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[Disclaimer: I think that this post maybe too low-effort for Culture war thread but other ones don't look appropriate to me]
Can you do too much noticing?
Fallout series released not too long ago and as a fan of games I was reasonably interested, especially after mostly good reviews came in. But while it has quite many political themes I will not talk about them, instead I will focus on some much less important and meaningful thing - casting and specifically race of the actors. Generally I don't want to spoil myself too much, so I ignore teasers, trailers and, of course full-blown reviews, even if they promise to contain no spoilers at all. So at the time right before series release I knew two facts about it, which were gathered from two old stills: protagonist is a woman vault dweller and there was also ghoul sheriff character. Yesterday when I finally had enough free time to comfortably marathon watch it(my preferred way), I saw a third one with a black character that was a member of BoS and my first thought was: "Oh, so it's mc's love interest". And I was right, like I was with similar predictions many times before.
I can easily see how the white woman/black man pairing become so wide-spread in recent years. You don't any conspiracies from 4chan white nationalists imagination, just brutal logic of the modern social justice thought. If you're making action movie, you need an action hero, obviously it should be a woman to combat harmful stereotypes. You can add some other traits: disability, PoC status, mental illness; but most often being a woman is enough for mc so we just return to default, white and pretty. Then you need to add some diversity in main cast, who is the most diverse and minoritiest of them all? - Black people, specifically African Americans. And we already have a woman, why not this one be a man. And if the cast is small or filled with mentors, monsters, villains and characters too young for romance, why not pair up the first two that we designed?
In many ways this is continuation of my previous post because anytime I notice one of the signs of this ideology dominant among American media creators and therefore their creations I feel robbed of enjoying perfectly adequate television because I for some reason decided to read about American politics. While being blissfully ignorant I thought that African Americans constituted at least a quarter if not the third of US population and movie demographics seemed absolutely normal in this light. I, like majority of Eastern Europeans don't have anything to dislike about people of African descent, those few who do live here are students or children of students, are not part of some diaspora and assimilate quite well(though obviously people will look differently at the black Ivan, or Stefan, but it's curious look, without animosity). I compared this feeling to watching soviet-made movies as an American businessman at the time of the Cold War(which of course vanishingly small number of them actually did). You notice propaganda against small bourgeoise like you, but why would it matter if USSR is very far away and communists that you know about are all educated intellectuals obviously against any kind of violence?
One thing that I don't understand is why nobody "inside the kitchen" don't notice how weird their attempts at propaganda seem. I think there wouldn't be so many far rightists in hypothetical America where there is much less to notice. IMHO, Hollywood elites aren't black supremacists and majority of them don't consider themselves in someway being against white race, they are true believers, who try to promote DiversityTM in their media because they think that it will make its viewers better people. My guess is that they do notice, but because of the implication of noticing being bad in itself, there is no one to say: "maybe better make him Asian this time".
My humble opinion is that they (the wokies et al) notice, and they will continue and double down and berate you if you point at it at all. They simply don't care if you watch or not, its their vanity project, but that is ok because they are making it better for their people (hint: not you). They are the middle management, the marketing people and the danger hairs with liberal arts degrees.
So far they have been getting their way because they were propped up by pension funds like Black Rock and Vanguard, but now that there have been significant outflows of capital there have been some purges, but it won't be enough. Looking for example at Hollywood, the writers guild's strike looks to have been successful in getting concessions from the studios (chaperoned AI [meaning, AI can only be used by the writers themselves, not the studios to replace writers] and a minimum number of writers in each writer's room of 5 I think).
Battlefields I have seen:
Hollywood
Videogames
Tabletop Games (W40K)
Novels (Nebula award)
Localization of Japanese Entertainment
Gundam Model Kits (This one I think is more a product of the imagination of the antiwoke people, as yuri is an staple of Anime/Manga)
CoC's in Software Dev Projects (This plus the ousting of Linus)
The push for Woke language in programming (example: the Master/slave controversy of a few years)
Marketing in general (Always mixed race or minority pairings, sometimes ads not even related to the product but for the purpose of browbeating their core demographics, the Budlight fiasco, the Gillete ad of "boys will be boys")
The point of it is trying to change the culture from the middle down (remember they are the middle managers and their minions, while some CEO's are probably true believers like the Ice Cream dudes Ben & Jerry, the majority are only looking up to enrich themselves and their cronies like with Bobby Kotick), and if you have any objection it just means you are an enemy and your opinion doesn't matter to them. Just look at the bruhaha that is happening right now with the female Custodes or the Blowback the Lovely Complex Localizer got for giving ammunition to their critics when he went mask off.
Assuming this is a racial issue: Shouldn't a true to the setting depiction of 40K be full of POCs? If anything it's weird that all of mankind 10s of thousands of years in the future produces mostly white guardsmen and space marines, given their depiction in various media.
the main conflict in W40K right now is female Custodes and female space marines. Black people was more an issue in D&D where the racists insisted that orcs were representation of African Americans.
But GW isn't introducing female space marines. So that's a non-issue.
Females custodes is a change. I'm not sure I'd denounce it as wokeness.
"But GW isn't introducing female space marines. So that's a non-issue." is the "it's just a couple of kids in college campuses,..." of tabletop. Anyone paying attention to the hobby culture wars already knows what is the next step, especially after the "Warhammer is for everyone" message.
But no. They aren't doing it. Not every slope is slippery all the way down.
What reason do you have to say that they aren't going to do it?
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