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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.

Almost everything put out by Hollywood and the big streaming services from the last 5 years is like this to varying degrees, IMO. This (the current, race/gender/sexuality-focused incarnation) began around 2013 but was easy to ignore, ramped up around 2016 when Trump's election broke the minds of many in our creative class, and has become institutionalized (1), (2) in the past few years. I don't expect it to get better, only worse. The average consumer of media has no understanding of semiotics and doesn't pick up on things like racial coding, so they will accept pretty much anything as long as the product is good and the dial is moved slowly enough. Which, fair. Most people understandably just want to experience a good story. But I think most viewers can't really recognize racial animus unless a brown Velma looks directly at the screen and says "I hate white people."

There's a line I've seen here and everywhere in oppositional nerd circles since racial and gender politics started getting injected into things they like. It usually goes something like, "the problem isn't the representation, it's that they focused on it instead of the story." This has always felt like a cope to me. Many progressives are good storytellers. A show can be well-written, compelling, and entertaining AND depict a false history/reality, or cast your demographic group/ideology as all the villains.

People mediate and understand the world through the stories they consume. How many misconceptions about guns or defibrillators does a layman have due to how they are represented in movies? How many people's mental models of who commits violent crimes, what the people of medieval Europe looked like, or what percentage of people are LGBT are primarily derived from what they see in shows and commercials?

In 2022's Batman, there is a scene where a gang of white men attacks an Asian man and tries to pressure a new member into beating him up. The recruit is a young black man, the only nonwhite person in the group, who clearly does not want to do this and resists the temptation of these bad men. This is not an outlier for the movie, as every villain is very deliberately cast as a white man. This scene is especially egregious though because it is deliberately set up to reference to the stories of violence against Asian people in New York and other American cities. If you recall, this violence was also blamed on white supremacy despite the demographics of the majority of the perpetrators.

You, a commenter on an offshoot of an offshoot of an offshoot of a forum dedicated to the noncensorious discussion of idea, may simply roll your eyes at this and file it away as a silly morality play. But what percentage of people are actually aware that it isn't white people randomly attacking Asians on the street? How many people had the opposite impression created by the media and reinforced by the movie? If you look at the comments of the video I linked, they're all talking about how cool the scene was and how much they like Batman. And fair enough, because despite all of this it was still a good movie, because these racial politics are not mutually exclusive with good filmmaking (or the good filmmaking is a vessel for this kind of political message*).

Borges' "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" depicts a fictional (within the narrative of the story) country encroaching on and reshaping the real world after a group of people spends generations creating it from whole cloth and presenting it as factually true in encyclopedias and other sources of information. You might understand that the Asian Hate narrative is grossly misleading, but do you think the average person is on the same page as you? When the story is printed as a footnote in the textbooks of future schoolchildren, whose version of reality will it support? One of the United States' biggest exports is its media. What kinds of ideas and narratives are we exporting to the world? Are you comfortable with them?

If you're someone who doesn't really care about this or who can stomach these themes, that's a fair enough position to have. These issues aside, in many ways we're in a golden age of content creation. However, if seeing your identity, ideology, or religion constantly attacked and depicted as evil/ignorant in media does bother you, that's not going to change unless something forces it to. There are many excellent shows saturated in progressive politics, and as long as people are willing to ignore the less savory aspects, they will continue to be made.

Many people mocked the trans lobby's attacks on anyone who played Hogwarts Legacy and declared them a failure. I'm not sure they were. As one commenter here said (I can't find the link unfortunately), they've made it so that if you're a public figure playing the game, you must first disavow Rowling and insist that playing the game does not mean supporting her, which assumes the premise that she did anything wrong in the first place.

You may or may not agree with the idea that representation in media matters and can significantly influence people's perceptions. I'd argue it does, and that the moderating influence of reality will only wane as information is increasingly filtered through algorithms and generative AI. I think it's fair to assume that the showrunners of TLOU agree with the position and find it important to represent different groups responsibly, given the show's politics. With this in mind, I'd argue that the things Rowling has said about trans people aren't half as egregious as the racial politics of TLOU, its creators, or shows like it. The question then becomes if you're willing to not give these creators your money, attention, and support.

*The posts in this thread from @DaseindustriesLtd are worth reading and were a partial inspiration to start writing this.

There's a line I've seen here and everywhere in oppositional nerd circles since racial and gender politics started getting injected into things they like. It usually goes something like, "the problem isn't the representation, it's that they focused on it instead of the story." This has always felt like a cope to me. Many progressives are good storytellers. A show can be well-written, compelling, and entertaining AND depict a false history/reality, or cast your demographic group/ideology as all the villains.

