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Notes -
True Detective Night Country
There is a culture war internet discourse happening around HBO’s newest show True Detective Night Country. The discourse can generally be summed up as follows: HBO newest show TD Night Country is the 4th season of an anthology mystery/crime miniseries. The first season came out ten years ago and it starred Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson as two detectives searching for a killer in Louisiana. The plot does not particularly matter, but the show is widely viewed as one of the greatest single seasons of TV ever. Speaking for myself, I agree with this assessment. I return to it every few years and I am still impressed at how good the acting, story, and cinematography are.
Fast forward ten years…two mediocre seasons (2 and 3) were released, and HBO announced the release of True Detective Season 4, co-named Night Country. Season 4 stars Jodie Foster and Kali Reis as two detectives unravelling a murder mystery in Alaska and people were very, very excited for this season. Prior to release, Night Country received overwhelming critical reception from TV critics. It currently has a 93% Rotten Tomatoes score (RT can be gamed, but the 93% score shows the general reception).
I was also very excited for this show. Critics were calling it the best season of True Detective since season 1; some were even saying it was better than season 1. With these very lofty expectations, I watched the show as it was released, week by week.
By episode two, I knew this show had problems. By episode four, I knew it just wasn’t very good. By episodes 5 and 6, I was hate watching. Many people have reviewed and discussed the show’s problems much more eloquently than I. This video is quite good and sums up the many many problems the show has:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=y2TCOd_YZF4
What I will say is that the show is simply…boring. It is a six-hour miniseries and at least 70% of the show is filled with boring relationship drama (the remaining 30% being focused on the actual…criminal investigation). The characters are uninteresting, low stakes, and unlikeable. The easter eggs paying homage to season 1 are like a frying pan to the face in their obviousness. The story carries no emotional weight, has major plot holes, and the ending is unsatisfying and bewildering. It’s bad. I would not recommend this show to anyone.
Now here is where the culture war comes into play. Online, fans of the True Detective series are panning the series. Go check out the audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, it is a paltry 61%. The True Detective subreddit is especially critical of the show. People are especially disappointed and confused given how critically hyped it was before its release.
But what has happened is that many critics, podcasters, even Issa Lopez, the director, are blaming the backlash on sexism and misogyny. They say that male fanboys of season 1 are brigading review sites and review bombing the show. They are saying that the viewers dislike the show because it features two women lead detectives and that viewers can’t stand the lack of masculinity that was so integral to season 1. Even the professional critics who have dared to post their negative opinions on Twitter are being called misogynistic.
The problem with this read is that…the show sucks. It’s just not good for all of the reasons I’ve listed above. It’s extremely frustrating to see people called misogynistic and “anti-woke” for criticizing a show with two women leads. I find it particularly unfair because other detective shows with women leads, such as Mare of Eastown or Sharp Objects, were fantastic. It didn’t receive the critical backlash because those shows were actually good. We now exist in a bizarre universe where a magazine like Rolling Stone overwhelmingly praises the show while a magazine like Forbes pans it.
I’m not one who normally gets involved in the culture war, but I found this discourse particularly egregious. I don’t know what the future of this series holds, but I’m hoping someone at HBO sees the light.
Update: Issa Lopez has been hired to write and direct season 5 of True Detective. Whoosh.
I'm late to this, so it may get buried.
I loved True Detective Season 1. It is difficult to explain how much that show has influenced me.
Something that is lesser known, however, is that its writing benefits from the fact that Nic Pizzolato pretty much wrote it twice - Once as True Detective and once as Galveston a novel. Galveston doesn't have some of the supernatural / occult elements of TD, but the major themes are present.
This also reminds me of The Wire, a show hailed for its intricate writing. Well, yes, because it was written by a Baltimore reporter who had a) seen the real thing play out before him in real life for 20+ years and b) written hundreds of articles, a few books, and a whole other series (Homicide: Life on The Street) beforehand.
I think people discount just how fast TV and movie script turnaround demands can be. So, somehow having a massive head start can be a big deal.
All that being said ... sadly not surprised that Season 4 sucks. I was hyped because of the location and the gimmick of forever-night. But Hollywood got there first.
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Upon watching the first episode, I said "They're doing Strong Female Characters by writing them as though they were men and making sure all the actual men around them are wusses or scumbags or wussie scumbags" and never bothered to watch further. The only thing I liked was how they pushed that everyone in town is depressed and miserable, that part rang true for me from my time living in northern Wisconsin.
I'm amused/vindicated that They are still doing the whole "You don't like our poorly-written show/film/game? You must just hate women and minorities" thing.
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I like when the one based guy who writes for The Onion is let off the leash: https://www.theonion.com/negative-review-of-a-wrinkle-in-time-peppered-with-cr-1823656342
Cultural critics are pretty much a captured industry at this point. Criticise a K-pop or Taylor Swift album and you'll be doxxed within the hour; criticise a nerd property and there'll be AI-generated porn depicting your wife and children plastered all over X; criticise a property which has been presented as woke/diverse/progressive and your peers will be calling for your head; praise an album made by four white guys with guitars and people will call you a regressive rockist conservative; praise a film which doesn't uncritically endorse modern progressive values and your peers will be calling for your head; criticise a walking simulator and people will accuse of hating LGBT people; offer lukewarm praise to a video game published by a company who has a big marketing contract with your employer and you'll lose your job.
No wonder so many modern film reviews sound like they were written by someone with a gun to their head.
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Season 2 wasn't mediocre.
I'd argue the reason it wasn't appreciated was that following the plot was mildly taxing on me, and I'm somewhere in the upper 10% of whites cognitively. Repeatedly had to stop and explain the plot to my dad, who has the equivalent of a PhD. But is face blind and not that young. The story is just too complex for a normal person, and they get confused. I really liked it. Really makes you appreciate your own life too.
Season 3 was good but not great. I guessed at the trajectory the show would take with a black protagonist and then ending.
Were you being sarcastic or have you truly not noticed they're going to rate bad shows highly if the politics are right? This has been going on for years by now. At least 5, maybe 7.
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Issa Lopez is a telenovella writer. She just (obviously) doesn’t have the skills to take on a show like this.
Hiding behind “that’s sexist!” makes the problem of sexism worse, since it means we are to believe that this is what a top tier female writer is capable of producing.
I think something that needs to happen for stories like this to be taken seriously is that they need to be more realistic about the shortcomings of the characters. For instance: one of the opening scenes is a female cop absolutely [wo]man-handling a guy twice her size. This scene plays a lot better if she tries to [wo]man-handle this guy, and gets the shit beaten out of her for it. It establishes this character as arrogant (which she is) and humanizes her. We should see multiple instances of these two lady-cops being unable physically interact with the criminals they are supposed to be policing. Maybe at some point they can play this to their advantage somehow.
There is also a weird culture war happening right now where suicide is being presented as hip and cool. This is a serious problem. I have a teenage niece who has had multiple friends kill themselves. This is obviously happening in Canada with the bizarre commercials for their suicide program, and then the end of this show one of the main characters killing herself (seemingly out of nowhere) as a means of "closure" or something? Ridiculous and actually bad for society.
Is there a scene of a heroine getting manhandled in a fight, anywhere? I can't think of this happening in media at all. It's all Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Black Widow, Peggy Carter, Emma Blunt, Rey... Probably there is stuff that I can't think of. Edit: replies show I haven't watched many recent action films.
I recall there was a backlash when the advertising for X-men Apocalpyse had Jennifer Lawrence getting manhandled: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-Men:_Apocalypse#Billboard_controversy
This is played straight in Joe Abercrombie’s “A Little Hatred,” where one of the MCs, a lady in her late twenties who had trained with the best fighter of the period for many years, asks said fighter to stop restraining himself.
(Abercrombie had screwed up on this front in the past with Ferro, justified by demonic lineage, and Monza, unjustified even without her injuries).
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I made this point before, but I think people truly underestimate how utterly brainwashed people can be by media.
As a non-culture war example that I've given before, I play a game called Commands & Colors: Ancients. It's a tactical dudes on a map game that has a bunch of Roman battles you can simulate. And it has cavalry. But these aren't armored knights, they are just dudes on horses. They are squishy, don't hit that hard, and mostly only useful for flanking or chasing down weakened units. If you try to form a wedge with them and ride right into the enemy's center with them like you see in movies, they will all die, and you will lose. Badly.
I played probably 50 games in a row with a guy who did that every single time. And no matter how many times I explained to him these aren't armored knights, these are just dudes on horses that predate that by about 1000 years, it never stuck. He couldn't stop thinking in terms of what he saw in movies. It had monopolized his brain, with it's rich sensory experience, in a way 50 less visceral personal experiences on a board couldn't displace.
Likewise, the US public at large has been brainwashed by decades of Hollywood action girlbosses, and nothing but. I honestly believe this is where all the confusion about men playing in women's sports is coming from. Forget all the scientific facts about male puberty changes versus female puberty changes, and documented physical advantages in nearly every measurable physical attribute, be it strength, reaction time, depth perception, you name it. Forget the fact that every 4 years in the Olympics you see the men's divisions regularly annihilate the women's divisions if you compared them apples to apples. 30 years of Hollywood girlboss action movies renders all that moot in the minds of most. The Olympics doesn't have a badass soundtrack, and dozens of camera angles edited together with just the right amount of CGI to saturate your brain in dopamine. So most people in their heart of hearts believe women can easily beat up men, or that men might be a little stronger.
The average MSNBC consuming normie probably has beliefs not that different from when Adam Conover beclowned himself on Joe Rogan arguing about how sports were sexist if men outperformed women in them.
You mean in a medium where: people have fantastical powers; get up after taking ridiculous beatings; fights that are choreographed in the heroes favour, women can be given unrealistic advantages? Yes. Is it part of a concerted effort? Yes it is; just the same as how media was criticised and influenced under previous cultural censorship. Even under that previous censorship, it came out through pushing women into roles and different ethnicities into new roles and criticising it when done badly. The status-quo has been feminism and women's equality for a few decades now. We got Black presidents in movies, many many times, before we saw Obama became president, and a woman president is just a matter of time now as well. A group of people thought that society would be better if women were more equal and ethnicities like Black Americans can have equal rights and opportunities with the rest of the population, and influence on the media was an important tool in making that happen.
The ironic part of the cultural control is that we project present values back into depictions of the past as well. It leads people to think that people in the past behaved within current cultural frameworks. This seems to create a perception erasor for the people in the present whose main context with the past is through that same media. Most people only really understand concepts like ancient rome through the lens of movies and television shows, maybe a few documentaries if they are more inclined. Shows like Star Trek: The Next Generation were epically popular at the time, but the values explicit to that show are normalised for today's audience. The same perception that caused the opponents to run their 'knights' head first into your troops is the same impulse that sees women as being equal by default. The sad part though is that with the abundance of dopamine hits, in our 'brave new world', people can pick the drug of their choice, or their entire perspective of how the world is.
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I like this scene from Atomic Blonde.
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Furiosa didn't do so well against Mad Max, even in a 6v2 fight.
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Emily Blunt's character gets overpowered twice in Sicario. Once in the apartment scene with John Bernthal's character, and once in the bunker by Josh Brolin's character.
This was praised for subverting expectations in being a relatively more realistic depiction of how a normal sized female would fare against a normal sized male in actual close-quarters combat, but also heavily criticized for the same reason (perhaps moreso). Yet the two scenes were still very much non-gorey, especially compared to the experiences of John Bernthal's character.
However, it's noteworthy how Sicario is... noteworthy... for this reason—that Emily Blunt's character was not some hyperagentic badass #GirlBoss—but a novice who's only there for technicality-related reasons, and who gets dominated and/or in-over-her-head multiple times.
In Dragonball Z, a scene that Western audiences commonly pearl-clutch at (and in-universe, it's also viewed as especially despicable) is where Majin Spopovich beats up Videl at a World Tournament. Spopovich is viewed as disgustingly evil, but he could be hailed as the ultimate feminist and gender egalitarian in treating a teenage girl as he would a teenage boy. Good for Bibidi and Babidi in maintaining a company culture that doesn't see sex.
I've not seen a mainstream Western film (or any film for that matter) that comes close to depicting a woman experiencing the level of extended physical brutality commonly inflicted upon men in movies and having her #GirlBoss illusions shattered as happened in the Videl scene.
Even explicit gore movies tend to cut away and/or make the camerawork more ambiguous when it comes to violence inflicted upon females.
