A hopefully non-controversial thought on character diversity in media.

[Dreiko_v1legacy]

I want real diversity, not diversity limited to the constraints of reality where if you have enough minorities or uncoventionally gendered people you are diverse.


No, I want playable dragons, war elephants, wind spirits, magma beasts, all that cool stuff. If you must make a humanoid, make them a god without anything remotely akin to real-like humans, make em an angel or a werewolf where the majority of the game is about the character being the actual damn werewolf and not the human.


Most diverse game ever is Okami, you play as a male wolf who is also a female goddess of the sun and patron of the Yamato clan, your sidekick is a liliputian beetle samurai. Compared to that, conventional "strong female protagonists" or what have you are absolutely dull.

 

[Zhukov]

I want real diversity, not diversity limited to the constraints of reality where if you have enough minorities or uncoventionally gendered people you are diverse.


No, I want playable dragons, war elephants, wind spirits, magma beasts, all that cool stuff. If you must make a humanoid, make them a god without anything remotely akin to real-like humans, make em an angel or a werewolf where the majority of the game is about the character being the actual damn werewolf and not the human.


Most diverse game ever is Okami, you play as a male wolf who is also a female goddess of the sun and patron of the Yamato clan, your sidekick is a liliputian beetle samurai. Compared to that, conventional "strong female protagonists" or what have you are absolutely dull.

Eh. As a kid I used to think non-human protagonists were just the coolest but now I find them completely non-engaging. Especially in anything remotely concerned with story.

Starcraft: Legacy of the Void was utterly boring for me because all the main characters were faceless, expressionless aliens who spent most of the game arguing about their psychic internet.

Non-human characters can be great fun to meet and interact with in games, but I generally want to play as a human or something sufficiently human-like that I give a shit about them and whatever their struggles are.

 

[Strazdas]

Basically, can we all agree that people generally enjoy seeing fictional heroes that reflect aspects of themselves?

No. What i think people generally enjoy the most in fictional heroes is when they are well written. The chracter aspects dont matter, how well these aspects are written does. There is a villian that makes you root for him is a sign of good writing. when your work is so good you can make you audience sympathize with an obvious bad guy your going to be good at writing the "good guys" too.

Heck, if Game characters were to reflect gamers instead of simply being interesting characters most would end up being lazy geeks that lead boring lives.

But tell me, if I make a story about a confident, charismatic, unflappable and highly capable male action hero who kills all the baddies and gets all the ladies have I made a boring Mary Sue (or Marty Stu or whatever) or have I made a fun badass?

Because such characters, who are a dime a dozen, have a way of mysteeeriously avoiding the whole Mary Sue angle.

Yes, a boring Mary Sue. See: pretty much entire career of Jean Claude Van Dame. There is a reason why better written characters like Jack Bauer are more memorable and liked than any of Van Dame's ones (i honestly couldnt remmeber a single name).

Question for "Diversity for the sake of Diversity sucks" crowd:

Why is it so negative for the minority character to be a bland character without flaws who nails every situation, but seemingly acceptable for the white dude/girl to be such? And yes, you're going to argue 'But that's still a bad character with bad writing' but its accepted, which is the issue. You cant rebel against the idea of a minority being poorly written and just accept a poorly written default character as just a bad character to tolerate.

But its not accepted? Characters like that are rarely praised and quickly forgotten.

I sort of think of it this way, if aliens were trying to figure out what our demographics were like just by our media, they would probably assume women were something like 17% of the population of the world and that the world was mostly made up of white dudes and it's just not.

I guess the aliens were tuning into only american channels, where population is in fact mostly made up of white people. If on the other hand you look at japanece cinema or Bollywood and add those to the list they would think whites are in extreme minority because India pus out enormous amounts of movies starring all indian actors all the time. Wheres the diversity in there?

The other thing, you need to be diverse if your story is about diversity. Hollywood keeps making movies about minorities being oppressed, only they are made up minorities like mutants or wizards or whatnot, and avoiding casting actually minorities.

Are you familiar with alegories? because thats what you are talking about! Alegories tend to work much better at changing peoples minds than direct routes. They also allow us to have stories with freaking supermutants instead of boring old humans.

Over-represented? Are we seeing more than 28% of characters of mainstream US films as PoC? Particularly in starring roles. Now, you can certainly argue that various minority groups are over-represented compared to each other, but white people are still dominating films disproportionately. We aren't seeing 1 in 4 superhero films be about PoC, for example.

