I cant believe in the Year of our Lord 2016 someone is actually panning Suicide Squad for hiring a Japanese woman to play a Japanese character.
What?
fyi
It sounds like that tweet is criticizing the stereotyping of the Japanese and Latino characters, not the fact that the actors are actually Japanese and Latino.
Yeah, the problem with that is the tweet or Tweeter-in-question is being either completely disingenuous or contributing to the very same stigma he claims to be criticizing.
1) Suicide Squad is a comic book, and in the realm of comic books, virtually everyone is a stereotype. That’s not a get-out-of-jail-free card, but it is a reality. The only comic book characters the public isn’t seeing as a stereotype are the people they’ve allowed themselves to learn enough about to see them as an embodiment of the human condition or a specific human failing/trait. (That’s why comic book movies shouldn’t be treated as just mindless entertainment.)
2) I knew of no one (DC fan or casual filmgoer) going into Suicide Squad thinking “This is the guy who’s the gang member.” No, they went into Suicide Squad thinking “This is the guy who can breathe fire from this body and control fire with his hands.” The Tweeter-in-question has reduced the character into being nothing more than a gang member because of his ethnicity. If he bothered to watch the film (or read the comic), he would learn that the character’s Aztec/indigenous ancestry enables him to have this ability, and not all heroes or anti-heroes start out on the straight and narrow. Two important elements that give El Diablo far greater depth and respect than someone simply labeled as a “gang member.” It’s the Tweeter who contributes to perpetuating this stereotype far more than the film or comic book did.
3) I think we can all recognize the need for more diverse roles in Hollywood for people of Asian and Hispanic descent, but that doesn’t mean that tales revolving around modern cultural mainstays don’t deserve to ever be made. How often in the last 10 years has Hollywood even made a film involving a samurai warrior? And now how many of those samurai warriors were women? The character of Katana is a DC favorite. She shouldn’t cease to exist or not be included in this movie because someone who claims to care about diversity in film has reduced her to a stereotype, instead of seeing her as a beloved complex character of the DC universe that is reflection of a cultural invention steeped in mystery and reverence.
If I thought for 4 seconds the Tweeter-in-question was actually genuine in their criticism, maybe I’d applaud their statement. But I know this is something that no one who actually knows/cares/loves comic books would utter. That or it’s someone who stans for Marvel’s cinematic universe and they’re deliberately throwing shade on a film they would like to see fail.
The part about that Tweet that really made me laugh was the fact that Adam Beach who plays Slipknot is in fact Canadian. I don’t recall him doing anything with maple syrup though.
Seriously, people give Tumblr a lot of shit for having users that are about being politically correct, but they miss a lot of sweet stuff that needs to be said. Bravo to all of you.
#I see this happen quite a lot #it always feels like people are projecting their own stuff out in their snappy criticisms #or worse taking their own racist/sexist attitudes and blaming it on some writer #when someone jumps in with a ‘look at this black character she’s so arrogant and troubled’ #when the character ISN’T #or even ‘look at this female character she’s just a sexy male fantasy’ #and it’s like…
I am all for poc being cast in roles that highlight their cultural history and struggles
But can we also campaign for giving poc roles that are about an average person with average problems????? Roles that are given to white people by default…….
A black girl in a romance movie where the greatest obstacle isn’t her race and the greatest reward isn’t that she ends up with the white dude…….
A romantic comedy where all the poc characters aren’t stereotyped by what Hollywood classifies as their culture…..
A coming of age story starring a diverse group of children instead of a token (stereotyped) minority character…..
Can we make movies that don’t make the family dynamics in black or latinx culture dramatic or toxic?????
Can we have more Muslim representation in general????????
Can we show non-christian religions as more than oppressive?????
Can we give poc more roles than the ones that were “written for them”?????
Can we make movies showing the true diversity of society rather than trying to convince ppl that poc are just sprinkles in a white world ????????
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.)
The Mistress completely owns her appearance. She delights in being a woman. Being suddenly female isn’t a source of shame or discomfort or even awkwardness for her, it’s an opportunity to completely rock a new style and have a whole lot of fun with it.
Missy presents as female, dresses in girly-girl women’s clothes, insists on being adressed as a Time Lady and having a lady’s name. She enjoys make-up, cute bracelets, pretty nailpolish, she’s even mounted her TCE on the end of the world’s cutest little umbrella. She freely uses a sweet little diminutive for her own name. She loves tea parties and dancing and she’s so completely bouncy and hilarious and confident and in charge.
And let me tell you — I have never in my life seen a story in which that has happened in any other fandom. Every transformation story or body-switch story I’ve come across so far (and that’s quite a lot, it’s something I definitely have A Thing for) has this obligatory plot point where the newly female character feels all fragile and weak and uncomfortable with their new body. (Obviously — a person’s gender and sex mismatching is hardly fun in real life, and it’s good when it’s represented as realistically uncomfortable in fiction.) But Time Lords and Time Ladies are from a race where transformations are biologically built-in and where their gender, if any, can switch right along with their sex. They can feel perfectly happy about a transformation of this kind — allowing for a revolutionary way of storytelling in which a previously male character is now female and completely fine with it. You know what that is? It’s downright inspiring, it’s intensely empowering. To see someone become female and not feel like it in any way diminishes their character. To see someone having a female body and, despite the current discourse in fiction, feeling one hundred per cent comfortable in their own new skin.
