, and trying to do that ussually involves a lot of kicking and screaming and destruction. Frankly I don't find it likely that we'll move in that direction while we're still a liberal democracy, and if we're not then there's more important changes going on to worry about.
Well, let's have a little look at that, shall we? I've never followed "Doctor Who" but I have been vaguely familiar with it. A superfan, who's also gay, got the gig as writer/showrunner (Russell T. Davies) from 2005-2010. He also created the spinoff "Torchwood" which was the "grown-up series Who couldn't be" (mainly everyone was gay or bi, was the big change there) which never rose to the same heights of popularity, and has now come back to try and make the show popular again after the era of the Female Doctor tanked it (turns out there is not a massive audience for making such huge revisions to an established character).
"Who" is a show that suffers from the problem of being perceived as a 'kid's show' so there's not too much they can do there to change it, and any changes that have been made since 2005 to now treat "adult" as meaning "we talk about sex and everyone is gay".
Davies started this, but wasn't responsible for the worst of it because at least he is a fan, and stuck with popular characters for the second spin-off "The Sarah Jane Adventures". But even then we got the Doctor having an ex-wife, lectures about black people in Britain, and the rest of the progressive push leading up to the Female Doctor in 2017/18 (well after Davies had left).
Now, if I believe what I'm reading online, even with Davies back, they had to bring back one of the new popular Doctors of his era - David Tennant as the Tenth Doctor, now the Fourteenth (even though all this makes nonsense of former canon that there could only be thirteen incarnations). And this is how we get the new Fifteenth Doctor who is black - a completely new process invented whereby the next regeneration splits into two separate beings.
The new actor is also gay (I'm presuming, from the description "the first openly queer actor to lead the series"). Since they've given previous Doctors romantic partners in the new revision, are we going to see the first gay Doctor Who?
Possibly, but who cares? Davies managed to revitalise the series, but also set it on the path to "we must have the first sexually active, first female, first whatever" revision of the character, as well as the lectures about black representation, colonialism, and the rest of it. The success of all that is that the show slumped again, until they had to bring back a popular, white, straight, conventional Doctor to lead into the new black queer Doctor. The hopes there are that instead of going straight from the female Doctor to the black one, and continuing to shed viewership, they can hook viewers coming back to see the return of Ten and keep them when Fifteen is on the scene.
My point out of all this rambling? That when your audiences are mainly white, and straight, and cis, then promoting lead characters on the basis of minority status is marking the show out as "oh it's for the LGBT+ crowd, not me" and you lose viewers and then you lose money.
There's a difference between "the return of a popular show and this time the lead happens to be X" and blaring "the return of a popular show where the whole point is that the lead is X!" I'll be interested to see how the new Doctor turns out, but if the show is going to be all "Did you know he's black this time? Yes, the first black Gallifreyan (if he is, I have no idea on that) and certainly the first black Doctor, he's black you know, we're going to have all sorts of lectures about black people and colonisation" then they're going to shed viewers like leaves in autumn, and then of course it will be blamed on racism and homophobia.
I was forced to watch the three recent special episodes with David Tennant back (absolutely the best doctor of the reincarnated version of the show) because of friends and was surprised just how much the quality had dropped since his original series with Rose Tyler. No 15. did seem cool though from the last few minutes of the last special episode (the plot of the last third of this episode was really stupid though), not cool enough to make me watch the show again, but definitely better than Whittaker.
Personally I think it's a terrible decision; if they're going to muck about with regeneration so that we get "bigeneration" and splitting into a black and a white Doctor (oh man, just typing that out makes me wince), then why not have the post-female doctor regeneration be a reset to a former version, i.e. Ten? They're already making this a Special Special regeneration, why not set it up as "uh, this has only happened very rarely and when it does then it's unstable" and that sets up for the Special Special Special bigeneration.
When a show does a return of fan favourite character, it's because they need eyeballs desperately. I appreciate Davies does love the show, but I think him being gay means he did and does want "representation" for personal reasons (and not just ticking off the DEI boxes), and when you are in a position to get your own fanfic done as canon, that leads down very winding paths.
You're thinking too small. Davies has hinted that this split regeneration has retroactively applied to every previous Doctor as well. So that they all now exist, simultaneously within their own time line, creating the Doctorverse, such that they can now have multiple Doctor's having multiple adventures at the same time. In other words this is the multiverse for Doctor Who.
Primarily this appears to be away to be able to monetize Dr Who more heavily, outside of just the rare crossovers due to the time line shenanigans they used to use as an excuse for why it didn't happen more frequently. That this happens just as Disney pump a whole bunch of money into the franchise is probably not a coincidence I would suggest.
Yeah, that's the kind of fanon retconning I meant. He's Officially In Charge now, which means he can set what the new canon is, even if it contradicts what has previously been established. The awful movie, where they decided that the Doctor was half-human, is quietly ignored. Can't do that when it's the television show.
They've done it to Trek, they've done it to Star Wars, and now they're doing it to the Doctor.
Interestingly he is also trying to reverse a retcon that was brought in while he wasn't in charge (The Timeless Child) by showing it was essentially an in universe retcon, the Master and Toymaker have rewritten the Doctors past. So trying to remystify his real origin.
To be fair original Doctor Who was always very blase with continuity and rules, so I can't really say even as a 7th Doctor fan, that it has got much worse in that regard. Famously they didn't have canon, just deciding on what was needed for each story to work (including regeneration itself) .
I believe "just deciding on what was needed for each story to work" is a central pillar of most western versions of Buddhism.
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