Disaster ‘Velma’ Is So Bad It's Spawned Psyop Conspiracy Theories

‘Velma’ Is So Bad It's Spawned Psyop Conspiracy Theories

archived 14 Jan 2023 17:10:03 UTC

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‘Velma’ Is So Bad It's Spawned Psyop Conspiracy Theories

People are certainly talking about Velma, that much is true. Just…not very positively. Velma currently has the lowest audience score I’ve seen for an HBO or HBO Max production, a 7%. To get that low requires not just “review bombing” but your show also likely has to be…genuinely bad.

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‘Velma’ Is So Bad It's Spawned Psyop Conspiracy Theories​

Paul Tassi
Senior Contributor
News and opinion about video games, television, movies and the internet.
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Jan 14, 2023, 10:20am EST
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Velma
HBO MAX
Yesterday, HBO Max bragged that Velma, the new adult-rated Scooby Doo cartoon, was its most-viewed animated premiere ever. I’m not sure precisely what that says, given that the only other Max original animated series I can even think of is Harley Quinn, plus a bunch of other older series that WB Discovery recently murdered.


But people are certainly talking about Velma, that much is true. Just…not very positively. Velma currently has the lowest audience score I’ve seen for an HBO or HBO Max production, a 7%. To get that low requires not just “review bombing” but your show also likely has to be…genuinely bad.

And it is. Velma is very, very bad.

Velma is so bad in fact, that it’s spawning conspiracy theories that creator Mindy Kaling made what is essentially a parody of what the right wing thinks left wing comedy is like. As in, a show that not just recast most roles with new races, but also features loads and loads of “white guys, amiright?” jokes. The idea is that Kaling is a secretly conservative force in media trying to make the left look bad by making a cringey adult cartoon full of “this rich white guy has a small dong” jokes that the right can point at as everything wrong with race-recasted, social justice-influenced media.


I do not want to go down a big rabbit hole about Mindy Kaling’s personal beliefs and influences here. And yet if that wasn’t the intent of the show, it sure feels like it in practice. On one side, it absolutely is working to spark mockery from the right, exactly as you might imagine it would. But on the other, it’s just not defensible at all by those who would normally welcome a progressive series.


Take She-Hulk for example. That was a hugely controversial show where it was very explicit about roasting misogynistic comic fans, perhaps often lacking in subtlety. But I would still very much defend that show, as I think its humor and fourth-wall breaking works, and most of the people who were upset about it are the very people that it’s overtly making fun of…for being upset about it.

Velma is not that. Velma is not defensible by any stretch of the imagination. It’s just bad. Making progressive jokes is fine so long as the jokes are good. They are not good. I heard the show described somewhere as a series written by TV writers who only ever talk to other TV writers. That’s a pretty good summary. And the idea here is that it’s so, so bad at landing its jabs at right wingers that it almost feels like self-sabotage.

There is a world in which this concept might have worked. I can see an “adult” Scooby Doo series where you have an overlooked Velma attempting to claw back credit from a privileged Fred, the “leader” of the gang. And yet here it’s not just jabbing at Fred for being an overconfident white dude, it’s literally “he’s such a whiny white man baby that his mommy cuts his steak and he hasn’t finished puberty so he has a small penis.” Like just…no remote hint of subtlety or nuance or anything that could make the progressive humor work.
An easy counter-example to turn to is the R-rated Harley Quinn series, also on HBO Max, which still feels true to the characters it focuses on, is full of left-leaning messaging on misogyny an LGBTQ issues, but importantly…is funny and compelling. I mean, this show recently did a full bit about the Joker running for mayor as a progressive socialist and it worked.
Velma? I don’t know what Velma is doing. I’m not sure I subscribe to this “Mindy Kaling made a dogwhistle series for right wing trolls” theory, as the Occam’s Razor explanation is that the show is just…bad. The jokes are…bad. That’s really it.
I may continue watching out of morbid fascination, but man, this is truly one of the most bizarre things I’ve ever seen.

 

[Drag-on Knight 91873]

To be fair,the message of that film and something Anno has always told his fans was to get the fuck out and touch grass.

