Let's Talk About "Representation" · 3:14pm Jun 4th, 2018
Hoo boy. This one might get heavy. Then again the only time things get heavy for me is if I blog about a story I don't like by a popular author who isn't Kudzuhaiku, so maybe not. I'm still preparing for [the discourse] because it is omnipresent and the source of all that is evil on the internet.
Okay so I wish I had prepared for this by being a detective and tracking down the origins of the current online "debate"1 surrounding "representation"2. Unfortunately I am busy, lazy, and also somewhat less interested in how we got to this point and more interested in talking about what representation is, what it is not, why people want it, and why objecting to it has become a lazy shorthand for "I'm a dickweed" (and also how to avoid looking like one).
First off, what even is "representation" and why do people want it?
At first blush the answer seems obvious. "Representation" is, well, just that. It's when a group, culture, subculture or idea is represented in popular media of any kind. While this answer is clear and straightforward, it also deviates a bit from how the word has come to be used, particularly in social-justice-now3 or the rest of the people driving discussion on the internet. "Representation" has become a synonym for positive representation, itself a thorny and un-intuitive term whose meaning gets confused a lot even by people who advocate for it. Fortunately for the internet, I am the arbiter of [TRUTH] and [DISCOURSE] and am thus uniquely qualified to explain these topics.4
Positive representation is an idea that gets confused partially because of the name. It doesn't necessarily mean that individual characters are "positive" role models or individuals, for instance. Rather, it's about representations of a race, people group, culture, subculture, or idea that work to humanize what they represent. Note that I used the word "humanize" and not "lionize" here, more on that some other time. Positive representation seeks to take what it represents and portray it as close to what that thing is in reality as possible, without the use of caricature or lazy stereotyping.
This sounds really easy until you remember that real life is hard and people are super complicated. Also that this discussion happens in nerd circles a lot, which means this conversation is happening not just about fiction taking place in the real world, but also stories set in realms of fantasy and science fiction that do not correspond to our world. As a result, representation is not always straightforward.
For example, let's look at two attempts at "representation" from popular culture: The film X-Men 2's take on mutants, and the aetherborn of the Magic: The Gathering setting of Kaladesh.
X-Men 2 attempts representation of queer teenagers through the use of "coding", a practice that's been around in Hollywood since the very early days of film in order to communicate details about character and plot that were literally illegal to declare outright because of draconian censorship laws. Coding involves using subtext to link ideas and characters together in the mind of your audience, which is useful not just for getting around censorship laws but also for making your story's themes and symbolism more obvious. In the case of X-2, the film includes scenes that deliberately try to link the idea of the government's attempts to regulate and monitor mutants - humans born with extraordinary superpowers - with real-world prejudice against gay people. The film tries to "represent" struggles faced by real people, in other words.
Leaving aside how successful this representation-by-proxy was in the individual case of X-2 (it wasn't, but that's more the bad metaphor's fault than anything else), could it ever have been? In other words if the goal was to represent a struggle, situation, or group of real people accurately, could it have been done by taking a real thing and grafting it to a fictional concept or setting? After all, if the goal is to humanize a real thing, it seems odd to both not explicitly refer to that real thing and to fictionalize it heavily.
As an answer to that, let's look at the aetherborn. The aetherborn are Magic's first (and to date, only) humanoid race of non-binary characters. They are elementals formed from the process of refining aether, and as a result typically have short lifespans of ten years or less. This leads to them having a tendency to live in the moment and embrace short-term pleasure, with many who wish to extend their lifespans or simply acquire wealth getting involved with criminal activity in some capacity. All aetherborn are non-binary, meaning they eschew pronouns like "he" or "she" and more specifically prefer "they/them".
As a direct representation of nonbinary human beings, the aetherborn aren't "successful". After all, real nonbinary people aren't elementals with a short lifespan, they're human beings. It also feels a bit like cheating to call them "representations" when every aetherborn is non-binary, vs. non-binary human beings living in the midst of other human beings who do fit into the gender binary more comfortably. On that level, the representation has failed.
Or has it? Aetherborn were received positively by queer and non-binary players in the community for the most part, and even those who criticized them felt like they were a good thing. The reason they were so positively received has to do with the fact that as a concept, the aetherborn make Magic as a whole more inclusive. The setting doesn't feel like it was exclusively crafted for a particular majority group's needs in mind, but like a wider setting that can and will include people who aren't part of that arbitrary group. It also helps that live fast/die young is a concept that feels a little too close to home, not just for non-binary people but for queer people in general.5
Alright so positive representation, or just "representation" put forward as a goal, is a movement within media and fiction - particularly pop media intended for wide distribution - to include depictions of minority groups, cultures, subcultures, et. al. that seek to humanize the aforementioned either by depicting them in a way that corresponds well to the real world, or by making them feel included within a broader fictional setting and including themes that are resonant for them.
