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[Disclaimer: I think that this post maybe too low-effort for Culture war thread but other ones don't look appropriate to me]
Can you do too much noticing?
Fallout series released not too long ago and as a fan of games I was reasonably interested, especially after mostly good reviews came in. But while it has quite many political themes I will not talk about them, instead I will focus on some much less important and meaningful thing - casting and specifically race of the actors. Generally I don't want to spoil myself too much, so I ignore teasers, trailers and, of course full-blown reviews, even if they promise to contain no spoilers at all. So at the time right before series release I knew two facts about it, which were gathered from two old stills: protagonist is a woman vault dweller and there was also ghoul sheriff character. Yesterday when I finally had enough free time to comfortably marathon watch it(my preferred way), I saw a third one with a black character that was a member of BoS and my first thought was: "Oh, so it's mc's love interest". And I was right, like I was with similar predictions many times before.
I can easily see how the white woman/black man pairing become so wide-spread in recent years. You don't any conspiracies from 4chan white nationalists imagination, just brutal logic of the modern social justice thought. If you're making action movie, you need an action hero, obviously it should be a woman to combat harmful stereotypes. You can add some other traits: disability, PoC status, mental illness; but most often being a woman is enough for mc so we just return to default, white and pretty. Then you need to add some diversity in main cast, who is the most diverse and minoritiest of them all? - Black people, specifically African Americans. And we already have a woman, why not this one be a man. And if the cast is small or filled with mentors, monsters, villains and characters too young for romance, why not pair up the first two that we designed?
In many ways this is continuation of my previous post because anytime I notice one of the signs of this ideology dominant among American media creators and therefore their creations I feel robbed of enjoying perfectly adequate television because I for some reason decided to read about American politics. While being blissfully ignorant I thought that African Americans constituted at least a quarter if not the third of US population and movie demographics seemed absolutely normal in this light. I, like majority of Eastern Europeans don't have anything to dislike about people of African descent, those few who do live here are students or children of students, are not part of some diaspora and assimilate quite well(though obviously people will look differently at the black Ivan, or Stefan, but it's curious look, without animosity). I compared this feeling to watching soviet-made movies as an American businessman at the time of the Cold War(which of course vanishingly small number of them actually did). You notice propaganda against small bourgeoise like you, but why would it matter if USSR is very far away and communists that you know about are all educated intellectuals obviously against any kind of violence?
One thing that I don't understand is why nobody "inside the kitchen" don't notice how weird their attempts at propaganda seem. I think there wouldn't be so many far rightists in hypothetical America where there is much less to notice. IMHO, Hollywood elites aren't black supremacists and majority of them don't consider themselves in someway being against white race, they are true believers, who try to promote DiversityTM in their media because they think that it will make its viewers better people. My guess is that they do notice, but because of the implication of noticing being bad in itself, there is no one to say: "maybe better make him Asian this time".
The white woman/black man "pairing" as you put it is not, as far as I am aware, a particularly new concept, though you may be correct in suggesting it has not long been mainstream in terms of characters in film (or games, or whatever, though I am out of my element there.)* In other words, while I do not deny that there may be propagandistic moves made by popular media in the service of progressive goals, and that often these moves are ham-fisted and disrupt story narrative, this does not seem like such an example to me. I agree with @Gillitrut in this regard, unsure where the propaganda angle is, unless seeing such an interracial coupling itself is jarring to you. (Again, based on my ignorance of this and pretty much all games I can't speak to how odd it is in that context.)
*Edit: Guess Who's Coming to Dinner was released in 1967 and was presumably a shocker then.
You know, it sure is harder to take this posture of good-natured misunderstanding at face value after you have explained your situation as a minority father of mixed race children in a country with very exclusionary culture. For you, normalization of miscegenation – whatever else goes in the package – feels necessary, so you will be obnoxiously obtuse, to the point that your rhetorics would've amounted to social violence, were your opponent not anonymous*. «Oh dear me, so do you think there is something… wrong when people of different races join hands in Marriage? Aren't we all God's creatures with inherent value? Huh. So strange, so cruel. But to each his own!».
