Everyone Hates ‘Velma’ But It’s A Hit On HBO Max: The Paranoid Conspiracy That Thinks The Scooby-Doo Spinoff Parodies Woke Culture

HBO Max reports that ‘Velma’his New serie spin-off of ‘Scooby Doo‘ for adults, it was its most watched animated premiere in history. It is not a very reliable data, because since its creation there have not been many original animated series under Max’s label, perhaps the most popular so far is ‘harley quinn‘, but the achievement is there and it is not to be taken lightly.

The data contains a paradoxical reality. People are talking about the series, but in a way that is nothing short of devastating. In fact ‘Velma’ currently has the lowest audience rating for an HBO production in Rotten Tomatoes, 6%, and criticism does not give it the pass either with 55% positive reviews. It is relatively normal for there to be a bombardment of ratings on pages open to the public, such as imdbwhere it has only reached a 1, 4, when there is a drastic change in a character, like here.

The “sacrificial trash” hypothesis

In addition to accepting the revelation that the character is LGTBI+ from his latest animated film, creator Mindy Kaling has turned the character into a teenager from India, also changing her race to Shaggy. Something that has literally driven those who usually complain about this crazy, but what nobody expected is that It will also anger the most progressive viewers, who apparently believe that the series is laughing at them. Hate from both sides.

Thank you everyone for watching! 🎉 @hbomax @velmatheseries pic.twitter.com/QoZ6AIiPtB

— Mindy Kaling (@mindykaling) January 14, 2023

Before going into the analysis of the situation Forbesit is convenient to contextualize Kailing’s fall from grace among a certain sector of the American population after showing sympathy for J. K Rowling in some tweet, which associated her with the feminist section called “terf”. This has led to conspiracy theories that believe that the series is a parody of what the right thinks is woke comedy, not only because of the changes of new races, but because of its jokes about white boys, which have led people to think that the writer would be secretly conservative and wants to ridicule the left so that the right can point to the series and blame it on fiction with racial sensitivity or influenced by social justice.

the showrunner of “velma”, mindy kaling, is both a transphobe and said that you couldn’t make “the office” today because cancel culture. she’s a fellow reactionary.

she *deliberately* made “velma” suck so the culture war youtubers make a million videos about it to boost its SEO. pic.twitter.com/5ZJJDN9gCr

— gryphoneer (@OneRadChee) January 13, 2023

crazy that talks about the series being “sacrificial garbage” created expressly to immolate itself and create guilt and more hate for “anti-woke” reasons. It is very difficult for Kaling, known for the very open ‘I never‘ orchestrated something this twisted, but his statements about “You couldn’t do ‘The Office’ today“They have also put her in the spotlight. The problem is that although it is not the intention of ‘Velma’, it seems so, since she is causing all the possible ridicule of the conservative sectors and she is not falling well with those who are supposed to that embrace those racial changes and similar details.

just bad jokes

‘She-Hulk’ laughed at the misogynistic fans of the comics, but broke the fourth wall, and created a meta paradox about the same ones who hated the series, but in ‘Velma’ many critics agree that “what’s missing is the frustrating meta approach it takes“, others his “gross lack of meaning” and in last instance what does it look like”written by TV writers who only talk to other TV writers“, which is summarized in that he is so poor at throwing jokes at retrograde America that he wants to criticize that it seems that he is self-sabotaging, doing an involuntary woke parody.

Thus, the laughs are focused, for example, on ridiculing the gang leader, Fred, for being a whiny white man whose steaks are cut by his mother and who has a short penis. The lack of subtlety in his jokes has reinforced the usual “review bombing”, also accompanied by Qanon’s own theories for sexual references between adolescents that it contains, but on this occasion it does not have too many defenders who take the series off the dam, for what the real theory of success of the series is the “hate watching“, that is, how people continue to watch the series out of morbid fascination, not really because he likes it. This can be seen in the responses to Kailing’s triumphant tweet.

Most watched = Most Hated. Perhaps your friends in Hollywood don’t know, but premiers are irrelevant if a show that is week to week it’s dead on the 3rd or 4th episode.

Which is what’s gonna happen to this. Since, almost nobody liked it, and didn’t watch past episode 1… pic.twitter.com/vT48IfojYq

— Zanzoltan (@Zanzoltan) January 15, 2023

Be that as it may, there are not many signs that ‘Velma’ will be renewed by HBO Max, at least until it is verified if the “hate views” are that or if it really manages to hook the viewers, meanwhile, it remains as an example that shows us the delusional political response to animated series, the conspiracy mentality in which we are involved and the difficulty of finding fiction that is not punctuated in some way by the cultural reality of generational contrasts or the consequences of the marketing dynamics of large companies that have used inclusion and diversity as currency to project a brand image.