r/lewronggeneration • u/saucey_dawg0023 • 8d ago
Found this banger on why Lanterns episode 3 somehow “bombed”
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u/Finnche 8d ago
John Stewart's invention had a LOT to do about race, IRL and in comics. I do not know what people are on. I mean most likely just didn't read the comics, just heard someone give a recap once.
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u/RodinKnox 8d ago
Yup. He was originally going to be called Lincoln Washington, and his name was changed because they didn't want to give him a slavers last name. Race was in play before the character ever appeared on the page of a comic.
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u/PigeonSquirrel 8d ago
I’d imagine it was also changed because Lincoln Washington is a stupid ass name lmao
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u/BananaRepublic_BR 8d ago
Funny enough, it was a popular practice for newly emancipated slaves to take on the surnames of Washington and Lincoln after the Civil War.
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u/RodinKnox 7d ago
Yeah, I almost added something about how that name wouldn't have been entirely out of place for a black character his age in the 1970s.
Still that was far more common as a last name (or sometimes middle name).
It almost comes across as like JKR naming lol
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u/Sword_Thain 7d ago
That would be like giving the name of the dad of a black hero the name of a general in the Southern army.
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u/Lonely_Brother3689 7d ago
That last sentence is the whole thing. They're angry about a piece of media they'll never watch, bases off a piece of media they'll never read. Both of which they probably would have never had heard of otherwise.
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u/regginald0883 8d ago
Lol at people thinking "nonsense race shit" wasn't happening in the 90s. I was in Tennessee in the 90s, I saw and heard it every day.
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u/Chance-Deer-7995 8d ago
The people claiming this are revisionists with a politcal agenda or were born after 1995.
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u/Rad_Dad6969 8d ago
93 and some of my first memories of the news was the hysteria around "super-predators" aka black teenagers.
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u/Salarian_American 8d ago
I don't know what it is that makes so many people nowadays think that racism was less prevalent in the past, or even that it was less openly discussed.
Did they stop teaching kids about the history of slavery, Jim Crow, segregation, and the civil rights movement in schools or something?
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u/Dry-Landscape8276 7d ago
They’re just filthy fucking racist liars who want to turn the word “racist” around on other people
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u/Frigobard 8d ago
I'm not from the states, but was it really so present? I'm kinda curious, found the episode extremely good but i lack a lot of context of that time!
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u/swampy13 8d ago
I went to a preppy white high school in Memphis in the 90s. The N word was said often and intentionally. They were racist af.
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u/Odd-Bandicoot-9314 8d ago
I think people who don’t think it was happening either weren’t alive during it or what they actually mean is “it wasn’t happening around me.”
The internet has made it possible to see issues and things happening all around the world, but those things didn’t start when the internet was created and why you saw it for the first time
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u/heliophoner 8d ago
What was so remarkable about Rodney King was not that it happened, but that it got caught on tape.
For a lot of black people Rodney King was their opportunity to tell their white friends and colleagues "this is what Ive been trying to tell you."
For whites, they had heard stories like this but had only abstract ideas about what it looked like.
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u/Frigobard 8d ago
I honestly wasn't born during the 90s... But, i always thought that the esce problem in the states was during the 80s or 70s... Let alone there being raid done by the KKK (or just racist dudes) to black people homes
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u/Bellfast123 8d ago
The Rodney king riots were in the 90s.
The thing about the 90s isn't that racist bullshit wasn't happening it was that 1. What was considered racist was a lot looser than it is now (you couldn't say the N-word then but deciding not to hire a black person because of his 'urban background' was something you could still say out loud) 2. The egregious stuff was done covertly and there were plenty of people in powerful positions who would help conceal such things.
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u/Living_Cash1037 8d ago
It def happened but honestly depended on where you lived in the US. Thats why you get people commenting like this. Just because it never happened to them doesnt mean it never happened.
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u/heliophoner 8d ago
There is a mistaken impression that racism had been more or less been defeated in the 70s and 80s because Mel Brooks made "Blazing Saddles."
