Why do I even bother, honestly.

I’d argue that forced diversity is primarily because so many higher ups don’t give a fuck about gaming or making good content.

The suits just want money, and for some reason corporate thought that weighing in on social and political issues was a huge money maker in the 2020s. The journalists just want to promote their own political agenda and get ragebait clicks. The project director is someone with a corporate background but a progressive flair that makes them seem “hip” to the suits.

Meanwhile the people who give a shit, regardless of their identity, don’t have a voice in the room.

I’m sure there are plenty of minorities that are super pissed about what happened to bioware, but the only way you’d hear from them is by looking at sales figures because they don’t have a bully pulpit.

I generally agree with you, with some caveats.

I think that most IPs have subtext, and a lot of time this is in the form of a deeper political message. I think it would be silly to say progressivism in IPs is always a bad thing. That’s part of the reason I mentioned Arcane and Spiderverse by name.

The problem comes from the fact that IPs are supposed to be entertainment first, messaging second. A lot of creators make a lazy and mediocre product, and somewhere in there is a ham-fisted political message. Some creators also seem to be making IPs bad on purpose as a fuck you to their target audience, which is an absolutely baffling choice.

There’s also the concept of nuance that’s sort of been lost. A lot of the creators will write something in some super reductive black/white way that’s basically guaranteed to turn off everyone who doesn’t already emphatically agree with them. This is a huge departure from a lot of older movies. For example Forrest Gump is a Republican movie, but doesn’t just portray republicans as automatically good or liberals as automatically bad. The end result is that there are a lot of liberals who love Forrest Gump.

The part that I strongly disagree on is that you seem to be blaming the corporations. I think ultimately a lot of the problem here is at the fault of the creators. There have been a lot of high profile cases where studios don’t interfere, give the creators a massive budget, and have their backs when controversy hits. The creators will still end up making mediocre culture war content. Todd Philips was allowed to do whatever he wanted in Joker 2. It turns out what Todd Philips wanted was for the Joker to be permanently defeated by the power of prison rape. There’s no studio head in the world who would have told him to do that.

I mean immigration existed, but it wasn’t nearly as common as today. A lot of these IPs just plop a minority in an area where their presence would turn heads, have everyone act super casual about it because they are too lazy for a backstory, and then call everyone a bigot who points out this is sort of silly. On the flip side, there are people who will call creators bigots for not including minorities in some quasi historical setting, even if their presence was rare.

Like pretend someone was making a movie in present day central Africa. Everyone is central African. Except one dude who is pure blooded Navajo. No explanation is ever given, and the only people who seem to even notice his race is the villain.

While it’s perfectly possible for someone of Navajo descent to find themselves in central Africa, it’s not really that likely. Audiences would want an explanation, and would consider it unrealistic if absolutely nobody commented on it except some over the top villain.

There’s also an aspect of gaslighting going on here. Over the past decade historians have made a lot of claims about racial compositions of historical groups that were later exposed to be largely inaccurate. While historical inaccuracies are always a thing, it’s pretty convenient that all these inaccurate claims fit into the narrative pushed by American progressive identity politics.

To be fair I’m sure if it was stylish to insert overt conservative themes into IPs those would be also too.

I don’t think progressivism is the problem. I think the problem is mediocre creators either deciding to turn an expensive IP into their own political soapbox, and executives giving it the green light because they either are completely disconnected to what makes a good product or thinks the culture war will allow them to pretend that bad products are good.

Woke isn’t being progressive. It’s being progressive to an extent beyond any sort of logic, virtue signaling constantly, and then calling anyone who disagrees with you morally or intellectually inferior.

