Poll: Doctor Who: Female and/or Non-White Master, Yay or Nay?

[Michael Kirley]

It doesn't matter to the art itself, but we treat it like it does. Nobody bats an eye at the fact that so many game protagonists are the same gender and race, but the second one of them is something other than a white male, it becomes an issue.

Lots of people bat an eye at that, but the issue here is that these people have a tendency to move from the general to the individual. While it may or may not be a problem for most protagonists to have some characteristic or another, that's a critique of the landscape of the medium; it's not a valid criticism of *this* work or *that* work.

Nobody is "Changing" anything; nobody is altering the source material to swap out this or that characters gender or skin tone (Not that it would make a real difference anyway). Link being a girl in one Zelda game doesn't retroactively change the other Zelda games.

And yet Link isn't a girl in any Zelda game, as far as I'm aware. The only reason this is even a topic is because some people thought that the latest trailer for the upcoming LoZ game portrayed a possibly female Link. Once the developers clarified that Link was, in fact, not going to be a female, the discussion should have stopped. But it didn't, because people started expressing their disappointment with Nintendo for having missed a chance to make a statement about diversity. And that betrays the sort of mindset behind these debates.

Nobody is privy to anyone else's creative process. Artistic vision doesn't just spring fully formed from the head of Zeus; every aspect of the artists personality, including their politics, will affect it in some way.

Of course, but there's a difference between politics (and other such beliefs) shaping the way the artist creates and something being created in order to advance a political agenda. While the latter certainly exists and there are relatively influential works of that genre, I'd argue that they're usually pretty awful and inferior to works that are able to resist the urge to be topical while still giving political insight. There's a difference between Animal Farm/1984 and What Is To Be Done?, for example.

The important thing is that it's up to the artist, and if they want to make a political statement, that's their right; neither you nor me have any right to say that a "Political agenda" is somehow forbidden from entering the process. An artist is allowed to listen to their audience; an artist is allowed to be political with their work if they want to.

It's already up to the creator. The point here is that if that was sincerely what people believed to be sufficient, nobody would have much ground to stand on when they complain about how X isn't represented in some particular work. If it's up to the artist, then it's up to the artist. Now, I do think that there's a point at which something stops meaningfully being art and starts becoming a trite political vehicle, but that's another debate.

I don't recall ever once saying that any character should be of one gender or another, I said it was ultimately unimportant. Why did you infer that I was advocating imposing such a thing when all I suggested is that we ignore it's existence?

Then why are we even talking about this? If it's "ultimately unimportant," why are you lamenting issues of perceived misrepresentation?

How often have you seen someone honestly attempt to convince an artist to do something like this? This thread has nothing to do with saying that The Master should be a woman, in fact all it's doing is polling the audience. Once again, you went from the mere suggestion of a possibility to the imposition of an agenda.

This isn't the first thread on this topic. People have (in this thread, even) long been making indirect critiques of Doctor Who on the grounds that, given the number of regenerations the Doctor has undergone, his failure to manifest as a woman is a cause for concern.

How is "I think this is a good idea" a forceful sentiment? Why are you getting defensive about a suggestion?

Because if it's "up to the artist," then why should any such choice be a "good idea" relative to some other?

As for diversity, the simple fact is that if you work in Hollywood, the amount of leading roles in American movies available to you will be significantly less if you are anything other than a Caucasian male. So yes, the color of their skin is not an important aspect of a character, but Hollywood sure as hell thinks it is.

Again, this is a problem with the people producing/funding Hollywood movies, not with the people writing them.

If every leading character in fiction was middle eastern, would we not stop to ask why? We've just come to accept that 80% of our leads are white men despite the fact that any of them could have just as easily been neither of those things. And this preference is entirely pointless; in fact it's kind of unrealistic.

It's more realistic than you might think, at least on the race side of things. According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_States 77% of the American population is white, and that number stays above 60% even if you remove ethnically Hispanic Whites from the sample. Interestingly, if you read Middle Eastern literature, you'll be surprised to discover that an awful lot of the characters are Middle Eastern. There ain't any Native American women running around in Scheherazade's stories.

We shouldn't sacrifice artistic vision for Politics, but that's exactly what we're doing already; we cast our protagonists based on their gender and the color of their skin, the situation is not equal.

That's not because of politics, per se, though. As an aspiring author, I don't sit down and say to myself "okay, no black people in this story." I don't think the vast majority of writers are any different. So it's not politics driving them to have white male protagonists. Hollywood may exacerbate the bias somewhat for political reasons, but the fact is that even outside of Hollywood, and even in other media, artists tend to represent characters similar to themselves/their own culture.

And this prejudice has actually INTERRUPTED the artistic vision of some artists; I'm sure we're all familiar with what went down with games like Remember Me and The Last of Us, both of which came under fire by publishers in some manner for attempting to put emphasis on female characters. So the owners of IP DO sometimes push this issue, but they get punished for it when they do.

And that's bad, but I wouldn't say it's the driving force of under-representation.

So when people say it would be nice if this or that character was something other than a white guy, "It doesn't matter" is exactly what they're going for; the point is not to cast more blacks/women/gays/whatever for the sake of it, the point is to stop ignoring these people, to stop playing favorites; when we can just as easily see a main character who is an Asian woman or a Hispanic man as we can a character who is white man, THEN it won't matter.

Except this relies on a flawed understanding of what goes into creating content. Suppose I get an idea for a novel that I think is really good, and start sketching out the plot. Suppose ideas for characters start flowing into my head, usually out of thin air. Suppose the protagonist that floats into my mind is a white male; that is, from the moment he pops into my mind's eye as the protagonist, he's a white male. From the point of view of the audience, "it doesn't matter" whether that character is black, white, or any other race. But it does matter to me, not because I have a problem with characters being black, but because the character in question isn't black in my imagination (i.e. the place where that character was created).

A great deal of art isn't made in a paint-by-numbers fashion. Even popular authors like JK Rowling aren't "playing favourites" when they make a protagonist who isn't an immigrant or a female etc.; that's just who the character is because that's how the author envisions them. It's nothing more than that. Again, this ties back into how you're trying to take a trend from the general landscape of art and trace it back to individual works.

This shit isn't going to stop until somebody sets a precedent. What I said before is true; it doesn't matter for the story. But we keep pretending it does.

Authors and artists often say things like "the character came to me fully formed," or "the character wrote itself." No, it doesn't matter in a utilitarian sense to the story whether Ned Stark is covertly a homosexual, but it does matter if GRRM says that's he not. Analogously, my name could as easily have been James as it is Michael; I don't dispute that. But the fact is that it's not James; it's Michael. There seems to be this tendency to perceive art as being a matter of random chance (after the fact, obviously), but that's not the case. Artists aren't obligated to flip coins in determining the gender/race of their characters. The characters are what they are because that's what the artist imagines them to be. If the Doctor is always a man, then the Doctor is always a man. It's not contradictory for the Doctor to always be a man, ergo it doesn't imply or suggest sexist bias in the event that the Doctor is always a man.

 

[Knight Captain Kerr]

I'm glad so many people responded, although some comments appeared to just be about The Doctor and not The Master. Really I didn't think there would be anyone who'd be okay with sex but not race, interesting.