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.
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.
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.