Woke isnāt being progressive. Itās being progressive to an extent beyond any sort of logic, virtue signaling constantly, and then calling anyone who disagrees with you morally or intellectually inferior.
In entertainment, that often results in some really annoying elements that I think we can all acknowledge are a thing after almost a decade of this:
There is a minority protagonist. Said protagonist is disproportionately a straight coded conventionally attractive white women in their 20s.
The only flaw the protagonist will have is not being confident enough
There is then a minority side character. Said character will disproportionately be a black woman obviously less attractive than the protagonist, or a upper middle class gay fuckboi.
If there is not one of these two things, a minority side character will be shoehorned in somewhere. The character will feel visibly out of place, and no explanation will be given. For example, theyāll do some random black character in a fantasy setting thatās clearly based off Scotland in the 1200s.
Important character goes on a monologue that feels like a political PSA
The IPās understanding of progressive politics and social justice is roughly equivalent to Tumblr circa 2013.
Absolutely terrible writing. Even if you swapped all the āwokeā elements for generic entertainment elements, the IP would still be terrible.
Likewise, the IP itself is often put together in an extremely lazy and mediocre way. If said āwokeā content was not there, it would be universally panned for its low quality.
Amazing reviews. All aspects of the IP get 10/10 from the āprofessionalā critics. All the reviews are similar enough that the critics either collaborated or read off the press release.
The critics care more about the social justice aspect than the game itself.
You get the sense both the creators and the critics of the IP not only donāt consume this type of IP in their spare time, but actively resent people who do.
Constant fucking gaslighting. Anyone who doesnāt like this ultimately mediocre IP is either morally and intellectually inferior. This usually comes in the form of accusations of being a bigot, a Nazi, or a Trump supporter.
Bigots, Nazis, and Trump supporters will then try to recruit people who are pissed about the gaslighting.
At some point the IP itself fades into the background, and it just becomes yet another culture war battleground.
I think thereās a reason Star Wars gets more shit for being woke than Spiderverse, or that Arcane hasnāt become a culture war battleground in the same way She-Hulk did. The reason being those shows are actually good, and most people are happy to watch good shows.
Your last bit is the only part that matters. Good content is good. Thereās so much well written progressive āwokeā stuff that does well, but itās easy to point at a shitty flop and say it failed because itās āwokeā rather than doing the hard work and actually analyzing why itās bad. āWokeā content isnāt an issue in media. Itās that weāre getting so much bad and lazy writing in AAA games (and other big media). They arenāt allowed to be creative, so it ends up being garbage.
Add on top of that that the games industry has laid off TENS OF THOUSANDS of devs in the last three or four years.
I know a lot of talented people who are no longer working as devs, or who have been job searching for months.
Of course this doesnāt mean that the studios still producing games have narrowed their scopes, they just dump more work on the survivors.
And āwoke DEI SJW snowflake game devā is far from the only thing making games worse, itās just what a lot of gamers can easily identify as a problem.
By the time I left, my last industry job had been reduced to what felt like manning the slop hose of mtx store items made by overseas outsource studios producing soulless trash under fuck-knows-what kind of nightmare working conditions.
We started seeing more diversity in games because devs are diverse and wanted to see themselves and their friends in their art.
The problem has never been queer or black characters in games. It is, and always has been, the prioritizing of profit over quality craft.
Iād argue that forced diversity is primarily because so many higher ups donāt give a fuck about gaming or making good content.
The suits just want money, and for some reason corporate thought that weighing in on social and political issues was a huge money maker in the 2020s. The journalists just want to promote their own political agenda and get ragebait clicks. The project director is someone with a corporate background but a progressive flair that makes them seem āhipā to the suits.
Meanwhile the people who give a shit, regardless of their identity, donāt have a voice in the room.
Iām sure there are plenty of minorities that are super pissed about what happened to bioware, but the only way youād hear from them is by looking at sales figures because they donāt have a bully pulpit.
Woke isnāt being progressive. Itās being progressive to an extent beyond any sort of logic, virtue signaling constantly, and then calling anyone who disagrees with you morally or intellectually inferior
I fucking hate that the idea of being woke was poisoned and turned into this when it very much is not and never was.
