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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34453 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.

The black guy was an older brother, not a father, and the Chinese guy is technically some manner of fascist.

I do have a beef that the Commune(ists) don't get any critique compared to the pastor and his pseudo-cult or the QZ revolutionaries (who could possibly uncharitably be said to be coded a bit MAGA-y).

It's just so damn annoying that no one ever tells the story of how communes descend into bickering committee backstabbing. Even Dying Light 2 barely touched on it.

The games at least are much less kind to the revolutionary factions. The first drops hints that they're just terrorists and not even good at it, and the second straight up says/shows they're only marginally better than who they replaced.

Jackson being a commune isn't a thing in the games, though we never see a form of currency exchanged so maybe it technically is in the sense that any group working together for just the common good is.

It's just so damn annoying that no one ever tells the story of how communes descend into bickering committee backstabbing. Even Dying Light 2 barely touched on it.

Disco Elysium?

It‘s in the backstory, but well.

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