Yes sadly this has become much more prominent in the last couple of years. It has blatant political propaganda inserted into all of their original content that is clearly forced and hurts the quality of the programming.
One example that probably flirts the line with hurting children was Netflix's Cuties.
"Netflix is also the streaming service behind "Cuties," a wildly controversial French film that tells the coming-of-age story of an 11-year-old girl as she discovers her maturing self, all while looking for acceptance in her religious family and group of young dancers she hopes to befriend"
If you want examples of pardon the term but I guess "woke" programming, this list is pretty extensive on Netflix. You can do a quick google search yourself to see lots of examples here.
My personal take (as someone who is left leaning) is when these messages are bombarded into programming it often feels forced.. even perhaps propagandized. This level of inauthenticity hurts the overall artistic and entertainment value of the programming (just my two cents).
There is no dispute that Netflix has woke programming, or heck many other kinds of programming and no sensible person would claim otherwise. What is being asked is which programs for children/kids are you arguing is politically motivated?
The only examples anyone has been able to produce are children shows that have homosexual characters in them. I am going to assume the best of intentions here, but it's very hard not to find it appalling that many people would think that a show that has some gay characters in it is making a political statement or has a political agenda.
The fact that the inclusion of LGBT and/or PoC in a children's program is at all controversial tells me we still have a problem that needs to be addressed. If you really don't like the idea of seeing a black or gay person on TV then you are the problem.
The sad thing is that a big majority of people complaining are people who are past child-rearing age and thus not even the target market for any of these shows.
What bugs people, me included, is very different. It is the forced inclusion of diversity seemingly everywhere. It is the constant subtle messages of "white man evil" in shows where it doesn't add to the plot. It is stuff like the Oscars being explicit about requiring minority leads. It is the one sided diversity where blacks, browns and Muslims are protected but it is perfectly acceptable to make racist jokes about white people or say Christians. It is the subtle shaming of anything conservative.
FYI I am mixed race, liberal, and not Christian. I am also of child rearing age and don't like seeing my kids being indoctrinated at so many levels.
It's nice that you're a mixed race liberal Christian who has kids, but please answer the question. It really is coming across as a bunch of people who want way too much to be angry about something without knowing precisely what it is they're angry about.
Also, apparently it's annoying to "force" representation in shows but it's perfectly fine to have shows whose literal only purpose is to drive demand for various dolls and toys. As if anyone would have created Bob the Builder or whatever without a plan for selling it in Walmart.
The content itself is political. That's increasingly problematic.
[1]https://edition.cnn.com/style/amp/abercrombie-fitch-exclusio...
There's also a difference between reaching out to disadvantaged groups -vs- targeting elites.
As an absurd example, compare a fancy restaurant to a soup kitchen. The fancy restaurant is targeting the elite, and excluding the poor. The soup kitchen is targeting the poor, and it'd be ridiculous for Elon Musk to demand food from them - but they'd probably still serve him if he showed up.
Analogously, it feels like you're trying to use the existence of soup kitchens to defend restaurants.
(To be clear, I'm not saying restaurants are evil, or that clothing brands are an act of charity. Just trying to illustrate why people are going to have different intuitions on Abercrombie -vs- clothes for black people)
What you're really saying is that it's not your personal politics, and is therefore bad.
The opposite is true. If a writer feels or is outwardly coerced that he/she must include certain characters, topics, behaviors.... this comes off an not genuine, propagandized, or even corporate commercially. My personal opinion is much of the Netflix original content falls into this later category.
> this comes off an not genuine
I get the feeling you'd say this even about authentically written content, so it's a moot point. You've drawn a line in the sand that characters and content that don't look like you are bad, and that it's origins must be from seedy beginnings rather than decades of hard work by dismissed groups of people that are now finally getting a chance to write stories about people like them.
Not necessarily. If Netflix had 10,000 shows and some of them were stories about Christian values, some were about Hindu values, and some were about Muslim values, nobody reasonable would have a problem with it. However, if all 10,000 shows made a forced effort to somehow include Christian values, or always had to shoehorn at least one character openly wearing a cross and saying a prayer into every show, it would rub on people the wrong way. That's how it is with Netflix original programming. You can break out your "woke" bingo card for any Netflix original show, no matter what it is purportedly about, and score bingo every time. Not every show has to include a facet of the same political agenda. Even if you happen to agree with that agenda, there is something to be said about diversity (true diversity - diversity of thought, not the fake kind peddling on Netflix).
