[ SECRET POST #2843 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #2843 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 018 secrets from Secret Submission Post #406.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 1 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

True, but, you know, life's shit sometimes.

[(Anonymous)]

Oh, I agree. I just don't understand the attitude that nobody should be held accountable for their shitty decisions and the rest of us should just shrug. Because if we do that, how does life ever get less shitty?

[(Anonymous)]

I'm not saying you should never hold anyone accountable. I'm saying that I'm not sure it makes sense to hold individual creators responsible on a work-by-work checklist kind of a basis. It makes sense to critique the system, and it perhaps makes sense to criticize harmful themes and tropes, but criticizing an individual creator or an individual work to include or not include strong female or minority characters does not seem valid to me.

I don't think that's any bar from changing things. Criticize the system, create better media, watch better media, convince other people that the system is broken and that they should watch better media. Don't say every movie has to pass a checklist to be acceptable.

[(Anonymous)]

DA

I think a lot of it is that Lord of the Rings is held up as The Standard for what high fantasy is "supposed" to be. When a massive chunk of the genre is all people imitating this one guy, then yes that one guy's failings are going to get called out as a big part of the overall problem.

[(Anonymous)]

AYRT

I agree.

And I think that problem is exacerbated by the fact that much of that influence is based on misunderstandings of his work - in particular, adopting surface images and themes without understanding the social and political context of Tolkien's work, without understanding what Tolkien was trying to do, and just grabbing indiscriminately and unimaginatively.

[(Anonymous)]

I see what you're saying, but it seems a little disingenuous to say that we should critique the whole, but not the parts that make up the whole. Don't get me wrong, it's a good way to preach the "right" message without offending anyone, but the problem is that most people aren't going to think of their work as something that needs reassessment, much like fixing. It's too easy to see that whole "we should improve everything in general" message, nod self righteously, and then keep doing what you're doing because you think that fixing it is someone else's problem. The approach you describe... I'm trying to think of a situation where that's actually worked. For anything, whether it's representation in movies, civil rights, whatever. I can't think of any laudable and necessary advancement like that which hasn't been driven by people kicking up a fuss and holding individuals accountable for their actions.

Not to mention that what's so bad about pointing out that a movie lacks diversity? I'm hard pressed to see how this is a deadly blow to creators when it's just facts. Whether or not that's good or bad depends on an individual's viewpoint, but it's hard to argue with the facts.

[(Anonymous)]

I don't, on principle, think that a movie lacking diversity necessarily makes that movie worse in quality. I don't think that is a valid criticism of a movie, generally. I don't, on principle, think that making a specific single work which lacks diversity is an action that anyone needs to be held accountable for. If you want to make a movie that features 5 straight white men in a room for the whole run time, you have not done anything morally wrong, and all other things being equal the movie will not be better or worse than a movie that features 5 Latinas in a room for the whole run time. So I am just intrinsically not going to be amenable to taking those things as criticisms of specific works, as a general rule. My problem with saying those things isn't a tone problem so much as I think that it is an incorrect way of thinking about the problem. I disagree with it.

(And I think, by the way, that is how we do talk about it. I mean, I don't want to push on this too hard, but look at the way OP talks about it - in terms of failings, and racism and sexism. That's not a language that's based around a value-neutral analysis of facts, as far as I can see. That's critical language - which isn't intrinsically a bad thing, but we do have to regard it as a form of criticism. And I think that's true in general.)

And I think we can make both strong criticisms of the system in general and of gatekeepers specifically, and we can make a strong positive case. Because the fact is, stories about people who aren't white men are interesting, good stories that should be told, and that's something that we can convince people of fairly easily. And stories that star people other than white men can make a lot of money, and that's something that we can easily demonstrate. And I have no problem with kicking up a fuss about it. I think people should be loud and exuberant about it. But I don't think it makes sense to talk about it on the level of individual works.

[(Anonymous)]

nayrt, but whatever

I think the biggest issue when people point out a movie lacks diversity, they wanted the movie that white dude director made to include more minorities when that's often just a superficial inclusion. Instead of a push to promote minority directors. I mean a white dude's probably gonna be better at writing white dudes anyway.

[darkmanifest]

It makes sense to critique the system, and it perhaps makes sense to criticize harmful themes and tropes, but criticizing an individual creator or an individual work to include or not include strong female or minority characters does not seem valid to me.

Why isn't it valid like any other criticism? I could criticize a piece for being too long, for the dialogue being absurd, for the plot being contrived, for the special effects being sloppy, for the characters not being compelling. Why not criticize it for a poor variety of characters? It would be a matter of opinion that would be up for argument, of course, but so would any other criticism.