God just typing that felt like a mess. No wonder people argue about this all the time.
And I've been focusing here on queer/gender representation in my examples. When you start talking about race, culture, or religion, things get even more complicated. With queer representation, the big stumbling block is whether or not you're turning your queer characters into stereotypes, jokes, or victims with no agency - roles we've occupied in fiction basically our entire lives and which we're exhausted by. Depicting a real-world culture or even heavily borrowing from it means having to deal with the legacy of cultural appropriation and colonialism which, hoo boy, that's-
Yeah I'm not even touching that. Look, Lindsay Ellis made this video essay about Pocahontas not so long ago and it's a good starting point for having a good conversation about cultural appropriation, colonialism, representation, etc. For our purposes the takeaway is that not all cultural appropriation is inherently evil, but some kinds - particularly colonizing cultures (usually badly) depicting the cultures of people impacted by that colonizing - are usually a thing you want to avoid.6
Which leads us to part two of this fever dream ramble of an essay I'm attempting: Who even wants representation?
Well, obviously the people who benefit most from representation in mass media are people who don't typically get to see themselves in it. This includes ethnic minorities, social minorities, and ideological minorities (primarily religious, occasionally political). The recent discourse and push for representation is a result of large groups of those people becoming allies and working together towards common goals. The problems faced by queer people and people suffering from mental illnesses aren't identical, for example, but both groups benefit from a world that's concerned with humanizing social minorities in mass media.
The people who object to representation, then, it follows, must be people who don't share those goals. That's not to say that they're the same thing as bigots - you see a lot of "classical liberal" types moaning about representation, etc. - but they tend to be individuals who don't get a direct, tangible benefit from a movement that seeks to make pop culture a force for humanization of minority groups.
The problem for these people is that objecting to the humanization of a minority group isn't a good look for anyone - these days even explicit hate groups use doubletalk and frame their objections around goals that normal people find more compelling than "screw the fags". Thus, even people who have less- than-savory reasons for objecting to representation tend to frame themselves as being opposed not to representation as a concept, but to the movement that pushes for it.
There's two major flavors of this kind of objection you're likely to run into, and unfortunately both have become the language of crypto-bigots: "Representation isn't realistic", and "are you saying you're not allowed to write [insert thing here] unless you're also [insert thing here]?"
The "representation isn't realistic" crowd are probably the most laughable even when they aren't crypto-bigots, because more often than not the objection is stupid on its face. If someone includes lesbian pirates in their fantasy movie about steampunk giant robots searching for Atlantis or their fantasy novel about an Arthurian order of knights questing for the Grail, their priorities regarding realism are screwed up. This kind of objection generally isn't worth even dignifying with a response.
The second objection, which I should really devote an entire essay to because it's bothered me ever since I've encountered it, is a bit more insidious because it plays off the values that lead to people pushing for representation. Remember, the goal of better representation is creating an environment where inclusiveness and humanization of minorities is the norm. An objection to telling people what they can and can't write about not only appeals to the liberal value of free speech, it also appeals to the desire for inclusiveness.
The "are you saying only X people can write about X?" objection most often is given not as a criticism to representation itself, but to crtiicisms of poor representation or explanations of why people shouldn't try to write about certain topics. See the comments of this essay by Mr. Numbers for examples. These objections become hard to parse because they're technically neutral towards representation, but they're neutral in the way that "concerns about property value" or "criminalizing marijuana" are "neutral" policies for racial minorities in the United States. The person making the objection might have legitimate concerns. They might also be a crypto-bigot using legitimate concerns to make their bigotry more palatable. It's really hard to tell if you don't already know the person in question.
In responding to the "can only X people write about X" the standard response is "of course that's not what we mean". But sometimes it is! Part of the goal of representation is giving communities of minorities more agency in how they're depicted in media, after all. That said, writing isn't the only form of agency there is. Criticism and response is itself a form of agency. If you write a depiction of fantasy native americans and find yourself getting a lot of criticism from the Sioux, Navajo, or Blackfoot nations (or appearing in a documentary by Neil Young, your response should probably not be to angrily defend your creative decisions but to admit that they probably know better than you what positive representation looks like for their community.
