Why WOKE adaptations REALLY Fail (Michael Bancroft)

I like Bancroft's definition of wokeness, that it is forced discrimination and not at all about being fair to everyone. Political correctness is not about treating other people with respect. Quote:

"It's about not being able to tell the truth when the truth is desperately needed. It leads to tyranny and has literally gotten people killed. It stops terrorist activity from being reported, it lets rapists, gang bangers, human traffickers go free ... it's how you describe months of fiery riots where people die, and billions of dollars of damage gets done as mostly peaceful protests, it's how you get the mutilation and sterilization of children as empowering. The idea that it is about people being nice and respectful to each other is complete rubbish."  

When it comes to woke comic books the problem is the drive to change things that are familiar to fans who have an attachment to the original character(s) and their behaviour - plus appearance. Logically changes to characters of any sort attract criticism. It's not simply hating changes because they make the characters gay or race swap them (although that is part of it), it's because they are radically changed in the first place. Imagine if a traditionally gay character was swapped to become straight? Imagine if we had a reboot of Beverley Hills Cop and the protagonist was race swapped to be Hispanic? The justifications for doing this cannot be about representation either. The number of gay people, as an example, in society is small. It's not one in three, as the woke activist creators would have people think. It's more like a few out of a hundred or less.

And why mess with an existing franchise? If the creative activists had real talent and imagination they should be able to create new woke IPs. But I suspect they know that this won't sell, or even launch, and so they hijack already popular IPs. 

Additionally, when it comes to the largely straight male audience for comic books, these people do not want to see overtly gay material. You can't force people to see that sort of thing. Imagine telling straight women they have to like gay female content and if they don't want this in their entertainment then they're bigots. Remember that gay activists always say that it's not their choice that they are gay. Well, it's not the choice of straight people to be interested in predominantly straight material. 

And so, when you market entertainment products to a fringe audience the sales for those things are going to be low. It's not a good business strategy when you are trying to sell a lot of books. 

Furthermore, woke hiring practices have elevated a number of creators into the comic book industry who are not up to the task, either mentally or talent wise (on occasion). Also, the woke mindset has ended up wrecking formally competent creators. Their obsession with representation leads to poor storytelling in general. Poor story telling is especially evident from those creators elevated to their positions who are not really interested in superhero action stories. And the bad writing destroys interest in the books. It's a convergence of destructive elements.     

[Posted at the SpookyWeather2 blog, October 11, 2022.]