Blah blah Avatar, 3D sucks blue cat people DAE no cultural impact?? Can you remember any character names??
but seriously it was bold as fuck for someone like James Cameron to make something so blatantly anti-US-military at a time when literally the entirety of Hollywood was united in jerking off American imperialism. It was not the least bit subtle and that makes it all the more impressive that Cameron was able to make a pointed takedown of Iraq-era militarism on such a scale.
At the time I remember a bunch of nerd reviewer types complaining about the movie’s stereotypical portrayal of… US Marines as a bunch of violent rednecks :michael-laugh: They were also angry because they felt James Cameron was trying to make his white audience feel guilty over the genocide of the Native Americans. The Avatar Plinkett review did this too and even went “uhhh ackshually the Native Americans sometimes killed each other too so who’s to say who the real bad guy is”
The overtly political right-wing reactionary YouTube guy did not exist at the time, and most of those people went on to become bog standard anti-Trump liberals with the associated baseline wokeness, which just goes on to show how reactionary nerd and broader culture were at the late 00s and early 10s and how it remained kind of unexamined until stuff like GamerGate
Jesus, I’m generally fine with the RLM guys but that’s just bad.
RLM pretty wisely keeps political topics out of their videos (unless you include their analyses of Hollywood rainbow washing), but occasionally something like this slips through and reveals that there are a lot of politically charged “non-political” things Americans are taught to believe.
RLM got pretty bad in one of the later Plinkett Star Wars reviews. Mike was pontificating about “forced diversity” without using that term exactly and his argument boiled down to something like: “This is a movie for kids, and when I was a kid, me and my friends never noticed or talked about race.”
They just don’t get it
The thing is, they constantly mention in their videos that they resent being dismissed as “flyover” midwesterners by coastal elites. Fine, I understand that lib stereotype of middle America isn’t helping things. Yet from time to time the RLM crew does reveal they do hold some backwards or questionable views
I don’t think they try to be reactionary. Politics isn’t a big part of their content. They’re certainly not ideologues or part of the right wing grifter media sphere, and I don’t think people should go after them
But do think twice before recommending their videos. Wouldn’t recommend anyone Asian watch the video where Rich, upon seeing Leo Fong, laughs and bellows out, “Why’s his face so flat?” and a big “racist” label ironically pops up
Flyover country is so real and whining about being treated as an empty cultural backwater when you live in an empty cultural backwater that has been utterly devastated and hollowed out by neoliberalism is extremely provincial and cringe. The Midwest sucks, and it’s few bright spots just reinforce how shitty everything else there is, and if you think that’s somehow unfair you’re pathetic.