There's a third objection to representation that I encounter a lot online, and it's even more insidious than the last one I've gone over. I'm not sure if it has a name, so I'm going to call it the bait-and-switch. It's particularly insidious because, like "can only X people write about X" it's designed to appeal to the values of liberal critics who support representation. Unlike "can X write about X", the bait-and-switch is designed to get them angry - at the wrong people.
Here's how the bait-and-switch works: some form of popular media includes women or minorities in a larger role than we typically see in pop media. Say, a big-name blockbuster genre film with an all-female or majority female cast. The project is flawed in some way: maybe the writing isn't solid, or the production design is bad, or the acting is uneven, or the director isn't very good. Whatever the specifics of this abstract film that is in no way the recent remake of Ghostbusters and not abstract at all, the bait-and-switch seizes on its buzz and capitalizes on it.
First, the bait: deliver legitimate criticisms of the film, but include just enough objections to its, say, girl-power messaging that social-justice-now types take notice. Then wait for them to argue with you. Once you've done that, you can switch your criticism, arguing that this film is what the social-justice-now types always wanted, that their movement is defending trash art, and that they are overreacting to your obvious legitimate criticism. Proponents of bait-and-switch are aided by the fact that social-justice-now types were probably receptive to what the movie was trying to do anyway, and will thus be more likely to overlook its flaws than a general audience.
The trick here is that the bait and switch has taken criticism of a single piece film and turned it into evidence that a movement is flawed and bad. The neutral objections - "the film has bad acting and writing" - become inextricably linked with objections to the movie's positive achivement of representation. Likewise, the negative elements of the film become associated with people who push for representation whenever they defend the film from people objecting to its representation. It becomes basically impossible for ordinary people to criticize the film without being mistaken for crypto-bigots, and for social-justice-now types to appreciate the film without looking like their movement is defending bad art.
So how do we deal with this? If the discussion of representation on the internet is dominated by reactionary young people who will overlook a crap movie's crap-ness if bigots object to it on one side and crypto-bigots using legitimate criticism to disguise their bigotry on the other, how is conversation even possible?
The knee-jerk reaction is to complain that both of the groups I've just mentioned are equally bad and ruining criticism, but that's not true. The crypto-bigots are by far the bigger problem, since they make the act of having a neutral criticism of media associated with being a reactionary crypto-bigot. That's why the best criticisms of positive-representation media explicitly repudiate crypto-bigot attitudes and show solidarity with people who have goals of positive representation. Yes, it's a bit annoying that you have to take a side in an ideological debate to even begin to criticize media now, but welcome to the internet, the center cannot hold and neutrality is the refuge of cowards and fools.
I was planning to end on a hopeful note, but honestly fuck crypto-bigotry and crypto-fascism they've ruined my life and I hate everything.
1Does something count as a debate if it's really a farce?
2Scare quotes intended to show the contempt a certain percentage of the internet has for the concept, not my own.
3There, I've got a term for circles like this that doesn't rely on "SJW" or "Tumblrite", descriptions pushed and co-opted by people who have axes to grind with the concept of social justice. You can now talk about people without demeaning them or buying into the rhetoric used by 4channers and neo-nazis. You're welcome.
4Narrator: "She was not any of these things".
5We're only just now entering a period where pop culture is accepting us as human beings who aren't punchlines. Depending on where you live, how old you are, and what your family is like, being non-binary openly can drastically reduce your life expectancy.
6"Usually" because, as with almost anything in art, exceptions exist to prove the rule. Also "usually" because chances are if you think you are the One Person who can get away with it, you probably can't.
So ... giant asteroid 2018???
Yeah, I've recently been writing an essay on something similar. Not with regarding representation, but regarding the "PC Culture" boogeyman used by the bigots and would-be fascists to bludgeon minority voices into silence.
On the "Only X should write about X" argument, I of course don't hold it to be true. (I actually think that people trying to write from the POV of a different life than their own is a very valuable experience for the writers, and I'm generally in favor of that kind of thing.) However, when I'm reading a story about a subgroup I'm part of, there's a kind of uncomfortable uncanny valley effect when it's somebody who doesn't know what they're talking about. Like, it's recognizable, and yet subtly wrong. Lived in experience tends to result in better stories, and there are some things you're not going to get right unless you've been there and done that, that's just kinda how it is.
The most important thing I got from this is that we need more lesbian pirates in fiction.
Oh boy, representation.
I think about representation a lot. Mostly, I think about how it's a double-edged sword. We unequivocally need more of it, but the people who clamor the hardest for it ("social justice now", I like it) will never be satisfied if you attempt it.
