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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34482 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 6, 2023

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Representation in the Last of Us

Because this show is highly popular and ongoing, I’m just going to coat everything in spoiler tags.

TLoS has been carefully, even neurotically manipulated in representation. HBO has a clear vision of what the perfect casting and screen time should be for every race-gender-sexuality stat of a person. The result has been lauded in the media. But there are serious problems in how they went about representation.

As has been the trend, every villain is white, despite the casting otherwise being meticulously modified to include every kind of person. HBO simply considered it acceptable to make every negative character straight and white. We have had sympathetic Native Americans (wise and peaceful), a plot line of a black father who is doing everything for his son’s safety, a black woman who runs a communist Utopia, a Chinese captain of a military base, all of which are coded good. We have also had four onscreen female love interests, and three of them have been black women — a carefully chosen decision to increase the SMV of a statistically less desired cohort. (This leads to bizarre patterns, like both the protagonist and his brother marrying black women.) On the flip side, we have had evil military soldiers, executioners, bandits, and in the latest episode a raping pastor, all of which are coded bad. The pastor was particularly egregious, as the writers found it necessary to code Christianity as negative: the actual act of preaching and talking about God was psychologically linked in the viewer’s mind with the worst kind of hypocritical evil.

The problem with this, is that having good white people in your show does not make up for representing all the evil as white. Because our mind makes implicit associations based on risk. If 100% of the evil people are white, and 50% of the good people are white, the takeaway in the mind (especially for a young viewer) is that white people are more likely to be evil. If representation is to mean anything at all, you need to diversify representations of evil, otherwise you are participating in the most harmful form of slanted representation.

Here are some examples that should explain this concept. If a child has 10 good experiences on a plane, but watches 1 horror movie of a plane, a phobia can develop regardless of the positive experiences, because that 1 horrible experience (seen through media) creates a fear reaction. If you get sick drinking vanilla-flavored whisky, you have a high chance of becoming disgusted from smelling it, and it doesn’t matter if you had 5 good experiences with vanilla-flavored whisky. The relevant factor here is “% of bad experience”. We see the inverse, where if people have a very limited exposure to a foreign culture which is positive, they may “fetishize” the culture and value it, despite this experience not making up a high number of sum total positive experiences. We see this with K-Pop, where the manufactured positive valence has led some young American women to fetishize both Koreans and Korea, hence the explosion in female tourism in Korea. The relevant calculus is something like “% great experience of cue X / sum total experience of cue X” but more strangely “% bad cue X / sum total experience of all things bad rather than cue X”.

There are other problems to explore. The idea of “Christian influence in America” is debunked, because only a pastor and his church could be represented so negatively in media — no other group would let this fly. Because we do not yet know how homosexuality develops, the focus on gay love stories (two whole episodes so far out of 7 episodes) could be ruinous for the younger generation, as they may be learning implicitly that this is the “correct” sexuality to have — effectively groomed by media. There is evidence this can happen, because boys who are abused by homosexuals are more likely to become homosexuals themselves, and the distance between physical and media grooming is not so dissimilar as to forbid discussion.

If I had to steel man the idea of making all villains white, it would go something like this:

Before the vast majority of Western history, minorities, especially blacks Hispanics and to some degree Asians have been caricatured. When mass media first came about this was accelerated to an unprecedented degree.

After decades and decades of this harmful depiction, negative stereotypes have been baked in. In order to reverse the already baked in trends, we will need at least a few decades of vilifying white people. Then maybe we could have equal representation and declare that the war against whites is over.

To be clear I don’t exactly advocate for this position, but I do think it has a sort of insidious logic around balancing the scales so to speak. And I would agree that minorities still deal with more racism than white people when it comes to day to day interactions, in America. Institutional bias is a different animal, and conflating the two muddies the water in my opinion.

And I would agree that minorities still deal with more racism than white people when it comes to day to day interactions, in America.

Where, exactly? In my neck of the woods, it is considered acceptable to say "white people are [negative thing]" and completely unacceptable to do the same with any other race. White people are discriminated against academically and in employment; if you understand what "equal opportunity employment" means, you are reminded of the fact that you'll be discriminated against every time you apply for employment as a white person. To believe that you're more likely to deal with racism in day-to-day interactions as a minority, I would have to put a huge amount of emphasis on microaggressions, perhaps to the point of treating things like this as a personal affront.

Much of the Bible Belt and Gulf Coast. In my neck of the woods it's more acceptable to call someone the N word than support BLM, Confederate flags are less controversial than LGBT rainbow flags, etc. TheMotte seems to heavily oversample blue state right wingers and not have many people from rural red states dominated by borderers and evangelicals.

I lived in a Bible Belt town in Alabama for a little while (military), the people there are just very conservative, that's all.

In my neck of the woods it's more acceptable to call someone the N word than support BLM

If you did a poll and found 5% of white Southerners think it's acceptable to use the N-word and 3% support BLM I might find that believable, but that venn diagram would not be particularly representative.

Also FWIW I honestly probably encountered as many pride flags on the gulf coast as Confederate flags I even saw a few houses who flew both.

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