Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by hnthrowaway1099 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

hnthrowaway1099

Wow brilliant idea, Silicon Valley needs a reboot.

View on HN

Recent twitter story would make great comedy someday.

Someday?

Yeah, the script wrote itself. You simply can't make this stuff up.

Nah, I am glad it ended.

Some characters were well written, others were pretty much a excuse for racism.

For sure. I remember really liking Gilfoyle as a character for his deadpan no bullshit and high skill personality. But then I watched a supercut of his "best moments" (at least according to one youtuber) and it was chock full of insults against Dinesh's masculinity, which is both gross from a racism point of view (I have been told that foreign men are often considered less masculine as a kind of racism) and gross from a healthy masculinity point of view (It's okay for men to cry, and have diverse interests, etc). Of course they could update the characters, but they could also just leave that story to rest.

All the things we grew up loving were once original stories, and I would love to see more new original content rather than this machine that "efficiently" churns out smoothed over copies of the same hits from last year.

Jian Yang's character is a pretty offensive depiction of Chinese people.

Gilfoyle being a grumpy sysadmin is probably an accurate depiction of a sysadmin. They're all grumpy.

The grumpyness is what I love about him. But in the supercut I watched, he is constantly specifically attacking other men's masculinity in a way which felt super toxic. There's plenty of healthy ways to present a grumpy character but Gilfoyle's behavior with regard to masculinity just sucks.

Why would you expect a character in a comedy show to be a good role model? All of the characters have pretty obvious flaws and the show is better for it.

It's not just his behavior, but how the writing and presentation of the show frame those behaviors. You can have a sexist character, but how the show treats that behavior reveals what the people creating the show want the audience to take away. The show can present bad behavior as leading to negative consequences. But Gilfoyle's sexism is presented uncritically as comedy, with no negative consequences. It is the framing of this behavior that I take issue with.

> I have been told that foreign men are often considered less masculine as a kind of racism

Not defending him, but Gilfoyle was foreign as well? I've known plenty of people like that, and they are just pricks.

Yeah think he's Canadian

Well a Canadian man in the USA making fun of a Pakistani man in the USA could easily be racism, even if it is subconscious. White men are the socially dominant group in the USA, and it is people of color who have told me about this issue with masculinity. A man from Pakistan and a man from Canada get treated very differently in our society.

But the behavior is also just plainly sexist. The implication of racism is just extra bad.

I'm not American, but he just seems like he is rude and unpleasant to everyone.

Dinesh gets it the most because he has the most interactions. Of course it could just be racism, veiled as general cuntishness.

What's ironic about this comment and some of the replies, is that it seems like people WANT this show and other shows to be "Disney-fied". Nothing uncomfortable, no awkardness, no real-world grit or problems, nobody is the but of the joke, nobody struggles, etc

Its fiction friend. Just fiction.

It's a good opportunity to right the wrongs and double down on the good stuff. In case of FTX, there are SBF, misters Wong and Singh.

Imagine a second coming of Erlich Bachman as a crypto bro. Who would not wanna watch this? For the feminists out there, there's emancipated miss Ellison.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com