A few years ago when you appeared in the trailer for Star Wars, you were subject to some racist comments (x).
Finn stans lowering their expectations and being preemptively pessimistic ahead of the trailer release is the saddest fandom moment I’ve witnessed in a while.
Warnings: Discussions of lesbophobia, age difference, suicide below.
It’s hard to express what this song and music video meant to me over the years. Not only was the video a rare example of queer girl representation, it was a heartfelt story of young love and a visual puzzle that I kept going back to put together. The song itself is fricking beautiful but takes on a whole new meaning when paired with the video. Plus, now that I watch again the character played by Kim Meeso (the one with the camera and long hair) is pretty blatantly coded as autistic.
I mean it’s not without its problems. The association of childlike pastel aesthetics with girl love and the desexualization of romantic love between women are both really overdone and reinforce the idea that love between young women is an adolescent phase. At least the video showed the two girls kissing, which shut down much of the inane assertions that these two are just really good friends. (Much, but not all–there are STILL people who insist this video was about platonic friendship wtf)
Speaking of girls, that’s a major beef i have with the video. I remember thinking as I watched, “There’s no way these actors are actually teenagers.” I turned out to be half right: The actor Chung Dabin who played the girl with shorter hair was 26 at the time.
Except I was only half right, remember? Yeah. The other actor, Kim Meeso, was 14. Filming love scenes with a woman twice her age. Ew like… let’s not do this? I did think the Chung character was excessively protective and big sisterly toward the Kim character, and this probably explains why. My impression that the actors were in their 20s probably stemmed in large part from Chung’s presence too, because I could not have imagined they’d have such a serious age difference.
One thing that surprised me when I looked up information about this video was that a lot of people thought the two characters were going to jump off the broken bridge. I think this interpretation is all wrong for a number of reasons. For one thing, just tonally, the girls actually stepped BACK from the edge where the bridge ended, showing they weren’t seeking out a place to die but had stumbled onto a dangerous place while exploring, much as they almost got hit by a train earlier.
For another, structurally the bridge sequence is framed around the cuts of the girls symbolically healing objects and places through photography, the visual puzzle aspect I mentioned above. They taped the picture of a wheel to a bicycle missing one, pictures of shirts to an empty clothesline etc. In that context the cut-off bridge is another gap that needs filling, but the characters don’t use a picture this time; instead they embrace each other and kiss. This means that the broken bridge was to be filled in like the other objects and places, and the connection was love.
There’s another reason I believe the bridge was a wound to be healed, and one too big for the smaller gesture of photography: It’s a very clear callback to the fall of the Seongsu Bridge, a 1994 accident which claimed 32 lives. Visually the break is practically identical, with the midsection gone clean missing like it was cut out. The similarity would be unmistakable to anyone who is familiar with the tragedy.
The video also purposefully invokes nostalgic aesthetics including the use of a Polaroid, which still had some currency in the early 90s when the bridge fell but was falling out of use in favor of digital cameras and smart phones when the video was made in the mid-00’s. This dates the video to the time of the Seongsu accident, making it a tribute of mourning and healing.
Also, just from common sense, the girls in the video let GO of each other’s hands before the end and that’s not what you do when you’re dying together, especially when you’re in love. You jump hand in hand, as a final show of solidarity and for courage.
I can see how people would be confused because the visuals of two people holding hands with a long fall before them, plus the “before I go” feel of the photography gestures, coupled with the homophobic and lesbophobic idea that people in same gender relationships can only find fulfillment in death, really do invoke thoughts of suicide. For all the reasons above, though, I believe this work calls to mind that conclusion only to subvert it, showing the courage to live in the face of loss and subtly flipping a finger at the idea that the girls would take their own lives. Besides I do not want more dead lesbians in my imagination, thanks.
The suicide reading is all the more unfortunate because this was the last piece of visual media actor Chung Dabin would ever appear in: She killed herself in 2007, the year after the video’s release.
The music video to 사랑안해 (I Won’t Fall in Love) is a complex accompaniment to a great song, with layers of meaning that I am still discovering over 10 years later. It has been my companion on sleepless, restless nights and forever cemented the song in my mind.
I like the part where it says they were “scared of backlash” if they casted a white guy, as if the only two options were make the movie with a white guy or don’t make it at all. There are plenty of noteworthy Asian American actors and, even if there weren’t, movies sell because they have an entertaining concept more than who is in them, as if the recent box office didn’t already tell us this.
