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Could I ask you to name some names regarding what's popular with the woke?
In my last brush with the New Orthodox Woke during the start of the pandemic, the stuff being pushed was Infinite Jest, Waiting for Godot, Blue Velvet, and anything Southern if it was to do with a black person, ideally a black person who had been lynched. Also, they keep saying they love D&D, but then refuse to play because the setting contains racial prejudice.
I do think there are certain things which are pretty appealing in a widespread manner. However, when you see the types of entertainment that does have a huge skew where the fanbase appears to primarily be of one political tribe, it's very notable how distinct they are.
I wasn't going to bring up specific examples because I think any specific discussion will invite some very vehement disagreement by people who happen to enjoy anything I lambast, but here we go.
So I used to be pretty involved in music communities, and a genre with one of the most overtly woke fanbases I can think of is PC Music/hyperpop (the most notable of these artists being SOPHIE). Example here. For those who are unaware of what this is, it's basically an ironic/post-ironic caricature of pop music which exaggerates every single one of the criticised elements of pop. The aesthetic of their music and music videos and entire public image exemplifies sterility, artifice, almost sickly cuteness and has a very strong undertone of cynical parody to it - basically nothing about it sounds genuine, and I think that's the point. Another factor that also probably helps to attract leftists is that a huge proportion of the artists making PC Music are part of the rainbow community.
Other artists that have a bit of a strange outsider aesthetic, even those I like, also tend to have a primarily leftist fanbase. I can testify to being kicked out of an Autechre discord server after expressing wrongthink once during a political conversation (which I did not start). While I enjoy their music quite a lot myself I can also testify that a huge amount of their fans are extremely woke and also tend to be quite the pretentious type.
Then there's games. I'm currently watching a friend play through Disco Elysium (a game with a fairly strong leftist bent to it that kind of plays out like a postmodern novel) with a group of other left-leaning friends. It's got style in spades, and I don't doubt that care was put into this, but at the moment my perception of it is that it's a pretty slow and artsy game which I can't help but regard as being quite difficult to like. It comes off as a bit of an unfocused mix of political satire, philosophical musings and absurdist nonsense all of which don't really blend into the murder-mystery narrative well. My opinions might change later, but I'm not too optimistic about that.
For film, I’ll just refer to a huge portion of A24’s output. Their films resonate with that same audience, the type who like artistic slow burns.
There are more I could include, but these are the first few examples that come to mind. And it's not even that they're always bad, either. It's just that in most of these cases, the people who consume them are often the type who tend to like distinguishing themselves from the normie crowd, and who see themselves as being part of a distinct, unique, subversive subculture that is new and revolutionary, one which is simultaneously aesthetically superior to and yet ignored by the normies. There's a certain amount of elitism that comes with the territory which doesn't seem to have been nearly as prominent in OG nerd culture.
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