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We can’t wait to hate with entertainment

There is no shortage of things in the world today worthy of genuine outrage.

We might not agree on what those things are, but everyone can point to something real and tangible that fills them with anger and disgust.

So why is it that so many seem willing to manufacture outrage for things they haven’t seen, for things that don’t even exist yet?

When it comes to entertainment, we can’t wait to hate.

As soon as a project is announced, social media seems to be filled with folks who are certain it’s going to be THE WORST THING EVER!!!!!

The latest example is “Confederate,” an HBO series from “Game of Thrones” creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss. Announced last week at San Diego Comic-Con, the show will imagine the present-day in a world where the South won the Civil War and slavery still exists.

Now, according to the creators themselves, there are no scripts yet for this series, not even an outline, but the announcement triggered plenty of blowback and not just from largely anonymous Internet trolls.

Roxane Gay, author of the acclaimed memoir “Hunger,” immediately tweeted, “It is exhausting to think of how many people at @HBO said yes to letting two white men envision modern day slavery. And offensive,” and she expanded on that theme in a New York Times op-ed headlined “I Don’t Want to Watch Slavery Fan Fiction.”

In the New York Times’ piece, Gay writes, “Each time I see a reimagining of the Civil War that largely replicates what actually happened, I wonder why people are expending the energy to imagine that slavery continues to thrive when we are still dealing with the vestiges of slavery in very tangible ways.”

She’s right. But genre entertainment — fantasy, science fiction and horror — often has found ways to address current problems that television networks and film companies are hesitant to address more directly. It’s appalling that it’s easier to deal with questions of race in a “Twilight Zone”-style allegory than it is to focus on the vestiges Gay lists in her column. But a show like “Confederate” might be able to address those very issues and draw a larger audience to them by using its high-concept premise.

Or it could be an absolute trainwreck, worse than Gay and other early critics can imagine. If it is, they should attack it with real outrage, citing all the specifics that infuriate them.

But they should wait until it “is,” until it actually exists, to attack it.

Imagine if the Internet was in full swing when Disney announced it was turning “The Lion King” into a Broadway musical. “The Great White Way will be sullied by a Disney on Ice-quality production, minus the skates,” would have been one of the more polite tweets. Instead, it was a show that used the elements of theater — costumes, lighting, set design — in truly imaginative ways.

I bet there were people who tweeted and posted on message boards that there’s never been a worse idea for a show than a hip hop musical about the first Secretary of Treasury where all of the Founding Fathers (and their wives and mistresses) are played by people of color. I also would bet some of them later paid scalper’s prices to get a ticket to “Hamilton.”

A few years ago, a lot of critics wrote columns about how greenlighting a film called “The LEGO Movie” was the ultimate proof of Hollywood’s creative bankruptcy. I don’t think I ever wrote that, but I’m sure I muttered it at some point.

When that movie was released in 2014, it was a box-office hit that received near-unanimous critical praise and was nominated for an Academy Award.

“The Emoji Movie,” which opens Friday, provoked a similar reaction. I haven’t seen it. I have no desire to see it. And the fact that critics aren’t allowed to post their reviews until 9 p.m. today indicates that Sony Pictures doesn’t believe it will get the same critical love as “The LEGO Movie.” But I’m not going to give it three poop emojis sight unseen either.

There’s no shortage of real, deserving targets at which to hurl those poop emojis.

Andy Gray is the entertainment writer for the Tribune Chronicle. Write to him at agray@tribtoday.com.

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