Woke is acknowledging the systemic racism playing out daily in the United States of America.
I think most of what you wrote isnāt even true to be honest, itās a well strung together list of annoying tropes which doesnāt even happen nearly as much or widely as some would suggest. Itās a neat little āhereās a bad way of caringā package but it aināt the truth.
I appreciate the effort you went through to write the post and I understand your viewpoint. At the same time, this is a great example of how the term āwokeā has been co-opted into meaning something it never really did. Being awake to the injustices present in our lives isnāt a bad thing. Turning woke into a slur to wrongly characterize and misdirect away from its true original intent has been an effective, and gross, way to get people to automatically reject real critique.
Woke is acknowledging the systemic racism playing out daily in the United States of America.
If only. But like all of your societal problems, itās being exported to all kinds of places, often where it has little relevance, but where it can be used for political gain by soulless individuals.
For example, theyāll do some random black character in a fantasy setting thatās clearly based off Scotland in the 1200s.
While I donāt know about 1200s Scotland specifically, the notion that black people didnāt exist in old Europe is a false narrative by racists who seem to believe immigration was invented around the 1700s (like, Iāve seen them claim black people donāt fit into Ancient Greece, which is definitely wrong.)
I mean immigration existed, but it wasnāt nearly as common as today. A lot of these IPs just plop a minority in an area where their presence would turn heads, have everyone act super casual about it because they are too lazy for a backstory, and then call everyone a bigot who points out this is sort of silly. On the flip side, there are people who will call creators bigots for not including minorities in some quasi historical setting, even if their presence was rare.
Like pretend someone was making a movie in present day central Africa. Everyone is central African. Except one dude who is pure blooded Navajo. No explanation is ever given, and the only people who seem to even notice his race is the villain.
While itās perfectly possible for someone of Navajo descent to find themselves in central Africa, itās not really that likely. Audiences would want an explanation, and would consider it unrealistic if absolutely nobody commented on it except some over the top villain.
Thereās also an aspect of gaslighting going on here. Over the past decade historians have made a lot of claims about racial compositions of historical groups that were later exposed to be largely inaccurate. While historical inaccuracies are always a thing, itās pretty convenient that all these inaccurate claims fit into the narrative pushed by American progressive identity politics.
I think thereās a reason Star Wars gets more shit for being woke than Spiderverse
Funny enough even within the Star Wars universe there are good and bad things. Mandalorian and Rogue One? Pretty great. Episode 7+ and Acolyte? Pretty shit. Youāll notice though that the more forced the progressivism is in a given piece of content, the more it sucks. In other words: bad writing doesnāt just fuck the story up, it bakes in messaging that doesnāt even make sense contextually.
Anyone who has ever read the Sword of Truth series and encountered the authorās obsession with hating socialism has seen what happens when right-wing folk do it: it ruins the experience. Why would we excuse it from progressives?
I disagree with your premise that that āforced progressivismā messes things up. Andor, for example, is the most progressive Star Wars media ever, and itās amazing for it. (Itās literally about a leftist, or at least leftist coded, rebellion against Fascists, and wears it proudly.) The reason is because the people making it were allowed to be creative and were passionate about what they were making.
Its the lack of creative freedom and passion that kills things. Most things with a lot of money put into them are directed by suits, not creatives. They donāt want to take risks, so they just follow trends and formulas. This leads to the media not having anything to actually say, and just a veneer of trying to appeal to certain people, without actually doing anything with it.
I havenāt seen Andor so I canāt comment, but Iāll take the plunge on your advice.
I think corporate āprogressivismā is certainly one of the culprits, but sometimes itās the creatives themselves who ruin things. Some creatives have even intentionally uprooted an IP like The Witcherās show, and Rings of Power. Sometimes progressive ideals are merely a shield against criticism, other times itās a creatorsā own ideals that made them ruin things, and sometimes itās just rainbow capitalism. Itās not a simple issue to talk about really.
I think that most IPs have subtext, and a lot of time this is in the form of a deeper political message. I think it would be silly to say progressivism in IPs is always a bad thing. Thatās part of the reason I mentioned Arcane and Spiderverse by name.
