Lit Beating a Dead Eopie: The Diversity Thread (various spoilers)

Well, if the Force Hound isn't the black armoured guy with a lightsaber, he might be the Mr Blond Redbeard in the picture. (Although... How literally should we take Sith in this case? What if it's a cultural or bloodline thing in this context, and Mr Blond Redbeard is the Sith? After 10 000 years and possible non-natural interbreeding, Sith features might have vanished utterly.)

The Dathomiri is more than a bit troubling, though.

 

Wait, is "Force Hound" a species? I interpreted that term as something along the lines of "Jedi bounty hunter".

 

Hmmm...guess I just assumed that.

Anyway, apparently the male and female humans there are from a commissioned piece that inspired Jedi Dawn, and are not actual characters from the comic.

 

Oh, that's good. And this is John and Jan we're talking about. Gay black female lead character?

 

thats weak cooper... a BI-black/indian female characters with 2 lovers of either sex!

Elisa Maza in spaaaaaaaaaaaaaaace!


wow that was nerdy....even for me.

 

You know, it never really dawned on me that you guys might not have been aware of this:
http://web.archive.org/web/20010827122918/http://www.wizards.com/starwars/article.asp?x=rpg_towns_6,0

It may serve as good fodder for you're discussion, from at least one company's opinion about things.

 

...1% Ewok?

 

Lt. Kettch gets around, I guess.

 

dathomiri are not nearhuman but fully human, like hapans. the nearhuman errors needn't be repeated *sigh*

the hybrid zabrak dathomiri are not existant in that early time, and the humans on dathomir arn't either, so it either is former human Rakata slaves left on dathomir or Kwa. all else would break continuity!

 

I thought Hapan's were near human dur to their vastly diffrent culture, and genetic tinkering for attractivness.

Dathmori (the real ones not that clonewars kiddy crap) were considerd near Human for the same reason the Kuruunai and the Kiffar were, divergent culture and abnormaly high force sensitvity in the human population.

 

true, but the nearhuman term is used too widely anyway, some nearhumans are very alien, others very human with nearly no difference. if simple cultural or forcesensitivity rates are enough to be no longer just human, it is weird. and the beauty was not artificially genetic tinkering, but natural breeding between beautiful people that over time got genetic due to the clusters inbreeding. It's like saying asians and black people are nearhuman, which is not true. their cultures are different too, and their bodies, while sharing same genetics and look, show some characteristics different from white peoples (I am no expert there but read about something with milk and other body chemistry stuff).

Hapans are not nearhuman for their beauty but their lack of nightvision. and that still is bad I think cause original source COPL had them human. same with Dathomir witches. I dislike the later retcons to change that.

 

[image=http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-fi0mlmJSR_A/Tkw5uxC9ZqI/AAAAAAAAAIQ/0R84mQi5woU/s1600/star+wars+ascension+golden+hardcover.jpg]

Dramatis Personae Characters (excluding droids and Abeloth): 17

Humans: 15 (88%)

White humans: 11-15

White male humans: 6-9

Diversity score (Non-WMHs): 58%

It's worth noting that 65%, pretty much the average diversity score thus far, is the absolute best-case scenario for this book - there are six definitive white male humans, and three unknowns - Lecersen, Vol, and Workan. The odds of any of those three being nonwhite, to me, are fairly slim, but I'll go ahead and be extremely generous and say that two of them are in fact something other than pasty old white dudes. That still leaves us with 7 WMHs out of 17 total characters, which means Ascension still gets the lowest diversity score yet. I'm tempted to give it the lowest possible rating, 47%, based on the absolutely pathetic two nonhuman DP characters. FotJ has the utterly unlimited palette of prose to work with here, and the percentage of real alien characters in this book is comparable to if not worse than the OT, which had to build its alien characters from scratch. We'll see if I have anything more positive to say once I'm done with it.

