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Gender changes and ethnic or ancestry changes don't hurt a story if the story is good. If you think about it, many of the secondary characters in the Harry Potter series could have been anything. J K Rowling could have made Nigel Longbottom any race, and in fact several of Harry's friends are Oriental or black, and equally distributed between male and female - heck, even some non-humans on staff at Hogwarts. Hagrid (R.I.P. Robbie Coltrane) was half-giant. Professor Flitwick was (I think) full or part gnome. It makes no difference to a good story.
Where the excrement hits the oscillating rotational atmospheric redistribution device is when you generate characters with wokeness in mind and make it a plot or sub-plot point. So we had the fast-rolling train wreck that was the Tom Swift series, where a gay black genius becomes a super-inventor and pretty much flaunts his lifestyle during family hour (prime time) on TV. To the good side, it only lasted one season. Which was pretty good for us. Since I am known to have a bad case of morbid fascination, I watched some of it. One take-away was that the actors obviously needed to take some kind of lessons on showing more than four emotions on their faces.
The point here is that "woke" can be handled tastefully or not. Case in counterpoint - TV series The Flash, which had a Hispanic ethnicity tech guy and when the actor wanted to try other projects, they found a black ethnicity tech guy. Both were competent actors and their ethnicity was never a major plot point. Unlike the Batwoman series where they replaced a gay white woman with a gay black woman, but the gender preference became a strong plot element. That show was so "woke" that I'm surprised it had as long a run as it did.
Scripted TV entertainment STARTS with the script. Not with ethnicity as inspiration. Not with gender preference as inspiration. With very rare exceptions, though a story may draw inspiration from the characters, it is that the SCRIPT was set in some situation to have those characters present in the first place. Going "woke" for the sake of public pressure or corporate policy usurps the central role of the script in defining the quality of the entertainment offered by the show or series.
Which actually ties into my other bete noir, the insufficient supply of script writers caused by the explosion of demand for content on the explosion of cable, broadcast, and streaming channels. The writing talent has gotten so diluted that there is almost no imagination visible these days. I'm doing my part by writing my fantasy series, but so far, no takers. Who knows? Someday I may find a decent taker. Until then, I write and pontificate.
Where the excrement hits the oscillating rotational atmospheric redistribution device is when you generate characters with wokeness in mind and make it a plot or sub-plot point. So we had the fast-rolling train wreck that was the Tom Swift series, where a gay black genius becomes a super-inventor and pretty much flaunts his lifestyle during family hour (prime time) on TV. To the good side, it only lasted one season. Which was pretty good for us. Since I am known to have a bad case of morbid fascination, I watched some of it. One take-away was that the actors obviously needed to take some kind of lessons on showing more than four emotions on their faces.
The point here is that "woke" can be handled tastefully or not. Case in counterpoint - TV series The Flash, which had a Hispanic ethnicity tech guy and when the actor wanted to try other projects, they found a black ethnicity tech guy. Both were competent actors and their ethnicity was never a major plot point. Unlike the Batwoman series where they replaced a gay white woman with a gay black woman, but the gender preference became a strong plot element. That show was so "woke" that I'm surprised it had as long a run as it did.
Scripted TV entertainment STARTS with the script. Not with ethnicity as inspiration. Not with gender preference as inspiration. With very rare exceptions, though a story may draw inspiration from the characters, it is that the SCRIPT was set in some situation to have those characters present in the first place. Going "woke" for the sake of public pressure or corporate policy usurps the central role of the script in defining the quality of the entertainment offered by the show or series.
Which actually ties into my other bete noir, the insufficient supply of script writers caused by the explosion of demand for content on the explosion of cable, broadcast, and streaming channels. The writing talent has gotten so diluted that there is almost no imagination visible these days. I'm doing my part by writing my fantasy series, but so far, no takers. Who knows? Someday I may find a decent taker. Until then, I write and pontificate.
