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You can interpret anything as non-woke if you want. I could interpret the Sequel trilogy of Star Wars as an aristocratic anti-woke vitalist saga if I wanted. The First Order displays massive superiority in engineering and warfare, the decadent new Republic clearly has no clue what they're doing. Democracy simply doesn't work and needs ridiculous feats of luck to prevail over disciplined, efficient authoritarianism. There's a treacherous black guy who displays zero positive qualities and even gets his attempt at a heroic sacrifice cucked away from him. All politics is decided by great men/women of esteemed bloodlines...
But that's not the message from the writers, that's not what they were aiming for and that's not what most people are getting from the story. Adolescence is a Netflix original, not a Little Dark Age edit.
A story framed around a young teen middle-class/non-gang white boy being a murderer is innately woke since this basically never happens. There are vast numbers of shocking and unexpected things they could do in the entire field of fiction, that they choose this particular theme is question-begging.
That's exactly why there is shock factor. It does happen though just infrequently. I watched a true crime about a 14 year old white american boy who murdered his parents in cold blood. If it was a jogger who did it nobody would care because it's just a Tuesday.
I'm looking for a woke angle and just don't see it.
Clearly given its popularity there actually aren't. In terms of shock value I think this actually tops forcing a bunch of poor desperate people to compete in death games for money.
It's true that murder stories of 'stupid black thugs kill eachother (or try to do so only to end up shooting random bystanders) over drugs' aren't that exciting. But the British media system is eagerly saying that Adolescence is relevant, they say it has some important truth to tell us about reality. They're putting it on in schools for free apparently.
It's not being treated like a shocking fictional story like a zombie apocalypse film when zombies were new and fresh, it tells people a story they want to hear like the tedious Capitalism Bad parts of Star Wars VIII. Loads of people latched onto the incel terminology as depicting their hated group, young right-wing white men. But in reality, the incel community is quite diverse racially and politically. If you go to incels wiki, they go on and on about browncels, ricecels, the 'just be white' theory. It's not John Smith and Adam Sterling watching Andrew Tate, it's Muhammed and Daneesh. Tate even described at one point how he put up one of his camgirls in a MAGA hat only for her to do poorly, many of the lonely hopeless men he was financially abusing were left-wing. Tate didn't pretend to convert to Islam to get more of the middle-class white boy market, he was clearly trying to skew to his strongest supporters.
If you want real shock value for a Western audience, you could try portraying environmentalism and eco-spiritualist anti-development sentiment as alien plots to subvert technological development (an innately good thing) and weaken us for an invasion.
That's what the Three Body Problem did, naturally they eased this out in the Netflix adaptation, along with race-swapping half the cast to be brown, white or women.
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The entire premise of the show and it's deranged state-led promotion by the UK government is specifically and explicitly axed around the depicted story being part of a "wider epidemic", at no moment whatsoever is the public treatment of it related to how "infrequent" such events are. There is no shock factor at play aside from the simulated shock of "behind every sweet white boy is a deranged sexist murderer" - which is of course demonstrably false.
Exactly. It would be as if we had an 80ies movie about how bunch of regular and nice kids committed heinous murder inspired by violent action movies while trying to reenact D&D spell in real life. And the whole thing would be promoted by school system as a guide for teachers and parents.
I am not sure if there was anything like that during satanic panic, but it would not surprise me. Wokeness has attracted the usual moral busybodies of yesteryear, I would not be the first one to go with "woke is secular puritanism" angle.
In 80s and 90s movies, gangs of criminal thugs would often reflexively be portrayed as diverse, so you’d have one white guy, one black guy, often one Asian guy, etc. It was kind of funny because of its dissonant sense of optimism. I have a dream where roving bands of murderous junkie rapists do not judge by the color of one’s skin but by the content of one’s (bad) character.
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Mazes and Monsters, starring Tom Hanks?
That one was even based on a Jack Chick tract comic, if I'm not mistaken.
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The demand for violence from the hated demographic far exceeds its supply.
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Clearly? Hollywood us releasing bomb after bomb in order to promote a specific message. We're not living in a world where the mist popular things get promoted, so we don't actually know this idea's relative popularity.
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