No (in case this has to be spelled out again): it's more about the hamfisted erasure of the representation of the most typical and normative pairing, and the campaign to code the Blacked.com** image of relationships as the default, whereas in reality it's a distinctly less prestigious and healthy pattern. This is what the producers have in mind, this is what they want the viewers to have in mind, this is no more complex or innocent than casting white men as dumb losers and creeps who get humbled by Girlbosses and Smart-Dressed Blacks (who have good chemistry with Girlbosses) in commercials.
*I have never figured out for sure whether people like you are just liars, or your brains wisely do not distinguish copes and object-level world modeling, for reasons of preserving memory capacity and behavioral fluidity. Either mechanism is enough to make conversation quite hopeless.
**one more "clever" status-preserving maneuver here is to say, for instance, «pardon me, I do not know what you are talking about… oh», and derail the topic into sneering insinuations about racist chuds watching interracial porn. It's a pretty transparent and pathetic development. As I've been warned for baiting people into petty comebacks, I'm stating this to avoid such a development. But neither can I be assed to put this in some other way.
Well, when we have the western white right wing on a complete hair trigger to the point where using a stock photo of a Muslima is enough to trigger something that wouldn't be out of place at a Klan rally you do start to wonder where else they may be hallucinating about Chinese Robbers in commericals.
Suppose we reverse stock photos in this picture.
Does it look like a snide suggestion that immigrants struggle with learning English?
Fair point yes it does.
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I guess I should be thankful that Twitter doesn’t display replies to us accountless peasants.
Anyway, this feels like a bit of a non sequitur. What’s Dase got to do with Great Value brand Klansmen?
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Where is that something, do you just mean the responses under the the tweet in your link? The pinned tweet on that account, while recent, makes me suspect the shitposting crowd was antagonized before already.
Yeah, just the responses under that tweet.
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This kind of petty antagonism is unbecoming of you.
I know there are plenty of regulars here who are fond of noticing, and working that into the conversation, however, George doesn't seem to be like that, but regardless, accusations such as:
are unacceptable.
You're a valued poster, but please, the angry nihilistic Russian trope can get old, as does lashing out at little provocation.
I explained once.
Dase explained again.
George E could have read my post where I explained exactly what the problem was, but he understood the whole time.
I didn't respond to Gillitrut because I foresaw the same blind-or-lying dilemma and chose not to engage in hopeless conversation. I'm glad someone else said what I wanted to.
Yo, since you're calling me out: A) What post are you talking about where you "explained what the problem was"? I didn't see it or read it. Perhaps you're right that I could have or even should have. I didn't. You're assuming.
You're apparently pattern-matching me to someone who denies there's a problem with media. I do not deny this, as my post history indicates.
The initial post by @FaibleEstimeDeSoi was about video games and a black/white pairing, which didn't and still does not strike me as odd. The issue is not with one game. The issue is larger, as with the tide that goes out--it lowers all boats. For whatever reason I did not make that connection to the post and I felt the issue was with the interracial pairing in and of itself, not a symptom of a larger issue (i.e. focusing on one boat instead of the tide.)
Dase decided to go for it and get personal. That's what I take issue with--well, that and his general writing style, which I find tedious but not because I think he's a liar or cretin. I don't think either of those and he seems quite intelligent. He was also rude and thus far in his interactions with me does not seem to be interested in changing that tack. So be it.
I'm not blind and I'm not lying. I spent three years in Africa and most of my life in Alabama--black men with white women is a thing. That is the issue I was bringing up. I am not Gillitrut.
(Edit: I'm probably one of the most normie dudes in here and need to adjust my expectations. Absurd really how thin my skin is at my age.)
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Dase, what happened? You seem much more bitter lately.
That's how ascension to a self-made Chad looks like
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I mean, the key attribute here is the monotony of it. As he notes, n=1 isn't really enough to say much because the pairing is not exactly unknown. It takes a good memory, a reasonable amount of exposure to modern Western media, and some level of political awareness to, as you put it, "notice". Most people don't have that. TheMotte concentrates those who do, but it's still not everyone here.
