How Many People Have The Entertainment Industry Ticked Off?

I’ve been spending the day sleeping and watching a playthrough of Assassin’s Creed: Shadows. I already have articles covering this game’s failings leading up to today’s launch here, here, and here, and even in the hours before launch it still managed to get on people’s nerves, the Japanese government’s nerves, the franchise’s fans’ nerves, historians’ nerves…basically everyone it can piss off is pissed off. Watch Az from HeelVsBabyface playing through the game on and off (he’s over 8 hours in just when I stopped to get something out today), there’s also bad AI in a game where you’re supposed to stealthily kill people, odd dialog, and decent visuals. So basically James Cameron’s Avatar franchise is the standard.

Since I’ve gone over this game so much a new angle would be trying to compile a list of everyone mad at this game, but why stop there? The Hollywood mindset, which includes non-Hollywood connected video games (who wish they were Hollywood) and comics (the top two companies owned by Hollywood for lazy idea collecting for the “important” media), has got a lot of people mad and they aren’t afraid to go online and let an uncaring Hollywood, and the people Hollywood keeps trying to get money out of, all about it.

While this won’t be a complete or comprehensive list, since that would take way too long, it is an overview of everyone the entertainment industry has ticked off, because it’s surprisingly not just the fans. I am going to start with them, though.

The Fans

We’ll get this one done quick, because chronicling the mistreatment of the fanbases of the properties the elitists, activists, elitist activists, media snobs, and everything for meeeeeeeeeeeee crowd has become a regular occurance for a storytelling analysis site like this one even when you try to keep the culture war out of the analysis. Besides, the activists only went through the hole someone else smashed open.

Between the corporate mindset, the creators who hate a work and insist it must be remade for their tastes and preferences, and higher-ups who listening to marketing people instead of the actual audience because they don’t care as long as they make money, numerous franchises have lost what made them special, what made them popular, and why they existed to be adapted, relaunched, or rebooted to being with. We’ll be using Shadows as our main example in this list but the Assassin’s Creed franchise isn’t the only victim. Still, we have a game that fans have been wanting for a long time, where you’re in Japan as a ninja, the “ultimate” assassin to play whether your historically accurate or not. And this game hasn’t been. Fat sumo wrestlers didn’t exist back then and definitely weren’t women. We’ve chronicled the whole Yasuke situation, and now they also have him hooking up with a “non-binary” of male biology…which is a relatively recent concept…while being out of place in Japan and in a game built on stealth kills.

Bad adaptations are nothing new, but we used to be able to call those out, and some were still good storytelling. Now the Hollywood types don’t even care. The studios want adaptations because marketing told them it’s safe money, so the showrunners and directors have decided because what they want matters more, uses existing brands as a costume for the stories they really want to tell, resulting in something barely resembling that think you like as a bunch of namesakes. Or they think using the branding will make their rejected work popular despite not understanding why the brand is popular, and thus only appealing to brand loyalists who watch/read/play anything under the banner and are afraid to rock the boat lest it go away. The Star Trek and Star Wars franchises are the best evidence of that.

Animation fans are seeing Warner Brothers Discovery toss cartoons off their streaming service despite having one of, if not THE, biggest animation libraries in the world at their disposal. Meanwhile the company started by Walt Disney, an animator seeking to prove that animation could be a great storytelling tool of high quality, is currently in the hands of people who seem to hate cartoons, so when they aren’t outsourcing their IP or creating mediocre movies, Disney is remaking their animated legacy in live action, and prove Walt right by putting out poor quality there as well.

The creators

This is hardly nothing new. Ask Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster. However, the big two comic creators are really getting called out lately for their treatment of their creators, the people who actually make the comics. The writers are fine, but artists are coming out and complaining about how little they’re paid, how they’ve dodged royalties, and one example of concept art being used at a cover, but the artist was still only paid for the concept art. Legally they have the right, but they kind of screwed her over.

Meanwhile, Rob Liefeld is angry at Marvel Studios for his supposed mistreatment at movie premieres despite co-creating the character Deadpool, one of the only successes Disney-period Marvel Studios has had. Other creators also feel slighted when it comes to their characters going to the big and small screens, but because Disney and Warner Brothers don’t care about the comics beyond seeing them as idea farms (again, without understanding why those ideas have an audience to exploit) don’t expect them to get treated as “real” storytellers anytime soon.

Then you have the remakes of anime and manga by Western studios who drain out everything about it, declaring live action to be superior just for existing. Cowboy Bebop and Death Note were so bad that the only way Eiichiro Oda would allow Netflix to make a live action One-Piece is if he had the right to refuse any changes they wanted to make…and apparently he used his veto a lot, leading to the only good Netflix live action adaptation. It’s not limited to Japanese media, but there’s no evidence that the creators of Avatar: The Last Airbender care. That used to be the GOOD “Avatar” franchise until The Legend Of Korra and the direction the comics took, but that’s a different discussion.

