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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   33194 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 10, 2022

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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.

The thing is, the people responsible are ultimately cogs in the machine.

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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