Lit Ignorance is Bias: The Diversity Manifesto

I saw the original story about this last week and already shook my head, and now I'm shaking my head even more. It's really, really sad the total lack of respect people who go to these things get.

Edit: Good grief, I've just read some of the comments to that article...

...let's start by having these cosplayers be barred from sexualizing their costumes, and consider them inappropriate for public display. [...] Problem is, you have these cosplayers purpose doing one-man-up-ship each other in order to get notice, and then complain how unwanted males treat them. Nonsense. [...] let's not kid ourselves on the role of cosplayers in this, especially when dealing with Beta Males who probably never really interacted with "girls" before in a mature manner.​

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Do I even need to say anything...?

 

General tip - don't go read the comments, it ain't a fun experience.

 

Ben you got that right... I read them just a minute ago (check my edit).

Blaming the victim at any time is bad enough, but they're treating a girl making a fun costume of her favourite character as if she's gone to a bar in the middle of the night dressed like a tramp. Those comments are just... cold.

 

That's so Beta of you.

 

I am going to begin a Werewolf: the Apocalypse game tomorrow and I just want to get this complain out of me -
In WtA so did there existed thirteen werewolf tribes (three now extinct) and of those thirteen so do only three come from north America and ONE from Asia while the British islands have two.

To compare: this map shows the global distribution of the common wolf, present and past, and you would think that Asia and America should have more then four werewolf tribes together

 

I know nothing (apart from what I just looked up on Wikipedia) about WtA, but... Gamiel you're saying the whole of Asia has only one faction in this game?

Well, the appropriate Alpha response would have gone along the lines of:

$%* are these *&^%ing %%^&s with their &^*^ing Victorian &^*^ing narrow-minded ^%&$ed up %^%$ viewpoints. The ^%£s should be %^£^ing rounded up and [The rest of this message has been deleted for breaching every possible item under the board's code of conduct policies and the poster has been reported to the NSA].​

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So, yeah... I went with the Beta response instead of the Alpha rant about how much stupid there is in the comments to that article.

 

You should have done a Clarkson Zorr!

 

A Clarkson, eh?

Eeny, Meeny, Miny, Mo,
Catch an Alpha by his toe,
If he hollers and cries no,
Just reply: "Now you know!"

 

Something off about the rhyming of that, it's sloping!

 

wowza

posted from my phone

 

Well, in the big rule book there is only one - the Stargazers who are from northern India and the Himalayas - but in later books we are introduced to the Hakken, who are an of shot to the east Europe/near Orient Shadow Lords, who live in Japan.
And in other later books we are introduced to other shapeshifters, like werecats and werelizards (their “battle form” are dinosaur/dragon like), who roam mainly in Africa, South America and Asia.
So no, there is not just one fraction for the whole of Asien but you need to buy the other books to find that out, and personally I find that that too little - if the British isles were big enoght for two tribes so should the whole of Asien be more then enough for more then one tribe and a splinter group, so were are my Mongolian werewolves!? (And Scandinavian werelynxes, Canada have them so why can not Scandinavian?)

 

http://thedissolve.com/features/exposition/618-were-losing-all-our-strong-female-characters-to-tr/

Dunno is this has been brought up at any point, it's a couple months old at this point, but it's an interesting article nonetheless. It's about something the author calls "Trinity Syndrome" where a female character is introduced, shown to be capable and effective at what they do, then sidelined as the plot moves past them. Valka in How to Train Your Dragon 2 is the main focus, with mentions of Tauriel from the Hobbit films, Wyldstyle from the Lego Movie and others.

I think what the author describes is more a narrative problem than a sexism one, since all of the supporting characters tend to get sidelined in the movies mentioned, not just the female ones. There's also no mention of characters like Gwen Stacy or Black Widow, for good or ill. Saying something overly-general like "All the female characters in recent movies are ____" (fill in the blank) without even mentioning two of the more prominent ones seems overly selective to me.

However, I do appreciate the main point of the article: that female characters should not be window dressing and used solely to balance the film's roster without having an actual role to fill in the plot. You'll get no argument from me there.

 

I'm not really familiar with many of the other examples, but I guess the problem with cases like The Hobbit is how the female character has simply been inserted into an old narrative and so inevitably stuck being a side-character. I suppose this has become noticeable more in recent years due to there having been a lot of classics getting remade recently.

