Lit Ignorance is Bias: The Diversity Manifesto

Two things I can think of off the top of my head, though both are special circumstances - the mirror universe episode and the one where he thinks he's some sort of swashbuckler (The Naked Time, maybe?). In both of them he shows clear interest in Uhura. But the JJ Abrams films changing the characters doesn't bother me, because they're not actually the same characters. The destruction of Vulcun didn't make Hikaru Sulu gay, but it did result in a different child being born to Sulu's parents than in the Prime Universe, whom they gave the same name and raised the same and had similar life experiences.

 

Well, the Mirror Universe is a whole 'nother can of worms.

 

I remember the day when us SW fans used to snub out noses at your petty ST canon arguments. You had a reboot. We had sourcebook duct tape. And it worked, damn it. We treasured our leaky splintering frankencanon like a well-loved ragdoll. Until it was replaced with the Disney version.

But I honestly think diversity is why a lot of old EU characters aren't coming back though -- not because there's no room in the new canon, but because when there was "diversity", they were stereotypes.

 

That's something that's really great about Trek. You revive the characters from a 1960s TV show for a modern-day movie and if someone in the board room with only a passing familiarity with the franchise says "Wait shouldn't we update it for modern day sensibil---" everyone else can be like "No dude it's already there."

 

The Mandalorian: Deborah Chow Reveals the Inspiration For the (redacted due to spoilers) Rescue
The first female director of a live-action Star Wars story brought her father's love of Hong Kong action to the fight.

(The linked article discusses that thing from The Mandalorian we're all still treating as a spoiler, even if you can't scroll very far through your Twitter feed without seeing something about it)

"Chow said the episode takes a lot of inspiration from 1961’s Yojimbo — Akira Kurosawa’s classic about a nameless ronin who finds himself in a town plagued by competing crime lords. She also credits her love of Asian cinema to her late father. 'My dad was Chinese, and he was a huge movie fan, when I grew up he was watching Hong Kong action films. So it kind of gets that reference,' she said, citing John Woo’s 1992 cop-and-kid thriller Hard Boiled as another reference."

"Chow’s work on The Mandalorian makes her the first woman and the first filmmaker of Asian heritage to direct a live-action Star Wars story. 'Even when I first got this job, it didn’t even cross my mind. I don’t know what fairyland I was in, to not think this was significant. But I went through prep and it didn’t occur to me until somebody said it on one of the first days of shooting.'

She noted that Bryce Dallas Howard directs episode four of the show, and the second unit team has several female directors. 'It didn’t occur to me that I was the first one to leap.'

'I want it to be about the work. I want to be a good director, not a good female director, not a good Asian director. But by the same token, obviously, my career path and the representation… it is important. It is meaningful. I want to see more women directors and I want to see more directors of color.'”

 

*stumbles into his own thread a week late*

This is also very relevant in SW--any given character is very, very unlikely to randomly proclaim their orientation in plot material, so there are huge numbers of major characters who could very easily be portrayed for the first time as gay or bi or ace or what have you without going against any existing canon. Look at Lando, a character from 1980, in Solo--I would argue that Jon Kasdan didn't go nearly far enough to actually portray him as pansexual but the fact that he was even able to think of him that way despite his, let's say enthusiastically heterosexual, portrayal in ESB shows that all manner of cards are still on the table with the existing stable of characters.

Just to piggyback on vnc's post, we can and have debated a great deal about whether RL demographics even should be the barometer for GFFA demographics, but even if you grant that--SW characters are and always have been 60-70% straight white men, which is biologically impossible. So we can disagree on that principle and still agree that we're not where we should be.

 

I'm always amused by the idea that filmmakers are, like, looking at census data when deciding how to cast a movie and not just unthinkingly reproducing what came before based on historical exclusion.

Anyway,

Spoiler

Tora's mom has the same accent as the other Dozas, so I wonder if she and Imanuel are from the same planet, despite having fought on opposite sides of the war.

 

Has anyone watched the Dragon Prince on Netflix? It's a cartoon made by one of the head writer from ATLA, and despite it being a "kids' cartoon" like ATLA it has also handled mature themes. It has also shown (at last count) 3 same-sex romances, including on-screen same-sex kisses and 2 Queens who are married with a daughter. It's also rather racially diverse.

 

Spoiler

My headcanon is that the Dozas are from Fest, like Cassian Andor.

 

Part of me loves this, part of me is very cautious about creating a, like, "Space Mexico."

OOOH!

Spoiler

But what if Vanissa's maiden name was "Andor?"

 

I was just going for, like, consistency in accents. Fest is a mountainous snowy planet, very dissimilar to Earth Mexico in that sense. Pantorans have South African accents, but Pantora certainly isn't Space South Africa, for instance.

 

Could be Space Peru or Space Sierra Nevada

When it comes to their clothing do I think of Russia.

 

If this episode doesn't lead to a bunch of fan-written Dozas backstories, fanfiction was a mistake.

 

What happened in Shatterpoint?

 

THEY CLONED JANGO FETT'S ACCENT.

CLONED IT.

 

I didn't mind that so much in Shatterpoint because it wasn't, like, "everyone from here is this particular earth culture." They were just the descendants of a small group of Jedi castaways. I do, however, think the intention here is to point to some kind of link between the Dozas.

I more meant that I'd love to avoid a situation where any actor or character with a Mexican accent is automatically assigned Fest. The idea of those two characters being related makes me very excited, though.

 

Look, Jango had a lot of weird conditions.

 

Mandalorian:

Spoiler

shoutout to the purehearted simple village widow who was willing to love the mandalorian for his character and kindness no matter how ugly he was under the helmet, blissfully unaware that this is what he looks like



lol poor thing i hope she never finds out

 

In terms of this particular criticism of Shatterpoint, I guess a question has come to mind.

Do people want Star Wars to represent the world we live in, or just our neighbourhood of the world we live in?

Realistically, in our world, you can travel to an African nation where virtually everyone is black, and certainly all the decedents of the original population there are black.

For myself(a Canadian)I can hop in a vehicle, travel a few hours north and be in communities that are made up of 100% indigenous people.

Why is the Star Wars galaxy having similar places a problem?

 

Well it's realistic if they're not in a cosmopolitan city/planet.

 

The latest episode of The Mandalorian gives us a similar question, which is

Spoiler

the human genome can only express itself so many ways, so on a planet where Earth nations don't exist, it can sometimes make sense to put people who "look" "similar" to each other together as the same "people."

 

Death in both marvel and Dc appears as a Woman most of the time.