Do you have any data regarding this because i couldnt find any. I found that the Oscars have proportionately less white actors win than the population, but oscars include many actors from other countries so demographics are wonky. I could not find data on mainstream films. I collected some data about games for 2015 (also because i couldnt find anything) and it does not seem to support the lack of diversity idea (more than half games allowed you to choose protagonist), but i cant be arsed to go through thousands of movies to get the data myself. The hundreds of games took long enough (damnit, why dont you include any info on your protagonist in games description publishers?!).

 

[Zhukov]

Basically, can we all agree that people generally enjoy seeing fictional heroes that reflect aspects of themselves?

No. What i think people generally enjoy the most in fictional heroes is when they are well written.

Reading comprehension, man.

I didn't say "enjoy the most". I said "enjoy". Those are two different statements.

This is like if I said, "Do people like icecream?" Then you reply, "No, what people like the most is chocolate."

Heck, if Game characters were to reflect gamers instead of simply being interesting characters most would end up being lazy geeks that lead boring lives.

Dear God.

Reading. Comprehension.

I didn't say characters should entirely resemble their target audience or that said audience would enjoy it if they did. I said "aspects of themselves". Then I used an example of myself and a character, Mad Max, that shares one small aspect (soft-spoken) and nothing else. (I was trusting that people would be able to guess that I'm not a crazy desert survivor.)

Yes, a boring Mary Sue. See: pretty much entire career of Jean Claude Van Dame. There is a reason why better written characters like Jack Bauer are more memorable and liked than any of Van Dame's ones (i honestly couldnt remmeber a single name).

Weren't Van Dame and his movies really popular back in the day?

I'm not a fan either, but a lot of people seemed to enjoy his characters for some reason.

 

[Strazdas]

Yes, a boring Mary Sue. See: pretty much entire career of Jean Claude Van Dame. There is a reason why better written characters like Jack Bauer are more memorable and liked than any of Van Dame's ones (i honestly couldnt remmeber a single name).

Weren't Van Dame and his movies really popular back in the day?

I'm not a fan either, but a lot of people seemed to enjoy his characters for some reason.

By a certain niche of viewers, sure. but they never got critical acclaim and were always considered mediocre-to-bad by the general population.

Now a good counterargument would be Bruce Lee, whose movies also follow this format but tend to recieve much more positive attention. Though i suppose that may be due to Bruce's personality itself, he was quite an unique man.

 

[Dreiko_v1legacy]

I want real diversity, not diversity limited to the constraints of reality where if you have enough minorities or uncoventionally gendered people you are diverse.


No, I want playable dragons, war elephants, wind spirits, magma beasts, all that cool stuff. If you must make a humanoid, make them a god without anything remotely akin to real-like humans, make em an angel or a werewolf where the majority of the game is about the character being the actual damn werewolf and not the human.


Most diverse game ever is Okami, you play as a male wolf who is also a female goddess of the sun and patron of the Yamato clan, your sidekick is a liliputian beetle samurai. Compared to that, conventional "strong female protagonists" or what have you are absolutely dull.

Eh. As a kid I used to think non-human protagonists were just the coolest but now I find them completely non-engaging. Especially in anything remotely concerned with story.

Starcraft: Legacy of the Void was utterly boring for me because all the main characters were faceless, expressionless aliens who spent most of the game arguing about their psychic internet.

Non-human characters can be great fun to meet and interact with in games, but I generally want to play as a human or something sufficiently human-like that I give a shit about them and whatever their struggles are.

See, I am all about conduct and not identity. I identify with beings whose conduct resonates with me, that is all. One of my favorite kind of characters is the robot or AI that achieves humanity through interaction, as that is a purer form of the ideal than anything actual humans can achieve, ironically enough.

Now, of course nonhumans also can be dull as hell, as can anything, but purely on the matter of DIVERSITY they are far beyond anything one can achieve with a human cast, no matter how gay and aboriginal it is.

I find boring things that strive to be like a real thing, because the real thing already is. I find interesting things that try to be something that has yet to exist. Of course either thing can be done badly and well, so I will ultimately judge each thing on its own merits, but given the choice, all else bein equal I will always go for the unrealistic option. The role of the knight fighting against hell is much less interesting than the role of the one maintaining hell.

 

[Thaluikhain]

The other thing, you need to be diverse if your story is about diversity. Hollywood keeps making movies about minorities being oppressed, only they are made up minorities like mutants or wizards or whatnot, and avoiding casting actually minorities.

