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Trope is a bad word for what's happening because it's too contaminated to really use to get any real meaning across, really, in any capacity. Everything is somehow a trope and its immediately negative. Tropes aren't really good or bad but woke tropes are almost invariably bad for several reasons. A black person instead of a white person isn't a subversion of expectations, it's a meta-subversion of expectations which should be meaningless to the plot but isn't. The reason it's a woke trope is the reason it's bad. The black person will not be the underdog. They will say they're the underdog, but nothing in the story usually holds that to be true. And almost always, conversely, when they make a genius woke character they will say they're a genius, but no actions or dialogue demonstrate this except that it is said to be so. "Sansa is the smartest woman I know." It's betraying the narrative for the sake of making these woke tropes true if only because the writers have written it to be so.
Also, the rules of the world are not the rules of a story. The underdog losing is a subversion of expectations because it's a story. The heroes are supposed to win and when it doesn't happen that's the subversion. Earning the subversion or making the trope not bad is about having it make sense once all is said and done. If they lose or win it needs to build to that in some way. A lot of stories don't bother to do this anymore. The subversion comes because the writers just write it to be so. It's stories written by people who kind of understand what goes into a story but don't understand what makes it good. Underdogs do not have to lose greater than 50% of the time, they should be, as set up in the story, worse than the antagonists, that's all. But this clashes innately with the meta-woke insertions. Black people and women need to be the heroes but they can't be portrayed as worse, so they just portray them as perfect. Perfect people are boring and also they're not subverting anything anymore when they do this. The audience expects them to be perfect, there's no subversion going on here except in the writer's and some critics' minds. What we expect of the world is not what we expect of a story. Anyone who watches sports and roots for one specific team knows this. But you rarely make a story out of a losing team's season, that'd be the subversion because the winning season is almost always the more interesting one.
It's just lazy. They want a black girl genius with no flaws and no interesting dialogue or actions and nothing done to even suggest they are a genius and they also expect that to be as engaging as a flawed, drunken white man who uses his genius to deflect and cover his weaknesses. Why is it the same in their eyes? Because she's black. Race, gender identity, sexuality, are a replacement for personality for many writers and uniquely stifling because no one really has the guts to give their characters flaws so they're all the same character which is not nearly as interesting. If you woke trope a story you will get a worse story almost invariably because its really hard for writers to not inject a new personality into a character that has been race/gender swapped and the personality of that character will suffer making the story worse. The idea of doing the woke trope swapping is pretty telling to begin with because it usually means a not healthy amount of presentism will be brought to bare on the story. Any british show that takes place hundreds of years ago will have a superbly able black person who acts as if its the current year and they will talk about their plight to others as if its the current year and a good portion of the story will include a woke sideplot that has nothing to do with the main plot.
In my mind, the things don't make a story bad, but they're a hallmark of people who don't care if they've told a good story but just that their propaganda/fetish/social commentary is out there. The more annoying thing, to me, is that it's obvious when this is done even on a small scale. Anyone who says it's not done is a liar. But once it's done it has an aura of protection because people are only criticizing the story because of its woke agenda (it also doesn't help that the reviews that do criticize often only talk about the woke agenda as why it's bad but that's just another level of why this deflection is so annoying) and if you criticize it you're only doing it because you're a racist/misogynist/nazi. I'm not sure it makes normal people more likely to like it but they won't believe bad reviews and will slog through a whole season before they think something might not be right with it. I think that's reason enough for Amazon to go full hog into protecting properties by having them critic proof before they air just by diversifying the cast.
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