Telling girls they can be stronger than men is a lie that can lead to terrible outcomes.
2. indirect harm - the girls told falsehoods begin to distrust institutions who hold themselves out to be unconditional truthsayers, thereby dissolving social bonds and encouraging unneeded division and rancor
First of all, anyone can get into a fight and lose. And more often than not, technique is what helps people prevail in fights, not strength. Any decent martial arts training will teach you that.
If you’re talking about professional boxing, sure, it would be stupid to claim that a well-trained woman could, on average, beat an equally-well-trained man in a boxing match.
But I don’t think that’s the claim here. The claim is that women can be as strong as men, and that isn’t totally false. Maybe not the strongest men, but certainly a lot of them, and especially if they train well.
As for the claim of indirect harm, I think people in general need to be better-educated to engage in critical thinking. Treating words from authority figures with a grain of salt is at the heart of post-secondary education, and yet, it leads to better civil discourse, not worse.
Also, there seems to be a thin veil of sexism in your claim, as though women aren’t capable of thinking for themselves and therefore can’t ascertain the nuance in a general statement like “women can be stronger than men.” It’s meant to be a motivational statement, not a rigorous scientific claim.
Find me a credible source that claims this. After all, we certainly don't group wrestlers into weight categories because of differences in technique?
>The claim is that women can be as strong as men, and that isn’t totally false. Maybe not the strongest men, but certainly a lot of them, and especially if they train well.
That claim is simply false. The most extreme female athletes come close to achieving parity with an average untrained man. There are almost none of these - certainly not "a lot of them". The vast majority of women are much weaker than even the weakest men.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17186303/ "Less expected was the gender related distribution of hand-grip strength: 90% of females produced less force than 95% of males. Though female athletes were significantly stronger (444 N) than their untrained female counterparts, this value corresponded to only the 25th percentile of the male subjects."
"The results of female national elite athletes even indicate that the strength level attainable by extremely high training will rarely surpass the 50th percentile of untrained or not specifically trained men."
>Also, there seems to be a thin veil of sexism in your claim,
I appreciate your candor.
> as though women aren’t capable of thinking for themselves
The problem is that everyone (men and women) thinks of themselves as the special snowflake who can "beat the odds". I think that the message to women "You are very likely weaker than the weakest men you know" avoids much more harm (case 1 direct harm) than the "good" generated by: "it's extremely unlikely but with good genetics and training it's a possibility that some extreme athlete women could become nearly as strong as a below-average man".
I personally am not sure how important I think the truth is as a moral good. I feel that as time has gone on, I've seen the dissolution on a societal level, and I now value truth more than I once did.
"Culture war" issues tend to be a bit more subtle, and can usually be ignored as valid plot devices. There's not even anything explicitly wrong with adding your own cultural values to a movie, but rather it can get pretty overbearing, even if you tend to agree.
A good way to look out for these themes is to look at the characters and ask some basic questions:
- Which characters in the show are in charge? What groups (racial, sexual, etc) are they from?
- Which characters in the show are competent? What groups are they from?
- Which characters in the show are the villains? What groups are they from?
- Which characters in the show are the victims? What groups are they from?
- Which characters have "good" traits such as humility, kindness, etc?
- Which characters are shown to be bigots?
- etc.
This can get a bit more complex, too. The solutions to problems, or explanations for the ills of the world might also follow culture war lines. Who are the bad guys? Are they from a corporation? From the government? From a certain gender or ethnic group? etc.
A great example of this might be the Mulan remake vs. the original. In the remake, much of the movie is occupied with showing how Mulan is better than everyone, and then quickly cutting to show face-shots of men who are either severely intimated, cowed, afraid, or impressed. I'm not suggesting there is anything wrong with this. Rather I'm just making the point that this was added to the movie for political and cultural reasons. The original cartoon didn't really have much comeuppance in this way, because it was written during a different time.
Again, I don't think there's anything wrong with people putting their political views into shows -- really, that's inevitable at some level. But, there's also a certain level where it becomes too over the top, too sanctimonious, too pervasive, and you just want to get away from it all.
* A social worker investigates the boys' home life and tells Mr. Drummond that she believes black children belong in black households.
* Mr. Drummond scolds Arnold for secretly recording other people's conversations. Arnold disobeys him and records Kimberly's boyfriend Roger making racist comments about Willis to his sister.
