Amazon was planning to bring Stargate back to our screens. Fans were excited because many of the original creatives behind the hit show were on board. Then this happened on IGN…

What you just read is proof that mainstream media is eating its own tail. These studios no longer care about the audience. They don’t care about entertainment. They don’t even care about making money.

The idea that “the existing Stargate fans” aren’t enough to support a new show is absurd. The series had over 17 million viewers — easily about 16.9 million more than “modern” shows like The Acolyte and Starfleet Academy can claim.

There’s no logical reason to make this statement and cancel a show that had fans champing at the bit. This decision was made because the old showrunners weren’t going to push the message hard enough, plain and simple. They were going to remain true to the source material and produce something good. 

But when you’re no longer in the business of entertainment, that doesn’t matter. The investors’ wallets won’t open up for entertainment — they only open for luxury belief messaging, virtue signaling, and ideological warfare.

Another Sign of the (Much Deserved) Coming Change

This can’t go on forever. It can go on for a really long time (look at the publishing industry), but there’s a finite lifespan on mainstream entertainment’s plans.

Celebrities have nearly zero clout among average people these days. Studios aren’t trusted. Awards mean nothing. Mainstream critics are shills owned by the same corporations that produce garbage media.

And we, the people, are so fed up with the low quality and outright disdain for what we want, we’re just making our own stuff.

More audiences are turning to indie sources. True indie sources…and the fact that major productions are stealing the word “indie” (see: Mixtape) shows that the elites see the trend and want to both poison it and leech off of it. 

Note that there’s another branch that consumers have been taking lately: time travel. A large swath of the viewing/reading/gaming audience are simply returning to old properties from back when media was worth a damn. They’re skipping whatever new trash Star Wars show got greenlit entirely in favor of watching the original films. Instead of playing “AAA Extraction Shooter #236”, they’re dusting off Modern Warfare 2. 

In short, we have options. Those options are crippling legacy media’s ability to control our consumption and they clearly have no idea how to handle that. Based on the Stargate incident, their only solution is enhanced gatekeeping. In their minds, if the only new media being produced is ideological trash, then that’s what we have to consume. That’s why allowing Stargate to reach the IP’s fans is not allowed. Giving them that one alternative means “the message” isn’t saturated. It gives viewers an alternative. It gives them hope. 

Mainstream isn’t interested in giving us hope. That’s why everything is dark, gritty, dystopian. The heroes of the past are all degenerates in rewrites and reboots. Everyone is defined by their trauma. History is being rewritten and colonized. Mainstream creators are driven entirely by ego, not audience. 

This is all meant to break us. A fun, entertaining show can’t do that — so mainstream won’t make one. 

But we can. The people that aren’t in executive suites or working with $300M budgets. We have the ability — and the duty — to bring some reality and common sense back into entertainment. It’s the indie novelist writing during their lunch break and the solo game dev pulling all-nighters that are going to make things better for all of us. 

Because indies can reach audience the way mainstream is failing, it means that we’re on the cusp of a new renaissance — one where the stories and ideas will spread from the masses, not from the elites up above.

We Need All the Toys in the Box

Here’s the take some of you might disagree with, but AI is going to facilitate this shift in the power dynamic. Indie creators need force multipliers. The better our tools, the more we can do. And indies NEED to do more right now. 

Go back and read the numerous articles I’ve written dismantling anti-AI arguments. Absorb the facts, not the hype or the hysteria. Recognize it as a tool and you’ll be fine. And you’ll see that it’s a tool that can give a creator in their basement the functional power of a ten-person studio. It can allow a hobbyist coder to develop an entire indie game. It can help an author get their first novel in the hands of readers.

These are all good things. Because right now we need every soldier in the fight. Every creator with even an ember of a good idea needs to bring it to life. The more this happens and the more people we can reach, the faster we can bury mainstream media.

And even though it’s already dying a slow death, time is of the essence.