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Oh great, another show about racism. My favorite.
posted by Ask Me AnythingSTAFFMOD on July 30, 2020 at 12:53 PM
I'm convinced the people who make this stuff don't actually talk to black people before they make these things. Some of us don't see ourselves as perpetual slaves or oppressed victims. But I guess that's how Hollywood sees black people. I will be surprised if this lasts more than 1 season.
Reply by Ask Me Anything
on August 26, 2020 at 10:25 AM
Saw the episode, you weren't lying. AT LEAST there was a payoff to the scene by illustrating how Leti and George couldn't remember their monster encounters. But the "whitys on the moon" song towards the end was a huge missfire, totally took me out of it, dumb choice.
My biggest problem with the show so far is it's textbook JJ Abrams "Mystery Box" trope. Why would Tony Goldwyn need to learn how to live forever when he has the power to bring Leti back to life? Why is cow giving birth to a vampire monster slug? Why'd they go through the trouble of setting up Goldwyn's character, showing him cut up pieces of his body and feed it to his cultists, only to kill him off in the same episode?
This feels like Lost where they setup a lot of stuff to get you guessing then don't pay anything off (see also: The Force Awakens).
Reply by Ask Me Anything
on August 27, 2020 at 1:58 PM
Okay I'm going to respond to the important parts.
This is a dishonest statement. It's not that people are opposed to non-white actors, it's that they are opposed to race swapping. I'm black and I am now opposed to race swapping because it's lazy, unless the race swapping can go both ways, which it won't. I'm also opposed to gender swapping as well because it only goes from male to female. It's just the studio wanting to appeal to a demographic while retaining the name recognition of a particular character. I care more about honoring the original character than changing a character so that it has my skin tone. Just create a new character.
Because Mystery Box. I'm going to continue with the show, but I swear to god, if the season ends with a ton of setups and no payoffs I probably won't return for season 2, I'm done being screwed around by JJ Abrams.
Of course it got wonderful reviews, it's woke. People are afraid of getting cancelled for disliking woke stuff or supporting un-woke stuff. This is why Amy Schumer comedy gets better critic reviews than Dave Chappelle comedy. If you give a bad review to something with a woman lead you're a sexist, doesn't matter if the movie/show is good or not, you're a sexist and you hate women if you don't like something with a woman in it.
Watchmen also got rave reviews but it got cancelled because no one was interested in seeing it because it wasn't Watchmen, it just took the Watchmen name and was about something completely different. Same for Picard, which was "a response to the Trumpian world of Brexit and nationalist populism" according to Patrick Stewart instead of being about goddamn Star Trek, and has reportedly been cancelled after it lost half its audience because it wasn't Star Trek, it was just using the Star Trek name to rant about people not voting the way Stewart thinks they should have voted.
But I'm willing to agree to disagree here.
Because she is. She's Wesley Crusher 2.0. Trek is supposed to be an ensemble where every character has a unique skill set and works together to achieve a goal, yet Michael (her name is Michael, ugh) is always right, insubordinate, starts a war that gets millions of people killed, and yet is absolved of her sins and loved by everyone because she's just the best at everything. She was also basically promoted to second officer of the Shenzhou right off the bat because of how awesome she was and not because she earned it.
I gave up after S02E01 where she dressed down Pike in front of the whole bridge crew and is of course not reprimanded by him, then they have the snooty white guy who won't listen to her and than is immediately killed because he was of course a toxic hetero male mansplaining to her. And on top of all that she's Spock's secret sister who was jealous of her because his parents loved her more and really it's Michael we have to thank for Spock being who he is. Give me a break. Michael isn't her own character, she's joined at the hip to one of if not the most iconic character in Star Trek to manipulate us into caring about her.
I'm sure if I'd finished STD S02 I'd have more examples but she sucks as a character. But she's a woman and black so any criticism of her is dismissed despite the fact people hated Wesley Crusher for the exact same reasons, but at least he wasn't the main character of TNG.
Of course she's coded as gay, that's what the hand holding was meant to imply. You don't hold hands like that with strangers you don't want to screw, do you? Also lesbians who want kids get sperm donors all the time so her having a son doesn't mean she's straight. It was also heavily implied Seven had some kind of sexual relationship with the Deanna Troi looking woman on Free Cloud, but that was a bit more ambiguous, the hand holding was far more clear. Woke writers love turning popular heterosexual characters gay instead of creating a gay character from scratch.
There were rumors Kirk would be bi in the Strange New Worlds show. These people don't actually care about writing good characters, just playing identity politics and aping off of popular established characters and franchises. To them women are better than men, black people are better than white people, and gays are better than straights instead of everyone being seen as equals... like past Star Trek did.