Dragonball's still gender egalitarian with respect to the occasional female who does appear. Videl loses because she's a human and all the humans are weak, not because girls are weaker than boys in this world.
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To nitpick, she was not a novice FBI agent when she was assigned to the legally shady task force as the liaison.
Her level of tactical experience doing law enforcement operations doesn’t particularly effect her ability at grappling.
But it does make the non-stop screaming just as irritating as it was in her role in Gravity (bonus points for accomplishing nothing without a man present in that movie, too).
Emily Blunt wasn't in Gravity.
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Actually in this show! Later in the series the same character tries to take on like 3-4 guys at once and gets beaten pretty badly.
Idunno if we can count it because she charges at the one guy then gets jumped by the full stack. the way it plays out makes the guys kinda look like a gang of cowardly violence junkies that are beating up a distressed (but kinda manly) woman.
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My issue isn't that the lead women had trash personalities. I'm actually really happy when #currentyear writes women and minorities as bad people. The issue is largely that the lead characters seemed to be badly written male characters that were gender swapped.
Also the 'murderer(s)' breaks suspension of disbelief. It's just a badly written detective show that some bright executive thought it would be a good idea to bolt the franchise's name onto.
Edit:
This was a forgone conclusion. The finale thread on /r/TrueDetective has a few comments (cough) predicting this deflection.
I would be happy, but I typically find that the writer themselves or the fictional world around the characters don't notice that they're bad people and just Yass Queen at everything.
This seems a really common criticism of these types of characters. I've heard people say about characters like She-Hulk, Galadriel from Rings of Power, Velma, and Echo that they start the show as aggressive, unlikable people, as if they're setting up for some sort of redemption or growth character arc, but instead it's the rest of the world that bends around her to make everything work out. And fans don't seem to connect with it. What I don't get is that this could've been predicted by anyone who took an intro to writing fiction class. When there are millions of dollars on the line with these productions, how is it that the people in charge allow this level of incompetence or unprofessionalism to be present in the script, the heart and soul of almost any movie or show?
Then again, I think I may be having some version of Gell-Mann amnesia about the standards of writing in Hollywood, because one of my amusing recurring thoughts is how many people at Lucasfilm & Disney must've read the Rise of Skywalker script and decided that they would proudly work on and forever attach their names to the film that used "somehow" as basically the entirety of the explanation for reviving the main bad guy from the first trilogy.
The standard psychoanalysis review is that stuff like She-Hulk is written by narcissistic women for narcissistic women. Which is an easy/lazy dunk.
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As far as I know screenwriting is a skill that is mostly on the basis of doing what someone else tells you to- in other words, a director or producer or somebody comes up with the plot, characters, vibe, etc, and the actual job of the writer is to ghostwrite the script in a format that makes it easy to film. So the question is why directors and producers are pushing such bad plots and unlikeable characters.
I'm under the impression that directors tend to have fairly limited influence over the more corporate film products (as has always been the case), and the writers we get nowadays are largely just mercenaries answering to the suits. Directors these days probably are more in lock-step with the producers, but that's both because of the insular nature of Hollywood culture and probably also the studios pushing away any directors too cavalier to follow orders.
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But I mean, that is their understanding of the human condition. They tell you every day. It's not immoral to hate your oppressor. The world does need to change. These are their fantasies playing out. I don't think there is anything mysterious or baffling about it. They have no other understanding of the world. Check any of their twitter pages.
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I constantly have this problem as well. For the same reason the successor ideology has destroyed parody, and everything you write comes true two weeks later, they've destroyed villains. I was watching some BBC show about a female doctor who discovers her husband is cheating and knocked up his mistress. She goes completely unhinged, breaks all sorts of laws, nearly forces her ex husband to commit suicide, and I'm watching this wondering if the writers/producers are aware this woman is a psycho? Or are they just "Yass Queen"ing the whole time?
Honestly it's a coin flip. The end of the show seems to show some self awareness that all her actions were ultimately self destructive because now her son wants nothing to do with her. But she kept her job, her house, her friends, etc, unlike the poor ex-husband she utterly destroyed. So yeah, I have no idea.
I wish I could remember the name of that show.
Doctor Foster? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Foster_(TV_series)
Yeah, that's the one.
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when the tough badass cop lady was furiously riding her boyfriend i cracked up. Maybe the most direct evidence of penis envy ive ever seen in media.
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I feel like this is generally an issue with miniseries. There's this relentless need to take the half of the show that's about an interesting topic (Mindhunter particularly galling for this) and then wedge it against the protagonist's personal relationship issues, especially if it's a period piece with period vibes for the main concept and yet the protagonist is living their personal problems through 2020 norms and cultural memes. I understand the actual core stuff is what costs money and is hard to write, but the amount of shows where it has to be wild pingponging between 'here is the thing the show is about' and 'here is his girlfriend feeling neglected' is ridiculous.
The Mr and Mrs Smith show on Amazon was guilty of this and I stopped watching at three episodes in. They squandered an interesting setup on what felt like the writers rehashing all the most awkward parts of their own failed relationships.
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I think it's a problem with period pieces in general. Robert Eggers's work (The Vvitch, The Northman) is one of the few examples I can think of where someone in mass media attempted to have the characters' concerns match what people of that period's actual concerns would have been. And while I'm not sure what Eggers's feelings about religion are, I can tell from his films that he actually gets religious people, something that makes him better than 99% of people in tv and film. The hardcore Puritans in The Vvitch and the norse pagans in The Northman make sense on their own terms, which actually makes them more relatable to me in a strange way even if I find several of the specifics of their beliefs repugnant.
I get the sense that this is something that's beyond the grasp of so many writers and self-described media-literate critics, particularly in the mainstream in the past decade or so. They seem to perceive everything at surface level, that a character is relatable if they share all the surface-level characteristics of the viewer, who they imagine to be some version of themselves. So they have the right skin colors, ages, sexualities, and political beliefs, but the characters themselves are flat and uninteresting.
Because what viewers relate to aren't such surface-level characteristics. And it's not even the so-called shared experiences of people who suffer due to sharing these surface-level characteristics that idpol likes to push as a real thing that exists so much; even these things are ultimately surface-level. To build a relatable character requires giving them something underneath all that that the viewer can connect with, something deeper and more personal than just having the right skin color and fighting for the right causes. And once you have that, the surface-level stuff largely don't matter, hence why something like a Puritanical colonial New England family in The Vvitch can be relatable to a modern person.
I imagine this is a predictable consequence of being taught that race/sex/etc.-essentialism was not only correct, but that it was the only correct and just way of looking at other humans all throughout their schooling. When your time and energy is spent focused on these surface-level features, then that doesn't leave much room to focus on the stuff underneath that actually matters. Writers write what they know, after all.
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I have to rant about a particular incredibly stupid plot point in the finale. SPOILERS if anyone cares.
It's revealed that the scientists at the lab are studying a life form in the permafrost and that they are better able to access the life form due to pollution created by the local mine which melts the permafrost. So not only does the lab publish fake reports about the pollution levels to protect the mine, but the lab actually asks the mine to pollute more to help its research along. This pollution causes deaths, birth defects, and other problems in the local town. The lab claims that their research will revolutionize the field of health in some unspecified ways, and that their work will eventually be unfathomably valuable.
Ok, so...
God, I know Hollywood hates corporations, but why does it think they are so stupid?
Everyone should read their Coase before becoming authors.
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Screenwriters and especially studio execs are dimwits who know bugger-all about science, but have absorbed the notion (from watching Captain Planet and Ferngully as kids) that science is Bad and destroys the environment.
Questions like "why don't they ship the permafrost off to some place where it's safer to melt" and "why can't they buy the stuff they need instead of getting it from pollution" are more "they have no common sense" than "they know nothing about science".
That's part of "are dimwits".
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And so have most of their audience.
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I wouldn’t say stupid. It’s that most of them have majored in film and writing and have been working on only that kind of thing and most likely have never met working scientists, business owners, or anyone who isn’t involved in writing and filmmaking.
That kind of insular world creates all kinds of stupid blind spots. They don’t understand science or know anyone who does, so they understand science only on a popular science IFLS level where it’s either terrible and destructive, or it basically shits out gadgets and stands in for magic.
Of course they do the same with politics, history, journalism, and education too.
I think one of the biggest things holding back screenwriting is that insular perspective. Not only does it prevent people from making compelling stories about other subjects, but since everyone has the exact same thoughts about those topics, there’s not really anything surprising. Andy Weir is good at making stories about ordinary working people in space because he studied the physics and chemistry of space and because he likely knows a good number of blue collar workers who don’t think like the elites do.
This same industry will hire sensitivity readers to ensure that they're not making the slightest offense to the most terminally online members of favored groups.
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From the purely academic g or IQ or whatever perspective, these people probably don't fall into the category of what people think of when they think of "stupid people." The mere ability to put together a script with a coherent plot and structure that fits a TV show (e.g. each episode presents some self-contained plot point that serves as a piece of the larger season-long plot) probably excludes them from that.
But as the mother of a fictional stupid person always said, stupid is as stupid does. And the behavior you describe is extremely stupid. If you're writing a mostly grounded script that involves some scientific mechanism as a core plot point and will be presented to a broad adult audience, then obviously getting that mechanism to be plausible to a layman adult should be a high priority. Which means checking the science and the typical layman's understanding of the science, so as to make sure that they're not falling prey to blind spots created by their insular perspective. After all, it's common knowledge that everyone has blind spots and that no one has a true grasp of their own blind spots; as such, if getting this plot point to sound believable to a typical viewer matters to the writers, then they would check.
They either didn't check or didn't care to implement what they learned when they checked. This indicates that they either actively chose to write the script in a way that made themselves appear stupid or just didn't care about it.
I think some people don’t know what they don’t know, and when everyone around them has similar blind spots it gets really hard to realize that you’re in one. For example, I’ve never been to Europe. Nobody I know has ever been to Europe, and none of my friends know anyone who has ever been to Europe. So were I to write something about life in Europe, the deficit would be obvious to people who have been to Europe, but not to me, and not to my first level draft readers (who are likely to be people I know personally). Nobody else sees the problem because they have similar low level assumptions about Europe that I do. Then nobody can point out that high tea isn’t really a thing, for example, or that London doesn’t look like brownstone buildings anymore or what have you.
Yes ideally you check. I try to check as well. But if you don’t know that you don’t know, things get missed simply because is sounds right to you.
But as you demonstrated, you were able to predict all of these problems that would arise from your own blind spots. As such, if you did decide to write a story that took place in Europe, you are now equipped to at least avoid and possibly mitigate these problems. The biggest insight I'd say you presented is that because everyone has unknown unknowns, it follows that it sounds right to you should, by no means, be the bar by which you decide if it actually is right for your story. Knowing all this, if you still decide to just proceed based on it sounds right to you instead of researching with actual Europeans or Europe experts and, as a result, you fail in your goal of writing a story that presents a believable description of a story taking place in real-world Europe, then I would describe that as, at the very least, acting stupid.
Of course, a writer probably doesn't have the time and energy to do this kind of checking for every possible unknown unknown or even every plausible one. But if the details are as important as to be pivotal to the main plot point of the story, it seems stupid not to prioritize getting that right.
I mean I’m able to predict that I don’t know those things because in that case, it’s a known issue for me. I’m also not exactly up to speed on a lot of other topics, including things that I think I know. And if everyone around me has the same blind spots and misbeliefs about a given topic, the chances of something getting on the screen that’s obviously wrong to an expert, or even a layperson interested in the subject goes up quite a bit.
I’ll be the first to tell you I don’t know much about the law. Most people don’t. The problem is that because of the popularity of legal shows and crime dramas, most people think they know the law. Any draft readers will have the same ideas about the law you do. And so it gets into police and crime dramas where most people think that’s how the law works. Any knowledgeable lawyer or even anyone who’s been in a real courtroom knows that the courtroom scenes of most crime dramas are bunk. Jury trials don’t work that way, at all. The lawyers are not allowed to pontificate as they do in crime dramas. The rules of what kinds of evidence and testimony and questions you can ask are far stricter than what TV has taught American audiences about criminal law. It still shows up on TV every week.
