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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 6, 2023

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There is a phenomenon i notice in media but never hear named. Call it, "Representation As Inherently Problematic."

Examples: There are no mentally handicapped people or trans people on shows that are not specifically about these topics. The reasons for this for mental disabilities are fairly obvious: mental handicaps are considered intrinsically undignified. If you show a mentally handicapped person doing or saying something dumb on a show, this counts as mocking a protected group. Thus: total absence.

Similarly: If you have a trans person on a show you need to make it clear to the audience they are trans, which either requires it to be a plot point (making it a sort of Very Special Episode) or making the trans person not pass (which is undignified and thus opens the writers up to criticism.) Thus: total absence.

Similarly, morbid obesity is undignified, and the morbidly obese are close to being a protected class (being as it is a physical disability). Thus, having them on a show is undignified and opens up the writers to criticism. Thus: total absence.

Another example: land o' lakes mascot, a native American woman, gets criticism for being stereotypical, which is synonymous to being visually identifiable as a native american. So she was removed from the labeling.

Another: Dr. Seuss gets criticism for visually identifiable depiction of a Chinese villager; book gets pulled as a result.

A similar-feeling phenomenon is This Character Has Some Characteristics Of A Protected Group, Which Is Kinda Like Being A Standin For That Group, Making That Character's Poor Qualities A Direct Commentary On That Group. Examples: criticisms around Greedo and Jar Jar Binks being racist caricatures; criticisms of goblin representation in Harry Potter as being anti-semitic caricatures.

There are certainly trans characters in left-coded media. You just have a normal looking woman, have them say “oh btw I’m trans”, and then move on. Very easy way to score representation points without having to deal with questions of passing or other thorny trans issues.

FTM representation is even easier, as they tend to pass quite well in real life.

Got any examples? None spring to mind for me. Though you are right, "trans as informed attribute" would be a (ham handed) way around this.

For a pretty central example of progressive philosophy on it: Super Lesbian Animal RPG is exactly what you'd expect given the name, and the two trans characters have that matter a little less than their purely-aesthetic 'animal'. I don't think this is popular as a decision, yet, but a number of CRPGs have gone with it (sodiummuffin mentions Baldur's Gate, but there's a wide variety of RPGMaker clones that have taken that approach). Dragon Age: Inquisition kinda Special Episodes it, but more in the sense that everybody with a backstory in that game has a ton of angst thrown in.

This doesn't have to be quite so ham-handed as Super Lesbian Animal. The extreme case is just a character with the trans flag somewhere; this sometimes gets criticism as either purely-informed trait (could just be an ally!), but it's not going to get you cancelled.

I think it's lazy, but I can get why writers sometimes do it. (And it's better than eg. The Broken Earth's attempt.) I think there's more clever things you can do with either environmental storytelling, or by actually exploring and considering what having seen the other gender's norms in close detail, but I can understand if not agree with why those are more controversial.

There are also some times where the theme overlaps with a short Very Special Episode: Night In The Woods is about depression and has villains that are trying to cut out the disliked from their community to sacrifice in hopes of bringing back prosperity, so having a thrown-in comment saying one of the background characters/targets is trans is... well, at least no more preachy than the rest of the story. Damning with faint praise, admittedly.

Alternatively, you can make it relevant to the plot for other reasons. El Goonish Shive is a gender transformation magic comic, so questions like "is this person female" (which means they can summon hammers with magic because animu) or "did this person grow a dick" (and thus was probably exposed to magic somehow) end up having physically verifiable results in a variety of ways completely orthogonal to real-world questions (which... uh, admittedly do also separately get brought up, because it's ultimately a drama piece). You might be able to clock the FTM trans guy before it becomes plot relevant if you're really familiar with some stereotypes, but he gets a short arc that's neither a Very Special Episode for him nor something that could be not-passing for anyone except a magic alien squirrel.