Not sure if any of you have ever heard of the Youtuber Just Some Guy, but I recently discovered him and was going through his videos and I came across one that made a point that I have been thinking about for a while.
He was talking about with all the obsession today with diversity/inclusion that the opposite effect will happen and I would have to say it is. I'm black and I'll be 40 next month and whenever I see a black character, author, director being hyped the first thing I think of is "oh great more white man bad material" and the same with female representation. I do feel kind of bad but I know I'm not the only one who is wary of this.
The best solution is to acknowledge that being diverse in and of itself doesn't make something great, and people are still required to do a good job. Sadly today you aren't allowed to criticize anyone unless they are a straight white male which is a shame because good honest criticism can work wonders. For instance in Star Wars Lando is a beloved character because he was a good character.
I remember when the movie Get Out came out and I saw it I was scratching my head as to why the critics thought it was so amazing. To me it was just another white people are bad message. I also got excited when I heard they were doing a New Gods movie but then I saw they were going to have Ava Duvernay direct. It think I'll just buy the source material and read Jack Kirby's vision.
Unfortunately, Social Justice advocates generally explicitly reject meritocracy as discriminatory.
Yes, according to social justice advocates people of colour are genetically incapable of doing good work.
It was an attack on woke white liberals specifically. The same woke white liberals love to self-flagellate so they just kind of let it slide as if they weren't the butt of the joke
Can confirm. I didn't particularly care about race until everyone started banging on about it nonstop. The constant screeching about "straight white mailes" didn't help either.
Same here. I used to just hate all humans equally. Now I hate some slightly more than others.
Same. I'm white, but a woman. I want to have great female characters, sounds freaking awesome. It's not a question if women can be cool or not, we can do great things. I don't need forced, disingenuous, OP bullshit like a teen girl beating up fully grown army men just for lulz.
I would go even so far as to say yes, talk about things in connection with minorities, with women, with gays. But make it interesting! Make it different, give it some new spin instead of whites/man/straight bad and that's it.
Indeed. Now, I liked to call "Kill Bill" "My idea of a chick flick", but come on, you can't just keep throwing wispy girls into fights and expecting it not to get old and silly (like everything else they've ever overdone.)
In Kill Bill she got fucked over more than once. Now not even that is allowed, women aren't allowed to get hurt and make you doubtful even if they win at the end. They have to just win without a single scratch.
This is one of my favorite internet comments.
The problem is that they aren't writing these female characters to be interesting, likeable or relatable. Rather, they are a kind of testimonial to the the writer's commitment to good feminism.
Feminists proclaim that women and men are literal equals, meaning literally the same. It's just the hetero-normative, white-supremacist patriarchy that makes it look like men and women are intrinsically different and, overwhelmingly, have different strengths.
A man and a woman might accomplish the same goal in an action movie context, but they are almost certainly going to do it in a different way. Black Widow is a great example of this in the Marvel movies. She's a fucking bad-ass, and she does not fight like the boys, she fights like a weird little jujitsu-spider-monkey, and the movies are better for it.
There is so much scope for cool concepts and fight choreography that revolve around a smaller, weaker fighter having to out think or out maneuver a bigger stronger opponent. But showing a woman having to compensate for a weakness would imply that women have weaknesses, which they do not #yesallwomen.
This turned into a rant. TL;DR: I agree.
Ah, yes, the ever-proven Galbrush Paradox.
The only situation where I've found complaints against having a flawed female protag tend to be non-existent is when you're given the option to create-a-character and alter their sex and appearance to your liking, and the story is largely built around the protag being a 'they' rather than a he or her, with little deviation between the two paths.
And you can't have a good story, or a decent protag, without tension, and if The Bride hadn't been beat up and fucked over, it would have been a very boring movie.
I mean, the biggest and most consistent complaint about old-school Superman is that he's BORING. You know he's going to win, he had no flaws, moral, physical, or otherwise. A truly perfect guy. And then when they started giving him any old grab bag of abilities, that just made him worse.
But now they expect us to suck up unbeatable, flawless Mary Sues who can't have any chance at even getting a black eye, because it might "glorify" domestic abuse or some bullshit (as if domestic abuse is the only way to legit get a black eye.) Sounds like being forced to use god mode/training wheels on a video game even after you've got the hang of what to do with it ... ie, something no one would ask for or find entertaining, at least not for long after the mere novelty wore off.
This. As soon as one of those characters comes on the screen, I think "Oh great, it's another smug, overpowered Mary Sue that I'm supposed to 'identify' with" and I nope out.
There's such a lack of subtlety and basic storytelling in a lot of things now, that all these "strong female characters" being promoted are really the same exact character being played by different actresses. They're not interesting. They have no hero's journey, because that might be sexist somehow. They barely even have a personality most of the time. They're just the best and hottest and the smartest and snarkiest and all the men around her are useless to highlight how awesome she is.
I can think of a million other things I'd rather be doing than wasting my time watching that shit.
I feel the same way and it's really frustrating. Before I'd see a new film and think "okay, this looks interesting I think I'll watch it". I never gave a thought about black actors or women etc.
Now though, I think the same as you. And they're destroying achievement and quality for everyone; they screw over white guys so why should they bother. And they grovel for blacks or women so why should they put in effort?
Bonus: Often it seems they actively avoid genuinely talented black people, maybe because they're less easily used as props in their sick parade.
Watch Strange Days (1995), think about what they took from us, and get back to me.
Oh, face it, they're setting it up so that "racist" means "white", so when they say they're going to "do something" about "racists", it's not going to alarm the dumb herd too much until it's too late and they're already having their light skin, hair and eye colour selected out of the population by the monophenotypic majority. The wild rats are coming after the domesticated, and they have no problem telling the difference from looks.
(Domestication causes changes in coat and eye colour. Domesticated races always have more phenotypic variety than wild ones.)
The biggest failure of modern media is the refusal to make the character an individual over a trope. Look at the spawn movie in the 90s. Middle class government agent living in the burbs with a wife and kids, but happens to be black. His blackness is not his identity and it allows everyone to see him as an individual despite his appearance. Denzel Washington has always been great in roles like this too, Man on Fire, Fallen, etc all great examples of how skin color does not need to dictate character.
Aye, old-school diversity isn't good enough for them anymore. Why? Because it's easy to forget how "diverse" the cast really is. This struck me while watching Agents of Shield, which I would now say has an old-school diverse cast. Strong white male lead, white female co-lead, mixed bag of everyone else, all of whom are characters I came to enjoy (except that Ward guy. FUCK that guy.) But I have to actively stop and notice "yeah, there's a black guy, and oh, the fast one is Hispanic. Oh, I guess the new Ghost Rider is, too. Huh. No mind, I like this guy better than that drippy Cage dude."
And that kind of sums up your "1980s-90s style" diversity.
But now? Now it's "I AM WOMAN BLACK DEGENERATE DOG-EATING BABY FUCKER FIRST and X-character second", I guess. Kind of like every parody of Soviet entertainment I've ever seen.
Agents of shield was riding the edge of having cringy left messages by still being watchable for a while
I noped out of the current season because they HAD to use the trope of time traveling to earlier 20th century and then complaining about how racist and sexist everything its for two episodes in a row.
But the first 4 seasons were really good (particularly 2 and the first half of 3) and I would recommend them to anyone.
Yes, I noticed that, too, BUT the ending, I found it quite satisfying. FitzSimmons for the win.