A thread for discussing representation and diversity in all kinds of media. This covers creators and casting decisions as well as characters and in-universe discussions.
Historical works and decisions are in-scope as well, not just recent news.
Please put any spoilers behind tags and clearly state which work(s) they apply to.
This week, producer Ross Putnam started a Twitter account called "femscriptintros
", where he puts up examples of how women are introduced in the screenplays he's read. And nearly all of sound like terrible porn or are too concerned with emphasizing said lady is beautiful despite whatever traits she may have. Here's a Take Two podcast made today where he talks about it.
(Edited April 19 2024 to add mod pinned post)
Edited by Mrph1 on Apr 19th 2024 at 11:45:51 AM
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
I think that's just creative differences at that point.
I'm going to be very careful with my next words here but.... a writer/artist .... for a popular television show..... has..... based on some rather solid evidence.... had some significant creative differences over the depiction of a particular gay paring between two characters.To make a stupid story short, the artist wanted the paring, the creative head(s) did not, and the creative head(s) won out.
In a lot of cases the issue isn't "do the gay or not do the gay" but rather "do the pairing or not do the pairing". It's at the intersection between shipping and representation, and that is an ugly road to go down.
Rock on, Gold Dust Woman
Mind clarifying what you're talking about?
Have you any dreams you'd like to sell?
That's a difficult problem to have, and one where I have a lot of sympathy for both the audience and the creator. The audience was once again denied a queer romance, and anger from them is both perfectly justified and perfectly understandable. And the creator tried like hell to make it happen, but lost anyway - opening them up to a lot of undeserved criticism from the fans, who may not have the whole picture.
Ideally, it's a problem that should be addressed with transparency, so that the audience can shift their anger onto the right target. Make it clear that you tried to make it happen and it was the stuffed suits on the executive board who blocked it, so that the anger is directed at someone who deserves it. But I also understand that that's easier said than done, thanks to both the diplomatic difficulties present in navigating creative industries, and the spread of misinformation among fandoms.
Also, not related to film, but a neat thing I came across anyway - the Black Mirror project (no relation to the TV series). After a black fashion model got sick of being told that various agencies "already had a black model," she decided to launch a campaign where she herself would pose in recreations of classic fashion ads. The goal being essentially to send the message that "we're here, we're beautiful, and we're underrepresented."
edited 8th Dec '16 12:32:43 PM by RBluefish
"We'll take the next chance, and the next, until we win, or the chances are spent."
At the same time there's quite a few legitimate cases of Shipping Goggles at work where the accusations of queerbaiting genuinely are based on fan projection rather than anything substantial.
Once again I bring up the dead horse of the Voltron Legendary Defender fanbase, where an interview from the creators suggested that Keith might get closer to Princess Allura without specifying that it was even necessarily romantic, causing a huge portion of the fanbase to scream about the creators indulging in queerbaiting and stringing them along with promises of a queer ship due to how they portrayed Keith in the first season. Except, as an actually queer person I found absolutely zero evidence of any Ship Tease for Keith in the first place whatsoever. No evidence that he was either gay or straight. It's as substantial to accuse the creators of acebaiting if they do pair him with a guy after an utter lack of any romantic inclinations in his character so far (and I'm sure some part of the fandom will do that). And if they indicated anything on Lance's end regarding sexuality it definitely wasn't directed towards Keith.
Likewise, the people who swear up and down that Angie and Peggy in Agent Carter were as good as canon, that people who don't see it are blinded from homophobia internalized or not, and that the executives intentionally moved the show to Los Angeles, dropped Angie from the recurring cast, and forced Peggy into two het romances out of spite towards queer viewers and that Cartinelli was going to be canon before they interfered. Even though, while I can see how people could ship the two it certainly wasn't the epic love story they made it out to be either, and I could definitely see how someone didn't see their relationship as romantic for reasons not related to homophobia.
edited 8th Dec '16 4:45:12 PM by AlleyOop
tl;dr: Creative mind involved with tv show attempts to push for particular queer pairing, it doesn't work out, lots of drama. I can tell the whole thing over PM if you're really that interested.
Ahr river
I'm interested.
Read my stories!
@Alley Oop: Considering that some of the creators of Voltron Legendary Defender worked on Avatar the Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra, shipping can be a special kind of evil in those respective fandoms.
Which is why I stay out of it, lol.
Not the head creators.
Also that is completely fangirl bias since well, the classic pairing is set up to be the one with the greatest storytelling potential.
Rock on, Gold Dust Woman
If you're gonna be secretive about it, I don't see why you'd bring it up. But fine, PM me if you can.
Have you any dreams you'd like to sell?
Also do share.
Screaming Into The Void
Also interested.
