In one of my blog threads a few months back, someone (I have entirely forgotten who, and feel free to make yourself known so I can credit you properly) argued that the problem with feminist gaming criticism is that it includes both ideological correctness and quality in the same rating. They praised Christ Centered Gamer, which separately ranks how good a game is and how Christian a game is.
As a non-gamer, I don’t really think it’s my place to have opinions about how gaming reviews work. However, I think this brings to light an interesting wider issue.
I would agree with my commenters if the only issue were effects on people reading. If reading sexist books tends to make people more sexist, and reading anti-Christian books tends to make people less Christian, then of course both I and an evangelical would like people to read ideology-compatible books. But people expect book reviews to be about the quality of the book. Giving a good book a poor review because I don’t want people to disagree with me is poor business practices in the free marketplace of ideas.
However, I think this argument is missing an important point: for the serious Christian, anti-Christianity is usually an artistic failure; for a feminist, sexism is usually an artistic failure; our reviews should reflect this. I’ll begin by giving an example of something where neither is an artistic failure: porn.
If a Christian went up to a porn writer and said to her “none of these people are married and the vast majority of them are bisexual! This is sinful!”, the porn writer would be well within her rights to respond “dude, it’s porn.” Similarly, if I, as a feminist, went up to a porn writer and said “none of your characters are doing anything remotely approaching consent best practices, also they are all gorgeous and that is promoting unrealistic and unhealthy beauty standards,” the porn writer would probably be like “dude, it’s porn.”
Porn is an artistic genre that is perhaps uniquely single-purpose: it is supposed to arouse the reader until they have an orgasm. All other artistic goals are secondary. If our porn writer– no doubt extremely annoyed at this point– were asked “how does this BDSM AU work on an economics level? Wouldn’t civilization fall apart if half of society were forced to do nothing all day but wear buttplugs and be chained to beds?” she would no doubt respond “it’s PORN! If you want realism, go read a literary novel about an English professor contemplating adultery! Jesus Christ, can everyone leave me alone to write about my characters toeing out of their shoes now?”
If character development, good worldbuilding, and an intriguing plot make the story more fappable, then the porn writer should include it; if they don’t, she should have cardboard characters having unconflicted sex in a deeply economically implausible setting.
This is true of other works which are supposed to elicit emotions. Romance novels are supposed to make the viewer feel simulated new relationship energy; action movies, excitement; horror stories, fear. To a certain extent, saying “but there aren’t actually any 27-year-old self-made billionaires with large amounts of time to do hanggliding and stalk college students” is missing the point.
So when is it an artistic failure?
The first is failure of imagination. For example: I don’t think that the reason so many characters are able-bodied white men is that every author has independently thought about it and decided their story can only be told using an able-bodied white male protagonist. I think authors default to able-bodied white male heroes without thinking about it. This is annoying, because a lot of stories would be legitimately better as stories if they were told about a physically disabled woman of color instead. This isn’t due to any superiority of physically disabled women of color: if authors defaulted to physically disabled heroines of color, the same would be true of white able-bodied men.
Avatar the Last Airbender fans: imagine Toph. Imagine Toph as a man who can see.
The hill I die on here is that Tony Stark would be tremendously more interesting as a wheelchair user. This gives him a reason to make the Iron Man suit in the first place: able-bodied Tony has no reason not to have just built a gun, but disabled Tony has just been shot in the back and needs help walking. He could make snarky comments and shut down journalists writing about Tony Stark, Who Used To Be A Billionaire Playboy Until He Became Disabled And Learned What Really Mattered In Life. There could be suspenseful moments when the villain attacks him and he doesn’t have the suit on, so he can’t stand. He could totally have a rocket-powered flying wheelchair. And if you don’t think that rocket-powered flying wheelchairs are awesome, get out of my face.
But nobody thinks to themselves “hm, would it be more interesting if this action movie protagonist were a wheelchair user?” and so we are stuck with zero rocket-powered flying wheelchairs.
The second is realism. Most stories are supposed to be Like Reality Unless Noted: there might be vampires, but Tokyo is still located in Japan. As a feminist, I believe that sexist ideas aren’t just unethical, they’re wrong. In the real world, women are actually concerned about things other than babies and lipstick. If all the women in your story are concerned about nothing besides babies and lipstick, then your story is flawed, in the same way that your story would be flawed if Tokyo were inexplicably in France.
This is the origin of my grudge against Pacific Rim. Pacific Rim is set in Hong Kong. The fact that there are no Chinese people with both names and speaking parts in the entire film is, in fact, unrealistic! Where the fuck are the Chinese people in this movie? Are they hiding?
This is also true, incidentally, for our Christ-Centered Gamers. Christians believe, as an empirical fact, that the world was created by an all-powerful, all-loving deity, and that Jesus Christ died and was raised from the dead to save us from our sins. If the world of your story does not look like the sort of world in which those things happened, it is unrealistic.
The third is thematic resonance. Most stories– particularly those that have any pretensions of being “art”– don’t just exist to entertain people. They’re supposed to convey something about how the world works, something of the author’s worldview, some truths that the author thinks are important. This doesn’t mean they should be preachy: in fact, good art is very rarely preachy. But NBC Hannibal is about abuse– about powerful, charismatic abusers, and how invisible their evil is and how cleverly they manipulate institutions, and the desperate lengths to which abuse survivors are driven to escape them– without any character sitting down and telling you “So, Abuse Is Bad, And Sometimes Abuse Victims Have To Do Immoral Things To Try To Get Abusers To Stop.” Similarly, the Hunger Games is a meditation on celebrity culture, but it doesn’t pause the book at any point to tell you “Okay, You Know How We Treat Child Stars? Basically The Hunger Games. Stop Laughing At Amanda Bynes For Having A Psychotic Break.”
I want to emphasize that this is not necessarily leaving the realm of art for art’s sake. Oscar Wilde took a far dimmer view than any Gamergater of art being considered “moral” or “immoral”, but he said also that “the moral life of man forms part of the subject-matter of the artist“. If the artist is engaging with morality as part of their book– as both Hannibal and the Hunger Games do– then critiquing their morality is fair game, without referencing other people.
And… I guess there’s a place for “I see what you’re doing and I respect your talent and that you have clearly pulled it off, but it gives me the fucking creeps.” I respect that Salvador Dali is an extremely talented painter, but I am not ever going to like his work, because I am never going to embrace “fuck rationality, we should all like dreams and surrealism instead.” And maybe that’s all I can ethically do.
But then that leads to a question of how we can do critique at all. My preference for serious optimism over grimdark is no different than my preference for lush prose over Hemingway-style sparseness, or creative and economically plausible worldbuilding over And Here Is The Generic Spaceship Set, or for that matter themes that grow organically out of the story instead of morals the author has someone explicitly state at the end. All published works appeal to someone, or they wouldn’t be published; how can I ground my opinion that Divergent is bad but fun or that Aristophanes wrote the best dick jokes of all time?
Barring someone solving the epistemology of book reviews for me (which: please do), I feel like reviewing themes is exactly like reviewing anything else: I can say “Frank Miller comics are bad because they are very grimdark.” And by that same token, it is licit for me as a feminist to say “your books are bad because the theme is that women should be slaves of men“. At the same time, I can say “Hannibal is such a good TV show! Its portrayal of abuse dynamics gets at truths that a lot of stories about abuse won’t touch.” Similarly, our friends over at Christ Centered Gamer can totally say “the theme of this story is that forgiveness is impossible and one should instead take vengeance; therefore, this is a bad game”– or, conversely, “this game champions the virtue of self-sacrifice, 10/10, definitely What Jesus Would Play.”
I hope this makes my position on video game reviews clearer. To the extent that video games are just supposed to be fun and challenging, critiques of them for their sexism are irrelevant from an artistic perspective. To the extent that they are supposed to tell stories, have themes, or be art, sexism is very, very relevant. The idea that quality can be separated from politics is false.
jossedley said:
I think the first question is what is the purpose of the review? There are room for many kinds.
1) To tell people whether a work is worth their time. These tend to be spoiler-free, even if that detracts from the depth of the review, and descriptive. So if I’m upset by graphic violence, I want a reviewer who will warn me “Hey, although this game has a lot of great artistic merit, people who don’t like graphic violence might avoid it.” IMHO, CCG might fall into this category – gamers who want a Christian compatible game for themselves, or more likely their kids, might approve of the heads up.
2) To engage in a discussion of the artisti merits. More likely to contain spoilers. It’s almost more important to be interesting than right. (Cf. Armond White).
3) To encourage movement in the field. A reviewer might have a project of encouraging “good” art in a field, or supporting emerging artists or diverse artists or feminist values or what have you.
Many reviews dip into 2 or 3 categories – I think Ebert had a foot in all three caterogories on some reviews, while others specialize.
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skye said:
“If all the women in your story are concerned about nothing besides babies and lipstick, then your story is flawed, in the same way that your story would be flawed if Tokyo were inexplicably in France.”
I don’t think that follows. Tokyo is a set quantity; women are not. There’s an infinite variety of people in the world, but Tokyo will always (for the foreseeable future, anyway) be in Japan.
I also tend to lean more Watsonian than Doylist. Your mileage may vary, of course, but I think it’s misguided to insist on critiquing a story in the context of our current world. For example, Gor is not arguing that women, in our current society, should be the slaves of men. It is depicting a world *where that is the case*. It reads into literature a kind of prescriptivism that I don’t think is fair to writers.
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skye said:
I also don’t think any individual work can be sexist (or racist, etc.), for the reason I mentioned above: there’s an infinite variety of people and possibilities in the world. A story where all the women are lipstick-and-baby-obsessed isn’t problematic in and of itself, because that *could* happen. Now, a literary market where *all* stories about women cast them that way…that’s different. It’s the difference between one ad campaign featuring waifish models and *all* ad campaigns doing so. There’s nothing wrong with slender women getting modeling jobs, but balance overall is important.
Narratives exist in the aggregate. There’s nothing inherently wrong with stories about lipstick-obsessed women, or even lots of those kinds of stories. There’s something wrong with stories that run counter to that narrative being suppressed or given fewer chances for publication, and I think that’s what people ought to be focusing on.
tl;dr worry less about individual depictions and more about why certain depictions are more widely accepted than others.
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Patrick said:
I can’t agree. Sometimes stories ARE offered as a “this is how the world is” morality tale. Not always, but sometimes.
In other words, sometimes the villain is gay just because. Other times it’s because the author wants to portray him as morally corrupt. Which one is Dune? Maybe that’s a tough question, maybe people pick option 2 too easily, but the questions viability stands.
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osberend said:
@Patrick: [content warning: spoilers through God-Emperor of Dune, dispassionate analysis of a homophobic position, wild tangent]
If the musings of the two best-informed characters in God-Emperor of Dune (Leto and Moneo) are reflective of Herbert’s own views, then Baron Harkonnen’s sexuality is implicitly portrayed as not just wrong, but backward: To have (and act on) homosexual passions as an adolescent is normal, but not to grow out of them is a failure of maturation that naturally inclines one toward sadism. Baron Harkonnen, on the other hand, “sampled many pleasures in his youth”—including sexual intercourse with a woman—but is exclusively homosexual as an adult.
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nancylebovitz said:
Thank you for this– it clarifies some issues.
Would the same standards apply to comedy? It’s about as focused as porn, except that the focus is on getting people to laugh rather than getting them to orgasm.
Artistic merit isn’t floating out there, independent of readers. Perhaps it’s unreasonable to expect people to judge the artistic merit of fiction they hate too much. (One of Frankowski’s Crosstime Engineer novels was so pro-rape that it struck me as being like stepping in a dog turd.) Maybe people aren’t good at judging the artistic merit of stories that they like too much and too simply.
For some reason, I’d like to see a super-powered character who’s an arthritic little old man. I don’t have a story line or world-building, just a vision of him hunched over and holding up an ocean liner between thumb and forefinger.
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aravenousapostle said:
I think one thing that makes comedy different from porn here is that so much comedy is extremely political — take the Daily Show, for example, which straddled the news/comedy line a lot and had a tendency to pick and choose which standards from each side were valid to hold it to. I don’t think there’s really an equivalent of that kind of thing with porn.
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Leit said:
Take it you’ve never heard of Centennial. He’s a little old black man with basically Superman’s powerset. Marvel comics. Go take a look, he’s brilliant.
As for old superheroes… that’s the whole point of DC’s JSA. They’re maybe not as physically aged as Centennial, but they’re all in their grey years. The Kingdom Come series from the early 2000s was *gorgeous*, and it starred a crop of heroes who had all aged – Batman the most severely, being that he needs a walker frame to even move at all. Which calls to mind the Batman Beyond series, where Bruce was still formidable despite being decades from his prime. Or The Dark Knight Returns, much hated by SJ types because it’s by Frank Miller. Cassandra Nova from the X-men books might actually fit your image of a geriatric holding up an ocean liner with her mind best, but she’s a villain and possibly possessed by an alien parasite. Magneto is a WW2 survivor, and apart from the tendency of artists to draw him in the same bodybuilder style as everyone else, he certainly feels his age… especially in the movies.
And let’s talk about the movies for a sec. I mean, you’ve got grandfather-aged Charles and Erik, Charles being one of those apparently rare wheelchair-bound heroes. But then there’s also Oracle – wheelchair-bound, not an action girl, but still a contender for strongest female character in DC’s stable. Until the New 52 retcon where they fucked everything up again, but it’ll come around again eventually.
There’s probably a bunch of characters I’m forgetting, and a few edge cases like Dr. Strange, who turned to magic after his hands were ruined, and who relies heavily on it to compensate. There were also storylines that explored the ideas that Ozy put forward up above, like Tony Stark becoming essentially paralysed and reliant on his armour – which has happened more than once even, but it turns out that while the limitations might make for a couple of interesting stories, the challenges get kind of monotone and predictable.
The point is that, as usual, comics are getting painted as monotone and *ist. By people who are apparently willing to overlook decades of stories and any characters that don’t fit their message.
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ninecarpals said:
I may get around to the main thrust of your thesis eventually, but for now I have two notes on your examples:
1) Hannibal is not, strictly speaking, about what it takes to get an abuser to stop abusing: It’s about the complexity of the abuser/abused dynamic. Will is not a blameless figure, and it’s clear that he’s drawn to Hannibal nearly as much as he’s repulsed by him.
2) Aristophanes did write the greatest dick jokes of all time. This is objective fact.
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Forlorn Hopes said:
I agree with what you wrote here.
Stuff like this:
Yeah, I agree with all that. It’s a personal opinion, and even a reviewer has personal opinions. There’s nothing wrong with that.
The issue wasn’t that video game critics added a feminist/progressive slant to their reviews. It was the contempt they had for the gaming community outside their clique. If they engaged with and respected views other than their own there would never have been a six month (and counting) flamewar.
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veronica d said:
This seems rather one sided. In fact, this seems to completely ignore how out-of-proportion the response to Sarkeesian was, with occurred before her first video was even released.
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roe said:
Lots of out-of-proportion stuff also happened in connection with “Racefail 09” and the rise of “Atheism+”.
My epistemically uncertain theory is that you can’t understand reproductively viable ants without understanding these two incidents as backdrop – in which certain progressives blurred the line between criticism and bullying/harassment/censorship. I think the gamers saw them coming and made certain tactical decisions – like focusing on “ethics in journalism.”
And note – there’s been plenty of bad behaviour on both sides. Sarkeesian was definitely *not* the only person to suffer harassment or threats.
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InferentialDistance said:
Sarkeesian was making videos before the Tropes vs. Women kickstarter. Additionally, shallow criticism of games and related media, with undertones of moral failing, have a history that well predates Sarkeesian (Penny Arcade Dickwolves controversy, for example).
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Held In Escrow said:
The general hatred between the press and the community has been going on for far, far longer than the current kerfuffle over sexism in gaming. Just look back to when Wind Waker came out and someone dared to give it an 8.8!
The issue is that there is definitely part of the gaming community that is made up of shitheads. Gaming press disproportionately interacts with them (because who else is going to leave comments on their articles?). Gaming press then hits back, but ends up striking way more than just the shitheads because the kind of people who are able to form halfway decent arguments and hit specific targets aren’t blogging about video games. War ensues.
The big issue I see is that social justice issues aren’t actually used as part of an end goal of better media or a nicer world. They’re a weapon used to attack one’s foes, with their intrinsic values being found meaningless in the face of how useful they are to signal your status and belittle your adversaries. Just look at Gone Home; it does absolutely nothing well and would have been laughed out of a Young Adult fiction area for its excuse for a story. Yet it’s held up as a Holy Grail because it can show that those who support it are “better” than their ideological enemies. You also get a lot of people who seem to think that the narrative is all that must be judged in a game, that the gameplay is secondary or less to the overall piece of work.
Combine this weaponization of reviews with what people feel is a market failure, that there just aren’t any good sites out there which review games from a non-feminist perspective (and aren’t in the pockets of the industry) and I can understand why they’re mad. They feel like their culture has been appropriated by a bunch of people who are only now jumping in because gaming is hip and are being told that their way of life is badwrong and they must change to accommodate these newcomers. The media that is supposed to represent them is instead stabbing them in the back and they’re lashing out.
In terms of reviews, I think the main problem in specific is the lack of a focus a ludonarrative perspective, combining presentation (both the story and graphics) and the gameplay (and what the game is trying to get across). If a game is trying to be about a bunch of sexy people in costumes fighting (such as Dead or Alive), you need to take that into account. You don’t grade a drama on how much it makes you laugh after all. Within that perspective you can apply your own personal views and biases, but a one size fits all review system just does not work.
The most important part here is that if you’re reviewing a game, the point is to make the audience better off in terms of making a buying decision. If you’re critiquing a game, then the point is to put your thoughts on how the whole package comes together. Very, very few writers are good enough to do both, so as a rule of thumb if you’re putting a score or a yes/no at the end, you’re doing the former. So figure out what the game is trying to do and what the audience is and work your review from that perspective. Don’t attack the audience for liking something, instead make sure they know if the piece of work is worth their time and money.
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Bugmaster said:
I liked Gone Home 😦 Yes, it had some very obvious flaws, but I think the end result still worked. Not because it passed some sort of a minimum shibboleth threshold, but because it told its story well.
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InferentialDistance said:
You’re allowed to like Gone Home. There’s nothing wrong with enjoying mediocrity. I enjoy a large number of exceedingly mediocre action movies. The issue is that it got praised disproportionately for its quality.
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Forlorn Hopes said:
@veronica d
Yes it’s one sided. This blog post is about critics, my response was about critics.
Unless you want to argue that two wrongs make a right Anita isn’t relevant here.
@roe
I can confirm that there were blog posts by non-gamers talking about what happened in their industry being passed around KotakuInAction from right near the start.
@InferentialDistance
I’d argue that “shallow criticism of games and related media, with undertones of moral failing” is an evolution of overt criticism of moral failing that go back to at least the early 1980s when Dungeons & Dragons was accused of Satanism and related nonsense.
Gaming’s history in this area is long.
@Held In Escrow
I wouldn’t say Wind Waker’s 8.8 is a prior example. When that kind of fanboyism happens it’s acknowledged as an internal conflict within the gaming culture; even by gamers who seriously dislike it.
This is something different. The feeling that this is two cultures fighting is new. My estimate for the first really visible signs would be 2012 with Mass Effect 3’s ending controversy.
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Forlorn Hopes said:
@Held In Escrow (again)
I agree with you when you say that
But it’s not the whole story.
You still need something to say why the games bloggers all agree with each other politically. Being red tribe or grey tribe doesn’t give you a magic ability to withstand the attention of comment arseholes.
From talking to some games journalists I’m fairly confident a large part of it is that games journalists take their payment in social status. The actual monetary pay and working conditions aren’t great, but if you are (or think you are) an activist then a platform to send a message from can substitute for cold cash.
The red tribe doesn’t care about video games in the first place, so even if they want a platform they’ll look elsewhere.
The grey tribe and libertarians in general aren’t interested enough in a platform to sacrifice money and working conditions for it.
Which only leaves the blue tribe.
So the result is you have a blue tribe, and since they’re sacrificing money and comfort for The Cause, they’re probably leaning towards the extreme.
Thus you get intensely blue tribe bloggers preaching to an audience that’s predominately grey & moderate blue. Naturally the audience doesn’t agree. To cut a long story short, the bloggers get increasingly bitter at their audience and the end result is war.
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veronica d said:
Right. I can understand anger that one’s culture has gone mainstream, so then I would expect nerds to focus their anger on big budget Hollywood appropriation of nerd-themes. So hate the Spider Man movie franchise. Send your hate mail to your normo friends who dare watch X Men. (I can’t even imagine how you are to respond to the Transformers movies.)
Since, you know, these folks are totes not-nerds pushing their noses into nerd space.
Or instead go after weirdo indie game designers and stuff that is “too popular” for the “wrong reasons” — which seems mostly to involve queer folks and so on.
Or watch the nerd-rage when they make a gay person a playable character, an available subplot.
OMFG RAGE RAGE RAGE RED-ALERT CALLING ALL NERDS FIRE UP THE RAPE THREAT MACHINE.
Be honest. This really happens. We’ve all seen it.
My thoughts: there is a market for sexist wank garbage and violence porn, and insofar as a steady stream of people want to consume such media, it will keep showing up. At the same time, feminism is here to stay, as is social justice, and a ton of *actual nerds* are convinced by social justice arguments. So the gaming scene won’t be the same.
It never was entirely your clubhouse anyhow. Gamergate was a temper tantrum.
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InferentialDistance said:
Yeah, but not by the side you think.
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Held In Escrow said:
@Forlorn Hopes
Oh, it’s very much not the whole story, but the whole story stretches back even further. I wrote a big old essay when the gaming battle of the Great Internet Slapfight broke out which I’ll try and dig up, but the basic issue is that there’s no real positive feedback mechanism for gaming reviewers.
