> The elephant in the room here is the obsession western TV now has with being woke.
The biggest Korean series on Netflix is absurdly "woke": I don't know how one could watch Squid Game and miss how critical it is of capitalism. I also find most movies by Bong Joon-ho to be similarly "woke" - not at the periphery, but as a central theme of the work - for instance Snowpiercer, Parasite and Okja, and they are hits in Korea and abroad.
Meta commentary: your appreciation for diverse types of movies (and not just the same-old bland Hollywood ones) is pretty woke too!
"Woke" has become a fuzzy culture-war term with no clear meaning when used perjoratively. Racial diversity? "Woke". Non-heteronormative relationships? Also "woke". A sci-fi movie about blue native cat-people fighting imperialism is apparently also woke[1].
A conservative strategist boasted that they successfully co-opted the term to be malleable enough to fit any topic that the conservative voters may dislike. So my definition of woke is accurate by their standard; where are you basing your definition?
When asked in court what was meant by the term "woke," Ron DeSantis' general counsel said "the belief there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address them." Other than using the modifier American, the parent comment's use of the term woke fits very well with this definition.
Woke is not new, it's around for 40, 50 years? But the way liberals are using it is different from how right-wings are using it today. For them, it's now a plain insult for anything not on their side. And this meaning has spreading like cancer in recent years.
Yes you will find politics in everything if you look close enough, but not everything is trying to program you on what is and isn't acceptable to think. Even with Squid Game, one can enjoy it without ever thinking about capitalism. In fact some fans have even debated that it is actually criticism of communism which one can get away with because the viewer is given the room to think for themselves.
The biggest Korean series on Netflix is absurdly "woke": I don't know how one could watch Squid Game and miss how critical it is of capitalism. I also find most movies by Bong Joon-ho to be similarly "woke" - not at the periphery, but as a central theme of the work - for instance Snowpiercer, Parasite and Okja, and they are hits in Korea and abroad.
Meta commentary: your appreciation for diverse types of movies (and not just the same-old bland Hollywood ones) is pretty woke too!