Lit Ignorance is Bias: The Diversity Manifesto

Same here

 

...so who do you hear as the "narrator"?

 

Naw don't feel bad. I think I might be slower too -- it takes me forever to read anything. I don't know how people can speed read and still remember everything, but it seems there are people on this board who can do that.

I'll admit there are some stories where the dialogue is so out of line with a character I can't imagine them saying it in their own voice -- most of GODV with the zoochberries and Skyhouse for instance. Also some aliens. I dunno why but I can't imagine Ortalans speaking English.

 

Probably for the best.

 

Same, unless I'm picturing the character as a specific actor/actress, in which case I hear that actor/actress' voice.

 

At which point you know Star Wars really just needs more black women.

Same. I definitely hear people, but I'm almost never able to put my finger on *who* I'm hearing unless it's an already established character.

 

Most aliens sound like a deep baritone with gravel to me. Even female aliens. It's just a generic alien voice my brain assigned sometime in my life.


Sent from my Ornithopter using The Force

 

There are a lot of articles out today trumpeting that the Power Ranger movie made Trini "gay", or at least (from the context I've seen) somewhere on the LGBT spectrum. A lot of them are saying that it's a huge thing, the first ever film superhero who isn't straight.

To which, the snarky part of my brain is responding that there is no way that George Clooney's Batman is straight. Not a chance.

 

Clearly someone has not seen the episode when Lee Meriwether came back as another character.

 

You know, I never really thought of Power Rangers as superheroes. But good. Now hopefully Marvel/DC/everybody else can follow suit.

 

I didn't think of them that way either, I think I first heard Linkara call them superheroes, and it was one of those moments. "Huh. I guess, technically speaking, they kinda are. Very Silver-age superheroes, sure, but still superheroes."

 

Awesome segment on dubbing Rogue One!

 

I was pretty happy to hear about Trini but I think this article makes a strong point.

https://www.buzzfeed.com/alisonwill...-tiny-gestures?utm_term=.aqYmdLXJa#.vgrrkqgz9

 

Yeah. I feel like in another decade or so that scene might be dated too -- the fact that she's so secretive about it, like she's done something wrong. And that they don't say anything more about it throughout the rest of the movie is sort of meh.

Still. Like they say. It's better than nothing, and infinitely better than what was going on for years in Hollywood.

 

FACPOV I kind of feel like making Billy the black one was a bigger deal.

 

So that's why they resisted Posion Ivy's charms so well.

 

Met EK Johnston at Wondercon and gushed for half an hour about Ahsoka. She confirmed again that Kaeden was intended to be queer and romantically attracted to Ahsoka. Disney apparently asked for the subtext to be made more obvious. She also noticed that a lot of reviews barely mention or don't mention Kaeden even though she is the second most prominent character in the story.

 

That's good to hear, about Disney wanting authors to be more clear about LGBT characters, not less!

 

That's pleasantly surprising.

 

The continuing adventures of "when something about a white guy sells poorly it's just a bad market but when something about a woman or a POC sells poorly it's because diversity isn't popular".

http://io9.gizmodo.com/marvel-vp-bl...&utm_source=io9_twitter&utm_medium=socialflow

It's tempting to think "at least Star Wars doesn't have this problem", but when Servants of the Empire was going on I remember it being suggested by Jen Heddle that if it didn't do well the brass would be less inclined to make a black kid the star of a story again.

 

Methinks the problem is being misdiagnosed...

It so happens that the core, Golden Age characters were mostly white men.

 

And speaking as a big Marvel reader, Event Fatigue is a very real thing. My favorite series, the ones I'm most loyal to, are the ones where one creator/team has been able to tell an ongoing story for at least a couple years with minimal status quo upheavals--but that's getting harder and harder to pull off.

ETA: anyway, now that RO is out I've been able to officially score it--on Parity it gets an 11, or as I prefer to think of it, "almost three times better than ESB's 4", and on Diversity it gets a 49, mostly due to all the stupid Death Star Bros being named characters while a few female rebel characters were just "Blue Three", etc. Even if you went out of your way to give them credit for every single woman it doesn't look like it'd help tremendously.

What's interesting about the Diversity Score, though, is that ANH had a 51--so whatever you think of the "they wanted to emulate the demographics of ANH" argument, they did sort of do it. Even ANH had a better rate of female characters though.