* Arnold's poor dental checkup has Drummond suspecting that the easy availability of junk food from vending machines at school is to blame. But when Drummond begins a campaign to replace the hot dogs, cookies, potato chips and soft drinks with more healthy foods, Arnold's friends try to convince him to get his father to reconsider.
* Arnold's joy of being transferred to an all-white school (and riding a bus to get there) is shaken to its very core when a racist busing opponent calls the Drummond household warning the pro-busing family patriarch not to send his black children to the new school, or else.
* When it is learned that Drummond's upcoming construction project may be located on top of an ancient Indian burial ground, he faces protest from a Native American who threatens to go on a hunger strike if the land is built on. Arnold and Willis follow suit by going on a hunger strike of their own.
--
And of course, we mustn't forget "All in the Family" from the 1970s; pretty much every episode was about politics in some way.
That said, there's plenty of room to make fun of white male Christians, just like there's plenty of room to make fun of everyone else. It's not like there's a shortage of hypocrisy and foibles out there.
Why is it only political when another group is creating the content?
This is dishonest. Minorities were also portrayed positively in legacy media, and villains were also frequently portrayed by white males.
>Why is it only political when another group is creating the content
In the past studios were creating content relevant to a predominantly (90%+) white audience. They were creating content which was largely in line with their target demographic culture.
This recent media instead is creating content to disrupt what it's owners and managers see as a "racist" culture. That's what makes it political. It's less about money and more about deliberately changing culture in a hypocritical manner - fighting alleged racism with explicit racism. Breakfast at tiffanies was not about punching down on asians, but black feminist vikings is about sending a politicized message.
Sure, maybe a century ago in the 1920s but it's been several decades since international revenues eclipsed domestic.
> That's what makes it political.
Other people having their voices heard is what makes it political? Or that you don't like what those voices have to say?
Well, it isn't. As a straight white man myself, I don't feel like I'm particularly suffering from discrimination. Am I picked first for everything now, like maybe before I would have? Maybe not. Does it adversely impact my life? Not really.
It's OK to let others to have the first sip from the fountain once in awhile, and you can help lift up historically-persecuted people without it necessarily being a loss for you. Attitude goes a long way in helping yourself be at peace with it.
If you're a straight white man and you're feeling seriously oppressed by D&I, I'd like to hear from you personally and understand your situation better.
Anyway, this is pretty far afield from the discussion, which is really about specifically how media is harming people and children in particular.
If you want to know why D&I is an issue, it's because it is re-entrenching all of the stereotypes by hamhandedly trying to give everyone different handicaps, like life can be simplified to a game of golf. The reality, though, is that it doesn't matter what handicap I'm given, due to my poor golf game I'm never going to play against Tiger Woods.
The only thing the handicaps change is what we're measuring, and at some point people decide not to play the game, or lobby to change the rules. Look at the resurgence of the far right: it is D&I which gave them the resentment in people's souls to which they could place their hooks.
Because it's racist and sexist? Because it reduces people to their skin color and gender? Because it implicitly reinforces the notion that minorities are "different" and forces us to nonsensically pretend that differences can only be positive in cooperative environments? Because it suggests that minorities need special advantages to level the playing field? Because top to bottom it is not a cohesive, consistent, or rational policy and implies that all inequities are exclusively the result of discrimination on behalf of white males who have been made into a target, are having their voices silenced, their job opportunities removed, and their livelihoods threatened for self advocating?
On one hand your ideology implies that all of this is deserved because of the past and necessary for an equitable future, but then at the same time you blatantly deny that any of it's happening and shame anyone who speaks up against this discrimination by calling them bigoted. It's insanity.
What is "forcing" you to do this? The D&I training I've been taking has been about finding positivity in differences to our mutual advantage, but never does it say that all aspects of it are 100% positive. People are always going to find areas of disagreement. Yet we find ourselves working together, and so we must find ways to collaborate as a team despite those differences, even to the point of respecting them.
> Because it suggests that minorities need special advantages to level the playing field?
The evidence on this is pretty clear, because several minorities do suffer from historical poverty (in money, in education, and quality of life) that has been very difficult to overcome. A lot of damage was done prior to the Civil Rights Act through mechanisms specifically intended to keep Black people down, and we haven't recovered from that yet. We're getting better, but I don't think we can just put our heads in the sand and conclude that the Civil Rights Act was the end of our journey to remedy the terrible legacy of slavery and racism.
