Or maybe it won't matter, because since normal people have other things to worry about it always pays to give in to the loudest, most obnoxious people. In which case, i guess we can look forward to a future where everything is influenced by the most unhinged.
"The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity."
When your catering to that fringe becomes a problem or uncomfortable, people will drop you en masse — precisely because they’re too busy to care.
Hollywood’s stocks aren’t doing well enough to say their strategy of catering to the fringe is working: they’ve all suffered massive losses as people tune out.
But it’s not because people are fundamentally uninterested: Rippaverse raised over $3M, anime and manga are setting records, etc.
The problem is that people can become inured to it, especially if there aren't better options. That state can exist for a long, long time.
Edit:
> But it’s not because people are fundamentally uninterested: Rippaverse raised over $3M, anime and manga are setting records, etc.
After Googling a bit, that Rippaverse thing seems like it's an opposite-polarity reaction, so it's still part of the problem.
But eventually the music stops and everyone leaves… which is what we’re seeing now:
Those companies haven’t produced quality within easy memory (5 years) and so people are overcoming their decades of inertia to find new properties.
You can look at the different receptions of Reacher and Terminal List versus Wheel of Time and Rings of Power, though, to see that putting The Message over quality doesn’t work.
> After Googling a bit, that Rippaverse thing seems like it's an opposite-polarity reaction, so it's still part of the problem.
You should listen to Rippa’s own description rather than the press around it:
He’s just trying to make a quality comic book, no explicit message.
That’s portrayed as “anti-woke” because not putting The Message front and center is a revolutionary act, these days.
Wheel of Time had elements of a message within it, but they didn’t take pre-eminence over the story… it was used to frame it, but that sexist power structure was a major conflict within the story because that wasn’t right either, even though it was a rational idea at the time it started.
Wheel of Time isn’t “The Message” of the 90s, but an examination of the back-and-forth between sexes which casts both extremes as problematic: men can’t shun their potential for ruin, but women-only and shunning men entirely doesn’t work either. The series goes out of its way to frame partnership as the ideal — to the point both sexes are required for elaborate magic. And that complex dynamic was framed within a well told story.
I think that stands in stark contrast to modern media — and that’s the difference I’m trying to highlight.
Amazon’s telling threw out all that complexity which explored the good and bad within both sexes to instead push a hamfisted ideology.
I take it you mean this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wheel_of_Time
I had initially mistaken it for a A Wrinkle in Time, given your description seemed to fit my vague impressions (from ads, etc) of the film adaption that has Oprah (and I have zero memory of the book).
This is extremely interesting to me for a couple of reasons. The use of "these days" here makes me think that you consider comic books with a political message (or Message, as you spell it) are a new phenomenon. That's deeply ahistorical; the first superheroes - among them Superman, Wonder Woman, and Captain America - were created in the 1930s with pretty clear political agendas. Captain America's would, I hope, be obvious; he was created by American Jews who wanted to portray the fight against fascism, and specifically Nazism, as patriotic and righteous. Superman, too, was created by American Jews, and has periodically been portrayed as anti-Communist and generally anti-authoritarian throughout his entire existence as a character. Wonder Woman was created in the 1940s by a polyamorous triad of outspoken feminists, and her creators explicitly stated at the time:
> Not even girls want to be girls so long as our feminine archetype lacks force, strength, and power. Not wanting to be girls, they don't want to be tender, submissive, peace-loving as good women are. Women's strong qualities have become despised because of their weakness. The obvious remedy is to create a feminine character with all the strength of Superman plus all the allure of a good and beautiful woman.
Superhero comics without significant, explicit political messaging are rare in the history of the medium. Popular ones are even moreso.
You went on a whole rant based on a poor assumption.
> Superhero comics without significant, explicit political messaging are rare in the history of the medium.
Your entire post is based around poor assumptions:
My comment was about the relative importance of political message and themes versus the quality of story telling — which you misconstrued as some kind of extremist statement about “no politics in comics!”
https://youtu.be/aQ2TQ_GRO4g?t=1528
But whenever they came up in Picard it's always pointing at something and saying this BAD. Or that GOOD.
It no longer assumes the reader/viewer is smart enough to make connections and draw their own conculsions. It has to be explicit to the point of bashing it over your head.
Star Trek has been an explicitly and somewhat clumsily political show since the very beginning, and people like that about it.
I was disappointed in the latest season of Picard, but I don't think calling the unsubtle preaching a departure from the classic series is a fair critism. It was always there.
I think what might be different "these days" is the level of polarization, or at least how gaping and in-the-open it is. Perhaps back then the agenda wasn't as grating because it better reflected some consensus?
Just throw in some side character who are caricatures of current thing or have the main characters preach about it directly.
It is all about the money. Hulu's ad revenue was most likely found to be underperforming the rest of Disney and political issue ads is at least one of the differences. They are just using this as a cover.
https://www.avclub.com/hulu-boycott-abortion-gun-control-ads...
https://www.newsweek.com/cancel-hulu-calls-grow-after-disney...
https://www.adweek.com/lostremote/boycott-hulu-streamer-reje...
There's also the angle where Disney's decision-makers might be sympathetic to the people in the campaign committees for personal, non-business reasons.
Every time there's any political news, all I can see is people complaining about "shriekers". Have you considered that complaint in itself might be considered the "shrieking" you so despise?
Now I realize that its also possible that the "shriekers" were in favor of political ads and he's against them.
Yeah, both sides look shriek-tastic to me.
WE CAN A LITTLE BIT I GUESS!?!!!?!?!!
But not by much. Never been a fan of English because of the lack of overt tonal expression; with gusto.
No. In fact I see this as a very underhanded rhetorical cheap trick - essentially a catch-22. Only on the most basic level is criticism of critical people some kind of hypocritical indictment.
'You say you don't like people taking things too seriously, yet it sounds like YOU are the one taking things too seriously. Curious'.
Why is criticism of company policies "shrieking", but criticism of criticism not?
Or to go a level further, why is my criticism of his criticism of their criticism a "rhetorical cheap trick", but your criticism to the power of four presumably legitimate?
Is this fifth level of criticism a "rhetorical trick"/"shrieking" too? And will your potential riposte be legitimate again?
I like your perspective of criticism to a power/derivative level, but that's not the angle I'm trying to come from. Rather, I am saying the nature of the criticism is what distinguishes between the two.
I do, however, read HN and every time a company changes policy due to some outrage, the first comment is always somebody saying something along the lines of what OP was saying.
That, to me, is just as annoying as I'm sure the original outrage was to OP. It's a low-effort rant about society and how it budges to spammy complaints without seeing the irony of being a spammy complaint itself.
I don't think the nature is fundamentally different and that might be where we disagree.
Understandable. And to be honest I'm increasingly fatigued in relation to what discourse has become. You had mentioned earlier that I was trying to police what is and isn't acceptable criticism, and in a way you're right. I would like to see a lot less hyperbolic pearl-clutching sophistry. But the downside is that trying to confront the use of such rhetoric is sadly perceived as negative or equivalent.
I don't think discussing those letter writers is similar to engaging in the actual pressure campaign, but it doesn't matter much anyway.
I just think it's likely that the people who prefer to see political ads are small in number but feel strongly and the people who prefer not to see political ads are large in number but less likely to organize around it.