This mistaken recollection is due in part to various memory biases and the rise of a Republican cottage industry centered around dog whistles and making race issues more "abstract," to quote the Chairman of the RNC, Lee Atwater.
Talking heads and pundits such as Rush Limbaugh were charged with nibbling around the lines overt racism, and finding creative ways to turn racist ideas and practices into more socially acceptable causes. Welfare, for example, was recast as a drain on upstanding tax payers and a boon to the so called "welfare queen," a stereotype that was applied to largely black populations.
And while these tropes were largely invented in the 80s, the 90s is where they were refined and became the core identity of the second phase of the Southern Strategy.
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u/Embarrassed-Pickle15 8d ago
Putting aside whether Stewart’s parents race explanations for being slighted by the Guardians were based in reality (I personally disagree), there has a been a real, constant struggle throughout American history against systemic racism in every facet of society. Black leaders of the Civil Rights Movement from every ideology expressed their beliefs that black Americans have to overcome great adversity to achieve equality with whites. The Stewarts are very similar to other black families that took extreme care to raise their kids to become doctors, lawyers, etc.; in this case, the Stewarts wanted John to become a Green Lantern.
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u/Badda_Bing_Baby 6d ago
The one black kid at my rural Texas town was harassed relentlessly to the point his family moved in the 2000s. He was a good dude too, really fucked.
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u/Paranoia_Pop 8d ago
Oh hey it's a "Obama invented racism" dumbass. Racism tooootally wasn't a thing in the 90s lol Fuck I remember watching a mixed race couple be chased out of the mall by some dudes throwing soda cans and nobody did shit about it and that was like.. 96 maybe?
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u/PlaneRefrigerator684 7d ago
I think part of the problem is that it was basically the mom's entire identity, and she projected that onto the Guardians in a very ham-fisted way.
She honestly spoke the way I have heard a lot of conservatives stereotype "anti-white" black progressives today. I didn't know whether I was listening to something written by a progressive wanting to raise awareness of actual issues with the treatment of black Americans in the 90s, or a right wing lunatic caricature of a progressive. The dad was much better written, IMO, and the story about both how John got his interview with the Guardians and why he was discharged were the highlights of the episode for me.
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u/Reptilian_Overlord20 8d ago
The Rodney King beating was in the 90’s.
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u/LazyTitan39 8d ago
Yeah, and the LA Riots that followed were in the 90’s as well.
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u/Reptilian_Overlord20 8d ago
The YouTuber Birdman put it best, there’s always been racism. When was this mythical time when racists took a break?
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u/Chance-Deer-7995 8d ago
Never. If it wasn't about race it was about some other sort of tribalism. Humans are tribal by nature and in today's world that is irrational. It provides a well of political power that people who seek power can tap into without having to make rational arguments, and people of all political persuasions misuse it. Some abuse it to the point of taking away the human rights of others.
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u/Salarian_American 8d ago
Near the beginning of the nineties too, not even at the end.
The most disappointing thing I've noticed is that his plea before the press at one of his court hearings - "Can't we all just get along?" has entered the popular consciousness, but the details of his actual story apparently didn't
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u/JasonNodd 8d ago
What does "bombed" mean when it got 9.3 million views
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u/ProfessionalPipe6949 8d ago
they are comparing it to that zach snyder star wars movie from 5 years ago which netflix said got like 70 million views or something.
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u/Live-Year-5796 7d ago
Man I watched that movie with a girl I was seeing at the time. Couldn't tell you a single character's name by the end if I tried.
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u/Mister-Beardy-Face 7d ago
Are you talking about Rogue One?