Basically, there’s no real reward for doing a good job reviewing a game. In fact, it’s actively discouraged in some situations. If you review a big budget game and give it a properly done but negative review, not only are you going to get heat from the fanboys (because they’re idiot fanboys), but from up above because guess who buys the ads that pay your salary? If you just give a big budget game a glowing but lazy review you don’t get any hate. For games without big fanbases or advertising budgets, there’s almost no feedback outside of your view hits, which means there’s no reason to really give it your all unless you think you can be snarky enough to get some of that viral goodness.
So the only mail you get is hatemail (because let’s face it, attaboys are kind of worthless from a feel good perspective and people love to write long hate messages rather than those of support), and it’s easiest to avoid hatemail by doing your job poorly.
So now that we have the (perverse) incentive structure in play, let’s look at the social aspects. I’m very much in agreement here about how game journos get paid peanuts, but their social status is mucking around with mommy bloggers at the very bottom of the Pit of Respectability. You’re the lowest of the low and nobody gives a damn about you or your job. So you naturally try and find a way to try and grab some respect. You’re not going to find any from the Red Tribe, as they don’t really play video games much, as you said. Which leaves grey and blue, and it’s way easier to be a blue activist online than a grey one.
Now, being a blue activist gives you an ego boost (you’re doing something good!), and it generates outrage, which means more clicks… which means more money. Now ain’t this some moral hazard; not only do you have an incentive to do your job poorly, but you have an incentive to tell your consumers that, by telling you to do a better job, they’re being immoral. And seeing as it’s the activism side that makes you money and goodfeels, you lean more and more on it until you’re a blue tribe blogger who just happens to hunt gamers for (metaphorical) sport rather than a game reviewer.
I have zero clue how to fix this. The subscription model meant that we at least had EGM doing good work back in the day, but paper subscriptions are dead. The clickbait model is too damn good at being a perpetual cycle of manufactured outrage to pageviews to metaoutrage to more pageviews. If we could somehow create a culture where well done and thoughtful game oriented reviews that looked at the product as a whole got lovemail then perhaps we could recover. Otherwise I suspect that games journalism is just kind of dead in the water, soon to be subsumed by the general “I luv Apple” bubble as people who are interested in holistic reviews move to Youtube, which actually relies on having good constant content.
@Bugmaster
Nothing wrong with that. I just think that GH was a glorified VN; it’s perfectly okay to like it (lord knows how many things I like which are deeply flawed), but the idea that it was anything close to Game of the Year status was kind of laughable. It became a figurehead for everything wrong with the other side for both sides of the Great Internet Slapfight
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osberend said:
@veronica: It’s not just about outsiders showing up (although, yeah, there are definitely people who get pissed about that too); it’s about outsiders showing up and attacking anything they dislike, including things that are popular with the core subculture. To return to that one beautiful in-a-nutshell tweet, Sarkeesian (who has stated that she’s not really a gamer!) asserted that a company should be embarrassed for making a video game with a damsel-in-distress storyline. Do you not understand why people who are actually into video games are justifiably enraged over that sort of shit?
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Ann Onora Mynuz said:
>so then I would expect nerds to focus their anger on big budget Hollywood appropriation of nerd-themes.
They do, and have done, for the longest time, but:
1. To many, mainstream validation of their hobbies is good enough to overlook flaws.
2. Hollywood doesn’t give a damn about their opinion.
Hell, number two also applies to the other side: one of the reason blue reviewers are so prominent in gaming is that, when they try to do the same thing to movies, nobody gives a damn either.
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Forlorn Hopes said:
@Held In Escrow
One thing to bear in mind is that in-group social status matters more than out group social status.
The general world might think they’re down there with mummy bloggers. But the online blue tribe activism group is very insular and has unusually powerful memes of self superiority.
I could easily see people favouring status in that clique than in the general public.
Anyway. I think this problem isn’t that positive feedback dosn’t exist, but that it was relatively intangible until recently. There wasn’t a way to see how trusted you are by the cash spending gaming public. Steam curators created evidence for that. When TotalBiscuit recommends another youtube numbers you can see the rise is subscribers.
I think more things like that are going to help. More meaningful statistics that relate to quality not controversy.
@veronica d
No one minds when the mainstream start enjoying nerd culture. They mind when people start attacking nerds.
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roe said:
The social-justice types said many times they were in the business of critiquing, not censoring, games.
Then a change.org petition got Target to remove GTA V from shelves.
*That’s* the problem. It’s not just about “attacking” nerds or invading our spaces or whatever (Yes, some nerds are belligerent – but most are quite eager to share nerd culture I reckon). It’s that the end-goal is obviously about forbidding all but social-justice-approved forms of expression. IOW, it’s resisting a recent, disturbing authoritarian strain amongst the political left.
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Flak Maniak said:
@roe, regarding the GTA V thing: If it’s the one I’m thinking of, it’s a) in Australia, which is a pretty censorious place by Western standards (It certainly is politically, and it wouldn’t shock me if it were so culturally too), and b) if I recall, it wasn’t active leftists but Concerned Mom types, whom one might even lump in with the right if one were so inclined. I don’t doubt there were leftist groups in support, but I don’t believe it was a case of The Left trying to censor. Especially because, well, it isn’t really censorship. Organizing boycotts to put pressure on people to not distribute media you disagree with is a pretty normal activist tactic, and doesn’t stop other retailers from selling it. Now I’m currently undergoing revisions in my thinking on whether such boycotts ought to be considered coercive in a bad way, but clearly they’re not Censorship with a capital C. (Yeah I’m really not that sure where I stand on them at the moment.) Anyway, YES we have to be wary of the left being authoritarian, and we need to fight back hard in the name of principle and fairness, because too often it’s “Freedom of speech, unless what you said is bad (by my standards)” or what have you. (Also, fuck Australia. They either don’t care about or don’t understand the principle of free expression, even more so than western Europe, which is lacking in that regard compared to the States. Okay fine in the grand scheme of things western Europe is fantastic in that regard, but they’re /not good enough/.) And last but not least: The GTA V thing was pretty much peddled on faulty evidence, and we should fight back against THAT too. The game is super violent in general, so no, I don’t think “Violence against Women” (as a term of art) is an appropriate criticism. You get to kill just about anyone you damn please in GTA, so if you’re objecting, object to THAT. (And even then I’d respond that, yes, it’s violent. You’re a villain protagonist. We really shouldn’t lump together “depicts violence” and “promotes violence”. Blah blah, the usual perspective argument.)
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Leit said:
@veronica d
Indeed, it’s one-sided. One side gets all of the positive coverage, and the other gets nothing but negative and mockery. The threats – rape, murder, all that good stuff – against one side are completely ignored, despite the same being used by the other side as evidence that they’re under attack and that their adversaries are monolithically evil.
One side has the public voice, and has decided that, since gaming has become widespread enough to be influential, games need to toe a certain moral line. And they’re pushing that line hard, despite what anyone who actually enjoys gaming cares about.
Game journalists aren’t gamers, they’re journalists. Or rather, as it stands, demagogues.
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Forlorn Hopes said:
It was in Australia and it may well have been concerned mom types (I think it was sex workers actually.
But none of that matters to this conversation. The only thing that matters here is that the social justice demagogues – the ones who always insisted they were in business of critiquing, not censoring – explicitly supported the petition.
They showed their true colours basically.
Sure they are.
If the boycott fails to achieve it’s aims it’s attempted Censorship.
If it succeeds it’s actual Censorship. Obviously it’s not very effective Censorship because it’s one store out of many, but that’s a distinction of quantity not quality.
Censorship isn’t always bad. The canonical example of good Censorship is that you can’t shout “fire” in a crowded theatre. Though trying to Censor GTA5 was the bad kind of Censorship.
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osberend said:
@Forlorn Hopes: I’m broadly in favor of limiting the use of the term “censorship” to cases where force or coercion[1] (not necessarily governmental, although that’s the most common sort) is involved. Neither boycotting a store nor a company choosing not to stock a particular game constitutes censorship under this definition.
[1] In the sense of threatening to do something that violates the other party’s rights if they don’t do what you want.
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Forlorn Hopes said:
Osberend, I think that definition is noo narrow.
To take it to extremes, lets say someone is very very rich, and also racist and evil. He could buy all the ink/chalk/pencil led/etc, every last drop, and refuse to sell it to anyone unless you’re 100% sure it wont lead to a racial minority getting their thoughts onto paper (computers haven’t been invented yet). His motive is pure spite and sadism.
Unless you believe that private property is inherently coercion (if you do, lets not get down that tangent for now 🙂 ) then I would definately consider this censorship – they aren’t aloud to write or publish anything – while not technically using force or coercion.
And once I establish that it is possible to theoretically censor without force or coersion in a rediculous hypothetical example, then we can start debating where the line is drawn.
———————————-
Anyway, to me censorship is defined more by the mindset of the person commiting the action than the actual action.
If the person is thinking “that thing shouldn’t be said” then any attempt to prevent it being said is censorship; including taking it off store shelves through non-corercive means. That dosen’t mean it’s wrong, for example, I approve of laws against “inciting racial hatred”. But it is still censorship.
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veronica d said:
@Forlorn Hopes — You are using are bad arguments. First, whatever some number of “SJWs” supported has little to do with feminism broadly defined, nor with the general feminist critique of media. Second, the GG crowd also tried to use boycott tactics. In fact, I guess IBM briefly caved. Such market pressure is kinda normal.
You’re engaged in tribal grousing, which is not what we do here. At least, it is not what this forum should respect.
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veronica d said:
@Leit — Can you explain what this means:
What I mean is, define “gamer”.
Does this relate to playing games? Or is this some elitist thing about playing the right games in the right way for the right reason? Or is it (as I suspect) purely tribal?
Indeed GG has come across very poorly in the press. Which is to say, they seem like spoiled children having a temper tantrum.
Which, actually…
In any event, feminist critique is nothing new in life. We feminists have been critiquing the media for a very long time. That we are just getting around to gaming indeed has to do with nerd-stuff getting more mainstream. Which to me seems a positive good.
######
Anyway, all of this seems to miss Ozy’s point, which was that social justice stuff *has a place* in reviews. The reviewer gets to speak their mind on how the politics shapes up.
This is a true and valid point, even if games journalism is complete rubbish.
On the other hand, saying “Oh no my tribe is losing” doesn’t get you very far. If so, then I say good. (Of course I would. I’m a feminist. Our goal is to change stuff. It is expected that some people will dislike change.)
And as I’ve said a billion times, your tribe doesn’t own nerd-dom. People like me have been here all along.
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Leit said:
@vd – and you’re engaging in hypocritical tone policing on a lost argument. But hell, lets turn this bus around for a sec.
First, whatever some number of “NERDS” threatened has little to do with gaming culture broadly defined, nor with the general GG critique of media. Second, the SJ crowd also tried to use intimidation tactics. In fact, I guess some NotYourShield activists bowed out over it. Such online misbehaviour is kinda normal.
So, tribal grousing, huh? Plank, eye, etc.
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Leit said:
@vd –
Their approach to gamer culture outside of their own bubble is disdain, contempt, and misrepresentation. Thus, not gamers. Of course it’s cultural, we’re talking about gaming culture here. But one can’t be a member of a culture that they so clearly despise.
GG has come across very poorly in the press because they’re calling the press on their endless bullshit, and the press are thus going to present GG in the worst light possible while papering over any and all objectionable actions from their side.
Nerd stuff going mainstream is great! But it got there on its merits, and it should be changing in reaction to what its consumers want, not what a self-righteous bunch of ideologues think is proper.
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jiro4 said:
“What I mean is, define “gamer”.”
How about “someone who is interested in and knowledgeable about games primarily as games”?
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InferentialDistance said:
The issue is not, and never has been, non-nerds enjoying nerd culture. The issue has been non-nerds not enjoying nerd culture and asserting that nerd culture is morally obligated to change so that they do enjoy it.
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Forlorn Hopes said:
If you’re going to criticise the examples we use, I’d suggest you brush up on the facts first.
The target petition does have lots to do with the feminist critique of games; because the feminist critics in question explicitly supported the boycott.
No one here has criticised boycotts on principle. We brought up boycotts as evidence of dishonesty.
So yeah, if you want to try and derail a discussion on the role of critics in the historical context of video games into tribal grousing I’d suggest brushing up on your examples first. Or better yet, stick to the topic.
I’d say that gamer consists of two simple criteria:
1) Considers video games as their primary source of entertainment – joint equal with related nerdy hobbies like science fiction or comics also qualifies.
2) Chooses to identify as a gamer.
This would include some of the games journalists.
In the case of a cultural conflict like this 2 is basically a mingles statement. Anyone can choose to identify as anything if it’s politically useless.
You could start policing by saying things like “anyone who publishes an article boasting about the death of the gamer identity obviously does not identify as a gamer”.
But honestly I don’t think this kind of thinking is that useful. It’s obvious that there’s two cultures at play – left wing liberal vs left wing authoritarian (progressive if you’re feeling diplomatic). With gamers being a more specific subset of left wing liberal.
However trying to really closely define those cultures is probably a bad idea – cultures are fuzzy and it’s best to think of them as fuzzy. Plenty of the games journalists who sided with the authoritarians had one foot in both camps; they traded their status in gaming circles for status in activist circles, that requires that they had gamer status to trade.
There are cases where you can unambiguously place someone in one culture or the other; but there’s plenty of ambiguity too. Unless you can point to something like a video where they say “I’m not a gamer”, if someone disagrees about who is or isn’t a gamer – I’d recommend accepting that it’s ambiguous and moving on to discussing the issues.
After all the issues are the important thing.
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Leit said:
@Forlorn
Hmm. That’s… a lot more thoughtful and realistic than my off the cuff stance earlier. Thanks for making me re-evaluate.
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Forlorn Hopes said:
I want to respond to this bit.
I think that quality can be seperated from politics quite easily.
Lets take the infamous chainmail bikini. To a (particular school of) feminist it’s objectifying. To a lot of female gamers it’s empowering.
Does that make a review inherently political? Either you praise the empowering charachter design or criticise the objectifying charachter design. Either is political.
Well I’d argue that if a reviewer intentionally tries to get into the designers head and angled their review in that direction – this designer believes that chainmail bikini is empowering, so I’ll compare her charachter designs to other chainmail bikini and judge how successfully she’s made them sexy and empowering. That designer is trying to portray a realistic world, her armour designs clash with her intentions.
I’d say that’s seperating poltics from quality.
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skye said:
Or you could go Watsonian rather than Doylist, and analyze the relative empowerment or objectification through how it manifests in the character’s universe rather than our own.
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Nita said:
Is it? Honest question. I’ve seen people argue that they don’t mind it (or consider it a small price to pay for the joy of gaming), but the empowerment argument is new to me.
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Forlorn Hopes said:
It is.
Negativeworld.org did an article where they interviewed seven female gamers about Bayonetta (not chainmail but still) and the words “empowering” and “power fantasy” was used.
I don’t have anything better than annecdotes at the moment. I suppose you could point to the popularity of cosplay as evidence, if you find something more solid do let me know.
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Nita said:
Yeah, I don’t think Bayonetta wears chainmail bikinis. I can totally see how “ridiculously sexy but also ridiculously badass” characters can be empowering (see also Lara Croft, Black Widow from the Avengers). I just can’t see how chainmail bikinis can co-exist with apparently functional armor on other characters without making the bikini-wearer look foolish or, uh, dressed to join a completely different kind of party.
And cosplayers are definitely dressed for a different kind of party 🙂
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Forlorn Hopes said:
The chainmail bikini is far from the only armour that doesn’t fit. It’s not uncommon to see a fighter in platemail, a wizard in robes and a barbarian in a loincloth in the same party.
In a lot of these fantasy settings armour and clothing is about image not practicality and the rules work to support that. Fighters don’t have to worry about the fact they’re walking around all day in platemail because plate is a cool image. Wizards can’t wear armour and use magic because the classic image of a wizard wears robes. The chainmail bikini is just another manifestation of the core image trumps practicality or consistancy design.
————————-
But just thinking logically.
If you have a set of female gamers who find empowerment playing ridiculously sexy but also ridiculously badass charachters.
It seems obvious that the the proportion of that group who also think “but only if it fits the setting” would be less than 100%.
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Nita said:
Eh, my complaint is not that different characters wear different clothes.
Medieval knights actually did wear platemail. Modern MMA fighters still wear the equivalent of loincloths. Monks, priests and judges wear robes, and if magic was real, wizards might choose them as well.
So, each of those choices both creates a particular badass image — “I’m noble and good with a sword”, “I’m very strong, courageous and down-to-earth”, “I’m wise and in touch with powerful non-physical forces”, and is fairly practical for the character type. These archetypes have historical roots, and they also make sense on their own.
But a chainmail bikini? What kind of badass would wear that? In what situation, with what skills or personality traits could it possibly be useful?
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Forlorn Hopes said:
I don’t know. Probably: “My strength comes from my body. Admire my physique!”, just like the MMA fighter or loincloth wearing muscular barbarian; but with a twist that the body which can outfight orcs also looks like a supermodel to enhance the power fantasy aspect of it.
Anyway I’d suggest asking the women who find it empowering. They’d know better than I do.
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veronica d said:
I recall that after Sarkeesian panned Bayonetta a bunch of gamer dykes told her to stuff it. It was amusing.
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veronica d said:
On the subject of hot gals in armor, I think Mark Smylie pretty much nailed it with his Artesia comic. Too bad it was something of a marketplace flop.
(I kinda enjoyed the RPG. It’s as if Smylie said, “You know, Runequest is way too easy to run as a GM. We need more bookkeeping.” And then he surpassed his goal!)
(I did actually run the game a few times. It was tedious.)
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jiro4 said:
Bayonetta is fully clothed (fully, not the chainmail bikini type). She is depicted in sexy poses that might resemble sexy poses by naked people, but she actually has clothes on in those depictions.
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osberend said:
@Nita: I can’t recall if words like “empowering” were used, but I’ve definitely seen at least one of Zak S’s players state that she prefers playing women in unreasonable but sexy armor. I’ll see if I can dig up a quote or two for you.
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Nita said:
@ Forlorn Hopes
Apparently, at least one man doesn’t find this ridiculous:
So perhaps chainmail-bikini-empowered women do exist as well.
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ozymandias said:
I think it is perfectly fine for chainmail-bikini-empowered women to enjoy their chainmail bikinis (and, for that matter, for people attracted to women to appreciate attractive women in not so much clothing), but there are presumably also women who like reasonable armor and it would be nice to cater to them as well. The existence of chainmail bikinis is not a problem, any more than dude pointless armor is; the absence of reasonable armor is.
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Forlorn Hopes said:
Ozy, there’s no shortage of women in reasonable armour or reasonable clothing.
I give you 50/50 that he think it is ridiculous and that’s why he’s wearing it. But either way, good for him
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veronica d said:
Much is said about the right to produce any story you want, regardless of how awful. Likewise much is said about one’s rights to consume such material. Which, fine.
However, if I find your art loathsome, I might just say so. If I say, “Hey, you know, stuff like this is really shitty and actually reflects real-life in a bad way, and maybe the art you like has some reflection on you as a person, and maybe even shapes how you see stuff — cuz I know it shapes how I see stuff — and perhaps you should look for stories where them women characters are not such obvious male wank material.”
Which, *some* wank material has to be okay. But it ain’t like there is any shortage. Producing more of this stuff is maybe less than admirable.
In other words, “That shit’s pretty shallow” is fair critique.
#####
I recall when I used to hang on these male-oriented erotica forums — and I can say this: I saw some *stuff*. Anyway, I noticed one topic that seemed alarmingly popular among a fair segment of the men: the “rape the cheerleader” stories.
Which, these dudes were clearly carrying a shitton of baggage from their high school days. Which doesn’t mean they were terrible people, since I don’t think they were, but there was some unresolved pain coming out in really gross ways.
It’s a free country. If that stuff gives you a boner, well, fine. I can’t stop you. But OMG. Really?
I understand that you cannot always control your attraction, but these men seemed quite resistant to any self-understanding. It is one thing to shout, “Freeze peach this is fine you can’t stop me” and saying, “Yeah, I got some damage and these stories help me work it out.”
On the other hand, stories about “working it out” would probably read quite different from the actual stories I saw.
In other words, this shit was self indulgent trash.
#####
Also keep in mind the doctrine of the preferred first speaker: point #2 here.
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Protagoras said:
Hmmm. Honestly, I like some pretty nasty porn. But one thing that always creeps me out, which I’m suspecting is a component in the “rape the cheerleader” stories you mention, is when the story tries to convince me that the victim deserved to suffer (probably for a BS reason, like being “stuck up,” but perhaps for a genuine offense). It gets too close to empathizing with the motives of actual evil people for me at that point. Still, I’m reluctant to be judgmental of those who are into such things; not being into them, I don’t have an insider’s perspective on what they actually like about them, and I’m not saying I never have revenge fantasies along the lines of the cliched murder the boss trope (though for me revenge fantasies and sexual fantasies tend not to mix). For that matter, even if I were into that stuff, that doesn’t necessarily mean that I respond to it in the same way as someone else who was into it; they might like it for different reasons than I do, even if we both like it. But it seems much riskier to try to draw conclusions about why people like things that I don’t like, and I try to be very cautious in doing that.
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veronica d said:
Well, the material I was responding to was amateur, so its author-insertions tended to be pretty on-the-nose. Plus I did talk to the fans of this material to kinda feel out where they were coming from, and “those bitches had it coming god I wish could go back and get revenge” *really was actually what they talked about*, like outside the context of the story.
“Of course I would never actually do it,” was also said. Which, I believe them. But still. “Ewwwww!” seems a valid response.
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Bugmaster said:
> Also keep in mind the doctrine of the preferred first speaker: point #2 here.
Don’t forget points #3, #5, and #10.
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InferentialDistance said:
Most of my problems with the critique of media for sexism is that the interpretation schemata are poorly defined and/or sexist. The former results in the critic conflating their emotional responses with meaningful criticism; the latter is vacuous, since a sexist interpretation can see sexism in a blank screen.
