[ SECRET POST #6577 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #6577 ⌋

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


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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 19 secrets from Secret Submission Post #940.
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

[fscom]

05. https://i.imgur.com/028E2Qx.png

[(Anonymous)]

Not gonna lie this is why [insert minority] characters feel off in a lot of well-intentioned media created by authors who are let's say, naive?

You got your black character with no other black friends or community of their own, your latino character with no latino friends or community of their own, your disabled character with seemingly only able-bodied friends, your queer character with seemingly only straight friends... it gets weird when you think about it.

[(Anonymous)]

Yes! For one person it's pretty possible, but when you've got the whole group of different minorities and everyone is isolated? Just no.

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah exactly, it's believable if it's one or two people out of a group who never connected with [community of whatever trait they represent] and know nothing about it and have no connection to it, plenty of people like that out there. Someone like that existing is not unrealistic

ALL of them being like that though? ALL of them have no families, no support groups, no culture, no friend groups, or nothing outside of this diverse cast? gets lol

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah, this. I mean, even just looking at my high school days, my friend group was mostly black/mixed with a few white and Asian kids and there was another big group that was mostly Asian. People gravitated to the people they had things in common with.

[(Anonymous)]

are you telling me the Burger King Kids CLub cast wasn' representative of real life?? /gasp

[(Anonymous)]

cringe

[(Anonymous)]

Can't believe a burger cooperation would just lie like that :(

[paperghost]

Yep.

[(Anonymous)]

Yep! It isn’t representation, it’s homogeneity while creating one job for each checkbox. Representation includes culture and perspective.

[iff_and_xor]

I can understand the argument that it’s not representation. (Or at least not realistic or substantially beneficial representation.)

But I don’t get why you’d call it homogeneous. Surely that would depend on how the characters were written?

[(Anonymous)]

In American media they’re all written to be white middle class suburbanites. Sometimes they’re meant to be urban but are obviously written by suburbanites with little to no experience with urban living. Homogeny is really the best word I can think of to describe it tbh.

[iff_and_xor]

That makes sense. I think I’m just missing enough experience with this kind of thing to know how it’s usually implemented.

[(Anonymous)]

idk, I've definitely been in groups of college friends where we've been like "Wow, we're like a diverse stock photo," because we have One of Each. But, of course those people would have family members and friends from their own culture/group as well.

[iff_and_xor]

TV Tropes offers up the term “Five Token Band” if anyone else wanted some specific media examples.

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FiveTokenBand

[(Anonymous)]

... yeah. As a POC, I get that people mean well and they're trying and that's great! But the end results are still kinda not good.

[(Anonymous)]

I've taken to calling this "Overwatch diversity."

(The other salient lesson of "Overwatch diversity" is that making up a bunch of cartoon characters doesn't actually mean you're not treating women and minorities like shit in real life.)

[(Anonymous)]

I mean, I have this kind of friend group irl lol.
But I do see what you mean - and even moreso when they just treat characters like check boxes rather than actual characters with their own needs and motivation for their place in whatever story is being told.
I think I've seen better attempts in 90s Saturday morning kids shows than what I've seen in recent years.

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah, that was my friend group in high school exactly. I was the token queer, which was also funny when there was a thread about how those are unrealistic because queer people form their own groups. Lol, maybe we would have if it hadn't been 1998 when you couldn't expect more than 1% of a school to be out of the closet.

[(Anonymous)]

Ok, but people who point this out almost never want the solution to be writing the characters as a group of multifaceted people who just happen to be insert groups here, nor do they want something in between (i.e. not every group is represented, but there's more than one of all or most groups that are represented). What they're really saying is "It'd be more progressive to go back to everyone being white, cishet, abled and neurotypical, actually. In fact, let's do that."

[(Anonymous)]

I doubt this is the case here, because those people would not then add that the reason is because real minority communities don't look like that, implying they want more accurate portrayals of real minority communities

People who want all white groups instead would point out that lots of white friend groups tend to not have all those minorities at all, lol

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah sure if it's a slice of life sitcom. If we're looking at families and friends and people grouping up by choice.

If the premise doesn't allow for the characters to make their own decisions about who they're around for the duration of the plot, like a workplace sitcom or five teenagers with attitude called to adventure, I don't mind it.

[(Anonymous)]

lmfao everyone in my friend group is neurodivergent or queer or disabled or a racial minority and a chunk of us are all the above. I think we have MAYBE two cis het neurotypical white men in it and those poor guys are usually wrangling us up and keeping us on track ROFL. We love our straight cis white dads.

[(Anonymous)]

see, the only thing that came to my head instantly was, somehow, The Last of Us 2 game lol, where we have two white women (one of them lesbian or at least bi) as main characters and a jewish bi, her asian ex-boyfriend and two POC kids one of them trans masc as main supporting cast (there's also cishet couple with a woman being heavily pregnant), but in TLOU2 it kinda works because it's post-apocalypse with zombie-murshroom-monsters, so like, the survivor groups being very diverse makes sense. (just realised there were no black ppl with any kind of important roles in TLOU2, tsk tsk. well, TLOU1 was very white and male in comparison, so eh, still better.)