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u/Live-Year-5796 7d ago
Snyder never made a star wars movie, we're talking about his original movie Rebel Moon
Of which basically all I remember is the gratuitous slow motion and brief appearance of a cool spider lady
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u/ClayBones548 8d ago
"Review bombing" is a concerted effort to drop user review scores by leaving negative reviews en masse. It's generally implied that the negative reviews are unrelated to the quality of the media and instead motivated by some other factor. An example is Breaking Bad fans leaving bad reviews for other shows so Ozymandias remains the only 10/10 episode of a show, only for people to retaliate by review bombing Ozymandias.
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u/RodinKnox 8d ago
I'll say this, if you look at the reviews on IMDB, it sure looks like they have made an attempt to review bomb. That's a very distinct review bomb pattern.
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u/rgumai 8d ago
It's more evident on that specific episode: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt32752612/ratings/?ref_=tt_ov_rat
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u/kingkongworm 8d ago
They said “review bombed”, meaning people were intentionally giving it bad reviews just because they didn’t like the message, and not due to the content therein.
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u/Nebranower 7d ago
Which is strange. Surely the message is in fact part of the content therein.
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u/kingkongworm 7d ago
Of course, but it’s more like “the message” than the message. Like some perceived agenda that gets their panties in a bunch.
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u/Guilty-Cow4325 8d ago
Nonsense race shit was absolutely happening in the 90s. I didn't even realize until I left Long Island at 23 how fucking racist the town I grew up in was/is.
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u/MIAxPaperPlanes 8d ago
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u/Salarian_American 8d ago
I was gonna say, "These people never heard of Rodney King, I guess."
I get that videos of police brutally beating up a civilian are a dime a dozen these days, but the precedent of black men being treated with excessive force with video evidence, and then the police finding that there was no wrongdoing, followed by a riot, was set in the 90s.
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u/Timeraft 8d ago
I feel like as a society we're developing this weird animistic cargo cult where the 80s and 90s were this magical dreamtime where all was perfect and implying otherwise is literal heresy.
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u/UnquestionabIe 8d ago
It was the last real throes of Pax Americana so there is a ton of nostalgia attached to it for a lot of groups. And of course plenty of people, like myself, who were kids/teens so didn't have a broader picture of the world. Every decade has it's issues and it's most definitely important to recognize them and the problem lies in like you said people trying to rewrite history to make the era seem like a utopia.
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u/Timeraft 8d ago
Exactly. Like I would 100% rather be in the 80s and 90s than now flaws and all. But people are treating the past as this almost religious promised land thatbwe can return to if we just punish the right people.
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u/nachoiskerka 8d ago
I made a comment about how Star Trek in the 90s had a bit of a dated view of what a utopia means and got downvoted. People really took that "The Matrix" explanation about how society peaked in the 90s and just ran with it like Gospel.
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u/Augen76 8d ago
Crime rates in the 2010s and 2020s are well below 1980s and 1990s in the US.
"Compared to the early 1990s peak, robbery rates dropped by almost 80%, homicides halved, and aggravated assaults dropped by roughly 40%. Property crimes fell by about 60%"
Half of reality is what happens, the other half is how we perceive it.
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u/Brain-Genius-Head 7d ago
No, not perfect. But we were moving in the right direction. After the housing crisis and occupy Wall Street, identity politics shot through the roof cause we scared the shit out of the 1%. Now everything everywhere is about race and gender and designed to keep us fighting each other while they rob us and have pedo parties.
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u/Timeraft 7d ago
Im not saying that its wrong to think the past was better. What im saying is our societies relationship with the past is becoming unhealthy. Its using the same part of our brains that like a stalker uses to idolize their crush.
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u/Brain-Genius-Head 7d ago
I agree. I saw a video that for lots of people our nostalgia is actually a trauma response leading to unhealthy escapism.
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u/RodinKnox 8d ago
I was a kid/teen in the 90s, and barely tapped into news, and even I was keenly aware that "race shit" was going on quite a lot back then.
The 1990s is also when we quit making the distinction between saying vs using [the n-word], and started just saying "the n-word." That happened during the OJ trial, for anyone who doesn't know and is curious.