Sure, but how often does it happen? Once 20 years ago. With woke "entertainment," entire Youtube channels live off of Western garbage.

In America, maybe.


Except if they're women, then it's about the same.

I think it's largely a woman thing rather than an ethnic or even immigrant thing.

Getting death threats is a pretty significant way for an audience to criticize a creator.

 

[TitusOvid]

I'll pick a well-known example of an insulting anime called End of Evangelion, directed by the same guy that made Shin Godzilla. So, EoE subtextually calls its audience wankers in about ten minutes, has a whole lot of murder porn in the middle, and it turns into a weird experimental movie for the second half of it. But it's an interesting movie just on how batshit insane it actually is. Fans didn't like it because they wanted a more normal narrative ending to their giant robot show, but a movie like this is very clearly the exception, not the rule. It's more often the rule that anime has a lot of coomer bait, often for the purposes of comedy, which is what fan service is referring to.

Velma Kaling is yet another example of a show that disrespects the built-in audience the IP built up over decades of competence, creates bizarre fiction that makes fanfiction look like New York Times Bestsellers, and is very clearly made to satisfy some creative's ego. It happened to Star Wars, She-hulk, Lord of the Rings, Star Trek, Ghostbusters, and Doctor Who. I'm sure I'm missing other examples.

Woke isn't just shit, it's a specific formula to make media absolutely radioactive.

I wouldn't say End of Evangelion is insulting. It added an interesting layer to the story and its generally loved as far as I know. Its in no way comparable to Velma and the like.

 

[JambledUpWords]

If this show was an original and not using an existing IP, nobody would even pay attention to it. Notice how with woke crap, they most of the time take already successful IPs to latch onto because deep down, even they know it probably isn’t watchable without that. I watched a review of this show on YouTube and the characters, despite using existing IPs as templates, are no different than what you’d see in a high school drama. Except for the outfits and names, the characters themselves are unrecognizable from their original counterparts.

 

[SBG]

This is one of the reasons anime took off in the West. Even the stuff for middle schoolers is more mature than your average Family Guy rip off #42069. Hell, I'm sure Anpanman is less insulting to an adult's intelligence.

Reminds me a bit of what happened with the 90's Spider Man cartoon, where Spiderman didn't get to punch people and the cops/villains weren't allowed to use guns so they instead use laser guns.

American kid cartoons are sanitized an insane amount, especially on network television so you'd end up with stuff like these odd edits:
American vs Original

It's weird thinking how kids will watch Family Guy with worse violence, but then won't produce anything more violent than Steven Universe for kids.

 

[ZehnBoat]

They already made money due to how Hollywood accounting works, they can also make money with left-wing investors by promoting left-wing values. The more people talk about it, the more likely it is that investors see it and promote it as well.

It's how things work sadly.

higher ups will get money no matter what, good or bad
the """""creatives""""""? "oh, you worked on white man bad, let's watch cockroaches fuck" show? get out, we have another 23409 woke celeb shows to greenlight

also i wonder how many white men worked on that show

 

[Zero Day Defense]

Getting death threats is a pretty significant way for an audience to criticize a creator.

That very same site has a page for misconceptions about Evangelion and its production, one of them being that Anno received any death threats at all. At best, it's uncertain that he did-- most of these were letters of appreciation, and they weren't even in response to End of Evangelion (since they were in End of Evangelion), but rather the compilation movie Death and Rebirth. More importantly, they were written by staff because they couldn't use fan mail for legal reasons.

What you linked to isn't a death threat. It's random graffiti, one of them being the kanji for "death"-- which means nothing more on its own. Another is "poop", another "SEX", and yet another is "Ikari rapeman".

 

[CuzinEd]

Just imagine, white guys with small dicks have accomplished more than niggers have in thousands of years. If this bothers them, they are going to hate the chinks.

 

[BiggerChungus]

If this show was an original and not using an existing IP, nobody would even pay attention to it. Notice how with woke crap, they most of the time take already successful IPs to latch onto because deep down, even they know it probably isn’t watchable without that. I watched a review of this show on YouTube and the characters, despite using existing IPs as templates, are no different than what you’d see in a high school drama. Except for the outfits and names, the characters themselves are unrecognizable from their original counterparts.

