From Mav: We’ve talked before about the ways in which people complaining that media is “too woke now” are often just not aware that the media they’ve always loved always has been. A few years back I remember when there was an uproar amongst comic fans when Nick Spencer, then writer of Captain America comics started portraying the Red Skull as a very thinly veiled Trump allegory. People demanded that they Marvel keep politics out of their funny books. Keep politics… out of Captain FUCKING America! Spencer responded by turning Cap into a Nazi for a while… specifically in order to illustrate what he thought of the alt-right’s views on how America should behave. It was a whole thing. But also, Cap changed back! The status quo returned. Because that’s how comics work. And while I didn’t necessarily love the storyline, I’ve always appreciated what Spencer was trying to do with the arc.
Movies and TV are a little different. A bigger budget means that you need a bigger return in order to make the financial investment worth it. Whatever you may think of Disney, they are not in the business of losing money. So the extent to which anyone is “going woke” with Disney mainstream content creation, it’s because they are not “going broke”. They are doing it because the numbers say that hitting the right mix of pro-left progressivism while maintaining the right mix of pro-right conservatism yields the right process. Someone in Kevin Feige’s office literally has a spreadsheet that reads that and tries to predict exactly how progressive stuff needs to be. And so you end up with… what we’re getting.
So Captain America: Brave New World is out and … honestly, I think it’s fine. A lot of the backlash against it was going to happen regardless. The simple fact that this is a movie about a black Captain America, when there used to be a white Captain America… that was going to happen. And there was going to be some people who were going to defend it just because he’s black. I’ve seen it. I watched it opening night and… it’s fine. It is what it is. It’s not great, but I also don’t regret my time in the theater. But one of the things that I found interesting in the lead-up to the film was the inclusion of Sabra, Ruth Bat-Seraph, an Israeli superhero with strong ties to the Mossad (Israel’s intelligence service).
The character has always had a controversial geo-political history, but between the time that she was announced in 2022 as being in the film and when it was released a couple weeks ago, the Gaza War went hot and there’s been a lot of questions about how Marvel would handle that in the film. And largely they just… didn’t. The word “Sabra” is never used and it’s not really discussed that the character is Israeli. In fact, in the film, she’s an American secret agent and just… has a bit of an accent, but mostly because Shira Haas, the actress portraying her is just using her normal voice and she sounds like that. Reportedly, there was more originally intended, but they cut it as the Gaza War became more and more of a thing.
Similarly, in another part of Disney, Pixar recently started a new ensemble show, Win or Lose, that follows a bunch of characters on a co-ed youth softball team. Having a full team means the opportunity to explore many different stories, and when the series was originally pitched, one of the characters was going to be transgender. In fact, they even hired a transgender actress to play the character. However between production and airing, the nation elected Donald Trump and so the show has just decided to “not do that” and removed all references to the storyline. The character is still there. She’s just presumed cis female and any storyline about transitioning is just gone. Animation takes a long time. So that means this story was in the works for a while. It was axed because corporate decided not to rock the boat in the current cultural moment. And in this case, “not rocking the boat” is just “pretending trans people don’t exist”. In popular culture, hegemony is the point where conflict between the grassroots arts and the corporate arts meet.
This isn’t new. it’s always been a thing comics and TV shows have often aborted extremely progressive storylines once people got cold feet while expecting praise for tepid acknowledgment when it does happen. And the true marks of progress are often very solitary and go unpraised in their own time. I would argue that the watershed moment of the silver age of comics isn’t the first appearance of the Flash. it is the publication of “Judgment Day” in Weird Fantasy #18. Famously, this is a story about implicit bias and the dangers of institutional racism to a society. It’s an allegory for 1950s America using robots in space. And the reaction of the Comics Code Authority at the time was to ask the publisher if they could rework the story ABOUT RACISM so that the human astronaut character was white because they felt that a black astronaut was offensive. The publisher, EC Comics, quite literally opted to go out of business rather than make the change. But most of the time people beholden to corporate and capitalist interests don’t take big swings. It’s why the whole concept of queer baiting exists.
So I wanna talk about that. What are your thoughts on the modern “ever so slightly woke but not too much” approach to mass media storytelling? Do you think things have been changing? Accelerating? Declining? Is there a way to actually have conversations about progressive issues in mass market popular culture under a capitalist system without pandering to the almighty dollar? Let us know your thoughts in the comments so we can talk about it on the show.
