It’s always a matter of when—not if—when wokeness comes to claim your hobby. It has toppled virtually every franchise and IP, defacing and vandalizing all with the same calls for diversity, inclusion, and representation. It becomes tiresome after a while, hearing the same arguments made verbatim across all entertainment. I’ve heard them. You’ve heard them. I’m sure there’s no need to go in depth here, but below are a few choice favorites from the latest controversy over female custodians:
Absolutely true, and this is why I write fantasy fiction; the genre long since fell to these clowns and the only way to resist and take back what is ours is to write new 'Dragonlances' 'new Warcrafts', 'new LOTRs' and so on. Definitely liked this article of yours Isaac Young!
Men are stronger than women. However, we have cyborgs, and they are equal....no. Guy has better body mass to cyborgize. Even in the cyborg future men are stronger, actually even stronger.
I just don't get why women would rush to be in combat. Who wants to see their mother, daughter or sister blown to pieces?
Yet another pander to the 0.05% of women who just can't stop being victims, or want to be men. It's not ljke anyone is clamouring for equality in garbage truck driving.
Yes, I've made this point repeatedly on YouTube, etc. Outside of emergencies, no society that is in a war of attrition against enemies with high reproductive rates would ever push breeding age women into situations of danger. It would be extremely foolish.
Female Custodians aren’t really important in of themselves per se. It’s just what the discourse erupted over. I expect the same slow decline as it has happened with every other company. Interesting post if true though.
I wish this were true but I don't think it is. The left didn't come after WH40k until now because it's only recently spiked in popularity. The original authors could get away saying it's a "satire" even though it's never written satirically. But as soon as the public attention is fixated on something, that is a signal for the left to attack it.
Despite the wealth of world building, WH40k survived by being a relatively small IP. This implies the keys to avoid convergence are more about financials and selective hiring. We can't rely on people who sometimes get it right. We need people who fanatically get it right.
I'm going to butcher the quote but I heard the woke worldview expressed as "the oppressed have emotion, but no agency while the oppressors have agency, but no emotion."
As someone literally trying to build a card game, believe me I'm all about us trying to build our own thing, but there's also a great effort underway to disrupt communication lines to disrupt this. I mean just look at this article, it ends without any links to any of the right-wing folks who have been writing and building for years now. I don't suspect Isaac is doing this deliberately, there's a high chance he's never heard of half the folks I know. Then there's a pretty good chance the half he does know - are all infighting. Should we even start on "the grifter" drinking game?
Eventually it's all so tiresome because it takes way more energy and effort to build, than it does to tear down.
The further we push away from the truth, the harder we try to remanufacture it and the more desperately wicked we become. As I read your essay, the scripture, "God is not mocked; what a man sows, so shall he reap," came to mind. Truth is often like a beach ball - it requires a serious amount of effort to suppress and hide it under the surface. But beachballs are going to beachball. Eventually, it springs to the surface. You may spend all of your life suppressing it, and some do, but the moment you let off, it'll show up in all its multicolored grandeur for all the world to see.
This has always been my take too, they engineered a universe where the sheer scale of horror ennobled anyone fighting against it. And it's worth pointing out that they did it by mistake. When you go back and look the guys that fleshed it out in the 80s Chambers, Priestley, Johnson they're 'fuck you dad' liberals groaning about Thatcherism. They imagined space marines as universal soldier types, drugged up cyber zombies butchering anyone in sight. The emperor wasn't even real, he was high school comment on religion 'look at these retards praying to someone so distant that no-one knows if he exists'. Total nihilism. There's a quote from Priestley to the effect that they used to refer to the warehouse guys in the magazine as Trolls but they all wanted the be space marines. Priestley couldn't understand that 'why would anyone want to be a lobotomized murder machine?'
This is a fundamentally unworkable approach to the issue. Trying to make a fictional universe so right-wing that it could not possibly be "ruined" by leftist writers is like trying to create a superhero so powerful that no writer could humiliate them. It's a fundamental truth of fiction that writers can defeat characters 100% of the time. If the Jedi Order were strictly male and to deviate from it would be heresy, leftist writers could merely write stories about heroic female force-sensitives who overthrew the old and corrupt sexist order, or they could simply end-run the problem and reboot the series to their liking. Looking for an in-universe solution to an out of universe problem is a fundamentally confused endeavor.
We have some pretty good case studies in which it's failed: no doubt you believe reality itself is full of rightwing truths, but that hasn't stopped the Left from placing its own interpretations on well, reality. The same goes for, say, Christianity. It hasn't happened to Islam but that's mostly because Islam has a small army of ideological enforcers who are willing to literally murder people who attempt the wrong interpretations, which is what we could call an "out-of-universe" solution to the problem of heresy.