As it happens, @George_E_Hale has just admitted that he's not exposed to all that much of this.
Some charity would be nice. Even a reasonable amount of SJers haven't noticed this sort of thing; I didn't until somewhat after I left.
Charity is in order, but I think it's fair to say that George's comment is very easy to read as sarcastic and strawmannish, even if that was unintentional.
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I'm honestly not sure where your apparent hostility is coming from here. Obnoxiously obtuse? Jesus. I wrote a pretty benign comment that I didn't see how having a couple of characters where one was a white woman and the other a black man was in some way propaganda or odd. Were this everywhere, in every episode and story and book and TV show, sure it would be notably odd. Also, if this were a game made in Japan for Japanese people (a country where as you say I do live) I'd see it as a bit odd. The fact of the matter is, however, in the US and elsewhere (presumably the primary market for this game, Fallout, though I admittedly do not know and am assuming) these types of pairings do happen and have happened. It's not as if the characters are a trans woman and a gay man somehow finding love, where I'd think there'd be more of a point to be made.
While we're at it, your link to the tweet about IQs strikes me as dubious. Mankind Quarterly? Forgive me if I don't immediately rush out and subscribe. And hauling in the other ideas of propaganda re: girlbosses and dumb males (where I see the point, and agree) seems disingenuous of you. When I've read your comments elsewhere dealing with others you've seemed both better reasoned and more polite.
It's true I don't use terms like "miscegenation" and to me it's not something I give much thought to. I probably should assume that there is at least a certain number of posters on the Motte who think I'm dirtying the gene pool (presumably of the Japanese). It's a bit close to home for me to feel like having that conversation, however.
Barring that, however, normally, as people do on this forum, I'd be interested in discussing the topic with you. But as you're now suggesting I'm a liar and probably a cretin, you're probably right that conversation is hopeless.
Your use of scare quotes struck me as snarky, and you very much did not understand or failed to address the argument being made, which was entirely about a pattern of behavior and the disproportionate representation. The hostility was, I think, a perception that you rather deliberately missed the point.
Very first post I made here was on a related topic . I'm not blind to the idea of this propagandistic swing in media, not am I its defender in some sort of fair-is-fair way. I won't say "the way OP presented the point" because I seem to be the only one who misconstrued, rather "the way I took it" was a focus on one affair as a plot device that happened to be between a black man and white woman. That this has become a widely-played trope I have not myself perceived but I chalk that up to a certain isolation (obviously I don't live in a hole so not complete isolation). Mea culpa.
You may be right that this, along with my use of quotes, fired up a reaction. But so what? Part of the ethos here at least by my understanding is that we suppress the heat and aim for light, or at the very least keep it non-personal. I wasn't trying to piss anyone off despite suspicions otherwise, certainly not OP, who had the humility even to doubt whether his post was low effort (I think it was perfectly fine). Even here you've very clearly explained to me the issue with civility. In any case I've let this irk me way more than it's worth. Thank you for your input.
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What's more embarrassing, watching Blackeddotcom or watching Hollywood movies and commercials?
That's a joke. But here's my point: I have an adblock, and I don't watch movies unless I expect to like them. And I don't watch many movies in theaters. It's not that I avoid movies with interracial couples or whatever, it's just that I haven't been watching many movies lately. As such, I am to a large extent not exposed to the phenomenon you're describing.
The downsides of eschewing pop culture exist but aren't enormous the way that the downsides of eschewing/being shunned from other stuff are. Pop culture is a pretty small part of culture. The more people read non-pop culture the more powerful it will be and the less powerful corporate dreck will be. That's something I think the right and the left can agree on.
I mainly keep up with Western media through second-hand complaints these days. I am well aware it's more of a religious and educational institution than an entertainment-focused one.
It is a pity. As a kid, I liked consuming American cartoons and such. Now it just doesn't click, the sermonizing is too pervasive and too easy to notice.
Loved Pantheon S2 though. Maybe "Hollywood" should try adapting more content of Chinese authors. It feels fresh, original and open-minded.
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