I think you have to accept that as part and parcel to the endeavor, though. Otherwise your dark-modern-Earth setting ends up reading like a satire of a cowardly self-censoring artist:

It’s never good to discover that yet another person on this planet is a victimizer, and it does sting even more when that person has enjoyed success and material comfort that most of us can only dream about.

“The easiest way to do that” isn’t exactly a ringing endorsement of considered journalistic craftsmanship.

Hollywood these days coddles cops and rich people, but not regular pleb racists. Even amongst the powerless (contextually defined by an ability to hurt Hollywood financially,) the regular pleb racists are *particularly* powerless. Even though there’s far too many of them for comfort, they’re still a minority; their…

So uh... those interspersed Ubisoft promotional pictures in this article sure were tonally jarring, weren’t they? Like, maybe this isn’t quiiiiiiite the article within which to be inserting de rigueur free advertising for the company in question? Maybe?

>And if they do it FOR Epic, they’ll have to do it for everyone.

I don’t recall humility being a relevant aspect of the D&D alignment chart, and I definitely don’t recall Dr. Cox being a bastion of it regardless.

>So much of the show seems poorly conceived. Ensign Mariner is a fuck up who doesn’t give a shit, but she’s also a hypercompetent know-it-all who insists on being the smartest one in the room.

“The food was awful!”

My recollection isn’t great after all these years, but two candidates for research would be that lightning lady and the psychic thief lady. I can’t remember either of them having any alien background.

There’s a pretty strong chance that, if left to our own devices here in the real world, the man-made climate change crisis is going to kill a lot more people than that, and drastically reduce quality-of-life for vastly more.

Oh the costume choices are intentional. The dude’s an edgelord. I don’t even mean that as an insult, at least not to the writers and actor. It’s an interesting spin on a villain. It’s essentially a dark mirror to the most quipalicious heroes from the MCU, fully postmodern. He cares about Cool Shit for its own sake,…

I still don’t get the Apu thing. At various times in my life, I’ve had coworkers, family members (both by marriage and in older generations by blood,) doctors, and random people I’ve interacted with in passing (including, wait for it, convenience store clerks,) who retain thick ethnic accents despite living and…

I mean, do you not think it’s even slightly relevant that their religion is, ultimately, based around the idea that the entire universe is a brutal, authoritarian dictatorship?

Jim’s certainly not a great guy, so attributing narcissistic injury isn’t a tough sell. But the script chose that whole “ethics and morals” scene quite intentionally (indeed, I think it may even have been a trope prior to Election; if not, it’s certainly one now.) When you have an intelligent, clean-cut, glassy-eyed…

The protagonist of Election is all kinds of shitty, sure, but you really can’t empathize at all with a teacher who disdains the “always raises hand, always recites the correct answer directly from the text, maintains a perfect public image, and will probably end up authorizing war crimes in the future” student…

I don’t think hard and fast rules do us any good here. Very Serious Films also have multi-million dollar marketing blitzes sometimes, and a variation on this poem wouldn’t feel out of place depending upon the substance. I’d suggest that Watch_Dogs is an appropriate property; the problem is Ubisoft’s reputation for…

The ‘teachable moment’ counterargument is already giving up too much ground. Art shouldn’t have to remain stuck in a childlike state where a Greek Chorus screams at the audience to tell them exactly what to think about every single thing that happens in the work. Uh-oh, this guy smoked a cigarette. CUE THE CHORUS…

You’re trying to tag this guy with that? Jesus. What do you think is scaring people into memory-holing episodes of television, here? Spoiler Alert: it’s outrage, and broad-spectrum outrage to boot - you know, the kind that many people start feeling constantly, and indiscriminately.

Now, when they’re forced to move on to another gesture almost immediately, we’ll all feel better about... something. Somehow.