One thing with some modern sci-fi shows is that it's more of a message with a disguise of a story rather than a story with a disguised message.
The writers justify the change by saying (correctly) that the message is important and that right now is the most important time to say the message. The message became more important than the vehicle that it travelled in so poor story writing is acceptable.
It's like Christian rock music, it's okay and if you are Christian you might enjoy it both for the message and the music but if you just want good music you are likely not going to enjoy it as much as regular "secular" rock.
But there's also rock music that everyone can enjoys which contains (not sure the word to describe it) non obvious but religious-adjacent themes.
Please go back and re-read some pulp scifi from, say, 70 years back and then spend some time scrolling through microfilm copies of newspapers from the same era.
You will find that SciFi has been mostly social commentary for quite a long time; what tends to throw us is familiarity!
Having read a ton of sci-fi from that era, they were entertaining even if one overlooked the social commentary. Young me did not give a hoot that Star Trek's "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield" was supposed to be social commentary but I can still recite the USS Enterprise's destruct sequence from memory because of the tension the cast and director put into that scene.
Being entertaining comes before social commentary, period. Modern entertainment is scorned by the public precisely because they do the opposite.
To paraphrase Peter Gibbons from Office Space, "The thing is, @moate, it's not that I'm unable, it's that I just don't care.", much like the rest of the public doesn't. I really do not think it is too much of us to ask that our entertainment actually be entertaining.
Your story was literally about your inability to recognize a message within media. That was the point you were making, that you were too young to realize what the adults in the room were talking about. Then you grew up and probably realized something incongruent between what you value in a society and what your favorite media was saying. People love the OG Star Wars trilogy and can enjoy it without recognizing that the Empire is the USA, but that doesn't mean that's not literally the point of the story. Right wing idiots can read 1984 and think "this guy is talking about how bad leftists politics are specifically and how only conservatism makes sense" despite points vaguely at the entire life of Orwell. I'm aware that you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him literate.
As I said somewhere else in this boondoggle of willful media illiteracy: the people who complain about "there's too much politics in my entertainment", to a person, actually mean "I don't like the point of view that's being expressed by this media". Entertaining isn't objective. People used to pack picnic lunches to go watch a lynching. The thought of that makes me want to puke, but I can't say those people weren't entertained. The thing is, I don't need to appeal to a vague majority without citation to support my thoughts. I can stand on my own statements without throwing in logic fallacies (or junk statistics, I really don't know what you were trying to do there) and accept that, to paraphrase PK Dick , reality cannot be perceived uniformly by all individuals and to pretend as such is folly.
I think the source of your confusion is that "overlook" has multiple possible meanings. One is to fail to observe something but another means to forgive or ignore a fault.
thinkingemote · · focus · HN ↗
The writers justify the change by saying (correctly) that the message is important and that right now is the most important time to say the message. The message became more important than the vehicle that it travelled in so poor story writing is acceptable.
It's like Christian rock music, it's okay and if you are Christian you might enjoy it both for the message and the music but if you just want good music you are likely not going to enjoy it as much as regular "secular" rock.
But there's also rock music that everyone can enjoys which contains (not sure the word to describe it) non obvious but religious-adjacent themes.
Shog9 · · focus · HN ↗
You will find that SciFi has been mostly social commentary for quite a long time; what tends to throw us is familiarity!
ThrowawayR2 · · focus · HN ↗
Being entertaining comes before social commentary, period. Modern entertainment is scorned by the public precisely because they do the opposite.
moate · · focus · HN ↗
ThrowawayR2 · · focus · HN ↗
moate · · focus · HN ↗
As I said somewhere else in this boondoggle of willful media illiteracy: the people who complain about "there's too much politics in my entertainment", to a person, actually mean "I don't like the point of view that's being expressed by this media". Entertaining isn't objective. People used to pack picnic lunches to go watch a lynching. The thought of that makes me want to puke, but I can't say those people weren't entertained. The thing is, I don't need to appeal to a vague majority without citation to support my thoughts. I can stand on my own statements without throwing in logic fallacies (or junk statistics, I really don't know what you were trying to do there) and accept that, to paraphrase PK Dick , reality cannot be perceived uniformly by all individuals and to pretend as such is folly.
ThrowawayR2 · · focus · HN ↗