It has happened again: an audiovisual product starring women has suffered what is called in English review bombing, that is, a mobilization in networks that agrees to leave a flood of negative reviews of an audiovisual product in the main review aggregators that allow opinions from viewers. They are always motivated by the rejection of the inclusion of female characters, LGBT characters or any race other than white. That is, when it is suspected that what a certain reactionary sector calls woke culture puts its claws on a product that was fine as it was: white, male and heterosexual.
The victim this time has been the fourth season of True Detective: polar night, available on HBO Max) released worldwide last Sunday. The attack it was so furious which led its director, the Mexican Issa López, to launch a message on X, formerly Twitter: “If you liked last night's episode and you have a Rotten Tomatoes account, could you go there and leave a review? The bros and the fandom of the first season they have proposed reducing the rating, and it is a little sad considering all the 5-star ratings we have.
On Rotten Tomatoes, the website founded in 1998 by Senh Duong and today owned by Warner Bros and NBC Universal, the ratings of professional critics coexist with those of users, and while the former gave the series 93% positive reviews, audience ratings barely exceeded 50%. Right now it remains around 70%. It is not strange that both groups have antagonistic visions about the same product (the audience tends to opt for lighter products), but some common elements in comments suggest a less than spontaneous movement: the emphasis on the fact that there are too many girl bossesthat is, women with power.
“Too many girl bosses” wrote one user, “I wish they had focused on telling a good story, instead of getting distracted by the girl bossing”, another commented. The list is endless and always points in the same direction: “This is woke up and you can see this problem during the sixty minutes of the first episode”, “Stop throwing your message in our faces, “Another franchise that makes man evil!”, “I don't know whose idea it was to let Hannah Gadsby write this season” (Hannah Gadsby is a lesbian comedian) or “Almost everyone is a lesbian!”
In reality there is only one lesbian, a teenager, who only appears on screen for a few minutes. But for those bros to whom López appeals, the term lesbian could be addressed to any fictional female character who does not conform to traditional femininity and does not remain in the background compared to men.
López ended up deleting the comment and replacing it with a kinder one, celebrating that the ratings had gone up since he published his first message and pointing out that he had unfairly generalized: that there were many straight guys and fans of the first season who loved this fourth season and had left positive reviews, for which he apologized. After also deleted that comment.
But who is a bro?
In any case, the complaint was made and the debate was open. What exactly are the bros What were you referring to? The journalist Ann Friedman defined them in 2013: “bro “has become shorthand for the kind of privileged ignorance that thrives in groups dominated by rich, white, straight men,” he wrote in an article in New York Magazine. bro “It evokes a particular type of man who operates socially by excluding those who are different.” Eleven years later, that definition is still valid.
And what is the problem with the fandom (that is, the most faithful and staunch followers) of the first season, which López also points to? Let's contextualize: True Detective It is an anthology series, each of its four seasons deals with a new case with different characters, which is in its fourth season. While the second and especially the third went largely unnoticed, the first, written by Nic Pizzolatto and directed by Cary Fukunaga, instantly became a cult series. Here appears the first key: while that one was carried out by two men (Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson), in the current one the investigation is led by Jodie Foster and Kali Reis, an Oscar-winning actress and a professional boxer. Two strong, tenacious and not very accommodating female characters.
In the first chapter, the only one that has been seen so far, Foster is a boss who has no problem censoring the behavior of a subordinate who has just bought a Russian woman from a catalog and we can see Reis supporting an abused woman in front of her abuser and calling the shots in a sexual relationship with a man who seems to want more than just sex with her. They are tough in their personal life and brilliant in their work. Two characteristics that would probably be universally welcomed if they were male characters. Another key: in the idolized first season, female roles were reduced to a suffering wife, prostitutes or corpses and in almost all cases their common denominator was being scantily clad.
“It reeks of sexist garbage,” wrote the review of The New Yorker Emily Nussbaum in 2014. “Every living woman you know is insignificant. None of them have an inner life.” She also had words for her protagonist, the idolized Rust played by McConaughey, whom she described as “a macho fantasy straight out of a Carlos Castaneda book.”
