Watching the Bones series and some of the new shows like Fallout and The Wheel of Time etc I realised something important!

In Bones the writers obviously have a centre conservative bent, so they depict what the state does as fundamentally right and any injustices that happen or evil things are the results of malcontents and bad apples perverting that sacred system.

In new things like the WHeel of Time, Fallout etc they erase “racial”, gender, and ethnic divisions that would normally exist and pretend that anyone in their world who is racist, sexist, or bigoted is just a bad apple or a malcontent.

In all these cases they CAN'T show society or the systems being at fault, it HAS to only be the fault of crazed, evil individual people.


That's problematic
The state, the system, society and people in general CAN all be in the wrong about things and often are. Injustice, corruption, racism, sexisim etc are more often part of the culture rather than individuals and those that fight against those negatives are the exceptional ones, not normal people.

By showing these things the wrong way it's a type of propaganda. The more you're exposed to it the more you start to misundertsand the world, history and past popculture that's not distorted in the same ways.
-though past pop-culture WAS distorted in various ways of course:
To show that socity was whiter than it really was (in Eglish speaking countries), sexisim the the gender divide was the norm, the state was always right, and so on. It usually reflected the feelings of people at the time, but sometimes it shoowed what they “wanted” to be true rather than what was (i.e the whiteness).

Now in something where they really DO work on the setting in a smart way like Star Trek the Next Generation they can justifiably get rid of some of those issues, even so they STILL have them crop up and treat them as institutional issues rather than JUST problems with bad apples.

Maybe I'm all wrong in this? Maybe I'M the bad apple? XD

You are correct. A lot of TV series go with what could be called the Archie Bunker trope. Bigotry doesn't stem from society. It's all from bigots.
Many times you can usually figure those shows are predominantly created, produced and written by white males. They aren't quite aware of society's role in all this or don't make an effort to depict it beyond individual bigots.

I can take a long view on how much things have changed since I first started paying attention. And I've been a curmudgeon for decades.

Part of the problem is that people generally tend to believe that their own moral standards are the “natural” ones, and when one takes away this carpet from below people's feet this creates a lot of philosophical problems.

For example, in our society we generally believe that women have the same rights than men, and we regard societies when this wasn't true as weird social constructions. It is true that old gender roles are social constructions, but so are modern ones (basically everything or almost everything is a social construction).

So when one writes a story in a setting where, e.g., there are strong “traditional” social roles so that a woman can never be a warrior, it is almost natural to have all characters in the story somehow perceiving this as an injustice, because our social norms are threated as the natural ones.

In some sense this is problematic, but on the other hand it is natural to have at least the good guys in a story behave in ways that, for us, are acceptable, and anyway often a media story is not the place to have complex philosophical arguments about how much of morality is relative and if there is at least a kernal of “objective” morality.

That said, I remember that when the movie “The Gladiator” came out, it was a big success, but I hated it, and one of the reason was that e.g. all romans seemed to have the same moral values of a modern american and, e.g., when a slave fights in the arena against the emperor, they root for the slave (if they were all that pro slaves, they probably wouldn't have liked gladiator shows to begin with).

By showing these things the wrong way it's a type of propaganda. The more you're exposed to it the more you start to misundertsand the world, history and past popculture that's not distorted in the same ways.

You had some interesting thoughts there, I can also agree with a lot, but I'm afraid this is the same way anyone else tries to justify censoring and banning certain types of fiction from all kinds of mediums, regardless of reason or alignment. Our children mustn't be exposed to it, you mustn't be exposed to it, society collectively mustn't be exposed to it, because it's dangerous. The very trend you're describing is partially a result of a lot of people getting really angry and loud about how people with serious character flaws being portrayed in sympathetic ways (in other words, not as villains and such) is to be called out and buried. I think any trend that shapes our etertainment is dangerous if the very basis of that trend is that we're incapable to draw our own conclusions so we need to be sheltered from certain ideas and force-fed others. It's sad, that some people cross so easily from valid criticism (what you're doing) to making sure their personal dislikes in tv get to disappear for all.

