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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34966 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 6, 2023

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There's a line I've seen here and everywhere in oppositional nerd circles since racial and gender politics started getting injected into things they like. It usually goes something like, "the problem isn't the representation, it's that they focused on it instead of the story." This has always felt like a cope to me. Many progressives are good storytellers. A show can be well-written, compelling, and entertaining AND depict a false history/reality, or cast your demographic group/ideology as all the villains.

Absolutely wrong and even the oppositional nerds will talk positively about good stories that just happen to have representation. These same oppositional nerds (assuming we're talking about the same group) will also talk about how much they love anime and videogames from Japan - if you were right and the focus was just a cope, they wouldn't be doing any of that.

But really the main reason that you're incorrect on this point is that shoehorning representation in absolutely does harm a story. If I'm reading a fantasy novel and the evil usurper Tonald Drumph the Orange starts building walls to prevent halfling immigration I am immediately catapulted out of the story and back to the real world. Stories and works of fiction actually do become worse and less compelling when they destroy the world-building they've actually done to stop and remind the viewer that they are watching a work of fiction and not doing the serious work of ending white supremacy/instituting fully automated luxury gay space communism.

I'm sure that there are oppositional nerds out there who get annoyed when they have to see people with different coloured skin, but those nerds would have been complaining since the release of the original Star Trek.

I mean, what you just imagined is nothing new. It's just the culture war that was being probed back then has disappeared so you don't notice what the story is about anymore. After all, the Wizard of Oz was basically agit-prop for silver coinage, but it doesn't really matter in 2023 that the Wizard was supposed to be McKinley.

The Wizard of Oz being "about silver coinage" is an urban legend spread by contrarian geeks.

After all, the Wizard of Oz was basically agit-prop for silver coinage, but it doesn't really matter in 2023 that the Wizard was supposed to be McKinley.

Did this even matter back in its original time? This claim is news to me, I've never perceived the perception of Wizard of Oz, at least in movie form, as anything other than a classic pure fantasy story from a post-Industrial-Revolution time. Like, nobody looks at Wizard of Oz in the same way, as, say, Rand's works (or even The Great Gatsby).

The reason why it hasn't hung around as a political tome is that the issue the book about is basically dead, outside of weirdo libertarians. Same thing w/ Great Gatsby - it's the movie about the mysterious guy who hangs out with a rich couple and then stuff happens. The whole parts of the book where Tom Buchanon talks about the intelligence of the various races, and other more political parts are either forgotten about or ignored by most people, because again, what culture war things in that book are mostly dead.

Libertarianism is still a live issue, and more importantly, Atlas Shrugged is a terrible book if you don't buy into the ideological argument. The Oz books are interesting outside of the coinage argument. Atlas Shrugged isn't.

There's nothing wrong with allegory, and there can absolutely be subtle and well-done inclusions of those contentious issues - but that isn't what we're getting in modern media. The same ultimate message and culture-warring was in a lot of the classic media that these oppositional nerds defend, but the way it was included matters. The X-Men stories were insanely transparent with their messaging, messaging that was bout concepts which the culture war is still raging over to this day - but there was enough subtlety and art to it that it didn't throw the audience out of what they were consuming.

That it doesn't matter in 2023 that the Wizard was supposed to be McKinley is the sort of thing that I'm getting at - even without knowing the details of the coinage conflict you can still get something worthwhile out of the story, and that largely isn't the case for the sort of movies those oppositional nerds complain about. Everything Everywhere All At Once was more diverse than half of the "woke" media being produced, and it didn't get those same whining nerds (or at least if it did I missed them). There's something that these people are complaining about, and it isn't the representation by itself.

"The X-Men stories were insanely transparent with their messaging, messaging that was bout concepts which the culture war is still raging over to this day - but there was enough subtlety and art to it that it didn't throw the audience out of what they were consuming."

Except there are letter pages from the '60s with the same exact arguments that are raging today in these and many other comment sections, about how Stan Lee was shoving his politics down their throat. This makes my point - that culture war issue is mostly dead, so it can become just entertainment.

In 2060, there'll be the right-leaning people of the day, going, "look, back in the 2020's there was subtle and well-done inclusions of transgender folks like the Republican nominee Senator Martinez-Chu, but now these damned transhumanists are shoving it down my throat!"

Except there are letter pages from the '60s with the same exact arguments that are raging today in these and many other comment sections, about how Stan Lee was shoving his politics down their throat. This makes my point - that culture war issue is mostly dead, so it can become just entertainment.

My apologies - I was thinking in the context of the same cohort of oppositional nerds, who would have been consuming X-men media like the Singer movies and the 90s TV show.

That said, I don't think the culture war issues explored in the X-men stories are actually dead. The topics of racism, homophobia and anti-semitism seem to me like they're still at the heart of the culture war, and I don't think you can really make the claim that those issues are mostly dead.

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