#the fact that representation in media is expected to be perfect and completely unproblematic

[princessmuk]

Here is the most simple problem every human experiences: If you are not familiar with X group, then any individual member of that group must represent the whole.

Your sister likes horses? Well, every girl must like horses then.

You meet someone from a different country that has a strange quirk? Well, everyone from that country must be like that.

Your gay friend is bad at math? Well, every gay person must be bad at math.

Your friend of X race has great skin? Well, every member of that race must have great skin, too.

This happens to everyone. Everyone. Trying to act like it doesn’t happen to you just stops you from examining your biases. And yeah, when you learn more about the world, it can be easy to make assumptions so you can more easily understand and interact with it. Cultural customs, trends, and characteristics are useful.

But with assumption comes bias and prejudice. And assumptions cannot lead you forever.

That is why you need to delve deeper. Expose yourself to different cultures and ways of thinking. Meet people who are different than you. Listen to them. Find media from their cultures, separate the stereotypes from the culture.

One does not represent the whole. Every human being is unique.

[zombieprowl]

Tiktoks and their multiple AI generated batshit stuffs about greek deities that also get reposted as YT shorts, definitely warped the "geneeal knowledge" about many gods. And two I cannot stand are the Ares "was the protector of women" and "Ares ended the age of mythology." And don't get me started on the "babification" of the Aphrodite and Ephaestus marriage where he even gets a glow up to "pretty boy with a mild disability" cause if he needs to be made pretty to justify their love story, I can't even.

Anyway, I think Ares, by his mere dominion was often portrayed much more negatively because popular culture and media teaches us that war = bad. But that same media somehow tells us Athena's take on the same concept is not bad often at the expense of justifying strategic war as somehow being less horrific than "non strategic" war. Both will end up with a body count.

That's not to say I hate Athena and absolutely adore Ares. Both are complex because at the end of the day Greek gods are a myriad of collective "someone said" with both positive and negative aspects and contradictions to make sense of things. Considering, for example, how Ephaestus appears in versions of myths that theoretically predate him and basically he seems to pop up whenever is convenient and it's unclear how that accounts for his birth and age, gods are maleable concepts that come up as needed.

Gods in greek mythology aren't characters in a novel or creative universe. They could behave one way one moment and then in a completely different way the next. If we were to look at the deities in other cultures, we'd find some greek gods mild and vanilla in their most "controversial" actions.

But I digress. The things that do bother me about the whole feminist-juice drinker Ares is that applying the term as we know it and exercise it today to a deity from ages ago is not exactly going to go well because we're applying our modern sensibilities to the anthropomorphic representation of an idea/concept/thing-that-happens. And for his feminist take to fly in today's unrealistic expectations of unproblematicness, the sanitization of the "character" is going to be extreme and often at the expense of vilifying others (like Athena or Ephaestus). And the second One stain shows up, the people who take issue with this will make sure it is known to the world Ares feminist icon isn't so perfect. (Because perfection is totally attainable).

This is one of the reasons Hades got the short end of the stick in popular media until his most recent iterations. Hades was turned into a villanous character (emphasis in the word Character) by merely being the King of the Underworld and then-modern sensibilities making the Underworld the equivalent of a Christian hell, therefore the ruler had to be the equivalent of the devil. (Disney's version actually gives him many atributes that enhance a more demonic appearance)

And likewise we often see Ares depicted as the shitties jock to ever jocked because the bloodthirsty god of war cannot possibly be anything other than a brute because war is bad. Sure, Ares wasn't particularly loved as a god because his dominion was likely seen as necessary if unpleasant. (He'd probably be a lot more popular with Aztecs since warfare was extremely important in the political and religious fields) But like every other deity, he was nuanced and had positive and negative aspects. His having decent relationships to the women in his life doesn't automatically make him a feminist icon by today's standards. Though it doesn't mean he was a certified misogynistic asshole either. The pendulum doesn't have to swing the whole other way.

The whataboutism regarding the fact he had feasts women were forbidden to attend in response to his epithet of being Feasted by women is also kinda meh as if that justifies the misogynistic brutish character are about as Meh as the Protector of mistreated women title.

Ares didn't go down and said "Ok chums, time to feast. Oh and ladies need not attend." The feasts were organized by mortals in his honor and those mortals decided who attended.

