Lit Ignorance is Bias: The Diversity Manifesto

Are we sure that position didn't exist already? Effective or otherwise?

 

There was a job posting last December for a Director of Diversity and Inclusion (presumably the Manager's boss), ILM held a Diversity and Inclusion summit last August, and Disney in general has been using the phrase a lot recently, at least as far back as this PDF from 2019: https://thewaltdisneycompany.com/app/uploads/2019/09/DiversityAndInclusionCommitment.pdf

 

Wanted to call attention to this latest bit of work by @Immi Thrax discussing SW's usage over the years of assorted gender/sex/reproductive terminology, which is absolutely essential reading not just for the wook but for the fandom in general.

 

Thought I’d share this from the wife of Noelle Stevenson and a great writer on Owl House Molly Ostertag

 

I would love to see what ends up happening with Jiliac’s page using these new guidelines.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

Thank you both! We welcome more feedback and input on improving Jiliac and other characters, so please feel free to join the discussion if comfortable doing so!

 

I'm not too proud to admit that "gnc af" took me a second.

 

I had to google it.

 

Awesome, I totally didn't notice that.

....though now I am a bit nervous, because the name Ninth Jedi...I dunno, I just have a vague worry that with a big ensemble like that all but the main character will end up dying by the end of the short. Or that at least a few of them will, and the alien jedi are at greater risk than the human ones.

 

You guys made try to work it out on my own but I failed as well.

I'll have to ask my kids if they caught that, they'll be stoked.

 

So this happened on a Disney Cartoon today

Spoiler

once again animated series for children are pushing boundaries major franchises never will

 

Not to mention that when Emira mentioned Eric having a date, she used gender neutral pronouns to describe his date rather than him or her. It's not the first time that gender neutral pronouns were used in the show and it's a small, but appreciated, touch. There is just so much care that has gone into The Owl House.

 

Once again showing how much better these animated series made for children are just SO MUCH BETTER at this stuff then the major flagpole projects.

On the one hand it's sad

But on the other hand at least it's laying the groundwork for the future generations to be better too.

So? Short term pain long term gain.

 

It was a pretty great episode. Between a whole heap of Ryloth and that, Disney did okay by us this week.

 

Indeed again these animated series...UGH, they are SO GOOD

Okay so onto a topic i'm curious to get peoples opinions on and that is real world issues in fantasy genre's.

Now obviously fantasy can still have a lot of allegory for a lot of the real world stuff and Star Wars was never above doing that. The OT is a story about freedom fighter rebels vs a repressive empire so obviously certain real world issues need to happen in order for their to be drama and stories.

But with all the talk of Bad Batch and whether or not if Omega is Trans or there is Trans allegory happening, I do wonder if Star Wars should have those discussions or not.

Like should homophobia and transphobia be things that exist in the Star Wars galaxy or not?

Personally I just like the idea that even if Omega was full on trans and not a Jango Clone or whatever that no one bats a eye and they move on. Since the idea of living in a fantasy world were real world things like racism, homophobia, transphobia and the like just don't exist. They are as normal as everything else. Now that doesn't mean Star Wars shouldn't have issues in it's galaxy like Anti-Alien sentiment or just genuine freedom vs fascistic dictators. But I think certain real-world issues can be left out the door and allow for a fantasy world to have those elements of escapism where LGBTQ+ is as normal as anything else.

But curious to here what people think on the when it comes to addressing these real world issues in fantasy settings that aren't earth or future earth.

What it breaks down too is, yeah you can have allegories for anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment in stories but do you want Star Wars to have homophobia and transphobia as a part of it's lore is what i'm getting at.

Curious to here peoples discussion and hope I made sense.

 

Based on all different cultures and biologies that should exist in a galaxy, yes.

It may not be social acceptable in the Republic to be openly homophobic or transphobic but on many planets or sub-cultures it migth be normal.

 

Almost all of science fiction and fantasy deals with real world problems. I'm sort of baffled when people say they don't want real life problems in fiction. Sometimes it's obscure, but it's there. Fiction's a means of exploring these issues from a different perspective.

So I agree with Gamiel, yes, they should. Not a 1:1 analogy with 21st Century Earth, but they could explore it from a different angle.

 

In my mind it would be odd (and also a lost opportunity) for any sci-fi setting with alien beings -- especially one that's in a state of war and not a state of utopia -- to not somehow reflect the -isms and -phobias of Earth.

For example, tension between different species in a story, or oppression of one species by another, is an incredibly common way to comment on** real-world racism, discrimination, and colonialism. And whether or not the story-humans display any form of human-on-human discrimination (e.g. racism, colorism) in the same ways that real-life Earthlings do, they may still display bias against non-humans (e.g. humanocentric speciesism and Human High Culture in the GFFA).

"Aliens" and "others" have for so long been stand-ins in fiction for real people who feel othered by their society, be it along lines of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, age, health conditions, a hundred different things -- and personally I would find it difficult to not draw parallels between lived experiences and those of such characters or groups in a story, difficult to not identify with and relate to "the Other".