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Patrick said:
I agree with the vast majority of what you’ve written. But!
1. Tony Stark is disabled. He’s got a big hole on his chest and a bionic heart thing. He’s just comic book disabled, where his disability almost doesn’t exist. This is actually a tough challenge for writing disabled comic book characters- you veer into disability-as-superpower really easily.
2. I think people reach for the “this portrays all women as” thing too fast. “All women portrayed are X” doesn’t entail “this implies all women are X” unless the work implies that the women portrayed are representative.
3. A huge percentage of games are nowhere close to Like Reality Unless Noted. Or, the “unless noted” happens right up front, and is glaring neon sign that says “this is a genre piece!” And I think that’s the nature of the dispute, frequently. The genres themselves are contested.
There are certainly games that can be critiqued on similar grounds to Pacific Rim somehow lacking Asian people. But a lot if the time the dispute is over stuff like DOA, which is explicitly a fighting game with character designs based on sexy fantasy anime art. And the critiques offered very clearly and very explicitly stem from feminists not liking sexy fantasy anime art, and willfully pretending to be genre blind to make that critique.
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Patrick said:
I should probably clarify. I think it’s ok to dislike entire genres on political grounds. I just think that it’s important to state what those political grounds are, and to admit what you’re doing. Pretending that DOA should be evaluated the same way we evaluate Call of Duty or Dragon Age is ridiculous. That’s a “confusing The Great Gatsby with Garfield” level of error.
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systemicinsanity said:
3. A huge percentage of games are nowhere close to Like Reality Unless Noted…
Best point is best. Genres themselves tend to have coded race- and gender- assumptions. Fantasy is extremely white, because papa Tolkien was explicitly trying to write a Western European myth, and everybody is copying him. It has lots of damsels, and also has a pretty strong sub-tradition of women-as-capable-warriors, because Eowyn. (This latter tends to collapse in to sexy chainmail, of course). And so the simple act of putting a dragon and a sword on the cover means that you’re broadcasting a reality that includes Western Cultural Traditions, and also An Epic Battle At The End With Elves In, and also A Spunky Princess Who Will Fall In Love With The Protagonist But Also Sass Him. In a sense, packaged conventions about reality are the whole point of having genres in the first place.
A critique like ‘fantasy should change (or not exist) because [x]’ is something that’s much more likely to receive hostility from fans, because it’s questioning the enterprise, not their success in pursuing it. If you tell a fan that The Eye of Argon is bad because it is technically inept, they will laugh and agree. If you tell a fan that The Eye of Argon is bad because its protagonist uses physical prowess to earn the love of a beautiful woman, them’s fightin’ words, because you just called in to question their goals. It gets all wrapped up in identity.
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Henry Gorman said:
I actually think that you missed the biggest reason that sexism causes artistic failures. Writers’ tendency not to give female characters actually motivation, development, agency, and character arcs tends to make a lot of female characters really boring– basically narrative deadweight. This is even worse when the female character is a love interest, because it means that the romance is almost certainly not going to create any meaningful emotions or tie in well to the work’s overall narrative arc in interesting ways. This makes big chunks of a lot of movies boring, and it makes movies that avoid that problem much more interesting. (This is notably true even of action movies– consider the relationships between Bond and Vesper in “Casino Royale,” between Peter and Gwen in “The Amazing Spider-Man,” between Erik and Charles in “X-Men: First Class,” and even, for a much sillier example, between Leonidas and Gorgo in “300.” In all of these cases, both partners were portrayed as people with independent characterization, agency, and motivations, and the romantic relationships between them added to the stories).
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jiro4 said:
One of the things that bothers me about this kind of criticism is that there are plenty of games where male characters aren’t given such things either. But the claim “we don’t have many female characters” is implicitly based on comparisons to how many male characters there are. You can’t count only the well-rounded females but all the males when making this comparison.
This is especially a problem since many video games are action-oriented and action heroes can be easily described as failing at motivation, development, agency, and character arcs anyway.
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Henry Gorman said:
Mmmm, I’m not intending to point this particular line of criticism at all games– just ones that are narrative-heavy and rely a lot on relationships between characters, like RPGs or the wide range of increasingly movielike Triple-A titles.
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Ghatanathoah said:
I usually view ideological correctness the same way I view special effects.
Awesome special effects can make a good movie even better. But no amount of awesome special effects can make a bad movie good. You need to have some preexisting resonance with the characters and story in order for the special effects to enhance it. Good special effects make “Interstellar” even better. But no amount of cool special effects can make “Transformers 2” not suck.
Similarly, having ideological views I agree with can make me like a movie more, if it is a good movie. But if it is a bad movie I will think it’s bad no matter how progressive it is. I agree that we should be accepting of transvestites, but that does not make “Glen or Glenda” a good film. There needs to be a good story or characters to latch onto to make the film good.
I can enjoy a good movie with bad special effects. “Jaws” is a great film in spite of the psychotic muppet shark. Similarly, I can enjoy a good movie with a bad ideology, “The Mask of Fu Manchu” is a fun adventure film even though it’s really, really, really, obscenely, racist.
I find that I can also “control for the time period” for both special effects, and ideological correctness. If I see a movie that had very good special effects for its time period, I tend to enjoy it, even if the effects would be unacceptably poor in a modern movie (i.e. “Destination Moon”). Similarly, I enjoy and respect movies whose ideology was very progressive at the time, even if it would be racist/sexist/etcist today (“Project Moonbase,” for instance).
There is also a certain threshold below which special effects are so laughably bad that I cannot take them seriously no matter how good a script they are attached to, and this impairs my enjoyment of the movie (“It Conquered the World” for instance). Similarly, a sufficiently horrible ideology will impair my enjoyment of a well-made film (“Birth of a Nation” is so racist I had trouble enjoying it).
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Alex Godofsky said:
(Throughout the following comment I will make a lot of references to “women” and “men” that should obviously be qualified with “on average”. Please mentally insert that as appropriate, I just don’t want to spend half of the text repeating those two words.)
Realism/verisimilitude seems to be a really central part of your thesis. How do you deal with stuff like Dragon Age, where women at parity with men in terms of strength are a dime a dozen? (A lot of Bioware games do this in varying degrees). The settings completely elide any hint of difference, or the prejudices that would naturally arise from such difference.
This is obviously intentional and in fact something a lot of people want / agitate for, on both explicit feminism grounds and as a way of allowing female gamers to roleplay whatever characters they want without a bunch of annoying NPC comments about how surprising it is that a woman can handle such a large sword.
Contrast this with how racism is treated in a lot of fantasy games, where racism (including Fantastic Racism, cf. TVTropes) is not only included, but made very explicit. This usually serves two purposes: first, (designers believe that) including racism makes the setting more authentic, and second it allows the game to include a “racism is bad” theme.
Also contrast this with ASoIaF, which makes no pretense that women are “equal” to men in physical combat; one of the few exceptions it shows is regarded as a freak of nature by everyone she meets.
I personally find the Dragon Age version of this to be a little jarring; the sheer quantity of women running around in full plate armor looks weird, especially since the body types under the armor are always Daenerys Targaryen, never Brienne of Tarth.
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Princess Stargirl said:
I personally like the “Dragon Age” model the best. Dragon age makes for a much better fantasy. I would personally prefer fighting ability was fairly orthogonal to physical size. And so I prefer fantasies where this is true.
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bem said:
I rather think that this is a result of the “all major characters are exceptional” thing that fantasy as a genre seems to have going on. I mean, how many stories are there where the poor farm boy trains with a sword for a few weeks and is suddenly Achilles-level talented in battle? Fantasy has a lot of implausibly tough swordsmen and dashing skilled thieves who can disappear into a shadow with a thought, and not so many guys who, you know, trained really hard with that sword, but are just kind of puny and have two left feet, or what have you. Obviously, there are exceptions, like ASoIaF, where you have a significantly higher reality threshold for people being accomplished, but in works where this effect is in play, “yes this chick who looks like Daenerys Targaryen can easily swing a sword as long as she is tall” doesn’t bother me any more than implausible things the male characters do.
That said, I would be thrilled if women who looked like Brienne of Tarth showed up a little bit more often.
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systemicinsanity said:
This is entirely tangential, I know, but I played through Dragon Age Origins as a female Dwarven warrior, and I would periodically fend off comments by people who were surprised that I was a brawler. There was one beautiful conversation with a party member who was adorably confused by this, viewing my character’s femaleness and warriorness and mutually exclusive facts that couldn’t be reconciled- not “women can’t be fighters, go be a rogue”, but “I’m confused, you look like a woman but you’re obviously a fighter”. It’s also the case that female party members you can get throughout the game are either mages or archers, not front-line anything that depends on strength.
I think your larger point holds, in that many games and stories ignore statistical differences in male and female bodies, as well as the consequent social assumptions. I just wanted to point out that your ‘central example’ isn’t one of them.
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Alex Godofsky said:
bem:
Many times it is “all major characters are exceptional”, but some fantasy games (including DA2, DA3, and IIRC Skyrim) also apply this to basically all characters no matter how minor.
systemicinsanity: sorry, you’re right, DA1 doesn’t do this. It’s DA2 and DA3 that do this in spades.
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mythago said:
In Dragon Age, your male character can sprint for miles over hilly terrain in full armor without getting tired or even sweaty. Your skinny little elf dude can swing a greatsword. Your character of any race or gender can run up a mountain at speed if the angle is right. Let’s not even get into the ridiculous levels of damage that can be shrugged off with no ill effects.
So we’ve got an entire setting that looks at realistic physical limitations on strength and endurance and says meh, forget that, we’re going to be all fictional and heroic about it. Given that, why is it the female soldiers that you find jarring?
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Alex Godofsky said:
mythago:
First off, you’re being disingenuous and I don’t appreciate that. “Oh, the gameplay mechanics are not 100% perfect simulations of reality” is basic gameplay and story segregation. When fatigue isn’t represented in these games (note: it is in Skyrim) it’s because it would be an annoying and superfluous mechanic, not because we are supposed to assume that humans never get tired in-setting.
Regarding PC design: there is a world of difference between allowing the unique player character to be designed however the player wants – which, yes, allows the player to choose to violate expectations, and also allows the player to choose not to – and giving a huge fraction of the NPCs unrealistic sex and body types. I would not design my PC to be a skinny elf dude swinging a greatsword in part because I think it looks ridiculous and unrealistic.
Male NPCs, especially those that actually pull off visually distinguished feats of strength, usually are built with a physique that looks like it is strong. Google “Iron Bull” as an DA3 example – he absolutely looks like he’s in the (100 – epsilon) percentile of strength. Female NPCs are not built to resemble the sort of women that have that kind of strength in the real world. They are built to be conventionally attractive.
Seriously, spend a few moments googling “strongest woman” or similar. Female NPCs pretty much never look like this.
Note that my critique is not “anti-feminist” or “anti-SJ”. If anything, the rigid conformity of female NPCs to this body type is itself a perpetuation of the kyriarchy etc.
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Leit said:
A tangent: this is why I like sci-fi settings in games. In Mass Effect, for example, my female Soldier is a) mostly engaging at range where muscle power doesn’t matter as much, and b) explicitly gene-modded (and later cybernetically enhanced) for frontline combat.
Sure, it’s tech effectively used as magic, but fantasy games usually don’t go so far as to make magic so pervasive as to justify waifish women and flimsy elves waving around mauls with heads the size of watermelons.
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Alex Godofsky said:
Yep, I feel the same way about Mass Effect, because in addition to the elements you noted everyone is basically running around in power armor.
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megaemolga said:
“To the extent that they are supposed to tell stories, have themes, or be art, sexism is very, very relevant. The idea that quality can be separated from politics is false.”
So basically what your saying is that art should reinforce peoples pre-existing political biases, and if it does not, that affects the quality of the work. By this logic if a reviewer is a creationist and plays a game taking place in a world were there are dinosaurs but no humans it is perfectly legitimate for them to give it a low score. This makes critique completely worthless. The goal of critique isn’t for the reviewer to drool over what they like, it’s to give the buyers a reasonable idea of whether they may like it. If I review a game based on my personal preference for androgynous pretty boys that makes it worthless for anyone who doesn’t care about the number of androgynous pretty boys in the game.
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Patrick said:
That isn’t remotely close to a legitimate reading of Ozys post.
Look. One of my favorite science fiction novels series was written by a conservative Catholic. After several long and enjoyable books that contain an awkward teenage love triangle, the protagonist, a girl, resolves the triangle by picking the obviously wrong guy. She does this because the author, as a conservative Catholic, has a creepy, alien view of life, romance, love, and women. He thinks his character is making the right choice, but that’s only because his perspective is sexist and, uh, just plain false.
That’s not separate from the quality of the books. It affects the believability of the romance. It affects the satisfaction of the ending. In fact, it forces a re-evaluation of the entire novel. Differences in perspective are a big part of the story. But suddenly you realize that one perspective was the authors, and he views it as the “right” one. The perspective shifts earlier in the book literally hold different meanings once you realize that they were supposed to lead you to agreement with a particular one over the others, rather than a balance between all four.
All of this matters! Politics encompasses things like *how the author thinks the world works*, and that directly affects how cause and effect operates within the story.
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jossedley said:
1) Which books?
2) “I hate this series because Sookie totally should have ended up with [spoiler] instead of [spoiler]” is actually a super-common review. Not sure what it means, though.
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megaemolga said:
Okay lets define quality for a minute. If your definition of quality is defined in terms of “believability”. Your introducing an inherently subjective criterion of judgement. What people consider to be believable is heavily influenced by their preexisting beliefs which are not necessarily objective. For example if someone is a pacifist and believes that there is no such thing as a justifiable war. Any movie that suggests that sometimes war is justified would be crap to them under that standard. Even if someone intentionally catered a movie to a particular demographic such as feminist. It would still not necessarily appeal to all feminist. For example if you make a feminist film which feminist should you appeal to? The anti-essentialist feminists who believe men and women are basically the same? Or the essentialist feminists that believe men and women are basically different?
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Patrick said:
Jossedly- Orphans of Chaos by noted jackass John C Wright. These books are genuinely good, up until the very end when you realize that just a few drops of the authors poison have been present the whole way through.
The issue isn’t “waah, she should have chosen A over B.” Trust me. The authors beliefs about women, religion, and politics bleed into the story in a sudden and unexpected way, resulting in a character making an implausible decision after being convinced by the (in the authors view) obviously correct nature of an Ayn Rand style diatribe.
Imagine if at the end of Star Wars the Emperor let loose a fifteen minute speech about neoreaction, and Luke switched sides.
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jossedley said:
Thanks, Patrick – I’ll check it out. I hope you didn’t take my comment as criticism – I didn’t know your reasoning, but the general topic made me thibf k of the s-storm when the Southern Vampire Mysteries hit their conclusion .
I feel kind of the same way about His Dark Materials – I don’t have a problem with the idea of an anti-Narnia series, but IMHO, Pullman’s ideological goals got in the way of finishing a good story.
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Patrick said:
Well, I should warn you. Wright really does suck as a person. He is a walking, talking, straw man misogynist who somehow was granted a human form. And the more you know about his beliefs, the less you can un-see them in his writing. I may have ruined them for you.
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osberend said:
@Patrick: Wright is amazing as a straw-rightist generally.
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Forlorn Hopes said:
Speaking of Iron Man.
I think that his story wouldn’t have worked if you put him in a wheelchair. By his story, I specifically mean the conclusion of his charachter arc, Iron Man 3.
The core of which I’d say is “even without his suit, Tony Stark is still Iron Man”.
That wouldn’t work if Tony Stark relied on his suit to be a physically capable hero; you could certainly do a story about “even without his suit, Tony Stark is still a hero” but it would be a completely different story. You couldn’t have him going head to head with superpowered soldiers without his suit.
Sure you could give him a super wheelchair, but that defeats the purpose of “without his suit”. In Tony’s first battle after loosing his house, he had exactly zero gadgets on him.
(Also, check tvtropes for super wheel chair. It’s a very common idea)
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jossedley said:
Doom Patrol had a rocket wheelchair, IIRC. Even better, it had a battle between two brains in jars.
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Susebron said:
I’ve read most of Grant Morrison’s version, and it is amazing. Where else can you find Dadaist supervillains?
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Ampersand said:
Forlorn Hopes:
Although she wasn’t fighting the kind of super-armored villains Tony Stark fights, the DC hero Oracle, before DC retconned her injuries away, was wheelchair-bound, but kept up her fighting skills from before she was injured (when she was Batgirl), and sometimes beat up bad guys personally (although more typically she worked in by teaming up with other heroes and providing logistical support & leadership).
Some examples here: http://luanna255.tumblr.com/post/23150357597/why-i-prefer-babs-as-oracle-clearing-up-some
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slatestarcodex said:
1. Failure of imagination. I think works need to be interesting, but they don’t need to be interesting in exactly your preferred way. In Star Wars, it was awesome that Vader turned out to be Luke’s father. But this doesn’t mean that other works that don’t have any secret father-son relationships are therefore deficient and should get dinged for excluding them. Would it be cool if Ozai was secretly Aang’s father? I can think of some ways of handling that which would be pretty interesting. But I think a reviewer who rated A:TLA poorly for not including such an awesome plot point would be missing the point that the show had fulfilled its awesomeness criteria in other ways and isn’t required to pander to that particular preference. Likewise, when you point out that in A:TLA it worked really well that Toph was a blind girl, that doesn’t imply other shows are deficient if they don’t make a disabled character. I feel like once you’re marking otherwise excellent movies down for things like “doesn’t have the hero be the villain’s son when I thought that would be awesome” or “doesn’t have the main character be a disabled woman when I thought that would be awesome” or “doesn’t include the hero making long speeches about how all of his victories are due to Jesus when I thought that would be awesome” you are doing something different than normal reviewing and you need to warn your audience of that.
2. Realism. This seems kind of hypocritical. Take your Tony Stark example. Tony Stark being an able bodied white male is a very realistic view of tech billionaire geniuses. Your portrayal of him as a disabled woman of color is not. Your contempt for works that violate “realism” is entirely one-sided. If we consider a work like Agents of SHIELD, we’ve got a government agency led by a black guy with like 33% women in top-level combat positions, and the same feminist reviewers that would pan a work where women cared about lipstick as “unrealistic” give it top marks despite this. When “Thor” cast one of the Norse gods as a black guy, the same people who hate works for being “unrealistic” if they have anything less than 50% women cheered and said anyone who disagreed was racist. So if you rate anything that’s unrealistic in an anti-feminist way worse, but you rate anything that’s unrealistic in a pro-feminist way better, you lose the right to say you’re rating based on realism. You’re rating based on ideology and using realism as an excuse.
3. Themes. I guess this gets to the heart of reviewing. If you say “Animal Farm was a bad book, because it argued against Communism, but I like Communism. 0/5 stars,” then you’re just not a useful reviewer. If you’re on the Communist Book Reviews site, and the only reason people go to it is to see whether, as communists, a book will forward the Revolution, then it might be useful, but it should say in big flashing letters on the top of the site THIS IS A COMMUNIST BOOK REVIEW SITE THAT RATES BOOKS FOR HOW COMMUNIST THEY ARE IN ADDITION TO AND/OR INSTEAD OF HOW GOOD THEY ARE, IF THAT’S NOT WHAT YOU’RE LOOKING FOR THEN GO SOMEWHERE ELSE. But I also think there’s an expectation most reviewers don’t do that. Otherwise…well, imagine there are two reviewers. One is ultra-capitalist and the other is ultra-communist. The capitalist reviewer automatically subtracts two stars from any communist work, and the communist reviewer automatically subtracts two stars from any capitalist work, but they don’t make it obvious that’s what they’re doing. Whether you personally are communist, capitalist, or neutral, that’s just adding noise to the reviews and making your artistic experience worse.
I agree there’s an epistemology problem here, but I’m not sure you’re solving it in the standard way. My understanding is that people in the movie business all agree Triumph Of The Will was an amazingly-done film even while agreeing its ideology was abhorrent. I think we’re adult enough to be able to hear both of those facts and do what we want with them. And if someone who hates superhero movies went to The Dark Knight and said “This did ‘superhero movie’ really well, but I hate superhero movies, 0/5 stars” I feel like this would be outside normal reviewing etiquette.
I think reviewing combines the social aspect (“Hey guys, here’s what I thought of the latest movie!”) with a guide aspect (“Insofar as you are similar to me, here’s some tips about whether you should see this movie”). This latter part requires an honest explanation of the “similar to me”. If a Communist rates Animal Farm 0/5 stars because it’s anti-Communist, then this provides good advice for other communists who judge things solely on their ideological correctness, and bad advice for everyone else. Likewise, the superhero-hater ought to say “I didn’t like this movie because I hate superhero movies, but if you like superhero movies you’ll probably love this”, or else just write for a high-culture publication where disliking superhero movies is assumed.
I think the problem with some attempts to smuggle feminism into reviews is that they are deliberately trying to hide what they’re doing, in order to force games to comply with feminism or else get poor reviews that will turn people away from them by tricking those people (who may not themselves care about feminism) into thinking they have bad gameplay. I think you would freak out if you learned that many of the reviews you trust were secretly combining information about how good a work was with how Biblical it was.
One way to solve this is to have a big banner on top saying “THIS REVIEW IS PARTLY BASED ON HOW MUCH A GAME SATISFIES FEMINIST IDEOLOGY, DO NOT USE UNALTERED TO ASSESS GAMEPLAY”. Another way is to have a separate feminism subscore versus gameplay subscore like the Christian site does.
Given that most sites already have separate subscores for graphics, plot, mechanics, et cetera (in order to eg guide gamers who don’t care about good graphics and just want a solid game versus people who want it to be pretty) I feel like if they can’t subscore out ideology then we should be very suspect of exactly the kind of coercive obfuscation mentioned above.
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veronica d said:
How often does someone make a feminist critique where people are broadly unaware that they are reading a feminist critique?
