Lit Ignorance is Bias: The Diversity Manifesto

I was very happy that they didn't drag out the who-cursed-Eda mystery thread and instead concluded it in one season. I feel like the show do go for a lot of traditional tropes, but it puts its own (very enjoyable) spin on them similar to how Gravity Falls did.

The way that the show handled the Eda's Curse mystery has got me cautiously optimistic that we'll see Amity and Luz reach relationship status before the final episode of the entire series. The Owl House is very good when it comes to character moments and interactions, which is why I'd love seeing them write a date episode (which is saying something because I'm not fond of date episodes).

 

It says it was confirmed "by Word of God" on TvTropes so, let me guess, confirmed on Twitter?

 

A podcast actually--which was then reported on all over the place so there may have been further official comments later on. Looking at the broader context I'd say it was much closer to a Korrasami situation than the showrunners themselves wanting to be coy.

 

That doesn't surprise me.....My rule of thumb is that i wanna give creators the benefit of the doubt and tend to think they wanna be more diverse then executive producers allow them.

Also to add to surprises, I was very surprised by Amity siblings...Who don't go for the "Bad Older Sibling Trope" as I fear they would.

 

Yeah, I haven't watch any episodes that features them yet, but I have heard that they start to treat Amity nicely after their first episode, which I was happy to hear because I was sort of dreading the Bad Older Sibling Trope.

 

I really need to get around to watching the back half of Owl House, I sorta lost interest during the hiatus.

 

YESSSS!

It's really ramped up!

 

I was wondering about that too after a quick Wikipedia search on Cassie Steele. I couldn't find anything actually saying that the character had been recast because of cultural sensitivity, instead reading implications that Cassie may have dropped out due to Covid-related delays to the film. If there was a director change, though, you could be right about them wanting to go less... nuanced? In the end Kelly's a great choice though.

 

Honestly there are a hundred possible reasons for it and it's somewhat uncomfortable to even speculate about--but with all the high-profile recastings over the last few months and that EW article dealing so prominently with KMT's heritage I have to admit my mind went right there. But even in something like Moana several years ago they had enough sense to cast Auliʻi Cravalho so it's not as if it wouldn't have been on anyone's minds before now.

 

Oh, also, I just read a Trek novel from the year 2000 that introduced a gay Vulcan. It was first mentioned in a casually progressive way that surprised me for being twenty years old --- a Vulcan main cast member of the series returns home and chats with her brother and just kinda asks "Are you still seeing that guy?" Then a few chapters later it brings in the unsupportive parent aspect when he mentions to someone else that his father thinks it illogical that he doesn't want to propagate the species. I liked it --- it had young people not caring one way or the other but the older generation being set in their narrow-minded ways, which is a common reflection of reality even today, but it also managed to incorporate the Vulcan species's idiosyncrasies into the mix.

And the book was overall very critical of the Vulcan fixation with logic, so it's not like the author was being sympathetic to the father or anything. He remained offpage and wasn't a part of the book at all, and the brother went the rest of the book without his sexuality being brought up again. It's a part of who he is but it doesn't dominate his characterization.

This is also the series with an Intersex character that I've mentioned a couple times in the non-SW-books-by-SW-authors thread. While not everything about hir has aged remarkably well, s/he is still constantly presented as a strong and independent character with hir own unique pronouns that everyone respects. In the nineties, DS9 was stuck trying to present queerness in the most grudgingly-approved-by-the-network way possible, but it's amazing what the novels were able to get away with since nobody really cared about them.

 

Was it Star Trek: New Frontier? THE GREATEST NOVEL SERIES OF ALL TIME?

 

I'm only halfway through it but damn man is Peter David ever horny.

 

Love those books. They inspired my writing career.

 

My first acquaintance with Peter David was the Worf's First Adventure Starfleet Academy book, at the high school library. Found it pretty enjoyable - and read a number of others at libraries, and bought a few from second-hand bookshops.

Q-In-Law is one of his most gloriously funny. I, Q is also pretty good, with, for example, the Grand Nagus dropping a few Vizzini quotes to lampshade that they're played by the same actor, among other things.

 

@FromDromundKaasWithLove

Did you catch the Owl House Season 1 finale?

 

I read those Worf starfleet academy ones. Those were the ones that had the Roshenko's as Jewish because the actors who played them were and caused me to think of the hilarious image if Worf at a Seder table with a yarmulke that does not quiet fit with his Klingon headridges

 

You don’t get Theodore Bikel (who starred in Fiddler on the Roof on Broadway) to play Worf’s dad if you’re not trying to portray the Roshenkos as Jewish.


