Politics in Media - The Good, the Bad, and the Preachy

The director of The Hunt gives his views on the movie's release being cancelled.

A movie like this would have only reinforced the polarization.

I like all the changes they made in The Boys so far. Ennis's original comic (which I binged in about a weekend after I found out about the show, then I watched the show) was far, FAR too dark and cynical to be faithfully recreated on screen, and they needed to make several characters either less dark ( Hughie - having him try to CPR A-Train during his seizure rather than just kill him is a HUGE difference), less Faux Action Girl (Starlight - she was a punching bag in the comics, and she basically ended up defining her worth by her relationship to Hughie) and less dumb ( Homelander - who wishes he was cold and calculating in the comics, but just falls into the usual "what would Superman do if he turned bad?" tropes, which his hyper-competent corporate handler considers to be so boring he almost walks off a building to alleviate the sheer boredom of it, while the show Homeland is intelligent and terrifying to his handler) to work in the adaptation.

It's also come out at a timely point, just after the end of the MCU's big ten year long arc, and has pivoted some details slightly to make most superheroes movie stars as well as crime fighters and publicity-hungry celebrities.

Making the heroes Badass Normals rather than Empowered Badass Normals also makes more sense, because the only reason that works in the comics is they had a TON of dirt on the Seven (inluding Homelander literally eating a baby) - they've also done a lot to tone down the background, Hughie the Audience Surrogate basically had to sit through two infodumps by two different characters to explain to him how the world worked. Given Black Noir's status in the books, I'm going to be very interested to see what they do with him in the show.

Yeah, I basically like all of the changes they've made so far. They all make sense, they all make the show better.

Edited by GoldenKaos on Aug 20th 2019 at 10:32:39 AM

On the subject of Valentine: yeah he's an honestly awful person and his plan is "fuck you got mine" personified. I think people get seduced by his charisma and the fact that he has genuinely patriotic intentions that they ignore or don't realize how awful his plan would be for the rest of the world.

He's my favorite Jo Jo villain and a good character but people definitely leather pants him.

It's kinda weird when Non-Americans do that. Who wants the Bad luck of the whole country of America?

Edited by KazuyaProta on Aug 20th 2019 at 11:40:21 AM

Regarding The Hunt, The Big Picture has done a video about it:

Yeah, I guess that? Thought a lot of his Nationalism come off as very selfish and he's really not above a lot of Evil Is Petty behavior, which weirds me as someone that knew him due to "Valentine actually was a hero in his own way" video in Spanish.

Since it's pretty hot in public and politic stuff right now, what anyone thinks of constant attempts of media to blame Video Games and comics on all shootings and tragedies that happen? And where will it lead us in the end?

Big Picture made a video about this (as well as Jim Sterling):

Edited by VeryVileVillian on Aug 22nd 2019 at 7:20:04 PM

It wouldn't lead to nothing, the GOP is doing drowning swipes, their reputation is at a all low throught pretty much everywhere and their attempts to blame videogames means that not even the Alt Right would like them.

Edited by KazuyaProta on Aug 22nd 2019 at 11:24:26 AM

Video games have the same effect on people as any other media. Nothing more, nothing less.

The problem with this question is that, for the most part, it's not the media doing it.

It's Republican politicians who are desperately attempting to deflect from the true source of this gun violence, i.e guns.

It will continue as long as Republicans are opposed to gun control/as long as there is gun violence because of the lack of gun control.

It will hopefully alienate gamer voters and maybe even get EA or some of the other supercompanies to spend money to destroy them.

I gotta ask the tropers living in USA, but what do you think of Falling Down and how political is it? It's about this guy, William Foster, who lost his defense contractor job, is under court to stay away from his family but wants to be present for his daughter's birthday and has a very bad day and goes postal. I like the movie and I like how ultimately Foster is a Villain Protagonist slash Big Bad in the end, with Detective Prendengast being the hero. It doesn't treat vigilantism nicely.

Interesting (Non American here, sadly).

As a note. I am wondering about how different are modern Geopolitics even when compared to 1900 geopolitics, and not even talk about before.

Like, the treatment of refugees is interesting. In the past, refugees were usually put into camps so the local government can decide what they do with them (usually a place so they can stay until they can be relocalizated), but now, refugees going to cities is the norm because is far easier to rebuilt your life in a city.

I am now wondering about fictional refugee crisis, especially those involving the In-Universe "Weaker countries"

Falling Down is a good deconstruction of action movie revenge pictures. However, the thing is that it treats its subject matter as something wholly bizarre like, "What if a white collar guy went on a killing spree." Even at the time this movie was made, that wasn't unprecedented.

After all, Charles Whitman existed.

To Drag: Don't also forget how damn sadistic can be either. The thing with the driver of the train is just like...why, his attempts to rape Lucy Steel, his utter apathy at causing collateral damage, etc.

