Anti-Woke Hot Girl YouTubers

How Critical Drinker Melted My Mind

In the above meme, the words coming from the girl’s mouth are verbatim an idea of the conservative movie and TV critic the Critical Drinker. I got the idea for this meme when a video popped up in my feed from an anti-woke channel called Mediaholic where the bubbly female host recited (borderline plagiarized) his ideas. The angle here is that if a woman is saying it then her viewers don’t have to feel they are in a toxic boy-only echo chamber. I am likening it to an adult webcam model that gives her viewers what they want. Amala Ekpunobi is a Black female YouTuber who produces similar anti-woke content and is the most prominent in this genre at the moment. But Ekpunobi’s content is more original and panders less than Mediaholic’s.

My perspective is too broad to be woke or anti-woke but when you make a meme you must pick a side. So I’m on the woke team with this one.

I posted this meme in a movie Subreddit called /Okbuddycinephile. Now movie groups shouldn’t be political, right? They should just talk about movies and leave politics out of it, shouldn’t they? No, every subreddit on every non-political subject has a political leaning. This is a liberal subreddit that loves LGBTQ+ films and thinks you must be a degenerate if you liked Sound of Freedom. Anyway, they loved the meme, it got 974 likes and 111 positive comments. The comments were on the line that these female YouTubers are “pick me grifters,” selling out their own gender to pander to males. The funny thing here is the speech bubble has a nugget of anti-woke truth that would normally get down-voted in this sub.

I’ve consumed too many anti-woke YouTube videos. This cottage industry exists on the premise that all new popular Hollywood content is trash because it is pushing a diversity agenda that fans don’t want. Most of the YouTubers are angry Gen-X men and their king is the Critical Drinker. He’s an alpha male who enjoys action, science fiction and super-hero films. He is no nerd, however. He’s played some video games but he’s not into comic books or science fiction novels.  His overall view of cinema is extremely limited – to him the 1980s were the golden era of film, and movies before 1980 aren’t very important.

Critical Drinker does, however, know the fundamentals of script writing and what make good characters and stories.  His rantings against diversity and inclusion feel true because those elements are front and center in films that are soulless cash-grabs.  His videos provide genuine criticism about how recent Disney (Marvel, Star Wars, Pixar) do not have satisfying character arcs, never take chances, have bloated budgets, have illogical writing and lack consistency with previously established franchise lore.  That means these movies are bad because they are woke, right? No. These movies are bad because of corporate greed and bad scripts.

Before anti-woke YouTubers told me that most new content sucks because of the DEI (Diversity, equity, and inclusion) agenda, I was already noticing contemporary gender politics on new shows I was watching. I didn’t think it was good or bad. It was just interesting to see it in my fiction.

I had been a fan of Sex in the City during its original run, which had always been a show that caters to a gay audience. It makes sense that they would take gay themes to the next level in the revival And Just Like That . . . The show added a non-binary character who came off as a caricature of wokeism and rattled off very cringey dialogue like “I’m your host and queer non-binary Mexican Irish diva representing everyone else outside these two boring genders.”

But mostly I wasn’t enjoying this reboot for the same reason I don’t like a lot of dramas – corniness.

Then there was a scene where Carrie was in the bathroom with a trans woman just hanging around and talking, just so she could virtue signal that she was totally cool with sharing the bathroom with a trans woman. Even though I share their point of view on this subject (and I think people’s level of comfort with trans women in the bathroom is really dependent their passability) I had to laugh at how ham-fisted the scene was.

Then I watched Star Trek: Discovery. I had enjoyed the 2009 reboot film (although the sequels were disappointing) and liked how this series incorporated the modern look of that film with a creative reinterpretation of ideas from the original series. The first season of Discovery had an interesting plots involving war with the Klingons and the mirror universe, while the second season took the time to mix original science fiction concepts with existing lore. From the beginning Discovery, which had a gay show runner, made a point of featuring strong female and LGBTQ+ characters. I was cool with the diversity, but the show became extremely boring in the third season. The conflict in that season was some kind of faceless universal crisis called “the burn” and there was no villain to speak of, or interesting ideas to explore. The action in the episodes usually involved the characters flying through stormy space clouds that would shake them up; and when they came out the other side of the cloud, they would have big cry. This symbolized that they went on a personal journey and lived their truth? — maybe, I was starting to space out and multitask at this point. I kept noticing so much crying that I looked it up and I saw YouTubers had already made compilation videos of the characters crying and crying and crying.

While the show was boring the audience to tears with a flaccid plot, it started to go heavy with pedantic scenes meant to educate the audience on the latest developments in politically correct speech. A new character, Adira, reveals that they are non-binary to the ship’s doctor. This then sets up the next scene where the doctor tells his partner how great the non-binary person is, repeatedly referring to them with proper they/them pronouns and at the same time educating viewers on pronoun usage. Like the trans woman in the bathroom scene in And Just Like That . . . this was both cringe and condescending.

Later a Critical Drinker video would tell me I was stupid for liking Discovery (or “woke Trek”) at all because the main character was a “diverse female space Jesus,” and all the male characters were weak and useless. But I hold to my original opinion that it was a good series for two seasons and went south in the third. I may be the only Star Trek fan who holds this nuanced opinion. I was briefly a member of a Facebook Star Trek fan group that made it clear that it was a liberal group and anyone posting anything they consider a right-wing opinion would be banned. When I wrote that I’m of the left but dislike the current tendency of Democrats to ban contrary opinions I was banned. The official opinion of that Facebook group was that the messaging in Star Trek: Discovery was infallible, and any criticism was right-wing.

So if you are anti-woke you must believe Discovery is shit from start to finish. If you are woke, you loved all four seasons and were not bored for a second.

Finely, regarding the meme below. I was watching the third season of the Mandalorian and noticed the title character was acting much stupider than he had in previous seasons and at the same time they were introducing a very strong and capable female Mandalorian. I think the idea was that she would take over the show. And what do you know, he went on a meaningless quest and needed to be saved by her twice in the same episode. I was a seeing a new “woke trope” that had been explained to me by the Critical Drinker. I made the meme showing it was weird the writers didn’t like the main character of the show anymore and I thought I was just factually pointing out what happened in the episode.

But that is not how it was perceived. I messed up when I used the term “girl boss.” This is like “woke” in that it was a term originally created by a feminist to brand female empowerment, but conservatives turned it into a term that mocks one-dimensional strong female characters in TV and movies. I had accidentally coded the meme to be anti-woke. When I posted it I was immediately banned from /starwarsmemes. This was a sad loss. I sent the mods an email saying I’m not really an anti-woke warrior and please lift the ban but they didn’t respond. On another sub I got all negative comments like “why don’t you just admit you hate women?” Oooops, sowwwwy. Face palm.

A week later the Critical Drinker made a video with the exact same take as mine. I had been able to come up with his take before he did. I was acting like an AI, taking his data and making a replication. I was the anti-woke girl.