Lit Ignorance is Bias: The Diversity Manifesto

Body types, you say?



It's funny actually--Caysin Bog appearing overweight (though he's not necessarily human so who knows) is the closest that group comes to IRL-esque body diversity, and he's an established RO character so you can't even credit the artist for that. I'm trying to think of other recent comic characters who weren't necessarily in peak shape and nothing's coming to mind. Not everyone is Duursema-buff though.

I think what I'd say re: modern comics art overall is that "mainstream" styles have loosened up a lot, so super-defined musculatures are less common among characters who aren't literal superheroes. And even among female superheroes who are supposed to be in shape there seems to be less pressure to keep them bikini model-esque like She-Hulk used to be.

 

One character I was going to mention in the context of a larger post was Clatriffe from the Age of Republic - Obi-Wan Kenobi one-shot. She is slightly thicker in both face and body -- a common build in real life, but not so much in the GFFA, especially among the usual willowy, "Hollywood slender" human, Twi'lek, and Togruta women. (For example, Ann and Tann Gella, Sebulba's slaves, were portrayed by real-life fashion models, Nifa and Nishan Hindes.)



Of course, it is not so good that I can only think of one, and also that she's only shown up once and is not a major or frequent character...

I meant to ask -- could you detail in what ways you felt Resistance was moving in the right direction in this regard? I was going to include Aunt Z in the context of a larger post as well, but the main human and humanoid cast all seemed to have the same general build (lean and slender). I guess Griff has slightly burlier arms than the rest... I have not watched Resistance in full so it would probably be better for other posters, like you, who have, to weigh in on it more than me...

I remember one of my posts from when we first saw images of Aunt Z -- "I love this design. Burly blobfish who's both way more femme than me (lipstick, blush, immaculate winged eyeliner) and way more badass (weapons tats)." (Oops, I guess those were really a space waffle and kitchen utensils, lol.) I still feel the same way. Fun design, a build that really contrasts with the main characters, and uses makeup in a much more visible way than most lead women SW characters (typically full face but au naturel application and colors; the "no makeup"-makeup look).

 

Well with midriff outphased in media slowly, I noticed in lots of media the new trend is to show muscle elsewhere, respectively the biceps.

Media uses that to show strong woman as a sign of feminism. Kinda running from the soft princess trope to the counter trope of muscled feminist heroine. From Legend of Korra to SW to She-Ra and elsewhere it got more and more used.




While I do not mind any of this, even love it kinda, I feel that media has not really learned its lesson and merely replaced one trope with another. Or in other words, covered the midriff but ripped off the sleeves instead.

Heck look at social media and instagram's teenage photo hell. Every influencer seems to go for the "I am a strong geek nerd" trope that emerged in recent years. Nice that women muscle up but too many just do it because it is a trend. Like geek media on a moneysucking high has every wannabe model pose with geek-fashion or cosplay bought instead of selfmade costumes.

While the motion and evolution is alright, I question the motive behind it for many. Is it really a deep cultural evolution and change or just the same old reasoning of people jumping on trends and smelling money and influence making options?

Not discrediting all those nice fellows though that do live the dream and not just because its trendy or such.

 

@Senpezeco

Maybe I was misremembering Resistance, granted I wouldn't consider their characters ideal bodies per say either. Average to nice but not ideal.

Again I don't think Star Wars suffers much from "Ideal Body" issues at least in a lot of their larger media's ...maybe comics...and maybe old EU stuff.

@ColeFardreamer
Also tried looking up Star Wars in She-Ra design...Didn't find much but She-Ra characters dressed as Star Wars ones

Well in terms of She-Ra to be fair they did a better job with that...Sure Adora is the more the muscular jock ala Korra...But Glimmer's design got a BIG upgrade in terms of character design as scene here. Notice how Glimmer is a bit more a ...well rounded body nature if you will. (Also I put Bow in here because it was the best picture of Glimmer I could get)




However 80's artist in general were just..Let's put the same face on the same body but put different colors and call it a day.

Now we just need to improve on the proportions .

Weird side note but I find it funny how She-Ra 80's characters look more like how STAR WARS POSTERS drew the characters compared to what they actually looked like in the movie.

She-Ra 2018 decided to go more with what they looked like in the movie but also take a step further.

