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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 26, 2024

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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.