Lit Ignorance is Bias: The Diversity Manifesto

Yup, which is why all the comic has to do is showing him flirting with a guy and I'll be happy.

 

CooperTFN

I'm sure it isn't canon, but I grabbed a copy of Star Wars: The Force Awakens - Look and Find today and looked through it. It's interesting, the scenes on D'Qar at the Resistance Base show a lot more diversity than we see in the films. Not counting Ackbar, Nien Nuub, or Ello Atsy, I see multiple other aliens in the Resistance. A lot more diversity, which is a good thing.

Finn, on the other hand, is considerably "lighter" than his actual skin tone. Like, a lot. Not sure why they chose to do this, but people of color (which are very evident in the film) don't make it into this children's book. A lot of aliens, a lot of women, but overall they all appear broadly white.

So a mixed bag overall. Figured you might be interested.

--Adm. Nick

 

This is unsurprising--there's always a budgetary component on screen.

This is...pretty ****ing surprising. I don't suppose you could post a few pictures?

 

I don't have a scanner, but I'll try to get some. Or you can PM me your cell number and I can text you a photo. You'll be surprised how light he looks... I was very disappointed by this.

--Adm. Nick

 

So yeah, this seems worth examining. Thanks to Nick for sending me these.




Poe for comparison:

 

Oh Mark. Like he wasn't enough of a treasure already.

Maybe it'll win an Oscar now

...are you ******* kidding me? Were the printers all out of brown?

 

Who is that guy wearing Finn and Poe's jacket?

But all joking aside, that's very odd and disappointing that they did that.

 

I was watching the Blue Shadow Virus episodes of TCW and noticed that Typho basically had the same skintone as Obi-Wan, which was very odd.

Sent from my E380 using Tapatalk

 

It's like Finn and his jacket switched hues.

 

That did not stop the PT



And unlike the First Order's Supreme Leader CGI were they noting but masks and animatronics.

Maybe they were told that Finn was played by Trevor Noah instead of John Boyega?

 

If anyone here has seen the Scify Channel's show Face-Off, it's not ridiculously expensive to make an amazing alien from scratch. Skill, sure, but it's well within the bounds of a Disney/Lucasfilm project. They could do what Gamiel was suggesting -- have characters like those seen on the Jedi Council.

But on the other hand, I wonder if JJA et al. were keeping the human:alien ratio so offbalance because they were trying to follow the OT more than the PT, and a lot of casual fan/non-fan audience criticism from those films was directed toward the overuse of CGI aliens.

Also I have a question for those who have been keeping up with everything TFA (I'm going to try to keep this as spoiler-free as possible): Why are there so few aliens (er... none?) in the First Order? Am I missing something? I have the visual dictionary and the novelization, but they don't say anything as far as I can see. Has an explanation been given yet?

 

I don't think anything has been said about the FO specifically, but we know the Old Empire was still pretty biased against aliens (outside of the Inq) so it makes sense that would've been inherited by the FO which was of course founded by the most fanatical guys.

Yeah, I mean, I can't say enough times that I was disappointed there weren't more aliens on D'Qar. But for whatever reason, it seems like a deliberate choice. They also deliberately chose to make Maz's castle look the way it looks, so I don't think we can make any solid extrapolations about the overall galaxy from either group.

 

But what about the new Republic senate? One/two non-humans and they could be the waiters for all we know.

 

We get precisely one shot of senators in the movie--assuming that anyone in that shot isn't a senator, aside from Sella who we know, seems like pretty bad faith IMO. Maybe someone there isn't, but I'm not in the habit of assuming the worst about an entire body of people based on like six of them. The Resistance is a different story because we see dozens of them.

 

Eh, What do you mean with "seems like pretty bad faith"?

B.t.w. are we even told that it is the senate we see?

 

If the new EU decides to go somewhere with this (and I hope they do, rather than sweep it under a rug), D'Qar could at least be explained with some sort of story. In the novel and VD, it's repeated multiple times that there were very few Resistance forces stationed there. So very few forces implies a number of other things could be going on: maybe most non-human societies that are supportive of the NR/Resistance wanted their forces closer to home during this increasingly rough time; maybe something happened to the non-humans and they were specifically targeted (Krytos-type virus?); or maybe Leia et al. were trying to scrape up whoever they had left and maybe targeted a key planet(s) for recruitment at D'Qar, which happened to have a mostly-human demographic.

