Diversity and Representation in Media

I agree, old friends can make amazing couples after both dating on their own for a while before settling down together. I mean, Korrasami, amirite?

If they had MJ and Peter be old friends who realize after 25 years they like each other that way, it might actually be refreshing. The more annoying variety, which seems way more frequent because it's thought to be "romantic" is meeting The One in Highschool and marrying them before you turn 20. (And then not getting divorced before you're 25, which anecdotal evidence tells me is the likeliest to happen in these cases)

Korrasami was brilliant for me on many levels, but most of all because that was one of the few times the main character of a show ended up dating that one character I actually felt was worth dating of the whole bunch (besides General Iroh, obviously, but it's not like he had a big presence).

edited 30th Aug '16 8:35:32 AM by hollygoolightly

I had mixed feelings on Korrasami because I really liked their friendship. It was great and well-written. And I felt like the writers fell into the old trap of "dating is the natural progression of a good friendship" which irks me to no end.

As long as MJ has red hair, I kind of don't care what they do. This is a pretty much guaranteed franchise, so I like the idea of them holding off elements for the future. But a token romance could end poorly because audiences might simply not be involved in a relationship that they know won't go anywhere.

I'll gladly take "Romance is the natural progression of a strong friendship" over "Bumping into someone and, falling instantly in love at first sight" or worse, "Romance is the natural progression of belligerently despising each other and wishing the other would drop off a cliff and die until the one day you realize that your fervent hate has secretly been True Love all along".

Also, any version of "He kept pestering her until she finally said yes and then they were in love forever" can burn in a fire too.

edited 30th Aug '16 8:52:08 AM by TobiasDrake

That last sentence basically disqualifies every romcom ever, then

With Korrasami, I'm actually okay with the "friends to partners" cliche, because it's just so rare for same gender romances to ever have a happy ending (especially for wlw, who often end up dead, depressed, forced to enter a het relationship, or otherwise, just unhappy). Imo, it's so refreshing to finally see LGBT women's relationship being treated as just as valid as a het pairing.

Yeah, basically. I really don't care for Dogged Nice Guy as a trope.

That's why I said...

...which is different from "after one dating on her own for a while, while the other creepily obsesses over her and only dates to try to make her jealous". I agree that DNG is a trope that needs to die.

I'm not a fan of Korrasami in particular because while it's good for representation, Asami never felt like anything more than a Shallow Love Interest to me. There's a reason she's by far the most popular choice for Possession Sue in the fandom. I'm glad Korra didn't get back with Mako, but when you ignore their genders it's not much better from a pure writing perspective.

As a result I'm not feeling any true eternal love or chemistry between them either, other than that they like each other a lot and might be the best currently available partners for each other out of all their acquaintances, whether or not it sticks in the long term. And being the cynic I am, I think it's likely their relationship won't last past a decade and they might eventually settle for other men or women, settling for just friends with each other (but don't say that to the fandom or they'll go absolutely ballistic).

The general evolution of a relationship like that, had it been executed much better, not dogged by Executive Meddling, and planned from the start to prevent feeling Strangled by the Red String, would not be bad for other series to follow though.

edited 30th Aug '16 10:52:02 AM by AlleyOop

When you're just starting a relationship, liking each other and thinking you might be good partners is all you need. The only promise Korrasami has of actually working out for the best is the Tethercat Principle. It's the last pairing we see, so we assume it's going to last forever.

But really, what we see is the barest first glimpses of a relationship becoming romantic. There is plenty of believable reason for them to take a shot at it, and the audience doesn't need any convincing that they will be Epic True Love forever. That's something that they'll have to decide during the relationship, months or years down the line.

edited 30th Aug '16 10:47:04 AM by TobiasDrake

99% of current relationships in media last for less than a decade, we are almost never shown the entirety of a couple life. Pixar's Up is an exception.

So I fail to see how the lack of confirmation on Korrasami's endgame should be a bad thing. Better a decade of happiness then moving on than six of boredom. Too much emphasis is always placed on the duration of a relationship, instead of its intensity.

