On Monday, I wrote about how the last released episode of Stranger Things spent ten minutes on a scene about one of the main characters coming out as gay right before the big battle. It severely displeased a lot of the public, and as a result, the episode is the lowest-rated of all the episodes across all seasons.
As I wrote in my article, the score is deserved, but not necessarily solely because of the gay factor. If I'm being honest, the gay part was the icing on the cake.
Read: I've Got a Nasty Case of LGBTQ+ Fatigue
The reaction to the backlash by the Left was that the reason people hated this episode was that everyone is just homophobic. It's step one of a tactic that allows the social justice activist community to proclaim the need for more representation because it's not normalized enough.
But again, it's less about the gay and more about the intrusion of the gay into the story, and this is a constant issue shared by way too many properties and franchises that were once very popular but became too focused on injecting a message that distracted from the story.
And it's here that we find the real issue with a lot of LGBT+ messaging. It's an uninvited guest that sees itself as so important that it's worthy of interrupting everything to make you pay attention to it.
The same thing happened in The Last of Us, a gripping story about a man trying to lead a girl who is resistant to a mutation of the cordyceps fungus that can infect humans across the country to safety. The characters, Joel and Ellie, were likable, realistic, and earned each other's trust and respect over time. The story centered around their father/daughter relationship and how that could ultimately decide the fate of humanity.
The first game was a monumental piece of storytelling that took the world by storm, but by the second game, the woke virus had taken effect. Not only was Joel taken out of the picture in a way that was entirely disrespectful and ridiculous, but Ellie's relationship with a woman became too much of a focus. It became a woke attempt at telling a story with inclusivity in mind while trying to keep the same deep drama of the first game.
The issue is, if you make one aspect of the character so loud and it has no impact on the overall story, then it's a distraction from the entire story, not an important character trait that drives the narrative forward.
Let me give you an example of what I mean from a personal place.
I'm currently writing a multi-book epic series about a Confederate sniper who experienced the death of his family at the hands of a Union captain, à la Josey Wales, and, after being captured and hung while chasing down the man who killed his family, he makes a bargain with a fallen angel to bring him back to life in return for never being allowed to truly leave this plane of existence. Among his character traits is a love of playing guitar, poetry, and cooking.
If I hyper-focused on the cooking aspect of his character too often, effectively stopping the story for him to display his obsession with trying to find the perfect way to salt-bake a tenderloin, the cosmic aspects of the book and all the important story elements that arise from it would have to, by nature, be minimized. I'd be slamming the brakes on what would be an epic tale of a gunslinging cowboy making his way through time and space to uncover the mystery of the curse he took on that forces rebirth after death in a moment of rage and high passion. I can display his love of cooking in various ways that flavor his character without damning the tale to tell you about it.
If I didn't do that, my tale would be more about a guy who likes to cook and made a deal with a fallen angel at some point in the past. The lessons he learns, the skills he develops, the technology he utilizes, the relationships he develops and loses, and the answers he finds for better or worse are all watered down as a result. A damned chef might make for a good comedy or quirky tale, but this isn't Kung-Fu Panda meets Dark Souls, meets The Expanse. This is a tale about how the war in Heaven sprang forth different ambitions in celestial forces, how rage often leads to regret, and how God can make even the most evil of events work for good. It's about forgiveness, bonds, bravery, and cosmic forces we can't understand but are affected by nonetheless. It's about the war between freedom and tyranny that's been ongoing since Lucifer attempted a coup and how humanity got wrapped up in it.
It's not a story of a guy who makes a really good brisket.
This is what the woke crowd is consistently doing. They're taking stories that could be epic in scale, exploring grand concepts, terrifying ideas, or deep questions about the human condition, and they're minimizing all of it to focus on shallow concepts that they alone are obsessed with. Whether it's homosexuality, female empowerment, racial equality, or whatever the cause célèbre is today, if that becomes a loud part of the plot, then everything else gets quieter or, worse, it all becomes noise.
And if you're trying to push the message where it doesn't belong, you're just going to annoy everyone, and soon, the thing you were trying to promote or normalize becomes something everyone is annoyed by and begins to reject. You're not going to make people like homosexuals more if you have them figuratively shouting "look at me" as something far greater is occurring.
Storytellers have to make a choice. Are you telling a story, or are you making propaganda? Because one of those things is something people like a lot, and the other is just an ad for an ideology.
