BW Media Spotlight

I need to get my posting schedule back on track after yesterday’s lateness. So I’m tagging in some help from the Literature Devil.

As much as I try to avoid political discussions here, as my focus is on how the activists took over, it gets tougher and tougher as they replace the traditional superhero narratives with their own. Instead of physical action they’d rather get into social conflict, one-sided sociopolitical pandering born of stereotypes, and the everything for meeeeeeeeeeeeeee crowd in general insisting anything popular must be made for them. As “geek media” grows in popularity the anti-geek Hollywood types try to wrestle superheroes away while the businessmen who don’t understand or care about superheroes are ignorant of the whole failure, wondering why what used to be huge profit is taking such huge hits.

As the cool cliques and activists try to defend their position, the new warcry is “but it was always like this”. This falls on its face when you realize “if this is how it always was then why is it only now being ridiculed as it fails miserably and ruins both pop culture icons and the very marketing they wanted to use to push their agendas, whether it was money, ego, or politics?”, which the usual suspects have no actual answer for. Now the claim is that Stan Lee always meant for the mutants of the X-Men to reflect not just outcasts in general but the specific outcasts of the latest cause du jour, that Professor X was a stand-in for Martin Luther King, Jr and Magneto for Malcolm X (the wrong guy got the “X” in his alternate name?), and that it was always political or “woke”. So if it was always “woke” why do the anti-woke crowd or general people of all political views, races, genders, and orientations suddenly upset with what’s come out the last few years to what was escapist entertainment that maybe made them think about the world around them without heavy-handed preaching a one-sided narrow view ridden with stereotypes and false understandings?

In the following video by Literature Devil, he disputes these claims not only with the history of the X-Men but Stan Lee’s own words and the words of other creators who came after him, including the one who leaned more into the bigotry allegory when he took over. He also looks at depictions of the Hulk and She-Hulk in light of the differences between the MCU and the comics and what both messed up in recent years.

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