Just some random food for thought connecting it all back to Star Wars here.

In fact to add again, it is funny how the many rip-offs of Star Wars (She-Ra being one of them from the 80's along with He-Man) took more from the posters and marketing material than they did the actual content of Star Wars itself.

Star Wars was sorta a weird subversion of the Sci-Fi action fantasy tropes while it's rip-offs sorta...Went full on back to those tropes and just embraced them. More or less. Muscular bound hero body types included

 

I truly think Carrie Fisher having to lose weight for the ST is what killed her.

 

Yep -- and not to repeat myself, I think a lot of that came from it being before the home video age, when people who weren't that "into" SW but wanted to cash in were relying more on ancillary media like posters and comics to get the "vibe". And it wasn't just Star Wars, either. It's hard to think of anything dorkier than the original BSG -- and if anything BSG78 deserves some mild props for presenting a mixed gender military and having Athena generally in uniform... but get a load of her being portrayed basically nude, on a snow planet even, on the cover of one of the contemporaneous novels. "Dirk Benedict" looking pretty ripped here, too.



And I think that's sort of because SW did indeed subvert some of the Flash Gordon/Buck Rogers/pulp SF tropes from which it also drew inspiration. The "used universe" thing really didn't start to get talked about until years later, nor the "dorkiness". Most casuals just assumed it actually *was* typical cheesecake/beefcake space fantasy in content.

 

@FiveFireRings

It's always weird seeing what essentially is the mindset of.

People who ACTUALLY remember what Star Wars (The OT Mainly) was.

and people who remember what Star Wars was, but I think in reality they remember the lunchbox. By which I mean, the lunchbox portrayed more what that BSG book cover looked like and thus gave a perception of the franchise that wasn't ever really there in the text.

 

While going through body types, I also got to thinking about hair and styling, particularly natural hair textures (I mean this, if a primer is needed). It's been depicted more and more frequently in recent years -- prominent examples are Finn, Lando (both younger and older), Val in Solo, Jannah in TRoS, Jarek Yeager in Resistance, Trace Martez in TCW S7, and Sana Starros in the current Marvel comics. (Trying to think of the 'first' example -- possibly Katya M'Buele from Marvel's first Annual in 1979?)

Of course, this probably tracks pretty closely with how often (or infrequently) POC have been depicted in SW throughout its history, since most white characters' hair and hairstyles are typically not of these textures. But I just wanted to say that it's nice to see a variety of natural hair textures and not *exclusively* relaxed or straightened hair on POC characters.

 

That's a good point. And counter to the thing in a lot of SF where those hairstyles were actually frequently used to connote some kind of "menace" for a pretty long stretch there... with the Predator design being one big example.

Funny postscript to my mention of BSG78 back in the day and the show's semi-progressive leanings (mixed with Mormon mysticism, which it kind of a mind trip): given my isolated rural American upbringing and age, I'd credit that show's portrayal of professional POCs like Tigh and Boomer in a fantasy setting with doing a lot to shape the way I looked at nonwhite people, in a cultural context where... there weren't many. In before Lando!

 

Along the lines of various body types shown in the movies, there are also Porkins and Snap Wexley. Anecdotally, over the years I've heard some larger guys decide to cosplay those two characters specifically. At the moment I can't think of any women in the movies who had a similar body type to them.

Even as a kid I thought "Porkins" was an odd name for the character. I don't know what other people think about it nowadays.

 

They called him Porkins because he was originally gonna be a Pig Alien but for whatever reason didn't go with that.

 

Reaaally? Can your source that intel? I mean, Porkins was the original Piggy Voort Sabinring? For real? Is that why Allston then created the Gamorrean Pilot character?



Also, my fav background character in the OT? Malakili, always Malakili. I love that guy. He too is a prime example of non-standard bodytype. But he really stood out to me with his brief appearance, love for the monster Rancor and so on.

 

@ColeFardreamer

Sadly I don't remember...But I swear I heard this somewhere....I just don't know where.

If anyone knows if Porkins was gonna be a pig alien person please let me know

 

I mean, just to start with? ANH wasn't big on incidental aliens.

 

If Porkins was originally conceived of as a pig person, he would have been the only alien on Yavin (besides Chewbacca, anyway).

I'm calling shenanigans on the part of whoever told you this.

