Expectations of Entertainments

    I’ve been playing a few various video games lately, and while I’ve been noticing that more and more characters are “politically correct” shallow caricature of SJW fantasies, it suddenly occurred to me that this is merely a symptom of a much broader societal problem.

Playing the game of Pathfinder Kingmaker, which begins with whatever character you create meeting a number of NPCs (Non-Player Characters) as you begin and proceed in the game.  This is not unusual as an RPG (Role Playing Game) game set up along similar lines to Dungeons & Dragons, but adapted for a computer game.

What struck me as more than a little odd is that in the game you first meet a bard, two warriors (one a barbarian and the other armoured from head to toe), an un-dead elf, a manic depressive dwarven cleric, and a megalomaniac gnome.  The gnome is more of an antagonist than a companion.

Of the remaining, all but the dwarf are women.  That is what stands out, that the warriors in the game are women and the bad guy is a man.  There is later in the game other male character characters but they are not the stereotypical front line warriors.

So, I naturally thought back to other games I have played recently as it had been a while since I played any computerized RPG-like game.  (No computer game can really pull off a proper RPG game because of the rather limited option nature of a computerized game, and this limitation is just getting worse the more that the games seek to improve the graphics and voice acting.)

Previously, I was playing Dragon Age Inquisition, in which the in-game religious hierarchy is ran by women, the first NPCs your character is introduced are a female warrior, an male elven mage, and a male dwarven rogue.  Nothing particularly unusual about this selection and one expects a natural tendency of modern games to have a greater balance of male and female characters.

However, why the sudden dominance of female warrior types dominating the main NPC spots in such games?  Then it occurred to me to look into other entertainment genres and I noticed a recurring and fairly consistent theme.

In the modern, annoyingly dystopian, teen fantasy movies like the Divergence trilogy and the Hunger Games trilogy, even the newest Star Wars, there is a noticeable absence of male heroic figures.  I am far from the first to notice this rather obvious trend of feminizing the very concept of the hero.  (And turning the men who are not villains into effectively the damsels in distress to be rescued.)

However, I also notice the same trend in politics as you see coming out of Hollyweird, with a whole bevy of “first Muslim woman” this and “first Hispanic woman” that, increasingly broken down into smaller and smaller distinctions like “from the third district of Wisconsin” or some such locality segmentation.

Why does it break down into such minute and detailed descriptions of firsts?  Because the firsts are becoming increasingly less significant and at the same time increasingly hyped and exploited for political effect.  We have already had the “big firsts”, the first woman in the Senate, the first Hispanic on the Supreme Court, and so forth and so on.

(Although the media conveniently forgets about many of the first black political figures as Governor, Representatives, and Senators, mostly because they were Republicans.)

So in order to constantly prove just how open minded the leftist political party is, they have to constantly contrive new firsts, to break through that wall or ceiling . . . which really is not there anymore and only exists in their collective imaginations.

Likewise, these movies and games go out of their way to break and defy stereotypes in an all consuming drive to show just how “inclusive” they are, how “unbiased” their perspectives have become, how “woke” their company, their entertainment field, and all that other PC stupidity.

The are currently not only faced with a diminishing opportunity for “firsts” and having to define ever finer lines like the “first divorced, Hispanic mother of three from out of state to hold office in the 5th Congressional district”, they are getting berated and castigated from their own supporters for not catering to every conceivable marginally defined groups of transpolyvinalesque-bronies or whatever.

(Even though that may essentially break down into a minority group of three guys in LA who did a little too much LSD over the weekend and invented the whole category.)

The real problem with these games, movies, and delusional quasi-realities, is that when something ceases to be a novelty, it simply becomes tired and stale.  People have gotten so burned out on these “edgy, stereotype breaking tropes” that it has become the stereotype itself.  You see an advertisement for a movie, you expect it to have a female warrior lead, or a homosexual twist, or any of a dozen other mundane “earthshaking” boring plot twists.

Stereotypes exist because they are normal.  That is to say they are the overwhelming statistical norm.  If ninety-five percent of your electrical engineers are male (I exaggerate, it’s really closer to ninety-nine percent), then the appearance of a female electrical engineer in a movie is striking.

However, if every electrical engineer in every movie is a woman, it ceases to be striking.  Further, because then such movies are so far departed from reality, the quality of the movie, in particular the ability of the audience to suspend disbelief, degrades significantly.

In history, there were certainly female warriors.  They did exist.  Many of them made it into the history books or legends and you know them by name: Joan of Arc, Queen Boudicca of the Iceni, and so forth.  But why did they stand out?

Did Joan of Arc stand out for her military prowess?  No, she was literally a “visionary” leader who inspired those around her to fight.  The same is true of Queen Boudicca, they both led armies in battle but neither were known for their fighting skills, only their ability to lead.

(That is not to say that they did not know how to fight, but the reality is that there is a natural difference in the typical ability of men and women to fight, and that difference carries through to the highest levels of ability.)

Which brings me back to the real topic of discussion.  If you are going to have a person or character who is an iconoclast, an image breaker, then you must first establish and maintain that image in order for it to be available to be broken.

To have a woman capable of holding her own against the men in some male dominated field like firefighting or police work is an impressive feat.  But it ceases to be impressive if the standards are lowered to accommodate her.  It becomes decidedly unimpressive if the system is artificially rigged to encourage the employment of equal numbers.

Recently the media regaled us with images of a young lady dominating her high school wrestling division.  However, with their fond new pretend label of “transitioning transexual”, they disguise the fact that she has been for years hopped up on so many supplemental steroids that many people thought she was a guy pretending to be a woman and not a woman wishing she were a man.

Either way the size and strength created from such elevated steroid intake gave her an obvious unfair and unnatural advantage.  There was a time when taking steroids to build muscle mass would get you disqualified from a sporting event regardless of the reason for taking it.

Simply put, a female warrior in a video game only becomes noteworthy if most of the warriors are men; a female heroine in a dystopian future is only a praiseworthy exception if most of the heros in dystopian dramas are men; the female politician is only worth noting when most of the politicians are men.  The same logic applies as readily to any and all minorities.  It even applies to the stay at home dad in Mr. Mom, the fathers in Three Men and a Baby, and many other comedies.

The surprise element in fiction or in reality only works if the norm is continually maintained.  When the unusual is expected, it is no longer unusual.  Even if the fiction defies the norm of society, if it is the norm of the fiction itself, it ceases to be interesting and actually becomes rather insulting precisely because it is a conscious denial of reality.

This has two effects, one bad and one good.

As more politicians and pundits are thrown at the American public because of their gender or ethnicity and it does become seen as the norm; the more people judge such people on the quality of their performance rather than the novelty of their position.

Alexanda Cortez, Kamala Harris, and Elizabeth Warren are all facing that very problem.  The novelty of the “female” candidate is wearing thin, so they face greater scrutiny on their policies and acumen than Hillary Clinton had to face.  Clueless, partisan, and dishonest respectively, the kid gloves are coming off and they face something they have been able to avoid until now . . . being judged by the content of their character.

That’s the good.

On the other front, entertainments in the forms of movies, television, and video games are becoming increasingly trite, boring, annoying, leftist propaganda, disconnected and distant.  Comedians are no longer funny, because there must be a grain of truth in all comedy, but truth is not allowed.  Games, shows, and movies are becoming boring and annoying because they are losing the emersive effect of a believable alternate reality.

That’s the bad.