If in 2014 it already raised some eyebrows, seen with the eyes of 2024, and after the #MeToo revolution in which the representation of women in audiovisual media has been reflected on and their presence in the script rooms has increased, the first season of True Detective It seems like a parody of masculinity. Seeing it again in 2024 makes the total absence of relevant female characters astonishing. In a police station where at least a dozen officers swarm there is not a single woman except for the secretary who answers the phone. In the entire season not a single woman with a minimum of authority appears, everything is cooked up by the bros. Needless to say, there are no LGBT characters either and they are all predominantly white even though they are in Louisiana! The only African-American characters are a couple of annoying agents who try to judge Rust's attitude.
A long career
The fourth season of True Detective It is just one more in the long list of products boycotted by angry spectators and the reasons that bother them are varied. A year ago the victim was another HBO Max series, The Last of Us. The third chapter, Long, long time which reflected a homosexual relationship between two men, saw its negative ratings multiply one hundred percent compared to the previous episode and on Metacritic it received a score of 4.8 out of 10 while the first two chapters had bordered on outstanding. “It literally has nothing to do with the plot of the series,” lamented a far-right critic named Ben Shapiro, despite acknowledging that he has never played the video game. If he had done so, he would know that this plot actually existed previously, already in the original video game. One of the humiliating comments on Twitter was met with a celebrated response from Nick Offerman, one of its protagonists. “Dude, your brand of ignorance and hate is exactly why we make stories like this.”
The inclusion of female and non-white characters in The last Jedi caused a real commotion in the universe Star Wars. Users used negative ratings to protest the inclusion of Asian-American actress Kelly Marie Tran as Rose Tico in the film. The personal attacks were so verbally violent that the actress closed her social networks. The case of Ghostbusters. There were those who accused the 2016 version of “stealing their childhood” simply for starring women. The 2021 version, a crude copy of Stranger Things without any resemblance to the original it went under the radar bro: There weren't enough women in authority to make her hateful in his eyes. Mrs Marvel (2022) where the protagonist was also Pakistani, and She-Hulk (2022) were destroyed before being released.
A phenomenon that suffered Captain Marvel (2019) at the time with such intensity that Rotten Tomatoes changed its way of scoring, resorting to verified ratings: aware that they have a problem with this type of hate mobilization, they are required to provide “justification” that the incident has been seen. movie before criticizing it, but it only works with tickets purchased online and is not required for television series.
For now, these measures have not managed to stop the phenomenon. Last year the bombing was The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. And not because of her weak script, but because of the representation of Galadriel, who was considered too warlike and unspiritual, and the presence of black elves. Racism is the other leg of the stool review bombing: the live action version of The little Mermaid (2023) was also attacked before its release and caused IMDB, the leading movie database, to begin using a weighted system to balance one-star reviews.
Beyond the screens
It is not an exclusive phenomenon of audiovisuals, it is present even in literature. Last summer, five hundred users of Goodreads, a website for cataloging and criticizing readings, organized to rate the novel with a single star. The Snow Forest, by Elizabeth Gilbert, which had not even been published. They accused her of romanticizing Russia. Although the fiction was set in the 19th century, the hostility aroused by the invasion of Ukraine caused its release to be postponed.
The writer and journalist Noelia Ramírez asked herself in an article about it: “Is the cult of scoring and encrypting everything we consume culturally getting out of hand?” Of course. And not just what we consume culturally. We have already become accustomed to clicking on the smiling faces that encourage us to mark some shopping centers to rate their sellers, to the dull desperation that we sense in the teleoperators who warn us that we will receive a survey to rate their service, to the misleading ratings on restoration portals motivated many times by personal revenge or reviews purchased or generated by artificial intelligence. There is a pack of toilet paper rolls from a famous brand available on Amazon that has 10,437 reviews. Some one star and devastating. Maybe we have scored too much.
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