Lit Ignorance is Bias: The Diversity Manifesto

They highlight the chieftan.

 

Yeah, it's not like "the Tuskens" are a single village or something. The ones with a relationship with Freetown are explicitly not Boba's tribe.

 

Right, and what happened to that Tusken village could happen to other Tusken villages, so it might seem like a reasonable story point to have at least some other tribal warbands want to prevent that. In fact, they could even make the point to the people of Freetown that there's no reason to believe the Pykes will only exterminate Tusken settlements - Freetown could be next.

 

I just finished Ronin the other day (AMAZING novel if you haven't had a chance to read it yet), and the core cast for that is really unique compared to most stories. The story follows five characters (and their droid), and of those:

• Three are women, a fourth this non-binary (the Ronin is the only male lead)
• Presumably, by Earth standards most of the cast appears to be of east Asian descent (I mentioned long ago in the Visions thread that I think Kouru is a Sephi, which still sort of fits because they have a strong East Asian cultural influence).
• The character and place names, as well as the descriptions of the art/architecture of the planets the characters go to, are reminiscent of Japan
• The author, of course, is of Japanese descent and intentionally modelled parts of the story off of Japanese myths
• Three of the leads are middle aged and elderly, which plays a strong role in the plot. This is interesting, because we rarely get older characters as leads in Star Wars stories. There are exceptions, especially recently with the Boba Fett show. But for the most part, older characters are there to play side roles, like Han/Leia/Luke in the ST, supporting the next generation. In this novel, the story is largely focused on the struggle of the older generation, from their perspective.

My hope is they offer Emma Mieko Candon another opportunity for a novel. She's absolutely fantastic. Different -- the writing style is definitely a few steps removed from the majority of SW novels to date, and her perspective of the Jedi vs Sith is unique -- but in this case, different is a lot of fun. The GFFA is better for it.

 

Found a good article about some...Unfortuantness that happened at the end of Killing EVE
https://edition.cnn.com/2022/04/21/...ur-gays-killing-eve-lgbt-trope-cec/index.html

But I found this good quote from it.

 

Killing Eve s1 - Kind of interesting and intriguing.

Killing Eve s2 ep 1 - went off the rails, into a yawning chasm and that was that.

 

We'll be getting more Pride variant covers this year. Here's one for Bounty Hunters #24, by Jan Bazaldua:

Spoiler

Aphra, Yrica Quell, Rae Slone, Sana Starros, Lando, and Terec and Ceret were the characters highlighted last year. I wonder who they'll highlight this year. I'm hoping for Kho Phon Farrus.

 

Kho's a safe bet but they could probably populate the whole thing just with THR characters if they wanted.

 

I have a project I'm working on (good of the ways done with it and just need to put in the data for all the characters now that I have them listed) and was wondering if anyone would care to assist. Basically I'm going make a post about the demographics of the NEU main characters and right now need to put down the information for the books/comics/games/TV. Its something I've been thinking about doing for a while and with the end of THR Phase 1 and with June around the corner I thought now would be a great time to do it. If we were doing A New Dawn for example you would take Kanan, Hera, Sloane, and any other main pov characters or antagonist/protagonists in the book. And putting in the age, species, race, home planet, sex/gender, attraction, and job down for each character . (And anything else people think others might be interested in knowing) Once I get everything done I plan to turn it into a graphic with pie charts and bar charts. IF anyone wants to help that would be greatly appreciated and I would make sure to thank you in the write up when I post it to reddit. Just DM me and I'll send you the link.

