for the next Reboot That Makes Men Angry I’d like to submit for your consideration Lupita Nyong'o as Indiana Jones
Indiana Jones and the Temple of NAGPRA Compliance
in case you forgot that it will never end and life will never be worth tolerating
art is for making unpopular people angry! take, for the explicit purpose of taking, out of the explicit love of taking!
it will never end and life will never be worth tolerating
Life will never be worth tolerating… because some people said on social media that they kind of want a black woman Indiana Jones?
You’re still allowed to write exhilarating new adventures for the white male one, you know.
This wasn’t “Hey, this would bea cool character”.
This was “Hey, you know what would be a great way to take for the sake of taking?”
It is explicitly framed as good because it is about taking. It is good because it makes unpopular people angry. Its purpose is to make unpopular people unhappy. It is taking for the sake of taking.
Taking for the sake of taking, for the purpose of taking, out of the sheer joy of taking, is something everyone agrees is wonderful and great and virtuous.
What would be the point of making a black woman character if we weren’t also making unpopular people unhappy? We align ourselves with diversity not because we believe it is good, but because that is an effective way to claim authority to make unpopular people unhappy!
That is why life will never be worth tolerating. Because that will never end. Malice will never stop being exalted as virtue.
…I’m not especially on board with @brazenautomaton‘s broader framing here, but I do think he’s entirely correct on the object level, so let me try a slightly different construction…
It’s not about the #blacklesbian!Indy thing. Almost entirely not-about-that, anyway. You can think whatever you like about race-and-gender-twisted reboots, and there’s certainly plenty of cultural criticism to levy on that front, but…at the very least, the desire for them often arises from a sincere love of the property in question. Those people clamoring for a canon female Doctor clearly take Doctor Who very seriously and are asking for something that they would find personally meaningful; whether or not you think they should get it, there’s at least something admirable about the motive from a fan-participation perspective.
If you’re cracking jokes about temple-raiding being Bad Imperialism while talking about Indiana Jones, your motive is…not that. Indiana Jones stories are stories about temple-raiding. The people who like Indiana Jones want stories about going into the trackless depths of the jungle and finding the lost exotic wonders there. If you didn’t want that, you wouldn’t like Indiana Jones. It’s kind of the heart of the thing.
It’s OK to feel that way. You don’t have to like Indiana Jones, or anything. You’re allowed to find jungle adventure boring. You’re allowed to be really hung up on proper archeological practice. You’re even allowed to think that temple-raiding stories are Bad and Imperialist and that we should stop telling them for ideological reasons, although I may roll my eyes at you.
But @brazenautomaton is correct to note that this kind of feeling often generates a sort of entryist impulse that is less OK. The thing that says, not “let’s not watch Indiana Jones movies” or even “let’s try to destroy the franchise and make sure that no one watches Indiana Jones movies,” but “let’s gain influence over the franchise, and make Indiana Jones about Our Thing instead of about the themes of the original property, and ensure that the new movies will serve to mock and discomfit the people who liked the old ones.” That is cruel and philistine. That is perverting an artistic tradition for the sake of your particular axe-to-grind.
(…if you’re looking for a concrete example of this playing out successfully, check out the way that recent years have seen a Massive Ongoing Shift in the role of romance in the Disney Princess franchise.)
If new!Indy’s shtick were “returning artifacts from the museums that held them to ancient primitive temples,” it would be really hard to read that as anything other than “ha ha, remember back when we were so STUPID and UNENLIGHTENED and SHITTY that we actually had our hero be a temple-raider?”. It would be a repurposing of the fundamental project, taking the franchise away from the people who actually like it for the sake of…well, for the sake of people who like seeing their media land ideological jabs, mostly.
Yes, I understand that @beatrice-otter‘s comment was a joke, and (for that matter) a joke that comes from a place of sincerely caring about something worthwhile. But it’s not hard to understand why people aren’t inclined to find that kind of joke funny at this point.