As with all things sushi J, I in some ways can't blame these people. If all they've known is personal hardship backed up by seeing themselves either reflected in media either as jokes, villains or not at all, then yeah, maybe it's understandable they're not going to appreciate a piece of art where the characters are queer, non-white, you name it, and nuanced and realistic characters. Which shoehorns creators -- ironically, even creators who are in the same "want representation of my own group now" boat -- into writing one kind of story (non-representational, or sterile and happy) or facing tumultuous backlash. See also: Rebecca Sugar.
Ultimately, defending bad art is less important than defending a person's right to be a person. But at the same time, you wish some of these people would just grow up. <.< I try not to let this fear prevent me from helping out. I try and do research. I try talking to people, although people are scary and I hate talking. D: I try and have more than one character from a group, just to show that whatever horrid flaw a character has, it's not coming from some perceived shortcoming of whatever group they're part of. (This is not the best solution.) I will represent as many people, as often as I can.
But I also really hate being yelled at more than anything. :(
All you can ask from someone is to do better than they did yesterday, but when you meet them for the first time, it's hard to tell how far they've come.
Lesbian space pirates need more representation.
Gamergate was when I first became aware of cryto-bigotry. Ever since then whenever I see these types of people trying to "trigger" others just to make them look stupid, I can't help but feel completely disgusted by them, regardless of their intentions.
Just fuck them
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That's one reason why I like writing about ponies. When your characters are talking cartoon horsies, it gives a certain amount of plausible deniability. You then have breathing space try to come up with a satisfyingly varied fictional experience without being held accountable for whether you have spent months or years becoming intimately familiar with the particular cultural traits of whichever human groups the characters remind the critic the most of.
I don't know how much real writers get such criticism -- but I think I would be a less comfortable with writing characters-who-are-not-like-me if there was a risk I'd have to answer to the real world for how accurately I'd mimicked it.
Good points all. Do in some sense need to wonder exactly what the desired alternative to (positive/realistic) representation is--leaving aside the cases where there is an identifiable zero-sum aspect that goes beyond [generic character/starring role] could have been a straight white male. Loving stereotypes that much? Wanting inaccurate depictions? Just imagining X doesn't exist? Kind of thing where it's difficult to imagine a good answer.
Too bad we live in a world where GIFT is shown to hold most of the time, and actual anonymity may not be as important as it once was. Wish some level of empathy, perspective, and a decent introduction to logic and rhetoric were requirements for public (or even internet) debate, but then, why stop there? Aaaaannnd now I've devolved into the original form of ponyblogging. :|
It's a good term. Very descriptive. Feels... balanced in the degree of positivity/negativity being invoked.
So where's the pool for how long before 4chan starts using the term and we have to find another one?
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Best I can figure, what they want is for spaces that primarily market to white males to continue to do so, and for criticism of that practice to vanish. It's not that they want zero positive representation, they just want it to happen in predefined spaces that don't make them feel guilty for indulging in things that aren't 100% positive. It's a kind of puritanical view of entertainment in and of itself, and makes me wonder if the "SJWs coming for your games/comics/whatever" isn't at least a little bit projected.
It'd be a sad goal if it weren't for the fact that having critical conversations about pop media is basically impossible at this point.
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And that would be completely fine were all those spaces already niche (I dunno, the equivalent of White-BET or Boystown or something), but my perception of the issue is that a big part of "spaces that primarily market to white males" is most or all of the largest, best space and platforms. It's one thing to say you need someplace to yourself; it's another to say it needs to be the space that, by virtue of being the broad mass market, basically everyone is primarily exposed to by default.
I'd say that the single most important skill you can have as a writer is to have empathy.
A lot of the problem with representation is that an awful lot of people lack it. They can't write people who aren't like them, because they lack empathy.
And sadly, a lot of the public struggles to even empathize with people who aren't like them.
"People need role models who look like them" means "These people are such monsters who can't recognize people of other races, genders, or sexual orientations as people worth emulating."
I often hear people ask questions like "How do you write a character of a different gender?" or "How do you write a character of a different sexual orientation?", which always feel really hard to answer, not because there aren't differences, but because the fundamental basis of the question feels off.
If you, at the very least, depict them as people, then think about ways in which their Xness would affect them, you will, even if you don't create a "real" person, at least create a person, and they can at least be understandable, even if they're not quite right.
But people struggle with even that much, and think that somehow, having a vagina or being gay means that they're somehow different in ways that lead to them being weird 2D stereotypes.
...
The ability to empathize with people is an important skill to cultivate in people, and a lot of people have very poor senses of empathy. They genuinely cannot imagine being people who are very different from themselves. They cannot put themselves in the shoes of other people.