If you actually wanted to figure out how to solve the proliferation of leftism within IPs, you're going to need to figure out how to build an IP in such a way that it survives Conquest's Second Law, which is that any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing. This means either 1. keeping it under the ownership of a person rather than that of a company, or 2. placing it under the control of an explicitly right-wing organization. Right-wing organizations are sadly composed mostly of uncreative goobers who whine about leftist media but rarely actually succeed in actually creating anything inspiring, so in practice you're left with (1).
It worked with Games Workshop for 30 years. And while I have no doubt that RW employees helped immensely with that endeavor, it also helps that their 40k universe was extraordinarily RW. I’m not positing a foolproof solution to Leftist corruption, only part of a larger strategy that will include irl political maneuvering as well. As an indie author, and speaking mainly to other indie authors, this seemed a good starting topic.
"Trying to make a fictional universe so righ-wing that it could not possibly be 'ruined' by leftist writers is like trying to create a superhero so powerful that no writer could humiliate them. It's a fundamental truth of fiction that writers can defeat characters 100% of the time."
In 1893, Arthur Conan Doyle attempted to kill Sherlock Holmes. In 1993, Mike Carlin attempted to kill Superman. And both times, they found that the fictional characters they were writing refused to die. Writers can twist a lot, but even writers have limits on what they can and can't do.
There was a *brief* period in which it was actually possible for something undeniably 'woke' to be entertaining - and I'm thinking specifically of season 1 of the show DIRK GENTLY'S HOLISTIC DETECTIVE AGENCY.
It has all the hallmarks of wokeness. The show itself has virtually nothing in common with the books, only the name and (for lack of a better word) superpower of the title character. The hired muscle for the good guys is a diverse strong female character, Farah, good with guns and only lacking in her own self-confidence. The most dangerous assassin in the world is a hundred-pound girl, Bart Curlish, capable of taking out a score of armed men bare-handed while protected by nothing but plot armor. The genius morally-ambiguous hacker recruited by the bad guys is black - and none of these diverse characters existed in the original books. The primary bad guys of seasons 1 and 2 were all white. And Max Landis wrote it. If it came out today, you and I would both 100% assume that it'd be 'woke' garbage. And we'd probably be correct.
But this was 2015, and it was possible to actually use those tropes in an interesting way. Farah was great with guns, yes, and thanks to her training could beat guys in hand-to-hand combat. But training won't let you win against five or six guys at once, or let you beat a male soldier who trained as hard as you (Alan Tudyk took her down instantly), and losing self-confidence in the middle of a fight can cost lives; it's not some trivial problem that can be fixed with a good inspirational speech.
Bart Curlish is an even better example. She was an absolute killing machine, thanks to her plot armor...and so, the logical question becomes, what happens when she tries to go against the plot, and assassinate the title character of the show (who logically has more plot armor than she does)? Suddenly, she doesn't know how to aim (normally, she'd wave her gun and it'd happen to be a perfect headshot), has no endurance or stamina (was never in an extended fight, never had to chase after a target), and when she gets hurt, has a complete psychological breakdown, because she's never in her life had to deal with pain before.
I could go on, but you get the idea. The show used the tropes we rightly associate with wokeness in an actually interesting way, and attempted to tell some sort of engaging story with it. Probably why the BBC hated the show so much and cancelled it as early as they did.
space marines really are 'men' to start with. They are genetic super soldiers whos sole purpose is to kill aliens and demons. They are basically clones of the God Emperor. also they are sterile and not able to reproduce. so what is the point in making females? Woudn't they just look like men any.... ..ohhhhhh~
Tolkien did this exactly and it still happened. No matter how objectively true you make things in your world they’ll just visit a time where the rules weren’t defined because why would you, and make it their own. That’s why we have lawd dem rangs. Thats why acolyte has a 200% uptick in LGBTQ characters and cringe butch hairstyles. No matter what you do they’ll just go 1000 years in the future or past and keep your aesthetics, iconography, and technology but twist the rest to their liking.
Okay, but LOTR is another example in my favor. It lasted decades before the Left could corrupt it. And I realize making the "ultra based" world isn't the end all and be all. There's a sizable amount of irl political maneuvering. But that's not advice useful to potential indie artists striking it out on their own (my core audience).
Absolutely true, and this is why I write fantasy fiction; the genre long since fell to these clowns and the only way to resist and take back what is ours is to write new 'Dragonlances' 'new Warcrafts', 'new LOTRs' and so on. Definitely liked this article of yours Isaac Young!
Men are stronger than women. However, we have cyborgs, and they are equal....no. Guy has better body mass to cyborgize. Even in the cyborg future men are stronger, actually even stronger.