Call For Comments: Get Nominally Woke Have Poorly Defined Return on Financial Investment
February 28, 2025
From Mav: We’ve talked before about the ways in which people complaining that media is “too woke now” are often just not aware that the media they’ve always loved always has been. A few years back I remember when there was an uproar amongst comic fans when Nick Spencer, then writer of Captain America comics started portraying the Red Skull as a very thinly veiled Trump allegory. People demanded that they Marvel keep politics out of their funny books. Keep politics… out of Captain FUCKING America! Spencer responded by turning Cap into a Nazi for a while… specifically in order to illustrate what he thought of the alt-right’s views on how America should behave. It was a whole thing. But also, Cap changed back! The status quo returned. Because that’s how comics work. And while I didn’t necessarily love the storyline, I’ve always appreciated what Spencer was trying to do with the arc.
Movies and TV are a little different. A bigger budget means that you need a bigger return in order to make the financial investment worth it. Whatever you may think of Disney, they are not in the business of losing money. So the extent to which anyone is “going woke” with Disney mainstream content creation, it’s because they are not “going broke”. They are doing it because the numbers say that hitting the right mix of pro-left progressivism while maintaining the right mix of pro-right conservatism yields the right process. Someone in Kevin Feige’s office literally has a spreadsheet that reads that and tries to predict exactly how progressive stuff needs to be. And so you end up with… what we’re getting.
So Captain America: Brave New World is out and … honestly, I think it’s fine. A lot of the backlash against it was going to happen regardless. The simple fact that this is a movie about a black Captain America, when there used to be a white Captain America… that was going to happen. And there was going to be some people who were going to defend it just because he’s black. I’ve seen it. I watched it opening night and… it’s fine. It is what it is. It’s not great, but I also don’t regret my time in the theater. But one of the things that I found interesting in the lead-up to the film was the inclusion of Sabra, Ruth Bat-Seraph, an Israeli superhero with strong ties to the Mossad (Israel’s intelligence service).
The character has always had a controversial geo-political history, but between the time that she was announced in 2022 as being in the film and when it was released a couple weeks ago, the Gaza War went hot and there’s been a lot of questions about how Marvel would handle that in the film. And largely they just… didn’t. The word “Sabra” is never used and it’s not really discussed that the character is Israeli. In fact, in the film, she’s an American secret agent and just… has a bit of an accent, but mostly because Shira Haas, the actress portraying her is just using her normal voice and she sounds like that. Reportedly, there was more originally intended, but they cut it as the Gaza War became more and more of a thing.
Similarly, in another part of Disney, Pixar recently started a new ensemble show, Win or Lose, that follows a bunch of characters on a co-ed youth softball team. Having a full team means the opportunity to explore many different stories, and when the series was originally pitched, one of the characters was going to be transgender. In fact, they even hired a transgender actress to play the character. However between production and airing, the nation elected Donald Trump and so the show has just decided to “not do that” and removed all references to the storyline. The character is still there. She’s just presumed cis female and any storyline about transitioning is just gone. Animation takes a long time. So that means this story was in the works for a while. It was axed because corporate decided not to rock the boat in the current cultural moment. And in this case, “not rocking the boat” is just “pretending trans people don’t exist”. In popular culture, hegemony is the point where conflict between the grassroots arts and the corporate arts meet.
This isn’t new. it’s always been a thing comics and TV shows have often aborted extremely progressive storylines once people got cold feet while expecting praise for tepid acknowledgment when it does happen. And the true marks of progress are often very solitary and go unpraised in their own time. I would argue that the watershed moment of the silver age of comics isn’t the first appearance of the Flash. it is the publication of “Judgment Day” in Weird Fantasy #18. Famously, this is a story about implicit bias and the dangers of institutional racism to a society. It’s an allegory for 1950s America using robots in space. And the reaction of the Comics Code Authority at the time was to ask the publisher if they could rework the story ABOUT RACISM so that the human astronaut character was white because they felt that a black astronaut was offensive. The publisher, EC Comics, quite literally opted to go out of business rather than make the change. But most of the time people beholden to corporate and capitalist interests don’t take big swings. It’s why the whole concept of queer baiting exists.
So I wanna talk about that. What are your thoughts on the modern “ever so slightly woke but not too much” approach to mass media storytelling? Do you think things have been changing? Accelerating? Declining? Is there a way to actually have conversations about progressive issues in mass market popular culture under a capitalist system without pandering to the almighty dollar? Let us know your thoughts in the comments so we can talk about it on the show.
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