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.

www.forbes.com

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

Paul Tassi
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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.

 

[Tasty Tatty]

Here's Janus Rose, the writer of the "Cowboy Bebop Isn't Supposed to be Good" article:

I am shocked that a tranny would cope with "it wasn't supposed to be good actually".

 

[Sargon's wife's son]

The whole thing is all women who aren't white just want white men's children
I'm not kidding like every single woke black woman a famous woke non-white is married to a white man because they realize the superiority of Aryan genetics
It's a mating strategy and that's why they bash white women

 

[Pissmaster]

View attachment 4305022
“White men bad.”

This really endears me to angry middle-aged Indian women who have nothing but hatred and a desire to destroy everything around them in their hearts.

 

[KiwiFuzz]

The Atlantic has a piece about it:

"But the real problem with Velma isn’t that its updates make Euphoria look like child’s play; it’s that its edginess comes at the expense of its own characters and punishes the audience for being invested. Like a certain Mystery Inc. member rummaging around in the dark for her glasses, the series is unfocused, confused, and desperately lost."

The Line That 'Velma' Crossed

The show’s real problem is its attitude toward viewers.

www.theatlantic.com

'Velma' Isn’t Edgy. It’s Just Mean. - The Atlantic

archived 20 Jan 2023 20:43:06 UTC

archive.ph

 

[ZehnBoat]

it’s that its edginess comes at the expense of its own characters and punishes the audience for being invested.

oh, now they give a shit about these things

 

[My cravat doesn't flutter]

I'm very much expecting at least one scribbler tripping over themselves to defend Velma in this fashion.

View attachment 4295547
(archive, if you actually want to read this garbage)

I find the "it wasn't meant to be good" argument fascinating. In the wake of Sharknado's so-bad-it's-good success, SyFy cranked out intentionally bad shark-related movies left and right (Trailer Park Shark and Jersey Shore Shark Attack, to name a couple) in a bid to recreate Sharknado's success. They were intentionally bad. The thing is, they weren't trying to be bad. They were trying to be so-bad-it's-good. Ultimately, they're trying to make something good. Truly so-bad-it's-good movies are made with full sincerity. My favorite example is a rape-revenge horror flick called Revenge, a very feminist female empowerment film. It is unintentionally one of the most hilarious movies I have ever seen.

The thing with people claiming that a show like Velma is meant to be bad is that literally no studio/production company would greenlight something with the intent of it being terrible and turning away a massive built-in audience like Scooby-Doo has.

 

[Jaimas]

I realized something, going over my back catalogue today: I know where Velma comes from, and I thought I'd share it with all of you.

When you see enough high-profile games fail, you tend to notice the patterns, and there's a few this show has that I saw in a number of similar high-profile failures: A particularly egregious author self-insert, race-swapped characters for no reason, no respect paid to the original, and it using diversity as a shield to protect itself from criticism, and nothing more. The fact that even lefties can see through this now is a testament to just how bad this particular fuck-up is.

This show hates you. It doesn't matter if you're an old-time Scooby-Doo fan or someone who has no idea what that is and just wandered into seeing it by accident: the show fucking despises you. It does not want to engage you. It wants to offend you, top to bottom. The bitterness and spite in this show is so blatant - so apparent - that almost every demographic walks away with the feeling that the show is insulting them for watching it - because it is.

Velma is not created to be a compelling character - she is created to be utterly unlikeable by Mindy Kaling. This author self-insert solely exists for Mindy Kaling. She is her character, and you will like her, no matter what. The show doesn't ask you to have an opinion, because it doesn't care about it. For veterans, the character of Velma is a fucking betrayal, but I assure you, it's little better for newcomers, as Velma is portrayed as fucking insane, violent, and mean-spirited to the point where even the Twittards can't find it in them to identify with this shitty character. Making Fred into a fucking joke and dressing him as Hitler has no emotional resonance for them; any newcomer is going to be alienated and fail to connect to this show in any way.

Fred, meanwhile is basically Mindy Kaling's metacommentary towards older fans: "Fuck you." There is no other message. It is straight-up telling you to fuck yourself. What Kaling did to Fred speaks volumes towards the disturbing headspace Kaling clearly occupies: she is incredibly insecure towards the previous de facto leader of the team. Kaling can't get away with killing him in a show like this, so she will do what she can and absolutely destroy his character, much as she does with everyone else in this show - Shaggy and Daphne aren't as viciously fucked over, but Kaling still spares nothing and turns them into complete destructions of their original character archetypes, and with such shameless aplomb that it cannot be anything but intentional.

In the end, this show is made for exactly one person, and one person alone: Mindy Kaling. It is a vanity project. It is not designed for you, me, or anyone who watches shows - it is for Mindy Kaling herself and to revel in her own greatness. That is why not even the usual suspects like this fucking atrocity: there is no audience beyond one person. I could make a laundry list of assumptions about her mindset from this show alone, but that's fodder for her own inevitable thread when the meltdowns start.

 

[SteelPlatedHeart]

Animation in particular seems like a really stupid thing to try and do the “meant to be bad” argument. Animation costs a lot more and takes a lot longer than just making some cheap live action crap.