The problem comes from the fact that IPs are supposed to be entertainment first, messaging second. A lot of creators make a lazy and mediocre product, and somewhere in there is a ham-fisted political message. Some creators also seem to be making IPs bad on purpose as a fuck you to their target audience, which is an absolutely baffling choice.
Thereās also the concept of nuance thatās sort of been lost. A lot of the creators will write something in some super reductive black/white way thatās basically guaranteed to turn off everyone who doesnāt already emphatically agree with them. This is a huge departure from a lot of older movies. For example Forrest Gump is a Republican movie, but doesnāt just portray republicans as automatically good or liberals as automatically bad. The end result is that there are a lot of liberals who love Forrest Gump.
The part that I strongly disagree on is that you seem to be blaming the corporations. I think ultimately a lot of the problem here is at the fault of the creators. There have been a lot of high profile cases where studios donāt interfere, give the creators a massive budget, and have their backs when controversy hits. The creators will still end up making mediocre culture war content. Todd Philips was allowed to do whatever he wanted in Joker 2. It turns out what Todd Philips wanted was for the Joker to be permanently defeated by the power of prison rape. Thereās no studio head in the world who would have told him to do that.
The problem comes from the fact that IPs are supposed to be entertainment first, messaging second.
Maybe you just want entertainment, but the purpose of art has almost always been message-first. If a piece of art isnāt trying to say something, whatās the point? People trying to act like gaming, or any other form of art, should only focus on entertaining, and always has, are not very media-literate. I canāt think of a single classically well received movie that doesnāt have a message itās trying to tell.
Nuance, yeah. Thatās important. The goal of art is to get someone to feel like the idea youāre trying to give them came from themselves. Thatās when itās effective. It doesnāt really work when youāre just telling them how to think. It just annoys people.
Also, of course some garbage will also be made when people are allowed freedom to be creative. The difference is that good things can be made in that situation, not that it always will. It pretty much never will if everything is targeted towards mass appeal. That ensures no one in particular will care because there isnāt a target. They do it because itās a safe bet. This implies the alternative is more risky, meaning more failures (like Joker 2), but also the opportunity for greatness.
Anyone who has ever read the Sword of Truth series and encountered the authorās obsession with hating socialism has seen what happens when right-wing folk do it: it ruins the experience.
And unions. Really drove that home when Richard was in the Old World.
To be fair Iām sure if it was stylish to insert overt conservative themes into IPs those would be also too.
I donāt think progressivism is the problem. I think the problem is mediocre creators either deciding to turn an expensive IP into their own political soapbox, and executives giving it the green light because they either are completely disconnected to what makes a good product or thinks the culture war will allow them to pretend that bad products are good.
The one character that felt shoehorned in to me was Idris Elba as Roland in The Gunslinger. Why?! Handsome, buff, young and black are not adjectives anyone has ever used to describe Roland Deschain. LOL, King might as well come out and say he ripped the description off a 40-something Clint Eastwood.
Woke isnāt being progressive. Itās being progressive to an extent beyond any sort of logic, virtue signaling constantly, and then calling anyone who disagrees with you morally or intellectually inferior.
In entertainment, that often results in some really annoying elements that I think we can all acknowledge are a thing after almost a decade of this:
I think thereās a reason Star Wars gets more shit for being woke than Spiderverse, or that Arcane hasnāt become a culture war battleground in the same way She-Hulk did. The reason being those shows are actually good, and most people are happy to watch good shows.
Your last bit is the only part that matters. Good content is good. Thereās so much well written progressive āwokeā stuff that does well, but itās easy to point at a shitty flop and say it failed because itās āwokeā rather than doing the hard work and actually analyzing why itās bad. āWokeā content isnāt an issue in media. Itās that weāre getting so much bad and lazy writing in AAA games (and other big media). They arenāt allowed to be creative, so it ends up being garbage.
Add on top of that that the games industry has laid off TENS OF THOUSANDS of devs in the last three or four years.
I know a lot of talented people who are no longer working as devs, or who have been job searching for months.