Right, and that phenomenon of getting things wrong due to being around people who are similarly ignorant as oneself is also common knowledge. I'd wager, for instance, that most Hollywood writers would characterize Evangelical Christians in red enclaves as suffering from this (some of them might think "Oh, those poor ignoramuses might fall prey to echo chambers, but a smart cookie like me is safe," which would be a stupider act than everything else I've written about combined). If there are some details that are important to get correct in one's script for the sake of keeping the audience invested, then it seems rather stupid to me not to avoid this kind of echo chamber effect by intentionally seeking out advice from people outside one's social circles, ideally from actual subject-matter experts.
I'd argue that part of the phenomenon here is that American media and American audiences have created a sort of fictional system of law shared within these various media properties that relies on just-barely-plausible suspension of disbelief that both the creators and the viewers have decided to agree upon in order to make things more entertaining. I categorize the legal systems we see in these shows in the same bin as the trope of a knock in the head being a reliable way to reliably make them lose consciousness for a few hours without any other health implications or sounds of explosions in space.
Funnily enough, one of the many pieces of criticism against the recent Disney+ show She-Hulk: Attorney at Law seemed to be how unrealistic its legal proceedings were. Perhaps they were no less realistic than what we normally see in legal shows, but maybe the show probably didn't respect the agreement of suspension of disbelief and just threw up there whatever was convenient for the plot, which was what lost viewers. If that's what happened, I think that would be stupidity; you don't need to check that the legal system in your script is accurate, but you do need to check that it is believable to your audience, which means checking what constitutes believability to your audience.
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The calibre of people here is higher than your average writer. Plus we actually care about plots and rationality of characters. Writers might not care, they figure out the plot to fit whatever they want to say.
"Somehow Palpatine returned. Despite him apparently resurrecting from the dead, we shall spend absolutely zero effort thinking about how we might kill him permanently."
I find it darkly amusing that this is also largely how the writers of new SW stories think about their political opposition. "Somehow, racism has returned. Despite racism managing to defeat our almost total control of western culture, we shall spend absolutely zero effort thinking about how to actually resolve the problem, and instead double down on the same policies that failed last time."
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Seriously? Wow, that's comic book levels of contrivance. Like, if it was Mr. Freeze doing something like that then I could buy it.
I guess they were going for some kind of twist? 'haha check it out it was the scientists after all bet u didn't see that coming😏'?
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As a practicing academic research scientist, perhaps I can shed some light on this. The short answer is that no-one believes you when you say your end results will be world-changing, so good luck getting funding for even so much as a dinky thermal element radiator.
Scientific funding bodies are staffed by a mixture of know-nothing bureaucrats and ex-scientists turned people managers, neither of whom have seen the business end of a revolutionary scientific discovery for decades at best. No practicing scientist gets any money unless they can present these grey beancounters with colourful diagrams of massaged "preliminary results" which purport to show that a revolutionary discovery is Just One More Grant Award away: and so, cursed by the incentives foist upon them, practicing scientists have to enter a rat race of hyperbole, the end result being that everyone is claiming to be revolutionary at once. This in turn makes the beancounter's incompetence a self-fulfilling prophecy: their inability to assign monies to measured, meritorious proposals means no-one bothers writing measured, meritorious proposals, and the process devolves into a competition about who can spam the most outlandish over-promises, shiny diagrams, and ESG buzzwords. Making skepticism about revolutionary claims retroactively correct.
So the fact that scientists on top of a world-changing discovery are forced to rely on warm mercury backwash from a mine because no funding body will give them $1000 for a space heater is... extremely plausible to me.
EDIT: The above probably constitutes sanewashing. For the record I think the even more plausible explanation is that lazy showrunners didn't give it any thought beyond Corpos Bad, Hard Scientists Bad. The plot device actually does make sense, but my opinion of the show is sufficiently low that I think them correct only by accident.
This sounds like a failure of academic research. In a case like this where you know the results could be hugely valuable, i.e., profitable, there is no shortage of venture capitalists who would be interested in properly funding the research at least to the point where its value could be proven out.
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This is just a cynical, pessimistic, edgy hot take; come on!
It's correct, of course, but you should have kept going until you reached very cynical, very pessimistic, and very edgy. It's too optimistic to imply that the beancounters would at least fund the best projects if only they could figure out what those projects were! As counterexamples, I was just last week treated to multiple separate stories of this form: Researcher A1 working on Project A demonstrated that with a slight modification AA he could make Older Project B obsolete at a fraction of the cost, so researchers B1 through Bn managed to convince their shared superiors that A1 was stepping out of his lane, and either further work into AA got canceled or all of A got canceled for the sin.
I've of course heard the claim that "science advances one funeral at a time", but I'd imagined it only being applicable to great intellectual frameworks versus the difficulty of making large paradigm shifts, not to every little idea and technology versus the difficulty of finding something new to work on earlier than you'd planned.
The one contra to support his thesis is it explains Elon Musks. Being a man who can see where techs could go has immense value as most people can’t do that. That we in fact have a bunch of techs that could flourish if only we had the manager who knew how to put all the pieces together. Also implies the average VC kind of sucks and really just trade off what’s worked in the past and building the next SAAS model or app.
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This is also how you get gain of function research. You have to find some way of making what you do sexy.
Another problem is that there are more scientists than plausible paths of scientific enquiry.
Philip Kitcher has some useful insights here on the division of epistemic labour in science. In short, it's not always ideal to have scientists pursuing just the most plausible hypotheses. Instead, we should allocate epistemic labour in proportion to something like expected utility, such that low-probability high-impact hypotheses get their due. Unfortunately, this can be a hard sell to many researchers given the current incentive structures. Do you want to spend 10 years researching a hypothesis that is almost certainly false and is going to give you null results, just for the 1% chance that it's true? In practice this means that science in practice probably skews too much towards epistemic conservatism, with outlier hypotheses often being explored only by well-funded and established eccentric researchers (example: Avi Loeb is one of the very few mainstream academics exploring extraterrestrial intelligence hypotheses, and he gets a ton of crap for it).
There are also of course some fields (maybe social psychology, neuroscience, and pharmacology as examples) where the incentives stack up differently, often because it's easy to massage data or methodology to guarantee positive results. This means that researchers go for whatever looks bold and exciting and shiny because they know they'll be able to manufacture some eye-catching results, whereas a better division of epistemic labour would have them doing more prosaic but valuable work testing and pruning existing paradigms and identifying plausible mechanisms where it exists (cue "it ain't much but it's honest work" meme).
All of which is to say, I think there's plenty of work to go around in the sciences, enough to absorb all the researchers we have and more, but right now that labour is allocated highly inefficiently/suboptimally.
I wonder if there's a labor quality issue here.
At Google and Facebook of old engineers had near absolute freedom to choose what they wanted to work on. Google famously had 20% time, Facebook had a fairly permissive evaluation system that let you go do things like make desktop Linux for engineers better if you could argue that it was impactful. They were trusted to do this because hiring filtered for very talented and self-motivated people. The filter was so effective that you could let the performance evaluation process weed out the slackers. As a result, you got the best match between what people were working on and what they were personally motivated to work on. People put in long hours because they really wanted to see their idea working and out in the wild.
From what I've absorbed from fiction, it seems academia used to kind of be that way? Tenure was used to prove out that you were the real deal, and then you just worked on whatever tickled your fancy. My guess is that as academia grew and grew, you got more slackers, and no real weed-out mechanism, so you end up with lots of gatekeeping on what kind of research gets done.
Or maybe professors have had to specialize in grant-writing for a very long time, I don't know the field.
Academia is many things, but I don't see people going for (and getting) professorships as slackers. They almost invariably are smart, hard working people who could be making well into the six figures or more in industry. (Note: this is for what I'll just call real fields.)
The big issue is that it's so astoundingly competitive to get any kind of professorship, let alone a desirable one, that intellectual conservatism reigns supreme. Going off on some tangent that has high potential but is unlikely to bear any fruit is just too risky.
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It’s a quantity AND a quality problem. Bear in mind that academia is universal, so one a problem is solved it stays solved and the first to solve gets 99% of the credit.
In most fields, there are a few approaches that look like they will bear fruit. I refer to these as ‘plausible’ above. The thing is, if you are not top-tier, you really don’t want to work on these, because other better-funded labs with cleverer researchers are already on it. But you don’t want to take the chance of going out on a limb either. What you want is something closely enough related to the sexy thing that it will get you money and prestige, without getting you steamrollered. In the same way that you wouldn’t try to DIY your own internet search algorithm these days, but you might try to make something useful that has slipped under Google’s notice and get them to buy you out.
The funders, who are somewhat out of touch, have to allocate research money in this environment.
One stable equilibrium is to only fund the top-tier people, on the assumption they are the most likely to make plausible breakthroughs. This is sort of what we already do. The downside is that you get groupthink in the big players and you miss out on the occasional transformative upstart. The other downside is that research is prestigious enough, and requires so much investment from would-be researchers, that you have a vast pool of no-hopers who will destroy themselves trying to make to top-tier.
What happens in practice is therefore that we funnel almost all the money to the big players and keep a secondary fund for any interesting-looking second tier work. The second tier is therefore a desperate scrambling mess of people trying to prove that their unlikely discovery will change the world. Many of them even delude themselves into thinking it’s true.
The decline in academia you note is mostly a function of the number of plausible research directions going down as the number of academics goes up. The result is a bunch of second-raters competing for scraps.
(Sorry, this is longer and ramblier than I hoped. Also, I should clarify that I was one of said second-raters. It’s not meant as an insult, just the sad result of hope meeting reality.)
EDIT: you got two replies in 10 minutes. Can you spot the triggered (former) academics?
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All true, but you already explained why it can’t be otherwise. Scientific labour mostly isn’t allocated, it’s chosen, and nobody is going to willingly sign up for a 99% chance of unadulterated failure. Even if we had the resources to make such a life cushy, which we don’t.
I don’t think it’s an insuperable problem. A difficult one to be sure, but academic incentive structures are a lot more mutable than a bunch of other social problems if you have the political will. There’s also the fact that the current blind review journal-based publishing system is on borrowed time thanks to advances in LLMs, so we’ll need to do a fair amount of innovating/rebuilding in the next decade anyway.
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The first assumption you could make is that Hollywood writers are just stupid. But that doesn’t feel right especially with HBO since writers do often get intricate stories right and research all sorts of mythology and historical facts to build characters and plots.
I think this leads you to a conclusion that Hollywood views corporations and business in general as low status. Therefore, learning how a business would think can’t be done because it would be beneath them to study how business would think. Thus business thinking can only be a caricature of dumb evil villains doing silly sort cuts to get things done.
From the outside I get the feeling that writers are being taught some kind of paint-by-numbers system, the construct a basic plot, and then dress it up to match the setting.
An example from the show: Chief of Police Danvers, portrayed by Jodie Foster, takes orders from some guy from Anchorage, and has to quote regulations to get him to defer to her. If you know anything about how police are structure in America, this makes no sense. Within municipalities the chief is the highest police officer. They do answer to others within the municipality, like mayors or police commissioners, but they're not part of some state-wide system.
My guess is that the paint-by-numbers called for the female chief to have a male chauvinist superior. The writers don't bother to make that align with any bit of reality except that it's "in Alaska."
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I only watched 20-30 minutes of the first episode of season 4, but it was clear it was going to be dominated by misandry and female chauvinism.
It's not a surprise that some people are trying to make the conversation about the supposed misogyny of its critics instead.
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You know what was really awful, with terrible plot, weak characters and acting, and tons of boring filler?
Every Jean Claude Van Damme movie.
Do you know what was widely enjoyed by male audiences, with positive reviews, fond memories, and enough cultural cachet to spawn respectful memes and callbacks?
Jean Claude Van Damme movies.
I'm not going to make any claims about this True Detective thing, I didn't watch the show, haven't followed the coverage or reaction, haven't seen the director's interviews. Don't really care about the particulars of this one case much, the dynamic you are describing is definitely a thing that could exist and very well may, for all I know.
But I do want to complicate the narrative beyond 'The people giving this show terrible reviews aren't saying it's bad because it has female leads and don't explicitly believe that's why they dislike it, therefore the director is wrong to say that they are rejecting it because it has female leads.'
No one would say 'I like Jean Claude Van Damme movies because the lead character is a man.' But a lot of similarly brainless beat-em-up action movies have been released with women leads over the years, often with better objective craft and quality overall, and male audiences have generally rejected all of them. It can be true both that male audiences did not reject those movies out of explicit misogyny, and that they would have enjoyed them more if they had starred a cheesy male lead. Those two things don't actually contradict each other.