 

[My cravat doesn't flutter]

I don't think the backlash would've been quite as massive if she hadn't used as iconic and enduring of an IP as Scooby-Doo. The Mystery Gang has been around more than half a century. Everyone has grown up with some iteration of the franchise. Whether you're a fan, a parent whose kid forced you to watch it, or lived in a household with someone who watched it, you know Scooby-Doo. Boomers grew up with it. Gen Z is growing up with it. This was the worst possible franchise for Mindy to latch onto. It's very clearly a case of an existing IP being slapped on an unrelated show because networks are hesitant to invest in new properties these days.

An insightful video of a former network exec breaking this show down:

 

[Chester Rigby]

And they cancelled Raised by Wolves FOR THIS PIECE OF AWFULLY DIGESTED SHIT?

 

[PS1gamenwatch]

Imagine how the Diablo Cody Powerpuff Girls would turn out, maybe this show will convince them otherwise.

 

[Mr. Zed da Robot Poon Fed]

Kaling can't get away with killing him in a show like this, so she will do what she can and absolutely destroy his character, much as she does with everyone else in this show - Shaggy and Daphne aren't as viciously fucked over, but Kaling still spares nothing and turns them into complete destructions of their original character archetypes, and with such shameless aplomb that it cannot be anything but intentional.

I would made the argument that Shaggy was viciously fucked here. He’s cucked and insulted by Velma all the time, when he was actually a lovable chick magnet in his original version. The black feminization is another thing that’s plaguing the industry. “Norville” looks like every black sidekick we’ve seen in film/television for the past few years now.

Edit: MeatCanyon put out this amazing video:

 

[Mr. Bung]

Animation in particular seems like a really stupid thing to try and do the “meant to be bad” argument. Animation costs a lot more and takes a lot longer than just making some cheap live action crap.

Alongside superhero and Star Wars crap, animation seems to be something woke millennials/zoomers resonate with. As a lover of animation myself, I'm noticing this grand irony now over how the long time commonly held misconception that animation is only for children has now aged into being at least somewhat correct because woke morons are in fact...children. FML.

 

[Lucille Bluth]

from what i have heard, the show seems to have been written by a bunch of hating (self-hating white?) women who are so disconnected from reality, they think real life is twitter before musk bought it.

I've looked at the writing credits per IMDb on some of the episodes, and I don't think that's true. "Akshara Sekar", who I'm guessing is a Pajeet or some Brown thing is a story editor, and the other two credits I see are men. I'd bet Velma Khan herself, Mindy Kaling, has had some part in writing as well.

This really endears me to angry middle-aged Indian women who have nothing but hatred and a desire to destroy everything around them in their hearts.

I find it funny that even Pajeets/South Asians are pissed off at Mindy. They called her an "Indian loser stereotype" and others accused her of being a "low-caste Indian".

 

[Random Internet Person]

Episodes 3 and 4 are here, and things still aren’t getting better.

 

[Tasty Tatty]

I find the "it wasn't meant to be good" argument fascinating. In the wake of Sharknado's so-bad-it's-good success, SyFy cranked out intentionally bad shark-related movies left and right (Trailer Park Shark and Jersey Shore Shark Attack, to name a couple) in a bid to recreate Sharknado's success. They were intentionally bad. The thing is, they weren't trying to be bad. They were trying to be so-bad-it's-good.

I don't think they're trying to be "bad", but rather "over the top". That's the difference. These movies are basically the drag queens of movies, absolute eccentric and it works for them. Nobody goes to see a drag queen to see them perform some moderate classy dance, you see them because they're excessive. Same thing. People want to see talking sharks with four heads fighting with vegan aliens because they expect them to be over the top and they deliver.

Eccentric over the top Scooby Doo can work (the two live action movies could be considered this a bit), but you have to make it very good because this ain't what people are expecting of the franchise despite the franchise premise. They would accept this if it comes with a good story. The two LA movies had that and it worked well. So of course we can give them a pass when they try a few edge jokes if the plot is entertaining.

In Velma, the plot is being edgy. The mysteries and characterizations are secondary to show how edgy they are. They are cringe though.

 

[My cravat doesn't flutter]

In Velma, the plot is being edgy. The mysteries and characterizations are secondary to show how edgy they are. They are cringe though.

At the end of the day, Velma isn't a shitty Scooby-Doo show. It isn't a Scooby-Doo show at all. It's a completely unrelated show that had a famous IP painted over it because networks are too scared to invest in anything that doesn't already have a built-in fanbase.

 

[DrNow]

I feel bad for the youtubers that actually had to watch rings of power and Velma to comment on them. With the exception of the live action films, there was nothing about Scooby Doo that needed reinventing. There was ‘mystery incorporated’, that stuck to the shows format and actually felt well meaning and not like the makers despised the viewer base.

There’s no grand conspiracy or psyop, it’s just a terrible show made by terrible people. Watching leftist propaganda crash and burn on review sites is more entertaining than the propaganda itself.

 

[My cravat doesn't flutter]

I feel bad for the youtubers that actually had to watch rings of power and Velma to comment on them. With the exception of the live action films, there was nothing about Scooby Doo that needed reinventing.

If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Mindy Kaling pitched a broken show, "fixed" it by slapping a beloved IP on it, and pitched it again.

 

[Anasûrimbor Kellhus]

I feel bad for the youtubers that actually had to watch rings of power and Velma to comment on them.

they probably made bank off the views the videos generated I wouldn't feel too bad for them.