2022: Fantasy sux

I have a lot of things I could talk about. The Z-man hit it out of the park with at least two columns since I last posted that I'd love to highlight. I've been busy mostly with my daughter's wedding and then entertaining all of the people (mostly from my wife's side of the family) who hung around after it was over needing to be entertained. Quite honestly, it'll be weeks before we're completely done, and by that I mean, put away everything that we have and figured out where it's going to belong.

And as soon as we're done with that, we have major changes to the house to make. We're actually (sorta) empty nesters now. I still have two sons who have their permanent address here, but they don't actually live here currently, so its just me and the little old lady. What this means is that eventually we're going to do a lot of major things to several of the rooms that we're redoing to better accommodate our expected lifestyle rather than our past lifestyle as parents with kids at home. Two rooms will become guest bedrooms rather than lingering boys' rooms, and one room will become an office/library. The basement will then also need and have the opportunity to be significantly redesigned, or at least have a bunch of crap thrown out of it and moved around, at a bare minimum.

Anyway, I've been busy, and I will continue to be busy, but not too busy going forward. But there are two things that I'd like to do; some 2023 goals (relative to the hobbies that I talk about on this blog, and also elsewhere in my life, but I'll only mention the first here) and a retrospective on fantasy in particular in pop culture in 2022. And because it merits its own post, I'll only do the latter right now, and the former later today or tomorrow.

First, let me quote someone else's blog, briefly. 

I don’t think there has ever been a worse year for the genre of fantasy than the year of our Lord 2022.

There is something almost magical in the way that an entire school of storytelling has been so unrelentingly subjected to incompetence in every way available to it.  How could any studio which theoretically exists to make money, so thoroughly **** up everything they touched?  

At the end of the day, there seem to have been 5 issues:

First, everyone wanted their own Game of Thrones, (it wasn’t just Jeff Bezos). 

Second, none of these producers knew anything about fantasy and they didn’t want to learn.  They just wanted to glom on to something and tell their own version of THE MESSAGE.

Third, neither did the people who ran the studios. They were green-lighting anything that could be accused of being a fantasy franchise with an existing fanbase. And they also wanted to use it to spread THE MESSAGE.

Fourth, Woke.  All of these shows were much more interested in contemporary politics than they were ancient worlds, eerie wonders, and glories beyond imagining.  They cared more about scoring points in Hollywood than they ever could about fantasy. 

Fifth, all of these shows were the result of globalism. Oh, it was Hollywood globalism to be sure, so on top of all of their other failings, they were shallow as a mud puddle.  But it was all globalist fantasy.  It was something too hopelessly bland to be at all interesting.

“The Shadow that bred them can only mock, it cannot make: not real new things of its own. I don’t think it gave life to the orcs, it only ruined them and twisted them; and if they are to live at all, they have to live like other living creatures.”

I don't always love The Critical Drinker, just I like I don't always love any of the other squishy Youtube critics of modern pop culture who are careful to not trip up YouTube's algorithm for demonetization by actually telling the complete truth. Of course, that assumes that they've accepted the complete truth themselves, and as I can personally attest, the red pill journey is, in fact, a journey, and sometimes it's harder to let go of certain pretty little lies that simply aren't true and never were than others. So maybe there's a reason why Geeks & Gamers, The Critical Drinker, HeelsvsBabyFace, Ryan Kinel, the Quartering, Midnight's Edge, Yellowflash, etc. are all exactly on the same side as squishy kind of sorta conservatives who go out of their way to virtue-signal their acceptance of Leftism morality before trying to then complain that Leftists are inconsistent in their own application of it. Well, duh. Yeah.

But in any case, the Critical Drinker's "THE MESSAGE" in a big echoey voice is absolutely something that's useful rhetoric, and its nice to see it replicated here. That said, his second, third and fourth points are really kind of indistinguishable. Yes, THE MESSAGE is the problem, but THE MESSAGE is wokeness. Saying that the writers wanted to spread wokeness, and the studio heads wanted to spread wokeness and then also another helping of wokeness is the problem is redundant. I mean, I get it; he's highlighting different schwerpunkts where valuing wokeness over any other quality failed these shows, but I'd do it a bit differently myself.