When I check the Into the Badlands tag I often see people who are / were watching the show solely for its supporting white characters and supporting white ships – either they stan the Widow or Jade or Quinn or ship Jade x Ryder. And… Into the Badlands, with all its faults (looking at you s2 finale), is a show lead by two Asian male leads, a show with a central romantic storyline (s1-2) featuring a Black woman and an Asian man.
And it’s not like I want to say that the Widow / Jade / Quinn or Jade x Ryder are not worthy of stanning or that people aren’t allowed to like them, but the thing is that all the above are far from being rarity in media and fiction – you can find those kind of white characters and white ships in almost any given Western book, film, tv show. Whereas MK, Sunny and Veil are the examples of those few representations that we have. Sunny and MK being Asian male leads in a genre show on big US network is unheard of, they are unique. SunnyVeil as a Blasin (AM/BW) couple centering romantic storyline of seasons 1-2 is rarity.
And it reminded me of something – of those Katrina stans from Sleepy Hollow. You know, that show that had a great first season and a disastrous continuation after.
Abbie Mills is not the first Black woman lead on US TV (though she’s shamefully close to it), but she was a main lead on a genre show, and in 2013, that was unheard of. […] Simply put, The Sleepy Hollow fandom was the first major genre TV fandom that was not explicitly white dominated. – Diversehighfantasy
Abbie Mills as a Black woman lead was important representation, and not just for Black women fans but to all of us. And yet, there still were the part of the audience that watched the show for a supporting white character Katrina Crane and supported the romantic storyline between Katrina and her estranged husband Ichabod (the show’s male lead). These people hated Abbie and wanted her gone off the show or become a supporting character to Katrina’s lead. The thing is that Katrina is a character that you can find by opening any book, by turning on TV and seeing in any show, you can go to a theatre and pick almost any play or a movie and you’ll see a Katrina and Ichabod x Katrina romance. So the defining feature of Katrina stans is that they are people who want the status quo – they watch the diverse films / shows, read the diverse books and latch onto the generic white characters and relationships that one can find in any genre of any piece of Western media / fiction.
You can find Katrina stans in any fandom, really. They are the Westallen / Richonne / Ichabbie haters who ship the white ships with the white men from those respective fandoms. They are the Rey.los, they are the Maggie/Daryl shippers. They are the people who claim that Finn is nothing more than a comic relief character, while Kylo is the “true male lead of the SW”. They are the people who insist that Scott is not the true lead of TW, but Stiles is. They are the people who watch Into the Badlands for its supporting white characters, they are the people who watch Cleverman for Iain Glenn only, they are the people who watch Marco Polo for its white male lead and couldn’t care about anything else in the show, they are the people who will watch Black Panther for M@rtin Freeman only. Katrina stans are people who erase Blade, John Luthor and Luke cage from their own canon narratives.
They are the Cl@lecs and J@lecs. And no, the latter are not “progressive” just because they’re not erasing Alec’s sexuality, like the former homophobes do. Because as rare LGBT representation is even nowadays, the shows featuring white gay lead characters and white gay / LGB relationships are still more represented than the shows featuring non-white gay characters and gay / LGB ships of color. I can name dozen of shows off the top of my head right now that star white gay characters and have central white gay / LGB romance. I can only name two that feature Asian GB characters – Shadowhunters and HTGAWM, and Oliver was a recurring / background character in s1-2.
And to a point I can see where these Katrina stans are coming from – never having the luxury of racial representation, from my very childhood I’m used to watching shows and films or reading books for one background character of color (not even an Asian character in particular, just the ones they can offer), who rarely has a central storyline, and is lucky enough if they don’t die horribly in the middle of the story. And you learn to cherish even those scrapes of representation they give you.
That’s why it hurts seeing when white fans, or fans with white worldview (not necessarily white themselves) try to erase those little scrapes of representation that we are starting to have. It’s not about “ship wars”.It’s about racial erasure. Racism hurts and it is always personal to a person of color.
White fans who indignantly ask “why does it matter what color of skin those character have?!” really don’t understand the mere concept of what it’s like never seeing yourself represented on screen / in fiction. They remind me that legend about “Let them eat cake” saying – the rumor states that when French queen Marie Antoinette was informed that the poor country people had no bread, she replied, “Then let them eat pastry!” The moral of the legend is that with all the luxury surrounding her, she didn’t know the mere concept of starving and having nothing but bread to eat.