Helping them to empathize with people who aren't like them is, theoretically, a good thing.
But a lot of people don't like that idea one bit, because it means that they will have to empathize with their enemies.
About 40% of Americans support Donald Trump. Should we encourage people to empathize with them?
Over half of the Middle East supports sharia law. Should we encourage people to empathize with them?
If you actually depict people who they dislike in a positive light, or at the very least, as people, they might have to recognize that they have a point about some things, or that you didn't actually understand them at all, and even if their views are flawed, you might recognize by viewing yourself through their eyes that some of your own views are flawed, too.
People really don't like that. And most people won't subject themselves to it, won't even try. It's repugnant to them.
How about directly monstrous people?
Should we help people empathize with people like Donald Trump?
Vladimir Putin?
Timothy McVeigh?
Osama Bin Laden?
King Leopold II?
Adolf Hitler?
Stalin?
Mao?
Pol Pot?
The Kardashians!?
Where does it end?
It's a double-edged sword. Because a lot of people, when they come to understand that someone like Adolf Hitler had actual understandable motives, won't see him as being all that evil. Draco in Leather Pants is a trope for a reason.
But the fact that he was a person doesn't mean he was any less of a monster.
I feel like the best thing I've ever seen in dealing with bigotry was Zootopia. Everyone was a funny cartoon animal, but the bigotry in that had multiple axes (big vs small, predators vs prey species), but they didn't directly map onto any real-world stereotype. As a result, it was much better at getting past people's defenses and both showing how stereotypes come to exist, how they can often be correct even, but how you also have to move beyond them and see people for who they really are, not just as being of various groups.
The fact that they didn't directly "represent" anything, I thought, made it easier to get the point across about the underlying message of acceptance.
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Wow. I was waiting for this hot take, and I'm not shocked at who's delivering it.
The issue isn't "we can't empathize with people who don't look like us". That's never been the problem. The issue is that we have no one who does. You can't imagine what that's like until you've lived realizing you'll never get to be a part of the wider imagination of people. Representation isn't just to see yourself in fiction, it's to know that you have a place in the larger imagination of human beings.
I can identify with straight white dudes on film all the time. And cis women. And gay men and bears and ponies and dragons and aetherborn and sentient fucking mecha and who knows what else. I don't want representation because I find it literally impossible to empathize with people who aren't me or I can't enjoy stories about people who aren't like me, I want representation because there aren't many stories about people like me, and I want to see them.
Please don't be a tool.
Um, I feel like wanting more stories where the gay woman doesn't spend the entire run as a sad victim is in no way equivalent to asking for stories about learning to sympathize with Adolf Hitler.
Like, what is this, false equivalence night at the Ritz? Are you going for a heavyweight title of internet troll here? Or are you just that bad at parsing this shit?
Please step up your game or get out if this is all you can offer to discussion.
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There is no "the" problem. Representation is not a single problem. It is a number of problems.
And one of the problems is that many people are bigots, and lack empathy. And empathizing with characters is an important part of connecting with them.
Have you ever searched for we need role models who look like us? Or maybe need more black role models?
I see people complaining about this on a regular basis. Some of these are phrased in pretty negative ways, like black boys need role models, not rappers. But even articles like there's a role model gap for black men and we need to talk about it are troubling, because the writer - a black man! - takes it as a given that the reason why he didn't have any adult role models when he was growing up was because there weren't any black men for him to look up to.
That's some hardcore casual racism right there. And this is coming from someone who went to Yale. Like, seriously. It'd be like saying that you don't have any, I dunno, astrophysicists to look up to because one looks like this and the other one looks like this.
It'd be fucking weird.
And yet, this article, and many others like it, exist, and even more articles about how people need role models who look like them exist. Black role models. Hispanic role models. Female role models.
I hear people suggesting that they didn't have role models because they were (insert group here), and that (insert group here) needs more role models. But the implication is that in their mind only members of (insert group here) can be role models to them.
And the reason why this happens is because they are bigots.
One of the reasons why stories about bunnies and foxes or purple ponies or whatever can reach people is that they don't map to their actual human experiences and, thus, people can care about them without being all "They don't look like me" because seriously, that's how some people think. It's one of the reasons why we have problems in society.
And there are people who can't even do that kind of abstraction.
There's even milder forms that I would hesitate to call "bigotry". and yet which still negatively affect representation. Consider romance stories.
I'm straight, but I don't have any problem empathizing with people in homosexual relationships. I can read romance stories about gay or lesbian couples, and they can be cute. Guy on guy porn doesn't do anything for me, but a story about relationships I can care about as long as the characters are interesting, just like any other story.
