Diversity and Representation in Media

This piece of new is waaaaay old, buddy Hellboy is coming out soon anyway.

It came out today and the review say...it kinda sucks.

The only review I’ve seen comment on the issue said that Daimio’s role is so small there was even less reason to whitewash it in the first place.

I'm... not looking forward to the movie, but it's nice to hear that he's found a place to land after the Hawaii Five-0 mess.

A Tomb Raider sequel is in development.

Renegate Cut weights in on Green Book

I have a question. How well do you think Fire Emblem handles diversity or representation?

On a semi-related note, What are your opinions of Mukokuseki, regarding representation and diversity in Japanese (or Chinese or Korean) works?

Edited by MorningStar1337 on Apr 14th 2019 at 1:23:46 AM

Oh, hey, Morning!

Oh, Fire Emblem and diversity? Not very well if you ask me. It's a very white-looking ^note  with the exception of characters that clearly evoke native Japan like the Hoshidans franchise. It doesn't help it regularly employs outdated tropes like Beauty Equals Goodness, Hades Shaded, light = good and dark = bad, etc.

Not to mention, the only dark-skinned characters were good guys I can think of off the top of the dome are Danved, Basillio, and Flavia.

Representation... could be its own whole topic.

Oh yeah! I forgot about folks like Gray, Benny, and Claude.

Edited by erazor0707 on Apr 14th 2019 at 11:44:14 AM

Fates and Shadows of Valentia have a bunch of heroic darker-skinned characters, and one of the protagonists of Three Houses is dark-skinned, but the series does fall prey to common JRPG pitfalls with its character design philosophy.

Mukokiseki can get curious sometimes. I remember a donghua where The Medic was from the Hui People and she was drawn equally as the rest of the Han Chinese characters (and the Taiwanese and Japanese ones).

She certainly counts as representation of a ethnic group, even thought she isn't drawn differently from the other East Asian characters.

Edited by KazuyaProta on Apr 14th 2019 at 1:42:35 PM

Hi, Camilla. :V

Forgot about Garret, Igrene, and Hawkeye, huh?

There’s also Fiona in Radiant Dawn, but she’s barely a character, so...

They're borderline, and I don't want to mistakenly associate tan-skinned with dark-skinned.

Edited by erazor0707 on Apr 14th 2019 at 4:02:36 AM

So I was thinking about Brie Larson's comments about having more diversity in film criticism and I was reminded of something I said a while back about the Mandarin controversy in Iron Man 3.

When the movie came out there were two dominant camps regarding the film's depiction of the Mandarin. There was the camp that felt the Mandarin was too much of a racist caricature to be played straight in a modern movie and there was the camp that was upset over the movie not respecting the source material. Now in recent years, I've seen a third but lesser known camp composed mostly of Asian Americans: the ones who did agree that the Mandarin had unfortunate implications but didn't think whitewashing was the way to fix him.

Now these days, criticizing the IM 3 Mandarin is a bit easier, especially in light of the MCU's (and other studios') other blunders with Asian representation but this wasn't the case in 2013. And with Larson's comments in particular are very telling and make me wonder how IM 3 would be looked at had the voices of Asian people been elevated in regards to the Mandarin.

This reading isn't exactly new, we have discussed it years ago (there is btw a fourth reading, that the Mandarin is a quite clever commentary on racism). The question is how present any of it was in the actual reviews. It has been so long ago, it is hard to tell.

Thus said, it is really frustrating how the conversation regarding Captain Marvel ended up dominate by mostly male reviewers who somehow completely missed the thematic arc within the movie.

Which actually proves the point Larson was actually making in the first place - male reviewers may (or may not) be able to see the feminist message of the movie but it's not a male experience, a female reviewer would have a real understanding of it as it speaks to something they actually have experience of.

The most interesting part is that this comment has nothing to do with Captain Marvel.

Yes. This discussion has also been had about the Ancient One and Iron Fist, where Asian-American voices have been heard a bit more clearly than they were back then.

What it boils down to is that poor representation is still better than no representation. Blaxploitation films are f*ckstupid and racist, but they also improved visibility for black actors. They gave black people roles to play - even to the point of making them protagonists in Hollywood films! They were not by themselves enough and it's good that we moved on from them, but we moved on by going forward with black representation, not backward.

Marvel isn't necessarily wrong when they say that casting Asian actors exclusively as stereotypes and caricatures is racist. But taking those roles away from them and leaving them with no roles and no representation at all is worse. Tokenism is bad, but erasure is worse.

That's not necessarily always the case. The depiction of trans women in media as predatory or 'just guys dressed as woman' contributes to real life violence against trans women, to the point that I've seen multiple trans women state that they'd rather have no representation than be assaulted due to poor representation.

Obviously, good representation should be the standard for everyone, but when forced to choose whether 'bad representation' or 'no representation' is preferable, it depends on the specific issues that the represented party faces in real life.

Song of the South springs to mind,the main character is a black man at a time when black people barely got any leading roles,modern Disney's denial of this movie is a text book example of erasure

On the other hand, and speaking as a black man himself though not one from America, Disney has pushed other products with black people in the lead, either on t.v or movies. So I don't think it should be held against them that they'd rather not advertise one of their oldest shames.

Edited by windleopard on Apr 15th 2019 at 7:45:22 AM

It had its place in history but that place has long since passed, and there's nothing wrong with being like, "Y'know what? That hasn't really aged well. In fact, by today's standards, it's pretty terrible. Why don't we talk about the good representation in later films?"

The catch here, of course, is that you must have good representation in later works before you can play that card. Which Disney now does. Trying to sweep problematic representation under the rug before replacing it with good representation only causes erasure.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Apr 15th 2019 at 9:54:10 AM

Right,but acknowledging your past mistakes and saying "We can do better" is better then being in flat denial

What upsets me is that by pushing Song in the South into obscurity, they pushed a great black actor offering a great (academy award winning) performance along with it. I wouldn't mind it if they would at least take the story and singing scenes and just get rid of the whole stupid frame story. But then, this might be even worse than not showing it at all.

Anyway, yes, it turned out that Brie Larson as absolutely right. I actually encountered one or two males who said that yes, they picked up on the fact that there is a subtext, but they can't feel it, and, well, I can relate to this because that's what I feel when it comes to Black Panther.