In entertainment, that often results in some really annoying elements that I think we can all acknowledge are a thing after almost a decade of this:

• There is a minority protagonist. Said protagonist is disproportionately a straight coded conventionally attractive white women in their 20s.
• The only flaw the protagonist will have is not being confident enough
• There is then a minority side character. Said character will disproportionately be a black woman obviously less attractive than the protagonist, or a upper middle class gay fuckboi.
• If there is not one of these two things, a minority side character will be shoehorned in somewhere. The character will feel visibly out of place, and no explanation will be given. For example, they’ll do some random black character in a fantasy setting that’s clearly based off Scotland in the 1200s.
• Important character goes on a monologue that feels like a political PSA
• The IP’s understanding of progressive politics and social justice is roughly equivalent to Tumblr circa 2013.
• Absolutely terrible writing. Even if you swapped all the “woke” elements for generic entertainment elements, the IP would still be terrible.
• Likewise, the IP itself is often put together in an extremely lazy and mediocre way. If said “woke” content was not there, it would be universally panned for its low quality.
• Amazing reviews. All aspects of the IP get 10/10 from the “professional” critics. All the reviews are similar enough that the critics either collaborated or read off the press release.
• The critics care more about the social justice aspect than the game itself.
• You get the sense both the creators and the critics of the IP not only don’t consume this type of IP in their spare time, but actively resent people who do.
• Constant fucking gaslighting. Anyone who doesn’t like this ultimately mediocre IP is either morally and intellectually inferior. This usually comes in the form of accusations of being a bigot, a Nazi, or a Trump supporter.
• Bigots, Nazis, and Trump supporters will then try to recruit people who are pissed about the gaslighting.
• At some point the IP itself fades into the background, and it just becomes yet another culture war battleground.

I think there’s a reason Star Wars gets more shit for being woke than Spiderverse, or that Arcane hasn’t become a culture war battleground in the same way She-Hulk did. The reason being those shows are actually good, and most people are happy to watch good shows.

Du

Way to avoid my point.

No you assholes choose any culture war thing as proof someone is a horrible person, and then act like heroes when you make fun of them like middle school mean girls.

Look you guys can keep doing this bullshit but I’m out.

This shit is immature and stupid. I also get the sneaking suspicion that a lot of this “resistance” shit is done by people who just want an excuse to be cruel.

Either way, it doesn’t work. A full decade of shitting on Trump and the end result is that he’s more popular than ever.

Most people on this list have taken their foot off the gas in a major way, and do more of what they want.

Elon is currently blowing tens of billions of dollars running Twitter into the ground, designs impractical cars because he thinks they look cool, committing light treason, and campaigning for a president who would be detrimental to his business interests.

While the Zuck is still involved at Meta, he also picked up a ton of other hobbies. A lot of them are objectively cool. He also seems to spend a lot of time with his wife and kids.

Bezos seems to spend most of his time having sex with his age appropriate mistress on his $500 million yacht.

I swear most of you are just assholes looking for manufacturer moral justification to bully people.

I feel like a lot of postwar US cooking could be explained by the following facts:

• A Americans lived through the great depression
• All Americans lived through world war rationing
• A huge portion of Americans grew up in a world where things like refrigeration, grocery stores, etc didn’t exist.

The end result was the food equivalent of giving a thirteen year old from the 1990s a smartphone for the first time. Just pure disgusting excess with no real rhyme or reason.

I feel like in a few years Valve is gonna have another go at Steamboxes, and both Sony and Microsoft are going to end up being caught off guard.

Well duh that’s what they Keyblade is for

If you think this is a conservative thing I really don’t know what to tell you. Anyone who has been paying attention for the last five years could tell you that this is a problem that goes beyond political affiliation.

Lol maybe if you’re a white guy in a middle class neighborhood below the age of 60 that doesn’t have any open indication of being queer or a ethnic/religious minority.

Men are much more likely to be a victim of every other violent crime besides rape.

Okay but it’s 20 bucks. The person paying it is probably a relatively regular person attempting to feel special. A rich person is just buying a first class ticket without a second thought, and then arriving at the last possible second to board after chilling at the airport lounge. A really rich person isn’t flying commercial.

Yeah, but it would be fun to figure out what they actually end up doing vs the marketing hype.

Do you mean flying first class? Because that’s different than priority boarding. They are in a different section of the plane, and the people there are paying for a lot more things than boarding.