White fans having the luxury of representation surrounding them everywhere they look, simply don’t get that we don’t have the metaphorical pastry. We barely can afford a loaf of “bread”, we don’t have the luxury of choice. So, basically Katrina stans are the people that come to your home, steal your last and only loaf of bread and then innocently wonder why are you mad.
If we continue the food metaphor, imagine this: you live in a world where all the bakeries offer only one pastry – the jelly bean cake. You like the jelly bean cakes, but you also crave for a raisin cake, after all, you are a raisin person. But you are surrounded with jelly bean people, so you adapt. You eat the jelly bean cakes. And when you’re lucky you see a jelly bean cake with one raisin in it, and you are the luckiest person alive, you buy the jelly bean cake with that single raisin and you eat the whole cake and cherish that one raisin. And then one day the bakery bakes a jelly bean cake with lots of raisins! You’ve never been happier. But then you see how jelly bean people come into the bakery, they buy the raisin cake, they take out the jelly beans and throw away the raisin cake into the trash bin. All in front of the baker, and then they make complaints about the raisin cake to the baker, because there aren’t enough jelly beans in it, even though the shelves of the bakery are full of jelly bean cakes.
That’s how I feel.
And if someone takes this post as a personal attack and “policing the fandom”, congratulations, you’ve missed the whole point.
Cultural appropriation and cultural sharing in Avatar: The Last Airbender compared.
Reblogging myself to talk about the ‘Disrespectful’ gif because Mai and Ty Lee’s disrespect in that scene is toward not only the Kyoshi Warriors’ culture but to the Warriors themselves as well. But that’s always the case, isn’t it? Cultural disrespect always goes with personal disrespect. Always.
Mai and Ty Lee’s attitude here plays into a really pernicious stereotype about women in colonialized cultures, that they are hypersexual seductresses out to sink their claws into men, especially men of the colonializing group. Of course the reality is that men of the colonizing group, and often women as well, hypersexualize and prey on the colonized people.
I mean, the Kyoshi Warriors were foraging in the middle of nowhere. They weren’t dressed up to look pretty: their clothes and war paint were their uniforms and ties to their heritage, not look-at-me-I’m-so-beautiful decorations. Yet so ingrained were the stereotypes Mai and Ty Lee had been taught about Earth Kingdom women, they took one look at the Kyoshi Warriors and dismissed them as exotic, sexualized creatures. The Fire Nation girls even seem to take OFFENSE at how the Warriors are dressed, as though their clothes are somehow demeaning or a provocation.
In the process Mai and Ty Lee subtly set themselves up as the more liberated women, the serious fighters as oppsed to these frivolous foreign girls. And I’m willing to bet a lot that the Fire Nation used its comparative gender equality for propaganda purposes, harping on the need to save the oppressed Water Tribe and Earth Kingdom women from Water Tribe and Earth Kingdom men. Sozin’s own stated motivation for starting the war was exactly what we would call a white savior complex if he were white. This is how white feminism and the white savior complex work to reinforce colonialism in our world.
While all the characters in ATLA are coded as POC, mostly Asians, these dynamics of colonialism and supremacy apply across culture and race. In fact I’m quite happy that ATLA depicts these issues between nonwhite peoples. Though colonialism by European and European-descended cultures is the most dominant currently in our world (hence the descriptor ‘white’), it has never been solely a European issue. Just look at how the Air Nomads are explicitly based on Tibet, which is suffering from decades of Chinese colonialism. China and other nonwhite colonializing powers have used their lack of European descent as a shield, but it’s not a defense. Just because European colonization has been massively destructive doesn’t mean other peoples can’t be oppressive as well.
I’d like to add to this idea that Earth Kingdom women are treated to a gendered form of racial or ethnic prejudice, because it runs though more than just the interactions Azula and her minions have with the Kyoshi Warriors. In “Zuko Alone,” for example, when Iroh sends Azula an Earth Kingdom doll, he writes, “And for Azula, a new friend. She wears the latest fashion for Earth Kingdom girls.“ What’s stressed are the aesthetics of her dress, and a hobby that Azula, and later Mai and Ty Lee, plainly associates with girlyness, not only femininity, but a childish, useless femininity.