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He played a lot of non Jewish characters too. He was cast alot as generic Eastern European(despite being born in Austria and therefore from Central Europe)

Though I never met him he was my maternal Grandmother's 2nd cousin

 

I believe that them being Russian Jews was intended.

Also, it was a writer's joke about how poor Worf was a long suffering in (not quite) dignity sort of fellow.

"That explains SO MUCH about Worf." - Writer's Room reaction

 

'“When black men grow out their hair it’s a very powerful thing,” he says. “Culturally, it stands for something.” In fact, it was what Boyega saw as attempts to control his appearance – allied with the smothering feeling of his packed diary leading into 2017 – that caused him to question his place in the sausage machine of big-ticket moviemaking, that made him wonder if there was actually room for someone who looked like him to exist on his own terms in an industry generally built to white standards and white norms. '

'In the continued afterglow of that first, franchise-defibrillating Star Wars film, he continued to notice a stylist he'd hired when he first started doing press “cringing at certain clothes I wanted to go for”, the hairdresser who had no experience of working with hair like his but “still had the guts to pretend”, and he decided that he could no longer grin and bear it like a grateful competition winner. “During the press of [The Force Awakens] I went along with it,” he notes. “And obviously at the time I was very genuinely happy to be a part of it. But my dad always tells me one thing: ‘Don’t overpay with respect.’ You can pay respect, but sometimes you’ll be overpaying and selling yourself short.”'

'What I would say to Disney is do not bring out a black character, market them to be much more important in the franchise than they are and then have them pushed to the side. It’s not good. I’ll say it straight up.” He is talking about himself here – about the character of Finn, the former Stormtrooper who wielded a lightsaber in the first film before being somewhat nudged to the periphery. But he is also talking about other people of colour in the cast – Naomi Ackie and Kelly Marie Tran and even Oscar Isaac (“a brother from Guatemala”) – who he feels suffered the same treatment; he is acknowledging that some people will say he’s “crazy” or “making it up”, but the reordered character hierarchy of The Last Jedi was particularly hard to take.'

'“Like, you guys knew what to do with Daisy Ridley, you knew what to do with Adam Driver,” he says. “You knew what to do with these other people, but when it came to Kelly Marie Tran, when it came to John Boyega, you know **** all. So what do you want me to say? What they want you to say is, ‘I enjoyed being a part of it. It was a great experience...’ Nah, nah, nah. I’ll take that deal when it’s a great experience. They gave all the nuance to Adam Driver, all the nuance to Daisy Ridley. Let’s be honest. Daisy knows this. Adam knows this. Everybody knows. I’m not exposing anything.”'

'Whereas previously he responded to the flagrantly racist commentary that greeted his casting in The Force Awakens with bullishness (“Get used to it ”, as his since-deleted Instagram response post had it), now he is keen to discuss the lasting psychic wounds that an ordeal like that leaves. “I’m the only cast member who had their own unique experience of that franchise based on their race,” he says, holding my gaze. “Let’s just leave it like that. It makes you angry with a process like that. It makes you much more militant; it changes you. Because you realise, ‘I got given this opportunity but I’m in an industry that wasn’t even ready for me.’ Nobody else in the cast had people saying they were going to boycott the movie because [they were in it]. Nobody else had the uproar and death threats sent to their Instagram DMs and social media, saying, ‘Black this and black that and you shouldn’t be a Stormtrooper.’ Nobody else had that experience. But yet people are surprised that I’m this way. That’s my frustration.”'

 

I'll just add this for now.

 

Finn deserved to be one of the greatest heroes of the new teens. He could have been the New Luke or New Han.

Instead, he was the New 3PO.

 

Yup. Totally. To quickly quote something I said a few pages ago:

I kinda liked that Episode VIII leaned into comedy but hated how hard that lean was. Finn standing there at the beginning with his suit leaking bacta... he never recovered from that. Not that the movie ever tried to help him recover from it.

Anyway here's some good news:
Star Trek: Discovery's third season to introduce franchise's first transgender, non-binary characters

(Please don't say "But what about that non-binary alien Riker fell in love with?!?!" It's not the same thing. Feel free to argue for Dax, though).

 

In other good news with THE OWL HOUSE

 

Yeah, I have. The reason it took me so long to respond is because I've been writing out my thoughts and I'm trying to to formulate them.

The short version is that I really liked it: my favorite parts being, of couse, every moment between Eda and Luz as well as Luz vs Belos. Unfortunately, I did have a big problem with the way they handled Lilith's character both in the finale and (because of hindsight) in the penultimate episode.

I'd probably post it every tomorrow or the day after.