Misused: Reactionary Fantasy (vs.Supposedly Rebellious Series)

Reactionary Fantasy probably needs some example editing—a fair amount of the examples are cases which were intended to be left-wing, but just aren't left-wing enough for the commenter. Which seems to me to be the latter trope (and therefore a YMMV, to boot.)

Examples:

"Empowered is ostensibly and Affectionate Parody of those comics, but Empowered is depicted in a sexual manner far more explicitly than most of the comics it's parodying, and often not in a funny way either, nor in a way that is so over the top that it isn't sexy."

"Sex and the City attracted quite a bit of flak during its run for how, for all its talk of being a progressive, empowering (even feminist) sitcom, the series nevertheless ended with all four female characters having found happiness by entering into committed monogamous relationships with white heterosexual men, and in two cases also by having babies."

The Warners film Cabin in the Cotton...which was about the class conflict between Southern plantation owners and their "peckerwood" sharecroppers, was both denounced and hailed as a piece of socialist propaganda, with the Soviet Union's government censorship bureau deeming it the first American film sufficiently anti-capitalist to be approved for release in Russian markets. But if you watch the actual film, you'll note that it isn't radical at all: the "peckerwood" hero combats injustice not by revolting against it, but by working within the system (he works his way up to a higher position than the other sharecroppers) and arranging a truce between the rich planters and their labor force. Furthermore, the rich people in the film are not villainous caricatures and are given the opportunity to defend their policies, and plausibly so."

In this case, the film was radical enough for the Soviet Union to approve, but not radical enough for the commenter. (Because of insufficient Black and White Morality, apparently)

"Five words: Lifetime Movie of the Week. To sum them up, even under their feminist undertones and alleged "empowerment" of "distressed women", half of the plots go on condemning whatever thing frightens middle aged suburban housewives."

"Another criticism by some is that the book" (Fifty Shades of Grey) "is marketed as kinky and edgy, when the sex is actually pretty vanilla, especially when compared to what many people in BDSM do."

A similar problem: sometimes the bar for "reactionary" is set rather low. Examples:

"Walter Hill's The Warriors on the surface appears to be very sympathetic to the (dubious) ideal of proletarian revolution, with thousands of rough-and-tumble anarchists - and what's more, outright criminals! - literally ruling the streets. But the revolutionary scheme fails early on, and the movie turns into a Stern Chase from that point forward."

Well, it does say "dubious". But maybe, just maybe, New York being taken over by street gangs wouldn't turn out so well. (In Marxist terms, that would be a lumpenproletariat revolution, I believe.)

One last strange example:

"Inevitably, this controversy will win the show more viewers. Because this is what TLC does: It finds people living atypical lives—usually ones in tension with "progressive" cultural norms —and turns them into spectacle. Watching the network's line-up, we're supposed to regard the show's subjects with equal parts amusement and outrage: Freaks with too many kids. Freaks who have never had sex. Freaks from the South. Freaks with multiple wives. This approach to programming succeeds, wildly, because it's a pure distillation of the appeal of reality television: self-righteous voyeurism."

This sounds like the inverse of a reactionary fantasy—shows purportedly reporting on a subculture, but actually pandering to *progressive* prejudices.

Locking as part of New Years Purge.