This derision of Earth Kingdom girls and women as “girly” and overly feminine comes up again not only during the battle with the Kyoshi Warriors, but after as well. Mai for example talks about wanting to get out of the girly disguise she has to wear, i. e., dressing as a Kyoshi Warrior, and when Ty Lee suggests that the Kyoshi Warriors have less depressing make up than Mai.
We can contrast this with what Suki says about her uniform: “It’s a warrior’s uniform. You should be proud. The silk threads symbolizes the brave blood that flows through our
veins. The gold insignia represents the honor of the warrior’s heart.”
Later, in the Comic “Going Home Again,” Azula puts a brainwashed Joo Dee in nominal charge of Ba Sing Se because she is so pliable. If the subjugation of Earth Kingdom girls is a rallying cry for public support for the war in the Fire Nation, it certainly does not trickle down to what happens on the ground. Just as normally happens in real life, Azula is perfectly happy to take over exploiting Earth Kingdom women in a gendered way similar to the way Long Feng did. There isn’t any enlightened spreading of feminist values here, not when gendered exploitation is so useful to the new colonial government.
The implied view that all Earth Kingdom women are oppressed also shows a cultural flattening of the Earth Kingdom. It’s pretty clear from the series that Kyoshi Island culturally distinct from Ba Sing Se or Gaoling. They have different gender roles and norms, and this is entirely ignored by Azula, Mai, and Ty Lee. This is also common to colonial powers historically, and still common today. Think of the way so many white western people treat East Asian ethnicities as interchangeable, especially with regards to and fetishization. In many ways, the implied attitudes of the Fire Nation people toward Earth Kingdom women and girls functions as a G-rated version of that same fetishization process.
Yup, the thing about the colonialist savior complex is that there’s no actual saving involved. These women are exploited in rhetoric to justify colonialism, and also in reality as well. It’s no wonder the Dai Li switched allegiance to Azula–she perpetuated the same system they were part of and benefited from, she just played the game better than Long Feng did.
One of the things I really liked about ATLA was how it showed the Fire Nation’s distorted perception of other cultures compared to their perceptions of themselves. The Kyoshi Warriors are a good example of this as you point out, as is what Earthbending means for Haru vs. the prison warden’s contempt for Earthbenders in the episode “Imprisoned.” The Earth Kingdom and Water Tribe characters have prejudices against Fire Nation people, too, with nearly deadly results when Jet tries to wipe out a village, but it’s also clear that the harm isn’t equal when the Water Tribes and the Earth Kingdoms are undergoing systematic genocide while the Fire Nation is facing, at its outskirts, insurgent pushback–some of it terrorist in nature, as in Jet’s case–from its aggression.
I like how the show’s response to all these complex issues was showing the diversity not only between common groupings but within them. Some Earth Kingdom women, like the Ba Sing Se upper crust, really are pampered and hyperfeminine, and that in itself isn’t a bad thing (though the system of economic exploitation underlying their luxury certainly is), the show’s subtle devaluation of girliness as bad notwithstanding. Katara, Toph, and Sokka all find something to enjoy in the Ba Sing Se high culture that caters to and is shaped by noblewomen. Some Earth Kingdom women are warriors and healers, others are everyday working class people like Jin. That kind of variety is a great antidote to the flattening view the Fire Nation imposed on other cultures, and in a way the whole show gives the lie to the idea of Asian interchangeability. (I mean it’s not perfect–it still follows the trope of “Asia” being primarily East Asia, with what could be a Southeast Asia analogue played largely as a joke and the Tibet stand-in presented as already dead and gone. But one story can’t do everything, and I can still enjoy it while seeing where it falls into common traps of thought.)
I know, who’s ready for this, eh? Anyways, here we go.
When I was a kid, maybe 12 years old, I went to the Experience Music Project & Sci-fi Museum (EMP/SFM) in Seattle for the the first time. In the area where the SFM now puts their traveling exhibits, they had a then-permanent exhibit about the evolution of sci-fi throughout history. It touched on the common themes and morals and ideals, the fear of man being outpaced by technology, the morality of science that we didn’t yet exist and didn’t understand. It looked at sci-fi’s transition from space westerns to an actual genre of its own.