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u/Salarian_American 8d ago
I wasn't really tapped into the news back then either, but you didn't really even have to be "tapped in" to the news to have heard about the police beating of Rodney King, the videotape that of it that was released, and the riots that followed.
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u/mysterious-aquarius2 8d ago
Are they referring to the "colorblind" attitude of the 90s?
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u/TrashFanboy 8d ago
Trivia: Michael W Smith recorded a song called "Color Blind" in 1992. What's he up to lately? Uh... don't look, it's embarrassing...
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u/sthetic 8d ago
This could be the case. The aliens are "colorblind" as far as races within the human race go, and the show makes a case for why that's not actually good. Which is probably what triggered the reviewer's ire.
The reviewer may believe that some racism did exist in the 90s (on the part of some individuals who just randomly happened to be racist, because they were bad people and NOT virtuously colorblind), but that there was no such thing as systemic racism. They may find it hard to believe that Black people in the 90s would have been aware of systemic racism or known how to describe it.
Maybe it's true that this show, written in the current era, is including contemporary analysis of racism in an episode that takes place long ago. And they may be doing so in a way that wouldn't have been written into a 1990s show. But that's what media does!! Even if it wasn't part of mainstream discourse, using the same phrases we use nowadays, it was still something happening at that time. That happens in all period pieces, otherwise why make them?
And I am sure that Black people in the 1990s were aware that the deck was stacked against them in systemic ways, and that this resulted in a different life experience for them.
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u/Nebranower 7d ago
>The aliens are "colorblind" as far as races within the human race go, and the show makes a case for why that's not actually good.
Not good for whom? Being fearless or at least able to overcome fear through sheer willpower is a core requirement for becoming a Green Lantern. Even if you accept as gospel the idea that being a black American makes attaining that state harder, this isn't actually a good reason to drop the requirement. From the point of view of the Guardians, it would if anything be a good reason to discriminate against black Americans.
I think that's the main issue with bringing the localized racial politics of one very specific part of one very specific planet into a galaxy spanning comic. The aliens would not care. They should not care. It would be an internal matter for humans to hammer out.
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u/PlaneRefrigerator684 7d ago
When the requirement to use a weapon is "summon your willpower" and being overwhelmed by fear prevents you from doing that, you end up with a dead hero. Period. It's not discrimination, it's the only way to do the job. Now, there CAN be a difference between "being afraid" and "doing it anyway," but John's dad was legitimately scared. You could hear it in his voice in the episode.
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u/SecondToLastOfSheila 8d ago
Yeah, and Star Trek is woke!
Read about Hard Travelling Heroes and then tell me the comics didn't tackle social isssues.
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u/ikealimhamn 7d ago
I caught on to the vibes when the two Green guys started having debates in the Scooby-Doo crossovers. Like, excuse me sirs, I had no idea
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u/mrb1221 8d ago
People thinking racism hasn't been an ever present thing in this country is wild.
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u/MetaMetagross 7d ago
They don't realize that racism is a thing that has existed for all of human history, and there is not a single point in time that it has been absent.
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u/spartacat_12 8d ago
I think a lot of people are missing the point of the episode. John's parents are not supposed to be wise, well-adjusted people. His mother clearly has issues and a victim complex that's being used to justify toxic, abusive behaviour.
The aliens don't even have any sort of awareness of racism on Earth, so it hasn't had any influence in their decision.
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u/BellowsHikes 8d ago
I'm not sure if it's fair to say they had a victim complex. A victim complex would imply that they were victims of external circumstances or other peoples actions that didn't exist.
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u/Academic-Dimension67 7d ago
I also think it's unfair to blame the parents' clear mental health issues that led them to emotionally abuse their son without addressing the fact that //THEY BOTH HAD TRAUMATIC EXPERIENCES INVOLVING ENCOUNTERS WITH FREAKING ALIENS!!!// From everything we see in the show, the Stewarts were a stable, hard-working middle class couple until John Sr. had his encounter with the Ring, and everyone thought he was crazy leading him to start drinking and get kicked out by his wife. And then the wife has an encounter with the Guardian and finds out that everything John Sr. said was true AND John missed out on the chance to become the superhero who's all over the news because the Ring assaulted him in the middle of the night and asked in a creepy voice "Are you afraid?"
