The decline of shared myths [Political]

Critical Drinker was downright insightful here.



It seems like the people who own the intellectual property of modern cultural myths are trying to kill them.

We have a Superman and Batman that murder people casually.

Luke Skywalker was made into a pathetic old hobo.

Picard was belittled and humiliated on his new show. The new Star Trek chips away at the optimistic future Gene Roddenberry created.

Marvel tried to push a superhero duo with the names Snowflake and Safespace.


This is all the tip of the iceberg. I thought the silver lining of 2020 is that Disney, AT&T, and all the other big media will have to stop pushing woke garbage because woke garbage always loses money and with the CCP Virus hitting their bottom lines they cannot afford to waste money like they used to.

But they continue to double down on woke.

 

That's a surprisingly deep analysis, for such a short video... but the Drinker is really good at these.

One of the (many) things that bother me about this need to chase inclusiveness at all costs, is that people fail to remember that women power and gay relationships have always been positively present in the world's popular culture. Even LGBT themes.
Sure, they may slip away through the much more diffused male figures, but they are there nonetheless and cover a important part of our cultural heritage.

 

On a strictly related note, i see a lot of comments in youtube video related to this subject, that cite The Incredibles, most notably the famous Syndrome's quote “And when everyone’s super... no one will be”.

Which is, apparently, a similar concept... but the approach is VERY different, IMO.
Syndrome was determined to destroy superheroes as they rejected him, so the plan was to give "superpowers" to everyone but for cheap... making everyone super without struggle or achievement, an easy way to the top. Basically, the result would have been to remove the "super" from heroes but only because powers would have been common. It was a perfect villain in a real superhero movie.
This, on the other side, destroys the superheroes, taking them down in the dirt. The result is to not only remove the "super" part by eliminating it, but also to destroy the "hero" part.

 

Thank you for your passionate but civil and thoughtful reply.

A lot of comic book youtube channels have basically said that yes, this is a comic meant to mock old school comic fans. By his own admission, he hated the old school comics and the people who wrote them. The creator basically said as much in an interview. A piece of media literally made to insult a fan base is not a good thing.

I disagree. I believe there is still a place for larger than life characters in our shared cultural myth. Comic book heroes are often meant to be aspirational, not representative.



I agree with you that fat shaming does not lead to a positive outcome. But I don't think fat acceptance leads to a positive outcome either. I am struggling with weight issues myself. I lost a lot of relatives to heart disease. My dad broke the mold and made his fitness a priority, he survived a heart attack with minimal issues because he was in shape. Fat acceptance is death acceptance. But yes, insulting fat people is not going to make them lose weight. Off topic though.

Another topic for another day is whether media should be filled with beautiful people or not. I was not a film or drama major but I took a lot of film and drama electives in college. One school of thought is that a drama should feature larger than life beautiful people and a comedy should feature down to earth ordinary people.

There are exceptions. In high school I was forced to write a paper on Death of a Salesman. A grueling drama about a nobody salesmen. Also in that decade, Friends was very popular. I never really identified with the comedic problems of those six beautiful people. I preferred comedies like Malcolm in the Middle and Roseanne. Friends became the sitcom template for over a decade after friends though.

In novels I like everyman characters, but in comic books I will admit I have a strong preference for characters to be good looking. It's a visual media, you cannot really escape it. People don't buy comic books with "body positive" protagonists.

I liked Alita Battle Angel. It's weird that a strong female character played by a Hispanic actress was dumped on and Brie Larson when she sort of replaced Monica Rambeau. In the 1980s Storm was leader of the X-Men and Monica was leader of the Avengers. No accolades though because these super teams just happened to have black women leading them. They weren't actively pushing an agenda and boasting about their diversity.

I cannot speak for all old school critics of movies/comic books, but for me I don't mind political messages in my stories as long as the stories are good. I am a big of the DC animated movies. All their Wonderwoman managed to put forth feminist ideals without sacrificing the quality of the story or relying on misandry. Justice League War is a masterpiece in my opinion, it didn't get political but there was a brief foray into "wokeness" that still makes me laugh where the lasso of truth is used to show a bigot's hypocrisy.

I have seen good stories, great stories that put forth a clear moral or political point but I have never seen a piece of media that is marketed primarily on it's political credentials end up being a good story.