So there is in fact a nuanced claim the director could be making here, that audiences 'aren't ready' for a female lead in this type of story, or that the story was written in a way that would appeal more to women audiences but the existing audience was mostly male and liked it less, or that having female leads and director led to some necessary changes from the first season that aren't bad but that are noticeably different and therefore upsetting to big fans who were promised a return to form, or etc. etc. etc.
I just want to carve out the fact that there is room for nuanced claims in this discussion, and we don't always have to reduce discussions about things like this down to the barest-bone caricatures of the two 'sides' in the culture war.
Can you give 5 examples, please?
As a huge fan of JCVD I can say that 50% of his movies are trash (but enjoyable trash), 45% are mediocre but entertaining, and 5% are good. I don't think I've ever seen anyone unironically argue that any significant amount of his movies are actually good in the critical sense.
I agree. Also, JCVD was never that successful, certainly not successful on the scale that Marvel/DC are pursuing. Arnie and Stallone were very successful, but usually only in films that hold up well. Terminator 1/2 and Rocky stand out as notably original films that were entertaining for a mass audience and yet offer food for thought, despite all the muscle on screen.
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You're pointing to one of the core differences at play here. Paraphrasing liberally:
Critic: JCVD movies are trash
Fan: but enjoyable trash!
vs.
Critic: True Detective is trash
Fan: This is just another example of the sexist misogynist backlash. In fact, it isn't even a genuine grassroots opinion and is part of a concerted effort by a politically-motivated brigade that can't accept reality.
It takes two to tango. Low-brow media (generally) doesn't push back against negative reviews, so any "controversies" die out immediately. Prestige media has both supporters and detractors, so they can feed off of each other in a growing cycle of escalation.
Going off of my memories of the Internet that was, it seems like merely being bad was grounds enough for vindictive mockery back then (e.g. Eye of Aragon, Twilight). Nowadays? You have to be actively stepping on toes or egregiously ripping people off to blow up online.
An example: remember Morbius? That Sony Marvel movie from like 2022 that became a whole meme unto itself? Well, this year saw the release of its spiritual successor, Madame Web, and that movie is unlikely to inspire the same amount of memery outside of a perception of it playing in empty theaters.
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Check the critical rankings of the classic JCVD movies. I don't begrudge anyone enjoying a piece of entertainment, but critics are supposed to be more discerning in their evaluations. There was a time when I trusted a critic score more than an audience score. Film and TV criticism now seem like mostly extended marketing efforts than honest takes on the quality of writing, acting, direction. Only technical aspects (sound, cinematography) receive regular scrutiny.
My sense is that critics are less willing to honestly critique the merits of certain shows and films that send the right cultural/political messages, or shows and films written, directed by, or starring women and minorities. Maybe they're afraid of being called out as racist or misogynist, or maybe they're just consciously or unconsciously defending their side against the other side, as they perceive the battlelines to be drawn.
The culture wars is have made everything that I once enjoyed so unbearably dumb.
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Perhaps you should watch the show and then revisit this post.
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Also every porn movie with female leads has worse acting, plot and characters and yet is welcomed by male audience. I think this totally disproves the misogyny narrative.
On a more serious note - the van damme movies were good where they mattered - the action. Nobody watched them for the plot. Also it's not like men shunned Cynthia Rothrock or the likes.
Universal Soldier (1992) was a masterpiece of cinema and the fact it has a 34% RottenTomatoes score is a blight on our culture.
This is the big issue. From what I did watch, Night Country is not a True Detective series. Had the True Detective name never been attached the critics could sing its praises in peace. They could glorify the importance of its message in a thousand reviews that no one would read. Then, the Prestige TV-cels could have then watched an episode, laughed at it, and never thought about it again.
The studio's decision to attach the True Detective brand cashes in a little HBO credibility with some part of their audience, but apparently the viewership was good? I guess there's a market for bad TV on HBO. It is a shame they pulled a bait-and-switch on a fanbase that I assume really really really wants another good season of True Detective, but alas. It ain't happening. I quickly bailed on the series and have no inclination to watch it.
It depends what you mean, Season 4 was I think (and the audience scores seem to agree) better than season 2. Was season 2 a real True Detective show? What is the requirement (beyond owning the IP) for it to be a True Detective show? I don't think it can be quality, because season 2 was pretty bad.
I think that (setting aside quality) Season 4 is definitely more True Detective than Season 2. In fact I might argue the reason it isn't good it because it is too much True Detective. It takes Season 1 and turns it up to 11. One detective who sleeps around, 1 with weird visions. A strange seemingly posed body/bodies. The spiral, a conspiracy, an ambiguous ending with something unexplained yet some sort of hope for the protagonists, An emphasis on visuals and a crime still being investigated years afterwards. A final confrontation in a maze like cave. The final reveal not really living up to the set up.
I'm not a huge fan, but I do recall it being lambasted for not meeting expectations or anything alike S1. After reading this thread I looked at the TD sub and it sounds like there's a rehabilitation of Season 2 going on.
From what I saw, it has some more similarities to Season 1 than S2. Season 2 may have had more detective work if not the cultish, supernatural vibes? It has been quite awhile since I've seen S2 and I don't think I will watch again. The shootout was the coolest part.
I recently watched Season 3 and it was enjoyable and interesting. After the noise surrounding S2 it makes sense they try to re-align with S1 vibes. It'd be fine if True Detective didn't follow the S1 formula with each season having its own themes, setting, and tone that aren't all that similar to each other. Big A-list names with acting bonafides, interesting/logical/grounded detective work, some well-written twists, and sure some supernatural flair if they want. Setting aside quality, that sounds neat.
Season 2 went to a bigger ensemble, (3 cops 1 mob boss) and yeah had basically none of the supernatural vibes (bar perhaps, Velcoro's dream). I think it is probably the least True Detective season and probably the worst season overall. Though I think it looked worse than it was as it was right after Season 1. I think season 3 got the cop dynamic right but the mystery was weak. 4, tried to go back to 1, which makes sense because most of the criticisms of 2 and 3 were they weren't enough like 1.
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This is a vague statement about things from a quarter-century ago which sounds plausible and yet doesn't provide specific examples and so falls apart when you try to think about anything to back it up, a technique mastered by tumblr's Prokopetz.
(Wait... that's David Prokopetz... are you...?)
There is one Van Damme movie that still has any cultural relevance, and it's Street Fighter, and that is mostly because of a exceptional performance by the late Raul Julia. Nobody cares about Timecop, or Bloodsport, or Double something, or whatever else JCVD was up to in the 90s.
Today's equivalent of Van Damme movies are Jason Statham movies, and those are hardly the cultural juggernauts.
Once again, no examples. Let's try to provide some on our own, then.
2016, Ghostbusters - everything I've seen about this one leads me to believe that it's just not an engaging movie, with the plot strung together from unfunny improv sketches. The same would be true for a male-led movie, the level of contemporary standup and sketch comedy is just abysmal, SNL's material is so bad that being worth even a mild chuckle is a once-or-twice-a-year exception.
2017, Atomic Blonde - I'll give the screenwriters one thing, they understood that for the "female James Bond" to make sense the character needs to be at least bi, or otherwise the dynamic falls apart. Other that that and a nice Blue Monday remix, pretty boring movie. The villain had barely any sensible motivation, and the acclaimed oner action scene was a bit of form over function. Want to see a good oner? Watch the first 10 or so minutes of Climax.
2019, Birds of Prey, or a Fantabulous etc. etc. - Well this one was at least engaging. It was, however, absolutely murdered by marketing (title change), and was a followup to a flop, so it was dead on arrival. Again, the villain was a bit of a strawman, but at least there was scenery to chew. If you want female-led movies, I saw Underwater on the same day as this one and I liked it much better.
2019, Captain Marvel - this this the one that's usually talked about, isn't it? And it even made pretty enough money, I think? At that point, the MCU has been running for almost 11years, so people got tired of yet another origin story, an the main character is a flying brick whose only solution to a problem is "moar hand lazers", so the action scenes were so-so. Plus there was a weird undercurrent of... revanchism and spite in the marketing and interviews, so that would be a turnoff for the people who were on the fence (that last point is also true to a lesser degree for Ghostbusters and BoP, and to a greater degree for Battlefield V, a non-movie exmaple).
Black Widow, The Marvels - sorry, we're past the endgame, audiences are tired, everythings flopping now, Ant-Man flopped too.
Charlie's Angels - this one is was just straight up bad.
But all that enumeration in unnecessary in the face of the more important point - if I want to see a female-led and female-centric movie, I can just go see Portrait de la jeune fille en feu (shame that one of the lead actresses has quit acting since), I don't owe it to anyone to watch mediocre derivative capeshit. I don't watch Jason Statham movies either.
As far as I can tell, Captain Marvel only made money because it was sandwiched in between the Infinity War movies. People were hungry for Marvel at that point, the last film ended on a cliffhanger and the excitement was palpable. This was clearly the high point of Marvel's energy in pop culture.
I'm of the opinion that they knew Captain Marvel wasn't going to be very good and sandwiched it where they did to boost the numbers.
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Ana de Armas was very well liked in Bond - the rest of the movie was an actual disappointment including Bond himself. Charlize Theron was awesome in Fury Road. Mackenzie Davis and Gabriel Luna were great in Dark Fate. Their scenes shine in comparison to Arnold and Linda who drag down the whole movie to mediocrity. Imagine how much better it would have been without them at all (at least Arnold).
The female equivalent of Jon Bernthal is uncommon to begin with and even more so for someone attractive enough to be a lead. Brie Larson doesn’t come close to convincing at portraying violence. Wonder Woman was successful in spite of Gal Gadot looking out of place in most of the action scenes (the last act being the worst by far).
Fights more often come across as cross fit than people trying to hurt each other and fearing for their lives in turn.
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You have it exactly backwards. Nobody cares about Street Fighter, because it's a bad movie all around. Bloodsport, on the other hand, is a genuine 80s action movie, and while it doesn't reach the heights of Predator, it's still easily his best movie and the one I would watch if I decided to get some JCVD in my life.
Kickboxer is also good, albeit pretty much the same movie.
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It would be easier to prove your case by showing hard-boiled or action female-led movies that performed well or are loved. Off the top of my head: Alien, Aliens, Silence of the Lambs, Fargo, Gone Girl, Murder She Said.
I thought Salt was a really good action movie with a female lead. I remember seeing talk of a sequel but it never went anywhere.
I’m not sure how well the movie did in the box office.
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I tried to limit myself to the last decade, because that's when the complaining and metacomplaining really started.
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The Tomb Raider series weren't cinematic masterpieces, but they did quite well with male audiences. Hunger Games also. Terminator 2. Kill Bill 1&2. Various versions of La Femme Nikita. There's really no need to scrape the bottom of the barrel. Add TV series and there's Alias and Buffy right off the top of my head,
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Take a list like this (or maybe one with a bit less recency bias).
Do you think those are intellectual action movies, so they don't count as brainless beat-em-up? Are they miscategorized in some way and don't actually have women leads? Do they have worse craft and quality? Are these too few counterexamples to count as "all", or else have they been been rejected (counter to my perceptions)?
As a sidenote, I've only heard of a few of JCVD's works, and none of them because of his name. Beloved action movies starring women popped into my head immediately. I'll be the first to admit I'm not a cinemaphile, but my experiences are completely opposite of the examples you've laid out in your comment.
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Such as? Which films are you thinking of?
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...yeah they're called Terminator, Aliens, Kill Bill, and Hunger Games, and they range from box-office hit to beloved classic.
Please proactively provide evidence in proportion to how partisan and inflammatory your claim might be. Is an attempt to carve room for nuanced discussion one where arguments and examples that have been brought up countless times are deliberately ignored in favor of implying someone acts out of unconscious bias? Why have you only considered bias going one way, and ignoring the possibility it is the female directors, leads, etc who are biased?
Given the above, I'm afraid I must reject your unsubstantiated claim that you're aiming for nuance, unless you back it up with evidence.
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You know what didn't generally get top reviews from critics?
Jean Claude Van Damme movies.
You know what no one got called sexist or misogynistic for disliking?
Jean Claude Van Damme movies.
Smoke and mirrors are not "nuance".
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Like what?
There are a lot of misses, but I'd guess that most of them are due to a dynamic where the producers start out with the goal of making an action movie that women will be interested in watching. They then start my casting a lead woman and usually other supporting women, but also change it in other ways such as making these women hypercompetent, degrading the other male characters, or focusing on themes and topics that would be of particular interest to women specifically. It's not really a surprise when men turn out to be less interested in these movies that are after all not for them.
