This is a jar full of major characters
Actually it is a jar full of chocolate covered raisins on top of a dirty TV tray. But pretend the raisins are interesting and well rounded fictional characters with significant roles in their stories.
We’re sharing these raisins at a party for Western Storytelling, so we get out two bowls.
Then we start filling the bowls. And at first we only fill the one on the left.
This doesn’t last forever though. Eventually we do start putting raisins in the bowl on the right. But for every raisin we put in the bowl on the right, we just keep adding to the bowl on the left.
And the thing about these bowls is, they don’t ever reset. We don’t get to empty them and start over. While we might lose some raisins to lost records or the stories becoming unpopular, but we never get to just restart. So even when we start putting raisins in the bowl on the right, we’re still way behind from the bowl on the left.
And time goes on and the bowl on the left gets raisins much faster than the bowl on the right.
Until these are the bowls.
Now you get to move and distribute more raisins. You can add raisins or take away raisins entirely, or you can move them from one bowl to the other.
This is the bowl on the left. I might have changed the number of raisins from one picture to the next. Can you tell me, did I add or remove raisins? How many? Did I leave the number the same?
You can’t tell for certain, can you? Adding or removing a raisin over here doesn’t seem to make much of a change to this bowl.
This is the bowl on the right. I might have changed the number of raisins from one picture to the next. Can you tell me, did I add or remove raisins? How many? Did I leave the number the same?
When there are so few raisins to start, any change made is really easy to spot, and makes a really significant difference.
This is why it is bad, even despicable, to take a character who was originally a character of color and make them white. But why it can be positive to take a character who was originally white and make them a character of color.
The white characters bowl is already so full that any change in number is almost meaningless (and is bound to be undone in mere minutes anyway, with the amount of new story creation going on), while the characters of color bowl changes hugely with each addition or subtraction, and any subtraction is a major loss.
This is also something to take in consideration when creating new characters. When you create a white character you have already, by the context of the larger culture, created a character with at least one feature that is not going to make a difference to the narratives at large. But every time you create a new character of color, you are changing something in our world.
I mean, imagine your party guests arrive
Oh my god they are adorable!
And they see their bowls
But before you hand them out you look right into the little black girls’s eyes and take two of her seven raisins and put them in the little white girl’s bowl.
I think she’d be totally justified in crying or leaving and yelling at you. Because how could you do that to a little girl? You were already giving the white girl so much more, and her so little, why would you do that? How could you justify yourself?
But on the other hand if you took two raisins from the white girl’s bowl and moved them over to the black girl’s bowl and the white girl looked at her bowl still full to the brim and decided your moving those raisins was unfair and she stomped and cried and yelled, well then she is a spoiled and entitled brat.
And if you are adding new raisins, it seems more important to add them to the bowl on the right. I mean, even if we added the both bowls at the same speed from now on (and we don’t) it would still take a long time before the numbers got big enough to make the difference we’ve already established insignificant.
And that’s the difference between whitewashing POC characters and making previously white characters POC. And that’s why every time a character’s race is ambiguous and we make them white, we’ve lost an opportunity.
*goes off to eat her chocolate covered raisins, which are no longer metaphors just snacks*
Just watched the trailer for Doctor Strange. It looks very entertaining, of course. But the Tilda Swinton as the Ancient One thing felt weird. So consider this reblog my post about it.
All 90 (and counting) Dead Lesbian and Bisexual Female Characters On TV, And How They Died | Autostraddle
The history of lesbian representation on television is rocky — in the beginning, we seemed exclusively relegated to roles that saw us getting killed/attacked or doing the killing/attacking. And until the last five or so years, lesbian and bisexual characters seemed entirely unable to date an actual woman or stay alive for more than three episodes, let alone an entire run, of a show. Gay and lesbian characters are so often murdered on television that we have our very own trope: Bury Your Gays. We comprise such a teeny-tiny fraction of characters on television to begin with that killing us off so haphazardly feels especially cruel.
When I first saw this headline it was 65. The number keeps climbing. That’s fucked up.
Now it’s up to 108 (the headline says 103 but I counted them). Like any good psychologist, I had to graph the data. I coded them (very roughly as I haven’t seen the majority of the shows) based on the method used to kill off the character, and whether the death was murder, suicide, accidental, or illness related. I don’t have non-lesbian/bi characters to compare these numbers to, but here is what the raw data looks like:
Gunshots, whether accidental or on purpose, are the leading cause of death for lesbian and bisexual characters.