 

Ah olay apparently William Hootkins thought he was playing a pig person because of what the script said. That must be it

 

So in conclusion, not what you'd call fantastic rep.

 

And that's one of the faults with Rogue One, that it did not give us more non-humans on Yavin. But than again Lucas could have added more of them when he did his directors cuts of ANH

 

Yeah, outside of Raddus and his two aides, the Alliance in Rogue One is still far too human for my liking. A trio of Mon Calamari is great, but if we saw some other aliens (outside of one Drabatan, which was a new species) featured prominently I would have been THRILLED.

RE: Lucas, I do wish that he added several Mon Calamari and Sullustans, as he said he was planning on doing. Hopefully he would have added some people of color and women too.

Speaking of diversity, have any of you checked out Lower Decks? It has the single most diverse Star Trek crew we've ever seen. Sure, it is an animated series, but still. They are consciously using aliens to a degree never before see in Trek. The crew of the USS Cerritos has, off the top of my head:

• At least three Andorians
• At least three Vulcans
• One Bolian
• One Trill
• One Benzite
• One Orion
• Two Bajoran
• One Caitian

Plus a few "background" aliens who may or may not be new species. Add this to the stellar human diversity and you finally get to see what the crew of a Federation starship SHOULD look like. It is a union of hundreds of worlds and thousands of colonies. It is not, to borrow from ST:VI, a "homo sapiens only club".

--Adm. Nick

 

D&D 5e seems to be moving in the direction of diversity a bit. The newest book, Rime of the Frostmaiden, has two gay married couples, and a person who presents as neither male nor female - and it's all treated really casually.

 

I wonder if this was a deliberate choice on the part of the filmmakers - certainly they went to a lot of effort to recreate the look of ANH. Maybe they consciously chose visual continuity over diversity (with the Mon Calamari characters neatly segregated to one ship that gets captured to explain them away).

 

I wouldn't be partly surprised in all honestly. That's defiantly something that Rogue One was going for was to be as much a match of ANH as possible, even giving certain characters 70's looking hair.

Especially considering everywhere else they jammed pack the screen with Aliens like the ones we see on Jedda and with the Partisans.

Not saying that's a good or bad thing but that may have been the mentality and that's sorta the pit-falls you have when you build off something that's problematic from the get-go. Sometimes staying faithful to it isn't a good thing.

Hence why I've loved a lot of these reboots of classic franchises, how they've been able to take these problematic stories (Like She-Ra ;p) and try to turn those problems into story points to talk about and or just try to do better in general.

Also here is something that me and @Sauron_18 talked about whether or not people back in 1977 thought Darth Vader was a African American character because well he was voiced by a African American actor and the implications of that seeing as all the hero's of ANH are all white.

This was added by a interested thing from years ago talking about the weird negative side effects of Vader being voiced by a black actor but when the mask is removed him being white.

That's good....I don't mind how a fantasy world is set up but I do think since again it is a FANTASY world...That it's okay to have a fantasy world were homophobia doesn't exist and those things are just considered normal. For if we create worlds that make it normal then we can imagine it being normal.

 

They even gave people the late-seventies British sideburns that so many Imperial officers in the original Star Wars had. Can't tell me that wasn't deliberate.

Brandon Badeaux was a fantastic artist who drew some truly gorgeous scenes for Rebellion, but my God did he love making everybody absurdly muscular. Luke, Leia --- every character in that series looked like they had just been cast as the lead in the next MCU movie and had had Disney's crack team of personal trainers shipped right to their door.

Side note: I always thought it was weird when he wasn't brought on to do Rebellion's chapter of the Vector crossover. Instead it was randomly given to Dustin Weaver, who had always been a KOTOR guy and who really should have been given KOTOR's Vector issues instead of that random guy who drew everybody with pointy chins. Then we could have had Weaver, Wheatley, Badeaux, and Duursema, each representing the best possible art of their respective series. Weird musing, I know, but hey, Admiral Nict's got me thinking of 2008 comics today. And on that note: Yeah, Duursema, while a fantastic artist, did have a tendency to hypersexualize everyone.

 

Did people even widely know James Earl Jones voiced Vader in 1977? I recall JEJ himself didn’t want to be credited because he believed voice acting was basically just special effects.