> He says Netflix is woke without any citations
People don't do citations in casual conversations.
Everyone agrees that Netflix is woke, the disagreement is weather wokeness is good or bad.
People don't do citations in casual conversations.
Everyone agrees that Netflix is woke, the disagreement is weather wokeness is good or bad.
This is factually wrong. I never even knew that there was a conversation about wokeness and Netflix. And I still don't understand why. Netflix just streams videos? Is this about the content they make/license or about their corporate/employee culture?
People who are pro/anti wokeness I think spend a lot more time thinking about this stuff than everyone else does.
They make a lot of content too
It'd pretty obvious Netflix is woke by their original content. It also tends to be boring now.
Sen..si..tive.
Netflix is extremely woke. If you doubt this, go watch Bridgerton (playing on my TV right now) and observe how half the people in regency England, including the Queen, are now black. Then go watch Manifest, and observe that in the final episodes one of the characters suddenly starts talking about how the government is "putting people in cages", quite out of the blue.
That's just the last two shows watched in my household. Manifest isn't as woke as Bridgerton but ... let's just say none of the characters are suddenly espousing the wisdom of Adam Smith.
Do you also get mad when the characters speak in modern english, or is that just fine?
Is it woke, or are you sensitive to race?
in the history of England, the United Kingdom and the whole Commonwealth there has not been a single instance of a king or queen being anything other than - here comes the dreaded word - white.
what's the point of making them black?
coming from Eastern Europe, it's like you made John Paul II black - or any of the patriarchs of Eastern Christian Churches. you can do it, but it's so far offbeat it isn't even funny.
in the US, I guess you could make Lincoln, Washington and Reagan black. they just weren't.
This is, in fact, (while completely beside the point) wrong. There are several non-white Kings and Queens in the history of the Commonwealth; e.g., Mswati III of the Kingdom of Eswatini.
> what's the point of making them black?
What's the point of alternate history and historically-inspired fantasy? That's a kind of big question. Do you literally think every film or show should simply depict life literally exactly how it actually occurred at some time in the past?
> in the US, I guess you could make Lincoln, Washington and Reagan black.
Or make Lincoln a vampire hunter.
(Of course, there isn't a long history of rumors that Lincoln actually was a vampire hunter taking as their starting point a too-literal reading of contemporary descriptions probably meant as throw-away insults.)
The complaints about Bridgerton seem to be highly-selective blindness to the entire concept that overtly fictional entertainment is typically something other than an exact recreation of history. (And/or assertion that race is somehow a uniquely unacceptable thing to fictionalize for unspecified reasons.)
“Woke” racists are the usual source of such race-swapping, because they’re obsessed with race and can’t simply tell a story as it makes sense.
The period in question isn't medieval England.
> can’t simply tell a story as it makes sense.
Using a literal historical setting unchanged doesn't make sense when the central premise of a story is taking a particular ahistorical (though historically rumored) fact proposition and dialing it to 11.
It's like making a complaint about the political intent of the X-Files because it shows unrealistic FBI procedures rather than telling the “story as it makes sense”.
This is so far out of touch it's unreal.
Woke people are currently trying to claim that maths education is racist because too many famous mathematicians are white. And you're claiming those same people would have no issue whatsoever with making a TV show about the history of Africa in which the Africans were all depicted by white people? It's hilarious and sad that people are actually reduced to trying to claim that.
And no, Bridgerton is not some fantasy or alternate reality. For goodness sake. Absolutely nothing in it is out of place in any way for the time except the races of all the actors.
> Woke people are currently trying to claim that maths education is racist because too many famous mathematicians are white.
I'm in the middle of "Woke America" and work on math curricula, and I've NEVER heard anyone assert this in one of the most liberal public school districts in the US. Is there someone that has said this before? I'm sure there is. Just like there are people on the right who believe Blacks don't have the intellect to learn math - neither represent the majority of these groups.
Now if someone tried to pass off white Africans as real history -- yes, you'd have complaints. But a fantasy story about it I think could be absolutely fascinating. Spoken from someone who self-identifies as "woke". Just in case you're keeping count.
You're statements would be funny, if they weren't so scary.
Is there someone that has said this before?
Oh boy, yes. Just search for 'racist maths' to find endless discussion of it. For instance here's Ontario editing maths textbooks to put woke nonsense at the start:
https://www.tvo.org/article/what-does-an-anti-racist-math-cl...
And California:
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/focusing-on-the-correct-a...
Here's a British university jumping on the bandwagon:
https://jonathanturley.org/2022/04/11/decolonising-math-durh...
These are just random examples. There are many more.
Bridgerton is not a documentary, or even historical fiction, it's a romance set in a fantasy setting largely spun off of an extended what-iffing of a long-standing popular (but rejected by all current serious sources) rumor about Queen Charlotte.
Not sure how it's existence supports claims that Netflix is “woke”; sounds a lot like the fringe Christian Right descriptions of any fiction including magical elements (but not exclusively explicitly Christian miracles) as satanic.
Bridgerton is "woke" for two reasons: 1. Like the extremely lucrative romance novels it is adapting, it doesn't care what men think of it & the female characters are the protagonists 2. It includes interracial relationships
That's it. To the anti-woke crowd celebrating Musk's purchase of Twitter, romance = bad, racism = good and any media that disagrees is "woke".
All streaming platforms are first of all streaming capitalism.
Netflix funds content. Netflix licenses content and has a say on how future content from that IP is produced. They are not just a streaming platform. When you look at every new show as of late you see themes commonly associated with wokeness. Replacing characters with "BIPOC" (I hate this term) when adapting from source material when it clearly seems out of place. Mixing in subtle commentary about immigration, healthcare, "hate" speech, etc. Women are always the strong saviors, men are always the aggressive out of control beasts or they're docile homemakers.
You can see it in pretty much every show. Witcher Season 1/2 (immigration, replacing characters, men/women tropes), House of Cards Season 6 (all of the above), Altered Carbon, etc.
Unless they were only going to adapt actual fascists like Campbell, it is impossible to create science fiction without questioning the premises our society is based on. That's sort of the whole point of the genre. If one considers science fiction "woke" that says more about the person watching than it does about the company making Hillbilly Elegy and Cobra Kai and The Crown.
> questioning the premises our society is based on
There's a difference between doing this in a way that also tells a coherent story and one that just forces themes that don't exist into the story. One of those things is woke and the other one is not.
Netflix produces a lot of content. I would venture a guess that 99% of it isn't woke or anti-woke.
Do they? I don't. Mainly because I don't even know what that phrase means anymore. Any meaning the word "woke" HAD has been thoroughly lost as it has now become a stand-in word for any position some conservatives don't like.
I thought conservatives preferred facts to feelings? This doesn't seem to be an opinion based on facts.
What Netflix experiencing is very similar to communist economy. Producers don't get paid for views hey generate and they have no market incentive. Unlike cinematic releases, you cannot go in loss on Netflix because deals are made upfront. There is no cost of failure to you. There is no real economic award or punishment from the market. So people just come in and slap whatever content they can to spend the available money.