Diversity and Representation in Media

As someone who doesn't like Brave and has a lot of issues with it, I never felt that anyone was grouping me in with "haters" and I always felt that it wasn't really difficult to criticise the movie. Granted, I simply didn't focus on the politics in the background for the most part, and mostly examined the merits fo the movie. I did address thought he claims that "Merida is the first princess which does X. To which I just had to say: The first princess who didn't end up with a prince was Pocahontas, the first one which fought against an arranged marriage was Jasmine, the first one which wielded a weapon was Mulan.

But then, I was pushing back more against people who claimed that Brave was the most feminist movie Disney ever did and that clearly Pixar is superior in their treatment to female characters (which is just a ridiculous claim, Pixar was always worse when it came to female characters, though back then I didn't knew that there was a good reason for this) and not against the studio. I learned my lesson regarding this during the whole Sherlock vs Elementary war, which was a controversy deliberately created by the CBS.

There are always two possibilities: Either the studio falls victim to toxic fandom and/or the Anti-SJW activists, in which case there is no need to pile on, or the studio deliberately creates the controversy itself, in which case I don't want to give it the satisfaction that it worked.

Edited by Swanpride on Feb 23rd 2019 at 11:00:04 AM

Oh? So it was CBS that made Mofatt and Cumberbatch diss Elementary and have people writing article after article about how Elementary was an insult to Sherlock Holmes?

CBS did a LOT to keep the discussion around the two shows going. They carefully constructed a narrative of the poor underdog show which got unfairly harassed. As if the CBS is the underdog in anything. I mean, you just proofed my point by claiming that Moffatt and Gatis "dissed" Elementary, when in fact, they never did. One of the favourite tricks of CBS was to create situations which would lead to the team of Sherlock being asked what they thought about Elementary.

But I don't want to rehash this old discussion. Let's just say that it was a masterfully done marketing campaign and leave it at this. I am sure the fans of Elementary enjoyed the show, and it is not like anyone was losing anything because both shows were successful in their own way.

Edited by Swanpride on Feb 23rd 2019 at 11:32:06 AM

@wisewillow: Thanks for the video you posted on the previous page, it was a good one (though I generally prefer articles to videos as reading is much faster than watching).

I think the woman in the video made a lot of good points, including that “callout culture” can end up being about power and prestige more than about actually improving the world; that we can (and should) critique works that we think have sexist or prejudiced elements without attacking the writer personally or saying no one should watch/read the work; that works that try to incorporate diversity and are imperfect can get a lot more criticism than works that just don’t try and keep a predominantly white male cast (which creates perverse incentives against diversity); and that less famous and more marginalized creators can get more criticism than famous white men because they make easier targets.

Ther are definitely some works that are outright bad and some writers and filmmakers who are actively and deliberated bigoted, but that shouldn’t be the default or automatic assumption when we encounter a work that we have issues with.

Edited by Galadriel on Feb 23rd 2019 at 9:41:41 AM

I can agree with that.

Honestly callout culture often feels like a new form of indulging in the same old Accentuate the Negative, except this time using the guise of social justice issues to sound more more objective in front of onlookers. There are well-intentioned criticisms out there but most of the time it feels like an excuse to invite well-meaning but less well-informed outsiders to join in on dogpiling over what are really more subjective criticisms.

For example, all the people who complain that the primary reason their favorite ship isn't canon/more popular or the story didn't progress the way I wanted it to has nothing to do with differences in expectations versus creative vision and entirely to do with the creators being racist, homophobic, fascist sympathizing, or abuse/pedophilia apologists, etc.

Call-out culture is a double-edged sword. On one hand, it can lead to people recognizing issues that they glanced over before. (Without that documentary or #Me Too!, Kelly and Weinstein probably wouldn't be facing the charges they are.) On the other, it can lead to people making up ways that whatever piece of media they hate is problematic just so that they have an excuse to act all holier-than-thou. (On certain awful areas of Tumblr I saw people flat-out falsifying "quotes" from books so that they could act superior to their fanbases, and of course most rebloggers never bothered to check if they were lying). On the very worst third Hindu-deity hand, it can lead to targeted harassment against fans or creators. (See the Steven Universe fandom.)

part of it is that not matter how good theor intentions are, social justices in the internet is still...int he internet, with all the dougebachery and stupidty you should expect from the damn internet.

I mean, I think part of it is that much of social criquite is....that critique, they dissect bad situation and the best result are jobs who avoids those situation in the first place. Meanwhile while fans goes on the other way, wanting their favorite X thing of fiction show(paring, fighting scene, animation, you named it).

So you have situation like those alley said.

