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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   25231 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 30, 2023

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Meta-trends can also break immersion. If you watch 10 films all with race swapped leads and each on their own works just fine, but you know that the studio heads made big noise about race swapping for the sake of it, about representation, and about making Hollywood less white, etc, you might still have your immersion broken by the clear politics behind the trend, even if each one works self contained.

Ultimately that's what makes it intolerable for me. I don't have a problem with one adaptation doing "what if we tried changing the race of characters in this to challenge their expectations?" But now the entirety of culture seems to be about racism. Every single recent show or movie it seems, if somehow they can't make it all about racism, they will at least try to fit in a subplot or even just a line to remind you of it. Recently I watched The Nun 2, a horror movie about a spooky Nun-impersonating demon happening in 1950s France. What does racism have to do with it? It makes no goddamn sense why, but in this one the main character's sidekick is a an afro-american girl who was sent to a convent, all just so they could fit in a line about how it was better for her to become a nun out in Europe than be black in america. For the rest of the movie, all the things her character does could have been done by other characters.

I mean the typical suspicion is that this has become necessary to secure funding or to be allowed to have a chance to win an award, but it's so damn transparent; it breaks immersion entirely. At this point, it's so overdone, even if it were done with innocent intent, I will resent it. And it's hard to believe it's done with innocent intent, because it would be hard for one not to notice just how oversaturated every aspect of culture is with this message already.

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