What makes people dislike preachiness?

Yes, that is what I mean. I'm not talking about general ideology, that is not the same as preaching. "Robots are cool" is an ideology, but people do not go preach that robots are cool. I have no clue why you thought I was referring to that in the first place.

Whether a message is delivered effectively or not, or even if the message is worth talking about in the first place, is actually irrelevant to the point I was trying to make. Do note that I used the word "preach", not the word "preachy".

Exactly my point. If a person does not like the message of the entertainment, they will either not enjoy it, or not even watch it in the first place, even if the message is worth talking about and delivered well. A climate change denier may be turned off by a movie about climate change, an atheist may be turned off by a religious movie, and a theist may be turned off by an anti-religious movie. So when people make a movie with a particular message, they risk alienating part of their potential audience, which is generally bad for business.

edited 18th Mar '15 5:42:25 PM by shiro_okami

I keep bringing it up because the word "preachy" is often used as a shorthand for "I don't like this", and the term is usually so variable and arbitrary that it has little long-term value in analysis of the work in question. It's kind of like people tossing around the term "pretentious". Man, that word has taken a beating lately.

Agreed. I groan inside every time I see another review with the word "pretentious" in the title. But usually when I hear the word "preachy", or especially the word "preach", the first thing I think of is the literal meaning, not any shorthand meaning.

For me, something becomes "preachy" when it loses all semblance of subtlety and becomes blatant "X thing is bad!" with all the grace of a street preacher shoving a bible in your face.

Case in point: Avatar. That movie's message was so ham handed you could serve it at a Christmas dinner.

Not that I'm necessarily disagreeing with you, but the hilarious thing about Avatar is that Cameron designed it to be a spectacle first and a political movie second. He basically took a bunch of environmental/military tropes and threw them into a blender for profit purposes. Not that I fault him for that, but it's a really good example of what happens to art and ideology when they are used to put butts in seats.

I've posted this video before, but here it is again from Red Letter Media.

Yeah, visually it was a great movie. But I hated the plot. I still maintain Quaritch was my favorite character. I loathe the fuzzy blue bastards, if only because Cameron made em too Mary Sue like.

So, do we have a consensus on wether Papa should, or should not preach?

I agree that "pretentious" is overused, but it is still a term I find useful. For me, "preachy" means the message is out of place or lacking in nuance, while "pretentious" means the message has too little coherent ideology behind it. The author goes through the rhetoric of a message without enough thought to what the message itself is.

The problem is when audiences don't pick up on the message or don't care for it, this is the go-to word.

I agree with that.