Lit Ignorance is Bias: The Diversity Manifesto

I think there's certainly a question of pushing into other markets, but more practically I think we're looking at them deciding how they want to be perceived.

 

One of the reasons I'm hesitant to make too much noise just yet over women in RO is that it's hard for me to believe KK doesn't have a personal desire to ensure a certain degree of parity--which TFA had in a way you also couldn't detect in the trailers. Though even if a huge number of the tertiary and backgrounds characters are indeed women, that won't entirely eliminate the issues with the main cast (or, say, that batch of Imperial officers).

 

I have to see it first. Because it looks like they're going with "women can be action heroes too -- those rare special few." Which is the majority of films.

 

Kathleen Kennedy was the executive producer on The Last Airbender, so....in my book, any additional diversity we see in Star Wars from her now is atonement squeezed from a rock.

I am sure marketing milked the "where is Rey toy" controversy for all it's worth, since they knew it would make conscientious parents more driven to buy those toys. I know it motivated me to buy more Rey product than I necessarily needed. Not including Rey in stuff (and doing a big Kylo Ren push) was an oversight, but they were able to milk it as much as possible to recover.

The child model used for the Rey Halloween costume is an Asian girl there is a big cardboard standout of her at my local Disney store can't wait for Kelly Marie Tran is all I'm saying
https://www.disneystore.com/costume...ar-wars-the-force-awakens/mp/1382280/1000396/

 

So, finished Xenoblade Chronicles X today. Thoughts on the game are over in the Games forum, reason for posting here is this:

In quite a few RPGs, you'll have a mix of female and male characters but it'll be rare that the female characters have a strong role through the entire game, or that the player character either has an option to be or is female. That might be why FF13 stood out, it's certainly why ME's Shepherd stands out - no matter whch gender you choose, the story plays the same.

So what's so special about XCX? That for the entirety of the game, all the way to the end of the story, the player character remains second-in-command to Elma, who is the main agent in the story of how they got to Mira. That stood out for me, as in RPGs the player character ends up taking over the story but in XCX the player acts more as a catalyst, to make things happen for others.

XCX is far from perfect in terms of representation nor is it really a mainstream game, but in this respect it really succeeded.

 

So after weeks of work, I finally published my latest Minority Report at ETE--which is going to be how I handle scoring from now on, as it allows me to a) take a step back and talk about trends instead of calling out each individual book as a success or a failure, and b) it gives the wook time to cover new releases so someone other than me is confirming when skin color, gender, etc. are established. Some quick takeaways:

• The canon adult (and YA) novels ticked down from 67 last year to 60 now.
• Rebels' first two seasons scored a cumulative 70, which is decent but lower than I'd have expected--naturally, it's mostly a problem with the show's Imperial military being uniformly WHMs.
• I sorted everything by IU order this time and you can see a noticeable decline in scores during the Imperial era, which makes a degree of sense, but so far post-Endor material has only recovered about half of that decline.
• Last but not least, I added an entire new system--parity scores. Unlike diversity scores' big ambiguity problem, it's much less likely that a one-sentence character won't at least have an established gender, so I'm willing to be much more critical of these scores, and sadly, there's a lot to be critical of--the average canon score is 22, meaning less than 1 in 4 characters is female.

Lots more details at the link, naturally, but those are the headlines I think.

 

I'm rather baffled that Battlefront: Twilight Company barely made it over 20% in gender parity. When reading it I thought it seemed like there was an equal number of male and female characters. Guess that is what happens when one line characters do not have the same gender diversity as the main and supporting cast.

 

Maybe of interest, the latest Magic: the Gathering set is visually inspired by Indian subcontinent

 

I am fine with UNFORCED diversity. I define this as creating characters naturally and letting them be what they are rather than trying to check off boxes to fit a quota. Don't let race\gender\species be a requirement or a barrier.

John Boyega was PERFECT for the role of Finn. The reason why was as an individual he was perfect for the part. Since they weren't looking for a specific ethnicity they were open to anybody and as a result cast the best person for the role. If they had determined their casting by outside influences like race, gender, etc. they could have ended up more concerned with appeasing outside groups than creating an authentic character.

To a degree they seem to have done this with Rey. First off I will say I am a huge fan of the character and of Daisy Ridley. I also know that they wanted a female lead and I was very happy with that. That being said there were definitely elements of the character that seem to have been thrown in to appease feminist insecurities which resulted in her being a MaRey Sue at times. Real diversity, and emotional security, would not have required Rey to say ANYTHING about holding Finn's hand or be overly competent from the start. She could have just been in the situation. But by hammering those points so heavily she became more of a token then an actual character at times. Luckily Daisy was charismatic enough to feel genuine in spite of the character limitations.

In the original Star Wars they ALL saved each other at some point. Leia never had to say she did or didn't need a man's help because she was completely secure as a character. Luke was never all powerful which allowed his heroic moments to really shine. Even Han made his share of mistakes. Which made them human.

And the other thing was EVERYBODY could identify with one of them because they didn't see everything through the identity politics lenses everyone seems to have now. Kids weren't concerned with the outward appearance of the characters because at the end of the day they didn't care. They wanted to be the characters instead of wanting the characters to be them.

Now everyone is so self absorbed that they need to see the characters as representations of themselves instead of seeing themselves representing elements of the characters. And that is really sad.

