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See, now that presupposes that media companies are putting so much effort into making sure that there are enough minorities being realistically portrayed in the work that it’s taking away time and money from writing the actual story. My experience has been that any diversity rep in bad stories is just to have an actor from a marginalized demographic plopped in. And the rep we see extends from the bad writing instead of the other way around.

That’s especially the case with queer characters in Disney canon. Usually the best we can hope for is a background/side character who will say something in passing that suggests they might be queer, or who kisses someone of the same sex in an unimportant throwaway scene so it can easily be cut out for overseas releases (only to get banned anyways).

Meanwhile, Disney aggressively suppresses and attempts to kill unabashedly pro-queer works such as The Owl House and Nimona. Both such works revolve around queer rep and were critically acclaimed. Disney heavily resisted allowing the former to enter production as a queer series, relented, and then pulled the plug on it after a few seasons despite how well-received it was; and it shelved the latter, bought the studio that acquired it and shelved it again, and it was only by the grace of Netflix picking it up that it ever saw the light of day.

Clearly there is an appetite for honest, in-depth exploration of stories revolving around people who aren’t straight, cisgender white guys. But late stage capitalist megacorps aren’t going to be the ones taking the lead on it due to the economic status quo and the built in incentives that stem from it.

Of course, I see that earlier you also presupposed that companies making a good-faith effort to consider hiring more minorities to their teams must mean that qualified people are being passed over in favor of unqualified people. So I’d recommend maybe unpacking why you seem to believe both presuppositions are true.

@The Smiling Pony
Maybe part of the reason their stories are bad is because they’re putting more concern into making them diverse than into making the writing good?

36-year old Mauricio Garcia, a Dallas resident who shared the same first and last name as the Allen, TX mass shooter has filed a defamation lawsuit against multiple rightwing media outlets who falsely identified him as the shooter, resulting in death threats against him and his family. His mugshot from 2022 for an unrelated charge was dug up by “internet sleuths,” went viral, and was subsequently published by the named media companies in their reporting on the shooting.

Defendants named in the lawsuit are Fox News, Newsmax, Univision, Steven Crowder and his Louder With Crowder media company, Timcast Media Group, InfoWars War Room host Owen Shroyer, podcast company Hollywood Unlocked, Today News Africa, and Today New’s Africa’s owner and sole reporter Simon Ateba.

Trump is in the courtroom for his hush money case right now. Today is also the deadline for his bond, so we’ll see where that goes.

“I am the most X person of ALL TIME!”
“Many people are saying”
“I’ve had someone run up to me and say ‘SIR! I love you whatever you say is true can I suck your dick?’, MANY such people! All the time!”
“Likes on Twitter are an accurate indication of how liked something is”
“This guy said something, we reported on it, then other media reported on our reporting and used it as fact!”

Entire books have been written on the efficiency of propaganda, social media is allowing many of it’s inner workings to spread rampant and unopposed. Since it’s now impossible to debunk a lie faster than it’s spread, media literacy and knowledge of basic fallacies should be standard for just about anyone going online nowadays.

I concur. A lot of the reason behind Disney’s flops has more to do with chronic sequelitis, reboots and remakes nobody asked for, and growing risk aversion when it comes to storytelling and pushing the creative envelope, resulting in bland formulaic plots that are practically the same movie over and over. Then you have movies like Wish that tried to coast by entirely on nostalgia bait.

People who say “audiences are getting sick of this forced diversity and injecting far-left politics into movies” are projecting hard about what makes them in particular angry about modern media.

@Background Pony #7A74
I’m not convinced they’re losing money because of this, or just because they’re creatively bankrupt and this “pandering by the numbers” is just another symptom.

A bad and boring plot isn’t going to be any better because of “better representation”, and a good story isn’t going to be worse because of what are realistically just surface level cosmetic changes.

@The Smiling Pony
That’s the strange thing, they lose money doing this yet they continue. Bob Iger’s Disney is perhaps the best example. If this is capitalism, they are doing it wrong.

@BlitztheDragon
Sounds like an easy way to sneak out a double-agent to start something to punish the group.

The Supreme Court has declined to hear an appeal on Mckesson v Doe, allowing to stand the Fifth Circuit Appeals Court (the Trumpiest of them all) ruling that upheld laws in Texas, Mississippi, and Louisiana that would make organizers of mass protests liable for any criminal act committed by even a single person at the event, which would see the organizers and any supporting groups face potentially ruinous financial penalties.

Fifth Circuit Justice Don Willet wrote in his dissenting opinion a warning that this ruling could allow for “counter-protesters and agitators” to show up at these protests and escalate them, and the protesters would be held liable under these laws.

So for now at least, it is de facto dangerous to organize any sort of mass protest in these states, as you could be hit with steep af fines if an agent provocateur opposing your protest comes in and breaks a window or throws rocks at police.

And the right likes to claim that facts don’t care about feelings or something.

The number 1 trend tying together the proven cases of election fraud was election denial and it being used as justification to do election fraud. The louder they scream, the more likely they’ve subscribed to the whole “I don’t have to follow the law if I believe in a conspiracy and am now above it” line of bullshittery.

Or is basic correlation only supposed to apply to skin color and “the left”?

Retail sales grew .7% in March, far larger than the predicted 3%.

This, coupled with the hiring surge and the small but still present growth in wages has powered economic growth despite sticky inflation and the rate hikes.

And the left likes to claim that they don’t also accuse the other side of election fraud.

@Zincy
Since it’s Trump, I expect them to move it forward just so they don’t have to admit that he’s a failure.

