A Message To The Anti-Woke Crowd
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My first exposure to the anti-woke YouTuber “TheQuartering” was of a video showing him enraged that he could not ogle Adora of the then-not-yet-released She-Ra and the Princesses of Power because she was underage. I’ve since learned that he’s had an inexplicable and unnecessary hatred for Brie Larson, peed in his basement during stream, and was sponsored by a Nazi book publisher.
Once the backlash against casting a black protagonist to play Ariel in the live action remake of The Little Mermaid subsided, headline after headline appeared on YouTube about fan outrage toward Hunger Games actress Rachel Zegler. She had been set to play Snow White in the remake of the remake of the remake of the Grimm’s Fairy Tale, but she is Colombian and talked about how this version of the story will be different from Disney’s first remake because it’s not 1937 anymore. Her open acknowledgment that time moves in a straight line–and the fact that she’s not 100% white–sparked a thousand angry responses that almost universally refer to her as “Snow Brown”.
None of these people are racists, however, claim these people.
In 2024, Nintendo updated the avatars for the game Pokémon GO, a game which hasn’t looked better than day old dog excrement since the announce trailer. While the redesigns do look terrible–which fits with the game because the game looks terrible–YouTuber “yellowflash 2” made a post saying that Nintendo was trying to “erase women”, which is something I thought these people wanted.
No, it turns out they think the character is trans. And they think Nintendo is another part of the alleged movement to push “the agenda” down kids’ throats. I’m surprised that the hilarity of the game spawning the poison gas-emitting Koffing at Holocaust memorials back in the day didn’t earn any charitability from this crowd. After all, this is this crowd:
And their headlines and video titles all consist of word salads like “WOKE Actress Tries to Get Movie Shut Down For the Crime of Starring a WHITE MAN” or “Disney CAUGHT Trying to Groom Children Into MAN-HATING WOKE IDEOLOGY”. And they haven’t met a new work that they haven’t condemned as woke months before its release.
I wish I could say that this was just some small corner of the Internet, some tiny and insignificant group that no one has heard of or cares about. But no, this digital cancer is prevalent.
Mainstream media outlets like Fox News and the New York Post interviewed Eric July, the creator of the Rippaverse, about how wokeness was infecting the comic book industry and how he’s supposedly defying cancel culture and the leftist agenda.
Ron DeSantis said that Florida was where “woke goes to die” on the campaign trail during his 2024 run for the Republican nomination for President of the United States.
Marjorie Taylor Greene has spent much of her time in Congress wailing about “woke ideology” destroying America, and she isn’t the only one in government to be doing that.
An entire generation made a massive political shift to the far right off of GamerGate, which started with video gamers being angry that a woman created a game to help people with depression and ended becoming the precursor to the MAGA movement. Back then, the insulting, scary term was “SJW”.
And to top it all off, they all think themselves to be the “real” fans, the ones left behind by Woke DC/Marvel in the pursuit of the Woke DEI Agenda or whatever. And those are the most reasonable ones.
So I’m here to deliver a message to the anti-woke crowd. You guys ready? Here it is:
You all sound like lunatics.
No, I’m not disparaging you, or making fun of you, or making a joke of any kind at your expense. I’m being completely genuine with you.
To everybody outside your bubble, you sound like lunatics.
Am I in my own bubble? Sure. But here’s the thing. Most people, your ordinary everyday fan? They’ll agree with my position that media changes over time and some things are good and some things are bad and that there isn’t any sort of political grooming agenda.
Your position? That there is those things? That companies and artists hate their customers so much and are part of a concentrated effort to push an anti-man, anti-white, pro-gay/trans agenda down kids’ throats? Normal people look at you like you’re insane because you’re insane.
I could say something about the rampant bigotry against women, minorities, and “the Alphabet Cult” as you put it (“the LGBT community” to everyone else). And I could point out that anti-woke ideology is just crypto-fascism with a nerdy coat of paint. After all, “Your favorite media and all of Western culture are being destroyed by wokeness being pushed radical trans cultists trying to indoctrinate your children into the man-hating, Cultural Marxist Feminist Agenda” isn’t that far off from “Your race and all of German culture are being destroyed by degeneracy being pushed by globalist Jews trying to indoctrinate your children into their demonic Cultural Bolshevism”. If you’re an idiot like I am and you go into these comment sections, you see enough dog whistles to qualify as animal cruelty and enough about (((them))) that you can hear them sieg heiling through the screen.
In case you’ve forgotten:
Instead, I’ll just point out that you all sound dumb and miserable.
I genuinely couldn’t imagine living in a world where I hate all art, all media. Unless it’s some substandard work that “triggers the libs” or something (meaning if they are hawking each other’s work), the anti-woke grift machine hasn’t met a piece of media it didn’t hate. Hate before it even comes out, mind you.
I never actually see you guys actually enjoying anything. Because you don’t. And you don’t just hate everything, but you think everything that you don’t like is part of the aforementioned malicious agendas.
Supposed “fans” of superheroes hating everything that Marvel and DC put out. Literally everything. That’s not statistically possible. Not if you’re an actual fan.
“Fans” who claim they are tired of “woke political agendas being forced down readers’ throats”....and then saying that they were fans of the X-Men back in the 90s.
As if I even have to specifically reference X-Men. Superhero comics have been “woke”--relative to their time period–since 1938.
When even The Boys gets accused of going woke, you really do see that these aren’t real fans. More importantly (because it’s okay to just not be a fan of something), you can see that it takes literally nothing to outrage these people.