Valentine is a massive dick in a personal level too

IDK if this is because personal sentimentalism, but Valentine's sheer apathy when two random farmers are killed due to his Stand reflecting Johnny's nail bullets is like, a breaking point for me.

Edited by KazuyaProta on Aug 22nd 2019 at 3:36:28 AM

I was gonna ask this question in the World-Building forum, but I figured it was sufficiently 'political' enough to ask here instead.

You know the Afrofuturism trope, and how it often features depictions of high-tech, futuristic and often (but not always) socially progressive African settings, both to explore racial issues in sci-fi and also as a pushback against the stereotypical depiction of Africa as a war-torn backwater filled with nothing but misery?

Does there exist a similar movement that gives that treatment to Middle Eastern societies? I'd have thought there'd be a few, since the Middle East (with the exception of Egypt, if you count North Africa as part of the Middle East - and even then it's usually more to do with ancient Egypt than modern Egypt) is another region of the world that has a lot of complex history and culture and yet is often written off by Westerners as a land of perpetual war that's not worth exploring (in modern settings, anyway; that is, if a country like Iran or Syria shows up in a modern or even near-future setting, it's usually in the context of war, espionage or religious tensions - and that's if they don't use a made-up country instead).

The only example I can think of is the city of Oasis in Overwatch, which is in Iraq. Maybe Cairo in Deus Ex: Invisible War, but I understand that game isn't particularly well-liked. :V

You could argue that Dubai is an exception to the usual depiction of predominantly-Islamic middle eastern societies in Western media, which is probably true, though I'd argue that said depictions are often quite shallow, and go too far in the other direction by glossing over its shortcomings. In both cases it isn't really 'explored' as it is just used as a backdrop, if that makes any sense. Hence the Deus Ex example, since I understand, despite Cairo being a futuristic cyberpunk society there, it's still far from a walk in the park - the key thing is that it's still treated with depth. Presumably. As I said, I may be wrong since that game wasn't well-received.

Edited by PresidentStalkeyes on Aug 22nd 2019 at 1:28:16 PM

Yes,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_Gravity_Fails

George Effinger created a Middle East that was the center of a cyberpunk Renassiance in place of the usual Japanese futurism. Unlike most cyberpunk, the Middle East is a pretty good place to live while the rest of the world has gone to crap.

Edited by CharlesPhipps on Aug 22nd 2019 at 5:49:47 AM

So...Post Cyber Punk then? Interesting.

On the subject of Falling Down: I think it is a interesting movie, but it suffers from a Do Not Do This Cool Thing problem. While the movie does a bait and switch by ultimately showing D-Fens as a deeply misguided man, majority of the film still relishes very much on his rampage as a form of wish fulfillment and it vindicates him somewhat (like the needlessly rude Korean worker or the Mexican thugs).

Speaking as a cyberpunk writer, I'm not sure Post-Cyberpunk is actually a thing.

I think it's just scifi.

But quibbling about labels is a thing I normally condemn.

Well, sci-fi needn't be optimistic, even non-cyberpunk works. In fact, the work that's often considered the Trope Codifier for sci-fi is Frankenstein.

Mind you, with Cyberpunk, a sort of dystopia (specifically a capitalist one) is practically baked into the definition, hence Post-Cyberpunk. For example, Mega Man is post-cyberpunk for the most part. Especially Battlenetwork. Of course, I can see the argument that Post-Cyberpunk should just be Cyberpunk "but optimistic" and doesn't need to be distinguished from it.

I'm more just saying that if it's cyberpunk but optimistic, I'm curious what tropes distinguish it from mainstream scifi in the first place.

As it strikes me the primary thing that distinguishes cyberpunk is its cynical themes.

http://unitedfederationofcharles.blogspot.com/2014/08/what-is-cyberpunk.html

Post-Cyberpunk is what happened when people looked at Cyberpunk stories getting too dark and going "Yeah, let's dial it back just a bit".

It's not optimistic like Star Trek is, but it's at least got people who are trying to improve things in society. That's what distinguishes it from something like Shadowrun, where the crapsackiness is so systemic and rooted in the system that it's more or less impossible for anyone to fix anything. All you can do is try to get by and earn more nuyen for another day.

Basically, a Post-Cyberpunk world still has a lot of the crapsack elements of a Cyberpunk world, but it's not so hopeless that changing things for the better is impossible.

Post-Cyberpunk is essentially a reaction to Cyberpunk. Which was itself a reaction to more "utopian" scifi like Star Trek. Which has gone through its own transformation into Darker and Edgier territory.

Edited by M84 on Aug 22nd 2019 at 9:34:13 PM

The eternal cycle of Tropes being Deconstructed and Reconstructed over and over will always amaze me

@President: There a lot of cultural analogues to be explored. But yeah, I get your point. The Middle East is usually ignored in Western narratives due to.it's lack of contact with it.