Diversity and Representation in Media

The only thing someone complaining about a show being "woke" tells you is that you shouldn't be listening to that person.

Oh certainly, I just thing examples like House of the Dragon and Guardians 3 prove that, even ignoring the fact that most of the anti-woke ideology is subtly racist and sexist, it's clearly arbitrary. Even if two pieces of media have the exact same levels of diversity, if one is considered good and the other bad, then the former isn't woke (or its even anti-woke) and the other's woke.

Subtle in the sense that it's (usually) not straight up saying "I hate black people"... just heavily implying that. Subtle is probably the wrong word.

Edited by king15 on Mar 27th 2024 at 3:25:46 PM

"Subtly"? It's pretty blatantly bigoted.

There's no mystery—the Game of Thrones franchise isn't as ubiquitously popular as it used to be after the first show shit itself, so it's not as profitable to moan about it. It bears repeating that the talking heads leading this 'culture war' horseshit are not fans of the media they talk about. They are grifters.

Edited by Chortleous on Mar 27th 2024 at 9:29:14 AM

Isn't part of the issue that wokeness is itself hard to define? I am pretty sure that it means something different to woke and anti woke people.

The House of the Dragon is often compared to the Rings of Power. Recently someone linked an article arguing that Ro P isn't woke, just poorly made.

If House of the Dragon depicts a patriarchy, Rings of Power doesn't. It changed the lore to remove all the sex discrimination and put women in positions of leadership that the men never question.

That is two opposite approaches to the same thing. It doesn't matter what you label it, but they aren't the same thing.

That's it really. Wokeness is just whatever the angry person wants it to be, it can be stretched in any way possible to criticise a work you don't like.

I think that, even though HOTD and ROP have different approaches (and I think either is fine), both can certainly be stretched as 'woke'.

Angry person- "Why does this work ignore the fact that women weren't equal in this period of history/in the lore of the series, that's woke."

Writers - "Ok then, let's realistically look at how women would have been treated in this society"

Angry person- "Why does this work now focus so much on women struggling in a patriarchal society? That's woke!"

You can't win. Well you can, the key to win is to just ignore the anti-woke bs.

Edit: Not that there absolutely no value to either criticism (for example, I disagree that fiction has to reflect reality as it happened, but it is an understandable perspective to think otherwise), but a lot of the time they seem to indicate a general dislike for any works with women in.

Edited by king15 on Mar 27th 2024 at 11:05:36 AM

Well, how often are women realistically depicted as being treated in fictional works?

I think the way Ro P depicts the characters, and defended those depictions is more typical of the current trend in feminist thought, and at odds with the feminist thought of earlier generations. If you look at Earthsea, Le Gruin believed it the author's duty to portray her male characters with more power than her female ones to reflect reality. Although she also believes that there are more than one type of power.

"The only thing someone complaining about a show being "woke" tells you is that you shouldn't be listening to that person."

This, I think, is PROFOUNDLY wrong. Even if we accept the idea that such complaints reliably identify an enemy — which is an idea we ought to be very, very leery of — it's a devastatingly bad strategy to stop listening to our enemies.

Sometimes we discover that they were never really our enemies at all. Sometimes we can learn something even from our enemies. But we ALWAYS learn something *about* our enemies, and that is *never* useless.

Noble, but futile words.

You should that due to many years of bigoted culture, that the majority who raise those objections of "wokeness" are probably either ignorant people who don't better, raging assholes who hate anyone who isn't them, greedy grifters, etc.

"Woke" at the very basic means "being aware of social injustices".

Somebody using that word like it's a bad thing is essentially the modern equivalent of a leper bell - signalling to you that you should stay as far away from them as possible.

Edited by DrunkenNordmann on Mar 27th 2024 at 8:09:55 PM

First, let them define "woke" as something that doesn't make them sound like the villain of a children's sitcom. Then we'll talk.

'Woke' is like 'politically correct': it was created by people with a particular ideological slant, abused by those people, adopted by other people who opposed their ideological slant, abused by *those* people, and is currently in the process of being denied by the people who created it.

And the circle of terminology goes on...

"Politically correct" was also a bullshit term that meant nothing.

No, woke did (honestly, it still does) have an actual meaning. It's just that the anti-woke crowd won't tell you that because if everyone knew the actual meaning, it'd make them realise that crowd's full of shit.

Edited by DrunkenNordmann on Mar 27th 2024 at 8:49:13 PM

Any term, no matter how potentially useful, can be ruined if it's used by people talking nonsense to refer to their position.

Anyone who tries to define themselves as correct as part of their first principles isn't worth paying attention to.

You forgot "Only a Sith deals in absolutes". Would you like to add it?

Right-wing mentality has always being this:

If the work is succesful then is not woke, if the work is unsuccesful then is woke and its failure is because of that.

There are exceptions but is pretty much a mathematical law.

