[ SECRET POST #3468 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #3468 ⌋

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

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 03 pages, 51 secrets from Secret Submission Post #496.
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

[feotakahari]

I'm coming at this from American terms, but there was a long time here when stories targeted to multiple racial groups weren't much of a thing. Stories could be repackaged for a different race, like the Uncle Remus stories repackaging black people's stories for white audiences, but for much of American history, the stories of the "popular culture" were by white people for white people. There's a limit to how prescriptive you can get with that now that people are writing stories meant for everyone.

Edit: to make my argument clearer, what you're saying reminds me of a guy I used to argue with who said that since all our myths are about kings and not presidents, people must subconsciously want kings and not presidents. For a long time, we didn't have presidents, so of course we didn't have myths about them!

[blitzwing]

That's not a very good argument though? That guy was saying "What people want in fiction, they want in real life" which is whoooooooooooooooooole other can of worms.

I'm not even saying "What people have in fiction, people want in fiction". I'm saying "if people don't want this in fiction but tolerate it and buy it for years, they can't be that strongly opposed to it" i.e it is not that important to them to get something different than what they're getting.

But apparently the nonny I was responding to wasn't even arguing that "society finds this important, so it's important" (which would be a decent point to explore).

[feotakahari]

You can't conflate "people" into a homogenous mass of consumers. You're a video game fan; you've seen how terrible developers and fan communities can be and have been to women, black people, gay people, etc. For a long time, they didn't care about those groups, because the SWM was their targeted demographic and moneymaker. You can argue that SWMs don't care about having main characters who aren't SWMs*, but that doesn't mean "people" as a whole don't care.

I feel like it would be so much easier to have this argument with Dethtoll, since he's had lots of first-hand experience with the most insular and xenophobic video game target audiences, and he's well aware that they don't represent consumers as a whole. I don't know your fan background, so i can't speak to your personal experience in the same way.

*I still think that's wrong when speaking overall, but that gets into anecdotal arguments and personal experience.

[blitzwing]

Ehhh but I think it is important to talk about the homogenous mass of consumers? I mean we're talking about all kinds of media here, from the 50-year old housewife paging through a romance novel to the 12-year old kid spouting homophobic slurs on Xbox live (to use some archetypes).

You can argue that SWMs don't care about having main characters who aren't SWMs*, but that doesn't mean "people" as a whole don't care.

If it was super important to them to have representation in a video game, they wouldn't play a video game that lacked it. It just can't be that important to them if they're willing to consume the media despite that.

Like, there are absolutely people that prioritize representation as super important--I know people that won't consume a work at all if it doesn't have queer characters. But that's the thing--they are not willing to tolerate the lack of what they want.

I get that them not playing doesn't bother the devs. But that's the thing--we haven't seen a mass lack of interest in video games from people that are underrepesented in video games. People don't care that much; it's just not that important to them.

[feotakahari]

Holy crap. There's probably a way to show you where I'm coming from, but I have no idea how to do so at this time. This is a much bigger gap to bridge than I anticipated.

The most I can say is that I'm not denying that representation isn't important to you. That is your personal feeling, and I don't get to dictate that. To a certain extent, you may also be able to extrapolate that if you were a member of such-and-such a minority, and you cared about representation, you would straight-up boycott works not about minorities (!!!) But you don't get to say that people who don't want to boycott all that content and solely consume minority-focused games don't care. Not everyone is that extreme, and different people make different decisions about what they value at what level and what they're willing to put up with. You can't assume everyone else is just like you, or that people with your approach are the only ones whose wants are real or matter.

(I guess I could see where you're coming from on a capitalist standpoint--corporations don't care about representation unless it costs them money. But it seems like you're talking about what consumers care about, not what creators care about.)

[blitzwing]

Hey, representation is important to me. I don't get why you'd think it's not.

But you don't get to say that people who don't want to boycott all that content and solely consume minority-focused games don't care.

I'm not saying they don't care. I'm saying they don't care that much. Sure, levels of tolerance vary from person to person, but usually if something about a media work bothers someone a lot, they don't consume that media (excepting reviewers and critics etc). Do you disagree with that?

[feotakahari]

As a consumer of Japanese fantasy, a lot of which has creepily sexualized little girls, nonstop panty shots, and other things I hate, I 100% disagree. It's all about what you want and what you're willing to put up with in order to get it, especially when you don't know where else to find it.

[blitzwing]

I'm not sure why you assume I have an extreme level of intolerance to things I dislike, rather than that you have an unusually high level of willing to tolerate things you dislike. Although we could both be on extreme ends of that spectrum.

I still think that this holds true: "usually if something about a media work bothers someone a lot, they don't consume that media". Being bothered is not a pleasant sensation. You have to want something more than a little to be willing to tolerate feelings of disgust and discomfort for it.

Even that plays into the idea that representation is not that important to people: if the desire to play a video game trumps the desire to consume diverse media, then the desire to consume diverse media was ranked as less important.

[feotakahari]

And again I'm reminded of the Platonist! He ranked every value he had, and in every situation, he followed whatever relevant value was highest-ranked. He was baffled that American liberals weren't committing mass genocide, because the values he saw them as ranking highly would lead to genocide if they were always followed in every possible situation over the values he ranked highly. I never got him to understand that most people give their values relative weight and follow one or the other depending on how extreme the situation is.

I'm really not sure how to proceed from here. It seems like I would have to speak your language, so to speak, but I don't really know how to get into your head and understand your point of view.