Seems like that kind of depends on the series you're following and what medium its made in. There was a web novel I started following a few years back where the most common and popular pairings for the female main character tend to be one of her female friends but there tends to be a lot of problems with those ships, (some of which that are borderline, heh, Space Whale Aesop) some of which the author commented on at one point.
Peggy/Angie wasn't quite solely fandom interpretation, as Hayley Atwell and Lyndsy Fonseca enjoyed posting Cartenelli fanart or referencing it
◊, even if the show itself was probably not filmed with that interpretation. Still, it didn't really have a chance of happening considering The Winter Soldier confirmed Peggy married a man and it's doubtful Marvel/Disney would even consider a Beard interpretation or something like Marston-Elizabeth-Byrne. Wish we could've had more Angie in Season 2, though.
edited 8th Dec '16 7:57:12 PM by Tuckerscreator
Feig contributed a guest column to The Hollywood Reporter for their Women in Hollywood 2016 issue titled "What I Learned About Being a Woman This Year." In it, he recounts his experience with Ghostbusters: Answer the Call, which we've talked about at length here at TMS.
The main lesson Feig says he learned is, "Wow, the will of women is much stronger than even I thought." Damn straight.
He also talked about the fact that media coverage focused on the negative response to an "all-female Ghostbusters," which also had an effect on how the film was received by audiences, both positively and negatively. He says:
"Sadly, the media kept reporting only on the negativity and insisted on referring to us solely as the 'all-female Ghostbusters.' I mean, it's 2016. Are we really that shocked that four women can star in a movie? Did it have to drive all our coverage? It points out that gender can still divide folks not just in politics but in entertainment — and boy, do we need to fix that. This film never was meant to be political. But, ridiculously, it became just that."
Admittedly, we here at TMS talked a lot about it being an "all-female Ghostbusters." To be fair, we're a feminist pop culture site, so we get really excited about things like that. And what I would tell Feig is that I believe that, on some level, all art is political. The second you have a vision, a story, or an idea that you want to share, and you create it and share it with the world, you're making a statement. The personal is political, after all.
It's a bit naive to think that the decision to do an all-female version of what was previously an all-male something could ever not be political, and that seems to be something Feig has learned as well. I understand that when he says "ridiculously, it became just that" that he's emphasizing the fact that he doesn't believe an all-female main cast should be a thing. We get it, Paul! You respect women and take their equality for granted. The thing is, being political is nothing to be ashamed of. You consciously made the decision to cast all women for a reason. Own that!
Something that he hasn't demonstrated he's learned? The intersection between gender and race when it comes to this experience. Throughout all the Ghostbusters hoopla, Leslie Jones (who just so happened to be the only black woman, or woman of any color, in the main cast) was repeatedly singled out for harassment, culminating in a racist barrage of harassment (complete with images comparing her to Harambe the gorilla) that caused her to temporarily leave Twitter.
While Feig repeatedly came to her defense on Twitter, her co-stars were conspicuously absent from the public conversation. While I understand that, as women, it would be difficult for them to get online and risk becoming targets themselves, as three white women, they could have come out in support of their costar and friend more publicly.
I hope Feig noticed this. I hope that this taught him the importance of intersectional feminism, or as I know it...feminism. I hope that he understands that supporting funny women means supporting all funny women. I hope he recognizes that there are hilarious women of color other than Leslie Jones and Maya Rudolph. I hope that he's taken note of talents who are members of other marginalized communities, like Shakina Nayfack and Shannon DeVido from Difficult People.
And much though I love Kristen Wiig, Melissa McCarthy, and Kate McKinnon, I hope that Feig starts branching out and diversifying his talent pool. If he really wants to be a champion for gender equality, he should start making it a point to pull from a broader swath of female talent.
He also learned nothing about not typecasting and bashing your potential audience.
Do me a favor and point to where he did that in the interview, willya?
"We'll take the next chance, and the next, until we win, or the chances are spent."
x6 That's the beauty of multiple interpretations, and a totally valid one since different people get different things out of media. Applicability exists for a reason. After all audiences are not monolithic so it's inevitable people are going to come away with different interpretations and just as it's not fair to insist a soft ban on queer interpretations of characters it's also unfair to insist that queer interpretations are the only objectively correct ones and anyone who disagrees has some nefarious agenda up their sleeve, as opposed to simply having different life experiences that cause them to relate differently. You can't force headcanons onto people.