“Dwarf” actors

When the live action demake of Snow White was in production at Disney, Peter Dinklage decides to open his “big” mouth to complain about stereotypes about dwarfs living in caves. Nevermind that people with dwarfism and the magical creatures called dwarfs aren’t the same thing, but if you watch the actual movie (and Dinklage obviously didn’t) you know that Doc and company lived in a cottage. They were miners so they worked in a cave but they went home to a house at the end of the day. Worried, Disney initially said they would replace the dwarfs with “magical creatures”, then showed us a bunch of full-sized adults before finally dropping the CG monstrosities they went with in the movie.

Actors of a certain size were rightly pissed off, mostly at Dinklage, but they weren’t happy with Disney either. Thanks to the little dink, seven prospective roles went to a computer, though apparently using little people as voice actors was fine. Meanwhile, two of Dinklage’s biggest roles post Game Of Thrones has been in the movie Pixels, which should be punishment enough if he hadn’t done that first, and a remake of The Toxic Avenger where somehow he’s playing the hideously deformed creature of superhuman size and strength. There aren’t many roles for small actors, and thanks to Dinklage there are now even less.

The People They Claim To Represent

Do you know how many people of color, women, and LGBT+ people who aren’t activists more interested in “the cause” than making good stories are seeing how they’re being used and pushing back against it. “I’m (insert division here) and I think what they’re doing is terrible and insulting” shows up in many a comment and chat stream I read. They don’t need to “see themselves” in a character to relate to them. They don’t need a race/gender/sexual orientation swap of a character they loved just fine the way he/she/whatever already was. Even George Takei, a noted gay rights advocate and gay himself, said that Sulu in the Bad Robot movies shouldn’t be gay because the character never was. They didn’t listen.

There’s only two reasons for doing this and they’re both shams unless they’re actually activists from that group wanting to remake everything in “their image”. Either they’re trying to use the race/gender/sex shield to protect themselves from criticism (“you’re just mad because your bigots”), or they want to look like their allies without putting in the effort. Thus stereotypes rule. All tomboys are lesbians. Gay men have the personalities of teenage girls. Black people actually like the hood and all have one set of hairstyles. Meanwhile a woman isn’t allowed to struggle and must be smarter and more powerful than men twice their size with more training, education, and experience. The people who are actually in those groups are taking notice. And they’re insulted.

Historians

Back to Shadows because it’s the most recent and best example, though not the only one I’m covering. Ubisoft’s insistence on pushing the false narrative that Yasuke was anything more than a retainer to a emperor, returned to his former slave owners when that emperor was slain, is baffling, especially now that they also made him gay. That’s among numerous other mistakes made historically in a franchise that once dropped a weapon prominent in a trailer after learning it was inaccurate to the period that installment of the video game series took place in. This ticked off a lot of Japanese people who are getting sick of this lone black man being given so much prominence because of Western advocates of false diversity. We’ll come back to this in the next category.

Let’s not also forget Black Cleopatra. The showrunner was told by her grandma that Cleopatra was black, and the child took that into her adult life and decided to make a docuseries for Netflix (them again) insisting this was totally true. Egyptian historians insisted that this was false, that it was an attempt to replace Egyptian history with an Afrocentric reskin of a historically Greek/Macedonian woman from a period in Earth’s history where modern racial divisions didn’t exist. It was all region and culture, not “black” and “white”, much like “non-binary” didn’t exist and gay pride flags came about after World War II but that didn’t stop Ubisoft with Shadows. Since it all comes back to that game…

Governments

Already annoyed by the historical inaccuracies on display and the misuse of a reenacting troup’s flag in the game, Japan would get the big rage when it was learned that both the large black man and the small Japanese woman could destroy Shinto temples in the game, the same ones they can pray to for a lifebar boost. (I think that’s the right mechanic.) Players do like games with destructible environments so they get to smash stuff, but this was a huge cultural no-no in a game already in trouble for all the cultural appropriation and historical rewrites by the French/Canadian game company filled with white people. Members of the Japanese government as well as shrine caretakers were understandable mad about this and threatened the company. Apparently there’s a day one patch that makes shrines no longer destructible and gets rid of blood (why?) but I didn’t notice any of that in the little bit of Az’s playthrough I’ve managed to watch thus far.

Meanwhile, Disney decided to tick off the Florida government by getting itself involved in politics. While Bob Chapek, who was not living up to his duty as a figurehead for Bob Iger, tried to stay out of the discussion about the “don’t say gay” bill, certain parties within the company forced him to jump into the political fray. That one had a serious retaliation and now the Disney World theme park is no longer allowed to operate under its own authority, a privilege given to Walt and Roy Disney as they put it together due to their hard work and dedication to things Iger couldn’t care less about like family entertainment, quality, animation, and legacy.

I’m sure there are more I could list, and definitely more examples, but you get the picture. The stewards of our pop culture and creative heritage are corporations who don’t care, snobs who only care about themselves, and extremist activists who only care about the cause du jour. The end result is the places we used to go to relax and have fun after a hard day or week are now in the hands of people who don’t know what they’re doing. While independent creators are trying to pick up the slack they don’t have the money and reach of the big companies so getting the message out there they exist or reaching the quality we used to be used to is difficult. The outrage will continue until people who know and care why these media and franchises lasted from before we were born into present day end up in the right positions to fix the mistakes of the current stewards. Otherwise they may not have a future as the next generation leaves it all behind.