[ SECRET POST #3216 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #3216 ⌋

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

01.


__________________________________________________



02.
(The Blacklist)


__________________________________________________



03.
[The Sum Of Us/Russell Crowe]


__________________________________________________



04.
[Dan and Phil]


__________________________________________________



05.
[Tokyo Ghoul:re]


__________________________________________________



06.
[dick grayson]


__________________________________________________



07.
[Scandinavia and the World]


__________________________________________________



08.
[Doctor Who]


__________________________________________________



09.
[One Piece]


__________________________________________________



10.
[Lost Dimension]


__________________________________________________



11.
[Sleepy Hollow]










Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 03 pages, 075 secrets from Secret Submission Post #460.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - 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)]

or (at least once) because political representation

Are you talking about the person who said Captain America? Or the person who said James Bond? Or both? Or neither?

Because the Bond one was me and I'm standing by that. I also give a hearty second to the Captain America one. We need things that challenge people's prejudices and biases, and shake up their/our flawed understandings of these huge concepts such as masculinity and nationality. When something does that it has the potential to make a significant impact. So if that's what you're arguing is tokenism, then we are just never going to agree.

But maybe you're actually talking about a completely different comment that I skipped over or something. In which case, which one?

I do think that wanting a character to be LGBT just to piss people off is a bit...petulant, I guess. But I really don't see it as exploitation. YMMV, all I can say is that I'm ace and I certainly wouldn't agree that making a character asexual just to piss people off was exploitation.

This is because I start from a position of "everyone is neutral unless stated otherwise"... does no one else do that?

I don't if it's probably not what the narrative is implying. Which is to say, if a character is established as being attracted to one gender, and is not relatively quickly established as also being attracted to the other (another?) gender, then I will assume their sexual preference is for the gender they have been established to be attracted to.

In real life I typically won't make that assumption about a person, but when it comes to fictional narratives it's usually a pretty safe bet that a character who hasn't been established to be bisexual isn't intended by the writers to be bisexual. With a few exceptions, of course.

I really don't understand some people's need to continually inject Big Political Statements into what should be a narrative question.

Me either, though to be honest, that does rather seem to be what you're doing here. I mean with the whole "If you do it for this reason then that's Exploitation, and if you do it for that reason then it's Tokenism" bit. That seems like make a big political issue out of a playful narrative thought experiment, to me.

[(Anonymous)]

It's probably one of those. I can't remember which comment I was thinking of this morning.

But anyway: If you really want to "challenge people's prejudices", that's what the "write your own characters" option is for. The idea that "it has to be an established character because they're well-known" just reads as "we need to use the name of someone famous to take advantage of their star power" more than anything else - and going along that line of reasoning, the hypothetical decision to make the character come out as LGBT+ focuses more on using them as a tool to further someone's political opinion than on what suits the character's personality and background.

If you're turning characters gay just for the sake of having more gay people in media, that's tokenizing in the sense that it's acting to fill an imaginary quota. If you're doing it just to "shake people up", and not because it complements the character and improves the story, you're using the character as a mouthpiece to convey your views in a very direct sense, and that's what feels exploitative to me - that, say, "gayness" or "transness" or "aceness" are being valued not for the depth they bring to narrative and character, but for what they contribute to someone's idea of a Message Everyone Needs to Hear.

It's the difference between a regular narrative and an author tract - intent. I'm agender. I'm aro (or gray-aro, damned if I can figure that one out). I don't know about you, but if someone picks me out for something "because we need more people who aren't cis or het here", that to me feels like being used - as if someone's trying to define me by my (lack of) gender or my orientation. Doubly so if it's more like "Hey, we're going to parade your existence around because we know it's going to make the cishets mad" - which is basically exactly what a lot of people are saying here. If it were me up there and not some character (and of course, none of these are our own characters), I'd feel exactly like a puppet on strings, and that bothers me. Is that so hard to imagine?

I mean, if it is first and foremost about enriching the narrative and expanding the character's dimensions in an interesting way, go right ahead. If it just happens to do us "non-mainstream" folks a favor, well and good. Just as long as gender/orientation isn't being made the character's defining trait.

I'm still going to maintain that my intent wasn't to *introduce* politicizing material. I already said I have no issue with the OP. I only responded to it because it leaves a sour taste in my mouth, in a "right things for the wrong reasons" sort of way.

As for reading into characters - I suppose if one way or another is actually clearly implied, reading them as that is probably valid (well, in my case, assuming I notice - I'm notoriously blind to romantic/sexual subtext). But if it doesn't come up (or just has a very weak presence at best) in the narrative, then they're undefined. Still, when it comes to "making a character xyz orientation", I hugely prefer having actual grounds to support it, not just throwing in a complete 180 degrees for some reason or other.

I'll admit, though. I still don't quite understand where you're coming from (or anyone else, for that matter) regarding the whole idea of using characters (particularly established ones) to send this or that message, or in this case changing said characters for that purpose explicitly. Mostly because this is one of the first times I've run into someone who disagreed without immediately turning things into a flamewar. So, well, I am curious.