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Notes -
Were your questions sincere? What are your answers to your questions?
I suppose I dispute that it was ever a fight, in the sense that original Little Mermaid wasn't as racially/politically motivated as the current release. That is, I think there was a default-white assumption that people didn't think about much, plus it was a European tale, whereas now there's explicit racial programming. In the era when I was telling others about the Bechdel test, I hoped that we would stop excluding women and minorities and start getting more variety in movies. And I think we got some of that: to stick with Disney, I think Moana and Mulan and Encanto were all pretty great. Encanto is interesting because it's the most recent, and it feels tryhard in ways that the earlier ones didn't, because now they're explicitly trying to be super race sensitive in ways that are eerily similar to the ways people look down on conservatives for. Whereas with the new Little Mermaid, I strongly suspect they're leaning into the culture war aspects because it drives buzz, and I think we shouldn't reward them for that.
Has entertainment always served dual purposes? Sometimes, I guess? I think I pretty consistently oppose that stuff, though: I don't like that the military trades access to gear for editorial control of movies. Old movies like Sergeant York or It's a Wonderful Life seem like they were pushing viewpoints in the same ways that I dislike in modern woke preachy shows. I do have a couple of super preachy things I like anyway, because I'm specifically into the thing they're preaching: Gandhi and Mendelssohn's Elijah are both in that camp for me.
But most of the literature I consider really great is because it's saying insightful things we don't normally hear elsewhere and that don't map to normal culture war battlefields. Citizen Kane, for example, or Kurt Vonnegut.
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