> all inequities are exclusively the result of discrimination on behalf of white males who have been made into a target, are having their voices silenced, their job opportunities removed
You cannot be serious about the silence of white voices in the media. Maybe some individuals are being silenced (see below), but the sentiments certainly are not. For every 1 person who may have been silenced, it's easy to find thousands who haven't, whose opinions track roughly identically. And those people who have been "silenced" seem to have no trouble getting their voices heard through other avenues. Alex Jones still has plenty of mouthpieces, as does Donald Trump. (Both also happen to own several of those mouthpieces...)
And it is especially ironic when a person claims they are being silenced... on Twitter, and then when it is republished through various blogspam ad nauseam.
> ...their livelihoods threatened for self advocating?
I think it depends on the nature of the advocacy in question. If you're saying, "I want the opportunity to learn, to work hard, and be successful," I would be very surprised if people were to threaten your livelihood over that. On the other hand, if your advocacy consists of lies, exaggerations, and hysterics, then people might not want to associate with you.
I don't accuse anyone of being a bigot because they have genuine and good-faith concerns about whether we are remedying social inequity the wrong way. It's when they flat-out lie, deny the past, make racist remarks themselves, or make themselves out to be the victim without evidence that they deserve that moniker.
You seem pretty sure about that for a person who wasn’t involved in its production. Even assuming, arguendo, that it wasn’t, would you contend that it would be appropriate to have such a character in a modern movie? Have you surveyed Asian people about how they feel about the Fu Manchu character?
Genuinely curious here - is there some difference between the dominance of one group in the 50s vs 80s vs today? Or do you feel that TV has always been dominated by political themes?
I think what you have these days is a splintering of the mainstream, and the rise of extremist viewpoints. Both of these, in my opinion are due to social media.
In the 80s, (and before) there was a true mainstream culture. For certain, people fell outside of that culture, and if you did fall outside of the mainstream I believe the consequences were harsher than they would be nowadays. But, broadly speaking, that mainstream culture encompassed more Americans than the mainstream culture of today. In modern times, there is no real majority mainstream culture, and because of this centralized media is reflective of a smaller and smaller portion of the country. In other words, there are simply going to be a larger number of people who might not feel represented by views and positions they watch in TV or hear on the news. And to be clear, I'm not talking about "racial representation here." I explicitly do not mean that "if I don't see a person of my race or gender in a show, I don't feel represented." I mean instead that the social and political values of a given show today reflect the views of a smaller percentage of Americans than the political and social values of a show in the 50s or 80s.
I'm not even arguing that this is a bad thing in the objective sense: simply that the political views of the current "mainstream" feel narrow and extremist to me, to the extent that I just don't want to watch a lot of popular shows.
Seriously?
Now, when She-Ra starts having extended monologues about taxation policy or the virtues of direct democracy vs. representative government, I’ll support ya!
(I'm not joking, that's canon.)
https://www.romper.com/life/lgbtq-shows-kids-family
Not that it's bad for those people to believe in those things or anything. But I don't want my kids exposed and normalized to these things until they're an appropriate age to decide on their own.
“Same sex couples exist” is not a political view. It is a reality of fact that children of all ages already know. My kid’s best friend since age 5 has two moms. Trust me: she has no concept of what politics are but knows what two loving parents are.
If “gays exist” is the example of politics jammed into TV, that’s a really really weak example.
This is what pushing me over the edge. I have both Netflix and Amazon prime subscriptions. I have thought several times to drop one. The only reason I still have Netflix is because my wife and kids watch their shows. But I have had a hard time finding good shows because everything is political, and I hate when the trailer deceives me and they just inject pure political propaganda in the middle of the show.
Suddenly I found myself reading about Synology NAS and how to set up Plex on it. I am very close to buy a Synology NAS, and to boot I can get host my own VPN server, seems like a good idea.
If every show I watched had ham-fisted dialogue about how great water sanitation is, how we should all happily pay more taxes to support it, how flushing chemicals down the toilet is evil, etc, I'd turn the channel off.
Even if you agree with the message, being preached to can be off-putting. If you disagree with the message and people like you are framed as cartoonish villains, it's a different matter entirely.
Another example of a series that, instead of focusing on its central theme, ends up injecting politically-motivated content is the series "High Score". Listen, I understand that a small portion of early video game enthusiasts care about those things, but for a series that has a purpose to tell the relevant stories about creation and development of video games in the 80s and 90s, you just can't help but to think that they felt that they needed to inject some LGBT content in it such as in episode 3 on the story about the 1st LGBT RPG game GayBlade. They end up leaving more relevant content on the table to shoehorn these themes into the series. Not everything needs to be "gay", or having a "gay angle".