The only thing I hope the new canon doesn't do is act like everything's equal when clearly it's not. At that point it basically becomes the Emperor's New Clothes.

 

I actually like the semi-explanation that the foundation of the Resistance is people loyal to Leia from the old days, because that's an explicit tie to another way-too-human group of people that we already know about, rather than being a whole new one--and it simultaneously implies that that other group is at least not quite as white and male as it seemed.

We're not--but we know damn well that it is, because we've been told in several other ways. "Bad faith" means automatically assuming the worst interpretations of events just because they aren't explicitly spelled out. In other words: how do we know rathtars aren't sentient and Han was selling them into slavery? How do we know all the miscellaneous humans running around on D'Qar aren't slaves? Finn calls Chewie a thing--how do we know he's not a virulent anti-alien bigot? How do we know Snoke isn't Waru?

Either we're talking about what the movie actually is, or we're not.

 

Now this makes me happy:

http://makingstarwars.net/2016/01/rogue-one-a-star-wars-story-to-have-realistic-aliens/

Read the article and be happy that aliens will be used in a manner we probably haven't seen in a long time... if ever. Other than say Jar Jar (bad example) and Ackbar (good example).

I've been dying to see aliens used not just as eye candy, so this makes me so very happy!!

--Adm. Nick

 

That said, based on that cast photo I think we need to prepare ourselves for the proportion of aliens to be similar to TFA.

 

Snoke is Waru, since Waru is part of everything and everyone.

And that is my problem, compare to the TPM were we see many non-humans in the senate with the quick shot of the NR's senate o the balcony, were we only se one or two of them.

I think part of my problem with this is that Abrams' was paraphrased to say* (or at least that was the impression I got from the people paraphrasing him) that they were using lots and lots of masks and animatronics. So I was expecting around third of the people in most scenes to be non-humans and I got rather disappointed . Not to say that I don't like the representation among the humans and I like that the pale skins are given more accents then just standard yank and british.

*is that how you write it?

my bold
Did you watch the PT or TCW?

 

Yeah, I expect that. I just want to see a a group of Rebel soldiers interacting where the fact that one is say, Duros or Sullustan, is really secondary to the fact as to how they are interacting. Too often, aliens are used as background filler, cool little nods, or as exotics. This is a galaxy where species have been co-habitating for millenia. In my mind, a young human female Rebel pilot shouldn't even blink at interacting with her Mon Calamarian commanding officer or her Twi'lek bunk mate.

If you consider the OT, even aliens with bigger roles (Chewbacca, Yoda) were treated as exotics. Part of the reason I have liked Admiral Ackbar for so long really is connected to how he is portrayed and used in ROTJ. A talking fish commands the Rebel Armada, but no one acts like it is exotic or weird. Ackbar may be Mon Calamarian, but the fact that he is doesn't ever play into how he is used. He is, first & foremost, a Rebel leader, fleet commander, and one of the supporting character we follow in the last act of ROTJ. This is extremely powerful and so many people overlook it's significance.

--Adm. Nick

 

Gamiel, as long as we agree that the human diversity is excellent, I'm happy.

Again, I was disappointed by the same things you were--but in the senate's case, I don't think we see a big enough group of characters to get too upset over it. In the prequels we see dozens of them; if we saw dozens of senators and one-two aliens I'd be more upset.

 

Yeah, we cannot judge the diversity of the New Republic Senate by one few second shot. And, as I mentioned a few (or several?) pages back, that scene has human senators from Commenor, Naboo, and Uyter. Not only that, but let's reasonable here. The New Republic, per BtA, stretches from the "Inner Core to the Outer Rim." I'm sure that the Senate is appropriately diverse, with human senators from Corellia, Chandrila, Coruscant, and Kuat serving alongside senators from Abednedo, Kashyyyk, Ryloth, and Mon Cala.

I'm very hopeful that the Poe Dameron comic series will show some of those senators who support the Resistance, which will be a great opportunity to flesh out the New Republic Senate is the years & months leading up to TFA.

Fear not, Gamiel, the Senate will end up diverse. Trust me.

--Adm. Nick

 

I actually liked the way aliens were handled in TFA - Chewie was an exotic to Finn, but then Finn's probably never seen an alien outside a targeting reticle in his life. All the others didn't seem to be presented as being strange or exotic at all.