The methodology for the project has been as follows for picking the characters

>Comics: Only doing the long running series and important minis like Son of Dathomir. Am not doing the Adventures or the one off anthology stuff like Battle Tales. For a character to be used as part of the comic I'm limiting it to two basic requirements. (1) they must be a named character and (2) they must appear or be mentioned in four-five issues as that is the usual length of an arc. Characters that appear in multiple stories (outside of movie characters who will only be counted in the story they are the MC in) will be counted once in each series they come in.
>TV Shows: IMDB for the shows and adding characters who appeared in at least half of the episodes or were the main side character of that episode. For example Frog Lady would be counted becausethe episodes were dedicated to her eggs
>. Books: This one I'm working on. Currently I went through and looked at every character in the book and picked out the main one. But I'm debating on going back and just running through appearances and doing all of the named characters that have more than a single paragraph written about them or aren't just "X-characters family member"

As for when it comes to all the other informaton it looks something like this
Age: If a exact date isn't given then average age range given for what the character is (college student, Captian of a ship, etc)
Species: Easy not needing to be explained
Race: This is where it gets tricky and as a history teacher I could go on a whole spiel about the concept of "race" to begin with. But its the world we live in so we might as well use it. Now for characters that have a live action actor (Diego Luna/Poe), Characters that have been on screen or comic (Aphra), or characters where the author makes it really obvious (I love that a few authors talk about who they fancasted in their head to play the character.) it can actually get specfic. But for everything else it would be white/brown/tan/asian/unkown/etc.
Home planet and Job: Putting these together because they are self explanatory.
Sex/gender: Going with AGAB. If they are presenting as male and using those pronouns and theirs nothing pointing out that they are transmasc or female then they would be assumed to be the sex/gender they appear as
Sexual Attracton: This is one I've went back and forth on because their are a lot of background characters where its never mentioned at all and you could head canon them to be whatever. But so far I have just going on the idea of characters defaulting to heteronormative unless told otherwise because the books are very good at telling us otherwise.

For the "Plots and Age" tab its mainly about looking at each book and seeing who is the POV character for the A plot, who is the POV character for the B plot (or does it even have a B plot, C plot, etc. As it would be interesting to see who the leads are and just how that has been divided over the past few years (Aphra and THR have really been putting their thumb on the scale so far and doing the most)

Here is a link to the view only version if people are interested in seeing what I have so far. If anyone would like to help I'd love to have it. I've gotten over half of the books done already, most of the TV shows, and a comic or two done.

 

And here they are, via SW.com:

Bounty Hunters #24, featuring T’onga and Losha (On Sale June 15) Artist: Jan Bazaldua

Spoiler

Obi-Wan #2, featuring Kho Phon Farrus (On Sale June 22) Artist: Derek Charm

Spoiler

Darth Vader #24, featuring Sabé, Saché & Yané (On Sale June 22) Artist: Kei Zama

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The Mandalorian #1, featuring Vi Moradi (On Sale July 6) Artist: Phil Jimenez

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Star Wars #25, featuring Larma D’Acy & Wrobie Tyce (On Sale July 20) Artist: JJ Kirby

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Han Solo & Chewbacca #4, featuring Lula Talisola & Zeen Mrala (On Sale July 20) Artist: Javier Garrón

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(This one is my favorite of the bunch, because of the poses and relaxed embrace)

Doctor Aphra #22, featuring Doctor Aphra (On Sale July 27) Artist: Paulina Ganucheau

Spoiler

 

So, this happened today on The Owl House.

Spoilers, obviously:

Spoiler

 

Having done a more narrowly-focused version of this project for quite a while (this thread goes back to 2012 and it's the third one) my main piece of advice would be to make sure you're very, very comfortable with whatever lines you decide to draw--canon vs. actor ages, assumed races, orientations, etc--because the reality is very, very murky and if your long-term goal is to actually visualize this data and draw conclusions from it consistency is going to be vital. You don't want to be halfway done and then have to go back through hundreds of characters because you changed your mind--as I did once I decided to track gender parity as a separate metric from overall diversity. While the OP of this thread (and the older ones) are mostly concerned with Legends I would recommend looking them over to see some of the calls I found myself having to make early on--and the types of early mistakes and critiques you're likely to come across

My canon research, on the other hand, is primarily contained in the Minority Report series on my blog if you're interested in seeing what I ended up with and how I got there. I mostly moved on after the ST ended, though, so it's nice to hear someone else is going to keep paying attention to this stuff--good luck, and I look forward to seeing what you come up with!