It seems to me a bit as if those writers were afraid of repercussions. Let's invent a world where women and girls are basically treated as commodities, this is to say things you can buy and sell, if you've got the wrong skin colour, you're a subhuman only fit for menial work and in what family someone is born into decides what they are and what their career will be.
The common way of proceeding would be highlighting the injustice of it all, our heroes and heroines fighting for a better world and finding lots and lots of allies in all social strata. Marcorossi is quite right.
But what if we were to take a more realistic approach: just about everyone in this world has lived with this all their lives and considers this normal and natural? Anyone who talks about injustice there will get a sound thrashing and that's that. That is, we assume that every reader in their right mind will already know this is bad and unjust, so we can focus on other things - like the way the limitations set by such a society hinder progress. I can imagine that this could be a fine example of dramatic irony at its most biting: readers will want to go into the pages and hit the main character in the face for constantly shooting himself in the foot in such (to us) stupid ways and since this doesn't work they can just appreciate it with a bittersweet grin.
The whole thing may very much read like an 18th/19th century adventure novel converted to modern style, by the way (and books from that time should indeed be great sources on how the kind of world I described shapes people's behaviour and thinking). However, we also make clear that this is set in the future, possibly not even a classic post-apocalyptic one, as we want this to be the clever kind of dystopia.

This is where many authors obviously fear shitstorms because it's nearly guaranteed that some people will read it as approving of this kind of society, and they will do so because they want to, so no amount of storytelling skill will change their opinion. I think it happened before.

German authors have a problem with that, too, because if you set anything in WWII and it isn't a historic tretise, you'll have to portray Nazis as fundamentally evil (and what they did really was) or you'll get in trouble for promoting “anti-constitutional sentiments”. So showing their human side is tricky - after all, the thing to realise is that most people don't want to think of themselves as the evil ones and will make all kinds of psychological leaps to maintain this. Normal people living their normal lives would keep telling themselves that it can't be nearly as bad as the (outlawed but nevertheless listened-to in the basement) BBC tells them, we're all human, right? They did. This is because it all worked. It's however a fundamentally human thing to do, not an evil one. This might be an important message for today's times - I'm looking at Russia here for instance.

I'm ranting again… Let me just finish by saying it takes confidence and spine to address loaded issues that matter, like sexism, racism, modern forms of slavery, fanaticism, and so on. However in the modern media landscape the very quality of having a spine (and, even worse, balls) is discouraged by the very people who see issues like the ones I named as a personal crusade. Oh the real-life dramatic irony!

PaulEberhardt is that why Generation War was considered so controversial?

You could do a movie where slavery is considered normal but it has to be the antebellum South and you have to have abolitionists in there and the slaves can never be depicted as content or happy with their life unless it's portrayed as a type of resistance to their masters.
The 1970s miniseries Roots is seen by some as being too easy on slavery. Chicken George is too content with his position.
And then there's Gone with Wind and how Song of the South is banned in the US (along with a few of Shirley Temple movies like The Littlest Rebel where Bojangles Robinson is a happy slave and then has doubts about being a free man! And he dances with his former master's granddaughter!)

Well, modern and contemporary TV is definitely a reflection of the times we live in, and in this day and age, yeah, it's the conservatives and right-leaning people who invoke their very privilege to turn a blind eye to these things and pretend they don't exist; it's one of the reasons why certain states like Florida are banning the teaching of Critical Race Theory in schools, and why they're banning certain books that deal with these subjects - even required reading of literary classics like TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, among others.

bravo1102 wrote:
PaulEberhardt is that why Generation War was considered so controversial?

Yes, it certainly is. There is this concept of the entire German people being loaded with irredeemable guilt, kind of like our own original sin. So portraying normal people as victims of a totalitarian system and its propaganda rather than active perpetrators doesn't sit too well with some (usually left-wing) groups, and they, along with others, denounced the series as an attempt at exoneration. That it didn't show any concentration camp from the inside - because most normal people back then wouldn't have been let near one either - was another point of criticism.

