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Twitter.com/Artiah669/status/1778933764984320157
It's been a real thing for years. The call is "NORMALIZE X", where X is a deformity, mental illness, obesity, etc. it's the natural result of "representation matters.".
You can see it in all the comments: "Damn apparently every character needs to follow strict societal beauty standards rooted in white supremacy" etc. etc.
Once again it's only a conspiracy theory when outsiders notice what the insiders celebrate.
Even that dev who was recently making excuses about how face modeling is hard snuck in an "and actually it's good to challenge cis hetero beauty standards and we're doing it deliberately" towards the end.
I find this apparent feigning ignorance endlessly frustrating. The writers and academics who call themselves "progressive" are very open about their desire and willingness to manipulate the populace into believing things they want them to believe by putting in certain tropes into the fiction they write. This is justified on the basis of their stated belief that all fiction manipulates the audience, and so it's better to do it with conscious intent for causes they consider socially just instead of doing so unconsciously while merely focusing on creating an entertaining/meaningful work of fiction which they contend inevitably reinforces the status quo which they find bigoted and intolerable. It's not always possible to nail down this as the cause of any given individual case of uglification, but given the prevalence of these types of people in fiction production and the ubiquity of this narrative, I don't think benefit of the doubt is at all justified, and it's perfectly reasonable to default to the presumption that any specific case was due to ideological intent until proven otherwise.
And if we were to follow the same standards by which such people deem fictional works as "white supremacist" or "patriarchal" or "heteronormative" or whatever, there would be no question that we could conclude that these were caused by ideological motives: as long as someone can write a convincing-sounding essay connecting some work of fiction with these concepts they consider bigoted, it doesn't matter what the creators were thinking or intending, these works are ideological and for a bad ideology. If the creators had nothing but pure entertainment-focused intent or even if they were actively trying to send a message of equality, then that just means that they fell prey to their implicit/unconscious biases which proves just how entrenched white supremacy/patriarchy/etc. really is. But double standards are also justified on the basis of relative power and such (which themselves are justified by someone writing a convincing-sounding essay).
You see this more broadly with people claiming not to know what "woke" or "critical race theory" mean. It's a kind of dishonest bit of self deception that fools no one other than themselves. I just wish they would loudly and proudly stand up for what they believe in, proclaim that they are trying to manipulate the populace for the purpose of a better, more socially just world, and let the chips fall where they may. I find Scott Adams to be... a very silly person not worth paying attention to, but when he said that he was hypnotizing people, including through the very same message of informing them of this hypnotism, because his hypnotism would work even if the audience was consciously aware of what he was doing, I could at least respect that more than this shell game of implausible deniability many writers and activists on the left like to play of openly claiming a desire to manipulate the audience and then acting shocked and appalled that others would accuse them of making creative choices meant to manipulate the audience.
It bothers me immensely and I'm struggling to finish an essay trying to explain it clearly.
Do you know Lewis's "The Inner Ring" speech? I think it's related to how concentric rings of social circles form, with people at each layer sneering at those in the outer layer, while apeing the fashions of the inner layer they're desperate to be inducted into.
The "shell game of implausible deniability" is how people advance in leftist circles. The dev I mentioned must affect all the correct mannerisms to be admitted to a higher circle in his ideologically captured industry. But to name that circle would be unthinkably gauche!
To label it with a term like "woke" announces you're an outsider, the worst kind of scum who has despaired of any social advancement, and anyone hoping for admission must publicly shun you.
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Normalize healthy BMI and smooth skin! Wait why am I being dragged to the ludovico theatre? Oh no its the Tess Holliday swimsuit special!
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