Are you familiar with alegories? because thats what you are talking about! Alegories tend to work much better at changing peoples minds than direct routes. They also allow us to have stories with freaking supermutants instead of boring old humans.

I disagree about allegories being more successful, especially in modern works set in something like the real world.

Now, when, say, the X-Men comics were first started, they had to use allegories because you just couldn't put LGBT and/or PoC in your comics back then. However, that's not at all the case nowdays, that'd no longer an excuse. Hell, the modern X-Men movies have less minority characters than the comics. "It's an allegory" doesn't really cut it anymore.

By all means, put supermutants in strange costumes in your works...only they shouldn't be all white and cishet if you are preaching about diversity and tolerance, it undermines the point.

Now, of course, if the oppression of mutants is just an excuse for CGI or whatever, that's not a problem, but pretending otherwise can be grating.

Do you have any data regarding this because i couldnt find any. I found that the Oscars have proportionately less white actors win than the population, but oscars include many actors from other countries so demographics are wonky. I could not find data on mainstream films. I collected some data about games for 2015 (also because i couldnt find anything) and it does not seem to support the lack of diversity idea (more than half games allowed you to choose protagonist), but i cant be arsed to go through thousands of movies to get the data myself. The hundreds of games took long enough (damnit, why dont you include any info on your protagonist in games description publishers?!).

Yeah, also not that invested, so I specified superhero movies to narrow it down a lot. Recently we've got Superman, Batman, an almost all-white X-Men cast[footnote]Storm seems not to do anything anymore, Magneto is somewhat hinted at being Jewish and Shadowcat is Jewish in the comics, IIRC. Whether Jewish counts as white or not is another issue[/footnote][footnote]I'm led to believe that the super fast X-Men character was a replacement as the original character was LGBT and the movie makers deliberately wanted to avoid that, also that Mystique is bisexual in some of the comics, again not in the movies[/footnote], Spiderman. There were some PoC in Suicide squad, as villainous types, not sure if they'd be counted as heroes.

 

[Strazdas]

I disagree about allegories being more successful, especially in modern works set in something like the real world.

Now, when, say, the X-Men comics were first started, they had to use allegories because you just couldn't put LGBT and/or PoC in your comics back then. However, that's not at all the case nowdays, that'd no longer an excuse. Hell, the modern X-Men movies have less minority characters than the comics. "It's an allegory" doesn't really cut it anymore.

By all means, put supermutants in strange costumes in your works...only they shouldn't be all white and cishet if you are preaching about diversity and tolerance, it undermines the point.

Now, of course, if the oppression of mutants is just an excuse for CGI or whatever, that's not a problem, but pretending otherwise can be grating.

Allegory does not have to be an excuse, it can exist just because the author wanted to. As far as them being more successful, in discussions in this forum and elsewhere people often use allegories in attempts to explain their points more clearly, it is a tool as intrinsic to our communication as anything else. Clearly, it has its uses.

I think the original 00s movies did pretty well in the opression thematic, the new ones does not seem to try much for that.

I looked up the cast of the latest one - Apocalypse, and it seems to have all kinds of skin colours in there, including Blue. Wheres the problem?

Yeah, also not that invested, so I specified superhero movies to narrow it down a lot. Recently we've got Superman, Batman, an almost all-white X-Men cast[footnote]Storm seems not to do anything anymore, Magneto is somewhat hinted at being Jewish and Shadowcat is Jewish in the comics, IIRC. Whether Jewish counts as white or not is another issue[/footnote][footnote]I'm led to believe that the super fast X-Men character was a replacement as the original character was LGBT and the movie makers deliberately wanted to avoid that, also that Mystique is bisexual in some of the comics, again not in the movies[/footnote], Spiderman. There were some PoC in Suicide squad, as villainous types, not sure if they'd be counted as heroes.

Storm was give quite a lot of time in the latest X-men movie and Magneto being jewish and thus ending up in concentration camp was the main plot device for him joining up with Apocalypse, so i dont think your statements there are correct.

I dont remmeber Quicksilver expressing his sexuallity in any way in the movie so maybe thats still up to debate. i guess we will see in the next one.

Havent seen Suicide Squad yet, but you do realize that basically all you listed is long time established characters that were played the same way they were playing in the originals right?

 

[pookie101]

im frankly glad that we are getting more diversity in media and it will help normalise that people who are different can be normal people but like anything eventually we will reach a point where it will become a non issue for the majority of most people outside ravings of guys on the net