Trump Media dropped below 30 in the pre-market hours.

I think it’s 27ish right now. Might rebound, but not by much.

The company filed a request over the weekend to issue millions more in stock, which when a company is losing money is a big sign of desperation.

@Background Pony #1079
GOP will then bitch about a witch hunt.

They’re petty fucks.

Since every accusation of election fraud from a Republican is a confession, if a Republican wins an election, Democrats should demand an investigation.

Residents of Orenburg, Russia threaten to impale Putler’s state officials on pictchforks
Putler doesn’t give one shit about the flooding that’s happening because of their failing infrastructure. To busy bombing Ukrainian civillians.

@Wiimeiser
From what I’ve seen, they’re the exception and have a few bosses who are racist towards white people if their tweets like how straight why guys kissing makes them sick are any indication. There’s also Kotaku defending them when the drama started, claiming you can’t be racist towards white people.

@Background Pony #7A74
If Yapping was a sport you’d be an olympin.

@Background Pony #7A74
It’s just basic capitalism, pandering to as many people as possible by including everything they can and offending no one that might raise a stink. Smooth everything out so everyone can like it.

It’s not a conspiracy, it’s marketing.

So, ESG, DEI, Sweet Baby Inc. What is all this stuff?

ESG - Environmental, Social and Governance - a set of overarching principles pushed by certain owner/investor companies to run their businesses by. They sound reasonable but often leads to businesses having to compromise profitability for social criteria for example.

DEI - Diversity, equity, and inclusion - A more specific set of principles and guidelines for companies and organizations in regards to their so called social responsibilities. Dictates that a certain percentage of the workforce must be of a certain ethnicity, what can and cannot be said internally in the organization, what the end product must include in terms of themes and people and social issues.

These two are often just lumped together and referred to as ESG/DEI.

Then there are companies like Sweet Baby Inc. Sweet Baby Inc is not the only one, there are many of these advisory companies. They market themselves as “narrative advisors” and claim to offer “consultation” to studios and writers in the entertainment business under the guise of making entertainment more representative, diverse and enriching. In reality they check the scripts of entertainment writers and make sure they are ESG/DEI compliant. Their employees often use titles like “sensitivity reader/advisor”.

Ever wondered why characters are genderswapped, race swapped, orientation swapped or why all of a sudden there are so many people of new ethnicities around that weren’t there before in a new version of something you are a fan of? That’s these guys at work.

Some people claim this is all a conspiracy, this does not exist, it’s all just right winger talk and so on. That’s not entirely true, it does exist and is a common practice at many large US businesses now.

For example, a while ago the Disney criteria for a production leaked online, if something does not meet these criteria Disney will not make it. The criteria covers what must be depicted and who must be hired to produce what they are making:

It was an extensive leak that can be seen in full here: https://imgur.com/a/V3FXgaG

Here is an example on the effect this has on a franchise, in this case Tomb Raider.

This is how you may know Lara Croft, going on expeditions and raiding Tombs:

After the ESG/DEI process has been applied to Lara Croft, she is no longer a “tomb raider” but a “truth seeker”. She will now respect the cultures she comes into contact with and no longer “mirror colonial practices’’. An upcoming board game shows the end result of this process, notice the racial diversity and the legs of the character on the far left, highlighted to bring this very special design choice to your attention:

So, is all of this something you should worry about? Well that is something you have to decide for yourself. This has been going on for the better part of a decade now and it has reached the mainstream audience.

There seems to be a fatigue now amongst the audiences. They are tired of seeing their favorite shows, games and movies change for the worse, diversity prioritized at the cost of storytelling. It’s great for those under the LGBTQIA/leftist umbrella, for those not under it, it’s getting a bit off putting. Movies like Top Gun 2 still perform at the box office while huge Marvel productions flop. Audiences are growing tired of being preached at.

So that’s it and now you know what’s going on.

To expand on that last point, their “smoking gun” that SBI is systematically blackmailing dev teams into hiring them to “ruin” their video games by adding “woke” elements was a seconds-long, out-of-context soundbite from a 2021 talk given by SBI’s CEO in which she jokingly suggested that employees of AAA studios’ marketing departments who want more diversity in games “terrify” their employers. She explicitly says she’s joking like two sentences later.

Sweet Baby Inc is a company made of former Ubisoft executives that offers consulting services favoring diversity and inclusion in games, the perfect scapegoat for a base desperately eager to push the idea that everything and everyone that isn’t “one of them” is part of some grandiose conspiracy (Obsession with a Plot, one of the core elements of fascism).

In truth, companies seek them out specifically due to their experience in the industry. Even the best writers sometimes screw up and end up introducing token minorities that are introduced and immediately gets their face eaten off, or introduce tropes that have already been played out identically in another game. It may sound surprising, but not all video game companies have industry veterans with decades of experience, or lack basic knowledge around the setting they’re basing their game in. That’s what consulting firms are for, patching up areas of expertise that may be lacking.

The “Negative” you’ve been hearing was amplified by Elon Musk himself and broadcast on his shitty propaganda outlet. Claims of SBI’s executives “bragging” about having blackmail on their clients and “forcing” them to uphold some kind of “DEI Agenda” have been consistently debunked but is echoed the next day from a lack of actual moderation on the website.

@Poison Trail
@SleepySteve
@Poison Trail
@Ereiam
So how does stuff like Sweet Baby Inc fall into this, I wonder? Because I’ve been hearing a lot more negative than positive, though it might be just the particular people involved.

@Dustcan
That doesn’t surprise me. Though what happens if the line goes down?