Don't Like the Swill Produced by Hollywood? Then You're a Bad Person (Hollywood Says So!)

You know this is true, because Hollywood, in the form of the actors, the studios, the PR firms, and legacy media, and probably a few others I have forgotten, are ALL singing the same song. It's almost like it's a coordinated campaign to convince people to "Just consume product, and then get excited for next product."

If you dare to question the writing, acting, directing, whatever of a book, comic book, TV show, movie, or whatever, which includes the work of a person of color, or a gay, or lesbian, or whatever, you are not just a critic of popular culture. No! You are an -ist or a -phobe. Racist. Sexist. Homophobe. Whatever-phobe. You cannot have legitimate critique of anything done by a person in one of the protected classes. [In your best Gretta T. voice....] How dare you say anything bad!

Of course the Left has used that non-argument, also known as an ad hominum attack, so much, that it has lost (or is losing) its effect. Eminem had a song years ago, "The Way I Am" that includes the lyric, "I am whatever you say I am." In other words, fine. Call me names, and I will fall back on a childhood saying, "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me." Say whatever you want. No one cares what you say anymore. (Go read "The boy who cried 'Wolf'")

Politics is downstream of culture, and for far too long, The Right has abandoned culture to The Left. The Right is populated by serious people. They don't have time to worry about Comic Books, or Movies and TV, or Popular Music, or Video Games. The Right believes that teaching is not a valid occupation for someone on the Right. And so the culture is hosed, state-run education is communist indoctrination, and the country's politics are veering toward disaster. Well done, all of you serious-minded conservatives; you have conserved exactly nothing.

This video is an excerpt from a longer conversation between Critical Drinker, Mauler, Chris Gore, Ryan Kinnel, George the Giant Slayer, and the Movie Cynic. It is an interesting 18 minutes.

Studios are aware of the fact that crapping all over loved IPs is a bad business decision. They continue to do it anyway. When people call them on it, the are reduced to calling people names.

Critical Drinker reaches a market of several million subscribers. (He has few subs on the After Hours channel.) Chris Gore has been in the movie business since the 1980s. (Maybe the late 1970s, but I won't say that without looking.) They have all been called "toxic" because there are things that are produced in Hollywood, that they don't like.

This is the Critical Drinker After Hours video: Drinker's Chasers - Why The "Toxic Fandom" Excuse Stopped Working.

This argument of the Toxic Fanbase... it's so dated now and played out. It's like they've tried so many times to make this stick, and it never really has, because people just rip off it immediately, and just go "Nah, You're full of shit." People are just criticizing things that deserve to be criticized, and that's it. You can't guilt people into liking things, I'm afraid, and you can't guilt them into staying quiet when they know something sucks.

None of this makes any business sense. You pay billions of dollars for an Intellectual Property. In Star Wars case, it was 4 billion dollars. That IP came with a built in fan base, that went to see all of the movies, that bought all of the merchandise, and made you value that IP at whatever the purchase price was. Then, instead of creating something to please all of those people that made your property so valuable, you create something guaranteed to piss them off. Taika Waititi said that EXPLICITLY. He didn't care about this thing that hundreds of millions of people loved, and so he set out to crap all over it, and that's what he did. (I will NEVER watch another movie that Taika Waititi has any part in. I won't even watch them for free. He can stick his head where the sun don't shine.)

Then, after you tear down, what hundreds of millions of people loved, ripped it up to tell "your story" or "set it in the modern Los Angeles" that you see everyday, you shocked to discover that your billion dollar franchise is now worthless.

Doubt that? There was just a Star Wars game released by the French game studio Ubisoft, called Star Wars Outlaws. It is dying a (not so) slow death. There are problems with the game, but the reaction of the Star Wars fans were mostly, "This isn't star wars, no matter what you call it." There are more examples in the video above. If you click this link, Mauler and Az are joking about an "indie game company with $1 for development." Ubisoft reportedly spent $300 million on this game. (Mauler's reaction to the end of the game is priceless.)

If you didn't get the reference "Just consume product, and then get excited for next product," you are out of touch with popular culture.

I linked to Nerdrotic's clip with Mauler. He does have 9 hour video - under Every Frame a Pause Psycho - if you're interested.