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PaperclipPerfector  24d ago (text post)   29185 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 26, 2024

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Is this the beginning of a popular rebellion against woke Hollywood garbage?

Like (I imagine) a lot of you, I got fed up with mainstream Hollywood movies and TV a long time ago. For various reasons, but a big part of it was how they insisted on inserting heavy-handed woke propaganda into everything, even where it made no sense. I'm hardly the first to complain about that, but it seemed to be mostly anonymous online reactionaries complaining, while mainstream critics and everyone "respectable" still lapped it up. The Star Wars sequels, Nu-Trek, and all Marvel movies made $$$$$$$ while also gathering rave critical reviews, even though it became something of a joke when the "audience score" on rotten tomatoes was always so much lower than the "critic reviews" score.

And to be clear, I'm not (just) mad at those things because I disagree with their politics. I genuinely think those are terrible movies. They have bad plots, bad characters, bad dialogue, and often even bad at basic filmmaking stuff like editing, camera angles, and sound mixing. One theory I like is that, for quite a while, Hollywood was so focused on exporting big famous brands to foreign countries that they didn't care how it sounded in English. They'd all be watching it dubbed or with subtitles anyway, and then (hopefully) buying merch. But for a long time I felt like I couldn't say these things without getting labelled as a deranged culture warrior.

But now? I dunno. I'm seeing more and more open criticism of big hollywood brands, and some of it is coming from people who are not easily dismissed. Examples:

The last one was what inspired me to write this post. Lots have people have already criticized Star Trek over the years, most notably the RedLetterMedia guys who kinda got famous from it. But I associate most of them with the online right. This is a 4 hour review from someone who doesn't normally do movie reviews, and she felt compelled to keep saying how she normally loves seeing pro-diversity left wing messages in Star Trek. But it's such an amazingly bad series that even its target audience can't defend it. I'm not woke, but I used to love Star Trek as a kid. Picard season 1 was so terrible I refused to watching anything after that, and it made me completely hate the franchise as a whole. I know that "some people say" that it got better, or that some other new Star Trek shows are good, or whatever. I don't care, I hate that pile of garbage so much that I'm never giving them another dollar or view unless they publically apologize for it. It felt like someone (maybe Patrick Stewart? Maybe Alex Kurtzman? Maybe all the Star Trek actors who have been stuck doing silly conventions with crazy fans for decades?) genuily hated their fanbase and wanted to give them the finger.

I don't know. Maybe I'm being too optimistic here. But I feel like we've finally crossed the threshold where everyone is fed up with Hollywood's crap. They've taken pretty much every bit of pop culture we loved as children, and burned it all down to make a quick buck. They kept recycling the same crap in their little clique of Jewish Hollywood elites and refused to listen to any criticism. You can only keep doing that for so long before the audience gets sick of it.

And at long last, we can finally agree that the new Star Trek movies are bad, right?

It seems to me that hollywood is currently ongoing somewhat of a hangover moment: a lot of people there got really high on ideology in 2019-2021 and now that the high has subsided they're scrambling to fix the mess. Hence the acolyte getting canceled, borderlands and the marvels getting dumped without advertising, snow white, blade and captain america getting long delays and reworks, etc...

But it doesn't mean they won't get high again in the future. In fact I would say that for movies at least, it is guaranteed: they codified their DEI in the academy awards rules. What are they going to do? Make movies that can't get an oscar? I don't think so. I wouldn't be surprised if the movie-making side of hollywood is just going to slowly die and become more and more woke in the process.

Picard season 1 was so terrible I refused to watching anything after that, and it made me completely hate the franchise as a whole. I know that "some people say" that it got better, or that some other new Star Trek shows are good, or whatever

Season 2 is actually way worse. I was actually of the opinion that season 1, for all its faults, showed promise. Season 2 is terrible. It gets better with season 3, actually, season 3 is even good if you don't think too hard about some things. If you ever reconsider, skip season 2.

One important angle to the problem of Hollywood being woke and out of touch is that it’s been exacerbated by intensified political self-sorting in different industries including Hollywood. I imagine it’s actually gotten harder to find competent conscientious screenwriters young screenwriters in LA who aren’t politically progressive. So even if you want to appeal to middle America, it may be hard to find people able to do so with requisite skills and experience.

I don't think the problem is being able to find talent. I think they genuinely don't care anymore. Its like how government ambassadorships are usually given to party insiders and weathy donors as a reward, and if they happen to actually be good at the job that's just a happy little accident. These big media franchises have become so big, "too big to fail," that the people in charge can do whatever they want and the fans would still just buy it anyway.

It’s not just self-sorting — Hollywood has been intentionally purging itself of right-wing talent for far longer than the term ‘woke’ has even existed. The rural purge happened in the early 70s.

Any inability of Hollywood to appeal to middle America is its own fault. If they’re suffering for it now, it’s just the chickens of decades of purposeful ideological and cultural homogenization coming home to roost.

As long as they can keep anyone else from making money by appealing to the people they don't want to appeal to, they're fine with it.

Strictly speaking, who is losing here? The progressive media elite say they care about fulfilling the market demand of the hidden woke masses screaming for representation, and will whine that normies don't give a shit about lousy shows, but in the end the only opinion that really affects the media elite is their own peers. The hundreds of millions of dollars burnt on progressive shows shows up as a line item on some production companies balance sheet that disappears into a thousand hollywood bank ledgers as accounting aether.

This money was never theirs to curate, manage or be responsible for. Make the highest grossing R rated movie ever? Pandering to incel chuds (Joker) or manchildren (Deadpool). Lose a billion dollars with your female and minority heavy slopfest? The Marvels/WW84 was never for the men anyways and also its their fault for not supporting it so just keep slaying kween, its all good.

Its not like anti-wokeness is an automatic money printer. James Gunns Suicide Squad lost money while incredibly woke Avatar 2 made money, but neither director is playing the media victimization game. For video games Cliff Blezinski and Randy Pitchford are whiners complaining that modern gamers are woke pussies who like the marvel aesthetic, while Kill The Justice League is a flailing shitpile with defenders playing defense for uglified women.

The hollywood elite are all playing social games with each other and burning some index funds capital while clogging up our media with trash. They don't actually care about us, and are not obligated to actually deliver shit the audience cares about. Crash winning an Oscar was the start of the end, and our shows have been continually enshittified as a result.

It's worse than that. They actively don't want the wrong sorts of people liking their shows, because that would look bad to their peers. Trump supporters shouldn't have things they enjoy, and you shouldn't make things for them. Leaving that money on the table is the moral thing to do. You don't want to be that guy who the far-right online trolls like RLM are saying good things about.

You can go back well before Trump or modern era. The Rural Purge was a deliberate removal of still-popular and still-profitable television shows that cut not just rural media in general in favor of urban, but also greatly reduced regional representation. The nominal justification was in pursuit of younger audiences, but the executives also reportedly hated the format/genre of rural-representation, and given that this was during the era tv-centralization in the United States, that was the ultimate sort of cancellation.

Strictly speaking, who is losing here?

I don't know. I have a sense that Hollywood inside baseball is a strange, insular thing and not really legible to outsiders. Like you said, the execs making the business decisions aren't really risking their own money, and Disney has so many bllions that even a hundred million isn't such a big deal to them. And the artists making the shows clearly aren't that concerned with the aesthetic concerns of us plebs. I'm reminded of that Michael Chrichton quote, where he says there are things in Hollywood that are obvious to him as in insider, but which get reported completely backwards in the news. So I'm inclined to agree with you that it's all some internal status game. But tastes can change.

And to be clear, I'm not (just) mad at those things because I disagree with their politics. I genuinely think those are terrible movies. They have bad plots, bad characters, bad dialogue, and often even bad at basic filmmaking stuff like editing, camera angles, and sound mixing.

I tend to think it's the bad film-making ruining things, not the woke. The original Star Trek was pushing all sorts of boundaries (i.e. "woke" for it's era), but it holds up because the writing is good, and the characters are amazing.

But they went into it saying "I want to write a great sci-fi story that is also diverse", not "I want to write a diverse sci-fi show". The goal was to make a good TV show, not to ensure that black lesbians got more air-time.

A lot of shows these days start with the premise "what if we did X, but 'diverse.'" There's no thought to the characters beyond some token diversity labels - god, when was the last time we saw a Strong Female Character that wasn't basically interchangeable with every other Strong Female Character? But Uhura? She was an actual character, and she existed because it made sense for her to be in the story. She reacted how Uhura would react, not following a generic Strong Female Character script.

(I feel like the recent "all female" Ghostbusters was the best example of this: they swapped the genders, but somehow that had absolutely no effect on the rest of the script. They didn't bother to write interesting new female characters, or even to explore how gender-swapping might affect the existing plot.)

But they went into it saying "I want to write a great sci-fi story that is also diverse", not "I want to write a diverse sci-fi show". The goal was to make a good TV show, not to ensure that black lesbians got more air-time.

It's probably further up the pipeline, too. They're recruiting writers who aren't particularly good at their trade, but they have the right politics and personal identity, so they get hired.

The backlash won't just be criticism, it will be creation. It won't just be negation, it will be renaissance. It won't just be tearing down, it will be building up.

I'm not going to be really optimistic about backlash until I see actually good anti-woke art being made. Stuff like BAM or the collected works of Yarvin are a start, but I want to see a creative imaginary.