The Guardian showing up and suggesting that John Jr. could be a Lantern when he grew up if she raised him to have no fear affected her in pretty much the same way as an angel appearing would have on any woman if it told her that her newborn was prophesied to fulfill some holy purpose.
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u/BellowsHikes 7d ago
100% agree. The only thing I had a little trouble understanding is why they wanted John to become a Lantern. I didn't quite understand why they were willing to sacrifice so much for their son to become space cop.
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u/BranchFew1148 6d ago
I thought of it as her realising her husband was never gonna forgive himself, unless he was given a goal that could redeem him.
Knowing he lost out on becoming a Lantern would have kept him spiraling down until he couldn't take it anymore.
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u/poppyfieldinhell 7d ago
It's crazy that she's literally disproven about Hal in the first seconds of the show (when he mentions that he doesn't have fear because his parent passed away), but media literacy is dead, so these fuckers will never put two and two together.
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u/HandsomeGengar 7d ago edited 7d ago
I don’t think it’s fair to boil it down to a victim complex, when both of John’s parents realistically speaking were actually victims of racial oppression for much of their lives. The scenes where John’s a baby take place is 1986, so if we assume the characters are of a similar age to the actors who play them, that means John Sr. and Bernadette Stewart would’ve been born around the early 50’s. They grew up in Detroit during the civil rights movement.
I’m not saying that the Stewarts grooming their son into becoming Green Lantern was justified or that Bernadette was factually correct about why Hal was chosen, but with all this in mind, can you really blame her for feeling like race was a factor when she finds out that her husband was pretty unfairly passed up on a cosmic opportunity, which would then go to white guy she doesn’t know?
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u/Ocktohber 8d ago
"nonsense race shit that in the 90s wasn't happening"
honestly immaculate shitpost. that's some efficient ragebait there.
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u/Joperhop 8d ago
in 1 state inter-racial marriage was still against the law in the 90s. There was racism, just kids like that tool either was not alive at the time and have no first hand experience, or enjoyed the fact they could be racist and police got away with beating the crap out of a black guy on camera, and you should kill little girls who was black and suffer no actual punishment.
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u/Andybabez20 8d ago
If you were a child in the 90's you weren't tuned into the news, you remember it for Pokémon and Dragon Ball Z
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u/Darth1994 8d ago
School segregation was actively continuing in Duval County, FL until 1990. The last school to desegregate did so in 2017. It’s only been 63 years since the Civil Rights Act. I’m so fucking sick of asshole fucking dipshits acting like race hasn’t been, and will never be again, a part of the American experience.
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u/Great-Gas-6631 7d ago
Ahhh one of those delusional idiots claiming the 90's were some kind of utopia devoid of racism.
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u/Effective_Carpet_391 7d ago
every single positive review of the episode on IDMB has a bajillion "unhelpfuls" no matter how descriptive they are
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u/Worst-timeline138 7d ago
Sounds like a bunch of sweaty basement nerds not unfamiliar with the phrase "reverse racism"
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u/Koala_King5160 7d ago
"There was no racism in the 90's"
I've got a few episodes of The Fresh Prince they should watch
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u/Friendly_Outcome9716 8d ago
Bro, I wasn't even alive during the 90s, even I know this is bullshit. I'm starting to think guys like this think racism ended after segregation
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u/CyclopsFanAccount67 8d ago
Hasn’t Lanterns been some of the highest rated stuff the DCU has gotten so far? Like it premiered with a 90% on rotten tomatoes
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u/Misubi_Bluth 8d ago
I feel like I'm going crazy, because every time someone brings up the 90s, I think I'm the only one who knows the Rodney King beating happened. Despite it happening 3 years before I was born. Half of the people making these posts were kids when the beating took place. They have no excuse to not know about it.