His being honored in a feast by women who fought and won a battle was merely a celebration of their victory dedicated to Ares. I guess because they felt their victory was influenced by his aid/favor. This, again, has little to do with him favoring women in some extraordinary capacity, war doesn't necessarily favor men over women or NBs in the battlefield when it comes down to it, whoever stabs the other in the vitals first wins that battle and can choose whether to eat a burger in Ares' honor.

One can choose to hold the belief Ares does look upon the weak and mistreated with hot headed compassion and empowers them with anger and fury to face their circumstances. But that is a personal belief and nothing that should be passed around as a fact about the deity cause, again, they aren't characters with a factual source of "this is how he was 2000%".

Interpretations are not facts. Even I make fun of the whole "Ares and his daddy issues" cause while there is only one source of Zeus telling Ares he's most disliked, I've yet to find anything about Zeus ever showing the littlest bit of parental affection towards Ares (other than agreeing to have him healed and his being his son the only reason why he's not in Tartarus with granpa Kronos). And that is mostly cause I can get away with dumbass videos of Ares singing Linking Park songs.

Then there is the whole "Ares ended the age of mythogy" goddness... no. Let me repeat that one: No. That didn't happen and certaiy not the way Tik tok and YT shorts have popularized in recent years.

Some sources cited that Zeus swallowed Metis because of a prophesized son that would become king of the gods, in other words, repeating the pattern of son defeating and claiming the throne of the father. Yet he went on to have many sons, but Ares is the one born to both him and Hera, his now wife and queen. (Hephaestus and his birth are again a source of headscratches. Was he born before Athena or was he conceived by Hera on her own to spite Zeus for Athena's birth?)

So, going from there, a case could be made that Ares could be the son to overthrow Zeus. Aaaaand that's more or less what DC Comics did. You see, Ares in DC comics is a very powerful being, often times a villanous character cause, again, War incarnate yada yada. But the thing is, he IS powerful and he has even rebranded his dominion to that of Strife because peaceful times meant an absence of large scale war weakens him but strife remains even in peaceful times. Not only that, at some point he kills Hades and claims the throne of the Underworld too.

In the many iterations of the DC Universe and events, there was one time where Wonder Woman asked about why the Olympians had abandoned the world of man, and it was revealed Ares allied himself with other gods (often times the ones depicted as more villanous in modern media such as Sekhmet) from different pantheons and he led them in waging war against the Olympians and won, forcing them from the world of man.

And thus the telephone game of how Ares ended the age of mythology began. Some changes were made to erase the gods of the other pantheons and replaced with some of Ares sons and other supposed allies. And now people are learning that Ares, in defence of humankind, decided to fight the Olympians and force them to stop messing with the human world and ruin their virgins or whatever.

Hades and Ares just can't catch a break from either extreme of the good vs bad gods. No god (other than Hestia probably) was entirely good or bad, and specially not for today's puritanical ways of "unproblematic".

One can enjoy making characterizations of them and adjust them if they want, I mean Lore Olympus and Percy Jackson exist, but getting into the high and mighty "my head cannon is totally a fact" with large amounts of sanitization and therefore vilifying others is like... yeah that's inviting unnecessary trouble.

[comicreliefmorlock]

A Reader’s Guide to Writing: Lesson #2

I... expect to get shot for this. 

-sighs and puts on a helmet- Body shots, fine, but I’m trying to avoid taking a headshot for what I’m about to say. 

The Constant Reader... does not give a fuck about flat, cardboard-cutout “representation.” We just don’t. In fact, it’s downright insulting to your Readers to assume that labeling your character “insert woke points here” will automatically endear them to us. 

(...god I’m going to get in so much trouble for this...)

When I see a book described as “it has two lesbians in it!” or “these characters are transgender!” my immediate and automatic thought is “...okay, but what is the story about? will I give a fuck about these characters?”

And that, right there, is something that can actually carry a weak plot (to a Reader’s mind) or absolutely drag a good plot into “well, I might as well finish reading it.”

Do I give a fuck about your characters?

Now this does not mean your character has to be Wholly Unproblematic or an Adorable Cinnamon Roll, Too Good, Too Pure for This World. 

What it means is “do I respond to your character like they’re fleshed out well enough for my brain to read them as a person?”

For Comparison-- Two Characters:

Here’s an example of what is honestly a really well-written character (in a... very... ugh, look, the pervasive racism makes it terrible to read now and I just kind of wince and groan at it and wince even harder knowing how well it was received) because the character has caused Emotion in a Reader.

Scarlett Fucking O’Hara.