And that's just my point: it doesn't actually try to exonerate anyone, just because it doesn't try to rub in the guilt either! It just tries to tell things as they were. The series focuses on how it was in the first place possible for a whole people to make themselves guilty of tacitly supporting horrible crimes against humanity (or of course actively committing them in a frighteningly large number of cases), instead of fighting the dictatorship that held them captive and kept them in a naive childlike state. That's just what the other half of the critics praised it for.

Much of the criticism must have been quite predictable, so the makers of Generation War took a risk. I'm glad they did, as most others don't.

The Arrowverse show Legends of Tomorrow was horrible offender of this.

They went back in time to the 1950's, in the middle of the Civil Rights movement. The plan is to kill Vandal Savage and get out without being noticed. The leaders plan is to:

Send the inter-racial couple to go house shopping and integrate into the local, all-white, community.

Send the Black teenager to go hit on the white teenage girl.

Have the lesbian go hit on the other lesbian.

I do not think they understand what subterfuge is…

Ozoneocean wrote:
Watching the Bones series and some of the new shows like Fallout and The Wheel of Time etc I realised something important!

In Bones the writers obviously have a centre conservative bent, so they depict what the state does as fundamentally right and any injustices that happen or evil things are the results of malcontents and bad apples perverting that sacred system.

I can't stand shows like Bones or CSI due to the fact they painted those who don't fall lockstep into a conservative view of adulthood as not people with different ideals, interests, sexualities, etc, etc can be functional adults that gravitate towards people of their own interest/beliefs but sick, twisted, broken, misguided, miscreant, wrong and don't deserve to exist or needed to be locked away.

The bloody CSI Furry episode still gets brought up to me by my ultraconservative aunt, and I HATE that show for it.

Anyway, I do want to add in something my mom pointed out about Bewitched, a show she loves but has a problem with at times.
Darin forces Samantha to convert to his lifestyle, no more witchcraft or magic and at times no relatives. He considered it wrong and abnormal so it was forbidden, sure the show often played it off as comedy and the magic just came about anyway but it was something mom brought was kind of messed up really.

But that's a lot of sitcoms really, and at times hearing what was excepted in the past is very, very disturbing.

On a similar topic, at times I feel kind of guilty trying to handle some more sensitive topics like classism, racism and how propaganda can screw people up an society can be kind of messed up at times even with best of intentions, and I wish I was a better writer so I can handle them more openly but I didn't want to ignore something like that either, and I loath a lot of furry fiction that just boils down things to “all Carnivores vs all herbivores except for the main characters”.

I feel like I'm tooting my own horn because at times I did try to figure out why one group would be put where, how did these groups wound up hating each other, why is this group suppressed or how these jerks took advantage of a different group for a long time before it blew up in their faces.

I feel like I'm talking out of my ass.

But I do want to say this, thank gods every day the internet exist because it connected so many of us “degenerates” and peeled away the falsehood of “normalcy” and honestly exposed so much actual nastiness in the past between the racism, the classism, the child neglect, the openly operating predators and so much more.

Furwerk studio wrote:
Anyway, I do want to add in something my mom pointed out about Bewitched, a show she loves but has a problem with at times.
Darin forces Samantha to convert to his lifestyle, no more witchcraft or magic and at times no relatives. He considered it wrong and abnormal so it was forbidden, sure the show often played it off as comedy and the magic just came about anyway but it was something mom brought was kind of messed up really.

That is totally wrong. It was Samantha's choice to give up her magical lifestyle for Darrin because she loved him so much, that was the whole point of the show's premise: being a witch with magical, supernatural powers, Samantha could've had any man in the world, had everything she ever wanted at the twitch of a her nose, but Darrin, a mere mortal, was so special to her, she wanted him instead of anything she could ever have. Yeah, this upset Endora, and much of the rest of their family, who saw Samantha as basically throwing her whole life away to marry a mere mortal, it'd be the equivalent of a billionnaire heiress throwing away her entire family's fortune all so she could marry some lowerclass, poverty-stricken, blue collar worker . . . but that was the whole theme of the show, that love knew no bounds.

