I enjoy some good sci-fi. I like urban fantasy. I like good story telling. Over the years there have been some series and settings that I always wanted to watch. Some examples of those are Star Wars, Star Trek, Lord of the Rings, and generally speaking Marvel and DC comic inspired shows.
These days...
These days my mind goes through a rather new process. "How much woke at the expense of story am I willing to tolerate?" The stories have become weaker, derivative, and often involve just rereleasing something from the past. It goes even so far as rereleasing a rerelease. Yet one thing that has changed and seems to be getting worse and not better is the emphasis put on making certain woke ideology is put into the new shows and the rereleases. In the process the stories are not as deep.
I have thought for awhile that if we view the creation process as having so many creative and productive cycles that can be devoted to the shows what happens when the criteria now includes a MUST BE WOKE category? They don't tend to reduce the special effects. We are getting more special effects and I'll admit I am a fan of that. Where do they get the time to determine "How can woke be injected into this? Which roles can we gender swap, sexual preference swap, or skin color swap?" The dialog will also need some work. "How can we change the dialog to push some woke talking points?" The end result seems to me that the stories often suck. They are an after thought. As long as they got the woke in then the rest doesn't matter.
So what is that doing to my watching habits?
I have to think "Do I have the stomach or the patience to watch this?" Often the answer is no. I have shows that in the past I would have watched the moment I had some free time and had my hands on them. Now many such things have been sitting in my digital video repository for some time and I just can't manage to watch them.
I have thought about this and written about it before.
Today I was adding Star Trek Picard Season 2 Episode 5 to my library. I realized I hadn't bothered watching episodes 1-4 and I wasn't sure when I was going to get around to it. I probably will at some point.
The new Amazon Lord of the Rings : Ring of Power I suspect I may skip completely.
I also was very disappointed in what they did to the Wheel of Time. The setting looked great. The story got pretty thoroughly worked over for the sake of wokeness.
If I didn't know those particular books I'd watch the Wheel of Time and think "It's a well made woke heavy show" and I'd likely still watch it. I did enjoy it. I have read those books several times. Now I've come to expect shows to not be as good as the books in pretty much every case. The liberties they took with the Wheel of Time did not IMPROVE anything. They just checked off some woke check boxes and that can be a major disappointment.
All I know is if it seems to be focusing on woke my mind may suddenly decide "I don't have the time or the interest in this."