Part of that exhibit was a piece all about science fiction that predicted reality. This looked at maybe a dozen or more major sci-fi publications through time and the real-world science that followed. This included things like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein predicting organ transplants and multiple HG Wells works that predict multiple future science, including genetic engineering, lasers, and nuclear weapons (wherein he stated that a world govt would be the only thing to save us from nuclear annihilation). We’re not talking vague predictions, either. The World Set Free predicted and inspired the atomic bomb. Leo Szilard developed the chain reaction method of splitting the atom, thereby creating atomic energy. He wrote that HG Wells’ book both showed him the power of such technology to create a better society, as well as destroy it.
Remembering this exhibit today reminded me of a news flood shortly after the release of 50 Shades of Grey about a rise in sex-related injuries. Both in America and Britain, ER visits for foreign object removal absolutely jumped, and it was directly attributed to the release of the novel. Why would that be the case? Well, as a person who’s been in the BDSM community, I can tell you that 50SoG is terrible at accurate describing both toys and consent. It’s not enough to feed someone a new idea and failing information, even in fiction. There’s a reason the BDSM community largely attempted to distance itself, not wanting to be responsible for the thousands of potential injuries newbies could be faced with because they were lacking information.
It’s more than just the idea, though. 50SoG, despite its many problems, became a HUGE success. This not just meant the signing of the movie deal, but the release of merchandise. This included an entire line of branded sex toys. Among the more innocuous stuff like lube, sleep masks, and feather dusters came much more dangerous items like paddles, hand cuffs, and anal plugs. Hand cuffs alone can be dangerous when you do understand BDSM, but throw in a lackluster understanding of consent and safety like we see in 50SoG and that shit can easily become rape and other forms of serious bodily injury. Detractors might say “It’s just fiction, people can tell the difference!” but the BDSM community and many feminists were quick to point out that making that assumption comes with a serious risk. And they were right. Fiction or not, grievous bodily harm befell a lot of people because fiction gave them an idea but left out the context needed for safe execution.
Fiction gives us ideas to explore and consider. Those ideas could be grand, romantic images of fantasy worlds, distant thoughts of a heroic quest, the morality of new sciences. Big, big ideas. It can also gives us little ideas to consider. What it would be like living in a new city or small town, how we would react to some tragedy in our life, the kind of interpersonal relationships we could have if we were just brave enough or bold enough to get out there.
Fiction affects reality in a very real way. You cry when you read a death scene? Fiction is affecting your very reality. You feel happy and relaxed reading a favorite book? Fiction is affecting your reality. You talk about some great idea or morality or social mores you read in a book with your friends? Fiction is affecting your reality.
In a sense, that can often be the point of fiction, science fiction especially. In grade school, we often read fairy tales that are meant to present young kids with “the moral of the story.” These fairy tales often exist for the express purpose of altering reality. It’s a neat, uniquely contained example of some bad behavior or action that wraps up perfectly. Consequences delivered, happily ever after. What better way to teach someone a moral idea? The details of the story don’t detract from the point like they would in real life, and things are clean-cut for children’s understanding. You can’t expect an 8 year-old to really grasp grey or complex morality, can you? Especially not when reality as a concept isn’t even universal, existing on several different levels and driven uniquely by different justifications.
Even more dangerous, fiction can seem like reality and subsequently be taken as such. Political publications are a perfect example of this. Many seem and sound very factual, but have no supporting evidence. Sadly, we often don’t check the facts on things we want to believe. The Oatmeal has a great comic about it that explains it better than I ever could: That can be found here.
This kind of fiction is insidious on purpose. But what about fiction that is insidious on accident? There is plenty of fiction out there that exists for the sake of empathy and identity; this is often the center of the debate around the impact of diversity in literary works and on screens. There was a reason Moonlight was so heralded as an exceptional example of diversity; it wasn’t just that the characters were black, it was also because the movie tonally encourages empathy with the characters. And tone is definitely a part of it. The way we say things, the way they are depicted, has a huge impact on how we understand and internalize those events.