They don't want to create new art or culture, they want to destroy yours.

 

[Frosted Snowflakes]

Gundam made a video about Velma. This should be interesting.

 

[The Nothingness]

It took a decade but it finally happened.

 

[From The Uncanny Valley]

It took a decade but it finally happened.
View attachment 4279783

*DBZ fans screeching and yelling in the distance*

 

[Patrick Bait-man]

Coming off of my last post, the IMDb rating has gone down an additional 0.2 points at 1.4/10 with 17K ratings (3K more from yesterday).

There's still 8 more episodes over the course of 4 weeks to air.

This show is setting records.

 

[TexNash]

Indian women are the second grossest on the planet (the first being Australian aboriginal women). The producers know this. In their efforts to get back at whitey, they enlist token curry muncher Mindy WhatsHerFace to tank yet another beloved franchise. She walks away with money and her ego sufficiently fluffed, and they get to destroy yet another beautiful thing. It's such a predictable cycle now that I'm surprised anyone cares. The goal is the demoralization of the population. Yuri Bezmenov told us 30 years ago how it was going to happen. We didn't listen. It's too late now. Get used to being force fed curry and ‎witchetty grubs or get used to living in the margins. Sins of the father, and all that. :/

 

[Back me up!]

Ahahaah Oh man, get ready guys. The current rumor is that Scooby is now a black girl named "Scoobi" and is gonna date the Shaggy stand in.

https://twitter.com/MrYGuy2/status/1615119797766836224

Now the emasculated black guy is gonna fuck the dog stand in.

 

[Pissmaster]

Ahahaah Oh man, get ready guys. The current rumor is that Scooby is now a black girl named "Scoobi" and is gonna date the Shaggy stand in.

View attachment 4279992

https://twitter.com/MrYGuy2/status/1615119797766836224

Now the emasculated black guy is gonna fuck the dog stand in.

 

[Bakarina]

I remember many, many years ago being told that race swapping the Scooby Doo cast to okay because it "modernizes" the show. How it's made better when no one in the group is white. How old SD was "racist" and shit because old ass cel animation that was done as cheaply as possible back in the day only had 8 colors to use.

This is the future you fuckers chose, everything woke turns to shit.

 

[NyQuilninja]

I might get crucified for this, but I don't think it's as bad as people say it is. Yes, it's insufferably woke. Yes, it shits all over the original Scooby Doo. But beyond that, I didn't find it heinous enough to warrant a 1.5 rating. Velma is not characterized as a based brown lady who is always right, she's an asshole that everyone hates and made her mom abandon her family because she was so annoying. Shaggy isn't a based black guy, he's a loser. Fred is even slightly redeemable as he's the only person that defends Velma.

Also, it was competently animated, and the scenes about Velma's hallucinations were actually kinda cool.

Power of positive thinking

 

[DankSmoker]

Ahahaah Oh man, get ready guys. The current rumor is that Scooby is now a black girl named "Scoobi" and is gonna date the Shaggy stand in.

View attachment 4279992

https://twitter.com/MrYGuy2/status/1615119797766836224

Now the emasculated black guy is gonna fuck the dog stand in.

Black girls are dogs, afterall.

 

[Nointey]

The only way I see them ever fixing this disaster of a show is by having all of the current main """characters""" die in an horrific car accident at the beginning of season 2.

 

[Computer Guardian]

Ahahaah Oh man, get ready guys. The current rumor is that Scooby is now a black girl named "Scoobi" and is gonna date the Shaggy stand in.

View attachment 4279992

https://twitter.com/MrYGuy2/status/1615119797766836224

Now the emasculated black guy is gonna fuck the dog stand in.

How the fuck does a brown dog with a speech impediment translate into a gorilla who might look like a FtM troon the moment we'll see more of her?

These fuckers are actually greenliting a second season of this turd. Just reenforces that shows should be made cheaply and that bad publicity is still publicity.

HBO Max cancelled/removed a bunch of shows and films due to the Discovery merger, but are keeping this trash fire.

I'm pretty sure that's a common tactic to ensure the excess money they wasted on the first season has something to be spent on (or is just the second half of one big season cut off to make it seem like there's more demand.)