#i mostly kept my examples to lgbtq+ because i don't feel comfortable speaking for communities i'm not part of

[lolly-dolli]

It also gives r a t i o n a l s k e p t i c y o u t u b e r s the excuse to say "uuuh forced diversity makes movies bad feminism is cancer uwu"

Bad representation and "forced diversity" have a name. It's called tokenism and we hate it too. A movie isn't automatically a bad movie because the protagonist is a woman or POC or LGBTQ+ or some other minority, it can be bad for a myriad of other reasons--often because it was poorly-written/directed/etc. But tokenism (ie where filmmakers explicitly say/imply that "We're doing such a good job being inclusive" while blatantly ignoring complaints of the group being "represented" about it not really being accurate or the movie playing on harmful stereotypes, it often gives off the impression of "this movie about X minority needs to be inoffensive to and made for an audience presumably mostly made up of the majority group," (Not saying a person in the majority can't accurately write a character of a minority well, but it DOES require an amount of care and research and listening to the group being portrayed).

We're not ungrateful for "representation," we're often angry because Hollywood is blatantly trying to get good boy points and look inclusive when in reality it continues to do no research and show no care about communities they "represent" (looking at you, ScarJo; who is 100% a woman and therefore unfit to play a man who looks nothing like her, which would probably never get off the ground were she casted as a man who were cis unless it were played as a joke). This becomes an even bigger problem when you realize how even with "forced diversity" There's still a pretty big problem in Hollywood with this.

People might argue that they "representation doesn't matter and I don't like gay characters being forced down their throats," for example; but that argument falls pretty flat when you realize that nearly every movie intended for anyone above the age of 12 has a (heterosexual) romantic subplot, regardless if there was reason or room for it in the script. And that isn't to say "all straight relationships are bad because I am snowflake"--there are tons and tons of good ones! But people who aren't straight would kind of like to also be represented.

And you may argue "representation doesn't matter! Can't you just connect to a character who doesn't look/act/love like you?" And not to say this is impossible (it happens all the time), but if this were the case, then maybe we wouldn't have so many anti-SJWs complaining every time a minority is represented on screen (be it tokenism or otherwise), presumably instead of a heterosexual man--these critics often being cisgendered and straight.

And no, being those things doesn't make you racist or evil, but coming from a place of privelage, where the default protagonist often is cis and straight and (a good amount of the time) white means it's possible you feel there's no imbalance representation-wise because you might not have experienced that. The problem lies in people who deny that there's at the very least a very, very, very big difference in representation between groups.

Please try to understand where marginalized people and their allies are coming from when we say this.

IDK this probably made no sense but anyway there's my long-winded poorly-punctuated crytyped SJW queerosexual snowflake feminazi soyboy cuck rant have a pleasant day

“bad representation is better than no representation”