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The very obvious explanation is that neither men nor most women actually enjoy watching a woman act like a man. An action movie featuring a thin woman punching, shooting, or otherwise overpowering men is not only wildly unrealistic, but also just aesthetically revolting on a primal level. Women are not actually strong, hypercompetent, ruthless badasses. The number of women who have ever lived who could truthfully be described in this way could probably all fit inside an average-sized parking lot. The number of women who have been successful police detectives is probably a bit larger - maybe it’d take two parking lots to fit all of them - but the fact remains that this is also a heavily male profession, generally utilizing classically masculine virtues.
Now, it’s unclear if you’re identifying this phenomenon as “explicit misogyny”. The director could be fully correct that audiences reacted poorly to this show on account of its female leads, but also totally wrong that this is “sexist” or “misogynistic”. Men and women are different. The overwhelming majority of both men and women are aware of this. They strongly prefer media which accurately depicts men as men and women as women, and in which men and women embody the virtues typical of their respective sexes. I wouldn’t want to watch a film about a male nurse or caregiver; the only three films I can think of off the top of my head which feature males employed in those professions are Meet The Parents (including its sequels), Mr. Mom, and The Pacifier - all of which are comedies which treat this situation as inherently and hilarious incongruous and weird.
Whether we’re talking about action movies or romcoms - the two most broadly popular film genres of our age - the overwhelming default is men acting like men and women acting like women. To the extent that True Detective challenges this dynamic by treating two women as hypercompetent, dogged, logically-minded badasses, it’s doomed to fail. I haven’t seen any episodes of any season of the show, so I can’t comment on whether or not that’s the case, but if it is then perhaps instead of blaming misogyny the director and the writers should blame themselves for making media that people didn’t ask for and didn’t want to watch.
Anime and other interactive media has quite a bit of this going on already; perhaps you just need to watch more of it. Popular examples include Gunsmith Cats (both the MCs do this), Gunslinger Girl, Ghost in the Shell, Upotte, Re:Zero, Made in Abyss (more 'girl acts like a boy', but she definitely gets beat to shit), Ranma 1/2 (and all the gender-bending anime that would follow in its footsteps; bonus points for female author), Genshin Impact, Fire Emblem, Final Fantasy, the Persona series, Fate/Stay Night (and the Nasuverse in general), You're Under Arrest!, Hunter x Hunter, Trigun, Nier: Automata, Bayonetta, Half-Life 2, and every other shooter video game or RPG that allows you to pick a female player character (the usual answer is "actually, I'd prefer to stare at a girl's ass in third person", but come on). Western examples include Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Alien, The Matrix, Kill Bill, Terminator/2, and the X-Files. For rarer 2010s examples, all the movies in the Kingsmen series have female antagonists; Edge of Tomorrow had an action girl right out of the '80s but that's an adaptation of an earlier manga so maybe it doesn't count. Also the most popular Vtuber in the world is a woman who acts like a man. This isn't an exhaustive list.
Of course, I'd actually say that in a good number of these cases the women aren't actually acting like men, but then that generates the "what's 'acting like a woman' mean?" question (in the same way as "what's 'acting white'?"). Gynosupremacists (and black supremacists) are by definition going to answer that question as selfishly as possible- and in so doing miss the truth that nobody has a monopoly on acting constructively (in fiction or in real life), most constructive (and destructive) actions don't have a gender, and all successful writers understand this. Now, it might be the case that the more flashy constructive/destructive actions do tend to go to characters on the right end of the population distribution- which is why they tend to be white and male- but the choice to just not do that is always there (the problem comes from progressives wanting it for free, hence the desire to colonize previous works rather than creating something out of whole cloth- this is the root of corruption).
The best example of "wants it for free" I think I've ever seen is the opening to Terminator 6; where it's literally "fuck you, we're killing off the whole reason for the plot in the first place; this series is now about (if memory serves correctly) some random interracial lesbian couple".
Beauty cannot come from corruption. The reason all the competent female characters come from the '80s and '90s is because feminism and gynosupremacism weren't quite yet the same thing for the average writer (or investor); that's no longer true, so all they can possibly write are Mary Sues. Places that don't have a culture of open gender warfare are less likely to suffer from this, though Japanese media also tends to have weird out-of-character things like "lost a fight, time to go back to the kitchen" (Sloot's DBZ example) so you have to contend with that instead.
Anime isn't interactive media, unless you're referring to anime-style video games.
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Hold on, which one? This needs some qualifications, because I can immediately think of several who are #1 for certain metrics/categories, and I wouldn't call Ironmouse or Gura very man-like in mannerisms.
EDIT: And yes, the difference between strong female protags then and now is that, before, there was genuine challenge for the likes of Ellen Ripley and Sarah Connor. They didn't suffer from the boring inevitable invincibility we accuse shonen protags of having, they had to face genuine life-or-death struggle.
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But in the show that kicked this discussion off (True Detective) this isn't true. Navarro is a schizophrenic with anger issues whose mistakes allow her sister to commit suicide and then provokes fights in order to have herself punished and beaten for her failure and is unable to have mature emotional relationships. Danvers is a bitter, emotionally repressed, failure of a wife and mother, tormented by the death of her husband and son, who treats everyone terribly and drinks and has meaningless sex a lot.
They make obvious mistakes, mess up a lot (missing huge clues that are right in front of them) and are pretty clearly flawed in a lot of ways. They are both unlikable characters. And this appears to have been intentional as Jodie Foster describes her character as a horrible Alaskan Karen. Most of the criticism above is not that they were Mary Sues but that they were portraying mostly masculine character traits. Most of the traits we see for them would be entirely normal to see on a hard boiled male noir detective.
The arc they both go through interestingly is to be more open to feminine traits (being more emotionally present and open (and physically present for her kid in Danver's case), and to let go of the rigid hierarchal structure of the law, to see the predominantly female scut work in the town as worthy of respect. It's certainly a feminist message in that respect, but you could have swapped in two male detectives as the leads who would learn the same message without having to change anything pretty much.
For a spoiler we meet a weak female character early on who is missing fingers, they find a palm print on the murder victims clothes which matches those missing fingers, yet dismiss the suspect due to her status. It turns out she was indeed part of the group that murdered the victims. The group of female cleaners has access to the various pieces of information they needed to solve the crime they were avenging because they were able to wander around the police station, lab facility and everywhere else in town as no-one gave them a second thought including our two female lead cops.
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I think there's a fair bit of context that's needed to make a decent female action character. It's easier to suspend disbelief when it's already been suspended for fantasy settings.
A female superpowered character is just as realistic as a male Hulk. In animated media, the downside of unrealistic representation (drawings) is balanced by the ease of implementing fantasy settings. An anime will never look as realistic as a live-action show, so writers may as well make full use of fantasy settings.
On the other hand, live-action shows can very easily make us believe in the reality of their settings. Real actors make us believe that we have real people on the screen, and their work (can) add a depth of visceral emotion that cannot be replicated by animated drawings.
Here the issue is also with the actors and actresses. While it is very easy to animate a badass superheroine/magical girl/ruthless adventurer etc, getting Brie Larson to look menacing/intimidating is not an easy feat. Even if the character is supposed to be fantastically superpowered, the behavior of the actress (and supporting cast) does not meet expectations. Weak punches that don't connect getting turned into devastating conflagrations by CGI does not satisfy the way a painstakingly choreographed movie like John Wick would.
Male actors themselves go through a whole transformation to embody an 'action hero'. Sadly, most of the cape movies actors are on steroids. Keanu Reeves who does not look like a great badass in real life apparently spent a long time practicing with real guns to be 'John Wick'.
What would be needed for satisfying live-action female badass movies would be a crop of actresses who would dedicate themselves to the genre like exists on the male side, and actually work on the craft, instead of feminist fantasies that neither women or men are interested in watching.
So for good live-action female action character:
for realistic settings:
I think the biggest issue with having women on the set of an action movie is that it breaks the magic, in a way. Mostly because female actresses in general seem to be bad at demonstrating violence, and nobody making these movies seems to have any issue with that.
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I'd argue that the enjoyment of watching Gunslinger Girl wasn't all that much related to how cool the girls looked doing manly things like chasing down and shooting terrorists in city streets. I always thought the action scenes had more of a somber and tragic tone than thrilling (though they often were thrilling). Then again, perhaps being funneled into a thankless, depressing, and dangerous line of work by a society that abandoned you before turning you into a monster might be the most manly thing there is, so I guess this counts.
I couldn't watch Gunslinger Girl. The whole setup with older men mentoring young girls to do weird things, even if in this context it was assassination, seemed too close to grooming for me.
As someone who watched a few episodes of the anime and didn't stick with it, I imagine it pretty much was just grooming without any sexual component to it--was probably the point, even.
It did start as a comiket doujinshi, so the grooming angle was explicit in every sense of the word. Complete with management having the "what did we learn, Palmer" discussion after a lovesick cyborg murder-suicides her handler: "sprinkle some terrorist blood around the scene, destroy the ballistics report, and for god's sake don't do whatever we did again"
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Which one is that again?
Gura, the shark girl. Male-coded interests, male-coded avatar, male-coded lack of disgust/manners/candor, male-coded memes (some of them are harder to catch, but c'mon, titling your video referencing "pee is stored in the balls"?)
It's not necessarily a 1:1 example because, well, tomboy... but there's something qualitatively different between her and the other girl streamers in that the whole "men and women are different" thing is minimized [even if it is an act, or specifically engineered to do that, you can't tell]. It's the "girl you used to be friends with a long time ago at the age before men and women naturally drift into their own spheres of influence" thing- and while all of the streamers do this to some extent, she just happens to do it better.
Yeah, I dunno, I feel like Mori is the more man/tomboy/ladette-ish of HoloMyth, Gura just comes off as "wacky girl" to me.
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Boy-coded, maybe.
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Indeed. If anything, the opposite.
Men, on average, are much physically stronger than women. Aside from physical characteristics, the concept of "badassery" usually entails some combination of stoicism, risk-taking, hyperagency, self-accepted disposability/expendability—traits that are very much more present in men than in women.
Thus, it's far easier to suspend disbelief for a male "badass" than a female "badass", just as it is easier to suspend disbelief for men dunking in pick-up basketball games than women dunking.
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Counterpoint: God created man (and woman), but Sam colt made them equal. There’s nothing inherently revolting about a woman with a gun. In fact, I’d say there are lot of ways to make female violence appealing to men, especially if skin-tight costumes are involved.
The catch is that making the violence great is still only going to pull in men. Might even push women away, whether or not the lead provides Representation. It’s not hard to believe that female audiences are generally looking for something else in their films.
Now, a more nuanced claim might say that empowering women is incompatible with the post-Bourne zeitgeist of gritty, jump cut fisticuffs. Maybe the 80s fetish for martial arts provided suspension of disbelief. Maybe men lost all plausible deniability for wanting Trinity to step on them.
I’ve gotten the impression that the generic modern fight scene is just a lot cheaper and easier to produce. You don’t need Jackie Chan on retainer. Movies which do invest heavily in stunts and choreography, ones like Fury Road, still come out looking pretty good.
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They certainly weren't hyper-logical and hyper competent. Dogged, probably, yes. I think there is also the fact, that of the female police officers I know, they do seem to act more masculine, presumably because they are in an overwhelmingly masculine space. If you are going to portray female cops I think you should show them as more masculine acting than the average woman, because they probably would be in real life. Female cops are likely to be more aggressive, because those who are not, are not likely to want to be cops at all.
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Great action movies with female leads are films like Alien where the lead is not beating the xenomorph senseless through pure baddassery like later Rambo films, she's mostly running, but also the only character who takes the threat seriously, and during the big fight she's using heavy equipment she's shown as having relevant skills to use.
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Neither are most men, even most action movie protagonists. Most of them are heroes, and being a hero means having a flaw you are blind to, having a cathartic moment and fixing yourself. Steven Seagal and JCVD are famous for portraying hypercompetent protagonists and their movies aren't really taken seriously by anyone.
Among the newer action movie protagonists I can only name John Wick as the strong, hypercompetent, ruthless badass. And his character arc in the first movie (and the sequels are trash) is not heroic at all. He's neither stronger nor wiser in the end.
I simply cannot agree with this. Revenge is heroic, very heroic.