For example, imagine someone says about a movie, “It’s too bad all the women were eye candy, just ornamentation to the male characters who got to do the cool stuff.” Now imagine this is read by *average movie review reader*, who we assume is *not* up to date on academic feminism. But still, I think they would see that as a feminist message.
Ergo, this must be (at least partly) a feminist review. Yes?
In my experience it seems pretty obvious when someone is talking from a social justice perspective.
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multiheaded said:
The opposite is far more common and far worse, IMO. Like, to run with the Gone Home example, enlightened progressive oh-so-serious reviewers pretending not to notice that a tear-jerker plot about white middle-class teenage lesbian girls does NOT automatically qualify as important and literary in every other medium. Well of Loneliness, a far more dramatic tale even if, by all accounts, not a good piece of writing, was written eighty-nine years ago. It is infantilizing to any audience to say that Gone Home is an Intelligent Competent Grown-Up Art. Nothing wrong with people enjoying it, but that’s not what became of it.
(I don’t care about “gameplay” as some objective and necessary criterion here, I prefer games where the “narrative” is subordinate to gameplay, but I’ve also flipped through several silly tear-jerker VNs about teenagers, like Yume Miru Kusuri, and I can appreciate this kind of entertainment.)
So the reviewers do not award political points up front (which would be entirely agreeable and even interesting if done well IMO), they fraudlently equivocate between literary value and Morally Correct themes.
Which, you know, Veronica, even ignorant/bigoted/people of low taste can appreciate really good art. Although yes, there’s a limit to how much can be done. We can’t have too many nice things, sadly. We get a female Commander Shepard, which makes for a nice non-sexist Strong Female Protagonist diversion, but Skyler White – the most astonishingly and brilliantly feminist character I’ve seen on TV – is still going to be hated, because she strikes the nerve. But this is the hard way to actually confront misogyny, and it is the only way. Because, guess what, at worst Breaking Bad is still *great*, it is competent, it does not leave the sexists with a *victory*.
Gone Home – not the game itself so much, but the whole climate around it – has been a clear SJ defeat on every level. And it feels humiliating to *me*. I am actually very displeased by all the lazy sexist fucking crap in popular games. But your comrades are making the problem worse.
Sorry for the rambling rant.
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Leit said:
@multiheaded
The one thing that Gone Home has going for it is that it isn’t Depression Quest. Blood of Odin, I was really expecting the protests on that one to be exaggerated.
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osberend said:
@Leit: I actually thought Depression Quest was not bad, and perhaps even slightly innovative (although it’s possible that the innovation in question flows naturally from how Twine works—I don’t know; I’m not an IF player), but not as good as it could have been either.
Of course, it’s also possible that there are other games that do the same thing better that I’m not aware of.
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Leit said:
If there’s another game out there that does what DQ does, well… I don’t want to know about it.
Depression Quest is an experience designed to punish the player. It’s drab, the author overestimates their writing skill, it makes assumptions based on a single stereotype of depression, and worst, you have to make deliberately idiotic choices in order to face any setbacks. The character is an unsympathetic cunt who deliberately sees everyone and everything in the worst possible light.
I try to give things a chance before I judge them, but that doesn’t mean not judging them on their merits and according to what they claim to be. As interactive fiction, it’s mediocre. As a game, this thing is… not even a train wreck, it’s a slow suffocating death at the bottom of a mineshaft.
And there’s your review in a post about reviews. Omg I’m so edgy and meta!
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Nita said:
So, a bit like… depression? 🙂
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Jacob Schmidt said:
How common is it for feminists to assert the game contains poor gameplay because of sexism? I don’t think it happens to any extent worth discussing. The reviewers are usually pretty upfront about saying “I docked points because of sexism.”
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Patrick said:
That’s the origin of the current debate about numerical scores. Reviewers are always crystal clear about sexism affecting their review, but a lot of them then translate that into a number for meta critic. And that doesn’t differentiate.
So, you’re right, but with a caveat.
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Forlorn Hopes said:
I’d say that reviewers are upfront now, but they weren’t at first. Most of the games sites in question started out as apolitical and started injecting feminism later.
For example Polygon, the most infamous for political reviewing, has in it’s grand strategy before launch that the website should be explicitly designed to attract men.
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Jacob Schmidt said:
Nothing gets differentiated with meta critic. If I don’t care about story, bad story will still drag the meta critic score down. If I don’t care about graphics, bad graphics will still drag the metascore down. If I don’t care about sexism, sexism can (now) drag the score down anyways.
Expecting what is explicitly an average of subjective reviews from many outlets to reflect your personal values is utterly silly.
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Leit said:
@Jacob Schmidt
Part of the issue is that reviewers being heavily blue-tinted in general means that games are pretty much consistently docked on the ideological front. Metascores will have balancing input from people who weight story, gameplay and graphics differently, but there’s unlikely to be a balance for ideology. That makes the scores untrustworthy for people who don’t buy into identity politics.
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Jacob Schmidt said:
I just want to note how far we’ve moved: we went from Scott’s allegation of deliberate obfuscation and subterfuge to a vague notion of blue tinting in game reviews.
Now maybe the latter is true. I’ve not really been given a reason to care; to believe that there’s anything close to an injustice going on. The demographic of reviewers don’t match up to some demographics of consumers. Welcome to literally every reviewing industry ever.
I generally don’t find reviews particularly useful. Metacritic is a useful aggregation, and useful as a heuristic to make a short list of potentially enjoyable games. Otherwise I stick to reviews from consumers in various communities: trading off ease of access for usefulness.
But that’s assuming the blue tint is there. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was, but given how bad people are at estimating the prevalence of their ideological opponents, I don’t buy the assertion that the blues or the feminists have effectively taken over gaming (indeed, I strongly suspect feminists have not).
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Forlorn Hopes said:
I don’t think we’ve moved that far. I said that the behaviour Scott talked about was true – but reviewers became gradually more and more honest about it over time.
No one said they had. If anything gamergate shows how little power they had. They were trying, but it was never going to work.
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Jacob Schmidt said:
I am perfectly capable of separating you from Leit.
Though quite frankly, I don’t find you characterizing what’s just as easily explained as “a gradual change in focus as new market demographics make their voices known” is the worst possible way very convincing.
“Part of the issue is that reviewers being heavily blue-tinted in general means that games are pretty much consistently docked on the ideological front.”
“Taken over” might be a unfair characterization of “consistently influencing,” but the strong prominence of blues, and their disproportionate influence was explicitly a point put forward for consideration.
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Forlorn Hopes said:
Everything I’ve heard in the last six months – including from people directly in the industry (both journalists and game developers) says that it’s less to do with this, and more to do with the fact that blue activists will accept lower pay if you give them a platform to preach from.
But please, do show me some numbers to say how big this new demographic is. Steam curator followers, sales figures, something.
It is an unfair characterization, and that’s why I objected to it. They trying to influence things, but they’re not having much impact.
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Jacob Schmidt said:
We’ve gone from subterfuge and conspiracy, to honesty replacing what used to be subterfuge and conspiracy, to the blues just being a more viable economic choice.
You might want to have that conversation with the others: I am not the ones arguing that feminists are having a significant adverse effect on the industry.
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Patrick said:
“My secret sources (that are definitely not #GG demagogues) say…” … “…prove it with publicly available numbers!”
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Forlorn Hopes said:
We’ve gone from “subterfuge and conspiracy” to “conspirators are more economically viable”.
“subterfuge and conspiracy” is an accusation about what games journalists were doing; obsurificating their feminist slant in reviews.
Economic viability is why the sort of person who would engage in “subterfuge and conspiracy” tends to dominate the industry.
The two are not mutually exclusive.
You could just ask. My not secret sources are:
Chris Thursten – deputy editor of PCGamer uk and outright opposed to gamergate.
Liana Kerzner – games journalist. After a rocky start she’s pro-GG these days.
Brad Wardell – CEO of a successful games studio. Unashamed pro-GG.
I’m afraid you’re going to have to take my word that they said this. Or search through thousands upon thousands of tweets. Chris was a private email and so I won’t be posting it (he asked gamergate to email him, and while we didn’t agree it was a good discussion). Still, I think an anti-GG editor of a very successful games review magazine makes a good source.
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Patrick said:
…so, again, your source is your own recognizance. But you expect more from others. While repping for #GG. No.
I will not take your word for that. You gotta earn that, not snidely demand it while refusing reciprocity.
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Forlorn Hopes said:
I’m afraid you’re simply reading my posts in the worst possible light in order to support your preconceptions about gamergate.
I asked for publicly available numbers because they’re the best evidence. That I would refuse to accept any other form of evidence, that’s you seeing things I never said.
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Jacob Schmidt said:
Look at the sneaky little equivocation there: blue activists, it’s been asserted, are willing to accept less money for similar work. Accepting that as true (and no, I will not accept remembered statements from others as sufficient), there’s still a gap between “blue activist” and “willing to engage in conspiracy”, and yet another gap between willingness to conspire and engagement in conspiracy.
So the problem remains the same: gaming media has undergone a mild shift in focus. Feminist talking points are mentioned somewhere on the order of half a percent of written articles. How is that explained?
Social justice issues are much more visible than they were ten years ago: buzzfeed, gawker, upworthy, etc, are all fairly popular, and regularly engage in SJ rhetoric. They are arguably unprincipled in this, but the point stands. Gaming media, then, appears to be merely lagging behind a little bit in an overall trend. I don’t believe we actually need more explanation.*
But let’s say we do need more: adherence to the general trend is insufficient. Gaming is somehow special or unique. Fine, whatever. We’re given a plausible explanation that the blues are willing to take less money because they’re also after the megaphone attached to that money. I don’t buy it (not in aggregate at least; individual cases, sure), but it would explain the mild shift in politics.
But no, we’re offered an additional proposition: not only are the blues a better hire, but they’re conspiring.
Y’see, after everything, you’ve yet to substantiate the actual substance of your hypothesis, and have in fact offered up an explanation that makes your hypothesis utterly unnecessary.
*Unless you want to make the claim that the whole trend is based on conspiracy, of course.
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Patrick said:
Poor light, yes, but no “preconceptions” about gamergate. I’ve been aware of it from within 24 hours of it’s origin. We’re at “conception” level, having left “pre” far behind.
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Nornagest said:
>When “Thor” cast one of the Norse gods as a black guy…
Minor point, but Thor‘s Asgardians bear about as much resemblance to the mythological Aesir as the Mexican wrestler “El Santo” does to the Bible. If you’re going to criticize them for “realism” in the context of their source mythology, Heimdall’s skin color should appear on the list somewhere around “ridiculous Jack Kirby hats” and well below “everyone isn’t obsessed with their inevitable doom”.
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osberend said:
Also THOR IS FUCKING BLOND! </mythology nerdrage>
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Ghatanathoah said:
It actually seemed completely plausible to me that there were non-white Asgardians. The idea seems to be that the Asgardians visited the ancient Norse people centuries ago and inspired their legends. It makes sense that they’d get a number of details mixed up and distorted over the centuries. Which is why the myths have Heimdall as white, Thor as a redhead, and Loki as Thor’s brother instead of his blood-uncle. And they portray Thor as the god of law and order and Odin as the god of war, when in the movie those roles are clearly reversed.
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Nornagest said:
This seems like a good time to link one of my favorite lists on Wikipedia. Dude collected names like some people collect stamps.
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Matthew said:
http://satwcomic.com/nordic-halloween
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Bugmaster said:
I agree with all of that, but I want to especially underscore point #3. One thing all ideologues have in common — be they Feminist, Christian, Communist, or whatever — is that they judge every work of art primarily (if not solely) on how well it spreads their preferred ideology. They lack the ability to distinguish between art and propaganda; to them, it’s all the same thing. But I think it’s a good idea for the rest of us to be a little more discerning.
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bem said:
I…sort of agree with this, but I think that the way it’s phrased is misleading. Art fails when it’s programmatically ideological, but it’s not just the feminists/Christians/communists that are producing blatantly ideological art that suffers for its ideology. Plenty of mainstream (ugh, is there a better word than this which means “not feminist, communist, or Christian”) media is quite ideological as well, just in different directions. The correct response isn’t “More propaganda based on MY ideology!” but it isn’t total lack of criticism, either.
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Bugmaster said:
To clarify, I was not taking about the art itself, but about the criticism and art appreciation in general.
To illustrate with an example: a Christian ideologue might say that all of C.S.Lewis’s works are great art, because they promote Jesus, and because the author himself is a Christian. Meanwhile, Frozen is a terrible movie because it promotes witchcraft, which is anti-Christian.
Meanwhile, a Feminist ideologue would say that all of C.S.Lewis’s works are sexist (and so is their author) and therefore terrible (*), and Frozen is wonderful because it spreads the message of empowerment.
To both of these people, the art itself is irrelevant; all that matters is the ideology. They would hail a brick with “Jesus saves” or “Down with the Patriarchy” written on it as a great work of literature. My point is that the rest of us should strive every day to be a little less limited than that.
(*) I’ve actually been told this by Internet feminists on more than one occasion, so this example is real.
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bem said:
Yeah, that seems reasonable.
Although, while I wouldn’t call C.S. Lewis’s work terrible, I don’t think that it’s noticeably improved by his sexism. Til We Have Faces, for instance, would be so good if he hadn’t felt the need to spend a hundred pages railroading the reader through the stations of Orual Is Ugly And Unfeminine and Everyone Hates Her and had actually allowed the novel to breathe a little instead.
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osberend said:
@bem: Can you think of any works that are notably improved by sexism? Off the top of my head I can’t (at least, by the definition of “sexism” that I accept), but I don’t regard it as inherently impossible.
In general, I feel like . . . pedestrianly bad ideology rarely improves a work, while radically bad ideology can, e.g., I like a fair bit of music that’s pretty unambiguously fascist propaganda[1]—despite the fact that if the revolution its dreaming of were to happen, I’d be on the other side of the battle lines—but can’t think of any mainstream conservative propaganda music that I like. Perhaps that’s a matter of taste rather than quality per se, though.
. . . and then I have to go and remember the hints of ambivalent religious conservatism in When the Pin Hits the Shell (content warning: suicide and problematic reactions thereto) and the multiple problematic attitudes (xenophobia, proprietary attitude towards women, possible homophobia) present in Move On, thereby undermining my thesis. Granted, neither of those is really propaganda.
Hmmm . . . now I’m not really sure what broad theory I have, if any.
[1] Most of it by Triarii. The artist behind it claims he’s just interested in exploring various ideas, but I don’t know that I buy it, and the art itself pretty clearly counts as fascist (Euro-nationalist, militaristic, autocratic, and atrocity-tolerant) propaganda, whatever the underlying intention may be. Content warning, in addition to the above: Many videos on Youtube use marching Nazi soldiers and the like for a visual backdrop[2]. This one does not (although the lyrics include the line “swastikas rising”), for anyone who wants a sample of what I’m talking about. Neither does this one (content warning: repeated mention of killing (presumable) civilians).
[2] And then there’s the ones that use Warhammer 40,000 imagery. Since vocal Triarii fans seem to be hilariously split between convicted neo-fascists, people who aren’t on board with fascism politically but like the aesthetics (e.g., me) . . . and Space Marines and Imperial Guard players who dig the imperial and militaristic side of it and don’t give a crap about the rest.
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Nita said:
Portraying capitalists as greedy, evil schemers conspiring to steal the fruits of workers’ labour is propaganda — it’s not true, and it incites working-class people to hate and harm business owners.
Portraying women as individuals with their own goals, preferences and plans is propaganda — … ?
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jiro4 said:
Portraying women as having a *specific set* of goals, preferences, and plans is propaganda.
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osberend said:
@Nita: Propaganda does not have to be false.
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bem said:
osberend – Well, I think it depends on how you’re defining sexism being present in a work? For instance, I think that there are a number of works that realistically depict sexism, and that this can improve a work. But off the top of my head, I can’t think of any works where sexism is part of the ideological structure/moral/etc of a work where this is a good thing. Most of the borderline cases that I can think of fall into the category of “sexism is present, but not explicitly endorsed by the author,” at least in my opinion.
Of course, I can also think of plenty of works that I like that undeniably have a sexist ethos. But I doubt that I would like them less if they were less sexist.
Nita & jiro – I think that, partially because of gaps in representation, a certain number of feminist critics fall into the trap of wanting Perfectly Representational Characters instead of, you know, well-rounded and realistic characters. There’s this feeling, in a lot of popular media, that every major female character is going to be The Last Female Character, and so any flaws she has are going to reflect the work’s thoughts on women as a whole, and so she must be a moral exemplar. I kind of understand where this is coming from, but I think it’s not the right response.
But anyway, it seems like the issue here is “Women characters should have realistic motivations” vs. “Women characters should have morally pure motivations.” The first is broadly desirable, the second is not something you want as a universal aesthetic rule.
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Nita said:
@ osberend
There’s no consensus on that. Here are a few definitions I found:
– information, especially of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote or publicize a particular political cause or point of view
– Official government communications to the public that are designed to influence opinion. The information may be true or false, but it is always carefully selected for its political effect.
– ideas or statements that are often false or exaggerated and that are spread in order to help a cause, a political leader, a government, etc.
– the spreading of ideas, information, or rumor for the purpose of helping or injuring an institution, a cause, or a person
Are you still against connotations? This is an example of how connotations can become denotations over time — the neutral meaning is older, but the negative meaning is the one people currently use more often, both when they express their own thoughts and when they interpret statements made by others.
More to the point, feminists complain about the abundance of anti-feminist themes more often than about the lack of feminist ones.
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LTP said:
I feel like you’re smuggling in the assumption that there’s an unbiased way to review stories. I simply don’t think there is. You can maybe do a non-subjective review gameplay in a video game, for instance, but I don’t think you can do a non-subjective review a story, including a video game story. For instance, you might say that feminists are politicizing video game reviews by taking points off a score for a video game review because it objectifies women and therefore sneaking in their views when they haven’t informed you that they are. But look at it from their perspective, *not* talking about the objectification is also a choice and also political. By not talking about it you’re saying you don’t believe objectification is a problem, or maybe you do believe it is a problem but that this game isn’t an instance of it. I don’t think it would be reasonable to expect non-feminist reviewers to have a big banner saying “we don’t care about objectification so it is isn’t factored into this review!” above their reviews.
Frankly, I don’t see how one is to review the story aspect of media objectively. The quality of the themes, the believeability of the plot, the quality and realism of the characters, and so on are inevitably colored by one’s subjective perspective.
It seems to me that people understand that all reviewers in non-gaming storytelling have their own opinions and perspectives and they find reviewers they have similar world views to and listen to them. Gamers need to take that view, too, when the story aspects of games are reviewed and critiqued.
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Forlorn Hopes said:
Perfectly unbiased reviews are impossible, but that doesn’t mean that one review can’t be more biased than another review, and it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t strive to introduce as little bias as possible.
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LTP said:
I guess I just don’t see stories as even having meaning without one’s subjective perspective. What would an unbiased perspective of a story even look like?
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multiheaded said:
“Otherwise…well, imagine there are two reviewers. One is ultra-capitalist and the other is ultra-communist. The capitalist reviewer automatically subtracts two stars from any communist work, and the communist reviewer automatically subtracts two stars from any capitalist work, but they don’t make it obvious that’s what they’re doing. Whether you personally are communist, capitalist, or neutral, that’s just adding noise to the reviews and making your artistic experience worse.”
….
Here’s Orwell himself saying much the same!
“I often have the feeling that even at the best of times literary criticism is fraudulent, since in the absence of any accepted standards whatever — any external reference which can give meaning to the statement that such and such a book is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ — every literary judgement consists in trumping up a set of rules to justify an instinctive preference. One’s real reaction to a book, when one has a reaction at all, is usually ‘I like this book’ or ‘I don’t like it’, and what follows is a rationalization.
But ‘I like this book’ is not, I think, a non-literary reaction; the non-literary reaction is ‘This book is on my side, and therefore I must discover merits in it.’ Of course, when one praises a book for political reason one may be emotionally sincere, in the sense that one does feel strong approval of it, but also it often happens that party solidarity demands a plain lie. Anyone used to reviewing books for political periodicals is well aware of this. In general, if you are writing for a paper that you are in agreement with, you sin by commission, and if for a paper of the opposite stamp, by omission. At any rate, innumerable controversial books — books for or against Soviet Russia, for or against Zionism, for or against the Catholic Church, etc. — are judged before they are read, and in effect before they are written. One knows in advance what reception they will get in what papers. And yet, with a dishonesty that sometimes is not even quarter-conscious, the pretence is kept up that genuinely literary standards are being applied.”
http://orwell.ru/library/articles/leviathan/english/e_wal
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bem said:
Novel length post because I went on a ramble about realism:
1. This is a rather perverse example, and I don’t think the argument really holds. The actually appropriate comparison here, I think, is not “Star Wars had the villain be the hero’s father, that was great, every movie should do that from now on!’ but “Star Wars had the villain be the hero’s father, that was great, but then every other movie also did that, the moment the villain steps onstage we know he is the hero’s father, perhaps we could try a new plot line!” (Obviously, I’m exaggerating a bit here, but still).
2. This brings up the question about when and if realism is desirable. I think that this depends a lot on the median in question, but I think it’s pretty clear that realism isn’t always desirable. I also think it’s useful to distinguish between different types of realism, though! For instance, there’s setting and world realism: does this look like the really world? Is it supposed to? If it isn’t supposed to look like the real world, is it still plausible? In some cases, such as most sci-fi, fantasy, and speculative fiction, the world is clearly not supposed to look like the real world, so the question we ask isn’t “Does this look like the real world?” but “Is this a plausible way for a world to look?” Thus, you can argue that Ozy’s BDSM alternate reality is “realistic” or not to the extent that it has plausible economics, etc, even if it doesn’t look like the real world.
Also, sometimes setting realism just isn’t on the table at all. There are plenty of stories with, say, teenage protagonists where all the adults in the story are useless so that the teenagers can do the problem solving. Whether this annoys you or not probably depends on how well-disposed you are towards the story’s original premise, but I don’t think it’s necessarily a great sin, at least in certain genres.