TOR: Deceived - 66
Knight Errant - 75
Death Troopers - 60
FotJ: Vortex - 65
FotJ: Conviction* - 65
FotJ: Ascension - 58

EDIT - no idea why that image isn't working.

 

Not surprised on that score.

I'd be interested to see what your score of Crosscurrent would be. The DP is all male, and it was rare to see female characters even as background or minor characters, unless you count the dancing girls.

 

Well if you don't count dancing girls, you might as well throw the whole system out the window.

I'd score it if Crosscurrent wasn't at the bottom of a box somewhere. It's just basic math, though - you tell me.

Same for everyone else - I'm mostly interested in the current slate of books, but if anyone wanted to go back and see how older stuff compares it could be instructive. The overall score is just the amount of non-WMH DP characters divided by the total number of DP characters. There are usually at least a couple unknowns, in which case I usually split the difference based on my overall impression of the book, and to what extent diversity seemed to at least be on the author's radar.

 

Did anyone else laugh when they saw that the Queen of Zygerria was a white lady?

The males have non-human skin tones, and the Queen has Satine's skin tone and a human looking face.

 

Coop, do you have any stats on the percentage of sentients in the GFFA that's human?

 

Only time I've ever seen someone even attempt hard numbers is on the site Genghis linked to up the page. It's more of a rough sketch of the common demographic types, but it's not a horrible starting point.

CT - she's meant to be a plausible romantic foil for Anakin, and therefore must look as appealing to mainstream westerners as possible.

 

Mmm... Judging by the era, and the mix of previously "isolated" and "mixed" worlds, the average of the numbers you came up with seem to sort of match up with that.

Which would indicate that the novels present a proper reflection of the demographics of the GFFA...

 

One, it depends on how common "integrated" worlds are compared to the other two (and "isolated", it points out, is only 95% human if there's no other established dominant species on that planet).

Two, my diversity scores reflect only white male humans; if I were tracking humans of any kind the numbers would be much different.

Three, whether a blatant lack of diversity is consistent with established canon isn't the same as whether it's a good thing.

EDIT: and lastly, "not a horrible starting point" isn't the same as "I buy these figures completely."

 

Now that this thread is back up, I might as well quote something I recently noticed.

Considering what's been discussed about this particular species before, this comes off as more than a bit of...unfortunate wording.

 

One and two: granted.

Three: you seem to prefer to frame this topic as individual artistic intent, though, not as a critique on the Empire's policies - or maybe even as a quest for the reasons why humans are dominant in the GFFA. Your line "the percentage of real alien characters in this book is comparable to if not worse than the OT" triggered me to wonder if that is actually justified.

Or maybe you just want to PT your EU...

 

[image=http://images4.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20070125180953/starwars/images/8/8f/Yun.jpg] [image=http://images3.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20060922065729/starwars/images/e/e5/Zupike.JPG]



The GFFA would absolutely hate Earth.

 

I see the OT as the height of nondiversity in SW, yes, but I also see it as the height of its defensibility - both for OOU budgetary reasons and IU Imperial reasons. Saying a book is "as bad as the OT" or anything to that effect is strictly a comment on the book, because unlike George Lucas in 1975, Troy Denning could populate his books with any type of beings he can imagine and it wouldn't delay the book a day or cost LFL an extra cent.

As far as the Empire's policies, even in light of those WotC numbers - I don't see setting something in Imperial times as having that much of an impact on overall demography, and in fact, it's nice when an attempt is made to contrast the homogeneity of the Empire with perhaps even more colorful Rebel characters. What I was saying in "three" is that even if Leland Chee came down from on high and said that humans were definitively, say, 75% of the galaxy, that would still strike me as horribly implausible, and yes, I would probably then start asking (not that I haven't already) why on earth, pardon the expression, that would be so.

And there'd still be the matter of nonwhites and women.

 

I don't get how tha epicanthix stuff ever got past editing.

 

If I were inclined to be generous, I'd say that they forgot what an Epicanthix was.