"What's Wrong with Woke Culture in the Entertainment Industry?"

 I had ripped this off from Quora from an online friend on Quora, from "Murphy Barrett".  Nice guy, well spoken and knows his stuff.  I thought the answer was a good answer to the question.

Two things, mainly. But first we must study the Greeks a bit.

Much of the West is steeped in Christian thinking. Some things are good, some are bad. Pride, for instance, is a Sin if you’re Christian. Not so, the Greeks. To the Greeks, Pride is a virtue. One ought to have pride in oneself and one’s works. It’s healthy, normal, and good. But an excess of pride, now that is a vice, known as hubris. It is virtue taken too far.

In the same way, Egalitarianism is a virtue, and Woke is that virtue taken to vice.

Woke media is characterized, for instance, by the ever-trumpeting of The Message to the detriment of the story.

Consider, in Old Trek, within the context of the story itself, Lieutenant Uhura was not remarkable for being a woman or a black, despite being a bridge officer. She wasn’t the first or the best at anything. She was simply a very competent and capable officer amongst many. Nor did anybody bat an eyelash at black captains and admirals. And why should they? Clearly, in the world of Star Trek, skin color is no more remarkable than hair color. That was how Old Trek taught Egalitarianism.

New Trek, on the other hand, cannot help but put the story on the back seat as it pounds you over the head with the first black this and the openly whatever that. New Trek would have you ignore a person’s merits and focus instead on what they are, not who they are. New Trek would spurn MLK jr as a racist for his wonderful dream.

As a lifelong atheist, woke media has much the same tone, to me, as the fire-and-brimstone preacher. As those obnoxiously badly written Christian movies where the right answer is always god.

The second problem is itself a compound problem, that being arrogance and lack of imagination. Wokesters, by and large, don’t have good stories to tell. They have nothing original, nothing universal. So many woke stories are merely personal experience writ large, as if wokies cannot empathize with anybody different than themselves.

Combine this with the arrogance to believe they can, and have the right to, take someone else’s work and “fix” it. Make it “more inclusive”. Update it for “modern audiences”. But one does not improve the Sistine Chapel by the use of finger-paints.

(Yes yes, I know that’s Christian imagery. It’s a masterpiece, get off my back.)

Thus, bereft of original ideas and arrogant enough to believe they know better than everyone (bit of Hubris there, no?) wokies appropriate existing, beloved IPs, and “fix them” in the manner of an amateur restoring a great piece of art.

Amateur restoration botches Jesus painting in Spain

And the results are just as horrible and depressing. We are left with media that isn’t entertainment, but a lecture. What’s more, it starts to feel all same-same. “Which show with the queer black trans-lesbians is this?”

This even shows up physically in media. Quite a few woke fantasy shows look all the same. It’s like they pull from the same casing pool, even when doing so is actively detrimental to the story. I recall the Wheel of Time show, where it’s a specific plot point that the protagonist is clearly an outsider because he doesn’t look like anyone else in the sleepy mountain village. But thanks to rainbow casting, nobody in that village looks like anybody else. Every backwater hamlet has as much diversity as a major trade port. In the second Game of Thrones and the Witcher spinoff, the architecture was all same-same too, thus it was very hard to tell where anyone was just by looking.

The point being that, ironically, woke casting and writing leads to this homogenized oatmeal of bland shows that all look and taste the same. It has no color, no flavor, no spice.

A show set in fictional fantasy Poland should feel and look different than one sent in fantasy England than fantasy Japan than fantasy Africa. Don’t paint over good works with pale imitations. Don’t treat characters as a conglomeration of intrinsic characteristics with no soul.

That is what is wrong with woke media.