But there's a lot of straight people who don't get anything out of stories about gay or lesbian couples.
And there's gay people, too, who don't get anything out of straight romance stories.
Straight guys generally "get" lesbians and straight girls generally "get" gays, but even those aren't hard and fast rules - there's definitely guys who can't get into a lesbian romance at all, or girls who can't get into guy on guy, because they self-insert into such things and don't have anyone to map themselves onto. It's where you get weird questions like "Who's the boy?" and "Who's the girl?" from, which... okay, are absolutely hilarious sometimes, but people really don't get it.
And while there's nothing wrong with people not liking such things, it does suggest that there is some sort of... lack of ability to relate to these things in a way that makes them appealing to them for some people.
This is a huge problem as far as representation goes, and people who can't relate to things genuinely do have reason to complain - they really are losing out. Their complaint isn't "Other people are getting stuff," it is "I'm not getting stuff."
People are often self-centered, and a lot of complaints about representation are fundamentally based on "I am losing out" rather than "other people are getting stuff".
Not understanding this is a fundamental failing of many people who talk about representation.
This is why, if you ever want to promote representation, you should never, ever fucking say "We need fewer stories about X", where X is whatever group. Beyond being a pretty obviously bigoted statement, it also means that people who enjoy X are losing out, and they will be upset.
This is why additive representation is so important - not taking away from what exists, but adding new things. This sort of framing is important, because it means that existing audiences won't feel harmed, because, hey, they're still getting all their stuff, and maybe some new stuff, too.
No, but the way you're quoting my post suggests that you are.
Let me quote the bit you cut off at the start of that:
Representation in the way being pushed for by social activists has the purpose of influencing people into changing their views about things or empathizing more or less with some group.
Obviously, if you don't feel that people need to change their views of said group, or if you feel that the presentation of people is unfair or untrue, either being too flattering or presenting them in a bad light, you're going to complain.
Let's not pretend like they're actually trying to build up people's empathy in general here, because they're not. The goal is to influence people in favor of specific groups. When you view it through that lens, it is a lot more cynical - and also, a lot easier for people to justify opposing it.
No one likes being manipulated, after all.
Hell, your final paragraph can be summarized as "To be critical of stuff, you should shill for my social movement to prove you're not secretly a bigot."
It is no surprise that many people react negatively to that framing, and with good reason. It's not so different from "Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists."
People aren't pushing for empathy in general. They're pushing for empathy for them.
It's hardly surprising that people who aren't part of that "them" might not be on board with that, especially if they are part of a group that feels marginalized or underrepresented itself. And if you're familiar with opinion polling, many Trump voters feel themselves to be targets of oppression and discrimination.
When they see some upper-middle class college kid whining about how no one understands their non-binary gender orientation and expecting sympathy for it, while they're worried about how they're going to make their mortgage payment next month while hearing people sneering about how they're a bunch of uneducated bigots on TV, that's very much a First World Problem to them, and they're less than sympathetic.
...
I think David Wong put it, if not "best", at least most amusingly:
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And that's the exact moment you revealed what a tool you are.
Look, wanting to see yourself reflected in fiction doesn't make you a bigot. I want that. It's why I wrote a self-parody into a kinky mystery story - that's my jam, and it's something I wanted, so I did it. That's not being a bigot, that's being a human being. Wanting to see more people who look like you, wanting more heroes who look like you, who act like you, who understand your problems, that's not bigoted. That's wanting more. What's bigoted is wanting that to the exclusion of all other kinds of heroes.
Like my dude you are either willfully dense or an awful human being, and at this point I don't care which it is. You're playing literal racist talking points right now. I don't care particularly if you're actually racist or not, to be clear. I'm just saying that repeating shitty arguments and blowing up your post to wall-of-text levels to deliver them either because you genuinely believe these things or because you're hoping nobody notices how silly your premise is? That's not a good look for you.
I repeat what I said before: If this is what you have to bring to the table, then get out.
Incidentally, assuming you are in fact arguing in good faith, can I at least interest you in admitting that since the bulk of my post is a discussion of representation as a concept and movement rather than the specific argument of "we need more X role models in fiction", it's hardly appropriate to assume that I'm setting this up as a forum to discuss your spicy hot take on that?
Actually, it was more appropriately "make sure you don't become an unintentional or useful mouthpiece for an opposition movement", but hey who's counting.
My dude, welcome to human fucking nature. Yes. It's building sympathy towards groups.
So?