[(Anonymous)]

How does a variety of characters make a film better, or a lack of characters make it worse? Assuming we're not talking about a case where, like, it's actually about race relations or something.

I can see how absurd dialogue makes a piece bad - because the seriousness of the subject matter is undercut by the unbelievability of the dialogue. I can see how being too long can make a piece bad - because the piece is unable to maintain its tone and plot over the length. I can see how characters not being compelling makes the piece bad. But I am damned if I can see how a lack of diverse characters makes a work intrinsically worse. I can see how it would make someone like it less. But I don't think that's the same thing at all.

Honestly not sure whether there's something I'm just missing here.

[(Anonymous)]

A variety of characters means (potentially) a variety of perspectives, allowing the audience to access the work from diverse viewpoints, gaining understanding of multiple facets of the story. A work wherein the audience is only allowed to get at the story from a few perspectives that are already similar to begin with feels restrictive, one-dimensional.

[(Anonymous)]

I don't think that it's true that all works need to be accessible from multiple viewpoints, though. I don't see any reason that would be the case. And I furthermore don't see, if we want to talk about viewpoints, why that should match up precisely with what we think of as diversity. Having multiple facets, or complexity, or depth are not the same thing as being diverse in that sense. Sometimes doing those things will improve a work, and sometimes increasing diversity is the best way to do so, but I don't think that's something we can say as a general rule. So I would think that if those are your issues with a work, you should make your critique on those lines, not on the lines of diversity.

[darkmanifest]

How is a subjective "I didn't like it, and here's why" not as valid as "this is objectively bad, and here's why"? Dialogue, length, characters, it's often subjective, what I criticize about any of those things in a work might have been the best parts of the piece for someone else. I might find a lack of diverse characters worth critiquing for a variety of reasons, depending on the piece - it can be unrealistic, it can be alienating, it can just be plain boring, to me; and sometimes it might seem totally fine to me. And for someone else, it can be a non-issue all the time. It's up for discussion, but saying it's just not valid at all seems...weird, to me.

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah so this is pretty obviously descending into the black hole of talking about what's objective and subjective about works of art, which there's probably not too much point going super far into because... well, you know, it's a black hole that we're never going to resolve. And I doubt you really care about Why I Think Art Isn't Entirely Subjective or whatever. So I'm going to try to keep this short I guess.

That said - I think there is a basic difference between criticism and preference. I do think preference is about emotional, aesthetic, personal response to a movie and criticism is more of an attempt to come to some kind of evaluation of a movie. I think there's a difference, in other words, between finding a movie boring, and criticizing it on the grounds of being too slow-paced. And people can disagree about whether or not a character is bad, without that necessarily being solely a matter of subjective difference of taste between them. It's difficult to tease these things out but that doesn't mean they can't be teased out.

And I guess what I would say, re: diversity as a critique, is that it's just difficult to see how that's generally going to impinge on a work's quality in general that doesn't come down to emotional response. If we're having a discussion about whether the film is good or bad - a failure or a success - I don't think you can make diversity a general criterion for that. There are times it does effect the movie, but it's not something that in itself makes a movie better or worse. And that's the problem that I have, I guess, is that it seems to me people are treating it that way.

[darkmanifest]

You're probably right about the black hole, there, and while I'm a bit interested about why you don't think art is entirely subjective, I dunno how that discussion isn't going to lead to "agree to disagree". I will say that I think the main difference between criticism and preference is one's ability to explain why they dislike something. If I find something boring because I think it's too slow paced, that's different than finding it boring for no reason I could state. For example, if your setting is in NYC and there's zero diversity, I dislike it because I consider that a poor representation of the city. Others might argue that there isn't diversity in every single corner of the place, and they'd have a point. And we could have further discussion about that.

Your absolute terms keep getting me, I've never seen diversity come up as the determining factor of whether or not an overall piece is worthwhile. Like you keep speaking as if you see people going "All the brown people in Middle Earth are a featureless blob of foreign evil, there's nothing worth reading/watching about this universe!" That hasn't been my experience, it's usually just one more detail people mention as part of a judgment of a work and their enjoyment of it, not a deciding factor.

[(Anonymous)]

I don't think people treat it as the sole reason to like or dislike something. But I do think people treat it as an objective flaw or criticism. It is not the determining factor but it is an inherently bad thing. That seems to me to be the mindset.

I mean, part of this is probably me responding to the OP's language - to me, if you talk about 'failings', that's something that's almost impossible to dissociate from that point of view. If someone's talking about doing better and worse, that's the language of criticism and quality to me. And they're talking about it in very general terms - like, I think there are occasions when a lack of diversity can be a problem with a work, but I don't think it just makes sense to refer to it point blank as a problem with the work. And to me, that's how I read OP, and that's something I see more broadly.