Diversity and Representation in Media

I'm not *entirely* sure I'm grasping this forum's etiquette, but bear with me...

"I don't get the fuss about villains having minorities or queer? Evil can come from all sides."

It's sort of like the '80s horror movie trope where the black cast members are always the first to die. Individually, it's just a quirk — somebody has to die first, and there's no reason it can't be the black folks. But when there's a pattern that's repeated over and over and over, it creates a context and sends a message that a single case doesn't.

There's a long tradition of heroes being presented as idealized in all ways, including what sort of appearance was considered most desirable, and villains as being physically flawed to match their minds. So if a villain is given any unusual trait, the implication is that it's villainous.

It would be nice if characters could have major traits that were generally considered incidental, the way we usually consider hair or eye color now, so villains could have unusual sexual orientations or races or physical disabilities and it would just be trivia... But we don't live in that world.

Does the Disney Animated Canon have any disabled heroes? I know it has disabled villains. I remember Fidget very well from Great Mouse Detective and he had a peg leg and crippled wing. Seems kinda crappy that the only guy I can think of with a limb difference dies in part because his handicap prevents him from staying alive (he can't fly, and so falls into the river Thames.)

Pixar thankfully has Massimo, a heroic single dad who was born with only one arm.

In The Hunchback of Notre Dame, the titular character is deformed. The entry Abled in the Adaptation in the page The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Disney) suggests that he is not as much disabled as in the novel.

Edited by gropcbf on Mar 26th 2024 at 9:29:43 AM

Yeah, in the book Quasimodo was deaf too, because of how he spent all his time next to the ringing bells.

I guess if you want to stretch there's also Long John Silver in Treasure Planet. He is technically the villain, but he's ultimately a character who's meant to be sympathetic.

And there's also Legend the dog from Strange World, who's missing one of his legs.

Yeah, I'm really stretching here. The list would be longer if you counted characters who need glasses, but still.

A lot of physical disabilities require finding an actor with the disability or careful special effects work, so they're usually not dropped into a story unless it figures into the plot. And there just aren't that many obviously-disabled actors, so if they're not sought out they're unlikely to fill a role, especially if their disability seriously limits what the characters they play can do.

It's basically why there aren't a lot of works by blind painters in museums.

Except we're talking about animated films, where that's not an issue.

Unless you're talking about whether characters who physically disabled by voiced by actors who share those same disabilities, but that's a different issue.

"It's sort of like the '80s horror movie trope where the black cast members are always the first to die. Individually, it's just a quirk — somebody has to die first, and there's no reason it can't be the black folks. But when there's a pattern that's repeated over and over and over, it creates a context and sends a message that a single case doesn't."

This is the best take on WHY it CAN be iffy to cast minorities as villains. I would have never figured this out on my own.

Part of the issue is also due to a legacy of villainization of minorities bleeding into villainous traits. Sissy Villain and a variety of other tropes come from the queer coding of villains, or how morality and nose shape have nothing to do with each other but large hooked noses being a sign of a villain has been a staple trope in Western works for a long time.

As authors do better research, are more aware, or often times come from the group in question there's more works that have good villains. Magneto is a Jewish villain, but he doesn't draw from the millenia of anti-Jewish stereotypes. Characters like Killmonger, and situations like the 2003 Daredevil Movie or Syfy's Krypton have black villains that aren't cut from anti black stereotypes. Still, creators need to be careful to do their research and not use lazy stereotypes as a basis for these characters.

Currently, trans people are seen as inherently evil and villainous by a great deal of people and there's not too much variety in trans characters in popular culture. If an author can pull off making a trans character evil without making it out that their transness is a sign/source of evil, it would be fine. But given how rare decent rep for trans characters still is, my first thought on seeing that a work will have a trans villain would be very skeptical indeed.

"Characters like Killmonger (...) that aren't cut from anti black stereotypes."

Except he has his own problems as a character. The film acts as though "Black people" is a uniform category in Africa, when in actuality it's the most genetically-diverse region on Earth and is home to countless cultures, many of which did not and do not get along with each other. Killmonger is outraged that the Wakandans did nothing about slavery, but there's no particular reason for Wakanda to consider those enslaved to be "their people" any more than the British ought to have considered the French and Germans to be their personal responsibility or vice versa.

Ultimately many of the problems with the film's messages come from it being aimed at African-Americans and mirroring their concerns while projecting those issues upon fictional situations where they're not appropriate and don't really make sense.

I personally don't see the advantage to avoid anti-Black nonsense in favor of pro-(American)Black nonsense, when nonsense is what I'm struggling against.

>Does the Disney Animated Canon have any disabled heroes?

Dumbo is mute, but it isn't entirely clear if it's just because he is still too young. He is intelligent enough past the toddler stage but it's unclear at which age an elephant would be supposed to 'talk' in that universe.

Then there is Dopey too, who is mute and might have some sort of intellectual disability.

Donald Duck, who was in Fun & Fancy Free, Saludos Amigos, Three Caballeros and Fantasia 2000 (actually making him the Disney character with the most appearances in the film animated canon, btw) has a speech impedement, are we counting that too?

I acknowledge that animated films avoid many of the practical problems of finding disabled actors, but the inherent problems of disabled *characters* remain.

Professor Xavier is no less dangerous a man than Magneto, but Magneto can be actively engaged in events where Xavier has to take backstage, because as nifty as the Prof.'s floating wheelchair is, he's hampered by not being able to walk.

