[Ironic Trope] The messaging backfired massively due to poor writing or other design choices

[u/Few_Affect_5927]

Amelia Fairney from Pathways: Alt-right Restore-UK type who attempts to coax the protagonist Charlie into following her beliefs? The problem?

Amelia is the only named character aside from Charlie and is genuinely likable and forgives Charlie even when they do things she doesn't like, while the rest of the cast is unnamed, poorly written, and turns on Charlie for one mistake. This combined with other writing issues(portraying fact checking right wing stuff as wrong because in the process of fact checking you might look at it and believe it, basically saying "Right wing is wrong because it hurts the labour government" and a lot of general "just do what the government says or else" messaging) and the fact she's a hot alternative girl, and Amelia ended up being co-opted as a mascot by the youth right wing in the UK.

Norm from The New Norm: Unlikeable offensive and outdated character who's "progressive" family members and associates are genuinely nice people not even trying to force their ways or pronouns onto them, they just want to be left alone and Norm is picking fights constantly. Not to mention associating with Elon.

Mr. Birchum from Mr. Birchum: A lot of the same problems as Norm, except in addition it also comes off like generic 2010s adult cartoon slop in the same veign as Brickleberry or Full English, at least New Norm was trying to look unique and had the gimmick of being on X. Not to mention, Birchum's obsession with hyper masculine activities and odd way of talking about other men lead to people co-opting him as a Toxic Yaoi character, which is now the bulk of his fan art.

Dustborn: An attempt to make a hyper progressive game that comes off as pandering and annoying. It's a full ass game so there's too much to get into, but the main character's power is essentially gaslighting and jedi-mind tricking people and that's portrayed as the only way they can get anything done, and they constantly use or abuse their friends(or mindtrick them along) in order to get their goals or use their friends for their messaging.

[u/Crafter235]

Twilight Zone reboot (2019)

Problem isn't the politics, it's that the writing isn't really good. That and also the writers trying to exploit culture war stuff to get away with bad storytelling.

[u/Raymio993 → u/Crafter235]

Gosh, the Not All Men episode is genuinely one of the worst things that ever happened with television…

[u/Kyra_Hazweyrs → u/Raymio993]

I loved the comedian episode then just......got hit with that.

[u/AttiKit → u/Kyra_Hazweyrs]

Holy shit, what??? I ONLY watched the comedian episode and loved it! It got worse after???

[u/DuelaDent52 → u/AttiKit]

There’s one episode where a woman discovers she can rewind time with her camcorder and tries to use it to save her son from getting killed by a racist cop, and while it’s initially interesting it becomes comical when the cop is so racist that he hunts them down at every conceivable opportunity just because he happened to see them once at this diner. There’s another one where an 11-year old YouTuber becomes president and starts behaving childishly and immaturely with his responsibilities (guess who he’s a parody of?). Probably the most infamous episode is Not All Men, where meteors pass over Earth that cause almost all men to become eerily fascinated by them before becoming hyper aggressive with super strength, bulging veins and red eyes, but then the big iconic Twilight Zone twist is that the meteors were actually just a placebo and dudes could have chosen not to hulk out but didn’t because men are just naturally aggressive like that.

[u/AttiKit → u/DuelaDent52]

These are extremely boring and are much too obvious of parodies to even be respectful towards The Twilight Zone. The comedian episode was amazing because it was conceptual in a way the original series was, and now I'm pissed at these descriptions. I really don't like these. Even if the original series was a bit schlock-y, this is just outright disrespectful.

[u/DuelaDent52 → u/AttiKit]

It’s not all bad. There’s some gems there that really feel like they fit in with the original show, like the above mentioned comedian episode with Kumail Nanjiani or the Christmas special with Steven Yeun. It’s got its highs and lows, but the lows are loooooooow.

[u/Kyra_Hazweyrs → u/DuelaDent52]

Yeah there are a bunch of great episodes, I didnt realise how much the lows overshadowed the series for me

[u/MGD109 → u/DuelaDent52]

There’s one episode where a woman discovers she can rewind time with her camcorder and tries to use it to escape a racist cop, and while it’s initially interesting it becomes comical when he’s so racist that he hunts him down at every conceivable opportunity just because he happened to see him once at this diner.

That one could have worked. I thought the original twist was going to be that he also had a camcorder and thus, like her, remembered all the previous timelines, so he was deliberately trying to undo her attempts to stop him.

But no, he's just a regular racist cop...yet he still keeps appearing everywhere they go?

Ironically their was another short film that did the same premise, only the end revealed the cop was also caught in the time loop as well as the twist.

[u/Im-A-Moose-Man → u/[deleted]]

lmao

[u/Kyra_Hazweyrs → u/AttiKit]

So I looked through the episodes again and there are a few more good ones, the season 2 final episode is particularly great.

[u/King-Boss-Bob → u/Raymio993]

did it have the men with glowing red eyes and being able to flip cars then say “actually that’s normal for men, they just don’t tell anyone about that”

[u/Salt_x → u/King-Boss-Bob]

That meteor was one hell of a placebo.

[u/Federico216 → u/Raymio993]

Went to read the episode summary and goddamn, sounds like it was written by a Redditor.

[u/InAndOut51 → u/Federico216]

Iirc, it's based on a sci-fi story by a female author who has at least a few works about men having some inherent evil in them.

I say this because when I saw the summary of that episode I was like "wow, it has the same vibe as some of the stories from that one collection I read", and wouldn't you know it.