 

Very cool! I especailly like that it is Indian magitech, instead of a more standard Indian fantasy setting, or a Victorian or Renaissance Italy style magitech.

 

Why is my existence more forced than a white person's?

I 1000% reject the notion that you can't both want a black actor for a role and have that black actor be good for it. In the end, the small handful of actors up for the role of Finn were all black, which suggests to me that it was intentional.

So why is it forcing otherwise?

Rey is fiercely independent and highly skilled because she's the main protagonist.

In the original trilogy, Leia is constantly batting down Han's come ons and gendered comments.

Because they were all white. The challenge is getting people to identify with people not like them. Underrepresented groups have gotten centuries of practice in this, while privileged groups complain when a character isn't different from them for "a reason."

Isn't this whole post literally complaining about not "forcing" diversity? So who's absorbed with the notion that a character must be a representation of themself?

 

Here is some creators' comments from MtG's home page http://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/making-magic/kaladesh-ingredients-part-1-2016-09-05

 

As if "forced" diversity is a bad thing. As an example, because it's so egregious: Coop's got the entire current canon* scored and less than 25% of characters are women. Last time I checked, males and females are born at a 1:1 ratio, not a 3:1 ratio. If diversity is supposed to occur so naturally, how does an entire fictional galaxy end up like that?

Either 1) Creators are intentionally making most of their characters dudes or 2) creators are unintentionally making most of their characters dudes.

Option 1 is forced homogeneity, which should be bad according to anyone who is also opposed to forced diversity. I also don't think it's the case here, except in the case of stories involving the clone army.

Option 2 is the result of the natural process and what I think is going on. It's also unrealistic (and dare I say, lazy?). There's no reason male should be the default status of a character, because it's not the default status for a human.

I'm certain we're in an Option 2 situation. And one of the things** I think will fix the situation (because it does need fixing) is making diversity a priority when making creative choices. AKA "FORCED" DIVERSITY.

*I can't read the article at the moment so I'm just assuming. I'm guessing it's either everything or very nearly everything.
**There are so many things I think need to change, but I can't even begin to cover them in a slightly-aggravated forum post.

 

The thing about diversity is that it's necessary to undo the very homogeneous state SW has been in since the franchise started, and it's not going to happen by accident. You don't make up for only having one important female character in a whole movie by including a couple female characters only if you see a character as female in your mind and nothing else makes sense. It needs to be done on purpose.

Everything is forced into a story by someone, no characters are there naturally or by accident. It's part of a plan. And if that plan seems to only have male characters, it's not more or less forced than that plan only having women. So yeah, I'm all for forced diversity.

If the Han movie comes out and besides Han there isn't a single white guy in the whole movie, I'm all for it. If the Han movie comes out and literally no one in it is straight up to Han himself, I'm all for it.

It's not like there aren't white guys in SW anymore, both the past characters and the ones that keep being created now. One of them is getting a movie.

 

Making diverse stories is a choice. Authors aren't going to magically include 50% female characters or a real-world equivalent of LGBTQIA, POC, and other minority characters. It just doesn't work that way. My default character as a writer is a straight white female because that's what I am. I know this, and I recognize it, and I correct it by saying "does this character need to be this gender? sexuality? color?" And yes, I go down my character list and make sure I have a diverse cast. If I don't, I genderswap or racebend or err on the side of everyone being bi. There is no reason that doing this would harm a story - and if it does, they weren't good storytellers to begin with.

 

It's been a long time since I sat down to write a prose or screenplay story. But I've begun GMing RP sessions, and started crafting stories in that context. I've found myself going over them and asking, hey,why didn't I make this NPC female? Also,in a SW context, "Is there a reason this person also had to be a human? And if a human, a light-skinned clone of me?" And suddenly - there was no reason for the character to be a male,so *swap*. Makes the world more diverse, and therefore realistic.

So yes - Very good point about writing a default perspective. It often makes for better world and storytelling if you consciously question your defaults in storytelling. SW storytellers have been doing a lot better in this regard as lately. And that's fantastic.

 

There's some instances of outrage towards a cast that isn't diverse that are really stupid, in my opinion. Take Lord of the Rings, for example. J.R.R Tolkien was mainly inspired by Anglo-Saxon, Germanic, Norse and Celtic mythology when he wrote everything involving Middle-Earth. So, what's the point of whinging about it? I don't see anyone demanding the same treatment be given to stories like Journey to the West or the Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Otherwise, it would be whitewashing. For Star Wars, it works. Besides, having strong female characters isn't new. I mean, Jaina Solo Fel was the mightiest duelist of her time in Legends, so I really don't see the issue.

Seeing a ton of aliens in that movie would be cool too. I want to see the full extent of the Star Wars criminal underworld.

 

Eh, the whole "historical accuracy" excuse doesn't really hold water for me, especially in fantasy. I'm not holding anything against Tolkien because that time has passed. But people who are writing fantasy right now? Yeah, I'll be annoyed if the cast is mostly white dudes.

 

When you're talking about an author who was a historian and philologist, then it sort of does hold water. For me, anyway. As for people writing fantasy right now, I agree.

 

I am not sure Tolkien did have all the brown people as corrupted as evil. After all Elephants only come from Africa and the Indian Subcontinent. Besides trade means the aforementioned people have been in Europe since at least Roman Empire.

 

Leaving race aside entirely, I wonder what LotR's parity score would be.





Hmmmmmmmmmm.

 

That's a whole lot of dudes.