And Christian entertainment is getting more common.

what is BAM? google search is failing me on that one.

Bronze Age Mindset, Bronze Age Pervert's book. A fun little read on PDF. I'm sorta using it as a stand-in for all the 4chan philosophy majors out there, who have scribbled fun little weirdo screeds and incredible credos. But they're the background, not the immortal art itself. Yarvin and Scott Alexander aren't the thing itself, they're the kind of guys who are background to background, your favorite author's favorite author.

IF the anti-woke backlash hits for real, people will read stuff like that when they get deep into studying the masterpieces that come out of it and they want to see the thinker that inspired the intellectual atmosphere. The White Panther Party to understanding Kick Out the Jams. Some of them might make it.

Ah OK. I've heard of it but I would never think of it from just the acronym.

Bear in mind, it can take time for aesthetic taste to change. So many artists who are now famous died poverished and unknown during their own life. And others who were popular in their time are now mostly forgotten.

Bronze Age Mindset (BAM), the principle written work of Bronze Age Pervert (BAP)

I loved the new Star Trek films and hated the new series’.

And I love TNG & DS9.

Sooooo, no.

Agreed otherwise mostly - but Tarantino didn’t watch Toy Story 4 because he loved 3 so much.

Personally I... enjoyed the new Star Trek films, in the sense that I thought they were a fun way to spend two hours but will probably never watch them again. But I absolutely hate the new series. So... I think you and I are in agreement?

Have you watched SNW? Disco I stopped watching after a few episodes. Picard was garbage for 2/3 seasons. But SNW was decent.

SNW wasn't bad. In the he broader context of this thread, though, I think it's interesting that what I saw as the most culture-warry episode (refugee courtroom drama) was also probably the weakest, least engaging one as well.

Star Trek works best when it has a positive vision of the world that it wants to portray. That vision may be fully automated gay luxury space communism, but at least that vision exists, and a solid narrative flows from it when the writers respect it.

Agreed 100%. That was by far the weakest and was the most “message” episode of that series.

It is ironic because two of the strongest TNG episodes were court room episodes (The Drumhead and The Measure of the Man). These episodes dealt more with abstract principles instead of shoe horning in the latest thing.

I haven't, and probablly won't. i'm just totally burned out on that entire franchise now.

Jewish Hollywood elites

Hollywood is, as @SteveKirk suggests, less Jewish today than at any time since the 1930s. A combination of the streaming wars (the leading streamers controlled by Reed Hastings, of OG Boston Brahmin WASP stock, and Jeff Bezos, who’s a mix of things but certainly not Jewish), DEI and long-term secular decline in Ashkenazi intellectual performance due to intermarriage has seen to that handily.

I do think we've reached some sort of inflection point. There can never be another The Marvels, there can never be another The Acolyte. They can only take so many nine-figure bombs directly on the chin, and the ones they've already taken have exposed certain truths.

It turns out that no, men will not automatically turn up for literally anything with the right brand name on it. Yes, you actually need to appeal to them on a continuing basis. No, women don't actually want to see male-coded space warrior bullshit but now with empowered lesbians of color. Women don't give a single shit about that kind of thing.

Popular media discourse likes to focus on the white male chuds who are constantly mad about all these shitty movies and shows, after all they are the ones making all the noise, but it's that silent overwhelming apathy from women that really left "modern audience" advocates up shit creek. They gambled billions on the idea that a bunch of LGBT activists knew what the female audience wanted, and they lost.

The other thing that's changed is that the "product not bad, audience just bigoted" defense has finally reached expiration even with dumbshit Reddit normies. The cancellation of The Acolyte really brought this to a head, with the press and the actress herself going out of their way to blame "a torrent of alt-right bigotry" blah blah blah, and people just weren't having it. You could see them in the /r/television thread going "Wait a minute... I think they just say this every time something is bad!" as their brains finally caught up to eight years ago.

Captain America 4 is going to come out next year and bomb, at which point the entire MCU theatrical slate for the last couple years will have consisted of Deadpool & Wolverine's white male asses sitting on a pile of a billion dollars, bracketed by humiliating diversity flops. Watching the usual suspects in the media struggle not to notice is going to be interesting.

They gambled billions on the idea that a bunch of LGBT activists knew what the female audience wanted, and they lost.

I should look up how many major feminist figures are lesbians cause I have seen this claim before: that feminism is skewed by lesbian attitudes. But it isn't even just LGBT activists. Someone like Rachel Zegler is, AFAIK, straight. And yet she disdains the classic Snow White story's romantic elements because what's important is that Snow White becomes a real leader.

Well, for most people, the actual point of most stories is not to become a king or queen since they won't, the romance is the most real thing in the story. Zegler, on the other hand, can hope to reach those heights.

They're making movies for themselves, not the audience.

The cancellation of The Acolyte really brought this to a head, with the press and the actress herself going out of their way to blame "a torrent of alt-right bigotry" blah blah blah, and people just weren't having it.

Half-white, affluent actress using the plight of dead underclass blacks to whine about racists not liking her show was too much even for normies.

Collier’s review came up in my YouTube feed a few days ago, and I’d never heard of her before. I ended up watching the whole four hours that same evening. If you’re like me, a Star Trek fan disillusioned by all the recent series, it’s a good watch.

This one has some things you won’t have seen before from channels like RLM. For example, she drops quotes from Patrick Stewart’s autobiography that give an insight into what went on in the creative process. Also some details on his personal life that make me deplore him even more than I already did.

While I’m done with Star Trek I still find Star Trek criticism fun and compelling. It’s cathartic and a verification that I’m not crazy.

The YouTube algo must have identified and hit all of us with the same recommendation. I did precisely the same thing. She actually reminded me a lot of Jenny Nicholson, whom I've watched a bunch of stuff from. I assumed that's why I she was inmy feed. I was surprised when I looked up Collier to find that she was a PhD and Science commentator and not a media reviewer.

To this point in my life, I've probably watched 10x the amount of ST:Discovery dissection than I have the show itself.

Yeah I think I'm pretty much on the same page as you. She's not a media critic at all, she normally does science education stuff, but it's obvious that she was a huge fan as a kid and put a lot of time and effort into that critique.

They kept recycling the same crap in their little clique of Jewish Hollywood elites and refused to listen to any criticism.

You can't blame the Jews for this. It's a global thing.

Only more evidence of the power of global sionism!!

Just like how systemic racism can be perpetrated by a black cop, it turns out systemic Judaism can be perpetrated by goyim. It has to be true, because you can't falsify it!

Ultimately, Hollywood is there to make money. Since activists will keep pushing and pushing until someone stops them, I guess it was inevitable that eventually there would be pushback from the viewers and therefore those who hold the purse-strings. When Disney spends $180 million on four hours of television, even they are going to care if nobody watches it. When Amazon spends $700 million on a series that gets outwatched by a car man running a farm badly, the business people notice these things.

One benefit of the streaming age is that series don't need to appeal to everyone, they just need to appeal to their market. If modern political correctness was as strong during the linear TV age, it could have been worse. We only had four channels to choose between when I was growing up, I can't imagine how it would have been if every single one of them was forced to include 1/4 black people in every Regency drama or sassy girlbosses or an inexplicably large number of gays.

I think the future of streaming is like Youtube. Hyper-specific niches and sub-brands determined by the algorithm. Sure, there won't be a common media culture, but that ship has already sailed anyway.

They kept recycling the same crap in their little clique of Jewish Hollywood elites and refused to listen to any criticism.

I was onboard with this post, but this came a bit out of left field and seems largely unrelated to the main thrust of your argument.

Yes, Hollywood is disproportionately controlled by Jews, so it's strictly true that Jews are responsible for recent trends in Hollywood slop.

But Hollywood has been disproportionately controlled by Jews for as long as Hollywood has been a thing. From Goldwyn to Wilder to Spielberg, Jews were responsible for some of the most beloved films in the American canon.

Whatever the underlying cause of the downturn in quality in mainstream American cinema, you can't just point to the religion or ethnicity of the people in charge. They have the same religion and ethnicity as the people who were in charge when Hollywood was good.

Yeah I hesitated a bit about whether to mention it. But I felt it necessary to, um, "notice" that this isn't a broad representative slice of America doing this stuff. It's a very niche, inbred culture of people who grew up in Hollywood and all know each other because of their family/religious connections. Maybe it worked out OK in the past because they were talented, but at this point it's just nepotism.

I would actually be interested in whether the Hollywood decline coincided with a loss of Jewish control, like it did with the universities.
In both cases it always seemed like they kept a tight leash on the pet elements that could harm profits/donations: Hakeem Jeffries got the "woah there sambo" treatment in the 90s once he clarified that "soulless white ice people" included the jews.

Once the grievance-studies departments took over the admin staff, the Rudenstines and Bacows couldn't stop Harvard going Gay.

Perhaps Harvey Weinstein's casting couch was the one remaining meritocratic hiring process in Hollywood?