First, fantasy is ultimately a hopeful genre. Yes, even the dark fantasy that I have here on this blog and elsewhere is largely based on romanticizing the setting that fantasy takes place in. I would say that fantasy is by and large conservative in many ways, because what it mostly romanticizes is the past, but it also creates romanticized utopias that never existed, and that's where progressives come in. Either way, shows that do not really romanticize their environment to some degree, but rather exist to criticize it, or to create a utopia that normal people see as bizarre and dystopian rather than something to be romanticized, creates a major, off-putting disconnect right off the bat, and this was a major theme of all of the shows that failed this year. And yes, that means the wokeness, the race-swapping, the blatant misandry and anti-white hatred and bigotry, ironically in a genre created by white people to celebrate their own heritage among their own people.

Relative to the first point in the quote above, this means that I don't actually think Game of Thrones is good fantasy, because it is nihilistic and tawdry rather than hopeful or romanticized. But I will give George Rape Rape Martin credit for at least doing something different, which led to his brief moment in the sun, and those who adapted his show also did something which people hadn't seen before, and which they clearly tried to copy with little success. But it was never really a model that was going to last, because it subverts the whole purpose of fantasy to tell nihilistic rape fantasies rather than hopeful, romanticized visions of the past or societies that the author wishes could exist. It's just a critique. Of nothing in particular, mind, just life in general. Personally, I find the Rape Rape Martin and Joe Abercrombie, etc. vision of fantasy very tedious, and I'm surprised that they've had as much legs as they have managed to have. But the end is clearly in sight, I think, for that kind of fantasy. It's not sustainable.

Secondly, it's worth pointing out that biological differences are very real, and treating men and women as if they are interchangeable widgets is off-putting at best, and seriously whack at worst. Of course, the "strong female character" is more than just a woman who acts like a man, or is put in a man's role in the story; it's a spiteful, petty insult to feminism and masculinity both, and deliberately so, by people who hate the very thought of normalcy because it reminds them of how far they deviate from it and how dysfunctional they really are. Pretty much every single one of the failed shows has "strong female characters" who are actually terrible characters; they only exist to constantly heckle, belittle and put down any male characters around them, especially if the male characters are also white and the women are brown. These spiteful "message delivery units" which is probably a better label for them than characters aren't fun for anyone to watch. I can't imagine that even progressive weirdos actually enjoy them, other than a brief endorphin hit of seeing their cult-like beliefs validated in them. 

Thirdly, as an outgrowth of the need of "message delivery units" to constantly harp on their message, the plots are absurd, clumsy, and poorly executed. Nobody's motivation makes any sense, things happen for reasons that are not organic to anything that common sense, action/consequence relationships, or believable human behavior would lead you to expect. This means that the shows all have a strange disjointed feel, and they don't make a lick of sense. People who watch them who aren't engrossed in THE MESSAGE delivery can't figure out why things happen or why characters do any of the things that they do.

It's probably possible (although not desirable) to deliver the message while still writing a competent story (although it will necessarily water-down the ham-handedness of the message delivery, of course), but the writers and producers have all—with the possible exception of Blood of the Dragon (which I have not seen, but that seems to be the review consensus from those who have)—made no attempt to write plots or characters that feel real in any way whatsoever. Stuff just happens because some pre-determined plot outline demands it, but why and how it happens makes no sense to the viewer. Although this was no doubt allowed to happen because of the wokeness of the creators, it isn't directly a product of their wokeness, only indirectly. It's just a product of blatant incompetence and lack of skill on the writers' part.

