Jawsphobia: March 2021

Regardless of the initial intent or officially stated meaning, liberal can be equated with sanity and woke with insanity according to how the terms are used. If you say something in error and someone fact-checks it or restores context, the deflection might be to call the correction "mansplaining" or "whitesplaining." When talking about movies and setting straight the current problems with pop culture, the expected response from yahoos on Twitter or from twits on Yahoo might be to deflect it as "fansplaining" or more likely to get out the big guns and make the leap to Toxic fan, Alt. Right, or sexist Nazi. Taken in large doses, the current culture can push people from the moderate middle to the fringe where they have no genuine interest in being. Calling out corporate spin is more vital than ever. One of the first things to have been removed from high school curriculums was any kind of media studies to prepare people for looking beyond the sales pitches they are fed. The powers that be do not want people thinking for themselves. They may still be fooled into thinking that is what they are doing when they choose Coke or Pepsi. Someone you know and love has voted for the wrong person, so do you acknowledge that there is still a passing grade on the score card or much overlap on your Venn diagram or do you exile them for a disagreement? It is important to know that Warner Brothers made a compromised version of Justice League and then did not want anyone to see the evidence of how much better the abandoned vision would have been, so when AT & T took over and greenlit Zack Snyder completing his cut of that movie to promote HBO Max and it was celebrated and well received its success was enough embarassment for some Warner executives that their next move was to try to distract from it and throw shade at the fans who pleeded ReleastheSnyderCut, fans who were called racist as one lump group defined by inarticulate outliers on-line despite the efforts of these potential customers to raise money for charity and also despite the increased diversity representation in the Snyder Cut. Whether or not movie studios can be directly connected to the rash of disparagement campaigns besetting youtube pundits critical of current trends, it is worth saying that consumers and customers represented by the more critical voices are valid market feedback that could be taken as data to improve and course correct the missteps of cinema especially. The hastage TheFandomMenace, a loose moniker for those who are vocal about pop culture losing its way, is made up of many principled individuals who are simply frank about what they like (Luke Skywalker's cameo in the season two finale of The Mandalorian) and what they do not (Lucasfilm's removal of Gina Carano and her character Cara Dune from the same show and other planned related series ostensibly for a shared meme but actually for voting Republican). So an action star has some degree of right-wing or conservative opinions. Stop the press. This is thought to be a strategic move to throw a monkey wrench into Jon Favreau's plans for the only Lucasfilm live action output the fans actually like. A recent hit piece attributed to Rewriting Ripley (short form Re-Ri) painted a number of popular youtubers with a defamatory wide brush. They succeeded because tags will bring up the article and video when those youtube channels are searched. Someone also went to the trouble of manipulating imdb credits to connect many pundits to the Fandom Menace as if that were a production company and not just a catchy term for disgruntled audience members. At the end of 2017 the release of Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi caused an exudus of half the built-in fanbase, to an extent that five months later when Solo: A Star Wars Story was released fewer people wanted to support it. Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy and her Lucasfilm Story Group as well as her other loyalists disrespect their core demographic in favor of trying to lure and pander to those for whom empty virtue signaling is enough. The false conceit being pushed is that youtubers are significantly more influential that their millions of dollars in marketing budgets and studio connections to mainstream media, popular talk shows who want name guests, and famous people like Kevin Smith who do podcasts in the same space and lean toward promotion of new content. Many blogs and websites that had sprung up to report the crazy misdeeds of the 45th President of the United States have less scandal to draw clicks and so they are mining the so-called Culture Wars. They may resent Fandom Menace and affiliated or like-minded youtubers with better subscriber numbers and view counts, even when youtuber criticism of their columns draws activity to their own sites. Smith's co-host Marc Bernardin, a writer for Star Trek Discovery season 2, is to the left of him physically and politically. He has used the term "Trojan horsing" as if it is a positive practice - using a popular brand as a front and sneaking in more woke elements. A better term for it is counterfeit. Millionaires talked of drinking "fanboy tears" when Paul Feig declaired his reboot of Ghostbusters the future of that brand, and when it underperformed (because activists can't be counted on and old fans should not be taken for granted), eventually it got retro-booted back to the original continuity and the angry tears were coming from the handful of FeigBusters boosters including cast member Leslie Jones who called it a Trump move. After the Covid-19 pandemic, with some theater chains closed and with some people possibly reticent about crowding into a movie theater after being acclimatized to physical media and streaming at home, it is less reasonable to expect a billion dollar box office on a two hundred million dollar budget and whatever is invested in marketing. This is a poor time to alienate a huge portion of the potential audience. For film studios with tremendous reach and resources to play victim and demonize the average moviegoers whose enthusiasm for brands of the past helped build their apparent value is nuclear meltdown level toxicity. It is less about the stated objective of broadening the audience to all cultures - who themselves will have divisive tastes and priorities - than taking something away from the perceived bro demographic that had been used to being satisfied, if only thirty years before. The Marvel Comics books division of Disney, as opposed to the Cinematic Universe, is run by more aggressively woke people. (DC Comics cleaned house to a degree when AT & T took over as parent company.) Modern Marvel comics has been continuing the misguided choices that ComicGate had questioned. Lando Calrissian is being put forward as an icon of LBGTQ because reporters embraced the suggestion (encouraged by Jon Kasdan) that the character might be pansexual, particularly due to banter with his robot. Jon's father, co-writer of Solo Lawrence Kasdan, was less committal and said the banter could mean nothing. Billy Dee Williams shot it down as making a big deal about a little moment with a droid and then when he referred to Brian's Song as a love story woke media ran with a misinterpretation that he was claiming to be bisexual. He then had to spoon feed them about Carl Jung's concept of anima and animus and how people can have characteristics of either gender without being gay. Nevertheless, that did not stop Marvel comics from doubling down on the character's ret-con. The trilogy of Lando novels from the Eighties and any other appearances in books and comics over the decades could have hinted at rainbow identity but it did not. And Han Solo is being spun in the new comics as if his smuggling was a facad and he was an idealist and activist all along. Utter garbage of woke imposition. Again, taking away and not building anything new. Rumors about a "more powerful than Vader" character for Brie Larson in an upcoming Star Wars show (maybe the ill-conceived Acolyte, run by Harvey Weinstein's former assistant) seem to be a troll of the fanbase who typically have some sort of aversion to Brie Larson and her lip service to diversity and her self-congratulatory interviews. If studios are this antagonistic toward the demographic that actually pays to see things and buys merchandise, the current leadership is very bad for business. There is nothing more toxic than the entitled hashtag wokesters who cheered the loss of Gina Carano or were triggered by the sight of her on The Mandalorian because whe would not put gender pronouns into a Twitter, or has the political bent of Chuck Norris.