Hollywood is turning to garbage because it’s now run primarily on nepotism, connections, blackmail and propaganda. The Acolyte is a good example of this. The showrunner/writer was Harvey Weinstein’s personal assistant. She likely got this opportunity as a bribe to keep her quiet because she knows where some of the proverbial bodies are buried (blackmail). The lead actress Amandala Sternberg is then selected because her parents have industry connections and she’s from a racial demographic that Hollywood favors (connections, propaganda). The supporting actress is hired because she’s married to the show runner (nepotism). The male supporting lead Lee Jung-jae seems to have been selected mostly due to talent. Notice that we are now four rungs down into the selection process and this is the first time that vocational talent seems to have been considered at all. And from everything I’ve seen in reviews left and right, he’s the only bright spot in this whole shabby enterprise. Many many projects are like this now. In the early days of silent filmmaking up until the 2000s, who got to make movies was primarily dependent on talent and sales. Now it’s like a late feudal monarchy or the Soviet Union. The number of Jews has mostly remained constant and I don’t think it’s a factor in the early success or the later decline at all.

Lee Jung-jae

I find it amusing that the only two watchable people in this atrocity were east asian males.

Hollywood is turning to garbage because it’s now run primarily on nepotism, connections, blackmail and propaganda.

I don't know about blackmail, but wasn't Hollywood always run on nepotism, connections, and propaganda?

Dafne Keen as the young jedi girl also brought her A game, and Carrie Ann Moss also brought gravitas. Both could work with facial expression, body language and limited dialogue to still bring character and intent.

You know, acting.

A good actor can be a shining gem in a bad script, but it just highlights how shit the script is and how much of a slog it is to get through. Bad actors in bad scripts just become exhausting, and right now there are no good young black actresses. Zoe Saldana and Zendaya are above average but not Halle Berry or Angela Bassett level, and Dominique Tipper is decent but can't do dialogue. Every other young black woman is some flavor of 'repressed racial rage' and can't fucking smile or joke because that's white supremacy or something. (Note: I heard good things about Abbott Elementary so maybe black talent is concentrated in comedy AS USUAL).

The Noticing variable for an enshittified show is a young black woman who don't take no shit from no man. Scifi is especially guilty of this, and thats why Discovery, Acolyte and Obi Wan sucked balls.

Interesting, I just realized the Expanse (which I really enjoyed) subverted this by having that character in the first few episodes, and then having her fall in love with and becoming a supporting partner with the (white male) lead. But then again, the show writers were constrained by the source material so probably they shouldn't get any credit.

Eh, they can get credit. Her name is Naomi Nagata, and could easily have been asian. They got an indian guy to play a texan hick as well, and no one really gave a shit because the series cleaved its racial differences as space palestine vs 2 faraway superpowers. In fantasy all colors of humanity unite to be racist against orcs, and speciecism is more appealing in scifi than racism still.

Not to the extent that it is now. If you look at biographies for actors and actresses before the 2000s, most of them were nobodies who broke out. Now they’re all some other famous actor’s son or daughter. Directors and producers usually got experience on smaller films or TV and then had one project that got really popular, catapulting them into the big leagues.

This was my question. If anything I'd assume it was worse in the past, given lack of regulation and transparency.

There has been an exponential increase in nepo-babies though, which is in a way only natural as time goes on and the industry grew but it also shows the lack of meritocratic guardrails in the industry.

Maybe there's a synthesis here: Hollywood did use to be pretty corrupt and nepotistic in a way that everyone knew about, but now it's corrupt and nepotistic in a different way we're not aware of.

This is an intriguing take, and one which—ironically—brings to mind a certain argument advanced by antisemites of the European paleoconservative ilk, viz. that the Enlightenment techniques of using reason and logic to question longstanding social norms were at least tolerable in the hands of Christian/Christian-heritage thinkers, who held an almost innate (if unconscious) sense of where to draw the line and stop applying the culture of critique, lest they rend Western society apart entirely. Jews, on the other hand, possessing no such intuitive metis, blew past all Christian guardrails in their blind zeal to make everything rational, scientific, legible—whence the horrors of checks notes communism and the Frankfurt School.

Jews have never been in a proper standpoint to understand Christian morality because they're the outgroup. All moral systems have profound flaws when viewed from the outside. I don't care what gentiles have to say about Jewish culture either because there's minimal chance they really get it.

I do think there's something to the argument that Jews are more prone to fall for the more excessive varieties of left-wing bullshit because they're much more culturally predisposed towards notions of collective (familial, racial, class) based consciousness, guilt, virtue, etc. than the wider West.

Except wokeness in practice isn’t really big into collective responsibility/guilt. It’s all about what you’re owed. A lot of it is actually quite individualist.

And what is the basis of this alleged debt?

It is rarely anything the claimant themselves have done, its all "you owe me because somone who looked vaguely like you wronged someone who looked vaguely like me 100 years ago" or "i deserve to have my choices validated because of [insert group membership here]".

The view isn’t too far from that expressed by various reaction-adjacent Jewish people. In any case, as one myself, I’m skeptical that Jews have any particularly great insight into Jewish culture that gentiles don’t (and vice versa).

I agree, Jews don't know where to stop in their criticisms. But that's a universal human trait. The problem is not "Jews like to destroy other moral systems" but rather "two or more distinct moral factions are incompatible with a healthy society and one will always try to trounce the other". To disdain them for refusing to integrate is natural, but on the inside there's an obvious tension of "Should we ever fully integrate, we may get targeted again but with our now weak communal bonds we'll be far more vulnerable." The best criticism you can give is that modern America doesn't seem like the Jew-persecuting type, but this cycle is so ingrained in them that mindless adherence to "They want to kill us!" is slightly justified. But I'm not in the position to fully dissect all that

This is largely Solzhenitsyn’s argument and is implicit in Churchill’s writing on European Jewishness. I don’t think it’s necessarily antisemitic, again Moldbug comes pretty close to advancing it now and again and if anything the most hardcore antisemitic dissident rightists of the MacDonald school usually dispute it. Essentially Jews embraced liberal ideas both more zealously and more literally because of a combination of their own desire (hardly surprising) to move beyond the previous status quo in European Christian-Jewish relations and because of the specific way in which criticism and commentary upon the Talmud was central to Jewish intellectual culture.

I don’t think it’s necessarily antisemitic, again Moldbug comes pretty close to advancing it now and again

I agree that it's not necessarily antisemitic, though I think Moldbug is not the best example to use here. I've always found his disavowal of extra-Overton-window takes (on HBD, liberal democracy, and antisemitism) to be lukewarm at best and performative at worst. My pet theory is that it's a kind of Kolmogorov complicity by proxy: though he's far from the levers of power himself and (genuinely, as far as I can tell) professes no desire to get closer, he doesn't want guilt by association to tarnish the prospects of any politico who openly touts him as an influence.

the most hardcore antisemitic dissident rightists of the MacDonald school usually dispute it

This is news to me; I wasn't aware that the MacDonald school* even knew about this argument, let alone disagreed with it. What's their take?

*Not to be confused with Hamburger University

Lots have people have already criticized Star Trek over the years, most notably the RedLetterMedia guys who kinda got famous from it. But I associate most of them with the online right.

This will be a bit of a nitpicky response since I'm a huge RedLetterMedia fan. But I just wanted to call out that they got famous for their Star Wars reviews. They did a lot of Star Trek reviews, but that was mostly of the next gen movies, and I don't think those reviews are too famous.

Also, they are definitely not right-wing. They're pretty centrist/apolitical, while sometimes mentioning that other people care about politics, but sometimes they definitely lean more towards liberal points. For example, they frequently talk about diverse casting as not necessarily a bad thing. But half of their members lean more liberal (Rich Evans and Jack) and half of them are slightly closer to the center.

Rich is pretty clearly an extant member of the old school, classic internet atheist-libertarian-contrarians (the two things that seem to get his goat the most are organized religion and new-wave mumbo jumbo). If he didn't vote for Ron Paul back in the day I'll eat my hat.

Like someone else mentioned, I definitely get the sense Mike is more woke-averse than he lets on, but smartly hides it or masks it under more innocuous complaints. He is by far the funniest, and a lot of that comes from being clearly unconcerned with being PC. This is even more clear if you have the Patreon and can see the outtakes. Like you said, I definitely wouldn't go so far as to say he's "right wing" though. Probably close to Rich's libertarian, but softer on religion; lapsed catholic vibes.

Jay is the hardest to read. To me he comes across as a truly centrist/apolitical guy who probably hangs around a lot of lefty artistic types, which rubs off on him, but at the same time is too contrarian to really buy into any of it, on either side. He just wants to watch his violent sex-weirdo movies in peace, and dislikes the scolds on either side that might get in the way of this.

Jack and Josh are pretty standard and openly left/liberal. Usually doesn't get in the way of the comedy though. Usually.

I think the big thing about them, and one of the things that makes them great, is Mike and Jay are the rare online content creators that don't appear to be very-online themselves. They seem genuinely and refreshingly ignorant of a lot of the underlying internet culture war BS, outside of where it intersects with a particular movie they may be interested in. It's rare to find such a genuinely apolitcal space online these days, especially with as long as they've been around. Most have either bought into the "woke" framework, or specifically positioned themselves as being "unwoke" and gotten into the right wing grift. Probably helps that they are older, more Gen-X than millennial.

I'm pretty sure "But I associate most of them with the online right" was referring to "Lots [of] people have already criticized Star Trek over the years" and not RLM specifically.

They are old fat midwesterners who dress as blue collar repairmen in their movie warehouse dungeon and don't breathlessly celebrate 'representation'. As far as wokes who worshipped Lindsay Ellis till Rayagate are concerned, these old white men might as well be MAGA redhats.

