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Comment by jbrins1 | Hacker News Reader

What is “feminist agenda trash” exactly?

Pretty much every new Netflix show will have some combination of the following:

- female characters are always independent, strong-willed, etc. Even if the story calls for someone that's the opposite.

- male characters are either generic muscle or have some stereotypically negative quality like aggression

- at least one main character is always black (and only black - don't even think about Asian or Middle Eastern or anyone that might look white), even if the story doesn't make sense

- at least one main character is gay, queer, or trans, even if the story doesn't make sense. I live in an ultra blue city and the population here is not as LGBT as Netflix plots are. I don't really care that there are LGBT characters but when you shove it into every story plot it gets old.

- every story line is about some part of the liberal political agenda, either gun control, universal healthcare, or immigration. Coincidentally every story features some Republican "coming to their senses" and "compromising" in order for whatever agenda item they're pushing to pass Congress.

Especially the last one is super prominent. I'll give you an example: the show Madam Secretary started off as a show about the life of a former CIA analyst turned into Secretary of State, but by the last season it morphed into a political soapbox about women's rights, immigration, and healthcare spending. A second example: Designated Survivor started off as a show about what might happen if the US Congress was all killed in a terror bombing, but then morphed into a political soapbox about gun control.

Ozark was the first Netflix series that sprung to mind and it has at best 1/5 of those.

Neither Madam Secretary nor Designated Survivor originated on Netflix.

Yes, that's why they started off good and later seasons went off the rails.

Madam Secretary aired on network TV for its entire run. Its production, as far as I can tell, had nothing to do with Netflix.

In a world where Netflix has produced a number of shows that are counterexamples to most of your points (wherein meeting one or another of them would happen in a sensibly written show anyway), it's weird that you're using shows as examples whose production had little to do with Netflix.

> at least one main character is gay, queer, or trans, even if the story doesn't make sense. I live in an ultra blue city and the population here is not as LGBT as Netflix plots are. I don't really care that there are LGBT characters but when you shove it into every story plot it gets old.

Doesn't make sense?

And being one of those things isn't shoving it into plots. If you have a typical number of main characters then it's really not notable for one to be LGBT.

LGB, sure. I know loads. Ts? Don't know a single one.

What fraction of Netflix's shows have trans characters?

According to this report: https://www.glaad.org/whereweareontv21

As a percentage of just the LGBTQ characters, both overall and in streaming specifically, trans characters were about 7%.

I'm not sure exactly what their total character count was, but that seems to put the percentage of trans characters solidly under 1%. Which is about right for matching the real prevalence of somewhere vaguely around half a percent. I think a slight overrepresentation could be justified, too, but there doesn't seem to be overrepresentation by these numbers.

It's fairly likely that you've met a trans person and didn't realize they were one.

> - at least one main character is gay, queer, or trans, even if the story doesn't make sense. I live in an ultra blue city and the population here is not as LGBT as Netflix plots are. I don't really care that there are LGBT characters but when you shove it into every story plot it gets old.

The population where you are is likely just as LGBT but more in the closet.

No no, they just haven't been convinced that they're part of the "community" yet.

Thankfully their parents protected their innocent minds from the forbidden knowledge that people they don't like exist.

I think you are being a bit overly critical. Maybe you watched a sjw show and now the algo thinks that is what you want.

Ozarks, The Witcher, Big Mouth, Stranger Things, The Crown, Umbrella Academy are some of the more popular shows that I have seen and I don't recall any straining for diversity or social justice.

I hear Umbrella Academy will have Elliot Page's character transition to match his own, so I guess that's out for ceeplusplus.

Well considering the actor's transition all I can say uhhhhhh..... that makes a lot of sense. Umbrella Academy will remain just fine.

You should hit "parent" once or twice to see the context. You missed something.

The parent comments are about needlessly working in LGBTQ characters. Seems like if one of your leads transitions, you are going to have to solve that issue somehow.

So if you check context (as I recommended to stjohnswarts), you'll see I wasn't actually commenting on that one way or the other at all. I was goofing on ceeplusplus.

Oh, I see. I just didn't read the last part correctly.

That'll potentially be the first trans character I'll ever be aware of in a TV show I'll watch.

Add The Last Kingdom to the list.

The Witcher - largely ruined by americanization/caricature of the (good in the original) female characters and squashing the elf themes into modern racism/immigration framework.

Ozarks feminist trash after the first season, the Witcher feminist trash in how they changed the characters from the game, stranger things is a poster child for feminist trash, the crown is literally about one of the handful of women rulers and I haven’t watched the umbrella academy.

I've watched Ozarks from the beginning and I would have to say that nothing in it has come across to me as a feminist agenda.

Apart from the second bullet point there, am I the only one who thinks this shows an incredible lack of awareness? Why is it that people are so put off by inclusion?

As far as the political stuff, I can't help but think you're being over-sensitive to things that are actually rather banal and moderate.

It's performative inclusion. If it was actual inclusion then other races like Middle Eastern/Asian/etc people would be included. But those people have been deemed by wokes to be "too white" so they're not "people of color" anymore. What exactly are you calling awareness here? Racial quotas for actors?

I’ll agree with you partially here, but only because the goal posts have moved.

I particularly object to the label “woke”, which I just find unproductively derisive, and juvenile.

There are plenty of Netflix shows with leading Asian characters:

https://www.popsugar.co.uk/entertainment/netflix-original-tv...

One of my favorite new netflix shows has a half asian lead, the other half presumably white.

I like inclusion when it's actual inclusion and not pandering. Like Paul and Hugh in Star Trek: Discovery. They are both good characters in their own right who also happen to be gay by complete chance. Because as a bi man that's exactly what I feel: There's so much more to me than my sexuality, something I had absolute 0 choice in.

It gets bad however in other shows when gay characters exist just to be gay and that's all they are, no character beyond that.

I can't say that I remember feeling that LGBTQ+ characters were out of place in many movies or shows (I'm a straight white dude).

One I particularly enjoyed was the character of Taylor Mason in Billions. Just an incredible character.

Could you give some examples of when a main character is black or LGBT and the story doesn't make sense because of it?

It’s not specific to Netflix, in the Apple TV book adaptation series Foundation the 2 main characters where swapped from white men to black women for no apparent reason. In the upcoming Amazon LOTR adaption the dwarf queen is black but black dwarves are not a thing in the books.

But the story still makes sense, doesn't it? If anything it now makes more sense in Foundation, where there is famously almost no mention of women in the books despite them presumably making up half the population.

I googled dwarven skin colour in LOTR and apparently it's not mentioned in the books, so I don't see any problems with a black dwarf.

The problem with foundation wasn’t what you state. The problem is that they changed the story so much from the books that it doesn’t resemble them and they got the central theme exactly backwards.

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