Microblog Memes

While I agree with your first point - corporate pseudo-progressivism is a stain - I don't really think it's fair to call it "woke". In fact, it's almost the opposite of what woke is supposed to mean. To be "woke" originally meant having "woken up" to the reality of systemic racism... Corpos thoughtlessly stuffing games/films with "diverse" casts are not really respecting that reality. It's performative. There is an argument that it improved things for actors regardless, but I still don't think it's "woke".

On your second point I have to slightly disagree. Taking Bridgerton as an example - set in something like Victorian England, but a racially diverse one. The Queen is black, there's a black Duke. I think these things immediately set the story apart from real Victorian England. Ok, perhaps if you know nothing about history it might be confusing, but to me I see those things and immediately one of two things is true:

• We are suspending our disbelief. Just like the pantomime dame, within the world of the play, is a woman and not a man in costume, we can assume that we're seeing black actors playing characters who would have really been white... Like Queen victoria.
• The world we see is not an accurate representation of history. In this world we might assume that slavery was abolished sooner, or never started, and black people moved not just into the lower but the higher echelons of British society.

Given that it's fiction, I don't mind either of these things. I think it's nice for people who aren't white to be able to imagine themselves in those stories, even if in the real history things would have been much different. Bridgerton isn't trying to present a vision of real historical events, it's primarily a romance. Just like mediaeval fantasy isn't really medieval, Victorian romance doesn't need to really be Victorian. We don't need to see the systemic racism any more than we need to see the cholera or dropsy or whatever.

I will also just briefly shill for Taboo which I just finished - that's a historical show which incorporates a "realistic" amount of diversity into it's cast while maintaining (at least what appears to me) a level of historical accuracy. The story is fictional, although it appears around real events... But the world it presents feels genuine. Crucially by contrast to Bridgerton, slavery plays quite an important role in the story - so here it would feel absurd to have a black Queen or Duke.