I can't see them as a very passionate or happy relationship either. Stable because it thankfully didn't come from Belligerent Sexual Tension like a lot of other forced relationships do, but there's not much to indicate they'd be particularly happy together other than a few expository lines in the last few episodes which screamed of compensating for their inability to show with a ton of last minute telling. Probably a symptom of having to hide it from the censors.

They'd at least not be a Masochism Tango with each other like when they were with Mako, but their relationship seems exactly like the kind that would fizzle out due to boredom after the honeymoon period wears off, unless Asami gets a heavy dose of characterization and agency to make her mesh with Korra as a person and not because she's just supposed to out of Watsonian obligation as the story's Love Interest Character whose business running aspects quickly fall to the side.

If they decide to take the friends-to-lovers approach with Peter and MJ, then it's important that they establish MJ as an interesting and independent character in her own right first before pairing the two up. That would benefit from her being introduced earlier than later. Technically she would have been put into the series with the purpose of being a love interest character, but with good writing she'll prove that she fills a narrative niche much more substantial than that, and by the time she and Peter fall in love it will feel like a natural progression of her character's wants and desires, rather than because the writers railroaded her into feeling that way.

edited 30th Aug '16 11:56:51 AM by AlleyOop

Supposedly they plan to do multiple movies in high school, though, before moving on to college. If they really do that, I think it would be kind of a drag to spend all the time on Mary-Jane. As important it is to establish a female character as a character first and foremost, the hero of the story is Spider-man, and it would feel forced to come up with reasons to tell Mary-Jane's story appr. three movies before she actually pairs up with Peter, especially since there will be the actual love interest, too.

They pulled it off fine with Falcon across the MCU. If they similarly use MJ up as Peter's Lancer as he's mooning over Liz Allen then that's already a strong foundation for a character who can be interesting and likeable without needing a ton of dedicated screentime.

Unless of course the MCU's endgame is to have Spider-Gwen as Spidermain, not Spiderman. Dat wud b awesome.

Black Cat/Spiderman OTP forever.

It would be nice to not have any love interest in the Spiderman movies, but since I doubt that's going to happen...

That premise being "it's ancient China, and yet still focuses on a white guy." That is what all the trailers and promotional material are deliberately leading us to believe. And if you don't see any kind of problem with that premise, then I don't think we have much to discuss.

Okay? When my point is "movies shouldn't feel like they have to focus the marketing on the most quote-unquote 'bankable' actor," saying "yeah, but movies do that all the time" isn't really a refutation. Again - the idea of the one white guy receiving top billing, over a cast full of people of color, when he's not even the main character? The problem with that should be self-evident. In fact, a lot of problems with this film should be self-evident.

Anyway - Inclusion is the Key to Better TV: It's Time to Reframe the "Diversity" Conversation. A look at the current state of inclusiveness in mainstream entertainment - particularly the industry side of things - and a warning about the dangers of relapse.

The rest of the piece is too long to directly quote here, but it highlights a fact that I think tends to be overlooked in these conversations. Whenever there's a debate - as there indeed just was right here - about majority writers writing minority characters, or majority actors voicing minority characters, everybody is quick to just go "oh, but so long as the characters are there, what does it matter who's making them?" And, even putting aside the many other counterarguments I've made, we need to consider this: they're there now. They're there so long as white creators and shot-callers still feel pressured to diversify their stories.

Then, the moment they feel the audience is mollified, the moment they think the heat's off, they go "job well done" and go straight back to the white people. Would all of them do that? Of course not - there would be some who stuck to their guns, particularly the ones who were making a point of diversifying their stories even before the current diversity push was a thing. But once executives thought they could get away with it, we would see a massive drop-off in non-white, non-male, non-straight characters. Crisis averted, diversity executed, back to business as usual.

And that's why we do need to care about inclusion behind the camera as well as in front of it - to keep that from happening. If we can use this current diversity push to allow more Ava DuVernays to break into the industry, then we're going to have a far rosier future - because then we'll have major creators and power brokers who actually give a shit about inclusion, rather than just viewing it as a passing fad. Creators who, yes, are looking to push their political agenda, rather than just blindly cleaving to the status quo.^note Because the status? Is not quo.