Plus women are limiting factors of reproduction. Of course for the sake of population growth they will be kept out of combat roles.
I just don't get why women would rush to be in combat. Who wants to see their mother, daughter or sister blown to pieces?
Yet another pander to the 0.05% of women who just can't stop being victims, or want to be men. It's not ljke anyone is clamouring for equality in garbage truck driving.
Yes, I've made this point repeatedly on YouTube, etc. Outside of emergencies, no society that is in a war of attrition against enemies with high reproductive rates would ever push breeding age women into situations of danger. It would be extremely foolish.
Even in an emergency when women have to fight. It is pretty much over.
You are going out for the evening and are guaranteed to get into a fight. Do you take 4 male friends or 4 female friends with you?
Also no offense to a fellow writer, I just post this because 4chan always has the best fiction*. ;)
https://twitter.com/eldarmark/status/1780858989678678438
*or is it?
Female Custodians aren’t really important in of themselves per se. It’s just what the discourse erupted over. I expect the same slow decline as it has happened with every other company. Interesting post if true though.
Great article. Entertainment is important, it's our modern day myths, and we need to fight for it.
I wish this were true but I don't think it is. The left didn't come after WH40k until now because it's only recently spiked in popularity. The original authors could get away saying it's a "satire" even though it's never written satirically. But as soon as the public attention is fixated on something, that is a signal for the left to attack it.
Despite the wealth of world building, WH40k survived by being a relatively small IP. This implies the keys to avoid convergence are more about financials and selective hiring. We can't rely on people who sometimes get it right. We need people who fanatically get it right.
Wish I could "like" this comment more than once.
I'm going to butcher the quote but I heard the woke worldview expressed as "the oppressed have emotion, but no agency while the oppressors have agency, but no emotion."
As someone literally trying to build a card game, believe me I'm all about us trying to build our own thing, but there's also a great effort underway to disrupt communication lines to disrupt this. I mean just look at this article, it ends without any links to any of the right-wing folks who have been writing and building for years now. I don't suspect Isaac is doing this deliberately, there's a high chance he's never heard of half the folks I know. Then there's a pretty good chance the half he does know - are all infighting. Should we even start on "the grifter" drinking game?
Eventually it's all so tiresome because it takes way more energy and effort to build, than it does to tear down.
Most my promotion of indie content happens on my Twitter. Few people make it to the Substack.
Ah yeah fair point.
The further we push away from the truth, the harder we try to remanufacture it and the more desperately wicked we become. As I read your essay, the scripture, "God is not mocked; what a man sows, so shall he reap," came to mind. Truth is often like a beach ball - it requires a serious amount of effort to suppress and hide it under the surface. But beachballs are going to beachball. Eventually, it springs to the surface. You may spend all of your life suppressing it, and some do, but the moment you let off, it'll show up in all its multicolored grandeur for all the world to see.
Great article not only how the left subvert fiction but also society in general. One of the only ways to resist it is through clinging to truth.
Btw. I don't think the Imperium of Man goes far enough. To exclude women from all combat roles.
Can't justify female custodes if there are zero female soldiers anywhere because life dictates they train to be good mothers not cannon fodder.
This has always been my take too, they engineered a universe where the sheer scale of horror ennobled anyone fighting against it. And it's worth pointing out that they did it by mistake. When you go back and look the guys that fleshed it out in the 80s Chambers, Priestley, Johnson they're 'fuck you dad' liberals groaning about Thatcherism. They imagined space marines as universal soldier types, drugged up cyber zombies butchering anyone in sight. The emperor wasn't even real, he was high school comment on religion 'look at these retards praying to someone so distant that no-one knows if he exists'. Total nihilism. There's a quote from Priestley to the effect that they used to refer to the warehouse guys in the magazine as Trolls but they all wanted the be space marines. Priestley couldn't understand that 'why would anyone want to be a lobotomized murder machine?'
This is a fundamentally unworkable approach to the issue. Trying to make a fictional universe so right-wing that it could not possibly be "ruined" by leftist writers is like trying to create a superhero so powerful that no writer could humiliate them. It's a fundamental truth of fiction that writers can defeat characters 100% of the time. If the Jedi Order were strictly male and to deviate from it would be heresy, leftist writers could merely write stories about heroic female force-sensitives who overthrew the old and corrupt sexist order, or they could simply end-run the problem and reboot the series to their liking. Looking for an in-universe solution to an out of universe problem is a fundamentally confused endeavor.
We have some pretty good case studies in which it's failed: no doubt you believe reality itself is full of rightwing truths, but that hasn't stopped the Left from placing its own interpretations on well, reality. The same goes for, say, Christianity. It hasn't happened to Islam but that's mostly because Islam has a small army of ideological enforcers who are willing to literally murder people who attempt the wrong interpretations, which is what we could call an "out-of-universe" solution to the problem of heresy.