Thus it tends to be very likely that the person complaining about "politics" is simply masking a disgust of others' identities, but doesn't want to get into specifics because it would be a bad look. Therefore the question asking for specifics is interpreted as a way to pick a fight, because they know what might ensue if they actually got into specifics.
Consider two shows that I watched in the same Week, Wheel of Time and Arcane. Both shows have a very clearly modern perspective, and are very much in line with what we might call 'woke' culture.
Arcane did this in a brilliant way, a great love story between female leads of the show. Genuinely showing lower class struggle, corruption and so on. Both the villains and the heroes (and in between) have a wide range perspectives, capabilities and identities. Great show, well executed.
Wheel of Time had a writer who made it a clear mission statement to transform the source material into a woke version of itself, going so far as to say 'this is how it would have been written today'. The show also has a female lead in a lesbian relationship, but one that feels forced and has little emotional core. Unlike Arcane there is a clear trend where females were powered up to a sometimes a hilarious degree, all antagonists were stereotypical boring men and all the main leading male characters were basically boring did basically nothing and their many story somehow relates to their relationship with a powerful women.
If 'Wheel of Time' was just another show, it would just be a badly written show. However that it is adoption of well known source material shows the writers bias and political message quite clearly.
Almost nobody is against LGBT characters or show that have woke politics in them. Its when it is badly done that it is annoying.
The same in the past would apply to war propaganda movies. If its a very well done and executed it can be great content. But most that produced with that goal in mind is just lame.
To suggest that the majority of people who criticizes shows for 'wokeism' are just LGBT haters is absurd. Its equally wrong as to suggest that all people who object to war propaganda movies are pacifists.
The reality is that these studies want shows with these kinds of messaging in them and that a great deal of content ponders to that political outlook. Just as in the past content providers have pondered to politics as well. It does not mean you disagree with the political outlook, it just means I don't need it to be shoved into my face at every opportunity by lazy writers.
It is possible for inclusivity to be executed well, and it is equally possible for it to be executed poorly. I'm not sure we should throw out the baby with the bathwater, though.
I’m not sure why you would think this. There is a huge segment of society that is very much against everything that could possibly be considered “woke”. They use the term “woke” as an insult and as something that is obviously bad on its face and by definition. They have a huge amount of political power, and may soon have an iron grip on political power in the US. I grew up among these people and was one of them for a long time. They believe:
* Gay relationships are an abomination, and any media that indicates otherwise is offensive politics and should be banned from schools.
* Women have specific child rearing and housekeeping roles ordained by God, and any media that indicates otherwise is offensive politics
* Christianity (or their brand of it) is meant to be respected at all times, and should be a core value of government
* Racism has been over since [slavery ended|civil rights era] and it’s high time for those communities to get over it and stop bothering those poor brave police officers and smashing those storefront windows all the time. Any form of education on the topic should be banned from schools.
It has been my experience that the people I grew up with who I know believe all the above are constantly wrapping their views in generic complaints about “woke-ism”. It is been my experience with people online that if you dive deeper into specifics or look at comment history of posters who actively and constantly decry “woke politics”, you often eventually get rants about white genocide or some other conspiracies that tend to ship in the same container. I think it’s always important to talk specifics, because I guarantee you that when e.g. my dad tells you that a show’s “woke-ism” is ruining it (and he definitely will tell you that), it’s because he finds gay behavior to be deeply disgusting and immoral.
That being said, thank you for some of those specifics. I’d really like to be shown otherwise, even if it’s one person at a time.
So your WoT example intrigues me. That’s the only show I’ve seen among those, but I do want to see Arcane (it’s on my list). I still don’t see how the “woke” part does the ruining, and maybe it comes down to whether you ascribe the boringness of the relationships or the Aes Sedai partners to be inherently caused by the fact that the roles are non-traditional in terms of genders. Where you see forced woke-ism causing boringness, I’d probably see as just plain old boring (which, eh, it’s entertaining enough for me, but not the best; it’s been such a long time since I read those books and I’m not sure I’d be as into the original source material nowadays anyway). The fact that the roles are non-traditional is at the very least novel when compared to the massive amount of history and media that has and continues to be the exact opposite. I have probably sat through over 100 full shows and movies where all of the women were defined solely by their relationship with powerful men. One more “boring” show that happens to be the opposite is not something I’d take to the internets to specifically decry, and if I did, I wouldn’t blame the boringness on the fact that this time the powerful important people were women.
