If you've ever watched a movie, television show, or played a video game and some moments just felt too forced or out of place, there's a reason for that. While these kinds of things have always plagued the entertainment industry, as no writing or directing is perfect, the issue has become so over-the-top nowadays and it nearly always feels politically tinged.
That's because it is and these moments are a feature, not a bug.
What you witnessed was the work of "sensitivity readers." Their entire job is to go into scripts, find things that might offend someone, namely what they would consider offensive to "marginalized groups," and then change it. These "marginalized groups" can mean anyone from the black community, transgender people, or women.
This is effectively a bastardization or corruption process and the original writer doesn't always know this is happening. As I wrote not long ago, the Japanese entertainment industry, namely manga and anime, is in an uproar after it was discovered that Western translators known as "localizers" were changing up scripts during their translation process to be more tasteful for leftists.
The result has been Japanese animation companies taking the burden of translating upon themselves and using AI to assist them.
Another anime called "Lovely Complex" recently got this treatment as well. The script was changed by people who openly admit to despising it and casting people for the roles who have no interest in telling the author's original story.
This of course includes running the rewritten script by "sensitivity readers" & hiring people from specific groups to join the cast rather than concerning themselves with telling the author's story. pic.twitter.com/sLHWl7IkO1
— Scratch Point (@Scratch_Point_Z) February 12, 2024
Again, this isn't an isolated incident.
These "sensitivity readers" are destroying pretty much anything they can get their hands on and, unlike the anime industry, some of them are paid quite a bit to do it. You've probably heard of Sweet Baby Inc., but it's a company that is paid quite a bit of money to go into video games and effectively ruin them by making them more DEI-focused and "respectful" towards marginalized groups.
As I wrote last November, one of its victims was the highly anticipated "Alan Wake II" which took the main character and made her a two-dimensional character filled to the brim with stoic girl power:
Thanks to the "sensitivity" assurance that Sweet Baby does for any games it gets its grasp on, the story is just...boring, and this is partly thanks to Saga being such a two-dimensional character. Like many modern stories, it has to fit within the rules set by ESG guidelines, and the main female character (in this case, Saga) can have few flaws, if any.
She's not just the best detective, she's a medical examiner who doesn't need to use gloves. She's stoic. She's referred to as a "Viking" from time to time. When she hears distressing news, she's not affected. She can (slight spoilers) watch a dead man with no heart rise up and slaughter police officers around her...and she'll just shrug it off like it's just another Tuesday. She's a cardboard cutout of a character much like many "strong women" archetypes are nowadays and affects the mood of the story.
These groups, often obsessed with social justice, are making good products into bad products based on some ideological drive to make things "better."
But they aren't better in the least.
What they're effectively doing is taking the works of better people, stealing it either through furtive means or social pressure, and making it theirs. The original experience and imagination of the author are corrupted and destroyed so that the "sensitivity readers" can inject themselves or, at the very least, their own ideological nonsense into the story.
They say they do this for others, but let's be real. It's for them.
The thing is, the market can't take too much of this. Eventually, as products begin to fail and audiences walk away, a change will have to happen. The question is, will the Western entertainment industry learn its lesson in time?
(READ: Hollywood's Way Back Into Relevancy Will Mean Ditching a Lot of Its Gilding)
