A Crash Course in Feminism Mk. II (or, why everyone should be a feminist)

[CoffeeGrunt]

The Last of Us and Walking Dead are not outliers, though. Those are multiple award-winning blockbuster games.

I'm sorry if I can't list enough examples of others due to my lack of movie watching obsession, I tend only to watch a handful of new movies a year and the odd TV series, though this year has been mainly Anime. To discredit the massive audiences of some of these creations is to discredit your own argument, you're removing data to suit your own vision. Granted, I can't deny that white guys are the protagonists of a lot of games, ignoring the ones that don't let you create a custom character of course. Even Last of Us swings back to Joel's POV at the end which sucked after playing as Ellie for the real highlight stint of it - I really hope if they do a sequel it's about her a lot more.

That said, I don't think there's many people looking at CoD:Ghosts and its ilk and thinking, "yes, that is an intelligent and realistic story of human nature in all its colours." It's a bit like calling out Waterworld on its misogyny when there's a shedload of other people it's diligently trying to insult with all its might.

I also think Michael Bay should be stopped before he ruins anymore 80s IP, but that's beside the point.

Also I generally avoid Tumblr for most of the hate speech quoted above. There's a lot of bitterness in that strange, little site, and the SJW movement is headache-inducing.

I haven't heard much of Guardians, friends tell me it's great, but I dunno given one of the cast is a raccoon and it's one of Marvel's more obscure works. Will probably translate to a good movie on that budget regardless.

[eldargal]

But they are outliers, estimates of games with female progagonists range from 3% to 10% depending on the time frame.

Every one of those pics from tumblr is a well deserved reaction to elements of our culture though, and the thing about the SJWs on tumblr is that they are overwhelmingly the people being oppressed. The difference between tumblr and, say, Huffington Post is that tumblr isn't moderating their message to make it more palatable to the people doing the oppressing. That is why it is confronting and makes a lot of people very uncomfortable even if sometimes some people get a bit carried away or don't fact check things adequately. the bitterness is there because tumblr is literally their only safe place. They can't say that **** in real life without losing their job/friends/putting themselves in danger, and everywhere else online is just horrible.

[Gotthammer]

If you think that's anything like actual hate-speech I just... I guess you are very lucky not to have heard any.

[Psychosplodge]

IDK a lot of the SJWs on tumblr are clearly middle class hipsters with no real problems when you look at the source blog.

[eldargal]

Some are, but when you look at actual tumblr demographics you see that women, people of colour and people with disabilities and LGBT and other disadavantages groups are much, much more highly represented than on any other social media sites (bar Instagram for women I think). When you get idiot SJW posts byt people who genuinely don't know what they are talking about they tend to be corrected pretty quickly.

[YorkNecromancer]

'The Last of Us' is one game.
'The Walking Dead' is one game.

Two games is NOT the industry.Two games is not ALL the games. I am not discussing individual games. I am discussing ALL the games, ALL the films. Remember what I said about scale? We are not looking at 'Oh this game is sexist', we are looking at a SYSTEM which is sexist. One game is irrelevant. The industry is what matters.

Why are you having such a problem with this idea? Two games makes up less than 1% of all the games featuring representations of human characters produced in a year. I am NOT discussing the audiences of these games. I am discussing the INDUSTRY which produces them. The audience isn't relevant. All that is relevant is what is produced, and whom it is produced about.

Not to mention, if we're going to talk about 'The Walking Dead', that is a hell of a problematic TV series to begin with (and I can't comment on the game - haven't played it and I have no interest or intention of doing so, but unless the main character is a women, I don't see how it's relevant here). The comic is find, has lots of characters of different genders and races (although it's default protagonist, is of course, white, straight, cis, het, thirty something, grizzled, and has a dead wife to get all sad over. I suppose that in the comics he does hit the box for SPOILER disabled, so there's that.

The TV show's first three seasons were crazy problematic. Every female character was basically a shrew, a nag, or a victim, except Michonne, who wasn't a character so much as a male wank fantasy...



Not to mention that for the first three seasons the rule was 'Only one black guy is allowed to be a party member at a time.' Seriously, every time a new black guy with lines showed up, it was like 'Well, previous black guy, it's been fun not getting to know anything about you, but your time has come'. I mean, the one black guy from the start only got character development AFTER HE DIED!

Season four has gone a fair way to avert this, thankfully - Michonne has a personality now, the other female characters have developed agency, there's two black guys... But seriously, the first three seasons, while fun, were super-problematic.

As for 'The Last of Us', I'm not sure how a story about a thirty-something, grizzled, het, white, cis man with permastubble who's all sad because SPOILER he has a female character die on him is so different from other stories where thirty-something, grizzled, het, white, cis man with permastubble are all sad because a female character dies on them. It might be a better told story than the others, but a really delicious hamburger is still a hamburger, no matter how much you might try to convince me it's a lamb kebab.

Mmmmm... Lamb kebab.

TL;DR: just because a car company with five thousand models of car decides to make a single model of awesome motorbike, it doesn't mean that there are now lots of awesome models of motorbikes. Nor does it mean that those of us who like motorbikes give two ****s about how awesome all those cars are.