> The same in the past would apply to war propaganda movies. If its a very well done and executed it can be great content. But most that produced with that goal in mind is just lame.
Agreed. But this applies to every single kind of message or moral of the story that the writer is attempting to convey. However, all I hear about here on the internet these days and from this forum is that woke-ism specifically is a poison pill. For me, I’m all for seeing LGBT representation and awareness of the experience of minorities, etc. There is a moral aspect of that that I appreciate. I also appreciate good writing, pacing, storyline, cinematography, etc. I don’t think the former inherently poisons or guarantees the latter.
I agree. That was badly phrased. I was more talking about my experience in talking with people in my country and social circle.
But even then, shows like Arcane have very, very few people riled up about 'wokism' and whatever. I have not heard a single reviewer or commentator say anything negative about the lesbian relationship or the fact that the most powerful political operators are black women.
> you often eventually get rants about white genocide or some other conspiracies
That's like because people who have far more normal and common views don't engage in these discussion. I tend to stay out of them as well, but the economic angle of Netflix interested me and I got baited into responding to a comment.
:)
> I still don’t see how the “woke” part does the ruining
Just to be clear, I think the show is terrible in a whole number of ways. What we in general call "wokism" would not be in my top complaints about the show. Its something that I consider annoying not some great sin or something. But I do think that general approach did impact the overall approach they took to writing the show and it made the end product much worse.
> I have probably sat through over 100 full shows and movies where all of the women were defined solely by their relationship with powerful men. One more “boring” show that happens to be the opposite is not something I’d take to the internets to specifically decry, and if I did, I wouldn’t blame the boringness on the fact that this time the powerful important people were women.
As I said, nobody would decry such a show if it was not based on popular source material. And I am certainty not defending other bad media that have bad writing and those things have of course been criticized rightly. But the existent of the opposite doesn't mean we should stop criticizing it.
The reason I use it as an example is because it is source material that already has powerful amazing woman of different types in it. But the writers of the show felt the need to take this up to an almost absurd degree and did the opposite with the male characters.
Let me give you an example of what I am talking about, I think you interpreted my comment very narrowly. I don't care that men have non traditional roles or are defined by their relationship to a powerful woman. Such characters are often part of stories and that is fine. I am more talking about turning characters who were more then that into that.
There are many examples we could talk about. To be clear, non of those individually are all that relevant or worth complaining about. Its only in aggregate when it gets worthy of critic.
Agelmar Jagad in the books is highly respected competent leader and general, living in a culture with very high respect for woman. His sister is competent highly respected noble woman is a trusted adviser and the second most powerful person in the city. Jagad will be a off and on relevant character for the rest of the books. Sound reasonable?
Agelmar Jagad in the show is portrayed as stereotype alpha male general with no brain. They forced a sub-plot into the show where his sister literally has to wear the ancient armor of the house (that the show made up) to lead a group of woman to fix what the men are to dumb to do. Ah and the sister who was non-magical in the book of course had to be elevated from just politically powerful to a super-powerful magic user as well. She is of course vital in winning the battle at the end, Jagad will of course be killed instantly like a total bitch, certainty nobody will miss this toxic male and he will likely not be mentioned again.
So the writers felt the need to totally rewrite that part of the source material. Why? These were pretty minor characters and the show runners already excused many of their changes on only being granted 8 episodes. Yet we had to spend major screen-time on another sub-plot where the evil alpha-male messes everything up and then the all-powerful woman to come in the save the situation.
Its a totally unnecessary plot shoehorned into the story with no relevance to the main story the show is trying to tell. The source material had brother sister team working together, but we can't miss an opportunity to rewrite it into incompetent alpha male/wonder woman narrative. That is a perfect example of force feeding 'woke-ism' into a story.
Again, this alone isn't a big deal. But this approach is pretty consistently applied.
> Agreed. But this applies to every single kind of message or moral of the story that the writer is attempting to convey. However, all I hear about here on the internet these days and from this forum is that woke-ism specifically is a poison pill.
I certainty agree that there is an over-focus on crisis of woke-ism and many-times unfairly so. For me this is not 'culture war' for civilization, rather annoying meme that makes TV show potentially worse then they could have been.
To give specific example in Wheel of Time. In the book the 'Two Rivers' is a part of Andor. Andor is basically the Britain of that universe. Given its history and isolation, 'Two Rivers' is very culturally and racially homogeneous.
