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The term you are looking for is "fan-baiting".
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1568182048564875265.html
“Fan-baiting” is a form of marketing used by producers, film studios, and actors, with the intent of exciting artificial controversy, garnering publicity, and explaining away the negative reviews of a new and often highly anticipated production.
Fan-baiting emerged as a marketing strategy in 2016/17, after fans of beloved franchises such as Ghostbusters and Star Wars objected to what they saw as poor writing choices, sloppy scripts, and cheap alterations to plot lines and characters for the sake of shock value.
Along side these critics, there was a small group of bigoted but vociferous commentators who objected to the inclusion of black and female actors in roles traditionally held by white male actors. Some of these individuals began publicly harassing actors.
Bigots have always attacked diversity on screen, but in a highly polarized political climate, instances of harassment on garnered disproportionately massive media coverage, which provided production studios with both free publicity and a new defence against actual critics.
Studios seized the opportunity to discredit criticism of poor writing & acting, insinuating that these, too, were motivated by bigotry. What used to be accepted as standard critiques were increasingly dismissed as part of the ignorant commentary of a “toxic fandom.”
Soon, it became standard practice before release to issue announcements specifying diverse casting choices, coupled with pre-emptive declarations of solidarity with the cast whom they now counted on to receive disparaging and harassing comments.
Actors who are women and/or BIPOC became props & shields for craven corporate laziness and opportunism. The studios save money both by avoiding expensive veteran writers as well as by offloading publicity to news outlets and social media covering the artificial controversy.
“Fan-baiting” works. It brings in a new sympathetic audience whose endorsement is more about taking a public stance against prejudice than any real interest in the art. “Fan-baiting” also permits studios to cultivate public skepticism over the legitimacy of poor reviews.
“Fan-baiting” also compels reviewers to temper their criticism, for fear of becoming associated with the “toxic fandom” and losing their professional credibly, resulting in telling discrepancies between critic and audience review scores.
The true nature of “fan-baiting” is never so clear as when a script is well-crafted and audience reviews are accordingly positive, exposing the announcements, declarations of solidarity, & grooming of skepticism for what they really are: cynical corporate marketing tactics.
The OP was probably looking for the term "race lift", although fan baiting is a more specific thing that can use it.
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If you don't like fan baiting I don't think you should make this argument. It provides a justification for the behaviour, and by presenting capitalism as the cause (because that's what it boils down to) you remove agency from the people actually responsible. You excuse them to say stuff like "Oh yeah sorry about the ridiculous casting choices and plot hole riddled stories, but increased profits demand we do stupid shit to annoy people! Aargh, we wish we could write a good story with well crafted characters, but we can't, because capitalism! Oh evil capitalism, puppeting us into writing lazy shit! If only we could abandon it we would be living in a land of milk and honey, but we can't, so we have to use this first draft we sharted and languish in banality."
Once something seems too big to fix (fixing it would require a full restructure of society) a lot of people just give up. I wish I could still consider it ironic that this is the exact reason progressives put so much effort into forcing representation.
The thing is, the people responsible are ultimately cogs in the machine. To use gaming as an example, people got mad at John Riccitello when he was CEO of EA (Riccitello oversaw that time period where EA became memed for killing studios and generally being dicks), and now that hatred is projected onto Andrew Wilson, the current CEO (who oversaw the more recent time period where EA went so full-steam-ahead on lootboxes that it invited government reaction).
You can criticize the King all you can, but eventually, the King will die and his successor being any improvement is far from guaranteed. It would indeed be more attractive to say "to hell with the Throne and all who bow down to it" at some point.
This is begging the question. It's also coherent to imagine a situation in which they are not machine cogs, but rather masters of their own fate.
The "fan-baiting" definition above does indeed point the finger at Muh Capitalism, but that's not the only possible explanation. Also possible is that the showrunners really do have agency, they really are self-motivated anti-whites, and they enjoy reverse-colonizing white people stories with black actors out of racial animus. That their actions have a side-effect of immunizing the products from criticism of their lazy writing is just a happy coincidence.
I'm not so much asserting that this is the case as I am asserting that it is a possibility which fits the evidence.
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