So, does anyone notice all the protag centric morality in the "Current Year" (2010s namely) works? - see title

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Sayon

Sayon

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I thought about this right after browsing the Steven Universe thread.

I notice that in recent works like SU or Star vs. The Forces of Evil or Legend of Korra or RWBY, all praised by the woke, have a habit of being protag centric in morals and how actions are treated by the narrative. As in:
>Characters who openly have contempt for the protagonist/s on not strictly petty grounds getting condemned anyway (like Raiko from LoK who becomes a Donald J. Trump stand-in in Korra's comics).
>Bloody or genocidal or otherwise nasty characters getting treated nicer within the narrative than characters just bad at worst to nowhere near as bad at best just from the protag/s "liking" them more (like how Ilia and to a lesser level Sienna Khan were both treated in a brighter light than Adam despite all of them being ultraviolent anti-human terrorists).
-The protag/s doing petty or criminal or dangerous acts that impact others but we either hear how what they did was "necessary" or woke or just laughed off like they're just wacky antics (like Weiss assaulting a drunk, Korra leaving portals open, Star exterminating magical beings).

And so on. I'm curious if anyone else noticed this habit of "woke series" as they call it and what is it about the woke that draws them to such works.
 
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This is a massive issue with most modern works. At least in America, we’ve been in a groove of having the protagonist be the good guy, while the protagonist is just who the story follows and morality comes from the content itself. This does make sense, we inherently expect to relate to the protagonist by virtue of him being the main character, and very few people think that their ideas are the wrong ones.
Antiheros are a mixed bag that tries to deal with this problem, they can either be way to ‘bad’ or way to ‘good’. Even with the more recent Joker, sorry to bring it up but it’s a good example, Arthur was more tragic than evil until the end. Yes, he is a murderer and insane, but we can see why he’s like that. It what made the movie good. It challenged the audience to relate to Arthur.
Then take something like Kampala Khan as Ms. Marvel. She’s the hero, she’s the protagonist, we’re expected to just accept that she’s the main moral pillar in her run. But then it gets weird. She never really stops doing morally ambiguous things because they’re ‘wrong’, but only when they either affect her life or someone tells her that it’s ‘wrong’. It’s very strange to read because it doesn’t give a good sense of either a hero, villain, or antihero.
I think it’s an issue because it means less types of stories are told, and variety is the spice of life.
 
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It's a mixture of the writers not having any experience to draw from and the lifestyles or whatever los angeles's writing community likes calling itself being an incestuous idea hole.

Can't make a good story if you don't have a story to tell, after all, so why not do what everyone else is doing?
 
There's a famous quote by Chuck Jones of WarnerBros. fame where to paraphrase; he said that to create good story, you have to draw from real experiences, real people, etc etc, or else it comes out hollow and flat. That's obviously not some sort of earth-shattering Confucian knowledge, it's fairly common sense. But, I think that's a problem with a lot of modern writers, at least here in the US, they all seem to fit a "mold". Usually people from the coasts, or who are in that sort of LA/Hollywood bubble and don't leave it, and have little experience outside of it, with actual people. I think that's why you see a lot of people say it's a detriment to a story when the protagonist isn't "the good guy", because they can't self-insert if they don't identity with them 110%. Even though there's nothing in the rules of storytelling that says one has to be.

tldr: all modern writers are dumdums and im really smart
 
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