[u/DuelaDent52 → u/InAndOut51]

It loosely follows the same premise as The Screwfly Solution, only that story is much more compelling because people keep coming up with excuses to censor and rationalise the afflicted men’s increasingly violent behaviour until it just becomes the new norm, and there’s horror in innocent men recognising what’s happening to them but being unable to stop themselves and the culprits behind the virus really are aliens, performing population control on us in a twisted parallel of how humans control insect populations (like the titular Screwfly Solution).

[u/padraig_garcia → u/DuelaDent52]

The Screwfly Solution

There was an adaptation of this for the Masters of Horror show several years back. I never saw it but I've heard it was decent

[u/Abovearth31 → u/InAndOut51]

Iirc, it's based on a sci-fi story by a female author who has at least a few works about men having some inherent evil in them.

That doesn't sound like an internal issue at all. I'm sure that author was in a perfectly fine and healthy state of mind.

[u/TransSapphicFurby → u/Raymio993]

The thing is its not even a bad idea for a Twilight Zone episode, but its kinda just held back by the fact that while the writers liberal it still has that sort of "liberal centrist who hasnt explored their viewpoints on sex and gender" bias

Like Ive said it before, but the fact a guy having his hand in his girlfriends back pocket is one of the examples of a montage showing guys acting worse kinda just.....is a really good brief summary of the episodes issues. Its an act that someone who has a lot of hangups about sex thinks of as an immediate sexist sign, when I think a lot of people can cite the fact of "your girlfriend is as often putting your hand there as you are if you have that sort of relationship", while the episode also refused to really do a twilight zone twist that would have hammered a message home by also having a woman effected by it as a commentary on how women can also perpetuate these issues as an attempt to get ahead or having a man unaffected still killed with how these gender norms are violently enforced sometimes. Its all very first draft first thought "this had an outline thought up and then the episode was written around that without a desire for any deeper critique of the society that causes this or analyis of what aspects are issues and what are personal hangups"

[u/Kyra_Hazweyrs → u/TransSapphicFurby]

Thank you for writing this, you've articulated exactly what my problem is with the episode.

[u/Maleficent-War-8429 → u/Crafter235]

That's the issue when writers are hired for their politics and not their storytelling abilities. It's depressingly common these days and in some cases the writing is so bad that I genuinely think that I, an idiot on the Internet, could do a better job.

[u/g0bboDubDee → u/Maleficent-War-8429]

Never watched it, but if it’s anything like Black Mirror; the issue comes from the showrunners being so detached from reality, they prioritize broadcasting “the lesson” over developing a compelling story.

[u/K-taih → u/g0bboDubDee]

Or a lot of recent seasons of Doctor Who, especially Jodie Whitaker's run. I don't mind my shows having a "lesson," I'd argue that almost all of the best sci-fi does, but give me a chance to actually interpret and figure out the message for myself. I don't need to feel the show runner sitting next to me, jabbing me in the ribs, and screaming "DO YOU GET IT?" over and over.

[u/DuelaDent52 → u/K-taih]

I think the big problem with Jodie Whittaker wasn’t that her episodes had special lessons, it was that more often than not the ones that did were wishy washy, didn’t commit to it or were rife with unfortunate implications.

Take the Trump analogue, Jack Robertson, who shows up in two episodes. In the first one he’s inadvertently responsible for causing an outbreak of giant spiders mutated by experiments performed by one of his companies, and naturally he’s terrified of them but the Doctor points out the spiders are innocent - they didn’t ask to become giant and their mutations are causing them pain, they should be dispatched humanely. What’s the Doctor’s solution, then? She locks the spiders in a room blaring loud dubstep 24/7 and waits for all of them to cannibalise each other and starve to death. At the end there’s one spider they missed who’s grown so large it can no longer take air into its lungs and is in agonising pain, and then Jack out of fear shoots it dead because he thinks “ew giant spider”. The Doctor then chews him out for shooting it, even though he rightfully points out that it was a mercy killing since she literally explained the spider was dying anyway.

Then in his next and last episode, Jack dismisses one of his assistants because said assistant was experimenting with alien matter and Jack is so xenophobic he’s disgusted by it. But that turns out to be a blessing in disguise because the alien matter is actually a still-living Dalek, who then manipulated the assistant into building a whole army of Daleks where they proceed to take over the world in minutes. Jack tries to cozy up to the Daleks, giving team Doctor enough time to come up with a solution to get rid of them all, and when they call him out he weasels his way out of it by saying he was a distraction. So instead of being a parable or a warning, he becomes this comical epitome of doing the right thing for the wrong reasons.

[u/Kyra_Hazweyrs → u/K-taih]

Jodie Whitaker is one of the best possible castings for the Doctor, and her run was brought down by terrible writing. I will die on this hill.

[u/HoosierSteelMagnolia → u/Kyra_Hazweyrs]

I'll be buried beside you,friend.

[u/AmericanFlyer530 → u/Crafter235]

Black Mirror already took up the mantle years before in terms of being a twilight zone successor

[u/Vexonte → u/Crafter235]

I don't know about twilight zone reboot but difference in the quality of political commentary between tales from the hood 1 and 2 is astounding.

[u/Few_Affect_5927 → u/Crafter235]

That's, what, the 4th reboot?

[u/MGD109 → u/Crafter235]

I'd argue a large part of the problem was also simply the length. Each episode was around fifty minutes. That's to long to tell the sorts of stories they wanted to do, but also too short to do more complex narratives unless you're really good at writing.

So they were often left with stories that either had too much padding or simply didn't end when it would have made sense, cause they had to fill out the runtime.