Absolutely wrong and even the oppositional nerds will talk positively about good stories that just happen to have representation. These same oppositional nerds (assuming we're talking about the same group) will also talk about how much they love anime and videogames from Japan - if you were right and the focus was just a cope, they wouldn't be doing any of that.

But really the main reason that you're incorrect on this point is that shoehorning representation in absolutely does harm a story. If I'm reading a fantasy novel and the evil usurper Tonald Drumph the Orange starts building walls to prevent halfling immigration I am immediately catapulted out of the story and back to the real world. Stories and works of fiction actually do become worse and less compelling when they destroy the world-building they've actually done to stop and remind the viewer that they are watching a work of fiction and not doing the serious work of ending white supremacy/instituting fully automated luxury gay space communism.

I'm sure that there are oppositional nerds out there who get annoyed when they have to see people with different coloured skin, but those nerds would have been complaining since the release of the original Star Trek.

I mean, what you just imagined is nothing new. It's just the culture war that was being probed back then has disappeared so you don't notice what the story is about anymore. After all, the Wizard of Oz was basically agit-prop for silver coinage, but it doesn't really matter in 2023 that the Wizard was supposed to be McKinley.

The Wizard of Oz being "about silver coinage" is an urban legend spread by contrarian geeks.

After all, the Wizard of Oz was basically agit-prop for silver coinage, but it doesn't really matter in 2023 that the Wizard was supposed to be McKinley.

Did this even matter back in its original time? This claim is news to me, I've never perceived the perception of Wizard of Oz, at least in movie form, as anything other than a classic pure fantasy story from a post-Industrial-Revolution time. Like, nobody looks at Wizard of Oz in the same way, as, say, Rand's works (or even The Great Gatsby).

The reason why it hasn't hung around as a political tome is that the issue the book about is basically dead, outside of weirdo libertarians. Same thing w/ Great Gatsby - it's the movie about the mysterious guy who hangs out with a rich couple and then stuff happens. The whole parts of the book where Tom Buchanon talks about the intelligence of the various races, and other more political parts are either forgotten about or ignored by most people, because again, what culture war things in that book are mostly dead.

Libertarianism is still a live issue, and more importantly, Atlas Shrugged is a terrible book if you don't buy into the ideological argument. The Oz books are interesting outside of the coinage argument. Atlas Shrugged isn't.

There's nothing wrong with allegory, and there can absolutely be subtle and well-done inclusions of those contentious issues - but that isn't what we're getting in modern media. The same ultimate message and culture-warring was in a lot of the classic media that these oppositional nerds defend, but the way it was included matters. The X-Men stories were insanely transparent with their messaging, messaging that was bout concepts which the culture war is still raging over to this day - but there was enough subtlety and art to it that it didn't throw the audience out of what they were consuming.

That it doesn't matter in 2023 that the Wizard was supposed to be McKinley is the sort of thing that I'm getting at - even without knowing the details of the coinage conflict you can still get something worthwhile out of the story, and that largely isn't the case for the sort of movies those oppositional nerds complain about. Everything Everywhere All At Once was more diverse than half of the "woke" media being produced, and it didn't get those same whining nerds (or at least if it did I missed them). There's something that these people are complaining about, and it isn't the representation by itself.

"The X-Men stories were insanely transparent with their messaging, messaging that was bout concepts which the culture war is still raging over to this day - but there was enough subtlety and art to it that it didn't throw the audience out of what they were consuming."

Except there are letter pages from the '60s with the same exact arguments that are raging today in these and many other comment sections, about how Stan Lee was shoving his politics down their throat. This makes my point - that culture war issue is mostly dead, so it can become just entertainment.

In 2060, there'll be the right-leaning people of the day, going, "look, back in the 2020's there was subtle and well-done inclusions of transgender folks like the Republican nominee Senator Martinez-Chu, but now these damned transhumanists are shoving it down my throat!"

Except there are letter pages from the '60s with the same exact arguments that are raging today in these and many other comment sections, about how Stan Lee was shoving his politics down their throat. This makes my point - that culture war issue is mostly dead, so it can become just entertainment.

My apologies - I was thinking in the context of the same cohort of oppositional nerds, who would have been consuming X-men media like the Singer movies and the 90s TV show.

That said, I don't think the culture war issues explored in the X-men stories are actually dead. The topics of racism, homophobia and anti-semitism seem to me like they're still at the heart of the culture war, and I don't think you can really make the claim that those issues are mostly dead.

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