Roughly 64% of the characters were murdered.
I also noticed a disturbing trend of deaths that were due to their orientation, such as characters dying because they came out to someone who reacted badly and it caused an accident, or due to jealous exes (or exes of their same-gender lovers) murdering them/causing accidents. Together these made up 16% of all deaths. Two other themes I noticed were pregnancy-related deaths and death just after a major happy moment for the character.
@lgbtviewersdeservebetter for the graphs
According to the media we can only die violent deaths. Let’s tell them we’re not accepting that any longer.
It’s up to 118 now…
When I get called in for stuff for Hollywood, I get to be the best friend of the Caucasian lead. If I want to play the main guy, I have found, I have to write it.
What to do when you’re not the hero any more
What to do when you’re not the hero any more
The rage that white men have been expressing, loudly, violently, over the very idea that they might find themselves identifying with characters who are not white men, the very idea that heroism might not be particular to one race or one gender, the basic idea that the human story is vast and various and we all get to contribute a page – that rage is petty. It is aware of its own pettiness. Like a screaming toddler denied a sweet, it becomes more righteous the more it reminds itself that after all, it’s only a story.
Only a story. Only the things we tell to keep out the darkness. Only the myths and fables that save us from despair, to establish power and destroy it, to teach each other how to be good, to describe the limits of desire, to keep us breathing and fighting and yearning and striving when it’d be so much easier to give in. Only the constitutive ingredients of every human society since the Stone age.
Only a story. Only the most important thing in the whole world.
The people who are upset that the faces of fiction are changing are right to worry. It’s a fundamental challenge to a worldview that’s been too comfortable for too long. The part of our cultural imagination that places white Western men at the centre of every story is the same part that legitimises racism and sexism. The part of our collective mythos that encourages every girl and brown boy to identify and empathise with white male heroes is the same part that reacts with rage when white boys are asked to imagine themselves in anyone else’s shoes.
“…because when you’ve been used to privilege, equality feels like prejudice.”
and also
“Capitalism is just a story. Religion is just a story. Patriarchy and white supremacy are just stories. They are the great organising myths that define our societies and determine our futures, and I believe – I hope – that a great rewriting is slowly, surely underway.”
^^^^ YES. This whole thing is glorious.
The Damning Data That Quantifies Inequality In Film | ThinkProgress
The Damning Data That Quantifies Inequality In Film | ThinkProgress
From the article:
The numbers are, to say the least, damning. A few highlights (lowlights?) from the study:
• In the top 100 films of 2014, female teenagers — 13-to-20-year-olds — were equally as likely to be shown in “sexy attire,” as in, with exposed skin, and were equally as likely to be referenced as attractive by another character in the movie, as women aged 21-to-39.
• Of the 30,835 speaking characters evaluated in all 700 films, only 30 percent were female.
• In 2014, zero female actors over 45 performed a lead or co-lead role. Only three of the female actors in lead or co-lead roles weren’t white. None was lesbian or bisexual.
• Some more zeros for you: Of the top 100 films of 2014, 17 had no black speaking characters. More than 40 had no Asian speaking characters.
• In 2014, out of 4,610 speaking characters, only ten were gay. And out of that year’s top 100 films, 86 had no LGBT characters at all.
• Off-screen is not much better: Out of the 779 directors responsible for the 700 top grossing films in the study, 28 were women, 45 were black, and 19 were Asian. Women of color fared the worst, with three black female directors and a single female Asian director since 2007. The numbers for writer and producers follow similar patterns.
so in iron man 2
a little boy in an iron man helmet tries to shoot one of the rampaging suits with his lil toy flight stabilizers
in spider-man 2
a little boy puts on his spiderman suit and stands up against the rhino
that’s great for all the little boys in the theater, but you know what I want?
i want a little girl to help the heroes
i want a six-year old redhead to kick nat’s gun to her
i want a twelve-year old with braces and a lisp to shake cap back to consciousness
i want a nine-year old latina girl to take clint by the hand and walk him down unfamiliar streets back to the main fight
i want a sixteen-year old black girl to kick an enemy in the back of the knees to save sam wilson
because girls are sitting in that audience too
and they deserve to see that
“I don’t like labels”
— almost every fucking character that canonly shows attraction to multiple genders because writers are allergic to the terms “bisexual” and “pansexual” (via adventuresofcesium