Of course this doesnāt mean that the studios still producing games have narrowed their scopes, they just dump more work on the survivors.
And āwoke DEI SJW snowflake game devā is far from the only thing making games worse, itās just what a lot of gamers can easily identify as a problem.
By the time I left, my last industry job had been reduced to what felt like manning the slop hose of mtx store items made by overseas outsource studios producing soulless trash under fuck-knows-what kind of nightmare working conditions.
We started seeing more diversity in games because devs are diverse and wanted to see themselves and their friends in their art.
The problem has never been queer or black characters in games. It is, and always has been, the prioritizing of profit over quality craft.
Iād argue that forced diversity is primarily because so many higher ups donāt give a fuck about gaming or making good content.
The suits just want money, and for some reason corporate thought that weighing in on social and political issues was a huge money maker in the 2020s. The journalists just want to promote their own political agenda and get ragebait clicks. The project director is someone with a corporate background but a progressive flair that makes them seem āhipā to the suits.
Meanwhile the people who give a shit, regardless of their identity, donāt have a voice in the room.
Iām sure there are plenty of minorities that are super pissed about what happened to bioware, but the only way youād hear from them is by looking at sales figures because they donāt have a bully pulpit.
I fucking hate that the idea of being woke was poisoned and turned into this when it very much is not and never was.
Woke is acknowledging the systemic racism playing out daily in the United States of America.
I think most of what you wrote isnāt even true to be honest, itās a well strung together list of annoying tropes which doesnāt even happen nearly as much or widely as some would suggest. Itās a neat little āhereās a bad way of caringā package but it aināt the truth.
I appreciate the effort you went through to write the post and I understand your viewpoint. At the same time, this is a great example of how the term āwokeā has been co-opted into meaning something it never really did. Being awake to the injustices present in our lives isnāt a bad thing. Turning woke into a slur to wrongly characterize and misdirect away from its true original intent has been an effective, and gross, way to get people to automatically reject real critique.
Youāre both right, but itās far too late to take the word back, no point in going on about the origins.
No it isnāt.
I am woke, and that is a good thing, and anyone complaining about that is an idiot.
If only. But like all of your societal problems, itās being exported to all kinds of places, often where it has little relevance, but where it can be used for political gain by soulless individuals.
I get what youāre saying, butā¦
While I donāt know about 1200s Scotland specifically, the notion that black people didnāt exist in old Europe is a false narrative by racists who seem to believe immigration was invented around the 1700s (like, Iāve seen them claim black people donāt fit into Ancient Greece, which is definitely wrong.)
I mean immigration existed, but it wasnāt nearly as common as today. A lot of these IPs just plop a minority in an area where their presence would turn heads, have everyone act super casual about it because they are too lazy for a backstory, and then call everyone a bigot who points out this is sort of silly. On the flip side, there are people who will call creators bigots for not including minorities in some quasi historical setting, even if their presence was rare.
Like pretend someone was making a movie in present day central Africa. Everyone is central African. Except one dude who is pure blooded Navajo. No explanation is ever given, and the only people who seem to even notice his race is the villain.
While itās perfectly possible for someone of Navajo descent to find themselves in central Africa, itās not really that likely. Audiences would want an explanation, and would consider it unrealistic if absolutely nobody commented on it except some over the top villain.
Thereās also an aspect of gaslighting going on here. Over the past decade historians have made a lot of claims about racial compositions of historical groups that were later exposed to be largely inaccurate. While historical inaccuracies are always a thing, itās pretty convenient that all these inaccurate claims fit into the narrative pushed by American progressive identity politics.
Great comment, youāve nailed it.
Funny enough even within the Star Wars universe there are good and bad things. Mandalorian and Rogue One? Pretty great. Episode 7+ and Acolyte? Pretty shit. Youāll notice though that the more forced the progressivism is in a given piece of content, the more it sucks. In other words: bad writing doesnāt just fuck the story up, it bakes in messaging that doesnāt even make sense contextually.
Anyone who has ever read the Sword of Truth series and encountered the authorās obsession with hating socialism has seen what happens when right-wing folk do it: it ruins the experience. Why would we excuse it from progressives?