Then there is psychological realism–do the character’s motivations make sense? Are they interesting and complex, or do they have just one or two briefly defined traits? While these aren’t always totally separate, I think it’s useful to treat them as broadly discrete categories, as many stories whose setting isn’t really striving for realism will still try to build characters whose personalities and motivations are plausible and compelling. This, furthermore, is what I think Ozy is referring to when zie talks about the lipstick example. It’s possible to write a woman who only cares about her appearance in a psychologically realistic way, but most writers who employ this stock character don’t do that. Instead of consciously deciding to write a story about a character who’s vain and shallow, and exploring how that would affect her motivations, relationships, and whatnot, they’re reaching for the easiest piece of characterization trimming, and often what they get is rather lazy.
And again, not all works are interested in psychological realism, either. Candide, for instance, works as black comedy because of its hero’s shallowness and complete inability to learn from his experiences! Lots of comedic works substitute whatever gets you to the funniest result for psychological realism, and lots of experimental works try to take apart the idea of characters with recognizable motivations and personality traits.
But I really don’t think it’s hypocritical to be irritated by a character whose motivations are shallow and undeveloped, and not by setting elements that don’t conform to the real world. People who do this are, I think, intuitively talking about two different kinds of realism.
3. I feel like that Orwell quote reached into my head and produced the things I wanted to say on this subject. “But ‘I like this book’ is not, I think, a non-literary reaction; the non-literary reaction is ‘This book is on my side, and therefore I must discover merits in it.’” What a delightful way of summing that particular critical sin.
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jiro4 said:
“But I really don’t think it’s hypocritical to be irritated by a character whose motivations are shallow and undeveloped, and not by setting elements that don’t conform to the real world.”
In other words, someone who doesn’t complain that in Super Mario, there are pipes and turtles that kill you unless you jump on them (setting elements that don’t conform to the real world), but who does complain that Mario’s motivations are shallow and undeveloped?
I would not consider that to be good criticism of Super Mario.
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bem said:
I think you may have skimmed my comment. You’ll notice that in the paragraph directly before the one which you quoted, I mentioned that not all works are interested in psychological realism, and that this isn’t necessarily a flaw. The two examples I gave were certain kinds of comedy and certain kinds of experimental work, but these are obviously not the only two! Many action stories–and I think this is even more true with action games–replace psychological realism with Cool Fights and Explosions, and, like, this is fine if what you like is Cool Fights and Explosions. People who don’t find explosions to be a draw in themselves, on the other hand, are probably not going to like the genre as a whole, and I think this is also a reasonable preference to have.
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bem said:
I also, on second thought, want to highlight that I was responding to the idea that it’s hypocritical to be concerned with realism in character development if you aren’t concerned with realism in setting elements. “I don’t like that Mario’s motivations are shallow” may not be a particularly useful criticism, but I don’t really see it as hypocritical, either.
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mythago said:
Why are we limiting the banners to feminist ideology? Because you hate it and want it singled out from ideologies you approve of?
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osberend said:
Why are we limiting the banners to feminist ideology?
Uh . . . he’s not?
Also, he’s responding to a post that is titled “Sexism as artistic flaw.” Focusing on feminism above other ideologies doesn’t strike me as very suspicious in that context.
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Jacob Schmidt said:
I imagine someone trying to complain about a fly in their fancy restaurant salad. When they do, the staff and other customers rebuke them. The lettuce mix was expertly crafted, they say, by the best chefs around. The vinaigrette was hand chosen by vote by a summit of the worlds formost food experts, and was combined to perfection with the freshest possible toppings to make an optimal salad. You shouldn’t care about the fly, they say, because salad is all about the lettuce and the dressing and the toppings. Besides, they don’t mind the flies, and some of them even like the flies.
The fact remains that there are flies in my salad, and I don’t like it.
We draw a divide between game mechanics and softer aspects of the game, like themes and narrative, and for good reason. It’s a natural divide to make: often times, flaws in the mechanics will not affect the narrative. At the same time, a great narrative will not save awful mechanics. The two are fairly independent. But my enjoyment of the game is a function of both these aspects. I want to know about weak story telling and poorly written characters and nasty implications just as much as I want to know about clunky UI and bugs; just as much I would were we discussing books, movies, or comics.
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osberend said:
I imagine someone trying to complain about a fly in their fancy restaurant salad.
I think to a lot of people, what a fairly common (though admittedly not universal) feminist/SJ response looks more like is this:
There are fried locusts on your fancy restaurant salad, served at a restaurant that focuses on the cuisine of a country where they routinely eat fried locusts. Instead of saying in your review “by the way, their salads include fried locusts, so if you find this off-putting (as I do), you may want to eat elsewhere,” you say “The owners of this restaurant deliberately put fried bugs in their salad, which is fucking disgusting. Despite some good ingredients, this renders the salad as a whole terrible. How are the owners not ashamed to make such an awful thing?”
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mythago said:
Doesn’t it say something that a significant number of people hearing that first review will translate it mentally into the second?
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osberend said:
. . . maybe?
I’m sure this happens, but I think it’s at least as common that someone posts the second, and then their friends say that they obviously meant the first (if they’re less hostile) or denounce people who complain about it for making “tone policing” and/or make cracks about delicious restaurant-owner tears (if they’re not).
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multiheaded said:
“I want to know about weak story telling”
Have you played ME3? Do you think it might have been better to cut an awful boring character like Cortez entirely, as long as Bioware is so incompetent at writing gay men being openly gay? Or do you think that ticking this box was important enough that you’d rather disregard the boring and perfunctory implementation?
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Jacob Schmidt said:
I have not played ME3.
Better for what goal? If all you care about is the story in the most simplistic way possible, then yes, it would be better to cut him.
If all you care about LGBT representation, I have to wonder if such shitty and ineffective representation is even worth it.
If you care about both, then you’d need to weigh them against each other, and see what wins.
I’m leaning towards “just keep him in.” It’s not like gaming is short on weak characterization, I doubt his inclusion is a primary flaw, and I don’t think including him will hurt anything. Keep him for what little benefit to representation he has.
(Though at this point I’m reviewing externalities of the game, not just the game itself. I do think that is absolutely valid, and will defend criticizing games for supporting gender roles just as much as I will defend criticizing restaurants getting food from harmful farming practices.)
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Patrick said:
Jacob- On top of that, one doesn’t always know whether a character is well written and worthwhile, or poorly written and annoying, until after he’s already written and published for the audience to evaluate… so in a way, this is a false choice. No one at Bioware sat down and said, “We need to check a box, let’s make a badly written character.” And cutting something from a video game isn’t always as easy as just deleting it. Characters in Mass Effect fill functions in the story above and beyond whether you can bone them.
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Bugmaster said:
I played ME3, and Cortez’s story was one of my favorites. But then, I’m the kind of guy who would keep zoning in and out of rooms for hours just to hear all of the environmental vignettes (e.g. the story of that one Asari Commando with PTSD), so maybe I’m not the right guy to ask.
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Togo Mimori said:
You might be interested in knowing that Togo Mimori, from Yuki Yuna wa Yusha de Aru, is a magical girl who uses a wheelchair. When she transforms, she moves around using tentacles, and when she reaches the height of her power she gets an armed ship to fly around on instead.
It’s anime so I don’t think you’d actually want to watch it, but you might like the character?
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Fisher said:
You want Iron Man to horn in on Professor X’s shtick?
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InferentialDistance said:
Wait, don’t we already have Arno Stark?
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Nornagest said:
Nah, different schtick. Professor X is in a wheelchair to emphasize that he can kill you with his brain — similarly for Oracle and most of the other wheelchair-bound superheroes I can think of. “Disabled person physically overcompensates with technology” is traditionally more a cyborg schtick in comics — which I suppose Tony Stark technically qualifies as, what with the nuclear reactor for a heart, but it doesn’t get much emphasis in his mythology.
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jossedley said:
In Marvel, I think Box and Nightwing are disabled supersuit heros.
For Tony Stark, part of the appeal has been that he’s an entitled playboy a-hole with a drinking problem. (Which is basically the part Bruce Wayne sometimes plays, but for Tony, it’s real). A permanent wheelchair might complicate his heel-face revolving door.
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ozymandias said:
…why? Are entitled playboy assholes with drinking problems somehow incapable of acquiring disabilities? We ought to bottle that and distribute it to everyone!
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jossedley said:
Hee! I could be wrong, but I don’t think the character would feel the same. (Hence the heel-face revolving door). It’s certainly ablism, but I feel kind of sorry for Larry Flynt in a way I don’t for Hugh Hefner.
(Although, now that I think about it, Matt Murdock went through some serious a-hole phases).
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osberend said:
And… I guess there’s a place for “I see what you’re doing and I respect your talent and that you have clearly pulled it off, but it gives me the fucking creeps.” I respect that Salvador Dali is an extremely talented painter, but I am not ever going to like his work, because I am never going to embrace “fuck rationality, we should all like dreams and surrealism instead.”
I rather like Orwell’s take on Dali (focusing on slightly different sins):
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multiheaded said:
99% in agreement with this.
“If Shakespeare returned to the earth to-morrow, and if it were found that his favourite recreation was raping little girls in railway carriages, we should not tell him to go ahead with it on the ground that he might write another King Lear.”
Amazing how, armed with a little bit of the old common decency, the bigoted sexist old dead Orwell would take a way more socially progressive position than today’s enlightened American cultural elites. (Re: Polanski, Allen, etc etc)!
(A brief taste: http://amptoons.com/blog/2009/09/28/rape-apologists-roman-polanski%E2%80%99s-rape-of-a-child-not-that-bad/ )
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osberend said:
This is a distinct pattern with Orwell, in my observation: He’s wrong about a lot of things, but is rescued from being atrocious in his wrongness by his belief in basic decency. His regard for it in others in notable as well; two passages from the last chapter of Homage to Catalonia come to mind:
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multiheaded said:
(Here’s some really rather liberal Anglican with a sharp rebuke along much the same lines. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/andrewbrown/2009/sep/30/religion-catholicism )
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ozymandias said:
Hm. I’m not sure I support saying things should be burned, even as hyperbole: that’s too close to censorship apologism for my liking.
That said, I guess my question is– assuming that one thinks that Dali is a good draughtsman and a disgusting human being– when you write a review of his artwork, do you stick to the “good draughtsman” bit or continue into the “disgusting human being” bit? And I feel like my bias is in favor of including that he is a disgusting human being in the review. (Not Dali’s moral flaws in general– those seem irrelevant– but his moral flaws as expressed in his work?)
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osberend said:
I think that one should include his relevant moral flaws, but should not allow them to influence one’s assessment of his draftsmanship.
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Lambert said:
IMHO Pacific Rim falls in the same category as porn, but with action scenes instead of sex scenes. The plot is not much more than an excuse for fights between mechs and giant monsters.
(The game Gratuitous Space Battles gets points for explicitly rejecting any pretense of a plot.)
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Henry Gorman said:
I think that’s a pretty shallow reading of Pacific Rim. The movie spends plenty of time on world-building, establishing characters, and getting us to empathize with and care about them. And Del Toro deliberately aligned its world-building with his main characters’ interpersonal and internal arcs– Raleigh and Mako need to bond and connect so they can pilot Gypsy Danger, and both of them need to overcome their personal traumas so they can prevent their memories from derailing their connection. Pacific Rim’s storyline and character stuff is fairly simple, but it’s very much there, and the giant monster battles serve it rather than the other way around.
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Bugmaster said:
In addition, much of Pacific Rim is pretty much a fond homage to kaiju movies. There’s more to it than violence; there’s also love.
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ozymandias said:
And it being a fond homage to kaiju movies is ANOTHER REASON THERE SHOULD BE MORE THAN ONE ASIAN CHARACTER.
(One-track mind? Me? Never.)
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Lawrence D'Anna said:
I kind of agree with you. Imagine Sparrowhawk (A Wizard of Earthsea) as a white, robe-wearing, medieval-europe-inhabiting Merlin clone. Yuck. Actually you don’t have to imagine it just watch that horrible miniseries. And Tony Stark would totally be better as a paraplegic.
Yet, was Christian allegory an artistic flaw in The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe?
Was having a “rightful King” of Gondor an artistic flaw in The Lord of the Rings?
Was Heinlein’s weird brand of militarism an artistic flaw in Starship Troopers?
Was criminality and sexism an artistic flaw in Grand Theft Auto?
Was a rejection of nonviolence an artistic flaw in Do The Right Thing?
I say, someone who would answer yes is a philistine.
I don’t think a person who can only appreciate ideologically pure art actually apreciates any art. The only thing they appreciated was having their confirmation bias stroked.
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osberend said:
Yet, was Christian allegory an artistic flaw in The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe?
Not as such, but it’s hamhandedness was. Tolkien did Christian allegory far better.
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Susebron said:
Tolkien’s Christian allegory was barely even allegorical.
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Bugmaster said:
Just to give you a random data point, I’ve read the Earthsea trilogy before I came to the USA; so I didn’t even pick up on the races of the various nations in it. If you asked me “what race is Ged ?”, I wouldn’t know how to answer (though obviously I could flip back through the book and find out). I loved the story nonetheless (although IIRC I felt that the third book was a little weak, and the fourth one wasn’t yet written back then).
When Ursula LeGuin really puts her mind to it, she is very much capable of writing a story with lots of complex themes in it: pride, redemption, love, revelation, responsibility, growing up, growing older — and yes, even the fight against oppression. Such stories are strong enough to stand on their own. At other times, LeGuin just gets lazy and writes 300 pages of nothing but “OMG FIGHT THE PATRIARCHY” sloganeering. I think there’s a good reason she’s famous for the first kind of stories, and not the second kind.
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mythago said:
She’s famous for explicitly political works, so I’m not sure what you’re referring to here?
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Lawrence D'Anna said:
Huh. Which book are you talking about? I think I’ve read them all and I never got that vibe, and I’m not exactly the home-town audience for feminist sloganeering.
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Bugmaster said:
Well, one of her worst offenders, IMO, is The Word for World is Forest. It’s so bad that the shameless movie ripoff of it is actually better than the original, and that’s saying something. Admittedly though, it’s not a feminist screed, it is built around another oppression axis.
Personally I felt that Tehanu, although marginally better than The Farthest Shore, was pretty much tacked on to the original trilogy in order to compensate for he fact that the original had a male protagonist (oops); same goes for that prequel story whose name escapes me at the moment.
The whole Hainish cycle is kind of hit or miss. Some stories in it are pretty good, while others are basically nothing more than pages upon pages of “Communism rules, Capitalism drools !”, or so it seemed to me.
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Nita said:
I’ve never even been to the USA, but the fact that whats-her-name temple girl* is very pale in comparison to Ged’s people was explicitly stated in the second (?) book. At that point I realised that Ged must be darker-skinned than I had imagined.
* I looked it up: she’s Tenar
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Bugmaster said:
Right, exactly, I didn’t pick up on it until the second book either. And even then, my thought was not something along the lines of, “oh, I see now, this whole trilogy is really about racial oppression”, but rather, “huh, I guess these guys have different skin colors, who knew; oh well, back to the story”.
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stillnotking said:
Le Guin is such a frustrating author. How someone can be capable of writing The Left Hand of Darkness — easily among the greatest science fiction novels of all time — and also mediocre stuff like The Dispossessed and Earthsea, not to mention downright awful crap like The Word for World is Forest and The Telling… it just baffles me.
Orson Scott Card is the same way. Perhaps it’s not a coincidence that both of them are ideologues.
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Held In Escrow said:
Orson Scott Card is the most swingy sci-fi author I’ve ever read. You have brilliant works and short stories, and then you have Children of the Mind which I use as a marker for ruining series. You have cool explorations of ideas in The Worthing Saga’s first book… which then goes full Mormon (and not even the fun type of Mormon). The man’s just not constant, but I suppose that’s fairly common in sci-fi.
That said, I suppose I’m fortunate in that I never really make pictures of characters in my head, so I don’t assign races. Descriptions of skin tone don’t really stick with me; the only book I can think of that I actually had a race pictured in was Jasper Fforde’s Shades of Grey due to its focus on color or absence there of (and thus lack of description of the character’s skin) led me to actually try and guess race based on the background ideas.
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Nornagest said:
It’s been a long time since I read the Earthsea trilogy, but the only time I remember race as such being an issue was during the first half of The Tombs of Atuan, which goes to some lengths to point out that its barbarian cultists are as white as the driven trash.
Not that that’s a major flaw — Tombs is probably my favorite book in the trilogy. Mainly on the strength of its setting, which can loosely be described as Lovecraftian; but we see it from the inside rather than through the eyes of a painfully xenophobic Anglophile New Englander, and that only makes it spookier.
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Patrick said:
Perhaps worth reminding people that the way Earthsea was racially politicized was by simply having a black protagonist in a classical fantasy and treating it as unremarkable. People lost their minds over this. Ged wasn’t allowed on his own cover.
Starship Troopers did something similar.
These are books you CAN’T read today the same way they were presented.
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multiheaded said:
stillnotking: 1v1 me m8!!!
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Fisher said:
On not realizing what race a character is, am I the only one who picked up that Duncan Idaho has the appearance of what would today be considered Asian?
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osberend said:
@Fisher: Really? Now I need reread the relevant bits of Dune; my mental image of him was . . . strongly Mediterranean, for lack of a better word. Like a Southern Italian or Spaniard.
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Illuminati Initiate said:
Currently the only Ursula K Le Guin book I’ve read is The Lathe of Heaven, which I found deeply ideologically repugnant on a level far beyond relative (I said relative!) trivialities like communism vs capitalism or whether or not it had a stereotypical depiction of women.
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mranon said:
If Tony Stark were a black woman, SJW’s would say “Omg, another sassy black woman. And she’s slutty too! So racist.”
If Tony Stark were an Asian woman: “Gee, an Asian girl who’s a tech genius, how original.”
If Tony Stark were a Latino woman: “Why Latinas always have to be depicted as drop-dead sexy? This Toni Stark character would be a lot less racist if she just looked your average Jane.”
If Tony Stark were a Native American woman “The first native superhero in forever… and you hate to make her an alcoholic obsessed with defending her honor. Good job depicting her mistrust of the federal government though.”
If Tony Stark were a Jewish woman “A Jewish billionaire whose erratic antics threaten world peace….are you trying to make a political statement here?”
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osberend said:
I was mildly amused until I reached the last one, and then I laughed out loud.
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mythago said:
That’s why SJWs were so upset at the female Thor, because she–
Oh, wait.
But I’ll let you get back to arguing with the straw-SJWs in your head.
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Lawrence D'Anna said:
Was he talking about a gender-swapped Tony Stark or a Tony Stark that was a woman from the very beginning?
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Leit said:
You mean the white female Thor whose defining moment so far seems to have been defending feminism against a literally troglodytic, painfully misogynist villain?
Yeah, there’s totally no difference between the new Thor’s characterisation and the old. Just like there’s no chance at all that the feminists who would have complained aren’t holding back because it’s such a perfect self-insert power fantasy. /s
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veronica d said:
This is a childish comment. Do better.
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Held In Escrow said:
I think the idea that the bar is raised when dealing with a represented minority in the SJ sphere is a discussion worth having. The Guybrush vs Galbrush screengrab makes the point fairly clear; your generic white male protagonist isn’t considered representative of all white males, but people tend to see minority representations as figureheads, possibly because they are so much rarer. You run into both the problem of “you’re bad at math/girls are bad at math” as seen in the xkcd (http://xkcd.com/385/) except coming from the people who normally rallies against this sort of thing.
This makes it damn hard to have a deeply flawed character that doesn’t adhere to an already socially acceptable role. You end up putting your characterization under a microscope and get pilloried for slight missteps that would be more than ignored if the character was made into an inoffensive white dude. This is a real worry; just look at the big comic outrages over the past few years. Just recently there was the evils of having a crossdresser villain who pretended to be Batgirl (which was a cool concept) and cries of male on female rape when a black man ended up sleeping with a white woman (because the closest many have to to Harper Lee’s seminal work is Mockingjay).
Is it any wonder that an author will take the safe route rather than a gamble for little gain?
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Toggle said:
This. There’s a certain sense of ‘live by the sword, die by the sword’. A character or story that is specifically signaling social justice cred (Captain Marvel, Dragon Age 3, Batwoman) will get lots of publicity in those circles and a boost in readership. But the social standards of that community amplify minor offenses against orthodoxy, and a large fraction of the work’s new readership is highly motivated to excoriate the work on social justice grounds. Captain Marvel is currently being held to a much higher standard than, say, Thunderbolts. It takes very little to fall from that position (“But you’re a…”), and it makes a big kaboom. The artists are now deeply constrained in the kind of stories and protagonist behavior they can show without losing their audience. Whereas a show like Spartacus can get away with murder with minimal social justice outrage, just because it never tried to join the club.
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Nita said:
@ Held In Escrow
The problem is — it’s not just SJ activists or members of minority groups who see them that way. Everyone does!
So we get an effect like “Barbie is bad at math -> girls are bad at math -> you are bad at math”. And, since being on the receiving end of that conclusion is no fun at all, people become super-sensitive to any hint of negative stereotypes in minority characters
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Held In Escrow said:
Exactly! Which means that you’ve created an incentive structure that emphasizes giving no representation to minorities. We need to cut off this negative feedback loop at the one place where it’s vulnerable, and that’s the raised bar. By holding them to the same standard as your generic bald space marine, you remove the disincentives that prevent making more of them.
Right now we’ve ghettoized all sorts of characters because the moment they move out of their archetypes, we descend upon them like lightning from on high. If we just treated them as another character, it allows writers to be a lot more comfortable trying out new stuff with them which then normalizes the minority. This normalization removes the middle step, the “girls are bad at math” because we’ve now got a culture accepting of girls who are good at math (assuming that was what we normalized).
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Bugmaster said:
“A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.”