Birth of a Nation was a love letter to prop up the Ku Klux Klan, and yes, it used techniques semi-similar to this (if you squint, representation is different than lionization but more on that in a future post). It also pioneered cinematic tools that are pretty neutral and can be used to do other, better things. Going "this is bad because you can use it to make people like Hitler" is rock stupid, because it flat out ignores the larger question of "is making people more sympathetic to group X a bad thing?"
Like, my dude, I appreciate your concern. Actually, no, I don't, because I'm like fifty percent this is concern-trolling and fifty percent you're a tool, and like a hundred percent you don't care. You have nothing to gain from this discussion (unless your goal is to put your spicy hot takes where my audience can see them, in which case fuck you, you have a way bigger platform, do this shit there).
4877638
>TD talking down to others about empathy
u wot mate
4877875 Don't mind him. Someone just neglected to install the new version.
4877638
Gods I wish I could downvote you twice. The experience of "Holy fuck, that's me! That's me! I never get to see me in a movie, but there it is, ME!" means I'm a fucking bigot? WHAT? No. No. NONONONONONONO.
Given that I'm pretty sure you're a straight white male, I could give you a pass on not getting how amazing it is to see "me! omg!" on screen because you've never seen anything but you in 99.8% of the stuff you've watched/played, but calling wanting that bigotry is just the point where I've got the draw a line.
Fuck no. Fuck that. Fuck you.
4878013
There's ten million six foot tall black men in America, but there's only one Barack Obama.
It is who you are, not what, that defines you as a person.
I see more of myself in someone like Twilight Sparkle, a fictitious female purple unicorn, than I see in a lot of real white men.
But there are very, very few characters who are all that much like me; at most, there's elements, but there are always significant differences.
That's not a bad thing, though; I'd be pretty boring as a fictional character. At least until I finish building my giant laser on the Moon.
But I don't read fiction to see myself; I read it to see other things.
4878027
Way to not even address the fucking issue. Oooooooooooo, you're Twilight Sparkle. How nice for you. Along with you being at least somewhat like everything from Ben fucking Hur to Harry Potter. Name me ONE genderqueer mainstream movie character. I know of exactly one EVER, in all of Hollywood for all of its hundred year history.
You have NO idea what you're talking about. You are delighted to see somebody who's you in every detail, while I'm hoping to someday see somebody who's me at all, even a little. You have no sympathy, you have no empathy, you have no understanding, and you called me a bigot for wanting what you already effortlessly have.
Fuck you again. Fuck off.
P.S. Fucking Nobody is saying we should end straight white male stories. We just all would like it if now and again we could see people like us somewhere. Your argument is not only unempathetic, it's an absurd strawman.
4878031
I'm not Twilight Sparkle. I simply am more similar to her than I am to many white males. That's because being a white male is not what defines me as a person.
If what you define yourself by is your race and gender, then the racists and sexists have won.
Who are you, as a person?
That is what matters, more so than the wrapping paper and whether or not you have a penis.
I'm not trying to upset you. There's nothing wrong with wanting to see a variety of character traits. Nothing at all. And that includes ones you share with said character.
But if that is what matters most to you, that does worry me.
Where did I say that?
The point I was making is that when representation is seen as additive rather than subtraction - as a non-zero sum game - people are happier to see it.
Hell, it can be about anything. Go on Reddit's r/games and look at people bitterly proclaiming because Bioware is making Anthem (a looter shooter) that they clearly aren't interested in RPGs anymore forever and THOSE DIRTY DESTINY PEOPLE ARE TO BLAME WHY ARE THEY RUINING EVERYTHING.
If some other random studio had announced the game, people would have been ecstatic. But because it was perceived as being done *instead of* what they wanted, people started flinging poop at the walls.
Are you sure? I thought it did mean "positive role models". That's usually what I think people mean by it... but I'll keep an eye out now for whether I'm just assuming that.
(Your definition grammatically says that positive role models humanize what a race or culture represents. I don't think you meant to say that we can decide what a group of people "represents". My guess is that you meant "a representation of a member of a race etc. that humanize what he or she represents in that story"?)
I think the phrase "crypto-bigot" presumes that people are more consciously aware of their motives than most actually are. But I have a bigger problem with your use of that term...
For that to mean something other than "people who disagree with me shouldn't talk", we would need to have an objective way of discerning "crypto-bigots" from people taking pride in their group or defending their group.
That used to be easier to do. But today, in our polarized environment, people on both sides sees themselves as a victim, as under-represented. People see our politics not as discussion but as war. You said yourself that neutrality is the refuge of cowards and fools. If you believe that, you'll interpret any statement that is, statistically, evidence that its author is on the other team, as something that should be attacked. How is that different from being a "crypto-bigot"?
