Diversity and Representation in Media

Jesus Christ, Disney, what the hell.

Guess they didn't learn their lesson after trying to trademark Dia de Los Muertos.

gotta get the trademarks so they can stamp it on all their merchandise,fairly standard for Disney,so it's not really a lesson Disney cares about it's more of stumbling block for them

Edited by Ultimatum on Dec 20th 2018 at 10:12:30 AM

I think it is the other way around...the trademarked Hakuna Matata in before, and now someone protest against it.

Yeah the trademarking of Haukan Matata actually predates the Dia de Los Muertos debacle by decades. In fact, I'd say this petition partly came about from the backlash Disney faced for that decision.

... How do you even trademark a facet of language?

You can’t trademark the word itself, but you can prevent other business from using said words in their names.

Here on the West Coast, it’s not uncommon to see this, with white-owned business that have trademarked including “pho” or “aloha” in a restaurant’s name, then suing restaurants with owners actually from those cultures.

Edited by Tuckerscreator on Dec 20th 2018 at 12:21:22 PM

Bruh wtf

It's not just words from other languages, too. It's illegal to use the term "Super Bowl" or "Olympics" in your business around the times of those sporting events without a sponsorship. Or, for another Disney song example, they've also trademarked the common English phrase "It's a Small World."

and 'Happiest place on Earth'

as well as “Princess Aurora”

An op-ed on the portrayal of Maori people (and indigenous peoples in general) as a Proud Warrior Race, focusing on Jason Momoa's problematic interpretation of the haka.

The haka he performed is called Ka Mate, for those who are interested.

Yeah, what Momoa said about his emotions from the haka, among with some rape jokes and set trouble on Game of Thrones and Aquaman, really give me the heebie-jeebies about what he views as acceptable male behavior.

Edited by Tuckerscreator on Dec 20th 2018 at 6:19:34 AM

Yeah, completely unsettling. The author of that piece seems to have the right of it.

He's turning out to be an even bigger creep day by day. And the Proud Warrior Race trope needs a good smothering in its sickbed. It keeps getting appropriated by fascists to fire up ethnonationalist violence (like the Axis countries in WWII using Teutonic/Samurai/Roman imagery in propaganda) or for colonial apologia (like using Aztec religious violence as a justification for their slavery under the encomienda system, never mind the European Reformation wars happening at the same time). Most iterations of the trope in sci-fi and fantasy are rooted in historical racist stereotypes, and it promotes a two-dimensional view of culture that bleeds back too readily into real life. I've seen way too many Facebook memes comparing the Syrian refugee crisis to LOTR orcs or GOT Dothrakis.

Wait...what?

Never have been so glad about not having a Facebook account. Even if it apparently makes me blind for some bottom of the barrel BS.

Anyway, I don't think that the proud warrior race will die anytime soon, but it is high time to reframe it. There is no reason why they have to be proud of toxic masculinity.

Edited by Swanpride on Dec 20th 2018 at 7:01:27 AM

The Stormlight Archive does a good deconstruction of a Proud Warrior Race with the Alethi, the country most of the characters belong to. They've been in a state of civil war for so long they don't even consider it worth mentioning, they're in the middle of a War for Fun and Profit and the one guy suggesting that maybe they should find a way to end the war (either in victory or diplomacy) is considered a coward who is literally insane, and when that same guy tries to enter into diplomatic talks with his allies, they assume he's either being nice to set them up for a betrayal later, or if he really is being nice, then he's insane. Oh, and every other country hates them due to their history of attacking anyone and everyone when they get bored.

It also does a good job of deconstructing Always Chaotic Evil.

Even Star Wars tried to explore and deconstruct proud warrior cultures with the Mandalorians in TCW, showing the New Mandalorians trying to rid themselves of this toxic warrior obsession.

There is a number of media that features deconstruction of the Proud Warrior Race Guy trope (Halo media about the Sangheili post-Halo 3 comes to mind), but a big drawback with a lot of them is that they focus too much on the face image of the trope and not the implicated baggage behind it. "Warrior race" is a trope that is easy to demonstrate as impractical for a society, because it was never true in the first place. Māori were also poets. Aztecs were also scientists. These cultures didn't last for ages by being all warriors.

It's like if someone tackled the "Mexicans are all criminals" stereotype by writing a story about how a society built entirely out of criminals wouldn't function. The stereotype is not supposed to function. It is intentionally reductive, to dehumanize.

Edited by Tuckerscreator on Dec 20th 2018 at 11:39:39 AM

That's one of the reasons I like Stormlight, because they aren't an insane barbarian horde; they're soldiers. A lot of the time it's easy for readers to forget they're all that different from modern society, and then one of the protagonists will casually dismiss a horrific civil war as "yeah, that's what we do." They are certainly functional, but still terrible.

To All The Boys I've Loved Before is getting a sequel.

Edited by windleopard on Dec 21st 2018 at 5:43:16 AM

Guys. I still like the movie but...

Do you think that the German Dr. Poison for Wonder Woman (2017) is a case of Whitewashing? I personally do, and I find myself in the awkward situation that I like her, but I also would like a Japanese Dr. Maru.

I mean, I know that the movie isn't set in WW 2 and that having a Imperial Japanese aiding a German during WW 1 wouldn't make sense. But still, I like the idea of a female Imperial Japanese Mad Scientist.

Edited by KazuyaProta on Dec 21st 2018 at 8:46:49 AM

..How is Dr. Poison even close to White Washing? They made her sympathetic and she got away without consequence,that's not really 'white washing' ,not really

To wit " "to gloss over or cover up vices, crimes or scandals or to exonerate by means of a perfunctory investigation or through biased presentation of data" they certainly didn't gloss over the fact that she was responsible for gas or experiments as I recall

Edited by Ultimatum on Dec 21st 2018 at 5:50:10 AM

Whitewashing as "Race Lift to White".

By whitewashing, he means taking a fictional character that is originally non-white and depicting them as white in an adaptation.