A car is not a motorbike, and a game with a thirty-something, grizzled, het, white, cis man with permastubble who's all sad is not a story about a female character. Cars have wheels, bikes have wheels. Stories about men can have female characters, but if the hero is male, it's not her story, no matter how much he might say otherwise. He's the one with agency, he's the one having the adventures, he's the one responding emotionally to her - it's his story.

More on 'The Walking Dead' and it's problematic issues:
[url]http://www.pajiba.com/think_pieces/make-sure-your-face-is-clean-now-cant-have-no-dirty-dead-race-gender-and-the-walking-dead.php[/url]
[url]http://flavorwire.com/354435/where-the-walking-dead-fails-viewers-when-it-comes-to-race[/url]
[url]http://www.salon.com/2013/04/01/walking_dead_still_a_white_patriarchy/[/url]
[url]http://www.salon.com/2012/11/11/the_walking_dead_has_become_a_white_patriarchy/[/url]
[url]http://www.back2stonewall.com/2012/10/walking-dead-skips-season-3-gay-storyline-imperfect-lgbt-character-rating.html[/url]

More on 'The Last of Us' and it's problematic issues:
[url]http://radicalmadre.com/the-last-of-us-a-feminist-perspective/[/url]

[Gotthammer]

Doesn't mean that they can't be angry about inequality. And if you look at my blog it's almost all vintage fashion, animes and mangos, you'd have to dig pretty deep to find anything about me and then it's only vague - would not explicitly qualifying that I'm affected by an issue negate any point I make? Like one girl I follow is basically a giant weeb who would post some feminist anti-racism stuff but then one day she went "well I need to ask for donations as I live in a gang riddled area, I've got native heritage which I embrace and now my super racist and abusive dad is trying to sell the house my mum and I live in and I'm probably going to be on the streets sinc ethe only jobs I can get are at night and if I go out I'm likely to be killed." Had no idea about that since she didn't detail her personal life. Didn't make any of the things she posted before then suddenly become more true or harder to dismiss.

Also the labelling of people as "SJWs" is dangerous as it's easy to other someone with problems as a SJW but break it down and say it like this "I am dismissing people angry about racism, sexism, homophobia and the oppression of other minorities". Most of these people are still high school students or college students and they are angry over a world they see as inherently unfair.
And as EG said, it's a community with an "overrepresentation" of minorities. Like I got a surprise when I found out someone I follow was straight. It's like the idea of "you can't make the whole cast gay!" for a show or fic. You can because gay people tend to stick together for protection and because of a mutual understanding. Really going on tumblr is like a public window into how minority groups talk about their lives and the things that affect them.

[YorkNecromancer]

It's like the idea of "you can't make the whole cast gay!" for a show or fic. You can because gay people tend to stick together for protection and because of a mutual understanding. Really going on tumblr is like a public window into how minority groups talk about their lives and the things that affect them.

It doesn't even need this justification, frankly. The justification is simple and it goes like this:

It's fiction.

F***ing deal with it.

It's like when Merlin was on TV and people complained that Guinevere was black. I was like, THERE ARE DRAGONS! HUGE FIRE-BREATHING F***ING DRAGONS! AND TROLLS! AND PIXES! AND SCORPIONS!

NOT TO MENTION, THE MAIN CHARACTER IS MOTHERF***ING MERLIN!!!

And somehow Guinevere's race is the thing you pick on as 'unrealistic'?! The idea that a castng choice made so little black girls could watch the fantasy series about MOTHERF***ING DRAGONS WHICH ARE VOICED BY JOHN HURT AND ARE AWESOME and feel included, that was a bad choice?! Because it's 'unrealistic'?!

That, my friends, is what we call a failure of the imagination.

[eldargal]

Yup, especially when we know that in Roman times there were tens of thousands of people of African descent in Britain and those people didn't just up and leave. Documentary evidence is lacking but there were tens of thousands of black English in the 15th and 16th centuries which are documented and a link between the two is not impossible. One of the Kings of Scotland was also probably black. So not only is a black Guenevere not an issue in a fantasy show it isn't even historically inaccurate really. She could have been black, the issue is whether you use historical evidence as an excuse for diversity or as an excuse not to include it. Which you pick says a lot about your character.

[YorkNecromancer]

IIRC about a year ago, they discovered that one of the Roman administrators of my home town and his wife were both black and of African descent. Still Romans, because that was how the Empire worked.

I seem to recall the idea of racism itself as we understand it today was largely a product of the slavery business, where it was necessary to dehumanise those poor Africans who had been enslaved because otherwise we would have had to admit that slavery was a monstrous, monstrous evil. Up until that point, I seem to recall black people had largely been regarded as *shock* human beings.

I do know that Daniel Conn, one of the first police officers in the UK, back in the 1700's was both black and gay. And this was when the police force was made up of four men, of whom one was blind, and another lame. His ethnicity was deemed utterly irrelevant in his selection as an officer.