I covered Spock but Picard spends the entire Picard show getting yelled at by people (women), told how awful he is, how stupid he is, and he's made to apologize for things out of his control. This guy broke with Starfleet to rescue thousands of Romulans only for those Romulans to tell him how terrible of a person he is. He's saved Earth countless times, yet when he asks for a ship the Admiral drops f-bombs on him and treats him like a homeless beggar. A reporter interviews him and it turns into an interrogation about how he's a jerk. Raffi berates him for torpedoing her career because he chose to save lives and for living in an inherited mansion when she lives in a society where she can have a free house anywhere on the planet.
That show did not "fix" Picard, it killed him and turned him into a hollow shell of his former self figuratively and literally, and Picard got over his hatred of kids in the TNG episode "Disaster" where he is wounded and responsible for getting a group of children to safety. Also the TNG episode "The Inner Light" where he lives a life where he has a wife and son, played by Stewart's real life son. Picard was written by people who don't know Star Trek.
That entire plot line was badly written, and there were no repercussion to 7 being a substitute Borg Queen. The plot would have made far more sense if they nixed the Agnes character and had 7 working at the Daystrom institute. They could have established her as having a wife or maybe even a child, and her and Picard having been friends for years having bonded over their Borg connection. It would have made so much more sense, but instead we got that awful Agnes character who murders a guy and never pays for it.
I don't know how much of the past shows you've seen, but I've seen every episode of ever Trek show and every movie more than once. The writers of these new shows clearly didn't. The new shows don't respect what came before, it's inconsistent with established characters and the established universe, it doesn't care about telling a good story it cares about pleasing Twitter.
The past shows weren't perfect, they had problems and there were badly written episodes, but it was never this bad. The science and technology is horrible (they have a device where you think something and it repairs the ship???) it also doesn't understand that the Romulans had thousands of their own huge starships and wouldn't need Starfleet to evacuate their planet and they controlled lots of territory and colonies they could have relocated to, lazy starship design where they just copy/pasted the ships in the finale, revealing Dr. Noonian Soong had a biological child even though he created Data/Lore/B4 because he and his wife couldn't have children, it's horrible. It's like how Harry Potter fans feel towards the Fantastic Beasts movies, or LOTR fans feel about the Hobbit movies.
I could go on but I can only imagine you don't know Trek lore like I do so this is all new to you and you don't realize how none of it fits with what's been established. They sacrificed long time fans like me for newer fans who never watched the other shows so we'll see how that works out for them because I'm done with post-2005 Star Trek.
Reply by Ask Me Anything
on September 1, 2020 at 11:03 AM
Responding to all of this is going to take more time than I am willing to commit to this, so I'm going to cherry pick for alacrity.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpjVgF5JDq8
JJ Abrams did a Ted Talk where he explains that creating questions in a story is more important than actually thinking up explanations to those questions, just so long as the audience is engaged. It's proven to be his crutch and why he can't finish a story properly.
That's close-mindedness. I'm a writer, I care about a well crafted story and characters that work together to tell a story that makes narrative sense. "Woke" is about using a story and characters to push a political ideology typically centered around race/gender/sexuality even if it doesn't make narrative sense for the story. And you should care given may "woke" movies, shows and books are inherently racist/sexist/prejudiced but it's okay as long as it's directed towards white people, men, or heterosexuals. Good people shouldn't be in favor of that stuff even if it's against people they don't like.
That wasn't my quote, that was Patrick Stewart's quote. It was his show and he had some creative control over it so I take him at his word, and it makes sense as to why the Romlulan/Synth story contradicts previously established Trek lore, ie it's woke, sacrificing storytelling to push politics. So yes, the argument can certainly be made the Romulans represented immigrants and Starfleet's attitude towards them mirrored people who voted for BREXIT even though Starfleet's actions in Picard completely go against everything Starfleet has stood for over the past 50 years of Trek shows.
Because she is. Granted this is my opinion but aside from her being a black woman there's nothing interesting or unique about her. She has no flaws, she's always right, she always succeeds, and she's perfect at everything. She's a boring character. Half her dialog is telling another character how she's right and they're wrong and then she's proven right.
Compare her with Major Kira from DS9, a former terrorist who had a lady boner for killing Cardassians and in the very first season she's given an episode where her blind hatred of Cardassians is proven wrong and she learns they're not all bad. She's later disillusioned in the politics of her religion. A woman who despised collaborators ends up becoming a collaborator when the Dominion takes over DS9, and upon realizing this she's disgusted with herself and starts working against the Dominion.
Now I am assuming you've not seen DS9 or many of the other Trek shows, but Kira's one of my gold standards for an interesting female character. Michael Burnham falls far short because she doesn't exist to be a good character, she exists to be a feminist icon, and feminist icons can not fail, be wrong, or second guess themselves.
