Diversity and Representation in Media

Granted, today's liberals will probably become the same kind of reactionary to the next generation. It's human nature.

Edited by TomWithoutJerry on Mar 27th 2024 at 4:54:45 AM

I'm not saying I'm against human-hologram relations, but do they have to shove it in my face? Good point though.

Edited by king15 on Mar 27th 2024 at 11:57:15 AM

Whig history.

Yeah, it completely ignores that people can and do move further left over time as well.

There are senior citizens right now who are incredibly progressive, while on the flipside you have younger people who are into weird reactionary shit like the whole tradcath larp etc.

Edited by DrunkenNordmann on Mar 28th 2024 at 8:56:19 PM

Why, there are even senior citizens who don't try to sum up political and ideological allegiances on a one-dimensional scale!

How's *that* for advanced!

From my experience I've seen people who are annoyed with "wokes" but they're not right wingers (since not in America), but rather, they hate twitter/social media reactionaries and slacktivism/virtue signalling. With some equating it with imperialism.

If you think rightwingers are limited to the USA...they're not.

Left and Right are social constructs that don't have fixed meanings. The terms originated during the French Revolution, but the actual ideology and make up of the Right and Left changed a lot during the Revolution.

It is more useful for describing political alliances and coalitions than ideologies.

If amateur critics use woke to describe a film with a diverse cast that they don't like, but argue that a film with a diverse cast is not woke, then they are using the term as short hand to describe what they don't like.

Greg Owen uses woke in his thumbnails, because that get hits, but prefers the term "Performative Diversity" which he considers shallow and poorly done representation.

Obviously some people are closed minded, but no ideology or film is above criticism and constructive criticism is not the same as opposition. You can learn from people who disagree with you. It seems a lot of politics are about hating the right people and talking past each other.

There are still disagreements between socialists, older liberals and for lack of a better term, the woke. All of those people are on the left.

Well the general gist of it is American politics. I'm talking about people who, while generally are decent folk, get angry at twitter posts who make posts about taking pity on something without actually doing anything. Basically they equate woke with clout chasing. It's honestly a mindset especially in third world countries.

Edited by Ookamikun on Mar 28th 2024 at 6:15:19 PM

Ignoring of course that even bringing attention to something being fucked up is doing something.

And honestly, when it comes to a lack of diversity in media? Pointing it out and saying "this is bullshit" to anyone listening is a perfectly valid response.

And. Again. Rightwing and leftwing politics are not limited to the USA.

Edited by M84 on Mar 28th 2024 at 6:27:50 PM

I think that, it's ok to criticise how diversity is done, if it does feel shallow or doesn't feel reflective or is stereotypical etc., and I imagine that there probably is the odd critic/reviewer who uses the term 'woke' and means it as a genuine criticism that doesn't just boil down to: there's women/minorities/LGBT+ people in this film. The problem is, there's so much use of the term for when that clearly is what the reviewer thinks (like reacting to a trailer that shows basically nothing and then calling it woke because some of the characters are women) that has made the term become so toxic. It's like how you'll rarely find somebody to use the term positively - like it's original meaning. The term has shifted over time so that it can be hard to separate when it will be used for valid (not objective, because there's no such thing, but genuine criticisms that don't just boil down to 'I don't like diversity') criticisms and when it isn't.

Think of it this way. Someone shared a screenshot making a big deal of people not throwing litter to the bin. Then someone asked if the person placed the litter in the trash. Then the response was "no" because it is not their job. Basically that form of cloutchasing.

Mind you this is more about how "woke" is perceived mostly overseas or at least in developing countries, or at least in mine.

Edited by Ookamikun on Mar 28th 2024 at 7:43:09 PM

'Left wing thinking' and 'right wing thinking' are not things that come in a single block each either. It doesn't have to be all or nothing for either side. 'Conservative' and 'liberal' ideas are not necessarily all lumped with each other in a person, so labeling them that way is wrong to begin with because humans are more complex than that, usually, unless they are indoctrinated to a nearly cartoony level, and when we start addresssing them in general that way we are sort of dehumanizing them as strawmen.

Like, someone can be fully accepting of homosexual marriage and still be adamant against abortion, just to name one instance.

Good points. It's like how the Soviet Union is considered 'Far-Left' despite having much in common with the 'Far-Right' (I think it's a vast oversimplification, but this is an example of the Horseshoe Effect in action, I believe). It's like how JK Rowling is very liberal in terms of LGB+ rights, just not LGBT.

Or, how a work can have fantastic race and gender representation, but non-existent or bad LGBTQ+ representation.

Edited by king15 on Mar 28th 2024 at 2:18:15 PM

You know what? I'm going to change topics a bit here, and talk about a specific episode of Sonic X that's very good on representation.