I must admit, though, that it could be fun sometimes to see remakes that want to be their own stories rather than "just" remakes. You get that sometimes, but it's certainly a lot less common, with directors always in fear of things failing if they're not "loyal" to the original text, but... meh, I hate consumers being so uptight about that. I suppose it isn't helped that when you do see things changed, it's nearly always a satirical remake, which has probably turned people off changes by associating "change" with "stupid".

 

I'm still going to wear my Hypno cosplay to MAGFest and no one can stop me!

That said, in terms of general cosplay etiquette, it's okay to want to hug and pose with cosplayers, but we do prefer if you ask first. Also, if we're taking a break, please don't bug us for pictures. Costumes can be very hot and restrictive, particularly large mascot-type costumes, and convention halls packed with people get really stifling.

Also, and this is speaking from my own experience, if someone in an awesome costume is just trying to get through a door, don't make them pose in the doorway. Let them get through the damn door and out of everyone's way. It took me five minutes to get through a door at Horrorfind Weekend because everyone wanted a pic of the Xenomorph costume. It got really bad, as I was stopped everywhere and couldn't even take a moment to get a drink of much-needed water!

We cosplay because it's fun. We cosplay because we like to make people happy. We cosplay because we enjoy the fandom and characters. We're not living action figures and elaborate and stuffy costumes require more stamina (and therefore the cosplayer needs more breaks) to wear. We get tired, we get thirsty, and we'll eventually need to use the bathroom. We're happy to take pics with you, but don't stalk us and give us some space when we need it. Thank you.

 

I think they're a little less Eurocentric than you're given them credit for; the Silent Striders were mostly Egypt. Get of Fenris is explicitly Norse, but the rest while sorta having origin points aren't, as I recall, tied that hard and fast to a geographic location.

I've just discovered I don't actually have my Werewolf books anymore, so I can't argue the point too stridently, but I think the point was made that only a few of the breeds are actually geographically based and with the exception of Get of Fenris none of them really seem set on being explicitly one human culture or another.

It's been a long time since I took part in a five year Werewolf: TA epic, but having read almost all the books at one time or another...it always seemed that the creators were pretty open about people being able to have their character have any geographic or racial background despite breed. There were some historical lands, but even those were never firmly set. ISTR that there may have been more than one destroyed bloodline as well, but I get confused once you leave second edition stuff as their reboot wasn't something I cared about.

 

I am not saying that WtA is Eurocentric, just that there is only one tribe that originally comes from Asia (if we don't count in the Middle East/East Europe as Asia), and only three from all of Norht America. Both those areas are big landmasses that I think should be able to house more then one/three tribes, especially since the British isles once housed two.

Black Furies are hellenistic, Fianna are irish/celtic, Silver Fangs are west of Ural russian and Wendigo are northern North America. Of cores the times being what they are with all the travelling and immigration so can you possibly find represents of more or less any tribe any were - well except for Wendigo who seldom leave their home country.

 

Okay, I see where you're coming from and mostly agree. I do think at the time some of the thinking wasn't exactly inline with the traditional wolf population areas, but one thing I do think that the WoD games tried to do (long before it caught on anywhere else) was make sure they had a mix of genders, nationalities, ethnic groups, etc, when they dealt with their characters and even examples in the text. They freely alternated "he" and "she", iirc, but in terms of the original werewolf tribes you're right about where their inspirations came from.

I actually can't recall whether there were supposed to be other tribes that had been destroyed/corrupted or not...but maybe you can handwave some of that with that.

 

They should have just switched Bard to female. His gender doesn't matter to the plot--he doesn't have to marry another character, for example--and it would have checked the Hunger-Games-pandering box even better than Tauriel since the bows 'n' arrows are his entire reason for being in the story. Evangeline Lilly could have still had the part and everyone would be happy.

In general I'd say swapping existing characters is less disruptive than trying to stuff in new ones.

 

Do you know how the hardcore fans would've reacted?

 

I'm pretty sure the hardcore fans already want to beat Peter Jackson to death with a printout of arguments on whether Balrogs have wings.

Seriously, not really that interested in the particular subject here, but no sane individual trying to make any adaptation - film, television, whatever - should ever bother trying to appease the hardcore fans, at least of the sort who demand rigid adherence to the source material.

 

Exactly. The hardcore fans are already mad at Tauriel for existing, so how much worse could it be?

I'd call myself a serious but not hardcore fan--read Hobbit, LOTR, Silmarillion a couple times each, Unfinished Tales once, working through the Histories off and on over many years--and I would still have preferred this.

 

Maybe when they redo LOTR they can just gender-swap the whole damn thing.