Consider this: Why is it so weird to watch a comedy show without the laugh track? We can even watch bits we’ve laughed at before, only to find them utterly unenjoyable without the laugh track. Tone is another piece of information for the brain as much as dialogue and body language; it tells us how to perceive the information we’re being given. Tone is the concept behind a lot of news circuits and editing, even music. Consider the tone of conservative and liberal pundits interviewing each other: questions are often asked with deliberate flare and frustration or skepticism. The problem being that doing so inherently turns the listener against the interviewee even before there’s been a chance to answer. This leads to fabled “gotcha” moments like we often saw on Bill O’Reilly. What was said doesn’t matter as much as it sounding weak to the audience.
We use tone to build empathy. We find that things can sound reasonable just because they are said calmly and with an air of authority, especially when we have no knowledge about the subject or evidence at hand to counter what’s being said. Consider how much false news stories are passed on on tumblr and facebook just because they sound legit. So many of us never even check the source!
This is how empathy can be created with tone. Take a topic that’s somewhat controversial and present it with soft music, gentle vocabulary, soft lighting. Now you’ve made your audience predisposed to understanding a scene exactly as you want them to. Remember soft focus in the 40s? Every time we saw soft focus around an actress’ face or a set, we knew that either romance or a dream sequence was likely to follow.
Tone is also how empathy becomes dangerous. A classic example is Birth of a Nation and the resurrection of the KKK. Despite having existed in almost no form in America since the 1870s, the KKK came roaring back to life in 1915 with the release of the movie, Birth of a Nation. In this movie, a freed slave is depicted as a thief and rapist and all around vile guy. The character is pursued, caught, and punished by KKK members. That same year, the Klan was re-established in Atlanta with only 15 members, their regalia based on the costumes in the movie. While the original post-confederacy Klan was almost entirely about anti-blackness, the rebirth version was focused on modern issues including anti-Catholicism and antisemitism, despite those values never being featured in the movie. Enrollment ballooned to an estimated 6 million members by 1924, but resistance crushed that number back to 30k by 1930.
It’s important to note that Birth of a Nation was based on the play The Clansman, which was a direct response to a play version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Three pro-clan books were written after Thomas Dixon Jr. saw the play and vowed to effectively rewrite the story in the manner he believed was historically accurate. He even “borrowed” characters from Uncle Tom’s Cabin and reskinned them in a positive light. This retort wasn’t just because Dixon was upset, but also because Uncle Tom’s Cabin, written by Harriet Beecher Stowe, had become quite famous and important nationally. While there were efforts to criticize it, it was largely perceived well and enabled many to empathize with the lives of slaves. The book created such a shift in national narrative about slavery that it has been credited with being one of the sparks starting the Civil War.
This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t write tricky subject matter. We absolutely should! Writing exposes us to new ideas, understanding, information. However, the fiction that we write has to be tonally appropriate for the content we are writing. This is where 50SoG failed. Despite depicting an abusive relationship that had no consideration for consent, those elements weren’t tonally defined as bad, but rather romantic. Hence the push following the release of 50SoG and, to a lesser extent, Twilight to contextualize and tonally correct the events of the books. Fiction affects reality, and tone is partially how it does so, so we have to be careful about how we write and interpret fiction in our lives. The consequences of glorifying harmful content is all too real.
Gamora is green -> a black woman was cast to play her
Maz Kanata is orange -> a black woman was cast to play her
Mantis has antennae -> an asian woman was cast to play her
Starfire is orange -> a black woman was cast to play her
And I’m sure there are more I’m forgetting now. Can you see the problem? White women get leading roles playing themselves, but woc are not even allowed to play humans.
Mod A.
This has been going on for so long, I’m always surprised when people don’t see it. People of color – if we’re cast at all – are always cast as animal sidekicks,
(shrek became human and was a white dude under all that green so – this movie counts for my purposes) elves, orcs, monsters, robots, rarely anything human and usually under makeup.
We’re referred to as monkeys and robots and elves in speculative fiction,
and our struggles are used to make allegories about racism and oppression in a fantastical setting. But even those roles are given to white people.
We can’t exist in white stories except as the exotic other: purple aliens, monkeys, robots. Because that’s how we’re seen in real life.
But most of the time, we aren’t even cast at all. Often in fiction, white faces wear oppression to the tell the stories of brown people.
We either aren’t cast at all or we’re asked to play something non-human.
It’s nothing new.
Exactly and this is also true for other pieces of animated media such as Brother Bear, The Princess and the Frog, or Emperor’s New Groove where the protagonists are people of color who spend most of the movie as animals.
Mod A.