Specifically, episode 14. Where Sonic hangs out with a crippled little girl. It's honestly a brilliant idea to have Sonic spend time with someone who can't run at all, and add some adventure to her life.

Like she doesn't let being handicapped get her down, and enjoys her time with Sonic. I dunno, this episode spoke to me, even as a kid. Her parents are overworked, and can't spend time with her, but she's not bitter about it. And knows the adventure can't last forever but that's why she treasures every moment.

Yeah, Sonic human cast members are hit and miss for most people, but Helen stands out despite being the focus for only one episode.

Also the entire episode is just Sonic and her fleeing from the military because they want Sonic to attend a presidential ball, that's awesome.

"Sonic! You WILL attend the presidential ball, and you WILL wear pants for it!"

"You'll never make me to! EAT MY PANTSLESS DUST, dorks!"

Well you didn't tell us what country what is, or what language you are normally using. If that isn't English, and woke is just a loan word, it's normal if the meaning is specialised. This is what almost always happens with loan words.

(In mainland French, woke generally has a derogatory meaning; woke people, when speaking French, use French words like progressiste. Right wingers and centrists made sure to import woke along with drama, as a tool to discredit left wingers. That doesn't tell anything about woke, the English word).

Edited by gropcbf on Mar 28th 2024 at 8:05:35 PM

"Or, how a work can have fantastic race and gender representation, but non-existent or bad LGBTQ+ representation."

Chekhov's Gun is a poor absolute but a very good heuristic. Beyond painting a background to create the illusion of a real world, every detail that's added to a story ideally serves a specific function. If a story isn't specifically about 'representation', then the presence of particular characteristics would distract attention from the important work being done to create the story; they'd be irrelevant complications, no matter how much some audience members want there to be trans ace black blind amputee vegan folks in wheelchairs.

Additionally, social minority groups often overestimate how common people in their group actually are. Homosexuals tend to congregate in major urban areas because they're just too scarce in suburbs or the country — in some cities they make up 10% of the population, while overall they're more like 3%.

The question is, why should the presence of diversity be considered "distracting" and not simply a natural part of the world you’re depecting?

The problem if you use strict representation rules like that...what shows get the queer characters? It's a dumb approach.

The thing is like, you can't really do the "so there needs to be a reason you have a gay character in your show" thing because you don't need a reason for a gay person to be around in real life. And because using that argument kinda goes with the whole "straight white people are the default and everyone else is an exception". This is not helped by how a lot of stuff still defaults to "gay couple? TRAGIC ENDING".

It's not actually a problem if queer people are overrepresented in fiction. Or Black people, or Asians or whatever. If you set a story in Edo Period Japan and it's super diverse, that would be strange, but something set in, say, vaguely post-Renaissance Europe? It's not that weird.

Like, people complained when the 2015 Cinderella movie had Black and Asian nobility. But it's a tiny fictional European kingdom that is contemporary with a bunch of real historical places that weren't contemporary with each other where an Asian or Black person could easily have done a favour for a previous king and got a noble title out of it.

There's a point at which it goes from "this is a little strange" to "oh, so you're willing to go on at extreme length about how in universe reasons justify this, that and the other thing, but a single black man in the movie completely kills your ability to do that and takes you out of the movie? That's literally racist."

Edited by Zendervai on Mar 28th 2024 at 4:07:37 AM

That's why all the best stories are about ageless, faceless, gender-neutral, culturally-ambiguous adventure persons. Any further detail would be irrelevant to the story.

So a character being a straight white male is relevant, but if a character is from a minority group, they are a irrelevant distracting complication?

It's especially weird when it's a fantasy setting.

Like...the writer can choose to do whatever they want. If they make a fantasy world exclusively white, that says more about the writer than it does about what makes sense or not.

Mmhmm. And it also says something that even a Featureless Protagonist is likely to be assumed male-by-default, sometimes even if the story goes out of its way to make a point about it (which has only really been changing over the past decade thanks to influential works in specific genres).

(I don't know if this data exists, but it would be interesting to know how audiences project qualities onto featureless/'stateless' characters based on their role in the story - I fully expect that featureless protagonists are always some combination of 'same as reader', 'same as author', or 'local cultural majority' in every category, but more interesting is how they perceive a featureless villain, mentor, love interest, comic relief, etc.)

It's also an issue because things that are vaguely historical sometimes run into issues where modern people perceive them to be less diverse than they would have been. Take the Roman Empire, which stretched across the Mediterranean and moved soldiers far from where they were born and encouraged them to settle in new lands as a rule. Or cowboys, who weren't as white as 50's Westerns would have you believe. Not to mention all the fiction set in a vaguely medieval setting that don't include Jews, or do well when depicting pre-Christian beliefs.