For LGBT+ issues my stance is "I don't care what people do as long as it involves consenting adults." I'm not offended by their inclusion in media, I just have not liked many pieces of media that put those characters front and center. There is one major exception that I like a lot. Brooklyn 99, my favorite contemporary live action show. There are other non-cis characters that came out later but the star of the show is Captain Raymond Holt who is gay. But Captain Holt has a very complex nuanced character with many positive and negative qualities and he has complicated character arcs and interactions with the other characters on the show. In far too many cases of media, LGBT characters are one-dimensional and their sexuality is the only noteworthy thing about their character. Along those lines, the Batwoman comic series was very good and the television show was crap. Besides bad writing and a mediocre actress, essentially the CW's Batwoman's sexual identity was pretty much her sole trait and her struggle was to prove herself as being equal to or better than the patriarchal symbol Batman.

In the comics she has more nuance. She works with Batman not against him but at the same time stand alone. In effect while Batman is patrolling Gotham, Batwoman if flying around the world going after the drug dealers and warlords that are pumping contraband into Gotham.

I am a white male and I do not know what it's like to not see myself "represented" in media ubiquitously. I cannot speak for that. But as a kid I did admire and try to emulate a bunch of Asian kung fu heroes, Blade, Mr. T, and other people who did not look like me. Moulan is my all time favorite non-Pixar Disney movie. As a young adult I identified with Katniss Everdeen (the books are way better than the movies btw) and Ellen Ripley. I have heard the testimony of many people who are not white males positively identify with fictional characters that happen to be white males. I think a good character is a good character regardless of gender, race, or sexuality. A bad character is a bad character.

I'm not morally offended by "get woke, go broke" but I am perplexed by it. At the end of the day, Marvel, DC, AT&T and Disney are all out to make money. Making a piece of media woke in theory, should draw new audiences to the media but they don't. People applaud Batwoman on twitter but they don't watch the show. The show got abysmal ratings despite the fact that we are in a pandemic. People cannot go outside, TV viewership in general is up. Same goes for Star Trek Discovery, the new Marvel video game. Their audiences are shriveling up at a time when they shouldn't be because more people are watching more TV and playing more video games.

From a sheer capitalist perspective, I don't know why major companies keep doubling down on strategies that keep losing money in order to virtue signal.

SJWs want representation, that's fine. Then they should create a new character rather than try to subvert an existing character. There has not really been a new super genre character that has caught on since the 1990s. Maybe Miles Morales. His comic book was unpopular but the recent movie Into the Spiderverse was a masterpiece and catapulted Miles' star. It is possible to elevate representational characters but it only works if the story is well-written, which is all too rare.

If I could wave a magic wand and redefine all fictional media, I would remove the general block buster model and replace it with many many niche films, TV shows, and video games. Blockbusters mildly entertain a large number of people. Niche films change the world for a small number of people. And sometimes, a relatively low budget niche film really takes off like Joker 2019 or Get Out. Or heck the first Aliens and Terminator movies were both low budget niche films, creating two of the most iconic female action heroines of modern times.

 

The Critical Drinker, in other videos, explains that the negative part of it, is that you pick an existing character (Alfred, but can be said for anyone else) and just stick to him a label (he's gay!).
You are not re-inventing anyone, you're just changing an aspect that is completely irrilevat to the story, just for the sake of calling your comic diverse and innovative, and than you present your "new character" saying that he's gay, as this was his main, defining feature.
"What if" should serve a narrative purpose.

Let's consider 2 hypothetical "what if" scenarios, starting from a real example.

Superman - Red Son: Superman lands in Soviet Union and he's raised believing in communism.
Superman - ???: he's superman, but he's black!

There is a notable difference. The first changes the character to tell a different story and it's pretty clear since the premise; the second one could tell a different story, but if you present it just as "black superman", people's reaction would be "so what?"
the final result is that all these changes deconstruct a perfectly working hero's figure, without adding any complexity to it but; on the contrary, they are viewed as forced changes in a worse direction (it's worse because the change is not funcional to the narrative, but it's functional to a political message).
It's a way to say: we don't care about what you like, we care about what we like. And you should like it too, because otherwise you're biased.

So yes, in this sense, an asian Batman is a derogatory portrait, because you mold a figure to represent your view of what it should be, only because you don't like its archetype.

 

In Gods and Monsters, they made Superman raised in a barrio of mostly undocumented immigrants. But they changed a lot more. Among other things, he was General's Zod's biological son but didn't know that his father was a villain. He thought his father was a hero and still strived to be heroic. Also, the entire world was different. Among other things the world was a shade a darker all around.

