The Totalitarian Prime Directive is simple: Permit no escape. After all, the evidence is copious that oppressed and subjugated people will flee if they can. Therefore, the totalitarian must block all escape routes, station men with guns at each of them, and shoot those who attempt to breach them as an example to others. Stories of such events at the borders of Communist countries are many. Survivors of those regimes often tell stories of aborted escapes. If the regime can keep its subjects despite their enormous desire to escape, its power will be secure against anything but invasion and conquest by a stronger power.
In our era, escape has come to mean something more than physical removal from oppressive circumstances. It often refers to a mental refuge from such conditions. Large industries have grown highly profitable by supplying people with such escapes. Fantasy and science fiction, superhero comics, movies made from such tales, video games and conventions for fans are all examples thereof. They provide a dollop of relief to those who need it…and a fanciful kind of hope, as well.
Today’s mental oppressors march under the flag of “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.” This has been called “woke” doctrine. Like “physical” totalitarians, they seek to close off all escape, such that there’s nowhere for anyone to turn for a respite from their demands. But the task is difficult, for it involves combatting market forces whose heft is measured in tens of billions of dollars. So rather than destroy those mental refuges, the dictators of “woke” have striven to pollute them.
I wrote about this some time ago, in connection with the “woke” assault on video gaming. But it’s also present in fantasy and science fiction, in comic books, and in the movies:
As you may have heard from our own Lincoln Brown or our friends at Twitchy and Hot Air, a new Star Wars movie is in the works, featuring everyone’s “favorite” Mary Sue, Rey ‘Skywalker’ Palpatine (poor Daisy Ridley, having to play such a hated character).
And of course, its new director, Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, is a perfect example of DEI: a Pakistani woman who proudly wants to “make men uncomfortable” and somehow forgot several of the most pivotal characters in the Star Wars saga were female (Leia, her mother Padme Amidala, Ahsoka Tano, just to name a few).
As Lincoln said, Disney isn’t trying anymore, just reanimating the corpse of a beloved IP they killed. Not even for the money (every movie they’ve been putting out in the past few years seems to be getting more and more woke, and they flopped harder than FIFA players), but seemingly out of sadism.
It’s not pure sadism. It’s an attempt to pollute the refuge the quintessentially escapist “Star Wars” movies offer to their fans. If the dictators of “woke” can render such hiding-places for our minds as unappetizing as the increasingly oppressive reality around us, they will be better enabled to impose their creed on us. We won’t have a redoubt from which to resist them.
The counter-agent to such invasions is the loss of revenue. Disney has already suffered greatly for its prior sins…but apparently not enough to force its masters to correct their course. Whether Disney will break before “Star Wars’s” fans, we must wait to see.
I could go on, for the examples of this sort of infiltration of heroic and escapist entertainment are many. But the point will stand as it is.
Fortunately, my chosen perch – independently-produced and published fiction – cannot be subverted this way. Indie writers and artists still make escapism and heroism available in quantity to anyone who seeks them. There’s also a steadily increasing community of indie moviemakers, who purvey their offerings largely through the Web. Whatever other sins may lie at Amazon’s doorstep, we have those outlets for relief. Pray that the dictators of “woke” don’t find an effective weapon against them.
5 comments
Skip to comment form
Interesting article, I wasn’t aware that Disney decided to drive the franchise into the proverbial bridge abutment at 100mph by putting a pajita behind the wheel.
The only movie from the previous string of tripe that I not only enjoyed, but was the subject of a few articles written by military people (hit up “An infantry officers assessment of Rogue One.”) was “Rogue One”. “The force awakens” was nothing more than a reboot of the original “Star wars” and horribly done at that. Weak characters, no plot and a rehash of material from forty something years ago. There were a few funny moments though, “You’re making a landing approach at light speed?!?” was one.
One of the bigger stories in relation to this that never gets mentioned is the fact that the team that were responsible for “Game of Thrones” were approached by Disney and offered the portfolio for the next installment of the franchise. Benioff and Weiss – the team responsible for GOT publicly stated how thrilled they were at being asked to join the project, adding that they grew up on the original “Star wars” and that it has always meant a lot to them.
According to sources at the meeting where Disney officials were to pitch them their ideas of where they wanted to take the franchise next, both Benioff and Weiss walked out of the meeting disgusted after about thirty minutes. That speaks volumes.