There’s a whole wonderful thread about people complaining that the show Invincible is woke trash. Reasons include “They made Amber black for no reason”, “They made Mark half-Asian for no reason”, and “Allen is voiced by Seth Rogan, a liberal Jew I hate for reasons that have nothing to do with him being a Jew”. Might I forget “Making the rock gangster [a black man named Titan] relatable and empathetic”?
I’m kind of glad most of these people are only content consumers and not content creators. I couldn’t imagine how bad their superhero fiction would be if they had the reins.
I guess that’s a good way to segue into the whole “bad writing” excuse. Because that’s the prevailing excuse. “We don’t hate women/minorities/LGBT in art! We just hate them being shoehorned in to force diversity and push an agenda! We just hate bad writing!”
Yes, I’m sure ComicsGate was really about forced diversity at the cost of story and character just as I’m sure GamerGate was really about ethics in video game journalism. That obfuscation has been around since people started posting videos about triggered feminazis trying to take away their video games about a decade ago.
Guys, that excuse doesn’t work if “bad writing” is what you shout every time you see a gay character.
The selective invocation of “just honest criticism” doesn’t work when it’s as nakedly transparent as raging online over a black little mermaid, raging online at the Resident Evil Netflix trailer for making the main characters “two black lesbians” (they were sisters), and raging online at being able to choose your pronouns in Starfield.
Here’s the thing: There’s lots to criticize in modern media. There’s always been lots to criticize. Superhero movies have become big budget affairs that cannot afford to take risks. These aren’t indie films. They have budgets in the hundreds of millions and can’t afford to deviate from what’s proven to work. So they end up feeling very recycled, throwing out the regurgitated plots and characters and lines from previous films.
But, for the anti-woke crowd, they think the problem is because it’s actually “the M-SHE-U”.
Superhero comics have a continuity problem that stems from longevity. After decades upon decades upon decades of characters inhabiting a shared world and death having no meaning due constant retcons, there’s not really a sense of weight behind anything. There was a big deal about Kamala Khan/Ms. Marvel being killed off in May 2023. She came back in July of that same year. The DC Universe has been rebooted multiple times in the past couple decades.
But, for the anti-woke crowd, what gets them mad is Jon Kent being bisexual and protested climate change in a non-canon panel.
Outside of superhero fiction for a second, I mentioned Starfield. I haven’t played it, but from what I know and if it’s like Bethesda’s other works, it’s a bug-ridden mess of a game set in a universe devoted of any interesting playable content. Like movies, video games have become big budget productions that risks can’t be taken on. Game developers have to play it safe, and that stifles creativity.
Instead, the anti-woke crowd cries about “FOOOOOOKING PRONOOOOOUUUNNS!!!!!!1111”
This thread complaining about how Starfield is woke (rather than an empty, soulless recycling of what came before by a studio that is creatively bankrupt) has this wonderful comment:
“It is a feminist power fantasy. Almost every character in charge is a woman (literary one of the first words uttered in the game is "Boss Lady"). Walking into the biggest faction in the game and the President is a woman, the Commander is a woman and the army general for the marines is a woman. Also funny when people say the ran across one gay guy when the first companion you meet who gives you your ship is gay (Barry).
I will be honest though in that I actually envy people who can walk through life with blindfolds and not notice a thing, just drool coming out of the side of the mouth, completely oblivious to everything and anything around them. You must even be able to enjoy the new Disney remakes where they cast a black ariel and remove the actual dwarfs from Snow White and the 7 Dwarfs.”
My dude, those Disney remakes you mention at the end weren’t made for you. I’m 99.9% sure you’re a grown man in your thirties or something. These movies are for elementary school children. Stop being so triggered.
Again, you don’t have to like everything. There’s a lot of bad art that gets produced, including superhero media. Sometimes it’s a bad writer, but a lot of it does have an underlying problem. Big budgets, risk-aversion, and executives and marketers that stifle the creativity of writers is a systemic problem in art and media. It’s why there is quite correctly a thirst for original superhero properties outside the Marvel/DC duopoly.
That’s not wokeness, guys. That’s capitalism.
I’m sure you all have strong opinions about people who take issue with capitalism.
And at the end of the day, it is capitalism. The anti-woke “fans” don’t have original opinions. They get their opinions from outrage channels on YouTube. TheQuartering has 1.86 million subscribers at the time of this writing. That means he’s likely making more than $1.4 million per year. When it comes to YouTube, outrage becomes views which becomes profit. So all these anti-woke content creators constantly manufacture fake outrage videos to keep you angry.
It keeps them rich.
And you fall for it. You find yourself angry about feminists and pronouns and Woke Hollywood and enraged by non-existent political agendas in works months away from release.
And you haven’t enjoyed a work of art in years.
And you sound like lunatics to everyone not seething in rage over “Mad Max: Feminist Road” or “Wokehammer”.
I guess that’s my message for you all who fall into this category. You don’t speak for a fed up silent majority. Everyone else is fine and thinks you’ve gone nuts. There have been plenty of great films and shows and games and comics in the past few years, the same as there are in every “past few years”. You are the ones incapable of enjoying everything because all you can and hear is “woke”.
The commenter who said he envied people “who can walk through life with blindfolds and not notice a thing, just drool coming out of the side of the mouth, completely oblivious to everything and anything around them”, that are able to enjoy Disney films? I genuinely pity people like that. People whose lives are so miserable and empty that the capacity for joy has completely eroded away.
I’m begging you to touch grass. Because this is not healthy. And, more so, because you’re all annoying.
Touch grass. Be less annoying.
Sincerely,
Everyone who still has the emotional capacity to enjoy great works of superhero–and non-superhero–art and fiction.
For exciting superhero fiction written by me, be sure to check out the BLUE EAGLE Universe!