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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.
Some of the (very left/progressive) authors I follow do talk about how sufficient representation is necessary for them to have more complex diverse characters, as opposed to aggressively averting tropes/stereotypes. To the point of one author saying they definitely were never going consider killing off $SPECIFIC_REPRESENTATION (in a book where the majority of the named characters died) because meeting those representation points was so rare. Having characters match stereotypes too closely is a lot less problematic if there's enough characters around in those categories that there's some around that don't match those same stereotypes.
This is part of why "token" representation is considered problematic, although calling representation "token" usually also implies that no real though has been put into the representation past sticking a label on a character that would otherwise be indistinguishable from a character without that label.
Are you talking about Wildbow? I remember him saying something along these lines a little while ago, specifically his breakdown of the backlash he received forthe "Avery is dead" arc in Pale.
Also, if there's sufficient interest in it, I have a jumbled mess of thoughts I might be able to kludge together into a top level post describing why I think he peaked with Twig, from the angle of someone who is very much in the visible1 minority (not trans, not a furry, not squeeing over various characters, not socially liberal) of his fans.
1Based purely off of a cursory examination of the online communities that bother discussing his writings in the first place.
Heck. I haven’t read much of Pale because it felt too humanly depressing. The apocalyptic nightmare scenarios of his books are fine; it’s seeing shitty people make worse interpersonal decisions that gets to me. Whichever protagonist has the narcissistic but useless dad, I did not want to deal with that.
That said…I ended up thinking Twig was his best work, too. But I’d be more interested in seeing a post about all the reasons it works rather than the reasons Ward and/or Pale didn’t, if that makes sense. Partly so I can read it avoiding spoilers, partly because I think it will invite more interesting discussion and less bashing.
A book review of Twig sounds kind of fun and might even be within my capabilities (I might have to reread it, so if I were to work on this it'd be a while before posting). And I agree more or less with
though my intention with critiquing his recent works would be to have something constructive, coming from a place of love, and most importantly IMO from a perspective I'm pretty sure he doesn't have in his life (could be totally wrong about that, don't know him personally and it is better to not assume stuff like that) that could be shared with him in a digestible, non-wordpress-comment format.
Agree, I think that accounts for approx. 40% of the problems I have with his recent stuff.
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