What he gets at the end is not strength nor wisdom, it's satisfaction. He accomplished what he set his mind to do, he finished the task he undertook, a task he set for himself not because he wanted to, but because he had to, because he was forced.
Revenge is one of the most heroic motivations, and Wick is a hero. It's also one of the few motivations that can be equally shared by men and women, as some of the most famous revenge movies star women as the ones taking revenge (Kill Bill, Carrie, Gone Girl).
Does he? His victory over Viggo is hollow. Both men who have slighted him are dead, but this won't bring his friend or his only living memento of his wife back. Wick's revenge is just a repressed death wish driven by grief. In the end, he's not satisfied at all, he's empty, bereft of emotions or the will to go on, saved only by the belated realization that there's more to his existence than grief and revenge, that despite the fact that he's lost three companions he might still save another life and form a new bond.
The mafia boss himself, Viggo, has a better character arc. He thinks of himself as the papa bear, his paternal obligations force him to protect his wayward son even from Keanu Reeves. But when push comes to shove, when he's staring at the barrel of a gun, he crumbles and trades his son's life for his own. Emasculated by his weakness, he seeks his own death in a way that mirrors John's, except he's driven by shame.
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I'm surprised this never occurred to me, but it definitely seems like the last decade or so of Strong Female Action Heroes in films has been as if major Hollywood studios handed Seagal billions of dollars to make his god-fantasy wish-fulfillment vehicles just with more expensive CGI. And then blamed the audience for being bigoted against fat people (or whatever other category you could stick Seagal into) when they complained about boring, unlikable, unrelatable protagonists with no growth.
JCVD is also a funny choice of example in the previous post, since AFAICT, JCVD isn't held in all that high regard today outside of the campy nostalgia. What do people remember him for today, maybe Street Fighter, famous mainly for the franchise and for being a filmmaking disaster, and Bloodsport, the one that was a breakout film for him. There are far better examples of similar action stars from his era who were far more successful, such as (obviously) Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone. And the films these guys were known for - e.g. The Terminator, Rambo, Rocky, Predator, Total Recall - were generally praised for having good scripts. Not fancy or deep or thought-provoking - though maybe on occasion - but having fun plots with charismatic, likeable characters that were easy to root for in stakes that made sense and seemed important and often even went through some journey of growth themselves.
To add on re Jcvd, the most prominent film of his I recall is JVCD, that meta film where he plays a loser version of himself directing his thousand yard stare at his own miserable life as essentially an international joke because of his old action films.
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I think Van Damme is also remembered for his leg splits, incidentally. His ability in that regard is almost a meme unto itself.
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Given that the new series of True Detective stars Jodie Foster, it's probably worth pointing out that, thirty years ago, she won her second Oscar playing an FBI agent-in-training, in a film which was both acclaimed by critics and awards bodies (still the most recent film to win the Big Five at the Oscars) and a huge commercial smash ($270m against a $19m budget). For added diversity points, at various points in the film Foster's character is assisted by a fellow agent-in-training, a black woman.
This makes the "you only hate season 4 because you can't stand to see strong female detectives" defense even harder to take seriously. No one* had a problem with a thriller revolving around a strong white female detective (and her black female partner) 30 years ago. You'll have a hard time persuading me that the average prestige TV audience member in 2024 is more misogynistic (and racist) than the average Anglophone cinemagoer in 1991. Not saying it's impossible, just saying it's a point that needs to be argued for and can't be taken for granted.
*Except feminists and trans activists.
I watched Silence of the Lambs a while ago, and I remember that Lector expounded that Buffalo Bill wasn't necessarily trans, he just hated his own identity--which, sure, these days, that might be more of a distinction without a difference, but it doesn't seem like the movie is as anti-trans as one might think.
Also, the source novel really labours the point that Buffalo Bill isn't actually trans, to the point that it almost disrupts the immersion. There's a point where one of the characters contacts a gender reassignment clinic looking for information on people who applied for the surgery but were rejected, and the doctor is like "you have to understand: we do not want the general public to think trans people are dangerous. This is already an incredibly marginalised community, making their lives worse in any way is completely unconscionable."
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I once argued that, on the film's release, TSotL wasn't transphobic, because during production "trans" was an identity category subject to medical gatekeeping: only people formally diagnosed with gender dysphoria by a qualified mental health professional are "really" trans; Buffalo Bill has not been formally diagnosed with gender dysphoria (and has had his request to medically transition refused on that basis); ergo Buffalo Bill isn't a trans woman. (One could plausibly argue that it was homophobic at the time of release, as Buffalo Bill is stated to be homosexual. My understanding is that Demme took this criticism seriously and made Philadelphia in a conscious effort to atone for it.)
But under the modern self-ID rubric, Buffalo Bill says she's a trans woman, therefore she is, therefore the film retroactively becomes transphobic by depicting a stunning and brave trans woman whose trans identity motivates her to become a vicious serial killer who starves and mutilates her victims.
In other words, TSotL wasn't transphobic until trans activists made it so.
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Jodie Foster's character also has a line where she specifically calls out that this behavior is unusual for transvestites, who are normally passive and far from dangerous. I believe the controversy existed at the time, and they slightly altered the script to ward it off.
It's based on the book, where the statement "transsexuals are passive types usually" is made (top half of the page around 164 or 5).
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There are a bunch of action movies with female leads that are widely considered good or at the very least have mass appeal. See: Aliens, Fury Road, Kill Bill, Terminator, Hunger Games, Underworld (not actually very good but a box office hit), etc. That expands further when you include movies that don't have female leads actually beating guys up but still taking aggressive, active roles. See: Zero Dark Thirty, Silence of the Lambs, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoos, Sicario, half of all horror movies ever made, etc.
Humans have had warrior goddesses for thousands of years. Surely the ancient Canaanites did not find Anat aesthetically revolting.
I guess the Underworld series falls into the "fighting f*cktoy" genre, so it doesn't really count. At least not in the eyes of mainstream feminists.
I mean, sure, but that's not a very nice way to talk about Michael Sheen
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And for any characters where it's too hard to apply that label, behold the Female Character Flowchart for some other options. (It's from a post on a 2010 nerd-feminist blog that was linked on Jezebel and made the rounds, it stuck with me because normally you only see such critiques used one at a time.)
And they have to resort to scare quotes ("Strong" female character) to disparage one expected action character path.
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Another possible reading is that it took divinity for a woman to transcend their stereotypes.
See also the ancient Greeks, who typically divided the sexes into separate spheres so strongly that would make a medieval trad blush -- while also worshipping and holding in high esteem goddesses like Artemis, Athena, and Hera, who are often depicted as more competent than the male gods. Certainly less likely to be diverted from their goals by a sexy woman.
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That long list of examples feels like it's undermining Darwin's little rant somewhat...
I don’t think he’s supporting guesswho or the directors so much as arguing with the Hoff.
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They made like five Underworld movies and five or six Resident Evils, and they didn't churn all those sequels out to lose money. That's ten or eleven reasonably successful female-led shit kicking action films over a period of fifteen years or so of the early 21st century, named off the top of my head with zero effort. I'm sure there are more. The idea that men don't like women in action movies is just a meme that gets trotted out by PR departments when something woke sucks.
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...This issue is not unique to True Detective.
Marvel and Star Wars have been effectively destroyed as cinematic and streaming franchises through this same process. The Witcher, Wheel of Time, Rings of Power, Indiana Jones, ghost busters, too many cinematic franchises to name.
I've been considering a retrospective of the topic, because we frequently debated whether there was a real trend of "get woke, go broke" going on in entertainment, whether casting choices and crew statements for various media indicated a coming drop in quality. It seems to me that it'd be worth an update, looking at how the culture war has actually cashed out for one of Blue Tribe's most secure bastions. Then, too, I'm curious whether the decline is overstated, and whether people are still optimistic about Hollywood's general state in the current year.
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This seems very common in media that isn't good enough to be well liked by either men or women, or where they try to have a basically masculine plot, but with a Mary Sue lead, as though that would appeal to large segments of either sex.
This is the first I've heard of True Detective, Season 4. I generally like Fargo because it's a good mix of detective stuff, characterization, and interesting cinematography and music, along with a tiny bit of fantasy. The TD4 trailer looks like a less interesting Fargo knock off.
Fargo season 5 is actually an excruciating example of this. You've got the ruthless girlboss executive running a debt collection agency who's painted as a villain in the first few episodes but then she totally owns some male, pale, and stale bankers, reevaluates her relationship with her daughter in law, and totally redeems herself. You've got John Hamm as the sheriff who's a total caricature of a right winger. You've got repeated unbearable catchphrases ("you know that a witch hunt is not witches hunting men, right? It's men hunting women to keep them in line"). The main character is (mostly) hyper competent and just about every man in the story is incompetent or a bad guy.
Even on reddit some people come out and say that it's a bit over the top, and others shout them down and call them "triggered magats" or whatever.
However it's still rated better than season 4. I don't remember the details of season 4 but I don't remember disliking it, I don't know why it got panned in reviews.
I think I quit on Fargo midway through season 3. It's a shame because seasons 1 and 2 really were extremely good.
I didn't really like season 3 too much and gave up on season 4, but season 5 was good enough.
I agree with a lot of what sarker said above, but the main variation with the wife in this one was, I think, an acceptable single degree of freedom (and a funny variation given how they've written the wife in Movie/S1/S2). Unlike True Detective Night Country, Fargo S5 worked pretty well just because they did so many of the little things well, even if a few things including sarker's points were grating. It's also not so jarring having the other characters, men, being incompetent since the show was always based on mostly everybody being incompetent for where they've found themselves. There's one episode later on that's almost a total write-off, but it's worth checking out.
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I've heard only negative things about it from anywhere online that wasn't part of, or tangentially part of, the mainstream media. I'm actually surprised it's rated at 61% (though almost anything below 90% for a TV show on RT is abysmal). But it should be noted that reviews are just not worth anything anymore. Almost everything receives either universal acclaim on Rottentomatoes which translates to about 70-80 on metacritic, almost anything outside of this usually comes from a much lower amount of reviewers even bothering to review the media to begin with.
Night Country was interesting to me because I was kinda annoyed that they brought in new people but Pizzolato last two seasons were underwhelming (Though, to me, I'd put that on mostly not having Cary Fukunaga to direct every episode). I was waiting for it to finish but it was heavily advertised and I noticed it a lot. Basically it was on my tablet when opening an empty tab in Brave it puts paid news there if you scroll down and Night Country was there every week like clockwork. First, it was the rave reviews, then the huge viewership numbers, and then it was basically articles taunting people who disliked it by saying that despite a small number of online detractors it was the most successful True Detective season ever both critically and in viewership numbers. When the finale rolled around it literally used the Rolling Stone review that said it was the best ending the series has ever had.
Naturally, I went to reddit's television to see what they thought and they were aghast. Game of Thrones season 8 levels, and this was in normal non-fandom subreddit. The show's main subreddit was just memeing all over it. The best people could come up with was meek, "I didn't think it was that bad." being heavily downvoted at the bottom.
I half expected this because we're in a revival era, but nobody who actually made the original shows is participating in the revivals. They brought back Justified to make a show that was nonsensical and bad but worse was not really in any way the show that had come before. They didn't bring back any of the writers and didn't really bring back anyone but the main character, and Olyphant brought his daughter in real life to play his daughter in the show and it was just painful to watch. They brought back In Treatment but replaced Gabriel Byrne with Uzo Aduba and I just didn't even want to deal with it because aside from not bringing back the star they also didn't bring back the creative team. Frasier they brought back Kelsey only and it really shows. It's just a modern shitty/middling sitcom that happens to have the same character. Why are they not even bothering to try to make these good at all? The exception I'll give is Party Down which, funnily enough brought back everyone they could, including the creative team. Even when it was blatently political and culture warring it was still better than these lazy ersatz elevator-music cover songs of something people used to like.
Night Country is just an example of things that have come before and haven't been noticed because most of the time things can squeeze by with just the right amount of mediocrity. They put their leads and creative lead front and center and girl-bossed their way into being called a good show, after they stole another show's name for seemingly little reason other than marketing. But all these things compound the other way. The better your show is supposed to be the worse it seems when it's not and this goes similarly to taking another's show's name for no reason. The culture war only exists when these projects fail, you don't like it you're sexist/racist/etc, otherwise it's yaasss queen slay even if it's just barely clearing the bar of success.