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InferentialDistance said:
Not playing is exclusionary, and therefor also discrimination against minorities.[/snark]
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jiro4 said:
mranon: Or generalized: There are so many things that SJWs tell you you should avoid about female and minority characters that it’s pretty likely for one of them to be true of your character just by chance.
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Ampersand said:
Which is why it’s a good idea to have multiple female, minority, and female minority characters.
It’s easy to think of isolated characteristics of particular female characters in Legend of Korra that might be on a SJ “things to avoid when doing female characters” list. But the narrative as a whole avoids falling into any “female characters must be X” traps, because there are so many female characters whose roles and personalities are varied.
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jiro4 said:
Iron Man is not an ensemble cast series the same way that Avatar is. You can do that in Avatar, but if you try it in Iron Man, it will fail, because it has a single main character, and the other characters are of lesser importance.
And even in Avatar, it only really works for women. Women are common enough that a series with 10 characters can have more than one of them and it makes sense. It doesn’t work for minorities–by definition, they’re minorities–there aren’t as many of them. It’s implausible that you’d have more than one barring unusual circumstances (two characters related to another, setting the series in a nation composed of that minority, etc.)
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Nita said:
@ jiro4
The Avengers franchise, however, is definitely an ensemble cast series — in fact, much more so than either of the Avatar series.
Well, if you mean racial minorities, that’s true. Literally everyone in Avatar is Asian (or “Mongoloid”, if you like).
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veronica d said:
The other day I was on the subway and I saw a group of teenagers get on, and they were all of them friends, hanging out together. They seemed like a group who all knew each other and were comfortable with each other and had their own intra-group traditions and drama.
You know, just like any set of friends ever. There were five of them. They were all black teens.
The idea that you could not make a super team of all minorities is preposterous. I mean, seriously, spend ten seconds thinking.
Maybe one of them, the intrepid one, finds access to the super magical girl world portal and passes through, where she discovers how she can gain powers. So then she does but she doesn’t want to be alone so she drags in her best friend, who also gets powers, but maybe different powers cuz she’s a different girl. And all kinds of cool opportunities for metaphors come up. Then of course they have powers and start doing their stuff but over time their other friends find out and want in on it — some of them; some don’t, a great source for drama — and things carry on.
Or maybe big-shot physics kid does some amazing shit in the physics lab at his all-black school, and thus unleashes superstuff, and then later finds out that the school has a secret inner-circle of super people who fight for justice, and they’re all black and they ask him to join.
This stuff is easy.
Want mixed races — which is maybe a good idea most of the time — fine. Give them white friends, or maybe an alliance with a not-all-black super team. Or whatever. Easy peasy.
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Ampersand said:
If Tony Stark were a straight white man: “Oy, yet another one of these.”
There is no conceivable way of racing and gendering Tony Stark that leads to the outcome “no one will criticize this, ever.” If that’s your win condition, then you cannot win.
But I don’t understand why “no one will criticize this, ever” is seen as a legitimate or even desirable goal. If you do a comic book that gets popular enough to be read by more than a few hundred people, then someone will criticize it. But you’re also fortunate, because the alternative – no one reading your work – is so much worse.
But it’s not like you’ll face universal condemnation, either (or if you do, then I’d venture a guess that your work is pretty bad). If you write a Latina Iron Man that is compelling to readers, then you’ll meet a lot of fans who are itching to read about superheroes that aren’t white men. SJWs will embrace your work. In particular, you’ll probably find that Latina and Latino fans are seeking you out at cons, because your work scratches an itch of theirs which hasn’t been scratched often.
Are drop-dead sexy Latina characters always rejected by SWJ readers?
Jamie Hernandez is a straight male cartoonist whose two most popular characters are deeply flawed “drop dead sexy” bisexual Latinas who have taken their shirts off pretty often in the course of his series. And the intro to one of his books was written by Alison Bechdel, who is the most radical feminist big-name cartoonist I can think of. Because in the end, what Bechdel wants – what pretty much all feminist comic book fans want – is to read wonderfully written female characters in compelling stories. Is that too much to ask for?
If your Iron Man character is being widely dismissed by feminist readers as yet another tedious “drop dead sexy Latina cliche” character, maybe those readers are just close-minded. But then again, maybe your work just isn’t well written enough so that readers see the character instead of the cliche.
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mranon said:
If Tony Stark were a straight white man: “Oy, yet another one of these.”
Being accused of writing a boring WSM is way, way better than being accused of writing a racial caricature.
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InferentialDistance said:
The issue is that the class of criticism being raised has no solution. There is no mechanism to pick and weigh which criticism is important, and follow that to the exclusion of others. There is no way, a priori, to know if a given depiction is advancing the cause of social justice, or harming the cause of social justice. You just wait for the dust to settle afterwords and see what the general consensus is.
This is the problem. You need a way to a priori know what the correct decision is. I know that the correct amount of money to donate to charity is 10% of my income; anyone who criticizes me for not giving more than that is wrong and can fuck off. Social justice criticism needs a similar mechanism whereby one can separate correct criticism from incorrect criticism. It needs to be possible to do this before taking the action that will be criticized. So that I can refuse to take actions that will be the target of correct criticism. And also so that I can respond to incorrect criticism by pointing to the mechanism and saying “your criticism is wrong, my action was correct”.
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Nita said:
I believe that this request is made in good faith and motivated by the best intentions. And yet, to me it sounds a lot like, “we need a mechanism to separate correct policy proposals from incorrect ones, so we can reject the incorrect ones outright”.
But we don’t know The Truth! People disagree on whether something is helpful or harmful. They disagree about taxes, they disagree about laws, they disagree about rap music. Of course they disagree about sexy Latina characters.
Will a particular story or a particular character ultimately make things better or worse? We don’t know. We can use research and reasoning to imagine what the effect might be, but we can’t know.
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Ampersand said:
There is no mechanism to pick and weigh which criticism is important, and follow that to the exclusion of others.
But there is a mechanism. That mechanism is the cartoonist’s mind, and the cartoonist’s artistic instincts. Use these to decide which criticisms are important and functional to your work, and which ones to ignore or modify.
There is a mechanism. But there isn’t a guarantee.
This is the problem. You need a way to a priori know what the correct decision is.
There is no correct decision. Any decision you make, if your work isn’t ignored, will mean that some people like what you did and other people disliked it.
Good art – and especially, good storytelling – is complicated, multifaceted, and nuanced. There are no simple rules which will tell us how to make good art.
That said, for folks who are serious about it, there are resources and books to help. There are essays and books on writing for diverse characters, there are classes people can take, etc.. But these books and classes do not boil down to simple rules that a creator can follow; they’re more about processes of research, attitudes to cultivate, and incorporating those things into your stories.
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InferentialDistance said:
I would be infinitely more aggreeable to your position if people didn’t make damning moral judgement based on “knowing” what we can’t know. You are giving zero bits of information. That isn’t useful to me. People will, however, hold me accountable for being unable to make better decisions with said zero bits of information.
I want to do the right thing. If there is no right thing, then there is no wrong thing either. If the rightness of an action is a priori unpredictable, then intent is fucking magic and the criticisms should account for that. Wait, is that mechanism by which an entire class of criticisms can be detected as incorrect? So, here’s a rule: any criticism that fails to account for the unpredictability and nuance of doing the right thing is invalid.
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Ampersand said:
@InferentialDistance, if you’re seriously asking for advice, can you give me a bit more context?
For example, are you a cartoonist? If so, can you say what comics you’ve posted or published (if you’ve already created comics that are public), or what sort of comics you hope to someday post or publish? (The expectations for political cartoons are different from the expectations for literary comics are different from the expectations for superhero comics, etc). Is there a specific story summary or character you’d like to discuss?
Here’s an essay with some good advice to get you started: http://www.sfwa.org/2009/12/transracial-writing-for-the-sincere/ But note that this advice, like all good advice, isn’t about “how not to be criticized.” It’s about how to improve your craft as a writer (or cartoonist).
Re: “damning moral judgements.”
I’d say that people criticizing a piece of art generally shouldn’t make “damning” moral judgements at all, by which I mean, judgements that explicitly state that the writer is a evil person with evil motivations. I think that all of our discourse about less than life-and-death matters should be forgiving of error and open to the possibility that, even if someone created a bad work this year, they might create something wonderful next year.
I think that’s too sweeping, because a review might be valid in some but not all of the things it says. Some reviews simply look at the work as a reader, and don’t consider the author’s perspective at all, and I think that can be a valid approach.
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InferentialDistance said:
In fact, for the purpose of giving out criticism, it is important to have mechanisms by which to distinguish good criticism from bad criticism. When I criticize people, I want to give correct criticism. When they deny the criticism, I want to be able to point to the mechanism and say “my criticism is correct, your action was wrong”. When I give bad criticism, I want people to be able to point to the mechanism and say “your criticism is incorrect, my action was right”.
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InferentialDistance said:
My context is as a person who listens and reads people making criticisms and advocating actions based on those criticisms. I wish to be able to make good decisions on whether or not to follow those advocated actions (or which, of mutually exclusive actions, I should take); that decision process depends, to some degree, on whether or not the criticisms are correct.
I also want some guide-posts in criticism so I can use them to improve the quality of discourse. I want to increase the signal-to-noise ratio, but to do that, I need to be able to identify signals over noise. So that I can promote signal-generating behavior over noise-generating behavior.
InferentialDistance said:
Alright, lets try that again, hopefully with less blockquote failure.
My context is as a person who listens and reads people making criticisms and advocating actions based on those criticisms. I wish to be able to make good decisions on whether or not to follow those advocated actions (or which, of mutually exclusive actions, I should take); that decision process depends, to some degree, on whether or not the criticisms are correct.
I also want some guide-posts in criticism so I can use them to improve the quality of discourse. I want to increase the signal-to-noise ratio, but to do that, I need to be able to identify signals over noise. So that I can promote signal-generating behavior over noise-generating behavior.
I agree. I think stating that “criticism that fails to be forgiving of error is bad criticism” does more to encourage the above behavior than “figuring out the right thing to do is hard”, even though the latter is true.
Reviews that fail to account for the variety, complexity, and nuance of readers are still wrong.
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MrJoshBear said:
I feel like there’s a distinction hiding behind “criticism” that matters a lot. I’m happy to hear criticism that says “this work would be a better artistic project if the creator did/didn’t do x”. On the other hand being exposed to criticism of the form “creating this work was immoral and the world is worse because it exists” has made me decide that I shouldn’t publish any creative work ever again.
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veronica d said:
Ampersand has it right.
I recall back when I used to write erotica (in mostly male oriented spaces), I used to despair over the female characters that my male counterparts created. Which look, it was not that the women were sexual, or straight, or wanted to fuck men. I’m all for cool, sexy straight gals who want to fuck hard. And yeah I preferred the lesbian stuff, but I’m open minded. It’s okay to be straight. But the women they created! OMG they were SUCH INCREDIBLY FLAT CHARACTERS.
Like, I expect a certain amount of author-insertion for the male characters, and I get that *this is fantasy*. But still. The “Marty Stew” dudes the men created were at least sort of interesting. Their motives where shallow, but at least they had motives. At least their male characters felt marginally inhabited. The women were ciphers, complete empty shells, pretty little animals who smiled and giggled when you put cocks in them.
Yeeesh!
Is this about sexism or about their skills as a writer?
Which, of course it was about both.
(Not that I was such a great writer either.)
#####
Add to this, from an industry-wide perspective, much improvement could be expected by supporting minority and women writers. If white-cis-dudely writer says, “Oh noes, I just can’t write minorities in a way that will satisfy the eeeeevil SJWs,” well fine. The company can hire a trans Latina writer who can handle the job.
#####
Step up. Do better.
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ninecarpals said:
@Veronica
Whenever one gender complains about the erotica another gender likes, God strangles a puppy. I grew up with yaoi and slash fanfiction, and women have no right to sit on their high horses.
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Nita said:
@ InferentialDistance
I think that discussion / guidelines on what makes criticism good or bad is a great idea. Perhaps I tend to take things too literally, but, to me, “correct criticism” is a different (and unreachable) standard.
Perhaps an even more useful approach would involve (meta-)critically reading the criticism itself — discerning its premises, evidence and arguments, and extracting whatever is plausible and helpful.
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Patrick said:
Ampersand- I get what you’re saying, but a lot if your response is orthogonal to the issue.
The social justice critique isn’t merely that a given depiction of a minority character is poorly written. It’s that a given depiction is objectively harmful according to an objective set of criteria.
The moment you concede that you can never make every social justice person happy, you’re admitting the fraud inherent in the system. If a plausible social justice critique can always be made, then this really is a con game in which subjective taste gives itself airs and a sense of drama by pretending to be more than it really is. Heck, even if the critique isn’t really plausible, even if it’s just strong enough to seem that way to a reasonable number of people, that gives up a lot of ground the social justice community cares about. At the very least, it puts listening to their complaints, then telling them that they’re literally illiterate fools who can suck it, back on the table as a valid moral choice.
If the social justice critique were as advertised, “write better characters” shouldn’t work. Whether a story “denies women’s agency” or whatever shouldn’t, and doesn’t, hinge on whether the woman in question is a well written and believable character without agency. And the usual follow up response, that well written characters have agency, is facile and again reveals the underlying fraud- plenty of well written characters lack agency, when the story line of a good author involves a character without agency. And plenty of characters are side characters to the narrative and don’t receive, or deserve, the attention required for this alleged solution. The way this is always offered as a solution admits that leaving out minority characters really is safer in many contexts.
And that’s not even getting into the tendency for things that ought enrage the social justice crew to be accepted by them if the work has enough social justice cred in other areas, or for critiques to be omitted if the writer is beloved. That shouldn’t be the case if objective harm was at issue.
Related issue- it’s frustrating that the social justice crowd is so bad at racism. Racism is a totalizing cultural concept. “Just don’t use racist tropes” isn’t an option because the interplay between culture and media is such that all tropes applied to a racial minority are, or will become, racist. The same is true of sexism. This is like, cultural studies 101 stuff. The social justice crew catches the overtones of this effect, and blame the work. Ridiculous.
Anyways… Rambling a bit here. I agree that “damn the torpedoes” is the only solution. And I agree that racist or sexist or whatever work really does exist. But that doesn’t mean we should pretend that social justice isn’t a toxic morass of personal taste armed with rhetorical super weapons that obviously and rationally can be expected to have chilling effects.
…Hell, I can write a social justice attack on Wizard of Earthsea. Takes two seconds. “Le Guin makes her characters dark skinned, but the fact of their ethnicity has no effect on the story. It is simple window dressing on a western medieval fantasy. Gandalf-with-a-tan is mere tokenism, and the honor accruing to Le Guin for what is literally the least possible effort at racial inclusivity shows how far the medium has to go. ”
See? I shouldn’t be able to do that! But it’s easy.
There is a problem here.
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Ampersand said:
Patrick:
The social justice critique isn’t merely that a given depiction of a minority character is poorly written. It’s that a given depiction is objectively harmful according to an objective set of criteria.
Citation, please?
If the social justice critique were as advertised, “write better characters” shouldn’t work. Whether a story “denies women’s agency” or whatever shouldn’t, and doesn’t, hinge on whether the woman in question is a well written and believable character without agency. And the usual follow up response, that well written characters have agency, is facile and again reveals the underlying fraud- plenty of well written characters lack agency, when the story line of a good author involves a character without agency.
Are you wiling to concede that some stories are more difficult to write well than other stories?
For instance, let’s say I want to avoid the artistic failure of depicting women-in-general as creatures inherently without agency or goals of their own. One way I can do that is by writing about women and girl characters who have a lot of agency and clearly defined, independent goals. (“Buffy” does this.) This is the easy solution. Even a mediocre writer can make this strategy work.
Now, let’s say that I want to avoid the artistic failure of depicting women-in-general as creatures inherently without agency or goals of their own – BUT I also want to write compelling narratives about women in situations in which they were horribly lacking in agency. That’s REALLY FUCKING HARD. I can think of writers who have pulled that off – Rachel Swirksy’s novella A Memory of Wind and Nalo Hopkinson’s The Salt Roads are two examples. Alan Moore’s depiction of Jack the Ripper’s victims in From Hell is another example. But all three of these writers are serious masters of their craft.
So here’s the thing: If I said that the writer’s skill level never matters, I’d be lying. Some things are harder to pull off than others. And writers who have a lot of skill can do things that less skilled writers can’t. I’m sorry if that seems unfair, but I think it’s realistic.
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Jacob Schmidt said:
Who said anything about “plausible”?
By the same reasoning, you’ve rendered all criticisms irrelevant. You never please all the people who focus on narrative; you will never please all the people who focus on characters; you will never please all the people who focus on themes; etc. Take any moderately size distinct group, and they will internally disagree about lots of things. There may be a majority in most cases, but internal disagreement will be prevalent.
Which gets back to figuring out which SJ criticisms are worth heeding. And yeah, that can be difficult, but I don’t see how that’s especially different from considering other forms of criticism, or claims in general. Is the reasoning sound? Are the premises sound? Answering those two are usually enough to get you in the right ball park.
I mean, look at this community: the folks around here are not strangers to analysing claims for validity. I don’t get why all that goes out the window once SJ claims about media are the subject.
—
On a separate note: something I’ve inferred from SJ discourse is that “agency” is confusingly used to refer to 2 separate, overlapping ideas. There’s agency as the ability to exert influence. And frequently there’s agency as being an independent actor.
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veronica d said:
@ninecarpals — Which high horse is this?
This was a forum where we were *supposed* to criticize stories based on their craft. Which is to say, there was a pretense to create stories that were both 1) hot and 2) well written as stories.
The stories I criticized were not well-written, as the characters were flat and uninhabited, their motives unrealistic.
Which is bad for any character, but I felt that (many of) these men had a particular problem. Their male characters were reasonably well drawn, taking into account we were all amateurs. However, their women were *terrible* as characters.
Of course, the fact that I was a woman speaking among men brought up *the things that happen whenever women speak out among men*. So there was that. Many of the men were sexist jackasses.
Which, no surprise. But whatever. Some of the men were not.
I also offered feminist critique. Which, it’s not as if I did not hear plenty from men about how they saw the world. If a story showed contempt for women, I said so. Plenty of the men managed to write stories that did not show contempt for women. Which, yay.
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Patrick said:
Ampersand- the fact that social justice critique includes claims of objectivity is obvious to the point of not requiring citation. Using the example already on the table, a story is either misogynist for denying women’s agency, or it isn’t. It either reinforces stereotypes, or it doesn’t.
Calling Birth of a Nation out for furthering pro lynching narratives is not a “that’s just like, your opinion, man!” kind of issue. It actually does this in identifiable ways.
Extrapolate to less extreme examples.
If I seriously have to provide citation on this, then this conversation isn’t worth having.
JS- see above for the distinction that separates this issue from other types of critique. There is a difference between disagreement as to whether a character is engaging, and disagreement as to whether a character embodies a negative stereotype, thereby furthering it. The former is a dispute over subjective opinions. The latter is a dispute over a question of fact. The point I am laboriously trying to make is that social justice holds itself out as the second type of issue. But it does not function as such. And the gap between reality and advertisement is filled with toxicity.
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InferentialDistance said:
The part where you call it “sexist”. It is not a function of sexism. It is a function of incompetence. The female characters were flat because the only characters with any depth were the author self-inserts. That is not a function of sexism, that is a function of incompetence. This is obvious when you look about females writing male characters; yaoi and slashfiction is full of flat male characters, for the exact same damned reason.
To call it sexism is to say that it is a bias against one gender that does not occur to the other. Which is to say that it does not occur to male characters. Which is empirically false. Your argument is incorrect, you do not hold the moral high ground, do not pass GO, do not collect $200.
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Jacob Schmidt said:
I disagree with your distinction between subjective and objective claims, but I really don’t want to get into that, so I’ll accept your formulation.
Sure, SJ makes strong claims of fact. And sure, people within the SJ community are not entirely consistent on what, exactly, those claims are. That’s not a uniqueness to SJ. That’s really, really common where determining facts is difficult. It does not follow to say that because the SJ community is inconsistent on statements of fact that they are operating on the whims of personal, subjective opinion.
The only thing strange about SJ is that it involves itself with moral imperatives: usually, a question of fact can be set aside until better information comes in. In SJ, that means defaulting to the status quo, and the status quo is the very problem they’re trying to address.
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Ampersand said:
Patrick – if it were so obvious as to not require citation, then I wouldn’t have asked for citation. That you can’t provide a citation strongly suggests that you’re attacking a strawman.
“The social justice critique isn’t merely that a given depiction of a minority character is poorly written. It’s that a given depiction is objectively harmful according to an objective set of criteria.”
I don’t know of anyone who’d say that an issue like “does a particular story reinforce stereotypes” is always an objective question, never requiring subjective judgement. It’s certainly not true that all SJ people – whatever the heck that term means – would agree with such an obviously stupid idea.
In some cases – like Birth of a Nation – it’s easy to say that it uses harmful stereotypes. But, contrary to what you write, we can’t extrapolate from the extreme case to all cases. That one case is simple and obvious doesn’t prove that ALL cases are simple and obvious.
There are easy cases. In those cases, it’s easy to make pronouncements, and to point to obvious and clear mistakes the creators have made. But there are also hard cases, where people can legitimately disagree, and where subjective judgements must come into play. Do you really think that many “SJ” people would disagree with that?
There are no rules that apply to all writing. I can imagine a meta-narrative that was working specifically against the idea of conventional character development, for instance, deliberately creating side characters with no agency. Or a sci-fi story in which some characters had…. well, without going into detail, I just mean to say there are no absolute rules in art. Any “rule” of writing has been broken successfully by some writer at some time.
But, IN GENERAL, if side characters lack agency or goals, that’s bad writing. And if female side characters in particular lack all agency and goals, while all characters with agency and goals are male, that would be very hard to write without creating a narrative that is both badly written and sexist.
(P.S. The women in From Hell aren’t the protagonists of the book. At most, one is – but all of them are well-written characters.)
