| Wow. Fascinating that you're unable to see them, but I guess I also read about people in Russia not seeing anything amiss about their media so I shouldn't be shocked. Here's a handful of "woke" things I've grown tired of, more because they're such overused cliches or unrealistic things that break my suspension of disbelief than any opposition (I'm a far left, pro-LGBT+, progressive atheist feminist to disclose any biases), but in no particular order: Every show having an "overcoming sexism" or "overcoming racism" narrative, where inevitably a white guy is the evil villain who underestimates, mistreats or is unfair to the protagonist and then the female/poc character gets to overcome this systemic injustice. (Sometimes this is central to the whole show, sometimes it feels like just an obligatory scene in an otherwise unrelated story). Casts that have an unrealistic "forced diversity" element. You might call it token representation, but if the scene is a random office in middle-America and the 6 characters are 6 different races or when each character is designed specifically to be the inverse of a stereotype, it makes the show feel less authentic and genuine. Related is changing characters from existing stories to be more diverse according to contemporary American notions of identity. Men being depicted as so absurdly rapey, or the general overuse of sexual harassment or threatening behavior. Exaggerations of nepotism, sexism and racism in most shows. As to your question of "whats wrong or what should be done differently", I think there are a few challenges. For instance, we all sort of accept action movies being full of guns and explosions while recognizing they're not at all representative of reality. However, there does seem to be some evidence that these movies contribute to European misunderstanding and to greatly overestimating the likelihood of encountering gun violence in America. The current set of media might bias a generation of young women to fear there's a rapist in every room and that every career disappointment is a manifestation of systemic discrimination. An easy parallel might be looking at the over-use of depictions of Black men as gang members, drug dealers or criminals in 1980s and 1990s Hollywood. Any one particular movie scene or tv show might be fine on its own with such a character, but when similar characters and scenes show up in dozens of unrelated titles and as a disproportionate representation it becomes problematic. It's different groups now being the recurring villains, recurring fools, etc, but it's the same fundamental issue. |