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Rant - Shipping/Romance Plots Are The Worst
5 years ago
I was watching the Netflix series Dark, which looked like a Tales From The Loop knock off, which was something I wanted. Just something to have on the TV while I eat breakfast.
This show about anomalies, mystery, and time travel spent the first 10 minutes going over who is fucking who, and kids arguing over a missing hoodie. I skimmed through the episode, and aside from one kid going missing, there was nothing really to advance the plot. It was all personal drama.
I hate this.
It’s a trend I’ve noticed over the last 6 years or so. Take genre fiction, be it sci-fi, action, adventure, super heroes, or even a specific licence like GhostBusters or She-Ra, minimise or completely remove the reason people are watching the thing and focus on love triangles and petty relationship drama.
Imagine going to watch an action movie, and the plot synopsis is “Darren is fucking his brothers wife while they go through a messy divorce, but tensions are further raised when he admit he wouldn’t quit his job to raise the kids-” Do you care? Does anybody care? I’m here for kung fu, stunts, explosions, and gun fights, not what someone is doing with their penis.
This is something I blame on social justice in general and Tumbr specifically. Toxic fanbases who don’t care about the thing they’re watching. All that matters is how popular the show is, and the relationship status and sexual orientation of the cast. That’s it. Everything else is largely irrelevant. How else do you explain the big finale of a popular “action adventure sci-fi” show for children being a gay kiss?
The obvious solution to this would be to make shows that cater to the Tumblr shipping crowd exclusively. Drop the pretense of being a genre show or a kids show and just have a romance drama, but the “how popular it is” part is important to Tumblr. In the case of She-Ra, the first season got 3000+ reviews, the second barely managed 300+, and by the final season barely 150. That’s a fairly steep fall off. Contrast this to DareDevil which had 8000 reviews, then 7000-ish for the rest of the seasons.
Part of me wants to say that this is done to appease the small but rabid Tumblr audience. Those guys will harass people to the point of suicide after all. Another part of me thinks this is to get good reviews from the press who will throw praise at anything that appeases their demands for “diversity”. All possible and fairly probable, but I have another theory. It’s cheap and easy.
Filling 10 hours of screen time with effects and action scenes is time consuming and expensive. Relationship drama? That’s just people talking. No need to worry about effects, or waiting for the right weather to film a scene. If it’s animated, no need to spend money on fluid or complex animation. It can also be padded out almost indefinitely. Just have them argue, reconcile, argue, reconcile, over and over and over.
One final point I want to make. Even as a kid, I didn’t like it when shows like MASK or Transformers focused on the annoying kid characters. I’m there to watch Matt Tracker and Optimus Prime, not annoying kids. Same with the token romance plots that almost every film had to have by law. Films like Dredd, John Wick, and The Raid prove that you don’t need that stuff to make a good film, but the last 6 years they've gone backwards. Instead of a token romance subplot, they are now relationship dramas with a token action C-plot they include out of obligation (assuming they include it at all).
This show about anomalies, mystery, and time travel spent the first 10 minutes going over who is fucking who, and kids arguing over a missing hoodie. I skimmed through the episode, and aside from one kid going missing, there was nothing really to advance the plot. It was all personal drama.
I hate this.
It’s a trend I’ve noticed over the last 6 years or so. Take genre fiction, be it sci-fi, action, adventure, super heroes, or even a specific licence like GhostBusters or She-Ra, minimise or completely remove the reason people are watching the thing and focus on love triangles and petty relationship drama.
Imagine going to watch an action movie, and the plot synopsis is “Darren is fucking his brothers wife while they go through a messy divorce, but tensions are further raised when he admit he wouldn’t quit his job to raise the kids-” Do you care? Does anybody care? I’m here for kung fu, stunts, explosions, and gun fights, not what someone is doing with their penis.
This is something I blame on social justice in general and Tumbr specifically. Toxic fanbases who don’t care about the thing they’re watching. All that matters is how popular the show is, and the relationship status and sexual orientation of the cast. That’s it. Everything else is largely irrelevant. How else do you explain the big finale of a popular “action adventure sci-fi” show for children being a gay kiss?
The obvious solution to this would be to make shows that cater to the Tumblr shipping crowd exclusively. Drop the pretense of being a genre show or a kids show and just have a romance drama, but the “how popular it is” part is important to Tumblr. In the case of She-Ra, the first season got 3000+ reviews, the second barely managed 300+, and by the final season barely 150. That’s a fairly steep fall off. Contrast this to DareDevil which had 8000 reviews, then 7000-ish for the rest of the seasons.
Part of me wants to say that this is done to appease the small but rabid Tumblr audience. Those guys will harass people to the point of suicide after all. Another part of me thinks this is to get good reviews from the press who will throw praise at anything that appeases their demands for “diversity”. All possible and fairly probable, but I have another theory. It’s cheap and easy.
Filling 10 hours of screen time with effects and action scenes is time consuming and expensive. Relationship drama? That’s just people talking. No need to worry about effects, or waiting for the right weather to film a scene. If it’s animated, no need to spend money on fluid or complex animation. It can also be padded out almost indefinitely. Just have them argue, reconcile, argue, reconcile, over and over and over.
One final point I want to make. Even as a kid, I didn’t like it when shows like MASK or Transformers focused on the annoying kid characters. I’m there to watch Matt Tracker and Optimus Prime, not annoying kids. Same with the token romance plots that almost every film had to have by law. Films like Dredd, John Wick, and The Raid prove that you don’t need that stuff to make a good film, but the last 6 years they've gone backwards. Instead of a token romance subplot, they are now relationship dramas with a token action C-plot they include out of obligation (assuming they include it at all).