I hate her. I’m not even kidding, I just hate this self-absorbed bitch. She drives me nuts. I’d love to yeet her off a literary cliff and watch her drown. 

...but I consider her a well-written character because she inspires emotion. I react to her. I legitimately read a page of “Gone With the Wind” (*again, I know, I’m sorry, the book’s slimy feel of ‘but... slavery was good!’ is just... horrific) and I want to grab the nearest heavy object and slam it onto her empty skull. She has obvious flaws--and they’re explicitly spelled out in the text--and those flaws totally fuck up her life. Scarlett doesn’t get what she wants because she is her own worst enemy in a lot of ways. And watching her make decisions based on what She Wants and then dealing with the aftermath feels legitimate. It feels pretty real to watch someone make a decision based on a want only to see them struggle with the result OF that decision. Not to mention the moment of realization that came too late, as let’s be fair, hindsight is 20/20 and a lot of us have had that ‘Ohhhhhhhhhhh...’ moment ourselves. 

What Scarlett has a lot of, however, is Emotion. And I don’t mean she has a lot of emotionally wrenching scenes. What I mean is Scarlett is actively driven by or affected by An Emotion at nearly every part of her story, even when that Emotion is just some self-absorbed Glee at how she’s gonna one-up this whole town.

Let me compare my reactions to Miss “I’m So Self-Absorbed I Should Be Taxonomically Classified As A Sponge” O’Hara to a character that I... honestly couldn’t give less than a fuck about, despite having read six whole books she’s the main protagonist of. 

Ayla of “Clan of the Cave Bears” Jean Auel fame. 

In the first novel, Ayla is... actually kind of interesting. A Homo Sapien child found by Neanderthals and raised in their society, there’s a bit that can be read into just how hard it is to fit into a culture and how sometimes that involves more self-repression than is mentally healthy. And in the second novel, “Valley of the Horses,” all the parts with Ayla before her Male Perfection Love Interest shows up are also fairly interesting.

She’s alone, she’s fighting to survive with only her hard-earned skills to carry her. It’s great!

And then... Jondalar arrives and we see her through His Eyes. 

I’m not sure exactly what happened here other than the novels (and Ayla) turn into a constant Display Of How Amazing Ayla Is. Everyone loves her! (And the people that don’t are Obviously Flawed and So Empty Inside.) She can do anything! She invents the needle! Horseback riding! Domesticating dogs! The travois! She’s drop-dead gorgeous, an accomplished healer, wants only to be a Good Wife (it’s a little icky, but considering the time period these books are set in, I give it a pass on that) and is always so confused as to why people seem amazed by her. 

She becomes basically a Perfect Woman and to be honest, all her struggles after that just feel like they’re directly tied to how Perfect She Is. Ayla suddenly doesn’t have An Emotion behind her. She’s just a vessel for everyone’s awe that such a “perfect woman” exists. And it just... turns her completely fuckin’ flat.

What I’ve found after doing a LOT of reading is that a Writer should keep one big thing in mind.

(And this goes triple for stories that tote themselves on the representation platform.)

Emotion--the experience of it, the sharing of it, the looking for validation of it--is one of those defining things that make what we’d call the Human Experience.

People who are looking for representation in media are looking for actual representation. For a Person like them on the screen or page. Maybe you don’t know what it’s like to be a teenager struggling with a realization of sexuality, but you can ask people who do. And you can relate YOURSELF to that on some level. 

Everyone in the world has had a moment where they’re trying to reconcile something about themselves with what the world expects or with what they expect from themselves. You can take that seed, that memory of sitting in your bedroom and listening to the same song on repeat while thinking wistful thoughts of what life could be like if This Was Different or imagining a future where What You Want is accessible, acceptable and within reach. You can find the Emotion and appeal to it.

I know that the experience of being gay or disabled or neurodivergent or trans or a minority is not universal; everyone has a different life, different experiences, different fears, worries, hopes, dreams. 

And I say this in full awareness that someone could very rightly be angry at me for paring off societal issues and cultural problems to make this accessible to writers who may want to write a specific character FIRST and THEN find sensitivity readers to help them refine it*. 

There’s a “but” to the whole “different life” thing. 

Humans have felt the basic range of emotion across the board, across the world, across time, regardless of where or when or who they are. And a Character that makes you Feel is a character that you can give a fuck about. Pare off the labels and start with the tinest, most concentrated idea of who this person is so you can find their emotions to use in the story. Are they a dreamer? A fighter? A creator? An explorer? What Emotion drives them? Hope? Curiosity? Anger? Sorrow? 

