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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 19, 2024

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Chinese entertainment — and to a lesser degree, East Asian entertainment generally — is dominating Western markets.

I'd actually characterize this as the other way around. I'd say that Chinese entertainment has noticeably lagged, between the death grip of anime and K-pop. China has some breakout hits like Black Myth Wukong or Three Body Problem, but in part due to interference from the CCP, most modern Chinese media has trouble breaking through to a wider Western audience.

Edit: To address the actual substance of the post, one thing that I think western entertainment has forgotten how to do is showing, not telling. Instead of presenting us with a dilemma and showing the consequences of the decisions the characters make (think Star Trek), we're now simply told what the correct decision is. Now this isn't a problem in and of itself, but all western entertainment is now like this. And what's even worse, the "correct" answers run completely contrary to the beliefs of a large portion of the audience. At that point, the piece of media is no longer entertainment, but a prolonged lecture. Much of Eastern media has not yet fallen into this. One notable exception I would note is actually China. The CCP is notorious for meddling in all of the cultural products that are produced. The Chinese entertainment that become truly popular outside of China are the ones that are free from obvious CCP meddling.

One quote that I believes fits the situation was said about a Korean player about The Last of Us 2. "It's a story about right or wrong written by people who believe they're always right."

On a separate note, when I understand that when something gets made, there's a limited amount of resources, both physical and mental, that goes into the making. I also understand that all of the decisions they make are deliberate, so that when I see that a character is changed from being White in the source material to Black in the adaptation, this is a deliberate choice made by the production company. It then stands to reason that every time a "woke" choice gets made in a piece of entertainment, some amount of resources went into making that happen. These are resources that could have been used to improve that piece of entertainment in other, tangible ways. Therefore, when I see a lot of these "woke" decisions being made, I have to conclude that more resources went into making the show "woke" than making the show good. So outside of general annoyance with the piece of media itself being "woke," I am even more annoyed in that they cared more about being woke than about actually making a good piece of media.

when I see that a character is changed from being White in the source material to Black in the adaptation, this is a deliberate choice made by the production company

I can imagine a world where this is not always the case. If skin color is not relevant to the story, and the change does not stand out as extremely unlikely (for instance, black characters in historical fiction happening in medieval europe), a production company could have a casting call that's open to multiple/all races.

But in the current cultural climate, I would have a hard time believing that's how any instance of "race-swapping" happened.

We can't race swap anymore without the metanarrative causing irritating discussions. It really doesn't help that Shonda Rhimes ruined 'put black people in fancy clothing' by inserting racism analogues, instead of just ignoring race and letting black actors dress and talk posh.

If the performance is strong enough the race or even gender swaps become secondary, like Idris Elba as Heimdall or Steve whatever as Corlys Velaruon or whoever played Jet Black in live-action cowboy bebop. There are a few gender swaps too, like Katee Sackoff as Starbuck, but I can't think of many.

Anyways, after initial kvetching, the blackness of the portrayal became secondary to the other criticisms of the media in question, because the flipping was relatively unproblematic.

Contra anything made currently where race and gender are front and center: maximal irritation without a good enough product to overwhelm criticism means everyone just shits on it and defenders are few. Dustborn and Valid@te are clowned on for being the woke shitpiles that they are, but BG3 literally has race swapping into an ANIMAL which is bestiality, not just furry, and it turned into a selling point of the game.

Also note that deliberate race-swapping can still make good art. Both Spike Lee & Mel Brooks made "Where did we go right?" movies where the premise is that terrible stereotypes actually sell great. (Bamboozled & The Producers)

"X But it's a $Demographic Movie" doesn't have to suck. It's still all in the execution.

Mel Brooks and spike Lee, notably, do not have products which mostly meet current year standards of political correctness(even as they are by no means conservatives).