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Patrick said:
JS- the difference between “I think this tastes good” versus “I do not,” as opposed to “I think this was seasoned with cumin” versus “I do not,” is well established. Even the most basic of SJ are of the latter variety. “This book is nisogynist” is a claim about the book, not about the authors reaction to the book.
I’ll happily acknowledge that the line is poorly policed (see, eg, “I hate this food” versus “This food is terrible”), but SJ critique is clearly on one particular side. Misogyny, racism, etc, are actual things. They are either invoked or no.
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Patrick said:
Like I said, Ampersand, if you’re seriously going to maintain otherwise then conversation is pointless.
The fact that you immediately concede your own error by shifting from a “that isn’t true” stance to “well, that isn’t true ALL the time” stance is, in my view, an implicit admission that you know you are in the wrong.
I’m going to cease responding to you in this thread.
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osberend said:
@Ampersand: You want citation for “the fact that social justice critique includes claims of objectivity?” All right, Here’s Sarkeesian for ya:
Assuming that somewhere in that 30 minute video[1], she states that a particular game contains Women as Background Decoration, she is asserting that that game objectively contains “female bodies” that are “treat[ed] or represent[ed] as a thing or mere instrument to be used for another’s sexual purposes” and are “presented as existing for the pleasure and gratification of others.”
(There’s also the hilarious bit of self-contradiction where she gives a definition for “sexual objectification” that requires that it be done to “a human being,” meaning that fictional characters can’t be objectified by definition. But that’s a secondary point, in this context.)
Note that I didn’t cherry-pick that description at all; I went to the Feminist Frequency website and scrolled down until I found the first video that was about a “negative” trope and wasn’t a follow-up.
[1] I find reading her writing enraging enough, watching video is pretty much guaranteeed to be worse. If you have some compelling reason why I should, I I can take a stab at it tonight, but it’s not the sort of thing I should do before work if I want to have a productive day at the office.
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Ampersand said:
Patrick, I didn’t concede an error at all.
I can’t see any merit in your position here, and I don’t understand why you react so badly to being asked to provide evidence for what seem tome to be extremely broad and dubious claims.
But since my general impression of you is that you’re an extremely smart and interesting comment-writer, my conclusion is that we’re probably talking past each other without understanding what the other one is actually saying. Sorry about that.
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Ampersand said:
Oserbend, I don’t agree that this is an example of someone claiming that the criteria are “objective.” Note that the word “objective” is actually not present in the quote. What she’s suggesting, in that quote, are subjective and aesthetic criteria, not “objective” criteria.
“Is this chair made of wood?” is an objective question. “Is this character designed to titillate presumed straight male players” is not asking for objective fact, but for subjective interpretation. In many cases, it’s a very EASY interpretation to make, but “easy” and “objective” are not interchangeable terms.
If you asked me, I would have once said that Aaron Diaz’s drawings of female characters were clearly intended to titillate straight male readers (and let me emphasize, I don’t think there’s anything morally wrong with that). I mean, really, really obviously so: http://dresdencodak.com/images/mars_preview.jpg . But when I asked Aaron about it, he disagreed that’s what he’s doing. He just likes the aesthetics of drawing curves, he said.
(Disclaimer: This is a conversation from years ago, so obviously I’m paraphrasing, memory is imperfect, etc.).
It’s not objective. Sometimes it’s easy or obvious, but even then, it’s not objective. Aaron and I both know a hell of a lot about cartooning aesthetics, but even that doesn’t mean we always agree.
(Also, the quote I asked for a citation on was “The social justice critique isn’t merely that a given depiction of a minority character is poorly written. It’s that a given depiction is objectively harmful according to an objective set of criteria,” not the quote you just presented.)
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osberend said:
To dislike something on the basis of subjective taste is fine. To condemn something on the basis of subjective taste (recognizing that that’s what you’re doing) is reprehensible.
To return to my earlier analogy: No one in this comment thread[1] is unhappy about people saying “The salad at Chez Sauterelle contains fried locusts, which I do not like. If you also do not like fried locusts in your salad, you probably want to eat elsewhere.” We’re angry about people saying “It’s 2015, and Chez Sauterelle has disgusting fried bugs in its salad! How are they not ashamed!? Don’t they understand that they’re part of what’s keeping women out of exotic cuisine!?”
There are several possibilities here: (1) Sarkeesian is asserting objective truths about the content of games she crticizies. I think this is the most charitable interpretation, given the alternatives. (2) Sarkeesian acknowledges that her criticisms are inescapably subjective, but uses them as a basis for publicly criticizing and attacking people anyway. She is despicable. (3) Sarkeesian is so bad at using language that she says “Dear game developers, it’s 2015 aren’t you embarrassed by this yet?!” and doesn’t believe that she’s attacking or criticizing anyone in doing so. Given all the criticism she’s taken, this leaves only two possibilities: (3.a) She is capable of learning to say what she means, but bull-headed refuses to do so. She is, again, despicable. (3.b) She suffers from a serious mental illness or mental disability that renders her incapable of communicating clearly on a basic level. This is not morally blameworthy on her part (and is rather sad), but it definitely raises the question of why anyone else is treating the feminist equivalent of Time Cube as meaningful commentary.
(Also, the quote I asked for a citation on was “The social justice critique isn’t merely that a given depiction of a minority character is poorly written. It’s that a given depiction is objectively harmful according to an objective set of criteria,” not the quote you just presented.)
I’m pretty sure that I can dig up a citation for that, but I don’t have one off the top of my head. I may return to this later.
[1] There are, of course, idiots who are unhappy about this, because there are idiots who are unhappy about anyone disliking anything they like, ever, and if your audience is big enough, it’s bound to contain some of them. But they’re not represented here (AFAICT), nor (I think) are they the majority of people who are angry about feminist attacks on their entertainment.
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Ampersand said:
@Oserbend:
To dislike something on the basis of subjective taste is fine. To condemn something on the basis of subjective taste (recognizing that that’s what you’re doing) is reprehensible.
Before I respond, can you say what “condemn” means in this context?
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osberend said:
@Ampersand: Roughly, “state that a work or act is morally bad, that it should not have been made or done, and/or that that those who made or did it ought to feel bad (e.g., ashamed, guilty, embarassed, etc.) as a result.”
That might be slightly off (or just underinclusive), and if I conclude that it is, I’ll let you know. But I think that ought to be enough to get us started.
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veronica d said:
@InferentialDifference
You have much to say about stories you never read.
When giving critique, I will always be speaking from my own perspective, and from my perspective some of these men had a particular problem drawing believable female characters, which did not match the problems they had with male characters. This on its own might not be sexist, but in many cases there was an element of manifest sexism in the content. In fact, many of the women seemed to be projections of their author’s own sexist preoccupations and general contempt for women.
Sorry, but sexist men exist and some of them write erotic fiction on forums where women, while not dominant, still participate. They put these stories up for review, to get comment. When they did this, sometimes I commented.
“Sorry, this story has problems. Here is what I think…” is a valid thing to say.
Of course most of the men were not so off-the-charts horrible. However, many did a poor job *in particular* representing women. There was a real gap between women-as-people and women-as-they-exist-in-the-minds-of-these-men. Pointing out such differences seems useful information to me. Furthermore, I indeed think some of the insight-gap was due to sexist beliefs held by the men. I did not always bring that up, as it did not always seem useful. But sometimes I did.
I was one voice, and I made a good faith effort to explain what I saw as flaws. I made my feminism clear. I explained why I felt as I did.
Again, many of these men intended to write well-crafted stories and considered women a valid part of their audience. In fact, often they bragged that women also liked their stuff. (Which is maybe a bit silly, but whatever.)
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ninecarpals said:
@Veronica
Either your original comment did not specify that this was a forum for critique or I just missed it, but that changes the nature of my complaint. Erotica forums where the purpose is just to write erotica – no matter how awful – are a different matter from ones where the writer is trying to improve. When someone complains about sex-specific problems in the former, I’m inclined to laugh at them, because most erotica is of low quality, and flat characters come with the territory. What it sounds like instead is that you were a member of a forum where writers wanted to improve, and the critiques you sent were intended to improve their storytelling.
Still, I’m not sure what the point of you insisting that these men had problems with women was. It may be true, but it doesn’t have much to do with the subject of what makes for good characterization/a good story. Perhaps I’m just forgetting due to the long comment chain.
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Ampersand said:
So you’re saying that to say that a work should be an embarrassment to its creators, based on subjective criteria, is reprehensible?
I disagree entirely. What you’re talking about is criticism. It is not inherently reprehensible to criticize a work, to say that the work is so cliched that its creators ought to be embarrassed, to say that making the work was a mistake, or even to say that a work is morally bad, based on subjective criteria.
There are several possibilities here: (1) Sarkeesian is asserting objective truths about the content of games she crticizies. I think this is the most charitable interpretation, given the alternatives.
I see no reason to believe either that Sarkeesian is asserting objective truths, or to think that this is the most charitable interpretation. If Sarkeesian believes that all her opinions are objective facts, the same way “New York City is in New York State” is an objective fact, then I think she is badly mistaken.
(2) Sarkeesian acknowledges that her criticisms are inescapably subjective, but uses them as a basis for publicly criticizing and attacking people anyway. She is despicable.
Nope, nope, nope. Having and stating subjective opinions about art, about morality, and about the overlap is not “despicable.”
Blah blah blah.
You don’t include another, completely obvious possibility:
(4) Sarkeesian is evaluating work based on subjective moral and aesthetic criteria. This is a perfectly reasonable thing to do, and is not inherently despicable.
Your standards for criticism, were they to become widespread, would either require all critics to shut up forever, or to criticize only with anodyne, bloodless, boring language (i.e., ” “The salad at Chez Sauterelle contains fried locusts, which I do not like. If you also do not like fried locusts in your salad, you probably want to eat elsewhere.”). If they don’t do one of those two things, they are “despicable.”
Fuck that. Criticism isn’t despicable, but your ideas are, because killing me is despicable and you want me to be bored to death by criticism. You want to kill me by boring me. Why do you want to kill me? What have I ever done to you?
(That paragraph was a joke.)
Bottom line: I don’t want to live in a world in which criticism has to be so boring that not even the thinnest-skinned, most philistine gamergater can find a way to object to it.
P.S. I think George Lucas should be embarrassed by Jar-Jar! I think that Darwyn Cooke should be embarrassed by “Before Watchmen”! I myself am embarrassed by many of my early cartoons! I think that Marni Nixon should be very, very embarrassed by the drug addiction plotline of season 6 Buffy! I could go on forever….
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InferentialDistance said:
And you generalize from anecdote.
You were not saying “some of these people were sexist, and it showed in their work work”. You said:
The women were ciphers, complete empty shells, pretty little animals who smiled and giggled when you put cocks in them.
…
Is this about sexism or about their skills as a writer?
Which, of course it was about both.
No. It was not about both. “The men” had some depth because you generalize from the author self-inserts to all men, and author self-inserts import depth from the real motivations of the author. “The women” had no depth because they weren’t the author’s self insert. The genderswapped equivalent was so prevalent in female-made fanfiction that the term “Mary Sue” was coined for it; an obvious wish-fulfillment character with some depth (proxied from the author), while all the other characters shallowly act out the author’s fantasy because the author is too incompetent to write better.
Yes, there were (and still are, and will continue to be) misogynists in male-dominated amateur fiction. Correlation is not fucking causation. The existence of poor depictions of women alongside the existence of misogynists does not necessitate that the poor depictions of women are because of the misogynists. The incompetence of the authors is empirically obvious. The incompetence of the authors is sufficient, as an explanation, of the poor depiction of women in said fiction. The incompetence of the authors is a simpler explanation because it also explains the genderswapped version of the phenomenon, which is itself empirically obvious, and empirically correlated with incompetence; sexism fails to explain the genderswapped version of the phenomenon.
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veronica d said:
@ninecarpals — My point is to agree with Ampersand and Ozy: feminist insight is a valid topic of artistic critique.
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Jacob Schmidt said:
I think it’s entirely valid to make a subjective judgement call and act on it. There’s a space between “objectively demonstrable” and “analogous to personal taste”; we operate in that space quite frequently. Given the actual videos and criticisms, I’m not convinced she’s overstepping reasonable criticism. Even if you disagree with her, they’re hardly calls to arms, or extreme in any meaningful way. She’s consistently level headed, and even if you like the things to which she morally objects (and thus might conclude she probably thinks you are immoral) that still only places her in a position similar to other moral objectors to things you like.
Huh. I saw that at the bookstore the other week. I was thinking of buying it.
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veronica d said:
@InferentialDistance — I was talking about particular problems I had with particular stories written by particular men at a particular time on a particular forum. When I said “the women were ciphers…” (in the quote you presented), I meant the particular women in these particular stories. Not every woman in any story ever.
I suspect that my experiences will generalize to *some degree*. However, this does not require that they generalize uniformly everywhere all the time.
You’re being vapid.
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ninecarpals said:
@Veronica
You can easily convince me that shallow characters, regardless of gender, are examples of sloppy writing that most works would benefit from fixing. (The counterexample of Candide raised elsewhere is duly noted.) If you mean something else by ‘feminist critique’ – such as implying a moral problem with the work’s existence – then I suspect we won’t get along, because you’re going to crash into the slash fanfiction problem headlong, and the fact that I truly do not care if groups I belong to that social justice acknowledges as subaltern are misrepresented in fiction.
(If you’re curious why I don’t care, it’s because I believe in quantity over quality when it comes to representation. Sloppy writing is sloppy writing, but when it comes to stereotypes, any given minority is going to have members that fit those stereotypes to a ‘t’. If you think of stereotypes as a disproportionate way of representing a group, then adding more of everything will almost certainly change that proportion, and save you from the trap described elsewhere in the threat where writers don’t feel like they can write a minority character without being nailed to the wall.)
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osberend said:
@InferentialDistance: Speaking as a fellow dude-who-argues-with-veronica-about-objectification-and-creepiness, I hope you’ll take this as the friendly advice that it is:
You’re getting mindkilled here.
One of the consequences of this is that you’re assuming things that veronica has not stated, such as that the writing in question lacked male characters other than self-inserts. It’s possible that veronica’s assessment of that writing is well-justifed, based on what she’s written, and even if it’s not, you lack the information to show that it’s not. The comments to this post contain battles worth fighting, but the one you’re currently engaged in is not one of them. As a co-belligerent in much of the broader debate, I advise you to let this point go.
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InferentialDistance said:
@veronica d
Then you should use language that communicates what you mean, not language that communicates what you don’t mean. You used the definite article “the” when discussing this topic; lacking a previously specified sub-set of “amateur male authors of erotica” for the the binding of the definite article, it binds to the entire class of “amateur male authors of erotica”. Same goes for “the men” and “the women” in the context of the works portrayed. If you wish to communicate some subset of “the men” and “the women”, you need to use language that specifies so: “some men”, “most women”, etc…
I assume, as a person who offered criticism to aspiring writers in the hopes of helping them improve, you understand the importance of articles in English.
It does generalize to “some” degree. That’s why, when you generalize, you say “some” not “the”. When you generalize do not use the definite article unless you mean to specify the entire class. Because what it means when you say “the problem with X is Y” is that Y is the only problem with X. The non-uniform generalization of the claim is “a problem with X is Y”. This is literally the difference between the existential and universal quantifier in symbolic logic.
You communicate poorly and then insult others for failing to understand what you meant. I am reminded of an xkcd comic…
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InferentialDistance said:
Yes. I already regret the comic I linked in my previous post, as it comes across as more hostile than I intend (violence is not an acceptable response to that depicted situation). It is some small consolation that I flubbed the URL so that it takes slightly more effort to get there.
I am bowing out of this particular discussion sub-reply-chain before I do some more egregiously inappropriate.
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Patrick said:
JS- I agree with most of what you’ve written. Sarkeesian certainly isn’t out of line on a per se level. And the reaction to her is dramatically beyond proportional.
That being said.
Regarding the difference between mere taste and objectively determinable. You are mixing up two issues- things that are subjective, and things that are objective but epistemically uncertain and about which people might disagree. The SJ critique of media is unquestionably offered as if it were the latter. Simple familiarity with it is sufficient to demonstrate this.
I used Birth of a Nation as an example earlier. It’s an easy example. If someone doesn’t believe that it furthers racist narratives, you can factually demonstrate that they’re wrong to the point where continued disagreement can be considered irrational. This is not categorically different from a debate about what type of film was used in its production.
Earlier in the thread I noted that a modern reader literally cannot read Earthsea the way it was intended, because the intended audience had traits a modern reader lacks. The narratives it addressed have shifted, not completely but enough, and the thing about “furthering narratives” is that it doesn’t strictly occur in the work- it occurs in the interaction between work and reader.
The problem is that if you start with that, then open your standard of morally condemnable material to the point where it encompasses everything, the chilling effect is astronomical. You end up condemning the work for the sins of your culture as a whole. For example, there’s no means of portraying a black character that can’t be interpreted as invoking racism- we have racial tropes for literally all possibilities. Thug, token, white guy with a tan, lamp shading stereotypes by smugly flaunting them, blaxploitation, etc. And those critiques aren’t necessarily wrong on a factual level! The issue is how we should respond.
The SJ critique, as I see it, notices the metaphorical water in which we swim. But it’s response is unacceptable. It fails to notice that not swimming in water isn’t an option for a fish. It screams at our metaphorical fish and holds them responsible for the water in which they exists. Then it offers a free pass to its friends even though it’s friends swim in the same water. And it defends the indefensible distinction with utterly irrelevant apologetics (“write better”).
Mans that’s why people offer the challenge- design, say, a video game that includes fan service for a male audience, but which won’t be validly subject to SJ critiques. Design a clearly black LoL character that is visibly African at 100 pixels tall, but doesn’t have traits SJs have said are Wrongful. Design a low agency female side character in a movie with a male protagonist that won’t fall afoul of the rules SJs lay down.
Or admit that you want to eliminate all of those things through social pressure.
SJs don’t actually want the latter. But the former can’t be done, because broaching those topics at all inherently involves touching narratives they want to make radioactive. That’s why people use the argument.
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osberend said:
Sarkeesian certainly isn’t out of line on a per se level. And the reaction to her is dramatically beyond proportional.
I disagree[1], and feel obliged to note this, since I’m otherwise in broad agreement.
You are mixing up two issues- things that are subjective, and things that are objective but epistemically uncertain and about which people might disagree. The SJ critique of media is unquestionably offered as if it were the latter.
THIS.
If I say, “if I were you, I’d be embarrassed,” that’s a subjective statement. If I say “you ought to be embarrassed,” I am not necessarily asserting that I have perfect access to the True Objective Standard of what conduct is rightfully embarrassing, but I am asserting that such a standard exists, and that I am quite confident that my model of it is correct in its prediction that the True Objective Standard says that your conduct is rightfully embarrassing. (I can tone down that confidence level by instead saying things like “it seems to me like you should probably be embarrassed,” if my model says that your conduct is rightfully embarrassing, but I am not confident enough in that prediction to make an unqualified statement.)
The SJ critique of media is unquestionably offered as if it were the latter. Simple familiarity with it is sufficient to demonstrate this.
Agreed.
The SJ critique, as I see it, notices the metaphorical water in which we swim. But it’s response is unacceptable. It fails to notice that not swimming in water isn’t an option for a fish. It screams at our metaphorical fish and holds them responsible for the water in which they exists. Then it offers a free pass to its friends even though it’s friends swim in the same water.
Yep. With the added bonus that free passes can be arbitrarily revoked for no apparent reason, triggering a new round of Happy Fun-Time Circular Firing Squad!
I agree with this as a functional analysis, but I do think that there’s some justice to the claim that (some) SJWs aren’t being inconsistent, they just hold wildly different opinions from each other.
Which, again, is fine if we’re talking matters of taste. But if we’re talking approximations to the One Truth, it’s unacceptable that such wildly different opinions should exist within a single movement that has as much United Frontism as SJ does.
And, of course, some SJWs really will, individually, attack you for any depiction of a black character. Or for not depicting a black character at all. Because some people are just plain unreasonable assholes looking for a fight.
[1] Except insofar as “beyond proportional” is understood to encompass “like anyone else saying anything controversial on the internet, thank you, GIFT.”
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Ampersand said:
@Jacob:
Well, don’t not get “Before Watchmen” because of what I said!
Cooke’s artwork is always awesome to look at. And the Silk Spectre story that he co-wrote and Amanda Conner drew (which is part of the same book) is the best of the “Before Watchmen” stories, imo. (Conner’s decision to stick with the strict nine-panel grid Watchmen used does a lot to make her work feel like Watchmen.)
There is something just… tacky about doing a work-for-hire project based on a property that one of the co-creators feels DC stole from him, and that the co-creator explicitly objects to. I mean, sure, the Superman creators said that Superman was stolen from them, and Jack Kirby said that [most of Marvel] was stolen from him, but at least in those cases the original creators weren’t saying “and I don’t want any more books about those characters made!”
And it’s especially tacky when the creator in question is someone like Cooke – someone who isn’t hungry, someone who is already very successful and who could have turned the job down.
But all of that is “inside baseball” stuff which I think you can justifiably ignore. None of that will make it wrong if you read Cooke’s BW stories and enjoy it. If what you want is to read what is essentially some really gorgeously drawn Watchmen fan-fiction, that’s fine, and BW will definitely deliver that.
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Patrick said:
I guess I should also add- ampersand, the second half of your post would be really compelling if the “women without agency” critique were only applied to protagonists. It’s not. It’s a regular part of critiquing female side characters who lack agency because they suffer from a bad case of not-the-protagonist. If your movements ideology entails that writing non-cis-white-male side characters is inherently hard, that might be a warning sign that the rails were abandoned some time ago.
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Patrick said:
I suck at threading. And life. How did I screw this up? Argh. This took effort to get wrong.
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InferentialDistance said:
InferentialDistance said:
Fuck, blockquotes and me do not get along this morning.
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Matthew said:
(This comment is technically meant to fall somewhere in a subthread above, but I was gone from this thread a few days, and trying to find the right spot is a challenge.)