Also, RLM skewered girlGhostbusters ,Star Trek Discovery and Last Jedi/Rise of Skywalker, the originators of 'fans hate their white male.heroes being replaced with strong women and blacks!' anti-criticism card. Since RLM was the only platform with significant reach to beyond weird film autists, they caught the ire of progressives.

Also, RLM skewered girlGhostbusters ,Star Trek Discovery and Last Jedi/Rise of Skywalker, the originators of 'fans hate their white male.heroes being replaced with strong women and blacks!' anti-criticism card

That's true, but they frequently call out people as garbage, who are anti these movies on the basis of hating feminism/woke ideology. And I remember when they were excusing a lot of what Brie Larson said in her rant as "she didn't really mean that, she just put her foot in her mouth". That's not to say I think they're progressives, I think they really try to take a middle ground most of the time, or are just kinda checked out.

Edit: see time 13:00 here https://youtube.com/watch?v=9pQNYeOEFJc&t=780

RLM has consistently dunked on whiny fanboys crying about Canon or muh blacks and girls, and especially mindless Consume Product fanboys. But RLM also doesn't hold back from criticizing mid products and calling them shitty even if they have a protected class in the forefront, especially Star Trek Discovery.

Perhaps the nuance here is that RLM has not actually come out as anti-woke, but that RLM has not onboarded the Message consistently pushed out by 2016-era progressives smirking about how all these legacy franchises were being replaced with new hip exciting Modern Audiences. The media/academic elite narrative came first: these legacy franchises with shitloads of money were ripe for being replaced by minorities and women for social messaging to be readily absorbed by fanboys hungry for content.

Of course, the problem for that logic is that fanboys are no longer restricted to whatever slop is out on the theaters or newly released or even in print. Torrents of legacy shows exist, reducing even the friction of going to Blockbuster and hoping the DVD for some oldass show still exists. I don't think ANYONE here on this board would have watched any Star Wars show without their dad or friend digging up an old copy of the Original Trilogy to let John Williams hit us right in the jimmies. Fans don't need to be wheezing 80 year olds trying to capture the magic of the 60s, they can watch legacy shit. The existence of RLM and other media critics (left and right) who can say 'hey this new thing is not like the old thing' is poison to new talent that want to force their relevance into the modern cultural landscape.

For the sin of knowing the past and not really giving a shit about the future, RLM is an enemy. Good thing they can just keep repairing that VCR to time travel to the good old days when men were alcoholic sex perverts and women didn't exist.

Yeah I didn't mean to hold up RLM as an exemplar of the online right. More like, they made an impact criticizing pop-culture franchises, and lots of other people followed in their wake, and most of those others were on the rightwing. But like the other person said, RLM is not explicitly left-wing, and in today's world, that pretty much makes them right-wing by default.

And ill nitpick you right back and say they started with their star trek movie reviews, and got a pretty decent following from them (including me) before they did the star wars ones (which admittedly got a much bigger reaction)

Ah ok, you got me there. I don't remember their star trek next gen movie reviews being that popular, but I wasn't really paying attention to them back then so you're probably right.

I think Mike is keeping his power level hidden.

He’s Polish and openly believes in ghosts. He’ll be back in the pews and reciting the creed soon, if he’s not already.

RLM’s media criticism is pretty traditional as it is. For a movie to work, it needs a certain narrative structure, should have setups and payoffs, etc. One of their compliments they give is “it’s a movie” where so much of what they review lacks the necessary elements to even be called a movie.

Underneath it all they’re really talking about truth, beauty, and goodness.

Might be but I don't think he's keeping too much hidden. Seems like a slightly lapsed traditional liberal that's keeping his head down to me.

I'd agree with that. But I don't think he seems right wing. He is always talking about how much he loves the Star Trek next gen liberal "positive future" values. There's a lot of progressivism that is kinda baked into that worldview.

I know that’s the general consensus. But it seems to me it misses the huge point that technological change likely changes economic systems. If you move to what seems like a post scarcity, then you likely abandon capitalism. But that doesn’t mean you abandon capitalism before you move to a post scarcity economy. That is, ST’s (incoherent) communism doesn’t address today.

I'd say there's very little progressivism baked into Star Trek (at least up to ds9, which is the only stuff I've seen). There's no notion of affirmative action. People are subordinate to their superiors. Race and gender is simply not salient at all.

Here's the classic scene: https://youtube.com/watch?v=HKII3sFUCgs?feature=shared

Acting commander Data (a (simulacrum of) a white man) takes Whorf (an Underrepresented Minority in Starfleet) into his office to give him a dressing down about being insubordinate. Whorf takes it like a man and apologizes. Could such a scene be made today?

Race and gender is simply not salient at all.

Relative to the time period this was extremely progressive.

There's a reason Martin luther king jr. famously publicly fanboyed over star trek.

I think the main difference is you're used to post 2010 ish idea's of DEI, and those are definitely much different from the 1960s progressivism in star trek

It seems to me that "treat people as individuals rather than members of groups" is the sine qua non of classical liberalism. Progressivism must necessarily be about the Marxist struggle of the oppressed (groups) versus the oppressor (group).

And that sort of classical liberalism was controversial in the 60's when Star Trek was doing it with the OS and, if not controversial, at least something people had in mind as a sore point when TNG was doing it in the 80's.

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It seems to me that "treat people as individuals rather than members of groups" is the sine qua non of classical liberalism.

Some would argue that it goes even further than that. If anything this is the sine qua non of enlightenment values and post modernism (of which Marxism is a sub school) is by its nature post/anti-enlightenment.

I don't think there is necessarily a contradiction there, especially for nostalgic media we loved in our youth. You can simultaneously enjoy the utopian idealism of a sci-fi show and don't have that reflect what you believe what current policy would be effective, especially not in all areas.

The depth of the spiritual rot is great enough to be noticed even by its proponents, but that doesn't mean it doesn't just get worse.

The underlying reasons for it are still there, the same talentless politicos are now entrenched in the production hierarchy and they're not giving up their seat.

There is some reason to be optimistic since the financial situation is now such that companies are habitually giving up on DEI and other nonsense aimed at courting activist investment.

I still think the most likely scenario is for some young upstart to poke at the whole rotten carcass of entertainment and collapse it with seemingly no effort. If young George Lucas was around today and managed to get some serious funding, he'd make bank. There's so much money on the table that institutions can't bring themselves to pick up.

What I'm seeing is that it started with (a) die-hard fans who would go see the latest "thing in franchise" no matter what and (b) progressives who would go see it to "own the chuds," and then give it critical acclaim and say that anyone who criticized it was just racist/sexist. But over time the right-wing chuds just stopped even bothering to complain, and the die-hard fans stopped watching. So there wasn't much for the progressive fans to do. It's not fun to watch a crappy movie and pretend you like it if you've got no righteous cause to fuel it.

Also kind of weird that Disney single-handedly controls so much IP. That should be a point of vulnerability. These days all the good stuff is coming from other countries.

These days all the good stuff is coming from other countries.

There are like 5 major countries that make interesting new IPs, The USA, Great Britain (which is so heavily tied with the US they may as well be one "block"), Japan South Korea and China. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-grossing_media_franchises Though really it's mostly Japan and The USA with South korea and china playing second fiddle.

Japan is being hard carried by video games anyway, if we limit ourselves to just television https://www.imdb.com/chart/toptv/?ref_=nv_tvv_250&sort=num_votes%2Cdesc it's almost 90% american/british made stuff. There are a few japanese cartoons in there and a small handful of korean dramas but it's predominantly american made stuff.

Japan is being hard carried by video games anyway, if we limit ourselves to just television https://www.imdb.com/chart/toptv/?ref_=nv_tvv_250&sort=num_votes%2Cdesc it's almost 90% american/british made stuff.

Doubtful a list with GOT in 1st place is of much use for anything. yeah, yeah the first few seasons are decent but if I'm reading the entries right, it comprises all the seasons, including the last one.

Another point against using that list as a comparison point between western series and anime in general is that the premier ranking list of the anime medium is MyAnimeList.net, doubtful you will find representative scores in imdb for anime outside of the overly mainstream series as Attack on Titan.

This isn't sorted by rating, it's sorted by popularity. there are 11 anime in the top 100 on IMDB. Attack on Titan, Death Note, One Piece, Full metal alchemist Brotherhood, One Punch man, Naruto, Demon Slayer, Dragon Ball Z, Cowboy Bebop, Hunter x Hunter, and Jujiutsu Kaisen. Those 11 are also extrmely high in popularity on MAL, main misses would be Sword art online, My hero academia Tokyo ghoul and Stein's gate.

japanese cartoons in there

How was this list generated? Anime is HUGE for young people but its very, very heavily pirated which may limit its appearances in some lists. It's also very often not of the best quality, even if beloved.

It's number of users who gave the show a rating.

Yeah anime's quality is pretty low overall, there's a reason there's a saying "this anime is trash and so am I". Look there aren't many what I'd consider "high class" anime. It's mostly wish fulfillment nonsense with little depth. At the same time you can find your wish fulfillment nonsense. Like me with the saga of tanya the evil and GATE thus the JSDF fought there.

Yeah some of (like barely any) is VERY VERY good, but Anime really hits for a lot of people and has huge cultural penetration.

The percentage of people under age 25 who know who Deku is is probably incredibly high, even in not very nerdy sub cultures, but if you aren't of that age or an anime fan.....not a blob of cultural relevance.

