BurtReynolds wrote:Got Some wrote:IMHO We have been in this so called “woke” era for a while lbh.
It doesn’t stop great art being produced.
It just seems the common way to say something has wasn’t your taste/story changing direction.
- We have been in it awhile (really began to explode on the society around 2008 or so). We seem to be stuck in time.
- It doesn't stop great art (or just popular entertainment), but it certainly makes it harder and more rare. There are certainly other factors at work, but it's had a destructive effect on the American movie, game and book industries.
- People misuse the term for that, but I assure you that I don't mean "that wasn't to my taste" when I call something woke.
But it does get fuzzy
Earlier you gave a pretty good dictionary definition of the term. But the more relevant (and complicated) question is, okay, what does that actually look like in a piece of art?
Because for as clearheaded as we all seem to be here on the Red Mosquito web forums, out in the world it's not quite so clear-cut. What's woke for someone is innocuous for somebody else, and vice versa. Some people go way overboard. I've seen posts that suggest that just having a minority in a lead role is enough to call something woke. You see it in responses to trailers a lot, where just the presence of certain identities is enough to trigger indignant cries of wokeness, stripped of any context or supposed ideological bent.
And I think even in cases where it appears to be less ambiguous, it's inherently messy because to declare it woke you have to make assumptions about intent. And in other cases, when something exhibits traits that get called woke but some ragebaiters
enjoy the thing, they will pretzel-logic explanations about how the thing is actually not woke. It's messy, and there's debate around it.
Woke really is in the eye of the beholder
