Some better versions of this take might be “In the culture war many people are only willing to consume media that perfectly signals their virtues, so even innocuous content can seem antagonistic.” or “Our culture changed and I don’t like it anymore, get off my lawn.”

For the most part I think this culture war is a figment of the media's imagination/desire. I think people just don't want to read for the most part—even those who purchase the books.

I find the culture war to exist primarily in the minds of the terminally online.

Maybe if you include "terminally watching the news on TV". But either way, it's a lot of people.

Most TV news now is talking about stuff in Twitter and I Can't Believe It's Not Twitter.

My issue with the wokeness is that it makes the stories very predictable. One race of characters is pretty much bad. The other race needs some saviorism. It's not the message of wokeness that is boring, but the repetitive and insistent manner in which it is delivered.

Not the message, but the fact there's little else besides the message to keep you interested.

As opposed, for example, to Richard Morgan's A Land Fit for Heroes. Where the main character is gay. He was persecuted for being gay. There are gay sex scenes.

However this is not what the book is about. Stuff is happening in that series. He's the hero of a decent story.

But then I'm talking about a fantasy series so it's not "literature" :)

Was Tolkien woke? I wonder.

Tolkien was super woke. He had men holding hands without wanting to fuck.

> One race of characters is pretty much bad. The other race needs some saviorism. It's not the message of wokeness that is boring, but the repetitive and insistent manner in which it is delivered.

This doesn't seem to be "wokeness" (whatever that means) so much as "shallow writing pandering to an editor somewhere who is obsessed with race but has no education to grapple with it".

It seems to me pretty clear that the article is arguing that "wokeness made fiction crap" is really just the most current result of "authors are optimizing for critics and editors, who are competing for status, and neither are interested in producing stuff readers like".

Just pointing out that publishers simply won't publish what doesn't cater to them, so we really can't measure what authors actually want to publish.

Those repeated allusions to how _we all know how publishing has gone woke_ really made me cringe.