Yeah but for people over the age of 25, many would know about Pokemon, Dragon Ball Z, and Yu-gi-oh. I suspect that many adults (maybe above 5% of americans) would know the name Light Yagami or Eren Yaeger. (I'd definitely bet above 2% and around 10% is probably pushing it).

Pokemon especially is the single largest media franchise on the planet,

Noticed Time had Pikachu and Eevee covers last week.

I don't think I have seen anything noteworthy come out of China since Hero.

But Japanese anime/manga/videogames and Korean dramas/movies/music are definitely viable alternatives to the otherwise dominant American/British/Canadian cultural block.

Thank God.

yeah, I guess liking stuff like Attack on Titan or Death Note instead of House of Cards and Game of thrones does let you get through. (ok the anime I watched recently like Gate thus the JSDF fought there and The saga of tanya the evil are extremely niche shows for a narrow Audience aka me)

I remember that in the TCG sphere we have the "big 3" which is Magic the gathering, pokemon and Yu-gi-oh. MTG is american but at least the other 2 are Japanese. Pokemon is huge in the videogames sphere and even though the mainline games have been a letdown from a main storyline perspective, the side-parts have gotten a lot better.

I just await the time when high school dxd hits the mainstream and everyone freaks out about japan poisoning our youth.

"highest grossing media franchises" isn't a good way to judge art, IMO. It might be cliche, but I still like French movies, even though they don't gross so much. Also Italy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_Strangers_(2016_film)), Mexico (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bardo,_False_Chronicle_of_a_Handful_of_Truths), and... Uganda...!? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Killed_Captain_Alex%3F)

It’s interesting, in that it seems we aren’t at 2018 levels of fervour, but most of those names look like crotchety outsiders or no-name bloggers to me: GRR Martin is a British author with no real Hollywood connections and although QT has always loved Hollywood I got the impression he was an auteur who never really fitted in. And also, reading the article, QT didn’t criticise anything, he just said that 3 was perfect and he doesn’t want to see 4 even if it’s good because he liked how 3 ended.

If I were taking a bellwether of Hollywood opinion I would look at people like George Clooney, Oprah, Matt Damon, Di Caprio. Or perhaps they would be the last stones to roll?

EDIT: I am completely wrong about GRR Martin. I thought I’d heard somewhere that he was a Brit basing his books on the War of the Roses. Authors who are unhappy with how Hollywood handled their works are ten-a-penny and always have been.

Uh, GRR Martin is American and has been working in Hollywood for decades, long before he hit it big with Game of Thrones. It's very odd for him to publicly criticize his own baby. QT is a little old now but he's still a huge name, so the same thing applies.

I don't know why you'd look to aging actors who haven't been a big box office draw for a long time now, for opinions. They seem to just smile blandly for everything. So yeah, they'd be the last stones to roll- if they criticize something it'll only be long after everyone else has already done so.

It's very odd for him to publicly criticize his own baby.

He's complained before about the inability of Hollywood writers to avoid changing what they're adapting just to "make it their own" and no doubt GoT soured him a bit. So I'm not shocked that he has opinions about HOTD. It is odd, but mainly because he's a producer.

Wondering if someone from HBO is calling desperately.

Sorry about that, I made a mea culpa above.

My understanding is that people like Clooney and Oprah are the movers and shakers of Hollywood - the ones who decide who gets access and who introduce people to each other at parties. Grandees, in short. I would care about their opinions in the same way that I would care about the opinions of George Osborne / Tony Blair / Obama over some up-and-comer. They’re the ones who decide who ups-and-comes and who ups-and-downs.

To be honest, im just not plugged in enough to hollywood gossip to know. You might be right, i just dont know. The producers, especially, confuse me.

As I have accidentally made clear, neither am I! It came up a lot in the context of Prince Harry and Meghan Merkle trying to make a new life and career for themselves in LA, and being tentatively accepted at first before being shunned, so what I know is from the reporting on that.

Re: producers, I understand their role varies a lot depending on the producer and the film: sometimes the producer is the driving force behind the funding, the choice of director, the script, etc. and sometimes they're a glorified bookkeeper. But again, I'm not really a film guy.

GRR Martin is a British author with no real Hollywood connections

Are the two people with the same name? The author of the game of thrones is American.

No, I’m wrong, but thank you for the charity haha.

The last new star Trek movie came out, what, 10 years ago, and they weren't particularly woke anyways (by Star Trek metrics). The beef with them was they were shallow James Abrams action-fests, not that they were too woke. Star Trek has always been progressive. It just wasn't always so #CurrentYear.

My beef is with Star Wars, anyways. I very specifically got accused of "being against strong role models for girls" when I said The Last Jedi wasn't very good, and I've kinda never forgiven the world for that.

There's still a set of critics and influencers who will clap like circus seals at anything that vaguely alludes to capitalism bad or hwiteness bad,

If anything, I find The Last Jedi a very strange film to use as a vehicle for that criticism? The female characters in The Last Jedi aren't very good role models, even if all you value is strength!

The major female characters in The Last Jedi are Rey, who achieves very little in the story and whose primary moral struggle is to do with resisting the appeal of sexy Adam Driver; Rose, who is a sidekick whose big heroic moment is saving the life of the man she's in love with; Holdo, who makes a series of bad calls, is overwhelmed by the First Order, and has to sacrifice her ship just to give the other characters a chance to escape; and Leia, who we last see nodding to a young male hero and telling everybody to follow him. If you look at the heroes whose actions actually drive the plot or save the day, it's mainly Finn, Poe, and Luke.

As Adam Roberts put it:

It’s great to show the good guys being led by strong, confident women, but it would surely be more progressive if these leaders were not—whisper it—so incompetent. I mean, the First Order senior staff seem pretty incompetent, and exist in a state of constant sniping, upheaval and infighting, but there is, surely, a big difference between a (male) officer corps that is dysfunctional because they’re all so ruthless and personally ambitious, and a (female) officer corps that is dysfunctional because they just don’t have the ability to plan six hours into the future. Add to this that the female officer corps all have really great hairdos, and we are surely encroaching on Egregious Sexism.

I don't know, I just feel like if I were going to pick a mediocre-to-bad film to defend to the hilt on the basis of it having good role models for girls in the form of its strong female characters, maybe I wouldn't pick a film in which the two female leads are motivated in large part by their attraction to more proactive male leads, and where the female supporting characters are demonstrably bad at their jobs.

I might choose a film that actually has compelling, three-dimensional female characters with well-rounded motivations, who overcome various obstacles through their talent, courage, and virtue; or failing that, at least a film with female leads who actually succeed at things.

Well-spotted, but I'm sure the person who said that to me was basing it off a YouTube video about how only misogynistic chuds don't like Star Wars.

I don't really hate the new Star Trek movies, they were stupid but at least kinda fun. it's the new TV shows I can't stand. Like you said, they went all in on the "strong female role models" angle and it became impossible to criticize them. But they were also this joyless slog through a grimdark universe of unrelenting misery. I do think some critics are finally waking up to that, or at least new critics are appearing who have noticed that the core audience is fed up.

I really do think it's becoming a more "normie" opinion that the Star Wars sequels were bad. If anything I hear more praise for the prequels now, people appreciate them for at least trying to be fun and being their own weird quirky thing.

There was a great article in Social Matter(?) (possibly by David Grant?) charting the decline of American liberalism through Star Trek.

From Kirk lecturing aliens about democracy in front of the literal American flag, to TNG's mushy ethical navel gazing, to DS9's cynicism, to Voyager's "me and my tumblr mutuals against the galaxy" interpersonal drama.

TOS liberalism wasn't coherent, but it was muscular and sure of itself. After that everything was built on a foundation that was already being "deconstructed"

I wonder what the author would make of the new shift to Gaslight, Genocide, Girlboss.

It's ironic that you resent the latest Star Trek shows being unrelentlessly grimdark, which is true, because Star Trek was originally a very optimistic view of the future, but as @haroldbkny says above, that was largely a progressive worldview. Star Trek has always been very explicitly leftist, albeit center-leftist (the original premise being that progressive multicultural politics would transcend all and the Federation was basically a future United Nations, as the UN was supposed to operate and not as it really does). You are no doubt aware that it's famous for featuring the first interracial kiss on broadcast television, and many, many episodes from the various series have been essentially liberal talking points turned into sci-fi thought exercises (sometimes poignantly and sometimes in a very ham-handed fashion).

Gene Roddenberry was extremely liberal and very much "woke" by 60s standards. Deep Space Nine was not the first time that writers took a somewhat more critical view of the Federation and suggested maybe it wasn't the post-scarcity utopia that early series sunnily portrayed it as, but Star Trek was still supposed to represent a future that is positive and optimistic. Humanity will eventually get its shit together and work together as a species, and we will face external threats and have moral conflicts, but we'll resolve them rationally and humanely, and we'll be able to include other races as well, grant civil rights to androids, recognize the self-determination rights of less technologically advanced people, etc... All very liberal and woke, no?

The more recent series have felt like they were written by writers who resent this optimistic view of the future - specifically, the idea that a largely Western, liberal democratic society could actually produce something good. And so they have painfully deconstructed it, so now the Federation is shit, all the characters we knew and loved are dead or assholes, and there is certainly no "fun" to be had in a universe where Western Enlightenment still holds sway.

The path with Star Wars is similar though not as obvious because Star Wars was always less nuanced. It was a children's story of good vs. evil space wizards. The Jedi were never supposed to be perfect, but they were fundamentally good guys. But unproblemetized good guys (especially white men) are not in vogue any more, and must be deconstructed.

