Lit Ignorance is Bias: The Diversity Manifesto

Curse you for making me use a family guy clip Coop

 

The real-world diversity is part conscious effort and partly something that was just gonna happen because these films are being made in the 21st century for a diverse audience, I think. Both are valid.

On the second point, I think one of the reasons they're forgetting the potential of alien characters is that every single one of the new films (and I like them all) is guilty of some degree of "greatest-hits-ism" which seems to settle on the background characters -- they'll rarely invent a new "major" alien character if they can use an old one, and between that and what you note as their obligatory Mos Eisley scenes, they seem to consider the alien box "checked". Oddly TLJ has the least blatant nostalgia of the bunch and yet also the least hot alien action, but that's probably down to the decision to make it such a direct narrative continuation of TFA.

Meanwhile, having a new semi-major droid each time out seems to be a much bigger imperative. Not sure what that's all about!

 

Just wanna say, I'm about seven chapters into Alphabet Squadron, and so far it's full of women, queers, and aliens!

 

Though I have it on my shelf, I don't think I'm going to have an opportunity to read it for a while, so out of curiosity, who are those queer characters in this?

 

Yrica Quell and Wyl Lark.

 

Just to note, Matt Martin has been suggesting that Rex and Nik Sant are still two different characters despite what Galaxy of Adventures might imply, so it seems like Rex hasn't been retroactively whitewashed.

 

Thank you!

 

I think the problem is that he looks like a white guy whose face is covered in the shadow of his helmet, not a guy with any Maori background. So it just gets awkward.

 

Nik Sant has always been an example of whitewashing; if they wanted to use someone from the North Pole why not an Inuit character

 

I'm glad that it's not just me, filling up a bowl of dog food five minutes ago and still thinking about it, that came to this realization.

 

I feel like we've made some real progress today.

 

The people who did the Decipher cards were awesome. In addition to naming Nik Sant, they made three of the guys from the Cantina into the three guys from The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly in both (anagrammed) names and character bios. And Bren Derlin's CCG card included the line "In the Mos Eisley Cantina, everybody knows his name." Which is played straight in the "Personality and traits" section of his Legends Wook article. Priceless.

 

I remember the first time I heard the old soldier in ROTJ had a name (in the Rebels thread, as it happens), I immediately had to go on Wookieepedia to double-check that it wasn't a joke.

 

I'm pretty sure that Galaxy of Adventure is narrated by Dante Basco. And they are definitely adding in more diversity in the animation (eg. Crix Madine briefing scene.)

 

They're definitely narrated by Dante Basco. And yeah, the briefing room looks very deliberate.



They also very deliberately stuck Rex into the Endor scenes but whether he's intended to be Nik Sant is only getting more confusing imo.

 

Well....Might as well just mention this since the Diversity discussion has been talked about with this latest Star Wars news ....I think it was announced a day ago. But Lucasfilm has hired Michelle Rejwan as new SVP to oversee future Live Action films and episodic series

 

In an interview with Game Informer, Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order’s game director Stig Asmussen addressed this issue – and essentially blames developer Respawn’s choice of a male protagonist on Rey, the main Jedi character from The Force Awakens and the rest of the ‘sequel trilogy’, as played by Daisy Ridley.

"We talked about different gender,” Asmussen tells Game Informer on their video podcast. “We arrived where we were because at the time, Rey was the thing for Star Wars, and so it made a lot more sense for us to have a male protagonist.”

He also talks about why they didn’t go with an alien protagonist either, which is even rarer in Star Wars – outside of games with customizable characters, such as Knights of the Old Republic or Jedi Academy. “Ultimately we didn’t go with an alien race because we felt like – no pun intended – that would alienate a lot of people. We wanted to make sure there was a real human connection to that character we have in the game.” Asmussen does admit, however, that he thinks it would be “really cool” to have an alien main character.​

https://www.pcgamesn.com/star-wars-jedi-fallen-order/protagonist-gender

 

Get that guy a press team! Under no circumstances let him talk to the press without pros present.

So what? There's now - or more accurately, always was ? - a finite space for female characters and once a certain number is reached, or certain level of profile, in this case, two high profile characters, that's it? There's no room left for anymore?

 

That sounds kind of like a lazy justification. All movies pre-TFA had male protagonists, yet that didn't mean all the games had women as their leads. Also, many aliens in Star Wars are still extremely human, just with different skin colors or head-tails instead of hair. Nothing that could really alienate people

 

Pun intended?

 

re: Games and identity

There are a whole load of people, of varying gender and ethnicity playing as:

• Female hunter in post-apocalypse world populated by robo-creatures (HZD)
• Male Egyptian seeking vengeance against the cult that killed his son (ACr)
• Female / Male Greek assassin running around 400BC - and there's probably a fair amount of genderswapping in terms of player to character. (AC: Od)
  
• Women playing as the one-man force of nature that is Kazama Kiryu in various Yakuza games.
• Kratos in the new God of War

There's probably an entire doctoral thesis waiting to be written on flexibility of identity in games now. And that's before looking at the create-your-character games.

 

Obviously

 

This is why I have been saying we need to have a canon Revan (which I am still not sold on at all) be a woman. Stop letting people choose and then defaulting to a white human dude. I sure as heck don't feel alienated playing as an alien in games, and despite being a white dude I almost always pick female characters. This dev needs to get the BLEEP over himself and understand that white dudes are not, nor have they ever been, default IRL. We get 2 female leads in the films, and 1 in videos games and....what? Suddenly we need to balance things out? When Luke and Anakin where the only leads we had, the games had Starkiller, Jaden, Revan, Farlander, Kyle, and so on by white dudes even if the player could technically pick. The only set in stone woman or person of color is Vana from Starfighter. I mean other than Adi from the sequel cause I think preexisting characters, while nice, are not the same as devs putting in the effort to actually create diverse leads.

Just....they proved exactly what had been urking me about Cal to be true. If the existence of a prominent woman makes you feel you need male representation, then thank you for being so forthcoming about your misogyny