Because I personally have seen myself in characters that I have absolutely no surface experience in common with whatsoever, but I responded to the Emotion that drove them because I recognized it. I’d felt it. Maybe what created the Emotion was different (wildly so!) from what created it for me, but I had the Emotion. The character is having the Emotion. 

And that makes me give a fuck about the outcome of their story, whether the personality carrying the Emotion makes me want to cut a bitch (fuck you Scarlett) or see them succeed in every aspect of life.

[*You will want sensitivity readers to refine the character because representation should actually represent and not be A Writer Getting Woke Points.]

[wakraya]

Okay I’m going to try not to actively engage in Lanquecourse this time around. I’ll respond to stuff from time to time I’m sure because hoo boy there is a LOT to unpack, but now that it’s morning, after the shock of everything yesterday, I have a few things to say.

vV Obvious Friendsim Spoilers! Lanque’s Route! Vv

First of all, let me say, I was worried about Lanque, and I was worried about him in many ways. He was one of the most awaited characters, he is trans, there was already discourse about him, basically he was just a ticking time bomb that could disappoint in many, many ways. I worried that the Fandom backlash from last time would make the Writers write him extremely safely, I worried that the writers would try to include something explicit about him being trans that could fall flat with the fans, I worried that if he wasn’t perfect in every way there would be more discourse. But honestly?

What they did for him exceeded any and all expectations of him. They could’ve gone many ways developing him, they could’ve done this in many ways, but what they opted to do was do meta commentary on exactly the things I was worried about him and his route.

I would’ve liked some comment about him being trans, yeah, but what we got was an immensely interesting commentary on Fandom Reaction to Lanque, Fandom Purity, and the general absurdity of the Friendsims and a few Homestuck/Hiveswap themes, while also having genuinely entertaining stuff and character development. 

First of all, the Valid Route. Already at that point the 4th Wall had been shattered to pieces, and we had literally gotten an in-setting 18+ warning. Deciding to not delve into the more crude themes led us to a poetry session with a very kind and gentle Lanque- Now first of all, while this one is OBVIOUSLY a reference to character woobification and purity stuff, I don’t think it’s ALSO 100% untrue. Lanque is stated to be an occasional poet, and while his gentle demeanor makes us empathize with him more here, his poem is long-winded and melodramatic and you can bet your ass Lanque does write that kind of monology stuff. The Flower Crown was fantastic, as many people have pointed out, with stuff like, True Crime Fandom putting it on serial killers and generally downplaying unsavory traits of characters to make them softer and more Fandom-friendly, it becomes a symbol of the softness the route portrays him with. He becomes the ‘perfect baby’ a lot of people seemed to want him to be, 100% unproblematic, and it’s really a fantastic but harmless jab at that kind of stuff. Sure, it’s making fun of it, but it’s also 100% going along with it as a good ending and development for Lynera, honestly. It’s his ‘gentle side’ as the achievement puts it. It’s played up for the route with the purpose of Fandom Commentary, but it’s still part of him.

Lynera too, hoo boy, that moment when you ask her if she likes Lanque and she responds to it like “No! I liked a girl before, it’d be problematic if I did, lol.” A lot of people are salty about this, and I can understand that, but that’s honestly such a raw take against bi erasure and militant pushing of some headcanons by some people. Like, if you headcanon some characters as gay or lesbian and even if you see some attraction as forced heteronormativity and don’t feel they count, that’s a 100% valid take and it’s exactly how I feel about Rose. But also there’s been huge amounts of discourse and, as per usual these days, bullying and death threats loaded from that kind of forceful headcanoning, and having Lynera drop that line instantly killed me. Ultimately, the route ends up in a ‘Valid’ end, and, even with how meta it is and how it toys with these themes, it’s still totally valid to unironically like this route.

But the other one. Oh my stars the other one.

First, starting with Ardata preempting the discourse and laughing about not mentioning the party is too problematic in social media was fucking amazing, and alongside the commentary by Hussie about how talk about controversial topics are part of the experience, it makes me feel less “Oh god why” about this Discourse, and more strongly about how this is... Very much exactly what the Team expected would happen with this route. It’s like, embracing the train wreck.

So let’s cut the chase.