Thus we arrive at Rings of Power and the laughable "Orcs just want to raise their families in peace." The problem with this is not that the idea in itself is laughable. It's that the writers actually think they are doing something new and subversive here.

Look, way back in the 70s, D&D players were raising questions about the "Always Chaotic Evil" trope. Just why should every single Orc be born evil? Yes, in Tolkien they're "fallen" elves and basically a sort of artificial race, but in D&D and its many spin-offs, they were just another humanoid species and thus presumably had agency and free will, so.... Half-orcs were a playable race since the very early days, and they weren't required to be evil, so clearly Orcs don't necessarily have an "evil gene." Most explanations were something like "They're naturally brutish and stupid and live in a violent society" (raising all kinds of Implications that have become Discourse today), but even very non-woke D&D players in the 70s didn't find the idea of an Orc raised in a more civilized environment turning out to be a Paladin or something outrageous. And later games (Shadowrun, 1st edition published in 1988) and Orkworld (published by the insufferable John Wick in 2000) took an explicitly critical lens to the "always evil" trope and made all the races, if still archetypical, less stereotypical.

These "woke" writers everyone complains about aren't inventing anything new, is the problem, but they think they are the first people ever to have mind-blowing thoughts like "What if the Jedi got too arrogant?" or "What if Orcs aren't just mindless killing machines?"

All very liberal and woke, no?

Not really. Where's the eternal oppressor class, which must be forever blamed for every wrong? Where's selecting a specific group and declaring it forever tainted with past sins? Where's the identarian strife and the oppression hierarchy? Where's the guilt for past injustices, overwhelmingly driving any future decisions? Where's the affirmative action, land acknowledgements, deconstruction and destruction of every past achievement due to them all being oppressive, removal of monuments, rewriting of films and books? Where's the only cure for past discrimination being future discrimination? Where are the species quotas and quarterly reports about racial and species-al makeup of the command structure, the redshirt casualties and the promotion schedule from every captain? I mean, no starship even has a DEI officer! That's not even close to woke.

Troi was totally the ship's political officer though. You can't unsee it after you notice. Outside the command hierarchy but involved in decision-making, authority to interrogate anyone on board for problematic thoughts the computer caught them writing in their journal?

Could be. So they are much closer to early commie sci-fi - especially Soviet - which also often was very bravura and optimistic. Woke though naturally would tend to be much darker and depressing.

Oh god, now I'm gonna have nightmares about corporate HR ladies seeing right through my poker face because they can sense my feelings as they drop prog talking points at lunch.

I once read, somewhere, that sci-fi tone shifted hard in the very early 2000s and that that was the death blow for star trek. I think the blame was put on Battlestar Galactica being so successful in the reboot.

Galactica probably does deserve some of the blame, but I frankly suspect a lot of that was mostly just the post-9/11 zeitgeist (which itself influenced new!BSG). It felt like everything got darker, edgier, and more cynical around that time.

We Stargate fans blame it for killing that franchise too, except it was more the network wanting a series that focused more on the melodrama BSG had in its later (arguably worst) seasons than the classic SG technobabble optimism.

Honestly Stargate was a 'humanity, fuck yeah!' series that could easily have been darker and edgier and was probably trending that way anyways. The turn towards interpersonal melodrama was, however, baffling- I liked seeing American soldiers kicking ass in space, not some alien hangers on worrying about their personal problems.

It could easily have had a Space! Iraq storyline.

Some of Stargate SG-1's problems were also wanting to become Voyager of all things, rather than Battlestar Galactica. Some extent of that was probably inevitable as power inflation started giving the US military access to spaceships, superweapons, (those stupid zats), Jackson ascending so often it turned into a punch line, and so on, but a lot of the entire Ori plotline was trying so hard to be MagicBullshitBorg following in the tracks of Seven of Nine, without understanding why that worked (and so many other interpersonal melodrama bits of Voyager didn't work!).

There were definitely dark veins and they could have tried to balance things (or just kept "classic" SG and then added things like Universe).

But I think they were just embarrassed, it's a status thing. Stargate was essentially the sort of show people mean when they say "I don't like fantasy besides Game of Thrones". BSG and the praise it got gave them an alternative/pretext.

A shame it wasn't actually as popular or well-regarded as Game of Thrones.

Look, way back in the 70s, D&D players were raising questions about the "Always Chaotic Evil" trope. Just why should every single Orc be born evil?

I don't understand why Orcs have always been the go-to example for this. First of all the "Always Chaotic Evil" terminology only goes back to 2000 and was gone again by 2009 - it originates with the 3rd Edition Monster Manual introducing a bit more nuance into alignments, with the usual alignment now preceded by "Always" (for things like demons where that alignment was part of their nature), "Usually" (where it was more a case of strong cultural associations with that alignment), or the rarely-used "Often" (like usually but the association is much weaker). I think humans got "Often True Neutral" but I can't remember another case where "Often" was used.

And Orcs were firmly in the "Usually" bucket. You even gave some of the reasons for this. All over the Internet people talk like they got tagged "Always Chaotic Evil" and it's just not true! In both editions where that terminology exists they are "Usually Chaotic Evil". The problem they are referring to (EDIT: insofar as it ever existed, which wasn't very) was already fixed in the same book that originated much of the terminology used to discuss it.

I'll need to check the books when I get home, but off the top of my head, orcs themselves have never been Always Chaotic Evil. The language used for monster alignment has changed across the editions, but I believe you're correct that 3e introduced the 'Always [Alignment]' phrasing, and in 3e, orcs were not Always Chaotic Evil. Always Chaotic Evil was reserved for demons and a few other similar characters - monsters that are by definition evil.

Even prior to 3e, though, there was some nuance with orcs - they were presented as usually evil, but not always, and sometimes they were presented with a valid perspective of their own. I remember the origin story for orcs in 2e Forgotten Realms was reasonably sympathetic to them, suggesting that maybe the 'goodly' races really did screw them over, and orc aggression and hostility is a response to an initial divine division of the world that relegated them only to the wastelands, and miserable lives of violence and poverty therein.

More when I have the old sourcebooks to hand, I think, but as far as I'm aware now, ACE orcs is a strawman.

But as I grouched a little while back, I think today, even among D&D players, there's widespread illiteracy as to D&D's past, and a tendency for people to substitute an imagined caricature of mindless hack-and-slash for the game as it actually existed. ACE orcs fit the narrative if you believe that everything prior to 5e was troglodytic monster-murdering with no hint of story.

EDIT:

Okay, here we are.

AD&D1e and AD&D2e both just list orcs' alignment as "Lawful Evil". AD&D doesn't give frequency, but it does say in the introduction to the Monster Manual 1e "ALIGNMENT shows the characteristic bent of a monster to law or chaos, good or evil or towards neutral behavior possibly modified by good or evil intent", and for the Monstrous Manual 2e "ALIGNMENT shows the general behaviour of the average monster of that type". As such I don't regard either manual as indicating that all orcs are necessarily Lawful Evil.

I don't have the 3.0 Monster Manual to hand, but I do have 3.5. 3.5 lists orcs' alignment as "Often chaotic evil", so not only have they swapped from law to chaos, they've also qualified it. The glossary at the back of the book clarifies that "Often" means "The creature tends towards the given alignment, either by nature or nurture, but not strongly. A plurality (40-50%) of individuals have the given alignment, but exceptions are common."

The 4e Monster Manual just gives orc alignment as "Chaotic Evil" without further qualification, but the introduction does note explicitly "A monster's alignment is not rigid, and exceptions can exist to the general rule".

The 5e Monster Manual also just gives orc alignment as "chaotic evil", though its introduction also states, "The alignment specified in a monster's stat block is the default. Feel free to depart from it and change a monster's alignment to suit the needs of your campaign. if you want a good-aligned green dragon or an evil storm giant, there's nothing stopping you."

As far as I can tell orcs have never been rigidly boxed into a single alignment. They have always been presented with an evil alignment as the most common default for them, but anybody who says that orcs were ever presented as ontologically evil in all cases no matter what is telling a falsehood.

As far as I can tell orcs have never been rigidly boxed into a single alignment. They have always been presented with an evil alignment as the most common default for them, but anybody who says that orcs were ever presented as ontologically evil in all cases no matter what is telling a falsehood.

Even in 1st edition AD&D, no one thought "Alignment: Lawful Evil" meant there could be literally zero exceptions in all the multiverse, and the earlier editions of D&D were much more freewheeling in suggesting DMs just make up whatever they wanted ("rulings over rules"). People came up with reasons to have non-evil Beholders and Mindflayers, after all. The point of the trope is not that modern players think back in Ye Olden Days, it was Gygax Law that all Orcs must be Evil, but that a lot of players (remember, D&D was mostly played by young men, often tweens and teens) did take the rules pretty literally. Remember that Alignment Languages were a thing? (Don't know if they still are in more recent versions.) And Alignment itself was based on Moorcockian and Vancian ideas that implied they were mystical properties of the universe and thus a fundamental part of a character, not just a rough label to describe behaviors. There were complicated rules for changing alignments.

So in that context, labeling races in the Monster Manual as "Evil" was taken as a sort of metaphysical categorization. 5E, which as I understand it has moved towards a more "blank slate" model where races do not have attribute modifiers or alignments or class limitations, is largely a reaction against that.