ETA: one other thing--in terms of gender identity and sexual orientation I can't recommend WookieeProject: Pride enough. Those can be some of the hardest calls to make and you won't find a more thorough and diverse range of input than you will there. Check this out!

 

A Survey of Character Diversity in Star Wars Canon: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1QTE6YYZziDS4wi6aYG5JnIi902oTSBgH/view?usp=sharing Here is the link if anyone wants to read it. I finally finished the project. Longest SW project I've ever done.

 

I think this is the longest project I have undertaken. Longer even than the super weapon or jedi survivor project. I'm glad to be done with it and I found out some interesting stats along the way. ~~star wars still belongs to straight white men YTbers can relax~~ While Straight/White/Male is still the main group of characters and main characters that number is being quickly evened out by Female and POC characters and much more slowly by LGBT characters.

The majority of books were either male with Female pov with Female POV books taking second and third place.

Their were more asian characters than I thought which I liked. And the most surprising thing was that TV/Games had the lowest numbers of LGBT or female characters. And POC as well if all the Clone's weren't Maori.

 

Some interesting results here! Do you have breakdowns of the specific characters you studied? In particular I'd be interested in knowing how you went about calling the races of book characters--lots of people are just described as "brown" or "tan", so that I get, but you've got a fair amount specifically identified as Asian, SE Asian, and Hispanic and I'm curious how you arrived there. A bunch of them I'd guess are people like Panaka or Bail who have a real actor associated with them, but it's 50+ characters overall and it doesn't seem like that would get you there.

 

So I've fallen behind the last three odd years on the EU.
I'd love to hear about what books and comics have had LGBT+ characters, especially queer men. I love my queer sisters but I'm more aware of high profile queer female characters from Doctor Aphra and the female couple in Andor, but I haven't heard much of anything on prominent queer men since Sinjir in the Aftermath trilogy.

 

In terms of highly visible and/or POV characters, some that come to mind are Just Lucky and Ariole from Aphra, Leox Gyasi and Cohmac Vitus from The High Republic, Wyl Lark from Alphabet Squadron, and Orka and Flix from the Resistance animated series. There's been a (relative) boom of nonbinary characters too, who naturally aren't women or men.

 

Thanks for the quick reply. Those are all series I'm interested in. I had been caught up with the Aphra comic two reboots back before those characters were added.

 

And I refuse to believe Poe never slept with another guy.

 

Dusting off this thread to give a recommendation: Burn it Down, a new book by journalist Maureen Ryan, is dedicated to exposing, interrogating, and suggesting how to reform all of Hollywood's outdated, exclusive, and abusive power structures. It deals with a lot of the topics that have informed this thread over the past eleven years: the under-representation of historically excluded groups in writers' rooms and executive positions, the tendency to focus TV narratives on white characters at the expense of BIPOC, the old boys' club mentality that shuts out voices which dare to offer different and unique perspectives, etc.

It calls for change, it posits that things don't have to be the way they are simply because they always have been that way, and it highlights refreshing counterexamples of writers' rooms that decidedly don't play by those old rules yet still produce great art. You may have seen an excerpt from it about the making of Lost that Vanity Fair published a few weeks back. If it piques your interest, give it a buy. I finished it on my Kindle a few days ago and want to spread the good word.

 

I'm sorry what

 

Apologies if this is violating forum rules, but very disappointed in a couple of posters in the Wookieepedia thread right now. I just... honestly do not understand what it is about trans issues that sets some people off so badly.

 

Hmm? <scans the thread> Oh.

 

Yeah, those posts stung to read. Thank you to everyone who spoke up, though!