I'm getting sick of this argument. At least you limit it to the 00s and not the 90s, 80s, or even 70s like some do.
I get it. You've read too much about propaganda and psyops and are seeing it everywhere. But I see that point as the other extreme. Whereas the left is demanding all stories have X, Y, and Z, the "right" is demanding all stories by A, B, and C.
tranny stuff has been happening since the beginning of the 20th century at least which is why the nazis targeted their sick research, i dont mean "and everyone was a faggot for all time" i mean its been creeping up. also yeah people establish norms. you cant really escape that. either you think faggot bum sex is fine or you dont and dont want it in. they are completely right in that if you think its okay its okay to be in our stories.
In Alien, Riply was written as a man, but Weaver was so good in the role she was cast instead. Ghost in the Shell had an athletic no-nonsense female lead because that's what Shirrow found hot. They happened to be two influential, popular bits of media and everybody rushed to add strong female leads in the same way every movie producer rushed to make a cinematic universe after the success of Marvel.
i mean more the surge of strong female characters later. think it was around the nineties when it happened where the woman had to be more competent. it started with things just wanting to play with tropes like simpsons but it started to get to things like kim possible and nearly every cartoon girl needing to be badass man instead of a traditional woman with feminist lite talking points. they did it better alot of those characters were still women for the most part but it helped bring culture to the point it is now where all guys are bumblers who need even little girls to guide them.
its true artists of the time thought of themselves as more chill with more types of people but ultimately they still had an agenda they wanted to push. reading random recommendeds from the nineties like preacher it has the same sort of character and message.
What's interesting is the real propaganda attempts of the day like Spice Girls, Captain Planet, and Earth Warp, are largely forgotten these days, because they were shit. As has been shown time and again, this hasn't been some slow, creeping escalation over a period of decades. They don't have that much self control.
if you were tuned in it was more companies reeling them in by force. you can see it go from subtle winks and nods and being made to cut out stuff from anime like sailor moon to steven universe where they still cant really say it but basically show scissoring live to kids. also no at one point they did have more self control, and they were actually able to make their case emotionally appealing to people, before the trump meltdown the left was actually fairly capable at convincing themselves and others that they cared about everyone, if you remember the smug "love trumps hate" when they thought they won.
Both sides have a lack of media literacy.
as ive said when i pointed out the director of the movie that inspired the game didnt even read the source material. also i didnt state this but i think the left has a bigger issue with it because theyre caught in a slump of just trying to find the clues be they obvious or obscure to find out the authors intent whereas alot on the right realize you can enjoy media without fretting over finding out if its an allegory for a preconceived notion you had or wanting the author to hand hold how you feel about a work.
i think the rights comes more from not wanting to face up how even media that they or even i like has some element of cultural infection from motivated writers and an insistence on an impossible neutrality thats only going to at best make works push for gay sex for kids more subtly, theyre go to argument of basic bitch deconstructionism and refusing to understand the difference between technical and colloquial meanings of "political" is retarded but at the end of the day they have media, they were able to communicate subversively through media before they were even allowed to explicitly outline ideas, they talk about this openly, you can find article after article blog after blog praising subversive pioneers in lgbt or minority representation, even classic westerns like the Searchers have some element like a symbolic torch passing from an american cruel gunslinger to a more ethnically diverse protagonist. they had entire underground scenes
https://outleadership.com/news/the-...years-of-symbolic-imagery-and-coded-messages/ just one example i scoured, been a while since i went in depth on it but they didnt just spring up they won people over, different concepts at a time building up and up.
Like you said, Helldivers 2 is a sequel to a game, a game based on Starship Troopers the movie, which was based on Starship Troopers the book that the director never read. In a sense, the "fascism" of Helldivers 2 amounts to them wearing uniforms and saying slogans that, if you squint really hard, could maybe look and sound like a cartoon space nazi.
i dont even consider the world of helldivers to be fleshed out enough to judge its political system. it exists to me as a splatterfest with altered quotes from a hack director.
A better game example is how Bayonetta keeps flip flopping between "sexist trash for incels" and "empowered LGBT icon" based on whatever is convenient for the author at the time.
also saw people try to say family guy was woke because it had gays or whatever when seth's been putting jewish and black caricatures and trans caricatures in his work for years. pointless to "claim" media for your side in that way, just taking something and pretending it agrees with you more than the opponent.
