A History of Franchises Repurposed By Activists

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What's your opinion on it? Really, anyone's.

Honestly, I'm tired of good storytelling taking a backseat while audiences are being lectured by shoehorned identity politics and author self inserts. It wasn't pleasant when it began and now it's everywhere and annoying, predictable, and tedious. What majority audience asked for any of this?

Movies aren't made for audiences anymore. It's a sad state of affairs. But it's probably less about politics and more about most writers being hacks. Real artists, with talent and all, I don't know where they went or where they are, but it's a shame about their leaving and all.

I will say that it is true that most characters have been one color for a very long time, and that there is something to be said about there needing to be other voices and faces. I don't think it's being handled properly though.

The Missus and I have been streaming Chinese and Korean movies on Netflix.  They all seem to be about conflicted relationships and rocky romances -- nothing that would please the the fans of "Woke" movies.

The Chinese movies are mostly historical dramas, and the Korean movies are mostly modern professional dramas (i.e., cops, doctors, lawyers, corporations, et cetera).

Asian media doesn't concern itself with the crappy politics and social identity whatever going on in the west. That's why manga and anime are kicking American comics and cartoons' asses.

Let's use Borderlands as an example. Here is Tiny Tina's story in the games.

"Tina and her parents were sold to Hyperion to become test subjects for Jack's slag mutation experiments, an event which led to the deaths of her parents. She escaped their fate using a grenade that she had hidden in her dress at her mother's insistence, and once she was free of Hyperion's reach she vowed revenge on the man that had sold her family."

In the movie, her dad is not an innocent victim like the game, but they make him the main villain who created as her as an experiment. This is an inversion of the original story. Beyond that, try to count how many stories these days make the dad a negative character. There is no way to defend this change as being creative, fresh, etc. It's the stalest choice they could have made.

Too many modern adaptations do not respect the source material. They use brand recognition to sell us generic and tired tropes rather than giving us the more unique original narratives and characters.

This is basically another one of those things where it's like "Hollywood knows best" when it comes to making a film adaptation of a video game and they never played one nor do they get the right people who are into the video games themselves to work on the film. I still have scars of disappointment after sitting through the Doom movie from the mid 2000s. I see many similarities between the Doom movie and the Borderlands movie.

Doom was a one and done movie but had it been faithful, it could have been a huge film franchise. That's the shame. When they actually respect the source material, it's really successful, because fans spread the word.

That reminds me of another thing. It's insulting to constantly rewrite stories and change characters as if they think they are superior to the creators who made these franchises. Insulting to the fans as well because they are implying this is the good version, not what they are already invested in.

It boils down to inclusivity.

Honestly, down with Hollywood. They are beyond their golden years. I wish there was a Slavwood, I'm sure the guys in the East have plenty of interesting stories to tell with wildly different ways of telling them. That or some serious film industry in Africa.

I have to say I'm tired of the Asians as much as I am the Americans. Wokeness aside, the stories are boring and I've heard them all before.

I'd like to see more countries develop their entertainment industries. Bollywood and Indian films seem to slowly be getting more attention. Who knows what great stories or perspectives are still untold out there.

Nollywood (Nigerian film) is pretty good.

Common inclusivity is one thing, inclusivity solely for the sake of being able to say "Look!  We're being inclusive!" is quite another.

In many Asian dramas, there are characters whose gender roles might be considered "fluid" by Western standards.  For example, in many Philippine movies and TV shows, there is at least one "Bakla" -- an obvious man who dresses and behaves like a woman.  But these "Bakla" are part of Philippine culture, going way back before Spanish Colonialism.  Nobody bats an eye because "Bakla" are just part of our everyday experiences here.  This is what I call "Common Inclusivity".

Forced Inclusivity, on the other hand, occurs when a fluid-gender character is included because of some unseen quota or backroom arrangement -- their gender does not advance the plot, but serves only to garner a few extra "Brownie Points" for nominations of an Emmy or Oscar.  If a gender-fluid character could be easily replaced by a binary-gendered character without changing the plot, then it is "Forced Inclusivity" -- a form of tokenism.

As always, other opinions may vary, and their mere variance from my opinion will have little or no effect on me.

Got any recommendations? I'm piqued.

What's interesting to me that I never see anyone mention is that the people who criticize Hollywood for making poor quality movies and the people who criticize Hollywood for stereotyping and lack of diversity used to be on the same side -- and sometimes were the same people. Maybe not always, but they weren't at each other's throats like now. People criticized Jar Jar for being an annoying comic relief character *and* for allegedly being a racist stereotype. The same went for reactions to live-action Goku and Aang being poorly written adaptations of those characters *and* being whitewashed.

Even with the hit movies, there wasn't the same divide there is now. Films like James Cameron's "Avatar" and Tim Burton's "Alice in Wonderland" both have obligatory messages, but the people who loved them loved them because they were special effects spectacles and the people who hated them hated them because of their derivative writing. These people disagreed, but each in their own way was looking for a quality moviegoing experience. I don't remember anyone having a strong reaction to the films' ideology, one way or the other.

Then came "Ghostbusters" (2016) and suddenly the whole conversation around movies was re-framed. Here we have a remake of an 80s comedy about a womanizing con-man and his buddies starting a business in defiance of government oversight. (YouTuber Lindsay Ellis called it "Reagany.") Yet simply by making them women and framing anyone who disliked the film as "mysoginist," suddenly the people who you'd think would have hated a "Ghostbusters" remake most became its staunchest defenders, pitted against the nostalgic fans who almost inevitably would have hated a male-led remake that lacked Bill Murray and Harold Ramis anyway.

The same thing happened again more recently with Disney's "Little Mermaid" live-action remake. Who hates the character of Ariel for supposedly giving up her voice "for a man?" Who would I expect to hate a remake for reintroducing this character to a new generation? The very people who furiously defended the remake simply because they race-swapped the character.

As for me, I want what neither side of the constantly raging social media debate seems to want. I want well-crafted entertainment *with* diversity, but *without* heavy-handed social messaging.