Again, it wasn't "Superman speaks Spanish now!" The ethnic change was paired with an interesting story arc.

Unrelated note. In my opinion, Superman: Red Son was one of the few cases where the movie adaptation was better than the source material book.

 

This article in question is using correct statements to lead readers to an erroneous conclusion.

"Did you know that the average wearer or diapers is about 40 years old?"

This is true and misleading. It implies that there are lots of 40 year old people wearing diapers but really the average is computed by lumping babies that are 0-3 with senior citizens that are 75 and up.

• Six years ago, Disney bought Lucasfilm for $4.05 billion.
• The four Star Wars feature films Disney has released since 2015 have grossed more than $4.8 billion at the box office.

This is gross. First off, Disney only receives a percentage of the box office gross. A lot of it goes to the movie theaters, some of it goes to the distributers, and some of it goes to the literal cost of the film reels.

Media companies love to brag about their gross box office to impress investment because "Grossed $500 million sounds a lot better than "Netted $10 million dollars" and it certainly sounds better than "Lost $50 million dollars."

Second off, movies have to pay the actors, the directors, the writers (barely), the crew, and they have to buy a bunch of sets, and they spend gobs of money marketing.

Solo grossed just shy of 400 million dollars. But Disney only got a small percentage of that and they spent tens of millions of dollars creating and marketing it.

Disney made a lot of gross revenue from their Star Wars theme park, but they also spent a lot of money creating it. They were losing money (albeit slowly) before the pandemic struck.

I don't know if Disney made their $4 billion back from Star Wars yet. Disney is not showing their math on how their profits when you factor in the costs of the movies, shows, marketing, and theme park rennovations against the ticket percentage, park attendance, streaming fees, and merchandising royalties.

It gets even harder to calculate when you figure that most people that visit the Star Wars theme park also visit other parts of Disney World, and if I understand, most of Disney's theme park revenue comes from their attached restaurants and hotels.

I liked Black Panther. It deserved to make a lot of money. Except for the two Token Tolkien white guys (the two most prominent white guys in the movie were LOTR stars), it was a mostly black cast, but the movie didn't really push social issues much all things considered. As far as I can recall, they didn't cover the patriarchy or white guilt at all.

It's not that woke makes for bad movies. A good story is a good story whether it is woke or not. Being woke certainly doesn't help a bad story.

Also, one could argue that the box office of Black Panther got an assist from being part of the most culturally relevant franchise of it's era.


I did not watch Captain Marvel. Every reviewer I trusted said it wasn't very good and Brie Larson said the movie wasn't for me, so I took her at her word.

It is widely believed that Captain Marvel got a high gross because it was sandwiched between the two Infinity War movies and the marketers implied but did not state outright that it was required viewing for End Game. Captain Marvel certainly got a box office assist on the strength of the franchise

If Captain Marvel/Brie Larson was very popular character/actress on her own merits, we would have seen Captain Marvel 2 by now. It would have either been one of the last blockbusters released before the pandemic or it would be mostly complete but in pandemic limbo along with Wonderwoman 1984. We got Spiderman Homecoming pretty quick and it's not like Brie Larson had any other projects eating her time apart from telling young Hispanic woman to drop her taco.

I agree. The is a correlational relationship not a causational relationship. But it is a very strong correlation. If I see a piece of media broadcasting it's wokeness, I'm not going to foreswear seeing it on wokeness alone, but I am going to scrutinize it carefully before throwing money at it.

I agree entirely. The statement I literally prefaced with "If I could wave a magic wand" was indeed unrealistic.

 

I could talk about get woke go broke on and on.

I will bring up a point in the correlation versus causation thing. Sometimes, It's in the other direction. "We are losing our audience, maybe if we put in woke stuff and make a big stink about it, we'll get some new viewers!" Usually doesn't work. That's kind of the problem with the American comic book industry. The industry is declining and the industry is getting more and more woke, but the industry was declining BEFORE wokeness was a thing.


I like the Youtube Channel Clownfish. I'm not going to put the whole video because they are not very succinct. They recently made fun of an article talking about problematic things in classic Christmas specials. Some of it talks about non politically correct non-woke things from decades old media, but some of it talks about a cartoon or movie being problematic because it covers bullying and death and other things that are difficult for children.