And is also logical from their POV. They consider themselves to be the overwhelming majority, the "silent majority" of society on which only a small vocal and fringe minority of wokes do not agree with them, thus is mathematically impossible that something popular and succesful is "woke", that can't happen in their minds is completely contradictory with their worldview. In the opposite, if something is bad and is hated is because apart from the small woke minority everyone is reacting to reject the same things they reject, and they feel they can claim triumphally "I told you so". That's from where the "go woke, go broke" comes from. And this way of thinking can be retroactive, for example have the Mario Bros movie be a failure I'm 100% sure the anti-woke camp would say is because it was "female empowerment, with veil LGBT messages and having Luigi as a damsel in distress subversion wokeness" what caused it, as it was a success conservatives immdiatly claim it was because it had a supposed "family-friendly and heterosexual" message.

And yes, I know some of the smartest among them do realized this is untrue but won't say it because it will go against their narrative.

Reality is that things can be either ideologically rightwing or leftwing and still be either succesful or not. For example Velma is pretty much hated by all sides of the spectrum as it was Santa, Inc (both having terrible numbers in RT and IMDB). Whilst movies like Ghostbusters and The Dark Knight Rises having right-wing messages (at least economically) are enjoyed by both. That's what quality means.

Star Trek is another example on how something essentially progressive and woke is enjoyed even by conservatives.

Of course, it's also important to know if the enjoyment is genuine or a rather shallow understanding of it. Because those so-called fans think Star Trek has gone woke with their themes... When it was the whole time.

They should take a look at Deep-Space Nine, especially the episode where there's a version of Sisko (the captain of the series, a black man BTW.) who plays the role of stuggling black writer in 50s America.

I can tell you myself that's a problem on Latin America, as someone who is in several Spanish-speaking Facebook groups of such as Star Trek (which is pretty popular here) and Harry Potter.

LA is a very socially conservative region and I would dare to say most people is anti-woke, even in countries with left-wing governments. And the discussion over LGBT and ethnic minorities representation is often horrible, imagine to live in a 4Chan forum, that's basically how it goes.

There are of course some of us who argue that they miss the point in both franchises for their clearly progressive message (yes, Rowlings recent TER Finess notwithstanding) and how they have clearly pro-integration, anti-racist, anti-fascist and inclusive messages even since the 60s (in ST case) and yet they still claim they don't and that want to ruin them making them "woke". Or that both are made for children and should not have LGBT and/or political messages (even when ST was criticizing racial inequality and Vietnam War back in the 60s, or conversion therapies and religion in TNG).

"Because those so-called fans think Star Trek has gone woke with their themes... When it was the whole time."

Star Trek had radical social politics since its beginning. It could not have been 'woke' before that term was coined and applied to a specific belief system relatively recently.

The difference between older forms of Star Trek and newer ones is that the older used to challenge the beliefs of its (relatively limited) audience, while the newer only seeks to pander to a much larger demographic.

Generally when people say "it's made for children and shouldn't be political" what they actually mean is "I was watching it as a child and didn't notice or don't remember anything political". Which also speaks to a failure to engage with their favourite media critically (and often media they dislike, as well, when any faults are attributed to the same reasons every time).

I guarantee you the type of people who are mad about Star Trek being "woke" nowadays are the exact same type of people who were fuming about Kirk and Uhura having an interracial kiss back in the '60s.

Edited by chasemaddigan on Mar 27th 2024 at 6:58:17 AM

That may be true for some people — I have no doubt whatsoever that there are people who would object to both — but it's certainly not true of me.

I dislike Discovery for a wide variety of reasons, and my disapproval of its ideological stance is merely one of them. My only objection to the Kirk-Uhura kiss is that in-universe they were being forced by telekinetic jerks.

Edited by Melendwyr on Mar 27th 2024 at 6:39:18 AM

RE: Listening to people who are anti woke: A lot of times these views thrive on views and clicks. Don't feed the trolls is in full play. If we want to see less of these videos, then don't click and don't give them advertising money and the like.

For my own part:

I used to be pretty right-leaning, and was a follower of the anti-SJW crowd.

At the time, the term meant to me something to the effect of a conspiracy theorist. A mindset of viewing society as a sort of Platonic Cave, a tendency to use rather dubious logical leaps to find things offensive, and a belief that everyone else is some kind of sheeple that needs to wake up.

This isn't to defend people using the term as an insult, mind you. But I do think it might help give context to what the term means to people who use it as an insult.

Incidentally, the "Anti-Woke" crowd has largely become what I just described "woke" to mean, except without even the socially progressive intentions. Indeed, the term they use now is "Redpilled" which draws up the exact imagery.

I will note of course that this interpretation does require an assumption of good faith, which is frankly usually naïve at this point in time in my view. Indeed, I left that movement precisely because it was increasingly obvious that they were just jerks arguing in bad faith.

There might have been a point where there were a lot of "good faith" members of that movement, but I think by now they've either:

• Left, like I did.
• Radicalized.
• Are very willfully blind to what they're a part of.

Edited by Protagonist506 on Mar 27th 2024 at 5:01:34 AM