Fourth, being "updated for modern audiences." This is, of course, very transparent code to let everyone know that the creators don't actually care a lick about the source material that they're adapting, but will fill the show up with woke virtue-signaling in a major, off-putting way. For no reason whatsoever, lesbian couples will show up. Even though the setting looks vaguely European, black and brown people will mysteriously appear at least as often as white people, dressing in a vaguely European style and living a vaguely European life-style, as if any sub-Saharan African were equivalent to a white European, or that if you simply picked up an African and raised him among Europeans he'd act indistinguishably from one. (Not likely.) I know, of course, that fantasy isn't the real world, and when I say European, I don't mean that the lands of Middle-earth or whatever The Witcher or Willow's setting is called is made up of actual Europeans, but fantasy is usually cast as an alternate idealized and romanticized European Medieval setting. I don't know why black, brown, yellow or red people should have any significant place in a white genre based on white heritage. Although few people have tried it, there's no reason why fantasy cast in a fantasy-analog to Africa or Asia or even Latin America couldn't exist. Heck, as long as it wasn't an excuse to bash whiteness, it'd probably be kind of cool and at least new and different, and the few attempts to have done so, such as Rokugan, Kelewan, Imaro, or a few others, have been at least moderately successful. But no; what these shows all do instead is simply insert black, brown and yellow people into a white context and then dare you to point out that it's seriously incongruous and off-putting to see them in that context. It smacks of not only laziness, but also covetousness and pettiness. Again; seriously off-putting, especially to the people who they are casually victimizing by appropriating our heritage.

And that's generically. More specifically, it's off-putting and insulting to fans of the source material being adapted. If Lord of the Rings fans are supposed to like Rings of Power; if Wheel of Time fans or Witcher fans are supposed to like the shows based on those properties, they have to actually resemble the source material. Nobody wants to see the name of a property that they're fans of attached to something that has little rapport with the material its allegedly adapting, because the writers and producers themselves don't actually like the material and really want to do something else.

Of course, I say all of this as if it's endemic to fantasy. The problems with fantasy are concurrent with the problems in pop culture, and among our soi-disant elites altogether. They all either have this woke mind-virus and actually believe these insane things, or at least they pretend to for social reasons, because their jobs, their social status, or something else depends on doing so.

Which is why all of the nebbish, bowtie-wearing conservative pundits attempting to "explain" to the leftists why their wrong with facts will never amount to anything at all. They're either talking to wild-eyed cultists, or people who's position in society depends on pretending to believe the claims of wild-eyed cultists. Facts aren't going to sway them. In fact, they will see facts that contradict their chosen world-view as threatening. Rather than engaging with and considering those facts, they will attack them as if they are a virus that must be eradicated at all cost, hopefully before they have a chance to spread.

Eh, anyway. That's a little bit beside the point. However, it's curious to see that the oft-repeated aphorism "Go woke go broke" actually has only ever managed to come true in the entertainment industry, which is why it's somewhat fascinating to watch it happen in real-time for Netflix and Disney and others this last year. For one thing, nobody has gone broke yet because the truth is that pleasing investors is more important than pleasing customers, and investors have passively and collectively decided that the ESG score built by Blackrock is an important part of the performance of an investment. So pissing off customers by going woke has not hurt anyone until recently, because it kept investment coming in. Also, for many industries there's no alternative. If you got pissed off when a Wal-Mart executive said that she actively discriminates against white male owned suppliers, what are you going to do? Take your business to Target, who actively threatens the safety of your daughter in the bathroom by encouraging creepy perverts to go in there with her? Take it to Amazon who actively crushes American business by undercutting them with crappy Chinese products? There are no good alternatives, therefore there's no way to effectively vote with your wallet. However, in terms of entertainment, I'm find all kinds of things that I'd rather do than watch crappy movies or streaming shows that feed woke garbage to me. I can watch YouTube stuff instead. I can read an older book. I can watch an older show or movie on blu-ray or DVD. I can play board games with my family. I can take a walk outside. I can go run errands with my wife. 

So, the entertainment industry is the canary in the coal-mine that shows that the anti-American, anti-white, anti-Christian, anti-normalcy cult that has gripped our elites can't last forever. It's finally starting to really, seriously wear its way out. And if history has taught us anything, it's that once the early warning signs of collapse are apparent, the collapse happens much more quickly and suddenly and thoroughly than anyone would have predicted ahead of time. In a way, that's a good thing. While nobody loved living through the collapse of Communism, nobody really loved living under communism either, and the collapse is an inevitable part of moving on to something better.