i sometimes see people saying things along the lines of "X story and Y story tackle the same 'woke' issue but you still like X story even though you hate Y story so you're just a hypocrite!"
what these people fail to understand about "the message" and "woke" shit is that it isn't abrasive because of the actual topic, it's abrasive because of the way the topic is delivered.
it's the difference between things being tryhard and being genuine. between trying to appeal to a certain demographic (or repel one) and being tactful.
the interesting thing is that, by and large, this is an issue with those who create things on both sides of the political spectrum. however, the people who actually consume it on the left far outnumber those on the right, seemingly. it shows to me that the left doesn't exactly care how a story is told or a character is portrayed, only that it is something that they agree with, and the opposite is true for the right. speaking in broad strokes, of course.
it's the same sort of thing you see with the right and left between realism and idealism, respectively. the idealists cannot see reality, in the same way that they cannot see how a person could possibly like one video game and hate another one even though they have the same themes because one is simply done better.
I still like Aliens, and like you said it doesn't beat you in the head with the feminism angle. But Ripley and Vasquez are both clearly still girl boss archetypes. They have better personal flaws that grounds them as characters. They aren't perfect, they aren't always right, and they still depend on men often enough for support but once you start noticing it is hard to stop. This was always a step towards a larger agenda.
That and I didn't remember Vasquez being that small. The actress is tiny and seeing her running with a heavy weapon like a smart gun is almost comical when they're first breeching the colony.
But if I bring this up and get the "you're just imagining things!" spiel from the same people that would be tearing a modern feminist crap piece together with me I am probably going to get cranky with them.
Like those retard faggots that screech how Warhammer 40K isn't satire. It just makes them come across as brain dead. While they've been toned down with time 40K always had satirical elements to it but you've got Omega Chud over here who doesn't want to accept the idea that a bunch of British nerds in the 80s were poking a bit of fun at religion or whatever. You can still like something without the authors agreeing with everything you think. You don't need to imagine Paul Veerhoven as turbo based to like Starship Troopers.
Then they call YOU the tourist. 🙄
Can't deny it would be a step up though.
@Deplorable_Degenerate @coded_artist there just wasn't attention drawn to it and that was so much better for their cause. They took it too far and now they can't stop.
@Deplorable_Degenerate @coded_artist I'm mostly just sick of hearing shit like "you hate woke things but you like metal gear and silent hill 3, curious... "
"Oh you like Metroid? Samus Aran is a woman checkmate Chudrick Westfallen what now huh?!"
Then I call her Samus Aryan and they block me
@Deplorable_Degenerate @coded_artist oh but Samus isn't a woman, Samus is trans obviously, because a guy who made some level background art in the original metroid said so.
@Deplorable_Degenerate @coded_artist is that where that awful transgender transformers cartoon clip is from? so unfortunate...
But I've got one for you if you wanna go that route. Arcee, G1 Transformers. That is such a convoluted rabbit hole I don't know if I can summarize it, but I will try.
Hasbro was against female transformers but introduced them at the behest of (((Ron Friedman))) a writer for them at the time who said "my daughter really likes the transforming robots but there is no one she can identify with I am going to write one in" so in 1985/86 there was a wave of fembots as they are now called. A human build female ninja robot, Nightbird, the female rebel Autobots on Cybertron led by Elita 1, and finally Friedman's creation for the movie Arcee.
Naturally Hasbro did make a little bit of a trumpeting about this to get good boy pats and to see if they could get little girls interested in the show. Before BlackRock and ESG there were other advocacy groups they just held less sway at the time.
Writers for the show and comics other than FRIEDMAN thought it was stupid as hell. They're robots. They don't have genders.
Enter Simon Furman, who is considered to be the father of the Transformer's mythos. Primus, Unicron (to an extent), the origins of the Autobots as laborers and Decepiticons as warriors, and a bunch of other lore relevant things. He ESPECIALLY hated the idea of female transformers because he was a gigachad.
Literally wrote an angry human feminist mob who considered the Autobots to be inherently sexist because they all had masculine personalities. It became a massive disaster in Autobot/Earthling relations so Optimus created a feminine body and put a transformer spark in it. Naturally the angry feminist mob was still unsatisfied (too pink, too curvy, blah blah blah) but now you had some unwitting alien robot soul in what amounted to a female robot which wasn't really a thing before this. But because gender wasn't a thing to them it didn't matter.
You already know where this is going.
Arcee is trans now. A transgender transformer. Because media literacy.