And yes, Darrin didn't want Samantha to use her magic, but it had nothing to do with what he saw as wrong, abnormal, or unacceptable. The was an entire episode that explored this: he had an underlying, albeit rational fear that if Samantha's true identity had been exposed, and everybody knew she was a witch, that they would in turn start taking advantage of her, exploiting her powers for their own personal, selfish gain, and maybe even try to take her away from him, which he didn't want . . . Dick York himself even said this was Darrin's true concern about Samantha using her magic.

Sadly, none of this translate well to today's contemporary sensibilities, and since people in this day and age really don't take the time to read between the lines, and look into a show's subtext, they miss the big takeaway from whatever message the show has.

J_Scarbrough wrote:

Furwerk studio wrote:
Anyway, I do want to add in something my mom pointed out about Bewitched, a show she loves but has a problem with at times.
Darin forces Samantha to convert to his lifestyle, no more witchcraft or magic and at times no relatives. He considered it wrong and abnormal so it was forbidden, sure the show often played it off as comedy and the magic just came about anyway but it was something mom brought was kind of messed up really.

That is totally wrong. It was Samantha's choice to give up her magical lifestyle for Darrin because she loved him so much, that was the whole point of the show's premise: being a witch with magical, supernatural powers, Samantha could've had any man in the world, had everything she ever wanted at the twitch of a her nose, but Darrin, a mere mortal, was so special to her, she wanted him instead of anything she could ever have. Yeah, this upset Endora, and much of the rest of their family, who saw Samantha as basically throwing her whole life away to marry a mere mortal, it'd be the equivalent of a billionnaire heiress throwing away her entire family's fortune all so she could marry some lowerclass, poverty-stricken, blue collar worker . . . but that was the whole theme of the show, that love knew no bounds.

And yes, Darrin didn't want Samantha to use her magic, but it had nothing to do with what he saw as wrong, abnormal, or unacceptable. The was an entire episode that explored this: he had an underlying, albeit rational fear that if Samantha's true identity had been exposed, and everybody knew she was a witch, that they would in turn start taking advantage of her, exploiting her powers for their own personal, selfish gain, and maybe even try to take her away from him, which he didn't want . . . Dick York himself even said this was Darrin's true concern about Samantha using her magic.

Sadly, none of this translate well to today's contemporary sensibilities, and since people in this day and age really don't take the time to read between the lines, and look into a show's subtext, they miss the big takeaway from whatever message the show has.

Huh.
Interest outlook, and kind of makes sense.
Honestly I'm more of a Munsters kind of guy, and basically listen to mom rant about that topic when it comes up…
Anyway, you did bring up a real good counter argument thought, and will think about it later on.

THE MUNSTERS was another great show; I try to binge it every October, but having a “real job” now doesn't really give me the time for such anymore. I find that despite how kooky, wacky, and far-out the premise and humor was, the overall show still holds up very, very well, given the core message of family . . . which in and of itself was something Fred Gwynne and Al Lewis took issue with in the second season.

The first season had more emphasis on the family aspect of the show, that no matter what sort of shenanigans any of them had gotten themselves into, or caused for those around them, and despite how unusual, quirky, and eccentric all of them were, at the end of the day, they were still a family, a united front who had each other, and would get through life's trials and tribulations together. But when we get to the second season, the writers apparently lost sight of that, and instead put increasing focus on the broad and slapstick humor, the visual comedy of people running away in fast motion, Herman's foundation-shaking manchild-esque temper tantrums, Grandpa's experiments going wrong, etc., all of which Fred Gwynne and Al Lewis felt cheapened the show and made it lose a bit of its integrity.

Yeah. The second season of the Munsters wasn't as good as the first but I found it still have some charm.
Munsters Today on the other hand, ugh.