When Hollywood is constantly sending the message of "fine, we'll make stories about people of color, but we still won't let people of color be the ones to tell those stories," it's a sign of, at best, shortsightedness - at worst, simple insincerity. They want the praise that comes with diversity - but they're still not interested in doing it in a way that benefits anyone other than white people.

My point was that a movie's promotional material focusing heavily on its most famous actor, out of proportion to their actual role in the movie, is not necessarily racially motivated.

Even if all the actors involved are white, you still get situations like Reefer Madness: The Musical, where Neve Campbell is prominently pictured on the DVD cover and is one of six actors to receive top billing, even though she's only in one scene, has maybe eight lines, and is almost completely superfluous to the plot. Meanwhile, Robert Torti and Amy Spanger, who have much larger and more significant roles, are nowhere to be seen.

Or you have The Other Guys, which stars Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg, but whose marketing heavily promoted the fact that Samuel L. Jackson and Dwayne Johnson were in the movie. It didn't go as far as making them look like the actual stars, but it definitely made it seem like they'd be a major presence throughout the movie. The trailer even used Manipulative Editing to make it seem like the climax was going to be a competition between the Ferrell & Wahlberg duo and the Jackson & Johnson duo. In actuality, Samuel L. Jackson and Dwayne Johnson aren't even in the movie after the first twenty minutes or so.

I don't know how famous The Great Wall's Chinese cast is in China or in other countries, but speaking as an American viewer, I've never heard of any of them before. So the trailer's decision to focus on big name Matt Damon instead? That makes pragmatic sense.

And please bear this in mind: the trailer spends a lot of time showing us Matt Damon, but what does it actually show him doing? First we see him walking down a street. Then we see him walking through a doorway. Then we see him standing on the wall with a bunch of other soldiers before jumping over the side (one of several characters we see do this in the trailer). We get a bit of voiceover where he mentions having been in a lot of wars, but this is "the first one worth fighting for". We see him firing an arrow, though we can't see what he's shooting at. And finally we see him looking in fear at a monster that's just off-camera.

That's it. We don't see him kicking any monster ass. We don't see him giving orders or laying out a plan or delivering an inspirational speech. We don't have any other characters talking about how important or special he is. We really don't see him doing much of anything.

That's part of what makes me think the trailer is exagerrating Matt Damon's prominence in the film; it has all the earmarks of a trailer working to make a character seem important even though the movie hasn't given them a whole lot to work with in that regard. And even if Matt Damon does end up being the lead, that wouldn't necessarily make him a Mighty Whitey who rescues China. Based on what we've seen so far, he could easily turn out to be a Pinball Protagonist who's always around to observe what's going on and have things explained to him, but doesn't actually contribute much to the plot.

edited 30th Aug '16 9:49:41 PM by RavenWilder

Bluefish is a guy and has made that clear multiple times.

And has made clear their reasons why: using and broadcasting the use of a harmful trope, pandering to certain audiences without any mindfulness of the periphery demographics, etc.

Whoops. Well my point still stands.

What point?

I'm not sure what the point in contention here actually is.

It's not impossible that the trailers and promotional material are being misleading as to what Damon's role in the film actually is or how prominent he will truly be. But I've already made my point about what that kind of marketing tells us, and you have to admit that as things stand what the film appears to be, regardless of what it actually is, looks pretty goofy and questionable. While we can reserve judgment for the film on the whole until it comes out, what the film looks like it will be and its overall marketing is the only thing we have to go on right now.

edited 31st Aug '16 12:33:18 PM by Draghinazzo

The point he's actually made is that "no matter how you look at it, the decision to focus the entire hype process around the White Male Lead is problematic".

Either the studio is playing Mighty Whitey straight, or else their deceiving their audience based on the notion that they wouldn't be able to appeal to an American audience without a White Male Lead.

There is no non-ugly side to this face, basically.