When creating a character, why make one who has significant limits to their capabilities if it's not a defining feature for them? It just makes it harder to have them in stories.

That is an important topic in its own right, but I don't think that goes against my point? I was framing it more from a 'pitfalls of writing minority supervillains- like everything else writing, do you research', which is why I included racebent adaptations like Kingpin and General Zod from both Krypton and Young Justice.

How American centric Hollywood is and the dominance of US media is a pretty interesting topic in its own right.

Xavier is not supposed to be a physical fighter. Whether he walks or not doesn't make much of a difference when it comes to fights... It's not being on a wheelchair or not what helps him not to be sliced to bits by Sabretooth, it's that he can mindwipe Sabretooth before Sabretooth can reach him, whether on his feet or the chair.

There's also the flipside of villains being adored by queerfolk, like the aforementioned renaissance Disney villains.

RE Disney/disabled characters, "The Twelve Dancing Princesses" has been a popular suggestion for adaptation for years, and I think in some illustrations of that, the soldier protagonist has a disability.

This might be partly Mandela Effect on my part, since I checked, and in Grimm's Fairy Tale Classics, the soldier has his arm in a sling, but still has it, but regardless, I think an adaptation could very easily have him be an amputee.

Edited by Hodor2 on Mar 26th 2024 at 8:01:29 AM

In the original story the soldier's arm isn't wounded but instead he's getting on in years for a soldier. That's why in some versions of the story he picks the oldest sister as his bride — he's not comfortable with the age gap as it is and doesn't want it to be even worse.

That reminds me that The Steadfast Tin Soldier was adapted as a short in Fantasia 2000.

Edited by Noaqiyeum on Mar 26th 2024 at 3:42:47 PM

I think acting a disability is hard, but selling it in an animated film?

I just want to see someone creating a Disney character based in someone with artogryphosis.

Is not the fact to animate someone in a wheelchair, is the fact to animate someone that can still walk but this walking animation is not easy to draw because the character tends to hump a lot.

And then to sell it to the kids as an amicable character, this is the real challenge, that I would want to see someday.

A real world one enters a bus and, the children just start looking scared... as if God has been too mean to him/her...

Edited by Travsam on Mar 27th 2024 at 2:28:31 PM

Note on Nelson Peltz - I didn't put together that Nicola Peltz was his daughter. The most ironically thing about his ranting on Disney is that when used nepotism to get Nicola Peltz cast in The Last Airbender and subsequently almost all other characters were made white, that was when the Racebending conversation and movement started. Racebending was the proto-movement for accurate portrayals of people of color in the media. So in a sense...what Nelson Peltz is ranting about...he was the catalyst for.

Funny how the world works.

Edited by MegaJ on Mar 27th 2024 at 8:54:46 AM

I have been told this might be off topic. Sorry.

Edited by BigBadShadow25 on Mar 27th 2024 at 10:41:42 AM

Unlikely, considering his record.

Also this is just doomposting, and off topic.

Edited by RedHunter543 on Mar 27th 2024 at 10:39:39 PM

IIRC Disney representatives have straight-up mocked Peltz to the press, so I wouldn't be too worried.

I removed the comment. I’m sorry. I just heard Peltz’s name and had to ask. Thought I was keeping on topic.

One thing I've thought about is how, by all means, House of the Dragon should be 'woke'. I mean, it's two protagonists are female (though it is an ensemble piece) and made more sympathetic then their book counterparts, there is even more of a focus on the patriarchal society they find themselves in, an episode mostly dedicated to female sexuality and there's several race lifts from the books (the Velaryons and Mysaria being the main examples). There's also a sympathetic gay character (who, unlike the books, is spared so as to avoid too much bury your gays) and a (purposeful) queer subtext between the two leads. And, not that it has anything to do with the show itself (but certain people online would take these sort of things as a sign of 'wokeness'), the main lead is non-binary and one of the other leads is queer. Looking at series that have done similar or even less of those things, there's a clear disparity. Don't get me wrong, I know there have been people calling it 'woke', just that there seems to be significantly less compared to other shows.

I imagine there's several factors. First of all (obviously YMMV but this is a fairly common view) it's very good. A lot of the time it seems if a work with diversity is bad, then the lack of quality can be blamed on the diversity (instead of, you know, the things that actually make it bad). If the work is good, then it's harder to blame diversity for anything.

It also helps that all the female characters are presented as flawed, so they're less likely to be considered Mary Sues.

Still, the response to House of the Dragon just demonstrates how arbitrary 'wokeness' is. It also shows that 'wokeness' doesn't matter for whether a show is good or not, it matters if the show is actually good or not (good writing, cinematography etc.). I'm aware that the people who hate 'wokeness' aren't a single, unified group, but I can still look at general trends and see how different things are reacted to.

That the anti-'woke' crowd's definition of 'wokeness' is entirely arbitrary. I know this isn't a new revelation, I just think House of the Dragon is an obvious example. Or, according to (I think) a Little Joel video (I can't find it), there were several people saying Guardians 3 would be 'woke' because... Nebula was wearing a T-Shirt (oh no!). Then, when it came out and was really good, suddenly it wasn't woke anymore. In fact, it was suddenly anti-woke (just ignore the anti-animal cruelty message I guess). A similar thing happened with the Mario movie, woke until it came out and was considered good (and all the critics who hated it must hate that it isn't woke!)

Edited by king15 on Mar 27th 2024 at 3:09:52 PM

I don't get what you're saying like at all,other then how wokeness does'nt make a show bad unless the quality of the show itself is bad