Lit Ignorance is Bias: The Diversity Manifesto

Well that's just the thing--purely as a reader in the moment, I love it. But after so many years of these threads, I know all too well how easy it is for an ambiguous character to end up white in artwork 2 or 5 or 10 years down the line. That's why I've historically counted ambigs as white in scoring--whatever lofty intentions an author might have, if it's not on the page, it's not a guarantee, and it can be forgotten. Even Pablo will sometimes answer canon questions with "well my take on this is X, but until it's in a story that's up for debate".

 

And this is the guys playing him

 

To be fair, I think that I remember reading that Mifune turned down the role.

 

In fairness, Gamiel hasn't heard of Google.

 

Well excuuuuuuuuuuuuses me, grand admiral, for wanting to illustrate my point about Obi-wan not being a "Asian" name in SW, at least for all we know.

 

Really, its up in the air until the movie is out weather i or anyone else should bebefuddled or not to have another female lead. People should hold their chips until they actually get to judge the movie and role by more than the minute long portion of footage we've gotten so far


...but as to why we got a 2nd female lead in a row i tend to side with Plinkett on that its an additional audience pull


Disney loves to micro manage and they've already learned how to play the diversity game well from the Marvel films, the math is simple, if you have one demographic that is pretty much guaranteed to see the movie no matter what (white males ages 14-54) what you dont do is cast more of their likeness so they dont feel left out, what you do is immediately move on the next largest and most profitable demographic next on the totem pole. Which i would wager is white females ages 15-35


oh comon, you know im right

 

Darn shame, because if Mifune had accepted the role, the totally awesome Paul Frees would have been called in to re-record all of Mifune's dialogue.

 

I think it's great Gray puts out her own fancasts, didn't know she did that till the other day. Kinda makes me wish they had just hired Noto or Doug Wheatley to do some illustrations for Bloodline, like what was done for Before The Awakening. Just add a few nice paintings of the characters in the book, especially when an author like Gray has already put the time into developing a clear image of her characters.

 

Admittedly I didn't personally picture Lady Carise being Asian myself. But, that could work actually.

 

I wish I had a digital version of the book, but Carise's skin tone is described at least once, as is Greer's.

 

Did a quick search for "skin"--Greer's is "coppery" (on two occasions), Casterfo's and Joph's is "pale", Hadrassian (whom Gray fancast as white) is "tan", and Carisse's is "deep-golden". I think we've come across all those terms before, so it's pretty interesting to actually have a real person to match to what the author had in mind for once.

"Coppery"


"Deep-golden"


It's funny; I don't think either description is inaccurate, but IMO both could just as easily suggest any number of other ethnicities. I almost wonder if we need to get to a point where certain colors are universally used as signifiers of specific ethnic groups, so anytime someone uses "coppery" in the future, say, we would know that means "Southeast Asian"--even though "Southeast Asian" alone encapsulates a big range of skin tones. But then part of me thinks the more important thing is just knowing they're POC and the precise heritage isn't worth creating en entire lexicon of code words...I dunno. This is and always has been one of the most fascinating things about diversity in SW.

 

CooperTFN

Minor spoilers, so it is tagged. Perfect diversity score of 100%.

Spoiler

--Adm. Nick

 

The tricky thing when it comes to books sometimes, because there's a lack of visuals, is that you need to be able to get the intended "look" across to the reader well, without seeming like you're playing into stereotypes.

And so Claudia's current fancasts are apparently:

-Ransolm Casterfo-Tom Hiddleston:



-Greer Sonnel-Priyanka Chopra:



-Lady Carise Sindian-Jamie Chung:



-Ciena Ree-Gugu Mbatha-Raw:



Hmm, interesting choices indeed.

 

Only "Deep-golden" girl and Priyanka Chopra are visible to me.

 

Tom Hiddleston:



Gugu Mbatha-Raw:




How about now?

 

Now it works, thanks.

 

Which is completely understandable--but I don't see any strategy that's both a) totally inoffensive and b) totally effective, so the varying efforts to balance the two is interesting. Gray's fancasting is great for people like us who pay attention (and ideally would be respected in future material) but it's not the same as Greer and Sindian being canonically Asian, to say nothing of Tai-Lin, whose appearance IIRC has even less descriptive language than theirs.

I mean, we actually talked about "golden" before as being a fairly accurate and inoffensive way of communicating East Asian skin tones--does it becoming more popular in that regard suddenly make it more offensive?

 

I'm not sure why fan-casting shouldn't be considered canonical in at least broad terms of a character's appearance, TBH.

 

I don't disagree--and perhaps it's noted somewhere in the post-reboot version of the holocron. But by and large the official word seems to be that nothing is canon--Pablo's tweets, for example--unless spelled out in story.

So do we then end up where I mentioned earlier--that being, contenting ourselves with the understanding that a given character is a POC even without being able to nail them down?

 

I think the problem is largely that these ethnicities don't exist in universe, and so there's no reason to draw weird lines between people who could plausibly, phenotypically, be considered to be from the same place. We also get into a weird place of people being, for example, blanket "Asian."

The real work is just eliminating white-as-default, because ultimately until we get canon representations it doesn't matter what these characters look like to us in our heads, so long as we get more used to the idea that they can look any number of ways.

When I first read Dune, and Duncan Idaho was described as being handsome and having dark skin and "curling black hair," I imagined him as looking something like Blair Underwood, in part because it seemed weird to me that everyone in the book was white and I hungrily clung to any indication that a character might not be. I think I fancast Cary Hiryoki Tagawa as Doctor Yueh.

 

Chopra isn't Southeast Asian, she's South Asian, but yeah. I think there will always be readers who think white is the default, but these signifiers are gentle proddings for the rest of us. There's also a painting of Greer in the latest Star Wars Insider that suggests some coordination and intentionality.

The fan casting definitely locked in my mental visualizations of some of the characters. While I didn't necessarily imagine Joph as the Peeta guy, once she said Tiddles was Casterfo my brain locked in and I couldn't imagine the character as resembling anyone else.

 

I kept accidentally picturing him as Loki.