I think there is a simple explanation for this dynamic. Imagine you're big media conglomerate such as Disney, and you own an innumerable number of IPs. If you try to do a "full revival" of a reasonably old show with not only all/most of the cast but also all/most of the original creative team, you'll run into the problem that media has not only a particularly extreme rate of turnover and both mobility and stickiness at different points in the career. Some people will not even be in Showbiz anymore and you will have to hunt them down, some will have become so sucessful that they're exceptionally well-paid, some will have carved out a comfortable main role in a mediocre but long-running TV show that they flat-out refuse to join the revival no matter what. It's tedious, it's expensive, and you might still just end up with a few anyway since the others refuse. So you ONLY attempt this if you're really, really confident about its success.
Now imagine you want to do a fully new IP. It has no old fans that you can appeal to, it has no basic structure that you know to work. So it's inherently risky.
On the other hand, a "lazy revival" is easy & cheap . It's basically all the upsides of a new IP, but much safer; You're almost guaranteed to have a lucrative first season, and if the viewer numbers are visibly crashing on the later episodes than you just discontinue it right there. And it costs you nothing extra as you're already owning the old IP anyway. You just send a call out to a small number of original cast members that seem likely to join and add to the recognisability. You hire a bunch of cheap, new creative members who get a chance to show their chops or get the cut. And the woke/SJW worldview lends itself very well to replacing most of the cast, so you use that as the cover ("we're just updating this old, beloved western classic to be more in-line with modern global viewer preferences"). Not that people don't believe that worldview, but the other way around, people tend to believe worldviews that are convenient for them.
Obviously, there is always some cases where it seems to be just dumb; Buying an expensive IP and then ruining it with a bad new cast & creative team. But I think it has become an almost industry-standard because of the former. And in some cases, such as Star Wars, they arguably did put in a lot of work; They got decent parts of the original cast, J.J. Abrams, whatever your opinion of him, is a sucessful movie director and they clearly tried to replicate the structure of the old movies (and too much so, in my opinion).
I think the problems with the Star Wars sequel trilogy can mainly be blamed on Iger rushing it to theaters.
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I think that about the third time I watched a "certified fresh" Marvel movie and walked out of the theater feeling like it was a mediocre waste of time I fully updated on critic reviews being compromised. To be clear, it's not just Disney movies that this applies to, but they do seem to be the biggest benefactors.
At this point, I get my film recommendations either from RedLetterMedia or the MauLer Clique (the Efap podcast), and even with the latter, only the core three plus maaaaybe Critical Drinker; too many partisan hacks further down the ladder.
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I have seen several mainstream articles discussing the show's shortcomings (e.g., Slate, NYMag, Ringer). Whatever the showrunner says, it doesn't seem like anyone really thinks the back half of the show was any good. The RT critics/audience disconnect seems to me like it is more an artifact of critics' scores usually being based on the first couple episodes.
The critics had the whole season available to review. You can click on all the good reviews by critics here and see that. https://www.metacritic.com/tv/true-detective/season-4/
But you're right, it was poorly reviewed by a lot of outlets, it's just to come out looking good on aggregators you only have to have a few 100s/90s to balance that out and still look well reviewed.
And videogame journalists have the whole game to review, but a recurring feature of videogame reviews is that the reviewer obviously played a game with 100 hours of content for about 2 hours and then wrote their assignment.
People are lazy and cut corners in their jobs, c'est le vie.
I mean, you get paid the same amount for writing the review whether you play for 2 hours or 100 hours, and you don't get paid very much either way.
I'm gonna say it would be pretty hard for most critics to feed themselves if they put 100 hours into every article they write. God forbid they have a family to feed, too.
Most entertainment reviews you see today are on free sites. You get what you pay for.
I understand you are trying to employ empathy for people who work crappy jobs - you wouldn't want to work a job for a hundred hours and get $200 out of it, so you understand why they don't do that. But the correct response should be to encourage them to find another job, not give them a pass on the job they signed up for. Nobody forced them to be critics, and they get paid so poorly because that's what they are willing to work for. Note also that if they enjoy the game, they are likely to play it for a hundred hours after the review for free.
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Quite a few outlets have right criticized it, but quite a few have not. Rolling Stone for example:
https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-recaps/true-detective-night-country-series-finale-recap-jodie-foster-1234967345/
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A quick glance at Wikipedia tells me that season 1 was made by Nic Pizzolatto, season 4 was made by Issa López.
I think men and women think differently about stories, media and what matters in them. This is over populations of course, exceptions exist. There are male ways of telling a story - plot-focused, rational, consistent setting, character agency, combat, violence, progression and character advancement. Then there are female ways of telling a story - character-focused, plot doesn't necessarily make sense, emphasis on emotions and romance. Great writers can appeal to both but that's hard. You can tell I don't really understand or appreciate the female side of things.
I think this is most obvious with the weakest, most unrestrained authors. If you go on FFN or spacebattles or webnovel, you find stories about men advancing their position with hard work and clever tactics. They fight and overcome enemies and court women, sometimes getting a harem. In the case of Harry Potter stories, there's a trope of Harry Potter hitting the gym, using some rituals to get stronger, taking control of his money from Dumbledore and getting a harem of hot Slytherins. If you go through and search by likes, that's what you'll see.
Meanwhile on female dominated places like AO3, you find endless romance and homosexuality. Putting the ocean of Harry/Draco to one side, there's a huge emphasis on shipping. Who do people end up with? Are there love triangles? Can there be more love triangles? Angst, rape, therapy? Plot is unimportant in and of itself, character relationships are exciting. There are even tagging features so you can search for exactly what ship you want. Often they take characters out of their world (not mechanically like an isekai) and reimagine them in a different setting - they could be at a normal high school together. Just to make sure there's no combat. Or they make up this 'soulmate' mechanic where people can write words on eachother's skin. It's a whole other world to male fiction.
Now if you're like me you might feel a little cringe at the male power fantasy stories. I imagine most here have more exacting standards of taste. But you'll feel revulsion at 370,000 words of:
Or:
Who cares about this stuff? Well, apparently women like it. I blame the influence of women on Star Wars. George Lucas's Star Wars was telling a male story, Kathleen Kennedy was telling a female story (boy does AO3 love Rey/Kylo). It's less obvious at this higher level since it's not out in your face but it is still there. Likewise in True Detective, I imagine.
Wasn’t FFN ridiculously female-dominated? I know early Harry Potter fandom was. A casual google doesn’t turn up much, but consider this thread where Redditors suggest 22% men is unusually high.
Point is, I think the gender balance within platforms is going to be swamped by the history of those platforms. Like Ao3 specifically refusing to ban certain taboos. At best you get a chicken and egg. Which came first: the forum dedicated to spaceship combat, or the audience of turbo-autists?
Mind you, I don’t disagree with the basic premise. The median masculine story is wildly different to the feminine one. And the 80th percentiles are probably mutually incomprehensible. Try to cite specific examples, though, and you’ll immediately run into Sturgeon’s Law.
Maybe FFN used to be female dominated and maybe they do dominate the boards I don't know or care about (Supernatural, One Direction). Since when has any man written a fanfic about One Direction or Twilight? But that subreddit discusses fanfiction generally, it seems to be mainly talking about AO3. I'm just talking about the FFN website. I don't know anything about Wattpad.
Harry Potter is the biggest board on both sites, FFN's top Harry Potter stories are extremely male. That's where HPMOR came from, just take a look and you'll see. Even the smut on FFN leans more toward male fantasy than female fantasy.
I can't emphasise enough that I was picking the absolute best of what each website has to offer. Yes, the second most popular fic on HP AO3 (451K works total) is about Hermione suffering, getting chained up and raped by Draco. It was translated into about 20 languages, including Welsh. They really like this stuff! The contrast with HPMOR is staggering, everyone who ever objected about HPMOR being cringe should have to read some of this. Then they can understand the full horror, the enormity of human variation.
It still never fails to impress me that one of the more well-known movies in the 2010s is literally just Twilight fanfiction with the names changed.
What do you even consider "male fantasy"? I'm pretty sure that "Hermione gets raped by Draco" is mostly a female fantasy (written by women, for women); while I'm sure you could self-insert as Draco I don't think that's the point. Yaoi fanfic is also female fantasy; you can tell because the dom/sub dynamic is pegged at 11 from the first word (the stuff that's actually intended for gay men is... different).
If nothing else, I'd consider yuri fanfic to be mostly by/for men; women aren't as interested in lesbians as men are. Most MLP fics (both porny and not) were probably written by twentysomething men (I don't think the target demographic for the show is that interested in seeing Pinkie Pie turn Rainbow Dash into cupcakes or meme about "Applejack pregnancy scare").
I still don't understand why people consider this unusual. "I can imagine attractive character from the show doing the sex to me in a way I don't have to feel otherwise morally conflicted about liking, also doing something nasty but not catastrophic to the character the reader is supposed to identify with means he would like me more than her" is arguably one of the more vanilla fantasies (and the more extreme variation of that, being "also, the self-insert doesn't survive the encounter", is an overwhelmingly-female favored fetish anyway).
What never ceases to amaze me is that there are three completely different types of gay male smut available for all kinds of genders and orientations. There is gay male smut aimed at straight men, otokonoko, which is exactly the same as regular smut aimed at straight men except that the "girl" is a little flat and has a certain extra hidden in "her" underwear (the infamous Boku no Pico is a prime example). Then there is gay male smut aimed at straight women, yaoi, which is exactly the same as regular romance aimed at straight women except that instead of a guy and a girl you have a seme and an uke. And then there is the gay male smut which is actually aimed at gay men, bara, which I know little about because trying to read it triggers my disgust instinct (by contrast, yaoi is just boring, not disgusting, and otokonoko is hot).
There is, unfortunately, not yet a genre of gay male smut aimed at lesbian women. But we can dream.
Take this with a grain of salt, as it’s mainly something I’ve just heard floated around in weeaboo haunts, but apparently, a significant proportion of fujoshi are actually lesbians; supposedly, yaoi gives them a way to explore non-heterosexuality in a less personal setting. If this is true (again, absolutely no reason to think that it is), then yaoi would serve the role of “gay smut for lesbians” as well.
Interestingly, I’ve also heard (again, based on screencaps of Japanese polls posted on imageboards) that a significant number of yuri fans are straight women. This is a priori somewhat surprising, but fits with surveys I’ve seen of Japanese yumejoshi (women who enjoy things like otome games and other genres involving extremely handsome men romancing a female self-insert) highly ranking certain female characters (with masculine/“princely” demeanors) as among their favorite and most attractive characters. (To put this in perspective, this would be like various otokonoko characters (better known in Anglophone circles as “traps”) ranking among the most beloved girls in a poll of male anime fans. From what I understand, this is very much not the case, with traps largely being relegated to “niche interest character” status, although who knows, maybe some of those otokonoko characters who have achieved “meme” levels of status might fit the bill.) The common cause of these two phenomena (that is, straight female interest in yuri and yumejoshi interest in “handsome” female characters) probably is just the usual “women are all bisexual” theory.
In the 90s-00s (western) fujoshi were what was called Fag Hags (mostly sexless women who hang out with gay men for a vicarious thrill), and were the reason I never went to any anime convention. For anyone reading who doesn't have experience with the subculture, google "yaoi paddle" and you'll instantly understand.
Yuri fans in the west have had a strange evolution. The ones into cute slice of life haven't changed much, but every scanlator of yuri porn I ever met has decided he's a lesbian in a man's body sometime in the last 8-10 years.
Interesting thread
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Playing actual gay male (typically though not always softcore) porn at Certain Types of lesbian meetups was a thing for a while, although from my understanding it's fallen out of popularity. This sometimes reflected complex gender stuff -- especially in the 90s, the line between butch lesbian and FTM was a lot blurrier than today -- but just plain lesbian fujoshi is definitely a thing.
The official story is that femmy gay guys in 90s porn were more appealing and nonconfrontational to women than the fake boobs and long fingernails (why!?!) of a typical porn starlett, and in the recent era female/female porn either filmed or (more often) written for female interests has become more widely available. But given fanfic worlds or spaces in the furry fandom (cfe SkylarShibe/RedfeatherStorm for a lesbian's take on f/f as discrete from f/m and m/m), I'd expect that there's other social and political pressures playing a role.