And yet she's paroled, placed on an experimental ship, and given carte blanche because of how awesome she is. Like, they couldn't hire someone who WASN'T a mutineer that started a war that killed millions with the same skill set, nope they need HER specifically because she's awesome. And by the end she's completely reinstated and not put back in jail. DO YOU NOT SEE HOW THAT'S BAD WRITING?
Having her mutiny in the first place was dumb, but she was proven that her "attack first" idea would have been the right move and stopping her is what REALLY started the war. Then she out-thinks the computer to let her out of her prison cell because she's awesome. She's such a terribly written character. I kind of want to finish watching Season 2 just so I can illustrate more examples but I'm not a fan of torture.
The blue shirt guy in the far right of this picture: https://www.denofgeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/star-trek-discovery-season-2-episode-1-review-brother-scaled.jpg
He ignores Michael and doesn't listen to her advice and he's killed for it. I'm starting to suspect you either didn't watch much of the show or don't remember what you saw, because I saw this junk 1 time and remember what happened. Either way it comes off as you pretending like you don't understand the points I'm making because to do so undermines your argument.
Look, if you like this stuff that's fine, have at it, I'm not losing sleep over it. But it's bad writing, especially compared to past Trek which had some excellent writing. I don't feel as though you are taking my argument seriously so I'm going to stop here. Have fun with your shows while they last, though I would highly recommend watching Deep Space 9 to see the real heights of "dark" Star Trek both character and story wise.
Reply by Philippe LeMarchand
on September 6, 2020 at 11:27 AM
I'm a bit short on time, so I'm just going to have to forgo quoting posts.
"I want to see something where the black character isn't in a 'black' stereotype": Check out Tenet - the lead is just the lead, not the "black" lead.
Ep 2: Not as good as the first, but still entertaining. I'm surprised that the Sons of Adam were dealt with so quickly (and by the death of ******). Also enjoying the literary references; I'm not sure many people these days know of Clark Ashton Smith or William Hope Hodgson.
Most of my other comments would be on the diversion to Trek, so I'll stay schtum there .
Reply by tmdb53400018
on September 6, 2020 at 11:20 PM
Are you sure he's "half white?" How do you account for that figure? Was one parent "pure," that is, 100% black/African? And the other white, no? "Pure" white? What if the one black parent was merely, oh, 82% black/African? Wouldn't that make Peele something like 60-65% white? I'm terrible with math, but....
What does that have to do with ANYTHING?? Also, check your math.
Agree on Get Out and the sketch show, but Us was good, not mediocre. Ha ha, no, that's just my opinion.
Reply by Ask Me Anything
on September 7, 2020 at 3:26 PM
i'm looking forward to seeing that. I was also a fan of the British show Luther until it kind of fell apart in its last season.
Honestly the percentage doesn't matter, the fact is he has white heritage, but in America if you're mixed race with white you are basically expected to shun that part of your heritage. I see this a lot in light skinned black people who, in some way, are almost fanatic about proving how "black" they are. Peele's a perfect example of a mixed race person with a white wife proudly announcing how he won't hire a white person as the lead of his movies. That's not only racism, it's self hatred given one of his parents is white (I recall reading somewhere his mother was white but feel free to fact check me on that).
If he's half white and his wife is full white then their child would only be 25% black and 75% white. Even if I'm wrong and Peele isn't half white, his child surely is, at least 50% white. He can't even make his own wife the star of his movie because she's white. Imagine if the races were reversed. He would be sleeping on the couch for eternity.
Reply by tmdb53400018
on September 7, 2020 at 5:41 PM
I agree... like with Laurence Fishburne's character in Spike Lee's joint School Daze. Interestingly, things can work almost the opposite way with black people who are dark-complexioned.
OK, I was waiting for this and it's the main reason why I ignored the thread for so long. In my opinion, that is not racism, it's merely discrimination. I hope not to get into a back-and-forth with you about that.
Look, all satirizing aside, my point is, I believe people rarely come in such neat, exact "percentages." (Edit: I meant American people mostly in that sentence.) If you're talking about African Americans, you won't find a lot of us who are 100% black/of African descent, due to slavery rape. So you are probably acting on an assumption and maybe not more if you say that Jordan Peele is "half white." Also, some of the white people walking around in America are not “pure”; they have tiny percentages of black “blood.” Beyond that, my point is this: I've realized it's sometimes dumb to think of people in terms of percentages. Stupid, stupid.
Reply by Ask Me Anything
on September 8, 2020 at 1:54 PM
I agree it's discrimination... based on race. I think we more or less agree on this point, what it boils down to is you shouldn't be hiring/excluding people based on their race. Unless Peele is exclusively making movies about historical black figures he should not be announcing he won't hire you based on your skin color, you can't defeat racism with racism.