In the show the 'Two Rivers' looks racially more like New York City. This certainty makes little sense from a story telling perspective. Cultures that are very isolated for 1000s of years simple are not that diverse. Now you can certainty change that from something based on white rural Britain to whatever other racial group want to insert.
You can of course explain this away in whatever way you want, its fantasy. Genetics might work different. Who cares. You don't even have to explain it at all.
One of my friends had a problem with this diversity suggesting it hurts the story and that priority should be an accurate representation of isolated cultures. He would have been fine with that being non-white of some kind.
I said, while I agree that it doesn't really serve the story, when creating a major 100+ million$ TV show with 5 lead actors all from the same village making them totally culturally and racial homogeneous isn't really all that practical. A am willing to throw overboard some story purity (or strict adherence to the source) as to give a diverse group of actors to chance to get a role in such a show.
PS: Pretty much all those actors doing a great job! That was the least of the shows problem. Fire the writers and keep the actors.
Hell, Netflix even has barbie cartoons, which leftists don't exactly view highly.
Calmly thinking through ones prejudices, even if only to defend them, is an easy way to erase them.
What do you mean by "political agenda"? Like open advocacy for certain policy position or political parties? Or just stuff like "gay people exist and should be treated with respect"?
Also, when I was a kid I would listen to conservative talk radio all the time. It's the only thing my dad would listen to while driving. And I don't think it was corrupting or traumatizing or anything.
Everything you experienced in your life can and does corrupt you.
Also, if you look at the content tropes constantly used, and especially used in much of the netflix library:
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- Lots of satan/evil
- The constant CIA/NSA/FBI/Cop/Assassin Badass Porn, with the invariable singular hacker support guy on the squad that can get into any system and has a 3D blueprint with wireframe models of every building
- The hero cop constantly going against the bureaucratic system that holding back his personal justice
If you cant see the constant hero worship of rogue cops/cia agent/killer/evil etc in literally 90% of hollywood content puts a subconscious desire in the impressionable young minds of males to acquiesce to a violent society where they can see themselves as the fictitious bad-ass action person.
Etc...
The entire hollywood movie-narrative is an incestuous cess-pool-adrenochrome--eating-gay-frog-orgy. (Tongue in cheek alex jones reference, relax)
So you agree then that hetero relationships in children's media is also a political agenda?
It is a fact that gay marriage is an experiment, never before tried in human history. We do not know how successful it will be in raising children to be healthy, productive human beings -- which is the chief social purpose of marriage.
Likewise the whole sexual revolution and the normalization of sex outside marriage is an experiment.
We do know that "hetero" relationships, and married ones in particular, can succeed enormously at producing children and raising them successfully. Perhaps these various new arrangements will succeed just as well, and I expect enormous political pressure on evidence and analysis to support just that conclusion, but we will see.
Until time has told, the presumption that homosexual relationships are the same as heterosexual is a matter of conjecture and, well, politics.
This seems extremely ahistorical. I'm pretty sure humans were having sex exclusively outside of marriage for most of the history of Homo Sapiens as a species. Marriage, and especially exclusively-monogamous marriage, is a relatively recent invention.
> We do not know how successful it will be in raising children to be healthy, productive human beings -- which is the chief social purpose of marriage.
We kind-of know though[1]:
> To date, the consensus in the social science literature is clear: in the United States, children living with two same-sex parents fare, as well as children residing with two different-sex parents. Numerous credible and methodologically sound social science studies, including many drawing on nationally representative data, form the basis of this consensus. These studies reveal that children raised in same-sex parent families fare just, as well as children raised in different-sex parent families across a wide spectrum of child well-being measures: academic performance, cognitive development, social development, psychological health, early sexual activity, and substance abuse.
Families with same-sex parents are not a new thing in 2022, there's been plenty of time to draw conclusions.
Marriage might be "a relatively recent invention", but it was so successful and adaptive that we really don't have much (any?) record of any other arrangement of human sexual relations.
> Marriage might be "a relatively recent invention", but it was so successful and adaptive that we really don't have much (any?) record of any other arrangement of human sexual relations.
The decline in same-sex marriage, and same-sex relationships in general can be predominantly attributed to the changing attitudes about sex that came about with the rising influence of Christianity. Christianity did not just ban same-sex relationships, it advocated for sexual abstinence in general, forbidding any form of sex outside of marriage and even within marriage promoting sex as strictly for the purpose procreation going so far as to forbid the use of contraceptives, oral/anal sex and even masturbation. There are numerous reasons for why this change in attitude gained popularity from economic reasons to major shifts in demographics due to the outbreak of numerous wars in the 3rd century resulting in, among other things, growing discrepancies between the number of men and women.