Lanque is sexual and crude and a total asshole. I’ve seen a lot of people confused about the two Lanques and how it seems like another Fozzer thing, but as I mentioned before, the Soft Lanque route is very much meta-commentary. Some of it may be true to his nature, what with him playing with Wanshi and writing poetry, but THIS seems to be the facade to puts on when he’s out partying and seems to embrace more canonically. Casanova, go-getter, pushy, Marvus was apparently written to be ‘that one hookup  you regret’ but honestly Lanque is that 100x times.

He calls out Lynera and makes her cry, he gets uncomfortably grindy with you and offers you drugs, there’s no sugarcoating it, he’s nasty, but also, he does cede when you refuse the drugs, and he does ask you about the kiss and sex. Like, he’s pushy and bad, like Kevin from SU, but he’s also not a scumbag that would force you or trick you. He’s very blatantly there to have sex, and he’s there to have sex because as a Jade he’ll be forced not to once he goes off-planet. 

He’s a lot like Daraya in that aspect, except instead of taking nihilism to protect himself, he’s thotting it up in a big party trying to experience something he’ll be forbidden from soon enough.

And I think that’s the beautiful part of it. He’s very sexual and forward, but there’s a clear reason for it, and in the Good End we see him cede and be like, a bit more chill. He also doesn’t attack Bronya back or get angry with you at any point even if he does tease around a lot. Sexual, but not violently so, and I can really appreciate that.

He’s not trans representation- In the fact that he’s not necessarily someone pleasant most people will project themselves onto and be happy, but maybe that is why I like it so much? Because he’s his character first. I would have loved some allusion to trans stuff, but with the rest of the tone of the Friendsim I’m also kind of glad there wasn’t, because I feel it would’ve only fanned the flames, fallen flat somehow. He’s not trans representation, but he is a trans character. It’s just a character who also happens to be trans, and with how Alternia is about gender and sexuality stuff, it also makes sense that there wouldn’t be much of a fuss about it?

He’s also the only confirmed trans guy, yeah, but that doesn’t mean he’s the only trans character. After all, as I mentioned before, Stelsa is Jewish because Cohen didn’t want just Xultan Matzos to be Jewish. That pretty much guarantees there are more characters that are trans we just have not been told about. I do have a big headcanon that Xefros is trans, and if that does turn out to be canon, the main Troll of Hiveswap would be great trans rep! I’d love that. I feel we’re just in too much of an isolated bubble regarding the other characters that will take a part in Hiveswap and the writers’ intent to really get militantly mad that the ‘only trans rep is an awful dude’.

So yeah. This entire route? It was very crude, it gave no fucks and went all meta on us to make commentary about a lot of topics. And I like it precisely because of that.

Oh also the comment making fun of how the Homestuck Characters are all #FFFFFF, both teasing the fact it feels a bit like a cop-out while fully embracing the representation that comes with it, and the bishie Lanque sexy times skip picture? 

I stand this was very interestingly handled, and I have no fear in saying the writers have done an astonishing job at mixing actual plot stuff, meta elements, and social commentary about the Fandom, Homestuck and itself, in a way I think was completely successful.

EDIT: I was talking about trans guys and trans girls specifically, but it’s true, Cirava and Charun do fall under the trans umbrella. They may not be specific rep for trans men, and we have yet to have a confirmed trans girl, but there’s them and they’re both great. So Lanque is not the only confirmed non-cis rep.

^ Spoilers End Here! ^

[dalish-kunoichi]

the problem with some of your views on Crazy Rich Asians is that y’all are expecting it to be the epitome of representation. This isn’t Black Panther. It’s not a representative story. It’s a romcom. I’m not saying they shouldn’t be criticized for not being diverse though. It’s not and it shouldn’t be claimed as such. We watch movies about rich white people who fall in love too. I’m pretty sure we can all say that we know not every white person is rich. We watch that for the story. 

The story of CRA is a romantic comedy plot. Could they have been better with casting asians who aren’t all or mostly east asian and light-skinnned? definitely. absolutely. it’s not representative of the diversity you would find in the actual setting. this is so true and colorism is prevalent in both culture and media. 

I’m going to go watch a movie about a woman who falls in love with a guy who happens to come from a rich family in another country and gets to experience being around them. Add in asian-american and asian to the mix and great! cool! Asian main characters played by actual asian people! I’m down for that!

I’m not going to say this movie is going to be perfect and completely unproblematic but think of it this way. If it was a movie with all white people instead of asians, it would probably still do well, and I would probably go watch that too. The fact that they casted asians for it was even better. Let me be excited about this thanks.