**And this commenting on something, it doesn't necessarily mean the author will have it play out exactly the same way as it does in our daily lives -- it could be an inversion of it, or a "what-if" scenario, or a silly or fantastical premise. So, to go back to the paragraph previous to this one -- even if an author explicitly stated "there's no XYZ-ism or ABC-phobia in this story-universe", those of us in the audience who are XYZ or ABC are probably still gonna find our stories reflected somewhere by someone. What I'm trying to get at is, as long as there's any form of shunning, discrimination, hatred, or fighting practiced in a story, readers are gonna find a way to tie their own experiences to it even if they're not 1:1, and readers relate to stories in ways that can't be constrained by what's explicitly included or excluded in the lore of the story-universe.

 

Well, one thing about a long running non-rebooting fantasy franchise, especially ones like SW and Trek that bounce around their own timelines, is their reflections of the "isms" of their times can kind of get reflected in sort of bizarrely non-chronological ways. Trek has a harder road there since it's a putative future history that springs from our own, whereas SW can just be its own thing, so it's mostly unconscious bias that makes it to the screen.

The toughest part of this is excluding the baddies from IRL bigotry and saying that they're just evil for other reasons, while not being anything-ist in ways we recognize, because while nothing is said in the OT about speciesism, let's be real: the Empire *looks* not only species-ist but frankly IRL racist and sexist too. And there's certainly every evidence that many gender stereotypes are in play all over the place, Han's behavior being just the most prominent example. There are all kinds of ways to handwave it away and thankfully there's nothing too explicit to reckon with, but it is a little odd if we roll with "people across the boards including the villains have progressed beyond certain kinds of bias, except around the tail end of the Galactic Civil War when people were briefly kinda skeevy about that kind of thing".

Strangely the most explicit "allegory" for IRL bigotry in SW is the one that it feels like it's never going to tackle head on, and that's anti-droid bigotry. It's telegraphed as a very straightforward metaphor for American segregation from the very beginning, but it's also a sentiment endorsed by heroes like Obi-Wan without much commentary. (shrug)

 

@FiveFireRings

I think most things that have their routes in the real world have a lot harder road to follow like Comic Book Universe. For no matter how goofy and bizarre they get they still are set on earth. Even when you have the heavily exaggerated 1940's of Captain America First Avenger and Captain America is not even a smudge racist as a character. Like I know it's possible to be ahead of the times in 1940's for a select few but still Steve Rodgers being a average joe if he were real was gotta be kinda biased even he wasn't malicious

Disney Era i feel has dialed down the IRL (Human) racist and sexist elements of the Empire to a degree or at least the books side has otherwise Rae Sloane would not be a thing.

Well that's as you say just what happens when you have a franchise that only quasi-reboots itself and is being written by (Hopefully) a more diverse crowd then just white men.

Star Wars is NOT a utopia by any stretch of the imagination but I do wonder how much some progress should be allowed in our fantasy sci-fi universe. Like if we ever get a LGBT+ main character it would be nice if people just considered that normal

Is that a subtle She-Ra reference

 

I think we have to be careful about framing GFFA prejudices in a real-world "progress" narrative, because unlike Trek it's not our future--there are more pertinent reasons to do or not do something than just whether it's a plausible evolution of present-day Earth. I used to wonder if it would make sense, for example, to see a character in a wheelchair when we know for a fact that medical technology would render them unnecessary--but now I see that it's less about IU plausibility (though it does open up interesting conversations about class and accessibility), than about letting the full spectrum of SW's audience see themselves. It's nice for the GFFA to be an internally consistent universe as much as possible but its higher purpose is as a sort of fictional playground for real people to place themselves into. That's job one--the IU explanations can come after.

 

With the way SW works, you can have tech that replaces wheelchairs but it's unaffordable, unavailable or both.

 

Oh yeah, I totally agree with that -- increasing rep should be happening, and the fact that chronologically it ebbs and flows on the protagonists' side is a pretty minor thing. I was more piggybacking off of the questions about Imperial speciesism and the fact that it also seems to dovetail with implied patriarchal and arguably supremacist leanings in the OT in particular. The fact that they're a bad faction and that their fascism at least feels like it incorporates those aspects into their "badness". I'd guess that it was as simple as Lucas conceiving them as "Space Nazis" and thus a bunch of white dudes fit that bill casting-wise, and it still feels that way -- it's totally impossible for me to imagine Rae Sloane walking into the Death Star conference in ANH and I really DO like to think of those guys as the worst kind of patriarchal and probably racist and everything-else-bad trash around for the story's sake. I guess it's just best to think that Sloane and various other Imperial women and POCs exist elsewhere and they're evil -- and represent an Empire that's evil -- for other reasons.

(I will confess to a personal blind spot to wanting rep among the antagonists because I personally hardly ever identify with the villains and I'd be perfectly fine with them being completely bigoted scum on every level -- but that closes down casting options as well as audience identification opportunities, even if they're ones I don't relate to. I know plenty of people do and they should have that.)

 

Yeah I don't wanna close down any casting options because hey, lots of diverse actors and actresses out there who probably wanna be villains too. Wield that red lightsaber or have a stormtrooper costume on cuz...IDK fun.

@FiveFireRings
Also I guess it just sorta depends on how you watch and view Star Wars....Watch it with a more Out of Universe perspective within the context of which it is made or more a in-universe perspective knowing somewhere Rae Sloane is doing Rae Sloane things and will one day be running the whole place till Snoke comes along.

Although from a In-Universe perspective too it's sorta funny all the little loopholes and retcons they have to fit in for the good guy side as to why in ANH the Rebels are all just a bunch of humans.