Out of sheer morbid curiosity, as an autist and a writer, things like this fascinate me. I like to know what not to do and how to avoid it where possible. That doesn't mean it's never happened to me, though, there's been a few times.
Now, I'm not talking about like gay characters in a show and you're not into that thing. I'm mean the media equivalent of receiving a great blowjob and then suddenly you get a finger in your ass that wasn't part of the original offer.
Mine is the show, The Magicians. I knew it would be lefty-leaning because that's just how the books were and the cast was diverse in hollywood's favorite way. That said, I was in for some trash and the fastforward button was for the parts I didn't like. 3 seasons in, I like the dumb plots and the sudden twists, then, the show decided to pull some stupid fucking meta and lecture the audience: Rasheed starts to lecture us that you're a racist, sexist, bigot if you don't watch/read something because the main character isn't white and male. After that, I completely skip a couple episodes, because fuck that bullshit. I calmed down and the first episode I watch, they killed the main fucking character, a white male. Series goes on, I do not. The whole fucking scene was the producers trying to guilt the audience into not rage-quitting the show by calling us bigots. After that, I decided I was never watching another syfyllis network show again, or one with a racially diverse cast, especially no Rasheeds.
For me, it was a while ago and had nothing to do with Woke.
But it was Dead Space: Martyr. The actual story in broadstrokes is great and very important to the lore of the series. But its written like an 11 year old girl trying to make characters sound cool, or scared, or quippy, or evil. Like at some point a guy hallucinates his dead brother outside a hatch underwater begging to be let in, who then proceeds to explode into gore and blood in front of him while he loses his mind trying to help him. When told to calm down he mumbles sarcastically back:
While he returns to work. Like its a big joke, instead of a scene of absolute horror in a fucking horror series. And the whole book is full of shit like that, despite the cliffnote version of the story fully fitting that mold. Showing the writer was given the outline and then told to make a book from it, and carried entirely by that outline.
That's the Buffy Effect.
I expect that from movies, and especially TV. I don't expect it from game lore novels, which are usually niche products written for ultra nerds.
Who do you think is writing the novelizations these days? And they are aimed at the girls who write fanfiction anymore.
Well this novel was written in 2010, in the midst of the Halo books being at their peak popularity and leading the path that all these other game novels would follow. Prior to books being entirely consumed by female only markets as the 2010s would prove.