"Hack and slash" gaming also existed, and described quite a few campaigns and convention games. It was so common as to be another trope. Of course this wasn't how the creators of D&D meant it to be, nor how it was presented in the books, and players and GMs frequently bemoaned "hack and slash" gaming. But they bemoaned it because it was common enough to generate semi-parodies like this.

I was done with D&D by 3rd edition, so I didn't even know how they mucked with the alignment system in later editions. But Orcs are the go-to example because even in earlier editions, they were a canonically "evil" race, like many others, but the ones even normies were likely to have heard of.

The only other race with as much resonance over this issue were the Drow.

The main bit of pre-2E orc lore I remember was an article in Dragon on their gods, most of which later showed up in books like Monster Mythology and thus became fairly canonical, if it wasn't already. Though skewing toward the violent and warlike compared to, say, elves, theirs were varied enough that even back then it didn't really support an "Always Chaotic Evil" interpretation.

Look, way back in the 70s, D&D players were raising questions about the "Always Chaotic Evil" trope.

No, they weren't. "Always __ evil" was a 3rd edition exclusive, and didn't apply to orcs anyway. Anyone who says this, particularly using the exact phrasing "Always Chaotic Evil", is probably quoting TV Tropes or imitating a meme copied from TV Tropes.

I was there, son.

Orcs were actually Lawful Evil in 1st and 2nd edition, if I recall. But that wasn't the point (as you are perfectly well aware). Whether or not the TV Tropes phrase existed, the issue did.

2nd edition: "Alignment shows the general behavior of the average monster of that type. Exceptions, though uncommon, may be encountered."

And this contradicts what I am telling you how? I know you love to think you have a gotcha that proves people are lying every time you find a single word that can be parsed in the most pedantic, literal fashion to contradict them, but reread what I wrote and then stop trying to die on a hill you already died on. "Always evil" monsters were a trope that was talked about in the 70s, it isn't something wokes discovered to make fun of on TVTropes in the 2000s. Dragon magazine published cartoons about it. People joked about it and made satirical adventures about at conventions. You are not being clever or getting applause from the crowd as you Au Contraire Mon Frere!

It's ironic that you resent the latest Star Trek shows being unrelentlessly grimdark, which is true, because Star Trek was originally a very optimistic view of the future

Sorry but how is that "ironic?" It's like you're saying that I'm "ironic" for hating new Star Trek for being something 100% against the core themes that it started with. That's not ironic that's just... natural? If anything I just want to acknowledge what a weird state we've arrived at, where these huge popular media franchises have been perverted into something that seems designed to antagonize all of its original fans, and we're not allowed to criticize them for it. I guess you could say it's our fault, as nerds, for not paying attention during high school English class- we were all so focused on the plot and worldbuilding that we missed what the teacher was saying how it's the theme and tones that really matter, so we let our ideological enemies take control of "our own" beloved media.

Like you said, it seems as though the writers hate optimism, hate fun, and genuinely hate anything good in life. I wouldn't mind so much if they just had a bunch of stupid plot holes. But these new sci-fi writers seem to genuinely want to inflict pain on their audience. I don't even know where they can go from here. Will the next season just be a long, extended, graphic scene of Patrick Stewart being raped? Because that seems to be the tone that they're going for.

Also like you said, "but what if the bad guys aren't really all bad?" is not really the innovative question that some writers think it is. It basically just marks the boundary between entertainment and literary fiction. But if you're going the literary route, you need to know that it's a tough road that will not be fun to follow, and you'll lose most of your audience along the way. Putting that into a normal genre fiction piece will destroy it.

The irony is in thinking it's progressivism that is making Star Trek grimdark. Of course I know some people think all liberality (even going all the way back to the Enlightenment) is an inevitable path to the grimdark authoritarianism we see today, but Star Trek was originally a very liberal vision. I guess technically it still is, unless you are one of us liberals who have become by modern progressive standards fascists. Though to be honest I haven't seen the last few shows or movies, so I only know what it's like from cultural osmosis and memes.

Also like you said, "but what if the bad guys aren't really all bad?" is not really the innovative question that some writers think it is. It basically just marks the boundary between entertainment and literary fiction. But if you're going the literary route, you need to know that it's a tough road that will not be fun to follow, and you'll lose most of your audience along the way. Putting that into a normal genre fiction piece will destroy it.

Strongly disagree with this. You can have complex, three-dimensional characters, like villains who have sympathetic motives or heroes who are flawed, in genre fiction. It doesn't all have to be black hats vs. white hats. "What if the bad guys aren't really all bad?" "What if Orcs aren't all evil?" "What if the Jedi fucked up?" Those are perfectly fine questions to introduce even into a genre set piece with bright lines between good and evil. The problem is not with introducing moral complication and nuance, the problem is with fundamentally rejecting the idea that "good" or "evil" exist, even within the context of a universe that was built on the premise of a conflict between Good vs. Evil. Deconstructing that and saying "Well, actually they're all just the same; Sauron vs. the Fellowship is like the Republicans vs. the Democrats, the Rebel Alliance vs. the Empire is like rooting for the Packers or the Cowboys... at the end of the day it doesn't matter who wins," that destroys the narrative unless you are just that level of cynical.

but Star Trek was originally a very liberal vision

Was it though...? It was set onboard a military ship, with a strict hierarchy, and the characters all strongly demonstrating classical virtues. It had some worldbuilding that could be seen as liberal, like the replicators that made everything free, but that's just sci-fi plot stuff. It certainly had some moments that would have been considered liberal for the 60s, like the famous "first interracial kiss on TV," but that was also, you know, a captain kissing his secretary. The themes of the show were classic western/hero's journey stuff, "wagon train to the stars." Most of the plots were along the lines of "a big bad Other shows up, and the heroic Captian Kirk must punch it to death."

What if the bad guys aren't really all bad?" "What if Orcs aren't all evil?" "What if the Jedi fucked up?"

The problem is, we get all that in real life. We look to entertainment to simplify and escape that sort of thing. If you want to write a story where the orcs aren't evil, it just ends up being a grimdark slog where Aragorn was ruthlessly genociding a sentient people and "we all need to feel sad, man, because that's just like what happened with the Native Americans, you know?" You can just read actual history for that. Or, perhaps, an avant-garde literary novel that assumes you've already read thousands of pages of both popular entertainment and criticism. It's not going to work for a normal human who just wants to experience the feeling of being heroic for once in their life, without having to feel guilt and shame for it.

Same thing with "what if the Jedi fucked up..." you mean like all politicians do? Just go watch the news for that. The Jedi were awesome as this mystical fictional ideal. We don't need to see that perverted into something corrupt. Surely you can find some other example of a corrupt politician, if that's what you're interested in.

edit: to me, that sort of criticism is like saying "what if the unobtanium is not really unobtainable?" It's not some profound insight, just poking at something that the writers used to tell an entertaining story in a simple way. Maybe that could be the basis for a great story, but you'd have to really think about why you want to tell that story, and make sure it's not just "because I want to depress the hell out of the audience."

Was it though...? It was set onboard a military ship, with a strict hierarchy, and the characters all strongly demonstrating classical virtues.

Those were not seen as incompatible with liberalism at the time.

It certainly had some moments that would have been considered liberal for the 60s, like the famous "first interracial kiss on TV," but that was also, you know, a captain kissing his secretary.

Harlan Ellison famously denigrated Uhura as a telephone operator, but she was not Kirk's secretary. The "secretary" position was filled by Yeoman Rand, who had a thing for Kirk (at least until "wolf" Kirk tried to rape her). Further, I don't think the idea that a power imbalance was inherently rape entered the mainstream until the 1970s. The past remains a foreign country.

The past remains a foreign country.

I think thats really the crux of it. I wouldnt argue that TOS star trek is some sort of alt-right bedrock, but it's hardly modern woke either. Even the existence of a heroic straight white male main character would invalidate that. It's... its own weird thing. A weird mix of ww2 nostalgia, 60s california hippies, and Gene Roddenberry just being weird.

The problem is, we get all that in real life. We look to entertainment to simplify and escape that sort of thing.

Mm, speak for yourself. Unambiguous Good Guys vs. Bad Guys can be fun sometimes, but not all of us want "simple" entertainment.

Introducing moral complexity and shades of gray doesn't mean you have to go all grimdark and nihilistic.

Agreed, but writers should think about why they're adding these "shades of grey."

Like, if I go to a bakery and buy sugar cookies, I expect them to taste sweet. Sweet tastes good. Perhaps it might be interesting, sometimes, to dump in chili pepper or coffee grounds or whatever and "subvert expectations" with complex flavors. But unless you really know what you're doing, it mostly just tastes bad.

JRR Tolkien was not a stupid man. He fought in WW1, and was well familiar with the horrors of war against a morally complex foe. But he still used orcs as a simple, pure evil, because that gave him the space to focus on other elements of the human condition. Saying "well what if the orcs arent pure evil" would overwhelm the rest of the story.

I actually had that happen in a DnD game once, sorta. We were being attacked by bandits, and knocked them unconscious. We were lawful good, so we couldnt just execute them. It basically turned the rest of the campaign into a boring slog as we ran a prison camp to try to keep these stupid NPCs alive, instead of doing any fun adventuring stuff. If I wanted to hear a story about the human nature in prison, there are other, better places for that.

