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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34491 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.

I'll admit that I'm typically pretty sensitive to these sorts of things, and while they are obvious in this show, the show is good enough that they're ignorable.

This show is really good. I think towards the end of The Walking Dead, there was this idea that audiences simply didn't have an appetite for zombies anymore, and that's why people were so hard on that show. No, actually, it's just that TWD became horrible.

I will say that everybody on that show seems to be a lot gayer than is statistically reflected in society, and while I love to complain to my wife about how annoying it is that writers will just lazily make characters gay as a way of making the story more dramatic, I ultimately don't care.

My thoughts on the most recent episode: I actually didn't pick up on the CW angle of the rapey cult leader. I know plenty of of protestants who seem about a half a step away from fitting into that archetype.

But I simply cannot imagine any crew of hardened post-apocalyptic warriors following that kindergarten teacher voice. I can’t buy it.

I'm not watching this show because I didn't play the game, have no interest in the entire Culture War angle around that, and the snippets I saw of the Epic Gay Love Romance Of The Ages episode turned me off because they were such treacly romance like a Mills and Boon/Harlequin novel. But this comment makes me laugh, because suppose they follow her around precisely because she has a kindergarten teacher voice?

They've been conditioned from a young age that when Miss says "Now children, come along with me and let's all play nicely", they automatically say "Yes, Miss" and line up (hand-holding optional) 🤣

(My view on the gay romance episode was that it was too much. I don't care that it's two guys, a short reference to 'oh yeah, they're domestic partners' and then get on with the plot, that's fine. I'd be annoyed by an entire episode about a straight romance as well, because this is supposed to be apocalyptic times and who wants to watch forty-five minutes of "I wuv you" "No, I wuv you more" when what you want is zombie gore action?)

Oh come on...

It's beautiful. People living in some horrifying hellscape, and still managing to find humanity there. Nick Offerman's character made a literal refuge for himself, and eventually somebody he cared about to live in. His work, and his masculinity is what kept them safe. We need more of this, not less. I agree that it seems a little tedious to make these characters gay, but...gay people exist. Slightly autistic sexually confused (I mean because it was implied that Offerman's character suppressed his homosexuality and never acted on it) dudes are the exact type of person I'd expect that have elaborate zombie preps.

My critique for the people who think that telling stories like this is pointless: what is the point of the broader story? None of it is real. It serves no utilitarian purpose at all.

"Some dude and a kid go to Montana" - is that really the whole story? I don't think so.

Very well said. I found the Offerman episode really lovely and it fleshed out the world.

I was disappointed with Ellie's romantic backstory, but that's because it missed the opportunity to show how a teenage female friendship can be so intense and all-encompassing without having a romantic element. That's the kind of story that doesn't get shown enough.

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