News TLJ Negative Buzz Amplified by Russian Trolls, Study Finds
- Thread starter Tuskin38
- Start date
No. There were not "many people" who disliked TLJ; there were a tiny minority whose opinions and behavior were so OTT that their influence was easy to distort.
I don't know what point your random grouping of sentences is supposed to mean. But Secular Talk is a YouTube channel run by one guy, it's not exactly news or representative of anything.
Scifi has always been political, usually very liberal. The Day the Earth Stood Still is anti-war and anti-nuke with an alien who is a thinly disguised Space Jesus. Star Trek's political leanings are as clear as transparent aluminum since the 1960s. The Twilight Zone had very politically charged episodes. Sterling even prefered to use science fiction because it allowed him to insert his political ideas because the networks didn't seem to care when Martians said the same things that Republicans or Democrats would say. Star Wars is heavily influenced by the post-Vietnam era. All art is political because all art is influenced by the time they are written and by the writers themselves. Maybe some people didn't notice it because the ideas presented have become the norm and when they originally aired were often times radical, which shows the power of fiction on society. So the people upset about the current political leanings of scifi and other media should get used to them, one day they will be the norm too.
Not always. A lot of SF and horror was steeped in ideas of white supremacism, including the works of H.P. Lovecraft and John W. Campbell (to an extent) and the prose stories that inspired Buck Rogers. There's also been plenty of libertarian SF from authors like Poul Anderson and Robert Heinlein. Heinlein seemed to experiment with a variety of ideologies, with The Moon is a Harsh Mistress being libertarian but Starship Troopers being overtly pro-fascist. (Although I read an article recently about how libertarians are surprisingly prone to support fascism, because their concern is often just with their own individual freedom instead of anyone else's and they assume they'll be the ones on top in a fascist system.) I think that, as with any other walk of life, there have been differing eras when SF has tended in a more conservative direction or a more liberal one.
That basically stopped around the 1950s though. I read Starship Troopers, it's pretty disgusting. I really loved that the movie took it to an extreme because Verhoeven saw firsthand the terrors of the Nazis and wanted to show the kind of world that rightwing ideas would produce if left unchecked.
Explain?
No, it never stopped entirely; there's always been a mix of philosophies expressed by different authors, because it's a free country (or it used to be). There are still quite a few libertarian SF authors, including former Star Trek novelist Diane Carey (who would go on post-Trek to run for office on a very conservative platform, IIRC). There's always been plenty of military SF, and though I'm not a reader of that genre, I'd imagine a lot of it (though not all of it, of course) appeals to more conservative sensibilities.
Of course, on the extremist fringe, you have groups like the Sad and Rabid Puppies, right-wing and often "alt-right" (i.e. essentially neo-Nazi) factions that believe diversity is "ruining" science fiction and want it to revert to what they falsely imagine was its "traditional" nature as just being straightforward action stories about white male heroes blowing stuff up. A few years ago, they organized "slate" campaigns to game the Hugo nominations and overload them exclusively with their ideologically approved works (though it was mainly just an attempt by the campaign organizers to get their own works nominated), which led to a record number of "No Award" results thanks to Hugo voters who didn't consider any of the "slate" nominees to have literary merit. It backfired tremendously and led to reforms in the nomination process to keep such cheating from happening again, but it shows there are still SF writers and readers out there with conservative views, everywhere from moderate to extremist.
Heinlein is in kind of a weird category all of his own and is very difficult to pigeonhole when it comes to his social and political views, particularly when you factor in his later works. He's all over the damn place.
Mostly though, I'd say he was a fantasist. In that most of his ideas were built around the premise of what would make the world a more enjoyable place for him (and only him) personally.
And yes, while there has always been a spectrum of political views among sci-fi authors, the *vast* majority of those who have had a lasting impact on the genre and the wider cultural conversation are very much of the liberal/left leaning/humanist persuasion.
Even if that wasn't the case, we're discussing Star Wars here and I think anyone would have a hard time arguing that Lucas kept politics out of his stories about a monolithic fascist military/industrial empire taken down by a multi-cultural rebellion. Plus of course the PT which had as many senate meetings and political conversations as laser sword fights.
Mostly though, I'd say he was a fantasist. In that most of his ideas were built around the premise of what would make the world a more enjoyable place for him (and only him) personally.
And yes, while there has always been a spectrum of political views among sci-fi authors, the *vast* majority of those who have had a lasting impact on the genre and the wider cultural conversation are very much of the liberal/left leaning/humanist persuasion.
Even if that wasn't the case, we're discussing Star Wars here and I think anyone would have a hard time arguing that Lucas kept politics out of his stories about a monolithic fascist military/industrial empire taken down by a multi-cultural rebellion. Plus of course the PT which had as many senate meetings and political conversations as laser sword fights.
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You'd be surprised how wilfully ignorant some people can be.
Depends on the era, I'd say. H.P. Lovecraft had a far-reaching influence on the horror genre, and he was virulently, genocidally racist. The Golden Age of SF in the '40s and '50s never would've existed without John W. Campbell, and he was deeply conservative. He resisted publishing stories with female or nonwhite protagonists, and he firmly encouraged Astounding/Analog authors to portray humans as fundamentally superior to alien races, as an allegory for his own racial and cultural views. (The reason Isaac Asimov chose to set his far-future stories in a universe without aliens was to avoid having to deal with Campbell's distasteful racial politics.) A lot of the more left-leaning, humanist, feminist, and diverse SF, fantasy, and horror of the '60s and after has been a reaction against the conservatism that shaped those genres in their early decades. Science fiction has always been a dialogue among its creators, with later writers reacting to, and often against, what their predecessors did.
Of course I agree with that, and have already made that point earlier in the thread.
Which is why both "Starship Troopers" and "Stranger in a Strange Land" (among others) are fascinating works in their own right. I personally enjoy Starship Troopers not for the world building but for the long soliloquies regarding leadership and philosophy.
There being too much of something and people getting tired/less pleased with both the quality and quantity of it seem easily pretty reinforcing rather than conflicting factors.
That is a good point for a different factor.
I'll let you figure out what happens to the career of someone in Hollywood when they quit making profitable big-budget movies.
Definitely authoritarian but I don't think outright fascist, it was an interestingly different kind of perspective and system for military service to be genuinely voluntary and yet also required for suffrage, for any political power.
Sure, I'd agree if that was supported by the evidence, but for a while many of us have wondered about the discrepancies between the immediate and mid term audience reactions. We went from overwhelmingly positive responses to a downhill slide which correlated very neatly with the abuse and aggression which started appearing on social media.
If the turn off was down to the quality of TLJ (which for the record I thought was actually one of the best films in the franchise, despite it's flaws) then the initial positive responses become quite difficult to explain. They become even more tenuous when we speculate without good cause that they were an influencing factor in the demise of Solo, despite the fact the by and large universally panned PT apparently had no comparable impact on the popularity of SW as a whole.
The logical conclusion here is that there was another (then unknown) factor at play leading to the controversy surrounding TLJ and this study lends hard evidence to exactly such a factor. It fits perfectly with the sequence of events and provides a more more elegant and consistent explanation.
Actually no, although it's not made as explicit as it might be in the novel military service was not a requirement for voting rights in Starship Troopers, merely governmental service. In his Extended Universe Heinlein made a point of emphasising this to clarify the point that the vast majority of those who had the vote would not have seen military service, be it in the mobile infantry or otherwise.
Could be some of these folks saw favorite online sites bashing the film? People seem to follow their favorite prognosticators, regardless of it lines up with the original feelings on the subject.
Some folks are sheep, more than happy to be led to the slaughter.
Oh, yeah?
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