How do the dominant cultural narratives in art and mass media affect our politics?

I have a rule for writing.

All villains should be able to articulate their motivations in a sensible manner in one paragraph.

They don't have to be good motivations but they must be internally consistent.

I'm gonna try to play it.

Let's see...

The Big Bad of my ridiculous The Big Bad Shuffle that would make Naruto look short: Destroy the entire reality and kill all mortal souls because she is a being from a reality before ours and want return to it. Despite the fact that all other members of her species are fine with reality as it exist.

The Dragon: Being able to watch the destruction of reality alongside with his master. A humble dream born of curiosity and a massive Lack of Empathy.

The Other Dragon: End all reality because she really believes that it is such a Crapsack World that non-existence becomes a improvement. In her own words: "A zero is better than negative numbers".

I doubt that you can summarize a villain in a single paragraph because several of them have actually pretty simple motivations but with complex personalities. But let's try.

Edited by KazuyaProta on Jul 16th 2018 at 8:18:30 AM

Question; what do you guys think of stories having human people of color from planets or realms not Earth but the story still features Earth?

An example of what I mean is Mortal Kombat which features Asians and black people from other realms besides Earth.

More diversity is generally better, assuming they don't fall into ethnic stereotypes. It's better to avoid Humans Are White or (in more mundane settings) Monochrome Casting.

Edited by M84 on Jul 16th 2018 at 9:47:48 PM

One of the reasons I ask is because if I recall Stargate: SG-1 correctly, Teal'C, who isn't from Earth was the only person of color of importance in that show.

He was human or a alien? Because if it's a human then I don't have any issue.

The issue is when the actual aliens turns out to look like people of color...yet no human is white.

Edited by KazuyaProta on Jul 16th 2018 at 8:58:25 AM

Mind you, he's not an alien but a genetically modified human.

They made fun of that on the Sealab cartoon, though, when the African American doctor was informed in the Show Within a Show that he was being made into an alien with a symbiote in his tummy to better appeal to the scifi crowd.

Edited by CharlesPhipps on Jul 16th 2018 at 6:58:48 AM

He was a genetically modified human born on a different planet. Come to think of it, nearly all of the dark-skinned characters that showed up in that series were Jaffa too.

It does send kind of a weird message when all of the prominent Earthling characters are white.

Shit, Star Trek: TNG, an older series, at least had one black guy from Earth as part of its main cast, Geordi. It even had another prominent alien character who was also played by a black guy, Worf.

Edited by M84 on Jul 16th 2018 at 10:02:25 PM

Oh well. I always knew that non-white were aliens. I'm hyped from my alien ancestry

Star Trek avoided it (they had Geordi) but there was apparently a statement the majority of POC on the show tended to be Klingons in the TNG era.

Edit:

Ha! Scooped.

Edited by CharlesPhipps on Jul 16th 2018 at 7:00:33 AM

Still better than Firefly, the show that wanted an Asian influenced setting with as few Asian people as possible.

Edited by M84 on Jul 16th 2018 at 10:04:44 PM

There's a lot of world-building flaws in Firefly.

I mentioned it earlier that I wondered why they bothered to make it the Anglo-Sino alliance if they were only interested in a Space Western. Why not just make it a more generic Federation versus adding in a bunch of chinese elements that you're never going to follow up on?

It's just an "exotic" element which is more offensive I think than if they hadn't bothered. Speaking as a writer, they shouldn't have thrown it in if they didn't intend to make it an actual part of the verse.

Edited by CharlesPhipps on Jul 16th 2018 at 7:09:38 AM

Knowing Whedon he probably did it thinking it'd help him score with a hot Asian female fan.

And yes, it's offensive as hell. Especially the butchering the show did to the Chinese language. They didn't even try to make the few Chinese phrases that were used not sound like gibberish. What, was there not enough in the budget to hire some trainers who were fluent in Chinese?

Edited by M84 on Jul 16th 2018 at 10:11:45 PM

In fact, the answer is arguably worse.

He wanted to do a cyberpunk/Space Western.

He wanted JAPANESE influences but couldn't justify it geo-politically according to him.

Edited by CharlesPhipps on Jul 16th 2018 at 7:17:13 AM

NVM

Edited by M84 on Jul 16th 2018 at 10:15:20 PM

A Chinese American friend of mind said he didn't realize it was supposed to Chinese until halfway through the show.

Hey, is there any science fiction show which DOES do an excellent blend of culture?

No. Most of them didn't even try. And looking at Firefly, maybe that's for the best. Again, it depends on what's worse: a bad representation of culture, or none.

A thought I (badly) was wondering about.

Oh well, not my place to say.

If it's a species of suspiciously familiar-looking aliens (weird foreheads being optional) I don't see why they couldn't have as much variation in skin color and/or ethnicity as we do, especially if they evolved on a planet with similar climate zones and whatnot. I guess this would also apply to humans from fantasy settings.

For literal humans who just ended up on a different planet for some reason, it would depend on what the first colonists/kidnapped humans/alien cloning experiments/whatever looked like, and how much time has passed. I've heard that The Expanse did some interesting stuff with that.

And if you do want to create a single-ethnicity "human" species for whatever reason, just be really careful with how you portray them.

Uh. Why aliens would not have race variations if their planet have different ecosystems. It's not my top of priorities, but different races among a single alien species seems likely.

That's not what I meant. They could (and probably would) have ethnic variations anyway. I'm just saying that I think not doing that on an Earth-like planet would draw even more attention to it.

I've personally tried to diversify my non-humanoid aliens a bit as well, since I haven't seen that done very often.

Edited by Corvidae on Jul 16th 2018 at 4:49:17 PM

The Expanse does a decent job for diversity in the fact it has a South Asian man with a Texas Drawl, a Polynesian Space Marine, a African descended second mate, an Indian politician, one white Baltimore thug, and sadly the white guy in charge.

With Stargate most of the human aliens were humans (or the descendants of) that and been enslaved and moved off planet, I kinda figured they were dropping an anvil by having the Jaffa be mainly black, you know, what with them being enslaved and all.

The lack of black human characters was certainly a thing though, I suspect it probably minored real life issues with the diversity of airforce officers.

Yep, and I’m going to blame Apple for the (now fixed) typo that my iPad caused.

Edited by Silasw on Jul 16th 2018 at 3:27:51 PM

I'm going to assume you meant to type "lack", right?

Edit: Ah yes, Apple autocorrect. One of the great evils of our time.

Edited by M84 on Jul 16th 2018 at 11:28:42 PM

The Jaffa's slave master in the early seasons is Apophis. Who is also black.

Edited by CharlesPhipps on Jul 16th 2018 at 8:56:56 AM