The point at which people switched from arguing about artistic merit in video games to artistic merit in erotica has thrown me. Erotica, like porn, is a medium in which I would expect really satisfying material for an audience of (typical) men to be different from really satisfying material for an audience of (typical) women. This is true not simply in terms of individual plot details, but in meta terms — what is erotica supposed to achieve?
It’s like the difference between a feminist complaining that a lot of mainstream porn is degrading to women, so they don’t enjoy it, and a feminist complaining that a lot of mainstream porn is degrading to women, therefore ur doin it rong. No. The solution is to go make different porn that would satisfy a feminist audience. Making porn less degrading would make it aesthetically worse from the point of view of the target audience. (My opinion colored by being dom, obviously.)
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Ampersand said:
From ‘The Birth of a Nation’: The racist movie everyone should watch – The Washington Post
The writer goes on, talking about many specific characters. But her point is that Griffith marred his own work because his racism made him incapable of imagining a decent Black character.
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Patrick said:
Alternative explanation- characters exist to fulfill roles and functions within a story. This particular story was a polemical and racist work by design, and the roles the black characters were written to fulfill exist in that context. Making them more complex or more deeply characterized would have detracted from the point of the tale. From the perspective of the intended function of the art, this would introduce, not cure, flaws. The problem with Birth of a Nation is not a question of execution, but of message.
That’s why “write better” is almost never an answer. It’s an attempt at providing seemingly neutral cover for the more partisan statement, “write something else.” And sometimes you should! But if that’s the critique, it needs to be justified on its own terms (“this movie is a racist polemic that we really didn’t need”), not disguised as something else.
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ninecarpals said:
@Patrick
Interesting point. I never even considered that “write better” wouldn’t be useful advice in some cases, since I usually give it to people who are asking me how to avoid stereotypes. (My position goes something like this: It’s neither possible nor your responsibility to make up for the accumulated social neglect of people like me, and it’s not helpful to think of representation in those terms anyway, because it’s more effective to combat stereotypes with quantity rather than quality anyway. If you want the character that you’re writing to be appreciated, write them as a full and complex character just like you would any other. Make them a hero, make them a villain, make them an antihero, whatever – just make them interesting and you’ll capture my attention, because a trans man who has personality is more compelling than one who checks every pre-approved trait box.)
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Patrick said:
Ninecarpals- is your name a reference to a certain Bloody Nine?
My objection isn’t that “write better” is never good advice or is never connected to issues if stereotyping. It’s that what counts as writing better varies depending on the function the character fulfills is a story. “Write better” often makes sense for a protagonist, and deeper, richer, more human protagonists are usually a good thing.
This isn’t the case for supporting characters. They exist to further someone else’s story.
Easy example- remember the racial stereotype guy who introduces Disneys Alladin? Making him a deeper, richer, more human character is a terrible idea. Doing that requires spending time on him. Spending time on him means spending less time on the actual protagonists and plot. It requires shifting focus from central issues to non central issues. If Alladin spent five minutes fleshing out this guys character to prevent him from being a stereotype, by many objective measures it would be a worse movie- viewers would validly ask what the point was of this guys existence, and why they should care given that he vanishes forever and never matters again. Why did he justify that attention if he didn’t matter to the story?
And once you realize that, “write better” as addressed to this character reduces to “don’t write stories with narrators who embody orientalist stereotypes.” Which might be worthwhile advice, maybe? But also might not. Because the line between “negative stereotype” and “beloved archetype” is darned thin, and crossing it is how we pull things from the former to the latter.
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ninecarpals said:
@Patrick
Now I want to hear about this Bloody Nine, because my handle was what happened when I was in high school and taking Anatomy and Physiology, and was put in the position of having to create a new username while way the fuck sleep-deprived. The carpals (of which we have sixteen, eight on each hand) are my favorite bones in the body, and so I just upped the per-hand number by one to sound cool.
How you treat supporting characters is going to vary by genre and media. In my longer post on the subject I do address this, because you’re right that some roles just aren’t intended to be nuanced. That said, even supporting characters can be complex and compelling – it just depends on the kind of space you have to tell that story.
The reason I’m hung up on not fighting stereotypes directly is that there are members of that minority group who fit the stereotype, and loudly proclaiming that “we’re not all like that” does those members a disservice. The most striking one I come across is how opposed the trans community is to the frequent portrayal of trans women as down-and-out prostitutes…but we also have a joke about how trans women get to choose between IT and sex work for a career because it pokes at a common truth. It plays like respectability politics when we distance ourselves from that reality. At the same time, though, the trans community is as diverse as any other, and it’s not fair for trans women to only have a few standard portrayals of them floating around, which is where my quantity proposal comes in.
I see that combination of complex portrayals and sheer numbers as a much better means of achieving an end than writing out a list of what not to do, which is what I see proposed more often.
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veronica d said:
@ninecarpals — I think there is probably a big difference here in the trans male experience and the trans female experience. Where you guys get erased, ignored, and basically shut out of the main discourse, we trans gals get hypervisibility and hypersexualization. Which is to say, I don’t really want to see another cis person’s “really compelling trans female character,” when that character ends up being another Myra Breckinridge or another Buffalo Bill.
Sorry, but nope. Those characters are lies, the result of cis people (in fact cis men) mapping their own sexual preoccupations onto us. Even a well drawn trans-written-by-cis character, such as Hedwig, misses the mark. (And I *like* Hedwig, but from a trans-representation perspective, the character is a shitshow.)
And this is *very much* valid critique. We trans women are also erased, at least insofar as the reality of our lives does not make it before mainstream audiences, but worse, they instead see a false version of our lives, a preposterous caricature. These caricatures happen again and again, as they seem to be an outlet for cis people to project their sexual anxieties into some empty vessel, some blank cultural symbol: the “transsexual.”
Indeed our real voices are as erased as yours, and telling cis writers to “Just give a compelling character,” doesn’t much help, since what we have now is what happens when they try to do that.
Be careful what you wish for.
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ninecarpals said:
@Veronica
That may be how you want things, but I can’t disagree strongly enough about whether it’s the right course to take.
Also, I’m not saying “just write compelling characters.” That’s an oversimplification and I don’t appreciate it. What I’m saying is that, for people who have asked me for my help, the best general course of action they can take is to imagine their character as a human being. That doesn’t mean other advice isn’t useful depending on the circumstances (and I do bloody well give other advice when I’m not having a different kind of conversation than I am here now); it just means that it makes sense as a starting place.
Also, Buffalo Bill is explicitly not a trans character. Explicitly. I can’t remember the dialogue from the movie adaptation, but in the book one of the characters consults with a psychiatrist who outright states that the character is not transsexual. It’s as ham-handed as the consultation at the end of Psycho.
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Patrick said:
Ah, Bloody Nine is one of the names of Logan from the fantasy series First Book of the Law. One of his most well known names is Nine Fingers. I wondered if your monicker was a reference, given the similarity. Apparently not.
He’s one of the best berserker characters in fantasy. The books are grimdark, which I usually hate, but they’re an exception.
My biggest beef with the “things not to do” approach isn’t so much that it’s impossible to make such a list… It’s hard, and relies on ever shifting social norms to make sense… But rather that these approaches never take into account the needs of the stories they’re critiquing. And once you take this into account, “write better” turns into “stop writing that, write something else.”
Easy example- manic pixie dream girl. If you try to “write better” this trope away, you end up with a richer, more nuanced character… Who probably ceased to be a manic pixie dream girl. And whither your plot now?
And I figure- if you want all manic pixie dream girl stories to die, say so. Don’t hide behind a seemingly neutral piece of non advice.
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ninecarpals said:
@Patrick
Hey, thanks for the book rec! That sounds like something I’d love.
Yeah, I’m not keen on the “don’t do” school of recommendations. It creates impossible paradoxes because so many stereotypes contradict each other, and many are broad enough to house just about anything.
An example of a concrete suggestion I give: There are stories about trans people that are related to them being trans that aren’t about coming out, or starting their transition, or hiding it. You could write a great story with any of those plots, of course, but you could also write about [long list here]. People generally find that helpful because it’s informing them of facts they weren’t previously aware of while remaining nonjudgmental.
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veronica d said:
We can also argue the Hedwig isn’t “really trans,” since she seems not to suffer from gender dysphoria, but instead gets surgery out of a “I’m really a gay man trying to get with a guy” subplot —
Which by the way is hella offensive, as that *very thing* is often said about trans women. So that show basically reifies a lie about us, just another cis gay showing how few fucks he has to give about our reality.
You know, LGb……(t)
Likewise, I don’t think the formal diagnosis of Buffalo Bill really matters. People see him as “A crazy person who thinks he’s a woman” and they think the same thing about me. I’ve seen “skinsuit” jokes aplenty from transphobic assholes. The message was not lost, and no one cares about the fine points.
But anyway, I could retype the whole “why the media sucks” chapter out of *Whipping Girl*, but at this point I don’t think you’d listen.
I think you’re transmisogynistic. I think you’re one of the bad ones, the reason queer spaces suck for gals like me.
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ninecarpals said:
@Veronica
You are welcome to ignore me on here, just as I generally ignore you. We just don’t get along, and I suspect that has as much to do with how we sound to each other as what we’re actually saying.
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veronica d said:
@Patrick — The problem with the manic pixie dreamgirl trope is not the dreamgirl herself. Instead, it’s the guy they put across from her. He is *always* such an obvious author-insertion, and there is almost never a plausible reason why *that girl* would date *that guy*.
Other than the author just wishes-wishes-wishes so much-much-much.
Anyway, blah. I don’t want to be the life-energy to fill the empty vessel of a boring man. Few women do.
Wanna make the MPDG work, put her beside an amazing man. (Or an amazing woman! This should become a movie!)
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osberend said:
I think you’re transmisogynistic. I think you’re one of the bad ones, the reason queer spaces suck for gals like me.
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osberend said:
Does wordpress suppress embedded images, or did I just botch my html tags again? Because that was supposed to be followed by this.
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Patrick said:
But isn’t that the underlying issue? The manic pixie dream girl story is about a bland guy, typically an unhappy one, who learns joie de vivre from a relationship with a girl who has more than enough to spare. If you make the guy into the sort of person the girl would actually date, you’re still changing the nature if the story. Your response still boils down to “write better, and by that I mean, write a different movie with different characters doing different things.”
Which isn’t inherently bad I guess, so long as you own it, and address the logical reply, which I imagine will be something like “Are you just saying that you don’t enjoy these stories? Or that they’re bad? Seeing that they’re wish fulfillment for cis het guys, it’s no surprise you don’t enjoy them. Presumably they wouldn’t enjoy your wish fulfillment stories either. What exactly is the dispute here? “
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Ampersand said:
@Patrick:
I don’t think you understood, or addressed, what I wrote earlier in this thread. When I said “write better” – actually, I never fucking said that phrase – when I said that skill matters, I was saying is that some stories and scenes are harder to write while avoiding cliches than others, and so what stories a writer can pull off depends on their skill level.
So it’s not “write better” as an alternative to “don’t write that.” My advice is actually both of those things. It’s “be aware of your own abilities.” If you actually want to do a narrator who has very little screen time, draws on a lot of orientalist cliches and yet not make a narrative that seems racist, then that’s an incredibly difficult thing to do that requires a lot of skill. If you don’t have the skill to pull that off, then yes, you should jettison that whole idea and do something easier.
(Trivia: Disney originally intended for the narrator to be revealed to be the genie in disguise, which is why the narrator is voiced by Robin Williams.)
Alternative explanation- characters exist to fulfill roles and functions within a story.
Obviously. But that doesn’t mean that the characters, while fulfilling their function, shouldn’t also be well written. Well-written side characters avoid cliche, are based on good observation, and give the illusion of having an inner life of some kind. Badly-written side characters do none of those things. (Most side characters fall somewhere in the mediocre middle.)
There’s a badness at the core of “Birth of a Nation” that can’t be rescued. But even if it had the same plot, making the black characters more recognizably human would make the movie considerably more watchable.
A less extreme example would be Rachel, the Black maid in the early-20th-century comic strip “Gasoline Alley.” Rachel was written and drawn in a racist way, with huge lips and cliched “Black” dialog. If the cartoonist hadn’t had racism obscuring his vision, he could have done a much better job writing and drawing Rachel, artistically – and she still could have served the same function in the story.
Why would making the manic pixie dream girl a richer, more nuanced character destroy the plot? A richer, more nuanced MPDG character doesn’t mean you have no plot; it means you have Katharine Hepburn in “Bringing Up Baby” or Diane Keaton in “Annie Hall.”
(The writer who made up “manic pixie dream girl” has said he now hates the term and thinks it’s been harmful to discourse.)
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ozymandias said:
I think that a MPDG who has an actual reason to fall in love with her love interest probably makes the story better as a romantic fantasy. Like… she sees his ~inner kindness~, aspects of himself that he doesn’t even know about, and this allows him to realize that she didn’t actually save him, she just showed him how to save himself.
Conversely: Fight Club doesn’t pass the Bechdel test. It would be a worse movie/book if it did, because it’s told from the point of view of a narrator who doesn’t realize that women are people, and part of that is not realizing that Marla Singer has her own subjectivity. I think in this case “this movie should pass the Bechdel Test!” is an incorrect critique.
Conversely, IMO Fight Club does a really good job of conveying that Marla Singer has her own shit going on that only sort of intersects with the narrator’s. She’s not a Crazy Bitch ™, she’s a mentally ill woman that the narrator thinks of as a Crazy Bitch ™. (And IDK if it’s intentional but it’s one of my favorite portrayals of BPD.)
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Patrick said:
No, well written side characters avoid cliche at times, but embrace it when it serves a story telling purpose, such as swiftly summoning up archetypal assumptions in order to get on with the story. They are based on good observation if and only if they are intended to be realistic depictions of actual life. They give the illusion of having inner life if it is convenient to the story that they do so.
The poorly shaven police officer who just doesn’t have time to follow your rules, but he gets results, damnit! gets called in to the chiefs office to be reamed for his latest arrest that got out of control. The chief is a minor character who exists mostly for this scene. What does he, and his office, look like? Maybe the chief is standing- no time to sit. There are a dozen cigarettes in an ash tray. Chain smoker. High stress. Works hard. He’s wearing his gun indoors at his desk. Serious business. Papers everywhere. Tied up in red tape. Trying to hold the department together. Evidence pinned to all the walls. Furniture is cheap. Cinderblock walls? Too much crime. Not enough resources. He yells at the protagonist. This is too much this time! Implies latest debacle is part of a pattern. Give me your badge! Protagonist throws it at him. Scene close.
The chiefs role in the story is to fulfill a function. Then to get out of the way. He is a “good side character” if he does this quickly, interestingly, and effectively, then goes away.
What you are describing is not a “better character.” It is a deeper character. Making our chief deeper isn’t necessarily good. It depends on whether our story needs him to be deep.
A more skilled writer might very well SUBTRACT detail from our chief, having decided that minimalism focuses us more effectively on how the chief functions in the story!
If we want the chief to not be cliche, we lose communication with the audience. If we want him to be based on observation, the fact that our genre story is fundamentally unrealistic risks being lampshaded. If we want him to hint at inner depth (beyond that which exists within the cliche itself), we have to spend more time on him- but the story isn’t about him, and that risks wasting time on an irrelevancy.
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ozymandias said:
Veronica: I’m curious what you think of Dr. Frank from Rocky Horror.
Like… on one hand, Dr. Frank is *clearly* a bunch of transmisogynistic stereotypes (he is literally a rapist murderer cannibal). On the other hand, it was made by a transfeminine person, and… it seems to me like the theme of the story is “wouldn’t it be great to get to be unapologetically queer and trans, even though it’s not possible?” Like… he’s the villain we all end up identifying with, except the narrative thinks we’re *supposed* to identify with him and not Cishet Dude.
But on the other hand he’s literally a rapist murderer cannibal!
I dunno. It’s hard to get over that feeling when I watched it the first time, when I was twelve or thirteen and didn’t really know what trans *was*, that this was A Person Like Me. And on the other hand it seems like we should probably have People Like Us who aren’t, y’know, evil. And it’s really easy for me to downplay the harms, as someone who is basically *never* going to be read as a threat because of my transness.
IDK.
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veronica d said:
I love the music!
Honestly, I haven’t seen it in a really long time, but I have a high tolerance for camp, so I expect I’d laugh and sing along like everyone else.
Likewise getting upset *in particular* at Glen or Glenda seems pretty pointless. A bad movie poorly done about terrible characters — so what? What would a tasteful presentation of transsexuality PRODUCED BY ED WOOD even look like?
I worry far more when a misguided representation gets critical acclaim.
Which is to say, there is room for terrible trans characters. The problem is the absence of any good ones.
Why can we never be just a normal trans woman doing normal trans woman things, in a well crafted story that shows us a true people? Why must we instead always be a symbol of sexual crisis for some straight guy?
Which, Crying Game is a great move. It’s well written. Dil is a well drawn character, beautifully portrayed. But another crisis for a straight guy afraid of TEH GHAY!
Utter fucking banality. Lazy writers barfing up cliché.
#####
I totally agree on the Fight Club thing. The movie just works.
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veronica d said:
[CW: self hate and suicide]
Okay, regarding *memories* of Rocky Horror —
This isn’t really artistic criticism, but even long before I knew I was a woman I had a really strong dysphoric reaction to (for lack of a more sensitive description) “hairy men in gaudy drag.”
Which, I have a really bad memory and I have these vague senses. I recall I would cross dress in private, but not often. After I did I was filled with shame and dissociated for days.
So seeing Frank —
(These are my thoughts reconstructed.)
“OMG is that what I am? He’s ridiculous, not feminine at all, nothing like what I want to be. I can’t I can’t I can’t.”
My thoughts on Buffalo Bill are even more fucked up. They go something like this:
“It wouldn’t work. Even skinning women like that, it wouldn’t work. You wouldn’t pass. What good is looking at yourself in the mirror? I want to go outside. I want to go to the lesbian club and meet women who will love me and sleep with me — as a woman. But that wouldn’t work. Nothing would work. Even surgery wouldn’t work. I’d never pass and I’m unlovable and a freak and a freak and a freak and a freak and freak and completely hopeless and I should never have been born.”
(I’m crying now.)
Representation matters. Growing up I did not see a single representation of a trans woman that made me think my life was worth living.
I’m surprised I made it.
#####
There is this popular thing among trans women, the “letter to your young self,” like what would you tell your young self if you could.
For me, “You’re a woman. You’re trans. No really. It’s not just idle feelings. This stuff ain’t going away. But don’t give up. You *in fact will* transition and the hormones will be great and you won’t-really-quite-pass, but you’ll pass well enough and you’ll love how you look and you’ll be pretty and people will like you. It’s gonna be great.”
Cuz it is great. Being trans is great.
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ozymandias said:
That’s interesting. For me it was like… this almost primal sense of want. I think the not-passing was part of it for me: he could dress like that and act like that and he obviously wasn’t a boy or a girl, he was something Other and… I hadn’t ever guessed that that was an option.
But like. There’s the problem, isn’t it? He’s Other, he’s ridiculous and he doesn’t pass and. The thing that made me go “oh god want” is the thing that made you go “I can’t I can’t I can’t.”
I don’t know.
I guess the answer is that we need trans female characters that make you think your life is worth living. And also more than one nonbinary character in all of fiction. And no more fucking Buffalo Bill. Fuck Buffalo Bill.
(I hope NBC Hannibal never gets the rights to Silence of the Lambs because, like, I trust Bryan Fuller but I don’t think anyone can handle that.)
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ninecarpals said:
@Ozy
Curiously enough, violent transformation is a theme I connect with – not corruption, per se, but very much Dolarhyde’s “becoming”. “Shiizakana” was one of my favorite episodes of television ever (and that includes moments like Six Feet Under‘s finale) because of Randall and how connected to that character I felt even though he was clearly supposed to be a villain. (He’s not even a powerful villain, or the main allure in Will’s descent – just a chess piece.)
Everyone has different tastes, and that’s okay. It’s not a contradiction to say, “I was upset by this thing that you loved,” and I think it’s a trap to try and weigh those reactions against each other to determine what makes acceptable art.
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Jacob Schmidt said:
This response falls apart in the face of a rather common use of cliche. There’s a space in which the term is used: at one end is “common archtype”; at the other is “thoughtless, repetitious overuse”. The latter is definitionally bad (else it would simply be ‘use’).
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InferentialDistance said:
“common archetype” => cliche that you like
“thoughtless, repetitious overuse” => cliche that you dislike
[/snark]
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Jacob Schmidt said:
I’m sure that’s true, to an extent.
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veronica d said:
@Ozy — There is plenty of room for Hedwig and Frank, but we need more than camp and trashy fun. The problem is the lack of anything that is both serious and true.
Which, when I grew up the Christine Jorgensen movie existed, but I never found my way to it. Nor do I think I would have related to it anyhow. She was such a different person from such a different time. Plus, audiences *would not let her be honest*.
Which is to say, she crafted her message so it was palatable for cis people instead of talking real-hard-truth about growing up trans. (She admits this in later interviews, not that it wasn’t obvious to trans folks.) She had to do this. An honest message would not have made it past cis editors, directors, producers, and such. The TV talk shows would not have invited her back.
*Nevada* was the first trans fiction I read that was for real. If that book had been around when I was young, and had I found it, everything would have been different.
Everything.
My advice, make sure queer-curious teen boys-who-might-be-girls find that book. I’d love to hand out a copy to every weird, isolated guy on 4chan. I bet over the next year there would be a notable uptick at the gender clinics.
”Wait! Other people feel this way?”
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bluejay said:
You make a lot really interesting points, and I need to go and think about them, but what I really wanted to say was that fanfic of Tony Stark being in a wheelchair does exist, and it is awesome: http://archiveofourown.org/works/936852
*shrug*
(Is this post old enough that this is weird? It’s weird, isn’t it. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to make it weird.)
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