Which is why it aggravates me so much when shippers react so hostile to other people who view their OTP as a sibling-like relationship and accuse them of having Anti Shipping Goggles or worse, being in an incestuous relationship with their real-life siblings, because there's only one kind of appropriate relationship for siblings to have.
x4 True but just because part of the staff does enjoy it doesn't mean it's canon or written to be that way from the getgo. Lauren Zuke seeming to like Lapidot in Steven Universe and drawing pro-Lapidot fanart doesn't mean the staff had any interest in making it actually happen, nor should the show be obligated to pursue the ship "for representation's sake", especially when it's already demonstrated that it's the kind of show for which homophobia isn't a restriction. So if those two don't get together it may be legitimately that the idea of this ship arising simply wasn't part of their original artistic vision.
While it's useful to make one's show a crowdpleaser and vocal fan support for a particular outcome may be indicative of good directions to take the series, at the same time they are also under no obligation to cater to the fans in any specific way. Which is how a lot of accusations of queerbaiting end up" "the creators opened this can of worms, whether intentionally or not it doesn't matter; to prove that they don't actually hate the queer people in their audience they had better follow it through to the end or else". In a lot of times such as Glee and Arrow excessive pandering to shippers comes at the detriment of the show's overall quality. Don't burn the house down just to chase the mice into their cage. Or some other less terrible idiom like that.
edited 8th Dec '16 9:40:49 PM by AlleyOop
Patty Jenkins on the importance of Wonder Woman in the current political climate
If that movie sucks, can we just cancel Justice League?
Please don't suck...
South Korean actor Lee Byung-Hun has spoken out about his experiences with racism in Hollywood.
But while Lee's Hollywood career seems to be doing well, his experience in the industry is not without challenge. In an interview with Korean site Dalian, the versatile actor revealed some racist encounters that he experienced in Hollywood.
In the interview, partly translated by Redditor Hangryforpeace, Lee recounted several instances when his colleagues would simply ignore him for being Asian.
"I do not want to name any individual names, but I felt like when I was working in Hollywood, there were some fellow colleagues of mine who didn't even look me in the eyes because I was Asian. I tried to [introduce myself] and shake their hands, but they would all ignore me and walk past me. I couldn't shake their hands until we had finished filming the movie."
"I am not disappointed, there were many times when I was really angry-angry at how I was treated."
He also expressed frustration over Hollywood's casting problems that have persisted for decades.
"[Despite having widespread protest over the lack of diversity in Hollywood], Hollywood really has not changed that much. I went to a local coffee shop [in America] for a cup of coffee and a barista who was working there approached me and asked, 'Are you a movie star?' At the time, I was beaming with pride that I was finally getting acknowledged for my movie roles. But unexpectedly, he then told me that he enjoyed the movie 'Hangover'. It was that moment when I realized that we Asians all looked alike to [white people]."
Yes, for some reason, someone thought Lee Byung-hun was Ken Jeong, Mr.Chow in the Hangover series.
"To them (co-actors who discriminated him), I was that typical foreign actor who did not speak a lick of English properly. There were many times when I wanted to confront these [racist people] head-on, but I wasn't able to fight back due to cultural and language barriers that I had to overcome at the time. But now things have changed and I want to push these people's buttons and see just [how far these people can go with their racism for my own curiosity]."
Having experienced such treatment for many years, he has grown accustomed to racism and developed his means of reacting to it and those who perpetuate it.
"By now, I am very used to dealing with racism and racist people. I have always felt a sense of distance from them [white people] and I think it has become very evident that it is my job to [bridge this gap between Asians and white people]. I haven't given up on Hollywood yet, I still want to [make movies there] and fight for [more Hollywood representation]."
I don't understand how anyone could mistake him for Ken Jeong. It's like mistaking Ben Affleck for Jim Carrey.
"I do not want to name any individual names, but I felt like when I was working in Hollywood, there were some fellow colleagues of mine who didn't even look me in the eyes because I was Asian. I tried to [introduce myself] and shake their hands, but they would all ignore me and walk past me. I couldn't shake their hands until we had finished filming the movie."
Not to belittle his point (he's actually pretty fantastic and I'm a fan), but... I'd guess that this has less to do with him being Asian and more him being a minor actor and they deemed him not worth their time. I'd bet a ridiculous sum of money they'd do the same to a white actor who was in the same roles.
Found a Youtube Channel with political stances you want to share? Hop on over to this page and add them.
The Dragon of the Eastern Sea
He looks like an Asian Mads Mikkelson.
I can't stop laughing
Either way, he was their coworker. You don't just brush off someone at work when they greet you like that.
edited 13th Dec '16 6:28:40 AM by blkwhtrbbt
Say to the others who did not follow through You're still our brothers, and we will fight for you
Michael Fassbender Says the Women of Assassin’s Creed Don’t ‘Depend on the Arc of Male Characters’
http://www.themarysue.com/assassins-creed-roundtable-michael-fassbender/
A thread about
the difference between queerbaiting and Executive Meddling.