So I’m on Youtube. And Youtube is BRUTAL on Disney and Amazon lately for the MCU/Star Wars/ LOTR adaptations and expansions. But part of why they’re brutal on Disney is wokedness issues, while the “other” side says “you’re all bigots who hate representation.”

I’m here to tell you, it ain’t that at all. It’s not the ideology, it’s the laziness. Amazon and Disney seem to be getting worse rather than better over time, falling into the trap of creating facile, low-effort “content” rather than working hard to create “compelling stories with inspiring characters.” Both are capable of doing much, much better.

Two recent, if not current counter-examples:
1. Arcane. It’s worldview and general characterization is woke from top to bottom in a crapsack world without a single functional family in it. It’s also a masterpiece, with sympathetic characters who have agency and motivation, rather than being simple cardboard ideological stand-ins, and who, like real world people struggling with Big Issues, frequently screw up and make terrible decisions, because the price of the *good* decisions is unthinkably high and more than the market will bear. The writing is compelling and the artwork and animation are leagues beyond, cleverly managing to portray character, setting, *and* motive in a way that no amount of bland genero-fantasy landscape CGI from Marvel can match. (Netflix, be on notice: this is your masterpiece, sitting right next to similarly-ideological pieces that are doing nothing to stop you from hemorrhaging viewers. More quality and less “content” will save you, though).

2. The Expanse.
Literally a meditation on bigotry, privilege, and hatred, set in the High Frontier. Awe-inspiring visions of Heroic Space and what it COULD be clash with the tragedy of “how it actually is,” as the powerful maul the lives of the weak, simply because they can, while the weak struggle to figure out how to be strong, without turning into precisely the evil that they hate with such clear justification. And the plot devices *work.* No recent fiction with powerful, three-dimensional, nuanced female characters? The show’s most influential protagonists are almost ALL beautifully-written, three-dimensional, frequently awe-inspiringly heroic women who hold their own next to completely capable men (rather than the more recent phenomenon of failing what I call The Reverse Bechdel Test, aka, “are your female characters so pathetic that you have to make your story’s males into idiot losers to make them look good?”). If depth and strength of character was a muscle group, these ladies would spank most of the MCU’s recent characters and send them back to day-care. Two of them reach *Ellen Ripley* levels of “your very name invokes awe.”

The irony is that Amazon *picked up* this IP off SyFy, ran it for three seasons, and slam dunked it, the only consistent viewer complaint being that the last season was simply too short (which kinda happens when one of the actors portraying a main character gets cancelled because of serious #metoo issues). And they picked up that material and ran it all the way into the end zone without doing the kind of violence to the franchise that has Tolkien fans screaming into their coffee cups. Instead, they took the source material and remained as true to it as a t.v. adaptation can get. The results are immensely compelling, and I’m hugely looking forward to seeing which of its characters my teenage daughter might consider a compelling role model.

People aren’t stupid, and they aren’t uncritically ideological: if you make really GOOD stuff that espouses worldview with which they don’t identify, they will still watch…. precisely because it’s good stuff. Audiences don’t at all mind viewpoint-diversity, so long as they’re entertained by compelling story. And if you put out lazy, low-effort schlock, no amount of ideological agreement between your producers and your viewers is going to keep your IP from collapsing as all but the least demanding of them stroll to the exits and don’t look back.