I disagree with your premise that that āforced progressivismā messes things up. Andor, for example, is the most progressive Star Wars media ever, and itās amazing for it. (Itās literally about a leftist, or at least leftist coded, rebellion against Fascists, and wears it proudly.) The reason is because the people making it were allowed to be creative and were passionate about what they were making.
Its the lack of creative freedom and passion that kills things. Most things with a lot of money put into them are directed by suits, not creatives. They donāt want to take risks, so they just follow trends and formulas. This leads to the media not having anything to actually say, and just a veneer of trying to appeal to certain people, without actually doing anything with it.
I havenāt seen Andor so I canāt comment, but Iāll take the plunge on your advice.
I think corporate āprogressivismā is certainly one of the culprits, but sometimes itās the creatives themselves who ruin things. Some creatives have even intentionally uprooted an IP like The Witcherās show, and Rings of Power. Sometimes progressive ideals are merely a shield against criticism, other times itās a creatorsā own ideals that made them ruin things, and sometimes itās just rainbow capitalism. Itās not a simple issue to talk about really.
I generally agree with you, with some caveats.
I think that most IPs have subtext, and a lot of time this is in the form of a deeper political message. I think it would be silly to say progressivism in IPs is always a bad thing. Thatās part of the reason I mentioned Arcane and Spiderverse by name.
The problem comes from the fact that IPs are supposed to be entertainment first, messaging second. A lot of creators make a lazy and mediocre product, and somewhere in there is a ham-fisted political message. Some creators also seem to be making IPs bad on purpose as a fuck you to their target audience, which is an absolutely baffling choice.
Thereās also the concept of nuance thatās sort of been lost. A lot of the creators will write something in some super reductive black/white way thatās basically guaranteed to turn off everyone who doesnāt already emphatically agree with them. This is a huge departure from a lot of older movies. For example Forrest Gump is a Republican movie, but doesnāt just portray republicans as automatically good or liberals as automatically bad. The end result is that there are a lot of liberals who love Forrest Gump.
The part that I strongly disagree on is that you seem to be blaming the corporations. I think ultimately a lot of the problem here is at the fault of the creators. There have been a lot of high profile cases where studios donāt interfere, give the creators a massive budget, and have their backs when controversy hits. The creators will still end up making mediocre culture war content. Todd Philips was allowed to do whatever he wanted in Joker 2. It turns out what Todd Philips wanted was for the Joker to be permanently defeated by the power of prison rape. Thereās no studio head in the world who would have told him to do that.
I disagree with this:
Maybe you just want entertainment, but the purpose of art has almost always been message-first. If a piece of art isnāt trying to say something, whatās the point? People trying to act like gaming, or any other form of art, should only focus on entertaining, and always has, are not very media-literate. I canāt think of a single classically well received movie that doesnāt have a message itās trying to tell.
Nuance, yeah. Thatās important. The goal of art is to get someone to feel like the idea youāre trying to give them came from themselves. Thatās when itās effective. It doesnāt really work when youāre just telling them how to think. It just annoys people.
Also, of course some garbage will also be made when people are allowed freedom to be creative. The difference is that good things can be made in that situation, not that it always will. It pretty much never will if everything is targeted towards mass appeal. That ensures no one in particular will care because there isnāt a target. They do it because itās a safe bet. This implies the alternative is more risky, meaning more failures (like Joker 2), but also the opportunity for greatness.
And unions. Really drove that home when Richard was in the Old World.
Oh you have definitely read it. I come from a family of union men, and am myself a union executive. Reading that stuff felt surreal lol.
To be fair Iām sure if it was stylish to insert overt conservative themes into IPs those would be also too.
I donāt think progressivism is the problem. I think the problem is mediocre creators either deciding to turn an expensive IP into their own political soapbox, and executives giving it the green light because they either are completely disconnected to what makes a good product or thinks the culture war will allow them to pretend that bad products are good.
The one character that felt shoehorned in to me was Idris Elba as Roland in The Gunslinger. Why?! Handsome, buff, young and black are not adjectives anyone has ever used to describe Roland Deschain. LOL, King might as well come out and say he ripped the description off a 40-something Clint Eastwood.