The Four Color Media Monitor

Reaxxion recently wrote about how Social Justice Warriors took over sci-fi and fantasy for a time, and this has been a big problem in the comics medium for some time too:

The people we now call Social Justice Warriors have (until a very short while ago) completely controlled the science fiction and fantasy publishing industry, and the result was something out of a GamerGater’s fever dream. If you were a new or mid-list author who didn’t espouse the “right” political views, you had no chance of being published. Even Orson Scott Card, quite possibly the most popular sci-fi author alive today and whose Ender’s Game has sat at or near the top of the bestseller lists for over a decade, faced massive boycotts and organized campaigns for his beliefs on gay marriage.

Almost any author who didn’t tow the SJW line was out, and that line moved further and further the more the SJWs consolidated their grip on power. Last January, an editor at Tor, the largest science fiction publishing company, called for a quota where every book must contain at least one transsexual character. This February, SJWs started a campaign telling people not to read any straight, white, and male authors at all.

What happened when the SJWs took over is an abject lesson for the gaming industry: sales of science fiction books utterly tanked. What was once a thriving genre is almost utterly dead.

For the same reason that no one wants to play Depression Quest, no one wants to read boring books that shove fringe values down the readers’ throats. You can see the top sellers in Science Fiction for 2012 here. Every book on the bestseller list was either five or more years old or a Star Wars/Halo tie-in novel. The lone exception, A Rising Thunder, was actually published by conservative publishing house Baen Books. The top selling book, Ender’s Game, is now over 20 years old. When it came out, Clinton was still in his first term, the biggest game system around was the Super Nintendo, and the world was still astonished at the graphics in the game Myst.

This is vital information, because it's also reminiscent of what's happened to the Big Two: the X-franchise seems to now feature a quota where almost every related book must contain at least one LGBT character, like Northstar. And over at DC, Obsidian was hijacked by the SJWs so they could turn him into a gay character. It apparently first begun in the mid-90s, but it was nearly a decade later when the transformative hijack really took place, with SJWs "laying a claim" to Todd Rice out of a sense of entitlement to somebody else's (Roy & Dann Thomas') creation. Even Archie's fallen victim to the same thinking. And criticism of Islam is forbidden at these publishers too. It's selfish motives that drive them, obviously, and it hasn't helped sales at all. Nobody wants to read dreary comics stuffing petty, fringe values down everyone's throats accompanied by extremely poor scriptwriting.

There's been a backlash against SJWs dominating the sci-fi genre. But fighting back against the SJWs dominating DC and Marvel is surely going to be a lot harder. I figure the challenging query is - how to get them out of the conglomerate hands they're now possessed by? Time's proven that Time Warner and Disney are not good stewards to own them, and how to find a better ownership/licensee, if that's what it would take to guarantee better storytelling, will no doubt prove a very difficult task, ditto convincing the conglomerates to split up the properties and sell them off, or license them to people who recognize how to make them work.

Labels: Archie, bad editors, dc comics, islam and jihad, marvel comics, politics, technology, X-Men