But you have to cover these things! I don't know a single human being who hasn't had to deal with bullies at some point. It is very rare for a person to not have a family member, friend, or pet die before they turn 18.

I admit there are things that should not be shown in a piece of media intended for children, but we are not doing children any favors protecting their feels from everything.

Spoiler Alert if you haven't seen the 1980s classic, The Neverending Story. If you haven't seen it and don't like spoilers, stop reading and go watch it.

I will admit that I have not kept fully to date with all media for children but I do a little bit of the mind of a child and I watch a lot of cartoons for a 37 year old man with no children.

Between 2000 and 2020, I have seen nothing created for young audiences remotely close to The Neverending Story in the ambitiousness of it's scope.

The Neverending Story covers death and loss a lot, in a way the entire franchise is a metaphor for dealing with depression specific and mental illness in general. These are things everyone has to deal with because these issues are so common that chances are if you don't deal with this yourself, one of your friends or family is.

The first villainous force is "The Nothing" and the second villainous force is "The Emptiness."

Despite the crudity of the puppets, this is one of the greatest scenes in a children's movie EVER.

They symbolism wasn't exactly subtle. The Nothing was taking people away and one character died in the Swamps of Sadness. The two scenes that could qualify as the emotional climax were not quite back to back but they were put close together. Here they are.





In both cases a character is dealing with the death of a friend. The child loses a friend and "don't leave me I need you! My friend is gone. My friend left me."

The adult's response to the same situation is "My friends are gone. I failed them."


I did not write this post and then post it immediately, I wrote it down and went back to look it over. I am questioning my own grumpy old man assertion "kids were tougher in the 80s and 90s!)

As I'm looking over what I wrote, I checked the date of Coraline. It was made in 2009. That's a very good movie that coddle children.

I also recall that Disney has been sugar coating grim (pun) stories since the 1930s. Every single fairy tale adaptation Disney made from Snow White to Frozen is a lot of softer than the original.

It's not an absolute, it's not like there is literally nothing in media that teaches kids to be strong in the face of adversity and it's not like parents in the 20th century never coddled their children more than their ancestors.

I could easily be blinded by nostalgia glasses, but I do think that there is a general trend that media for kids is getting softer. Maybe too soft.

Neil Gailman, who wrote Coraline before it was adapted to a movie was quoted saying this.

“Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.”

Okay, so while I don't want to see Scooby and the Mystery Inc gang solving grisly murders, to make beating the dragon meaningful, the dragon needs to be established as a real threat.

Now that I think about Scooby Doo. I think if you are going to traumatize children with a piece of media that covers a very serious issue, it probably should be 60 minutes or longer in length to establish the necessary arc. I don't think a 22 cartoon show is adequate.


I'm 37 and I haven't been dealing with the year 2020 as well as I'd like. I feel like I've been learning lessons the last couple years that I should have already been ingrained in me by my early 20s. I'm sure cartoons did not have a huge impact on my development.

It boggles my mind that we have adult workplaces with crying rooms. Or that online safe places are being established so adults don't get their feelings hurt.

If you are reading this thread, you probably saw my CCP awareness thread. It just infuriates me that we are living in a world where the leadership of the most populous country on earth is engaged in sex trafficking and murdering religious minorities for their organs to sell AND this nation is invading the borders of all their neighbors AND is seeking to subvert the governments and media of the West. All that is barely being covered by the traditional media or trending social media.

But if a prominent Western celebrity says something hurty that offends a few Karens or SJWs and that's covered by the mainstream. The person involve is the subject of cancel mobs to destroy his or her career forever.

I just wish we could address the slave labor, sex trafficking, and organ trafficking before trying to boycott a celebrity who said something insensitive about a disadvantaged group.

 

Not as strong as TNS, but How to train your Dragon deals with some of adult issues, be it the loss by death (Hiccup's father) and loss by growth
A similar theme can be seen in Inside Out.
Funnily, both of them cartoons

I think that one of the issues is also the expectations by authors / companies, be them in movies, comics of videogames.
They make a "diverse" product. Which can be fine.
But if this product fails, then the fault is because the "audience" was biased, phobic, racist and / or similar. They don't accept a negative judgement of the quality of the product, they blame someone else. Which frankly is reaching an embarassing level of ridiculousness.
There are many evidences about this attitude, from the responses to the low ranking of Batwoman, to my current favorite one:
"The Last of Us II" won a TON of awards, from "game of the year" to " Best action / adventure", mostly gave by game critics.
HOWEVER, the award "best game of the year" from the players, went to Ghost of Tsushima.
It shouldn't be a problem right? Still, many ones went crazy, and one of the most stupid critic was "you stupid bigots, you didn't even noticed that Lady Masako in GoT is bisex!"
The doubt that players noticed it, but gave the award to the game it was perceived as most satisfying, without caring for sexual issues, didn't touch their minds.