Nailed it in your last paragraph. It’s not just polluting the IP: they’re seeking to kill off our HEROES. Why take down statues of the Founders and Confederate leaders? Patriots look up to those guys: they had balls. Positive examples of bravery and other virtues that, emulated by their enemies, would be dangerous to them.
Thus, Luke Skywalker must be made into a sulky defeatist green alien milk-drinking coward who would attempt to murder his nephew because he had a bad dream he’d turn to the Dark Side. Same Luke who risked everything to redeem his father who was the MAIN ENFORCER for the Dark Side!
And thus the clown parade marches through popular fiction: Captain America betrays America and join Hydra. Other superheroes are replaced by gender-and-race swapped dopplegangers who beat you over the head all day with their Woke ideology. And to top it off, when their audience turns their noses up at their new offerings for being the pile of shit that they are, it’s WE who are to blame for not being sophisticated enough to appreciate it.
One franchise / fictional “battlefield” where they’ve been trying hard to get a beachhead (and being crushed mercilessly by the fans with memes) is the Warhammer franchise published by Games Workshop. We have our own problems with GW overpricing their models and otherwise squeezing their consumers for cash, but they haven’t debauched their IP yet. Warhammer is troublesome for them (especially 40K) because it includes stuff like:
* A grey-and-black Crapsack World where Humanity, despite being brutal and oppressive in most cases (don’t piss off the Inquisition, they won’t think twice about nuking your planet), and “fascists” led by religious fanatics devoted to a God Emperor are arguably still the closest thing to “good guys” existing in the grim darkness of the far future…
* Exclusively male chapters of bio-engineered Space Marines (“Astartes”) – there’s been a big push by whiny feminists who don’t even play the games for “female Astartes” which has been laughed out of existence by the fans. I guess they don’t like the Sisters of Battle (“Sororitas”) because they’re a bunch of religious fanatics who reverently burn heretics, traitors and mutants in their devotion to the God Emperor.
* Humanity’s Intolerance of Xenos: be they the barbaric and destructive Orks, the haughty and inscrutable Eldar, or the scheming (supposedly do-gooding) Tau, Humanity’s first impulse is to purge with bolter, chainsword and flamer first, and not ask questions later.
* Slaanesh, the Genderqueer Chaos God of Pleasure and Excess, is most DEFINITELY a Big Bad, and following him/her has nasty, nasty consequences (Slaanesh was born from the decadence, perversion and excesses of the Eldar empire and quite literally consumed their souls and ate a big chunk of the Galaxy in the process, forming the “Eye of Terror” where the Warp (basically Hell itself) meshes with normal space, and the Eldar were reduced to refugees or twisted into sadistic, murderous Drukhari…
I could go on and on… still, there’s a lot of signs of hope in our pushback against these forces trying to subvert, taint and pollute our beloved heroic IP’s. Right now Henry Cavill is working on launching a 40K cinematic universe / TV shows, and signs are so far positive that it’ll stay true to the IP!
https://spikeybits.com/2023/12/henry-cavill-set-to-star-produce-in-warhammer-movies-tv.html
I heard this yesterday and there may be the initial purchase of tickets when it hits the big screen but I had a different reaction to her statement of “I want to make men uncomfortable”. She comes from a very repressive culture. How many years was she repressed, abused, at least in spirit, put down and possibly even more because she was a “female” and therefore inferior. She’ll get her moment in the sun and will be nothing more at the end but a footnote as the one who tanked the Star Wars collection beyond redemption.
I suspect her “culture” has little to do with her misandry. She most likely grew up a spoiled brat in Karachi and, because she was so abused and misused, got to come to the US to attend the dyke factory known as Smith College. Likely it was there she was able to realize how men pressed their boot heels upon her fat reptilian face. Then, being so repressed and oppressed, she was able to get two Masters degrees from Stanford, where her mind was fully opened to how toxic masculinity had poisoned all of her opportunities in life. This toad then somehow received six Emmys and an Academy award, most certainly because of all the other cucks in Hollywood who felt so badly for the repression she surely suffered before being lifted from the mire in America. I’m sick of these people and those who purport to relate to their mental illnesses.
Wouldn’t it be fun if some dude with $$$$$ picked up either the Weber “Honor” universe books or maybe Drakes’ “Slammers” or Dicksons’ “Dorsai” and built a franchise around those. Especially the Honor series. Woksters’ heads would exploide. Hell there are tons of really good SF out there waiting to done right that would pull audiences in. “Course as Correia pointed out a while back crappywood has no intention of following any story they pick up. . .