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Fascinating breakdown, thanks, I never really thought about it this way. This actually slightly clears up one of the bigger mysteries I've pondered for years while hanging in degen-adjacent spaces - the memetic insistence of how traps/femboys are totally not gay. It's impossible to take the egregious contradiction on its face (there's not even a fig leaf like with e.g futa - you are literally fucking another man), and I presumed it was mostly cope, but from this point of view it apparently is a valid and intended feature, I'm just too normie to see it.
I now have several more interesting mysteries to ponder, chief of which is what is the overlap with loli mentioned downthread, and whether or not this is basically a, for lack of a better term, culturally evolved substitution where
degensconnoisseurs can openly lust after femboys (which are considered based and mostly retain the uh, required body type) instead of lolis (which are heavily stigmatized even in degen-adjacent spaces). It would explain a lot of things, it can't be just the bi-curiosity in the water supply.Further ramblings from downthread:
Apologies for the Reddit link.
It's actually kind of interesting to me that, from a certain point of view, you go from 100% masc to 0% masc and then back to 100% masc- from "I wanted a woman and got a woman as far as I know" (full masc) through "pretending not to notice the cracks" to "the illusion is obviously broken but we're fine with it anyway" (totally not masc) to "not even bothering to keep up the illusion" to "this isn't meaningfully distinct from being gay but that's what I wanted anyway" (full masc).
Having sex but putting aside it's not the thing you actually wanted/having to put extra effort in to enjoy it is probably the least masculine thing you could do more or less by definition, and the middle position on that graph is the one that symbolizes that the most.
I think our words for how people think about gender are probably still pretty bad here; that's why we can point out that "traps are gay" is incoherent as a concept but not actually be able to explain it any better than that language allows us. Actually, I'm doing the same thing with what "masculinity" is above, too, but this isn't yet the effortpost it needs to be to do this properly.
Futa is honestly really weird and doesn't tend to line up with traps/tomgirls at all; the latter tend to have an intentional de-emphasis on both kinds of secondary sexual characteristics whereas with futa they're both on absolute full blast all the time (proportions range from the large side of normal to wildly exaggerated). Maybe you get a slight hourglass and exaggeration of pecs into breasts with a trap (the meme is "draw a girl, call it a boy" but only the low-effort traps are done like that), but with futa you usually get a wasp waist, massive breasts, and a dick half as long and just as thick as their arms.
I only say this because I've noticed that the portrayal of traps tends to be more immature/loli-adjacent than the characters that surround them- their faces tend to be rounder, their outfits tend to be closer to what a child would wear or slightly out of place in that direction with respect to the rest of the cast (if applicable), and the context and memes around them is more immature and more evocative of a loli than a "proper" grown woman (the "boys are the best girls" thing, as opposed to normal male sexuality... which is more likely to pattern-match to futa anyway).
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I think bara is a fascinating glimpse into what superstimulus for gay men must look like- it's bizarre on a good day, and I've seen some examples that look downright alien.
For that matter, I think the same about yaoi more generally since it focuses on massive hands, very tall and triangular heads, and emphasis on facial features women themselves try to accentuate.
And then we have the otokonoko body types, which are basically just slightly taller lolis (no hourglass figure, small cute face, usually dressed in a manner more suggestive of a girl than a woman but without the outright childish attitude to match) that straight men can use as reasons to be less conflicted about liking that body type.
On that note, I'm not convinced Boku no Pico is otokonoko. I think shotacon creates a corner case for the categories; I'm pretty sure that not only was it yaoi (that cover picture is the exact opposite of otokonoko dress, lmao), but it was yaoi intended for straight men. That paradox is probably half to blame for why it's still a meme (and the other half is that famous reaction video).
Is there a genre of lesbian female smut aimed at gay men? (For that matter, is there a genre of lesbian female smut aimed at lesbians?)
There's a very funny horseshoe(?) effect with shota, isn't there? Where it circles back to being totally the domain of gay men: even the plot of Boku no Pico is a standard gay summer hookup that Milo would reminisce about.
I wish it was still the 00s internet so we could do an Aella-style Hot or Not poll on this stuff without half a dozen groups trying to cancel us.
It's media involving gay men, but meant for ostensibly/otherwise straight men (there's way too much of it for the opposite to be true).
Which means that either "it's gay" is missing something important, "the audience is straight" is missing something important, or both are. (And if that's the case, what's missing, why is it missing, and how come nobody notices?)
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Eh... that's definitely a thing ((and I'd argue that a lot of penetrative gay porn is superstimulus for gay men in a way that straight porn isn't for straights, for simple practical reasons)), and sometimes hot because of the thing, but there's also a tendency to emphasize the extreme variants in what escapes into more public spaces. Bara as a genre can cover everything from your overmuscled aliens to 'probably a little more muscled/chubbier than practical or realistic' to 'JoJo's Bizarre Adventure Extra' to 'this is a twink, with facial hair'.
... there's definitely stuff that fits that category, but it's an absolutely tiny field, and it tends to either be focusing around gay men who are going to turn out to be bisexual transwomen (cfe here for a pre-transition piece if you're logged in, cw: explicit f/f lesbian; will also warn that artist is great at giving very unusual kinks), or a side effect of an artist that mostly works m/m getting commissioned or otherwise roped into stuff outside of their normal focus (eg, Braeburned has 1 f/f piece ever, and if you didn't pay a lot of attention it'd be easy to miss that the top has breasts).
I don't think there's a named genre.
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Harems, casual consequence-free sex with very attractive women. More emphasis on physical activity, less on emotions. Zero angst.
Go read a couple chapters of Manacled. It is weird and unusual. It's not about the sex. The sex happens in about 5 lines where Hermione's super ashamed and humiliated about it. It is not written to arouse. The writing is good and I'm intrigued by the premise of this mysterious secret... but the actual content of the story is pure suffering (there's a heavy Handmaid's Tale influence). It's mostly about angst and severe trauma. I'm guessing that it's the ultimate 'I can fix him' fantasy where Hermione subdues this super-evil, hypercompetent Draco Malfoy with her wiles.
I broadly agree, but it's not that simple. Here's what top 30 games by "weighted rating" on f95 are (I've tried to be liberal with the definition of "harems, casual consequence-free sex with very attractive women"):
Out of 30 games, we discard 3: one for being made by a self-declared woman about a woman, one for being about futas and one for being gay. Three more are too fucking weird and I don't feel adequate to classify them. We're left with 24 games, out of which:
The two genres are more evenly matched if we take only the top 10 games.
Interesting, I guess I could make excuses like 'games need some kind of conflict to be interesting'. I don't really know anything about lewd games though.
I guess I was trying to describe the platonic ideal of male sexual fantasy. On a three-axis chart of 'high quality vs low' 'male vs female' and 'vanilla vs weird', not much would be firmly clustered around the male end. The most popular and best products will have broader appeal - Katawa Shoujo for instance, it's not just about sex either. Even within the male area, there's a certain tendency to cover all bases and all tags - consider Project Harahel. Extremely male oriented but it puts in the weird stuff like vore too, as an option. It fits the male fantasy (as is obvious visually) but that's not all it has to offer. And it's not just about sex but power too.
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This is completely normal for female erotica. It's what gets women off. From "The elephant in the living room":
And from the comments of "Reaction 101: The reactionary red pill on women.":
Good point, the actual point of diversion in the story was Draco manning up and killing Dumbledore early in book 6. Some Peruvian Instant Darkness Powder and a Killing Curse out of the blue dealt with the most powerful wizard on the planet. He then goes on to hunt down and personally execute a good number of the remaining anti-Voldemort rebels under a false identity. He's got everything: aloofness, alpha energy and a secret identity.
I'm mildly sympathetic to such a manly, proactive character. In contrast, Hermione has a panic attack going down the hallway and spends most of the chapters I read plotting and failing to kill herself. She's exhibited no agency thus far, she gets chosen to be with Draco and the plan is that after she gives him 3 children they'll send her off to be bred by others. Instead of fighting in the war, Hermione was a Healer, undoing curse-injuries. She got the most passive, feminine, supporting role imaginable. Things happen to her.
And these women love the story! It's in all these collections:
If there's one thing that Jim and co got right most of all, it's that sex differences are very great. Completely different mindset.
I'm going to tattoo this on my forehead for the next time my girlfriend suggests we watch a Victorian period drama jfc
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Counterpoint:
The shift to women creators and LGBTQ+ lead actors might be coinciding with a dismaying shift from GenX to Millennial entertainment production. My favorite hobby-horse, MLPFiM, was created by a woman several years my senior, Lauren Faust, and it has a GenX worldview behind it, contrasted with the Millennial storytelling of its biggest contemporaries, Adventure Time and Steven Universe. Those are shows which delight in subverting the Hero’s Journey, and also pioneered the wide acceptance of the “bean-mouth” rubber-hose stylized animation trend.
Consider also the Cobra Kai series which leaped from YouTube to Netflix. It has been a tremendous accomplishment because it takes its farce seriously and yet doesn’t skimp on powerful character development. Film schools should be studying this phenomenon for the next decade. The creators were born in 1977 and 1978.
There are plenty of millennials writing manly stories. They're all over Royal Road since traditional publishing and media frowns on that kind of thing. There's plenty coming out of Asia too - Three Body Problem series for one. The series puts great emphasis on plot, combat, advanced technology and creative problem solving. The whole series revolves around idiotic/evil women who do their best to wipe out humanity, only to be mostly foiled by heroic male efforts. Or my hobby-horse, Reverend Insanity where our based sigma MC rejects all romance in favour of acquiring more power. It's funny to see readers show up, feel like they can see a ship coming up only for the author to pummel them with 2000 chapters of 'no, it makes absolutely no sense for the most sociopathic man and woman on the planet to pair up: their relation is purely platonic and dominated by blackmail, betrayal and exploitation - and by the way, the power of love is strong but not unbeatable'.
The thing is that female storytelling is seen as more classy than male storytelling. They're choosing less-acceptable-to-men authors and creators of all ages. Kathleen Kennedy's no blue-haired millennial. Ryan Johnson's no millennial yet he felt free to go on a random tangent about how capitalism was so terrible in his Star Wars movie and nobody at Lucasfilm objected.
I don't know much about MLP but it is a very girly show, by design. I won't say that girly media can't be good or attractive to men. But even Equestria at War shows the fundamental differences between the sexes. They found a setting that was basically derived from horse puns, secondary to the characters and turned it into a world of blood, death and industrial warfare. What's so specifically Gen X about MLP, isn't it just a well-made creation generally, something that entertains both sexes?
Gen 4 is Gen X girly ("girly isn't anything out of the ordinary; guys could engage with these things too but simply choose not to"), not Boomer girly like Gen 1-3 ("girly means absurd immature diabetes fuel") or Millennial girly like Gen 5 ("girly means 'that which alienates anyone who isn't a girl'").
Gen X girly is also referred to by "cute girls doing cute things" when the context is anime. Fooling around, story stakes, and conflict resolution in a way typical to girls, basically; something that boys know exists but don't have the time or opportunity to explore.
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I've never watched an episode of True Detective from any season, but Freddie deBoer has complained several times that even the first season suffered from being deficient in these areas - the plot hints at a bunch of things that end up being irrelevant and the solution to the mystery is contrived and arbitrary.
Freddie's not wrong that Season 1 had its share of bad lines and eyerolling moments, but it also had tension, and stakes, and an interesting structure, and terrific characters. The episode where Rust goes back undercover is one of my favorite episodes of TV.
I'm not blind to its flaws, but relative to Season 4 it might as well be The Sopranos.
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Fans can switch to a better show if they don't like the one they're watching, but PR executives and social media managers have to find some way to defend whatever show they work for.
Accusing your critics of being some form of -ist is just another part of the standard playbook now. No sane company would shy away from using this highly effective tactic just because the show they're defending is actually bad.
Idpol can defend a bad position just as well as it can defend a good position. Is it any wonder that so many people with indefensible positions resort to idpol?
I always thought that this quote was anti-nationalist, but it occurs to me now (shamefully late) that the line is about the phenomenon you're describing. When you have to defend the indefensible, the easiest way is to latch it to something that's above criticism. Patriotism then, idpol now.
Wikipedia agrees:
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The tactic in question appears to be "effective" in the way that taking out new credit cards to pay off your old credit cards is an effective strategy for managing your money: it might work in the short term, sort of, but in the long term it's a disaster.
Disney appears to me to have straight-up destroyed Star Wars as a brand, and arguably has done the same to Disney as a brand. that is a staggering achievement, and it bears notice.
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