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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 26, 2024

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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.