Chuds think they want a show where the winningest winners win all the time because they’re good and special and better than the evil losers, though I think only the chuddiest of chuds would actually be entertained by that.

One of the biggest chuds in my biological family refused to acknowledge the director’s intended message and got into Heinlein’s satire-free original book version on top of that.

Another person that used to be in my older tabletop group credited the movie as his primary motivation to join the US military… as an intelligence officer.

Yes, just before he went off to academy, he described Arabs/Muslims as “bugs.”

“It’s not that deep bro”
“I agree. This is surface level, yet you still struggle with it”

What do you mean the author grew up during the Troubles in Ireland and has an intense disdain for religion, conservatism, and imperialism? Why can’t he just be non-political?

Adults In The Room that Make The Hard Decisions and Get Shit Done for the lanyard liberals, and Grizzled Middle Aged Man With Gun that must Avenge Fridged Wife and/or Rescue/Protect Camera-Sexualized Daughter Figure from The Others for the chuds. Everyone’s happy!

The chuddiest chuds thought the show (and Homelander!) were “based” until later seasons made them feel increasingly uncomfortable with that.

More people don’t do this. You don’t have to like every piece of media you see. It’s okay to not enjoy a popular album. Sometimes you just don’t vibe with something. As long as it’s not problematic with slurs, violence against women, etc. you don’t need to have an opinion on it.

So holy shit fuck off and find something else to enjoy. You don’t need to force yourself into becoming a WWE fan. And you especially don’t need to force yourself into the fandom and demand they make changes to suit your chud tastes.

A lot like the treat printers themselves, derivative slop needs something to derive from.

Capitalist Realism by Mark Fischer has a good explanation for why this happens.

In short, it’s ok to have some media criticism of Capitalism to diffuse any actual organizing against the system. Tabling is hard, but watching a greedy person get their just desserts is easier. Feels good without having to do anything!

All media critical of capitalism will eventually be subsumed by capitalism and sold back, capitalism’s great power is to absorb critique of itself, etc etc

People in general recognize the problem. They just want to be told they aren’t part of the problem, they’re the resistance.

It’s porky putting on a rainbow top hat to make people think they’re good

why a lot of media, particularly some in Hollywood seems to skew culturally leftward?

It’s not though?

With rare exceptions, it’s always been “we’ve been trying to do the right thing but sometimes we were too keen on bringing change to others that we make mistakes and things blow up in our faces and foreign countries ended up hating us, and unfortunately our freedom and democracy also means that sometimes it can be hijacked by bad guys (looking at you, Trump!) but at the end of the day, we’re really striving to do the right thing to bring peace and prosperity to the whole world and by critiquing our own mistakes, we hope to learn lessons from it.”

We got a Trump presidency not because our institutions have failed, but because bad people like Trump took advantage of the system. The CIA was trying to do the right thing, especially to defend our democracy from evil Putinist KGB, but sometimes we made the mistake by thinking that assassinating corrupt evil dictators will bring change faster to the oppressed people. We are portraying them as such so we can learn from our mistakes.

It’s always focused more on the personalities than the institutions, more “Trump-like figures hijacked our democratic institutions” and not so much “our system is producing Trump-like figures”.

Liberal capitalists love this because it allows them to alleviate the guilt of being complicit in the crimes of capitalism.

Think about it economicaly, studio execs know that the boomer white racist population is not that big and pandering to them is preaching to the choir in a church full of corpses.

No matter what it makes economic sense to always pander to the younger generation to make sure you have a growing market.

George Lucas’s problem is his obvious lack of talent but he was a very important landmark, by explicitly saying “hey the biggest hollywood franchise needs younger fans yesterday!”. The last 20 years is basically hollywood realizing this demographic shift, its not 1965 anymore and you absolutely can’t pretend some cracker in the south is representative of the entire population or even the majority.

Demographically these crazy chud middle class whites are not more than 50% of the population, not even close in fact. It doesn’t make that much sense to alienate the majority. They’re the niche market instead.

While there may be the obvious economic difference and white middle class have a lot more money this doesn’t matter when buying a movie ticket is not like financing a $500k home.

It makes perfect sense for media to reflect the changing US demographics and specialy the urbanization and rural vs urban division in political views.

In addition to what others have said, I think a lot of people in Hollywood are leftwing, but lack theory. They’re trying to disseminate leftwing ideas, but don’t realize how entryism doesn’t work. They will tiptoe around execs (who are mostly a bunch incompetent of failsons with zero media literacy) to get projects made.

One of the examples that comes to mind was Dalton Trumbo, an openly communist writer who was blacklisted during McCarthy. But he had a lot of friends in Hollywood who liked working with him, so they helped him by giving him a pseudonym on projects or coming to his defense in court.

Stanley Kubrick would help Trumbo get back in the open with Spartacus, starring Kirk Douglas. It’s not like Douglas became a tankie Maoist, but he did have positive things to say about Trumbo and his writing. Douglas’ son is Michael Douglas, married to Catherine Zeta Jones. Again, they aren’t die-hard communists, but they at least have enough connection to a leftist to have some leftwing ideas.

tl;dr-- there used to be a bunch of commies in Hollywood until McCarthyism, but some of the sentiment is still present because LA is a small town.

It’s a pressure valve on capitalism, sort of like “ironic” Che shirts.

Art leans left. The suits role is to keep that leftism from getting too overt, while raking in the money.

Another aspect: The common theme of the universe naturally leading to the resolution of injustices is a very addictive form of hopium that lulls individuals into inaction in real life. Like a lot of underdog stories. It really doesn’t matter if the fictional baddies are right-wingers, so long as the content prevents everyone from doing anything about the real life baddies.

And a final aspect: Who needs to be portrayed as good when they’re rich and powerful? It’s mostly people who rely on other people - rather than the privileges of money - who benefit by being good. The system already protects the rich. So when many people get rich, they stop caring what others think about them. It doesn’t matter for their own quality of life anymore. And then people come along and want to to make a rich studio exec a lot more money by creating a show where the rich person’s likeness is a baddie? The execs know that formula sells like hot cakes - easy deal!

Dibs on Fahrenheit 451 to be the leftist 1984…because I’d rather not sound like a eugenicist when chuds are doing chud shit by comparing it to idiocracy.

“Literally Fahrenheit 451.” rolls off the tongue kinda.

You just brought back deep memories by referencing that movie.

“The curtains were fucking blue” anti-analysis ideology and its consequences.