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It's ironic that you resent the latest Star Trek shows being unrelentlessly grimdark, which is true, because Star Trek was originally a very optimistic view of the future, but as @haroldbkny says above, that was largely a progressive worldview.

Meh. It was also pretty reactionary. I'll even say most of it's optimism comes from rejecting progress.

Gene Roddenberry was extremely liberal and very much "woke" by 60s standards

So what? Things are what they are, not the direction and velocity with which they are moving. Woke progressives have no claim on Star Trek, whichis proven by them having to adjust it to fit their ideology, and breaking it in the process.

Meh. It was also pretty reactionary. I'll even say most of it's optimism comes from rejecting progress.

It's reactionary in the sense that, as harold says, Roddenberry himself (and probably most of the show writers) still had a positive view generally of democracy, law and order, American military power, and the military in general. But they assumed we'd continue down the progressive path on race relations, gender relations, abolishing inequality, etc.

So what? Things are what they are, not the direction and velocity with which they are moving. Woke progressives have no claim on Star Trek, whichis proven by them having to adjust it to fit their ideology, and breaking it in the process.

Well yes, my point is that the current woke movement is a rejection of the optimistic liberalism of the 60s. That wokeness is in fact very illiberal is not a new observation.

It's reactionary in the sense that, as harold says, Roddenberry himself (and probably most of the show writers) still had a positive view generally of democracy, law and order, American military power, and the military in general. But they assumed we'd continue down the progressive path on race relations, gender relations, abolishing inequality, etc.

It's a lot deeper then that. It's reactionary in the sense that it has respect for the limits nature places on humanity, that borders on religious, even if they're all superficially secular. They have the ability to rewrite DNA on the fly, hack into the nervous system, support lifestyles of endless hedonism and debauchery... and they never take the bait. If they used the technology they had to it's full potential (and/or in the service of self-actualization rather than higher ideals, as following progressivism would imply) the average episode would end up being a mashup between Black Mirror and The Garden Of Earthly Delights.

Well yes, my point is that the current woke movement is a rejection of the optimistic liberalism of the 60s. That wokeness is in fact very illiberal is not a new observation.

Then what was the point of mentioning it's relative "wokeness" in the 60's? You made it sound like there's something ironic about people bemoaning Current Year's Star Trek making a far-left turn.

To be fair, honestly most of us are in grimdark phase right now anyway because so much of our real world society is falling apart. You’ve undoubtedly been reading the descriptions of Philadelphia here. Or if not you’ve seen the ruins of most major cities with bars on the windows, trash in the streets, drug use and homeless people everywhere one looks. Where taking public transportation is an exercise in risk management during the day and unsafe at night. Where kids no longer expect to live as well as their parents even as they must work ever harder to not fall into poverty from the cost of living and debts and lack of real opportunities even though those kids worked extremely hard to get where they are. It is not exactly surprising that the grandkids of people who watched the original show resent that their grandparents believed in a hopeful optimistic future where there’s no poverty and people can live a life they want when the promise is not only no closer to being delivered, we’re actually farther away from many of them than we were in the 1960s.

Philadelphia was that way in the early 2000s too (it got better in the interim), worse before that or so I'm told, and media wasn't so grimdark.

Media was dark back when it was worse, but it wasn't grimdark and it was good.

And it could play its darkness off really lightly. Crocodile Dundee is very family friendly for how it portrays the dregs of Manhattan in the 1980's.

Yes, media was less dark, but the reality was at least as dark if not darker (certainly Manhattan and Philadelphia were worse)

Kind of interesting how, as things get better, the outlook gets bleaker.

I don't know who "most of us" is. There are problems I find intractable at present, yes, but that said, if you asked me if I'd rather live today or in the 60s (without any tricks like "You get to know the next 60 years of history and can make decisions accordingly," etc.) I would definitely choose today.

Reminds me of all the black people who insist America today is not even a little bit better for black people than in the days of slavery. I just flat-out don't believe they actually believe this.

Roddenberry was a political odd duck much like Robert A. Heinlein. He was a progressive hippy, but also a former military officer and LAPD policeman. So he had a lot of progressive ideals, but also held fairly small-c conservative attitudes towards organizational hierarchy and he believably writes what a pseudo-military organization (Starfleet) would look and act like. And he’s pretty optimistic about that pseudo-military organization’s morals and goals. No Machiavellian glowies like Section-31 in his mind.

The more recent series have felt like they were written by writers who resent this optimistic view of the future - specifically, the idea that a largely Western, liberal democratic society could actually produce something good. And so they have painfully deconstructed it, so now the Federation is shit, all the characters we knew and loved are dead or assholes, and there is certainly no "fun" to be had in a universe where Western Enlightenment still holds sway.

I imagine this is a large part of why lower decks was so well received. Unlike the other shows it sticks with the original positive premise, even if it's modern, progressive and deconstructing star trek.

Unlike the other shows it sticks with the original positive premise, even if it's modern, progressive and deconstructing star trek.

did it though? From the (two) episodes I watched, it seemed to be constantly taking the piss out of the optimistic naive male character that wanted to do good, while propping up the #girlboss# female character as a queen who could do know wrong, no matter how insufferable she was. Most of the jokes were just taking little bits of what the older shows did for convenience (eg, making a teleporter because filming a shuttlecraft was too expensive) and trying to seem "smart" by pointing out minor inconsistencies.

In star trek tradition the first episodes (and by extension the first season) were the worst of the series and things get better from there on. The female character doesn't get to just be an uncriticised girl boss that does no wrong and the male character isn't just a pathetic punching bag. I watched the first episode and though it was a bit shit but pushed on because there seemed to be such widespread praise of the series even from places that were kind of primed to shit on new Trek.

Even after the first season, there were standout stinker episodes to the point where one in three was good, another one in three was serviceable or had something redeeming, and a 3rd was offensively bland and pointless garbage.

I do love Landlord Cops, though. And Big Strong City, Capital of Pakled Planet.

That may be but it's hard to overstate how much of an improvement these metrics are to the rest of new Trek.

Even Tolkien himself didn't like orcs being irredeemable. You might already know about this, but if you don't, you might find it interesting. Look up Tolkien letter 153.

The more recent series have felt like they were written by writers who resent this optimistic view of the future - specifically, the idea that a largely Western, liberal democratic society could actually produce something good

I think it's worth mentioning that this shift is probably largely because progressivism or leftism itself has shifted. Back in the 60s, I think people were more optimistic on the left, and less of the view that the west sucked. There were those people and those themes, but they weren't the majority. More liberal themes dominated, and people were more into the idea that we can all live together in utopia, less that the West is responsible for dystopia. It wasn't until the 2010s that the "West sucks" crowd became the majority.

Picard S3 abandoned most of this and wasn’t bad. SNW is also not bad (there are some work themes but focus is generally on the characters and not the message).

To me, that's like saying "Bill Cosby has a new comedy series, and it's not that bad! A lot less terrible than his last season of the Cosby show!"

Like... why. Why do these people get to make so many mistakes, and still get the big chances to try again. We need to stop watching them.

I held off from watching season three for about a year, watched the first episode, then didn’t bother with the next. They had Beverly Crusher do a murder and then setup a mystery box, and I lost all interest.

Though after watching Collier’s review I learned the mystery boxes all get resolved immediately in the next episode.

They didnt let mysteries simmer which was nice. Bev made dumb decisions

Literally everyone I've talked to about episode 8-9 irl have thought they were atrocious. The apolagia for the new movies seems like an (almost) entirely online contrarian/"AstroTurf" thing to me. Perhaps it's different in parts of America though.

When Force Awakens came out I liked it. Looking back, if I could watch it alone without the ones after, I'd still like it okay--because it was basically of the same film family as the original trilogy, down to the exact same tropes. Rey was feisty and headstrong, but that was a combination in a way of Luke and Han. She showed weakness, at least one time, until she suddenly didn't, but there were unanswered questions that might have been answered in a way later that could have explained this. The film ended with a cliff hanger--you knew Luke was going to be awesome in the next film.

He wasn't. The Last Jedi on first watch was like a spice you've never had at a restaurant you're trying for the first time that serves food you thought you knew how to eat. The spice wreaks havoc on your digestive system and you think "God damn what did I eat? What was in that burrito?" I wanted to like it. I even refrained from piling on when people complained about it. And I still feel like Rise of Skywalker at least tried to undo some of TLJ's damage. But the trauma was too great. It was like taking an overdose of painkillers for a really bad headache. The cure made things worse.

The only thing positive I can say is that the acting as a whole was pretty good in the sequels. Every lead role actor and actress gave convincing performances. The soundtracks were quite good, as to be expected. And now I'm out of praise.

Tellingly, my sons, who I showed the original series to, and then the prequels, and who rewatched these films many times, never wanted to re-watch any of the sequels after seeing them once. Once!

The one guy who I've met in real life who claimed to love the Last Jedi was a literal Antifa guy on a flight to seattle to "help out" with the Chaz/Chop thing after it had already ended. All the people who will try to make excuses for it have been some manner of Leftist. Probably because it vaguely alludes to "capitalism bad" at one point.

I remember 8 being hugely contentious. Lots of people were saying it was great, and we "just didn't get it." The main star wars subreddit banned all criticism, to the point where people started a new one "saltier than crait" just so they could complain about it. I worked with nerds in a progressive area, so I was kind of afraid to discuss it with them. I feel like it started with a ton of apologia, and even ardent fans, and now that shit is finally dying away.

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