There is an entire industry of books about PoC being cast as “the other” in SFF media, and it’s been happening as far back as The sixties.
Gather round, children. Auntie Jules has a degree in psychology with a specialization in social psychology, and she doesn’t get to use it much these days, so she’s going to spread some knowledge.
We love saying representation matters. And we love pointing to people who belong to social minorities being encouraged by positive representation as the reason why it matters. And I’m here to tell you that they are only a part of why it matters.
The bigger part is schema.
Now a schema is just a fancy term for your brain’s autocomplete function. Basically, you’ve seen a certain pattern enough times that your brain completes the equation even when you have incomplete information.
One of the ways we learned about this was professional chess players vs. people who had no experience with chess.
If you take a chess board and you set it up according to a pattern that is common in chess playing (I’m one of those people who knows jack shit about chess), and you show it to both groups of people, and then you knock all the pieces off the board, the pro chess players will be able to return it to its prior state almost perfectly with no trouble, because they looked at it and they said, “Oh, this is the fifth move of XYZ Strategy, so these pieces would be here.”
The people who don’t know about chess are like, “Uh, I think one of the horses was over here, and maybe there was a castle over there?”
BUT, if you just put the pieces randomly on the board before you showed it to them, then the amateurs were more likely to have a higher rate of accuracy in returning the pieces to the board, because the pros are SO entrenched in their knowledge of strategy patterns that it impairs their ability to see what is actually there if it doesn’t match a pattern they already know.
Now some of y’all are smart enough to see where this is going already but hang on because I’m never gonna get to be a college professor so let me get my lecture on for a second.
Let’s say for a second that every movie and TV show on television ever shows black men who dress in loose white T-shirts and baggy pants as carrying guns 90% of the time, and when they get mad, they pull that gun out and wave it in some poor white woman’s face. I mean, sounds fake, right? But go with it.
Now let’s say that you’re out walking around in real life, and you see a black man wearing a white T-shirt and loose-fitting jeans.
And let’s say he reaches for something in his pocket.
And let’s say you can’t see what he’s reaching for. Maybe it’s his wallet. Maybe it’s his cell phone or car keys. Maybe it’s a bag of Skittles.
But on TV and movies, every single time a black man in comfortable, casual clothes reaches for something you can’t see, it turns out to be a gun.
So you see this.
And your brain screams “GUN!!!” before he even comes up with anything. And chances are even if you SEE the cell phone, your brain will still think “GUN!!!” until he does something like put it up to his ear. (Unless you see the pattern of non-threatening black men more often than you see the narrative of them as a threat, in which case, the pattern you see more often will more likely take precedence in this situation.)
Do you see what I’m saying?
I’m saying that your brain is Google’s autocomplete for forms, and that if you type something into it enough, that is going to be what the function suggests to you as soon as you even click anywhere near a box in a form.
And our brains functioning this way has been a GREAT advantage for us as a species, because it means we learn. It means that we don’t have to think about things all the way through all the time. It saves us time in deciding how to react to something because the cues are already coded into our subconscious and we don’t have to process them consciously before we decide how to act.
But it also gets us into trouble. Did you know that people are more likely to take someone seriously if they’re wearing a white coat, like the kind medical doctors wear, or if they’re carrying a clipboard? Seriously, just those two visual cues, and someone is already on their way to believing what you tell them unless you break the script entirely and tell them something that goes against an even more deeply ingrained schema.
So what I’m saying is, representation is important, visibility is important, because it will eventually change the dominant schemas. It takes consistency, and it takes time, but eventually, the dominant narrative will change the dominant schema in people’s minds.
It’s why when everyone was complaining that same-sex marriage being legal wouldn’t really change anything for LGB people who weren’t in relationships, some people kept yelling that it was going to make a huge difference, over time, because it would contribute to the visibility of a narrative in which our relationships were normalized, not stigmatized. It would contribute to changing people’s schemas, and that would go a long way toward changing what they see as acceptable, as normal, and as a foregone conclusion.
So in conclusion: Representation is hugely important, because it’s probably one of the single biggest ways to change people’s behavior, by changing their subconscious perception.
(It is also why a 24-hour news cycle with emphasis on deconstructing every. single. moment. of violent crimes is SUCH A TERRIBLE SOCIETAL INFLUENCE, but that is a rant for another post.)
L.J.'s Obsessions 