I agree, there are no exact percentages, but the point is he and his family have white ancestry and he's incredibly ashamed of it. And not all mixed race ancestors were the product of rape, many were for sure, but anti-miscegenation laws existed because people from other races have willingly wanted to bone each other for centuries. Google Pace v. Alabama and Loving v. Virginia for public examples, not to mention white women claiming rape as to not be ostracized. Even in 2020 certain interracial couples are still frowned upon and not just by racist whites.
Anyway, back to Lovecraft Country, I watch the latest episode and I'm still mostly enjoying it, even though it likes to stop to focus on racism for a few minutes every episode, at least it's mostly wrapped up in historical facts so it's not as intrusive. They are doing a sloppy job explaining the lore as I can only peace together they are hunting pages from the bad guy's book to protect themselves and the house Leti bought is somehow connected to an underground tunnel where they found the transgender native american lady.
The show is getting so crazy I am more and more convinced they are just kind of randomly throwing in supernatural elements that won't really add up to anything in the end, they're just their to keep us guessing. At least it's more entertaining than Raised By Wolves.
Reply by tmdb53400018
on September 8, 2020 at 4:50 PM
We don’t really agree on the definition of racism. And for Christ’s sake, I don’t see why two black guys should bicker so much about something like Racism. I figure you have your reasons though, and this is my last word on it in this thread.
I would say one reason why light-skinned black folks are defensive about our blackness is the use of callous terms to describe us, like you used as far as initially calling Peele “half white.” Jus sayin’.
Reply by tmdb53400018
on September 8, 2020 at 11:43 PM
I saw Jordan make the same statement at the end of the Us DVD, and right now I'm wondering, damn, maybe that's just where he's at right now creatively? I've been writing scripts for over a decade, and it took me a long time to gain the comfort and confidence to write about white characters as the leads in them. Why does it have to be about "self-hatred?" Let's not do the tried and true exercise of putting the black celeb on trial in a forum where s/he can't do anything about it... and always accusing him/her of self-hate....
Reply by Ask Me Anything
on September 9, 2020 at 2:25 PM
I've been writing scripts for over 20 years, and I made the decision to not list the race of characters unless it was necessary to the plot, that way you're not directly excluding an actor that might be interested. Then over the last 5-7 years there's been more of a push to actually list black characters, so I did that without actually changing anything else about the character and I'd get comments like "it's great you have so many well written black characters in your scripts", they're just characters. I didn't write them as a specific race even if I had a certain actor in mind for the character, the moment you start writing for a race you're tying your own hands.
As for the "self hate", what else would you call it? If a black person has practically any non-white ancestry they can celebrate it, but you better not celebrate your white ancestry because white people are still viewed as blue eyed devils in the black community. You have green eyes or light skin or straight hair or can pass as white? You better hate yourself for it. You're a black guy and you married a white woman? Oh you just want to be white (this might be why Peele is so staunchly anti-white).
It's one of the reasons why I think racism is such a hot subject in 2020, because there's literally nothing stopping a black person from achieving as much success as any other person since a company/employer even suspected of being racist is publically flogged, but racism is a great excuse to not even try, to stay complacent, or to take the blame when you fail. There are more black millionaires and billionaires in american now than ever, plenty of black athletes, entertainers, and artists with white fans, but America is still racist somehow. Meanwhile the presidential candidate who mass incarcerated black men in the 90s is probably going to win the black vote. Go figure.
But what other descriptor could I use? Saying he's bi-racial/mixed could mean anything. I have cousins who are half white, spanish/hispanic, or Filipino. My intent was not to be callous, it was to be precise. I suspect if Peele didn't have white ancestry he wouldn't feel the need to single out white people.
Agreed. But I suspect this is kind of the point of this TV show, they want people to discuss race issues, otherwise they wouldn't lean so heavily on them in the show's plot.
Reply by tmdb53400018
on September 9, 2020 at 6:58 PM
I made my first effort at a feature script in '90-91, so I'm in the same boat. I just didn't feel like making a big deal out of it. For some reason, in regard to fiction I started out seeing "white" = "universal" and vice versa. To write a black character is to make things more particular. So I've wondered if writing white characters automatically makes them more interesting, compelling, etc. I set out to write characters with a certain "race" in mind, as well as gender, nationality, age, and so on. I don't think one of us is right and the other is wrong; I'm just noting a different approach in our writing styles.
Reply by tmdb53400018
on September 10, 2020 at 1:48 AM
I am not one of those males.
Reply by Tsavo
on October 29, 2021 at 7:10 PM
I am not afraid to get into a back and forth. Any discrimination based on race is racism. No poor pseudo-intellectual attempts to re-define the term so that your rhetoric appears less racist than it is will ever change that. (Please note that when I say "you", I am not referring to you personally, but rather to those who have been attempting to change the definition.
Reply by Ask Me Anything
on October 31, 2021 at 9:06 AM
I think the fact I was right proved my point, people are tired of this stuff.