To people who believe they're engaged in a zero-sum contest, even a purely positive statement about group X is, effectively, an attack on group Y--and any attack on group Y is, effectively, a defense of group X. People who believe they're in a war can't properly be called "bigots", even if they hate the people they regard as their enemy. Their hatred is caused by the structural effects of polarization. Blaming it on prejudice will only make it grow.
4878040
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Holy fuck.
So are you actually saying that the problem is that straight white males aren't being coddled nicely enough and reassured gently enough that they're still in games and these representations of people who aren't exactly like them aren't replacing them?
Because if that is your actual argument, then you're more or less saying that when the Charlottesville protestors were chanting "Jews will not replace us" the problem was on the side of the Jews and not the tiki torch brigade. You know, the Nazis?
And if that's not your argument, if you think the fault lies with the people seeing "A game I might have liked has a black guy/woman/gayperson in it HATE HATE HATE" then why are you bringing it up?
That thing I just quoted there, that you wrote, is a fucking NAZI TALKING POINT. It is a literal argument you get from people who literally visit Stormfront. Why the fuck are you sounding exactly like a Nazi trying to dogwhistle here? Who have you been spending time around? And at what point will minorities be small, quiet, and non-threatening enough to the majority who, by the way rule large portions of the world and already have basically all the power anyway, for you to say it's okay for them to merely exist in media a white guy might see?
Are you arguing that minority representation in games should be kept separate from big, mainstream titles? Game segregation? THAT is your offered solution? Separate but equal, sounds great! Those darkies and homos are just fine, so long as they stay in their own little corner, nice and quiet, where nobody can see them!
4878276
Representation is coddling people compared to other, more blatant methods of social engineering.
We present to them people who they can relate to who are parts of different groups to try and humanize them in their minds. And indeed, it is used as well to tell minorities that they are a part of the greater civilization, that they are one of us. Coddling isn’t inherently bad – we do it for a reason, and that is that it makes people more comfortable and less likely to freak out.
This is much more subtle than other forms of social engineering, but it is done (and is often more successful) for a reason.
It’s often easier to push people towards being less shitty or to appreciate something if you don’t rub their faces in it, because all too often, if you rub their faces in it, they’ll get angry and do the opposite thing, just to spite you. That doesn’t mean that sometimes you don’t have to go out and smash them in the face with a clue bat, but you have to strike the proper balance.
If you want to say “We shouldn’t coddle people”, that’s fine. I lean towards that end of things myself – hence me even having this conversation with you. But that also means you can’t demand to be coddled yourself. Even I get annoyed and uncomfortable at times with how reality actually works, and how people actually behave.
When you don’t coddle people, you upset them far more often, even when you aren’t trying to do so. And that can have negative consequences.
Look at politicians. They generally use a soft hand unless people are setting shit on fire. And even then, you often condemn the behavior of “a handful of criminals and thugs” once you’ve managed to clear the streets of said “handful” of criminals and thugs, which was definitely not hundreds of people.
These are people whose job it is to deal with the public and try to minimize the amount of shit that gets set on fire by angry mobs because of what they said on TV.
The politicians who don't are the Trumps of the world, and don't tend to be very good people, and start riots when they recognize another country's capital city in disputed territory.
4878040
Race and gender etc. are part of who someone is as a person. No shit, they aren't everything, but they're aspects of someone's life that can be pretty salient if they aren't "default." They shape how a person interacts with the world, their social roles, upbringing, and more. Where representation or role models are concerned, it's not just about "this person looks like me," there's an important "this person has a shared lived experience with me" aspect. Or if you prefer, "this character arc is relevant to a key one in my own story."
4878753
I know SPark replied directly to you, but I'd really appreciate if we're keeping this discussion going we do what I requested privately already and go to PMs. Which is as much for your benefit as anyone else's, because nobody needs to see you failing at RealPolitik [TM] this badly.
And also to fail at taking your own advice. ("How to convince this skeptical audience I'm here to argue in good faith... associate a common argument for positive representation with bigotry, then talk about how people are scared of being replaced because they perceive pop culture as a zero sum game, thus validating them! This is sure to result in a calm, even exchange where I don't start by making everyone suspicious of me.")
Like my dude even if you think these things - and I hope you don't and you are just really bad at making points - you really could've stood to workshop this.
I think we're all done here. If I come home from work again today and I find this comment chain turning into a dumpster fire, I will not hesitate to start blowing things up.
4878783
Yeah, I'm fine with taking it to PM if anyone actually wants to continue the discussion. I won't reply to anything else in-thread.