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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   29183 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 31, 2023

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It's the "some fraction". At the moment, for all the figures we can get which are not particularly great, the transgender etc. percentage of the world population is estimated anywhere from 0.1% to 5%.

So that is more like "making a game without Zoroastrinians it it would be editorial". Yeah, if I'm setting the work in the Middle East in classical times, it would be, but not if I'm setting it in 13th century Florence.

Certainly "if you set something in San Francisco and have no trans people" that's 'not reflective of the world around us', but for a lot of places "maybe somebody is trans but the population here is likely to be 98% cis" so it wouldn't be editorial. That's the problem with adaptations of books for TV fantasy, it's been pointed out that the small village in Wheel of Time which is noted to be isolated and off the beaten track was put on screen with a racial mixture more akin to 21st century New York.

That's where the pick-n-mix approach to "make sure you have Representation" falls down, because you're ticking off "do I have at least one of each racial, sexual, and gender minority?" boxes instead of developing the characters organically, and you have to make sure you have your characters labelled for easy identification so the critical hordes don't descend to scream about -phobia and -ism. We've already had this kind of kerfuffle in YA publishing.

We've already had this kind of kerfuffle in YA publishing.

I'm aware of this issue and have heard about it extensively from other people; but do you happen to know of any good write-ups about it?

I tried to be careful about that with the qualifier, “modern-era.” Yeah, if someone goes for modern trans dynamics in a Jane Austen setting, they are definitely making a political move. It was jarring enough that HogLeg imported modern tropes, and I can’t even tell how serious they were being.

But OP was talking about anything that wasn’t sci-fi. For modern, urban, American settings, I think it’s justifiable. As @Hyperion correctly points out, that constitutes a lot of today’s media.

I think Razib Khan said it best when he said they cast these shows like they are demographically the same as a major midwestern city. Even if it's in fields like medicine that are overwhelmingly south/east Asian. It feels like people think casting in major films is just a jobs program for whatever demographics are common in Hollywood and New York at the time, without regard for how they actually contribute to the final product.

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