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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".
I don't think most people think "white woman protagonist with black man love interest" is "propaganda." Like, propaganda for what? Would it be propaganda if they were both white? If it was an asian woman and a white man? What is the non-propaganda interracial pairing? What makes such a pairing not propaganda?
Miscegenation and racial admixture, of course.
Obviously not.
No, because that pairing actually reflects reality rather than distorting it.
There isn't one. This is about race.
I don't see how this is true. According to PEW (as of 2017) 11% of interracial relationships in the US were white/black compared to 15% that are white/asian. Black men are twice as likely to have a white spouse as black women, while about 50% more asian women have a white spouse compared to asian men. That's 7% of all interracial marriages that are black man/white woman compared to 9% of interracial marriages that are white man/asian woman. Hardly a substantial difference.
Why not? Surely it would be propaganda against race-mixing then.
It's huge when you consider the relative proportions of Black vs Asian people in the US.
According to the US census there are 41M black people in the US compared to 20M asians. I'm highly skeptical there are more white men married to asian women than black men married to white women.
Well, there are according to your own immediately previous post, about 28% more WM/AW than BM/WW with no particular reason to think the flipped-gender versions would balance that out. This seems to roughly match my own observations for the tiny, potentially biased bit that's worth. The numbers and the way they were arrived at have a lot of room for rounding errors but not enough to cancel out or reverse the conclusion they'd lead you to.
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