It would take on the order of a thousand years before attitudes on sex became more liberal, with the Anglican church among the first to formally permit the use of contraceptives, and Protestant movements recognizing sexual acts between husband and wife as serving a "unitive" purpose rather than strictly procreation.
The point is to say that homosexuality was a casualty of very strict views on sexual relationships in general that came about with the rise of Christianity, but prior to that most societies didn't care to think much of it one way or another. Some people like vanilla, some people like chocolate; why would the people who like vanilla care too much about the people who enjoy chocolate?
Ok, name two.
> The decline in same-sex marriage, and same-sex relationships in general can be predominantly attributed to the changing attitudes about sex that came about with the rising influence of Christianity
Name a same-sex marriage in pre-Christian Greece or Rome.
The Greeks had no problem with homosexuality, Plato is full of jokes about it. And it wasn't that big a deal among the Romans, Julius Caesar's own legions would sign songs about his escapades. But I don't know of any evidence that it was ever the basis of a household. None of the great Greek dramaturges bothered to write a play noticing it.
> There are numerous reasons for why this change in attitude gained popularity from economic reasons to major shifts in demographics due to the outbreak of numerous wars in the 3rd century resulting in, among other things, growing discrepancies between the number of men and women.
I don't know where you're getting this stuff, I know a fair amount of history and I'm aware of nothing so remarkable as a shift in gender balance in the 3rd century.
> homosexuality was a casualty of very strict views on sexual relationships in general that came about with the rise of Christianity
I don't think Christianity/Christians have ever cared that much about it, really. They/it think it wrong and immoral, sure, but it isn't something that has ever attracted an enormous amount of attention or effort. It wasn't important enough to get much attention from Chaucer, Dante, Bocaccio, Shakespeare -- none of whom were shy about the range of human experience.
I know there are historians of gay sexuality, of which I am ignorant, but as a layman familiar with some of the core texts, my impression is that the overall view was "eh, whatever".
This seems rather disingenuous.
Pieces like this are the telephone game played by ideologues. Get a couple of articles published, never mind the sourcing or review, cite them as "scholarly" and voila! evidence of . . . whatever the hell it is you want evidence of.
If gay marriage were a thing in ancient Rome, or Greece, we'd know this. There would be a list of examples as long as your arm. We wouldn't have to look to a couple of obscure journal articles to establish it. And btw? Nero isn't exactly a role model of proper behavior in any one's eyes.
No one but a partisan would regard this as "evidence". Please stop with such nonsense.
> Pieces like this are the telephone game played by ideologues. Get a couple of articles published, never mind the sourcing or review, cite them as "scholarly" and voila! evidence of . . . whatever the hell it is you want evidence of.
Then why are you asking for people to cite evidence which you are recognizing wouldn't have had the literary capacity to exist? You're asking for everyone to prove something when little remains of written record, which for all intents and purposes, largely seemed like a rather irrelevant thing to highlight, as you acknowledged in your sister comment:
> The Greeks had no problem with homosexuality, Plato is full of jokes about it. And it wasn't that big a deal among the Romans, Julius Caesar's own legions would sign songs about his escapades. But I don't know of any evidence that it was ever the basis of a household. None of the great Greek dramaturges bothered to write a play noticing it.
Maybe another way of framing this: There are 170,000 same-sex married couples in the US in 2013[0] out of 59.2 million total marriages[1]. Assuming this is an extremely rough approximation of the ratio of homosexual to heterosexual relationships throughout history (which is definitely influenced by a lot of factors), can you provide us with proof for 350 Roman or Greek marriages that qualify with your record integrity?
[0] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/06/24/how-many-sa... [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/183663/number-of-married...
Was it because of deviations ? Who knows. They also had alot of issues going on in the meantime. But you are free to have own opinion based on histories available. I for sure have my own.
Also about Ancient Grece. „Meet my Spartans”.. Either way if the show plot has nothing more to offer, its just boring.
Offering of Netflix is extremely poor if you crop out all the duplicate shows popping on your feed.
Ive decided to drop Netflix simply because:
- new interesting shows are popping up so rarely, there is no point to pay the monthly sub
- there is too much political agenda sold even in children shows (Kids really dont need this kind of crap)