Star of Mexican film 'Roma' prompts raw discussion of race, class

I once joined a discussion group that talked about media with a focus on diversity like people do here, but it quickly became clear that Accentuate the Negative was in full effect, and made you feel like works, or even people, could only be divided into the binary categories of "totally woke" or "totally bigoted garbage" without regard for any more complexities than that. While probably not all of the members were that bad, the atmosphere of negativity, complaining and hivemind mentality got so suffocating that I left only after a short stay.

I guess I feel that discussions here are much more informative, nuanced, international, and can even have scholarly citations at times, and I'm glad for that.

I had a bit of Fridge Logic after seeing the recently released Le Chant du loup (The Wolf's Call, a French submarine thriller). The four main characters are played by:

• François Civil (non-immigrant French parents)
• Omar Sy (Senegalese father, Mauritanian mother)
• Reda Kateb (Franco-Algerian father, Italo-Czech mother)
• Mathieu Kassovitz (Jewish Hungarian-naturalized-French father, Catholic French mother)

That's a lot of diversity in four people. At the end of the movie, only the first one survives. That was probably not deliberate (I assume the script didn't specify anything more than "French" for the characters), but thinking back on it I was like, "come on…" Although we can also add Alexis Michalik (Polish father, British mother), who has a semi-important role and survives.

I have mixed feelings on Roma 's impact. In one side, is nice that there more indigenous people in film.

In the other, I can't but feel bitter than the only roles they seem to get is to be The Woobie for mundane GRITTY REALISTIC SOCIALLY CONSCIOUS reasons.

Basically "Los prietos no pueden ser felices: La Pelicula" as a mexican said online. (Brown people can't be happy: The Movie)

J79

To answer your question from last page, holy hell was there a backlash against Monica. She was a black, female, legacy superhero who was stronger than most of her male teammates in the 1980's.

You better believe "comic fans" made a stink about it: so much so, in fact, that she didn't appear in a Marvel comic for almost 15 years after her initial departure because Marvel didnt want to deal with the controversy.

She was also the leader of the Avengers. The editors actually forced her creator to write her as incompetent to justify Steve taking back the leadership position.

I still have to watch it someday (I'm very busy those days). But...I still feel.kind of awkward about Roma, the discussion that it had sparked reminds me to the peruvian The Milk Of Sorrow.

Now, Roma seems to avoid the worst excesses of Milk (which was filled with Unfortunate Implications). But I still.have a feeling of awkwardness at the idea of the only Native representation being "life is SUFFERING".

We have to start from something but still...

I missed the Oscars. Any topics that came about in relation to this thread?

Ohhhhh boy....

This is gonna be a long one.

Heh.

Okay, so. Cliffs notes:

• 30 years after Spike Lee' Do the Right Thing was arguably robbed by Driving Miss Daisy for best picture, his Black K Klansman was more than likely robbed by Green Book, which is effectively Miss Daisy Drives and is another classic "Racism is bad, but it's a good thing that this white guy can solve it because racism is about cartoonish caricatures hating black people and nothing about subtlety or institutional racism. Don't worry, you're not racist."
• Mahershala Ali won best supporting actor again.
• Black K Klansman got Spike Lee his first Oscar for best director.
• Black Panther won a several awards it 100% deserved, Costuming, Original Score, and Production Design.
• Bohemian Rhapsody won a great deal of awards, and Rami Malek is the first actor of Egyptian heritage to win best actor. BR and his acceptance speech are guilty of No Bisexuals.
• Bao won best animated short.
• Into The Spider Verse won best animated feature.
• Period End Of Sentence won best long documentary, which is pretty cool. The fact that "a documentary on menstruation" won an Oscar was lampshaded.
• Roma got some good wins.
• A few subtle jabs at the Wall, Spike Lee told people to "vote in 2020 and be on the right side of history" which Trump called "a hit piece" even though it didn't mention him, implicitly saying "I am relying on voter suppression and apathy, and am not going to be on the right side of history."

I'll add if I think of anything. Honestly, if it weren't for the whole Green Book "let's feel good about racism because you're not racist" thing, it would have been pretty okay.

Edited by Larkmarn on Feb 25th 2019 at 4:08:00 AM

On a more positive note...Black Panther won three academy awards which meant that for the first time ever a Woman of Colour won for set design. And Into the Spiderverse won, so hopefully people will shut up about the "academy award for animated feature is so Disney" now.

... Oh my.

Into The Spider-Verse's win also makes Peter Ramsay the first black director to win a Best Animated Oscar.

Huh. All this time I thought Miller and Lord directed that film, turns out they just produced it. Anyway, I'm really happy for him, and it means I now think he's a superior director to those two as I enjoyed it a lot more than Lego Movie.

Edited by AlleyOop on Feb 25th 2019 at 7:08:44 AM

Phil Lord worked on the screenplay but neither of the duo directed.

6x Don’t forget about the amazing Regina King winning Best Supporting Actress.

. . . Doesn't Disney own Spiderman now?