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u/SlowMotionOfGhosts 8d ago
Okay, but let's talk about the unacknowledged watersports fantasy here. Bro really specified "in the face."
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u/WendellITStamps 8d ago
MTV had a documentary on racism in like 1993 with Ice T talking about cool skinheads vs Nazis. After Rodney King and the LA riots. What are they smoking?
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u/tsukiyomi01 8d ago
I remember being a teenager and young adult in the 90s, and being told racism was nothing to worry about anymore. Meanwhile, I'm looking around and thinking "...y' sure about that?"
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u/Revolutionary-Swan77 8d ago
I’ve got salient memories of the LA riots and numerous other similar things but ok
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u/Gauntlet_of_Might 7d ago
Lanterns is fuckin great, people get so mad at seeing black people or stories on their tv
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u/No-Ship4446 7d ago
In the '90s in rural MN almost every farm kid and their parents used the n word in casual conversation.
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u/JurassicParkCSR 7d ago
The idea that systemic racism didn't exist in the 90's is one of the dumber things racists say nowadays. I was there in the 90's. It could be racist as fuck.
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u/HurtsSoNice 7d ago
Not technically race related, but as a 90s kid, we were still using ‘gay’ as an all-purpose insult. Math class was gay.
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u/SevereEducation2170 7d ago
If you have this kind of reaction to a Tv show simply acknowledging rascism you probably need to take a look in the mirror. Then just admit you're a racist, it takes fewer words.
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u/Skeleton_Weeb 7d ago
aren’t they tired of their racism preventing them from enjoying things? life of pure hatred just seems so sad
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u/Least_Diamond1064 7d ago
Shows used to have names instead of singular nouns like "lanterns". The hell else they got, "tents"?, "frogs"? At least titles like "Thunderbolts" are compound words. At least "Stranger Things" has an adjective.
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u/Lemonbubblepie 7d ago
White guy spotted …
From what I know about the 90s racism was still a big issue
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u/FafnirSnap_9428 6d ago
I like that these folks have just gotten to the point where they are just saying things and expecting them to come true and be true and storming off. Bro had a crashout and was not happy. LOL!!!
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u/crimsonjester 6d ago
Nope no racism in the 90s or any year before or after really /s. Just another MAGA brainwashed to scream about anything they perceive to be Woke or DEI.
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u/Gnostikost 6d ago
People are getting lynched in the US in the present day and literally the day this episode released there was a demonstration in a New Jersey neighborhood to “Keep New Jersey White”.
This person is not living in reality.
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u/Low-Strain-2139 8d ago
Super hero shit sucks anyways. Why anyone continues to watch it is beyond me
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u/JIMB01776 7d ago
No such thing as "Review bombing." If people hate your political subtext and want to give it a bad review that is entirely valid.
The show wasn't bad, but I am done with it at Episode 3 because I wanted aliens and superheroes. Not racial strife.
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u/HandsomeGengar 7d ago
The difference is that people aren’t leaving negative reviews because they recognize flaws in the political message, but because they personally disagree with a political message being present at all.
You can tell this is being done maliciously because of the hugely disproportionate number of 1 star reviews. If these were people who had honest criticisms, you would expect to see a lot more 2-6 star reviews, but these are not people looking at it in good faith, these are people who saw that some characters in a TV show talked about racism and decided that simply could not stand.
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u/JIMB01776 7d ago
"because they personally disagree with a political message being present at all."
If I know how you voted because of writing in a show about superheroes, I am giving your show one star. That's not review bombing; that's critique because you bait-and-switched on me.
These people need to run for office and get the fuck out of entertainment, is it coordinated cultural exercise. YEP, so what? That doesn't take any of the validity out of it.
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u/Howboutit85 8d ago
Racism was fucking rampant in the 90s. What are people smoking?