If you actually wanted to figure out how to solve the proliferation of leftism within IPs, you're going to need to figure out how to build an IP in such a way that it survives Conquest's Second Law, which is that any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing. This means either 1. keeping it under the ownership of a person rather than that of a company, or 2. placing it under the control of an explicitly right-wing organization. Right-wing organizations are sadly composed mostly of uncreative goobers who whine about leftist media but rarely actually succeed in actually creating anything inspiring, so in practice you're left with (1).
It worked with Games Workshop for 30 years. And while I have no doubt that RW employees helped immensely with that endeavor, it also helps that their 40k universe was extraordinarily RW. I’m not positing a foolproof solution to Leftist corruption, only part of a larger strategy that will include irl political maneuvering as well. As an indie author, and speaking mainly to other indie authors, this seemed a good starting topic.
"Trying to make a fictional universe so righ-wing that it could not possibly be 'ruined' by leftist writers is like trying to create a superhero so powerful that no writer could humiliate them. It's a fundamental truth of fiction that writers can defeat characters 100% of the time."
In 1893, Arthur Conan Doyle attempted to kill Sherlock Holmes. In 1993, Mike Carlin attempted to kill Superman. And both times, they found that the fictional characters they were writing refused to die. Writers can twist a lot, but even writers have limits on what they can and can't do.
Woke entertainment can be described in one word. Anti-whitism. It hates the white race and is antiwhite to its very core.
There is no such thing as woke entertainment. I am yet to see anything woke be remotely entertaining
There was a *brief* period in which it was actually possible for something undeniably 'woke' to be entertaining - and I'm thinking specifically of season 1 of the show DIRK GENTLY'S HOLISTIC DETECTIVE AGENCY.
It has all the hallmarks of wokeness. The show itself has virtually nothing in common with the books, only the name and (for lack of a better word) superpower of the title character. The hired muscle for the good guys is a diverse strong female character, Farah, good with guns and only lacking in her own self-confidence. The most dangerous assassin in the world is a hundred-pound girl, Bart Curlish, capable of taking out a score of armed men bare-handed while protected by nothing but plot armor. The genius morally-ambiguous hacker recruited by the bad guys is black - and none of these diverse characters existed in the original books. The primary bad guys of seasons 1 and 2 were all white. And Max Landis wrote it. If it came out today, you and I would both 100% assume that it'd be 'woke' garbage. And we'd probably be correct.
But this was 2015, and it was possible to actually use those tropes in an interesting way. Farah was great with guns, yes, and thanks to her training could beat guys in hand-to-hand combat. But training won't let you win against five or six guys at once, or let you beat a male soldier who trained as hard as you (Alan Tudyk took her down instantly), and losing self-confidence in the middle of a fight can cost lives; it's not some trivial problem that can be fixed with a good inspirational speech.
Bart Curlish is an even better example. She was an absolute killing machine, thanks to her plot armor...and so, the logical question becomes, what happens when she tries to go against the plot, and assassinate the title character of the show (who logically has more plot armor than she does)? Suddenly, she doesn't know how to aim (normally, she'd wave her gun and it'd happen to be a perfect headshot), has no endurance or stamina (was never in an extended fight, never had to chase after a target), and when she gets hurt, has a complete psychological breakdown, because she's never in her life had to deal with pain before.
I could go on, but you get the idea. The show used the tropes we rightly associate with wokeness in an actually interesting way, and attempted to tell some sort of engaging story with it. Probably why the BBC hated the show so much and cancelled it as early as they did.
Female custodians are just comfort brigades.
Change my mind.
space marines really are 'men' to start with. They are genetic super soldiers whos sole purpose is to kill aliens and demons. They are basically clones of the God Emperor. also they are sterile and not able to reproduce. so what is the point in making females? Woudn't they just look like men any.... ..ohhhhhh~
Tolkien did this exactly and it still happened. No matter how objectively true you make things in your world they’ll just visit a time where the rules weren’t defined because why would you, and make it their own. That’s why we have lawd dem rangs. Thats why acolyte has a 200% uptick in LGBTQ characters and cringe butch hairstyles. No matter what you do they’ll just go 1000 years in the future or past and keep your aesthetics, iconography, and technology but twist the rest to their liking.
Okay, but LOTR is another example in my favor. It lasted decades before the Left could corrupt it. And I realize making the "ultra based" world isn't the end all and be all. There's a sizable amount of irl political maneuvering. But that's not advice useful to potential indie artists striking it out on their own (my core audience).
Women have been in combat roles for all of human history. It doesn't seem strange to me for WH40k to finally acknowledge that.