Here is the point where the line is crossed: when an author believes that its product must triumph because it covers "diverse" themes, and if the product somehow fails, then it's because people are biased. As if the story or the quality doesn't matter.
So, when an author presents a comic with announcements as "batman is asian and Alfred is gay", this starting attitude triggers an alarm in my mind.

 

I don't want to sound boastful, but here goes.

It occurred to me that since I regularly identify with talking lizards and weird looking space aliens and that I personally do not need the characters "to be like me" in order to identify with them. Maybe that is why I can easily identify with human characters who are not straight white males. It is possible that some people with weaker imaginations are not as flexible.

So you might be on to something. Or maybe not. Ever since I was little, I've always been good at pretending to be other people, even radically different people. Perhaps too good, I find it hard to make time to exercise and do chores sometimes because I'm too busy "living in my head" as my dad.

I wish I were taller. I envy tall people. On average tall people make more money, have less heart disease and have more luck finding romantic partners.

You ask a tall person about their privilege and will tell you about all the times they are cramped in a car, plane or train. They will tell you about the times they hit their head on low doorframes or shelves.

Whatever your demographic is, based on human nature you are likely to focus on the negatives of your situation and have a grass is greener on the other mentality.

It is not cool to have a white pride parade because of it's associations with Nazis and the Klan.

But there were attempts to have a Straight Pride parade which I don't have a problem, but they got drowned in red tape and shouted down on social media.

A lot of comments were along the lines of "It's okay to be straight and happy about it, but could you do it quietly? You don't have to rub our face in it."

The irony is this is exactly what people said when the gay rights movement was still young and no one seemed to realize how hypocritical they were being repeating the discrimination of yeasteryear in a new form.


The race and sexuality swaps in Gotham High don't really bother me. I guess what bothers me is that Gotham High is essentially a Batman story without Batman in it. It's just that the identity swaps were used as a selling point which I found milddly condescending.

Four times this happened to me personally. Three times it was water off a duck's back but one time my parent's car was vandalized when I very small and I was scared.

I will admit that four times is not many. We are basically talking once a decade. I'm sure there are non-white people that had to deal with this crap on a weekly or daily basis.

While it's never been directed at me personally. In the last ten years I have heard many variations justifying so called "reverse discrimination."

"It's not racism if you are discriminating against white people because they deserve it." Usually it is sugar coated, but not always. That's a gateway to bad stuff. There were some academics that took English translations of Adolf Hitler's memoir Mein Kampf verabitim except they changed references to Jews into ether "the patriarchy or the system of white privilege" and the references to "the German people." were replaced by "women or people of color" and these pieces got published in academic journals and lingered there for weeks before someone caught on.

This is wrong. Discrimination on the basis of race or ethnicity is always wrong. Two wrongs do not make a right.

Looking at the Rwandan genocide. It was mostly Hutus killing Tutsis, but eventually Tutsis from outside Rwanda came in to help their beleaguered and some of them were not discriminatory about which Hutus they attacked and which ones they didn't.

95%+ of the innocent victims were Tutsis, that doesn't mean the Hutus that had nothing to do with the genocide that were killed deserved to be killed because they shared an ethnicity with the people who did horrible things.


I am a not a huge gamer. I mostly play online versions of card games (especially Sentinels of the Multiverse which is also quite inclusive!) I like or turn based strategy games like Civilization. I am however trying to play video games less because I need more time in my day to do meaningful things.

So I guess I have much to say about recent videos. If a video game is known for having a good story, I will usually watch a well-edited "Let's play video," rather than play it myself so I'm not entirely oblivious to how politics enters video games.

Obviously people should not be run over.

At a certain point too many severe challenges will break someone's spirit and/or kill them. On the other never being challenged leads to weak people who feel empty inside.

I don't know where the perfect middle ground of suffering and struggle is, but I believe there is one.

2020 is a rough year and I expect the entire decade between 2020 and 2030 to be a rough decade and I fear that we as a world are not particularly well-prepared to deal with it.

I hope I'm wrong.