This, this sort of thing, is exactly what science-fiction is for. To present situations that are impossible in real life, and to show them as something inspiring. Now, I’m not saying the Mistress is a good role model — I mean, she’s an evil megalomaniac and all — but do I love the way she’s written? Hell yes. I love it more than I can possible put into words.
“When I was young, my dad always let me listen to comedy albums. I always knew about comedy, I always loved comedy.The day that I saw Whoopi Goldberg on television, I cried so hard, because I kept looking at my daddy going, ‘Oh my god. there’s somebody on TV that looks like me! She looks like me! Yay! I can be on TV! I can be on TV! I can do it! Look at her look at her! she looks just like me.‘”
And she’s saying this to the child who saw Nichelle Nichols on Star Trek and ran screaming through the house, “There’s a black lady in tv and she’s not a maid!”
Whenever I hear that old chestnut about “lol superwholock and its queerbaiting” I always want to ask “…have you actually watched Doctor Who?” and the answer is usually no, and that makes me sad, that everyone thinks it’s a homophobic mess, because Russell T Davies.
Like, I have my issues with Russell T Davies (oh boy, do I have my issues) but back in 2005 he did something huge with Doctor Who, which was use it to – being gay himself – completely and utterly normalize queer relationships on British TV. And he did it really well and he did it really loudly, to the extent that you had homophobes both online and in the media complaining about his ‘gay agenda’ on pretty much a weekly basis. By the time the Doctor and Jack kissed in The Parting of the Ways, it was sort of cemented that Yes, Gay and Bi People Had A Place In Doctor Who Now. (Doctor Who has actually had a “gay following” since at least the 80s, but it really seems to be all but forgotten these days, although maybe not in the UK?)
And I know that people are right at this moment gearing up to type “That all went away with Moffat’s era, though” but it…mostly didn’t? Madame Vastra and Jenny were introduced and ended up a loving lesbian couple who faced down monsters constantly and yet remained alive. Clara and River both made allusions to relationships with women that revealed them to be bisexual. (Even though the show still hasn’t ever said the word, sigh.) Don’t get me wrong, this all sure as hell wasn’t/isn’t perfect – the T is still mostly missing from the LGBT representation the show has and that’s just for starters – but it was such a big, awesome deal at the time, it’s still making waves now even.
Essentially, it just seems a real shame that all the things Russell T Davies did for Doctor Who, and for questioning kids have just been forgotten, smushed together with a couple of other shows and completely dismissed. Because he really fought hard for it. Remember that lesbian adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream that everyone rightly adored when it aired on the BBC? That wouldn’t have happened without Davis first setting the groundwork with Doctor Who.
See I barely remembered the original movie, but when Brent Spiner showed up I was all ‘Oh I remember him!’ Then there was his partner and I didn’t remember him at all and it onnnnnly twigged for me at the end when they were holding hands that yes, they were actually meant to be in a relationship and it wasn’t some queerbaiting thing
…..and then the poor guy dies like five seconds later. (The sheer out-of-nowhere-ness of his death wouldn’t have been out of place in a parody, in all honesty.) So….ur….on the one hand, Roland Emmerich is gay and he considers it a step forward I guess? I don’t know if anyone else will though.
Turns out the Guardian had some thoughts on the subject too (and they also mentioned the uh, shipping potential of Dorky Guy and Warlord Guy). So did other websites I’m not familiar with. I think, as good as it is to have one of the franchise’s most memorable characters turn out to be gay (his sexuality was never mentioned in the original, right?) it’s not really executed well.
The story depicted a human astronaut, a representative of the Galactic Republic, visiting the planet Cybrinia inhabited by robots. He finds the robots divided into functionally identical orange and blue races, one of which has fewer rights and privileges than the other. The astronaut decides that due to the robots’ bigotry, the Galactic Republic should not admit the planet. In the final panel, he removes his helmet, revealing himself to be a black man.
Apparently the Comics Code Authority tried to prevent the author from making the main character black.
Boy did they! It took the writer (and the company) threatening the CCA with a lawsuit and telling the guy to fuck off (literally) to get this thing printed:
Comic Historian Digby Diehl recounted in Tales from the Crypt: The Official Archives:
This really made ‘em go bananas in the Code czar’s office. ‘Judge Murphy was off his nut. He was really out to get us’, recalls [EC editor] Feldstein. ‘I went in there with this story and Murphy says, “It can’t be a Black man”. But … but that’s the whole point of the story!’ Feldstein sputtered. When Murphy continued to insist that the Black man had to go, Feldstein put it on the line. ‘Listen’, he told Murphy, ‘you’ve been riding us and making it impossible to put out anything at all because you guys just want us out of business’. [Feldstein] reported the results of his audience with the czar to Gaines, who was furious [and] immediately picked up the phone and called Murphy. ‘This is ridiculous!’ he bellowed. ‘I’m going to call a press conference on this. You have no grounds, no basis, to do this. I’ll sue you’. Murphy made what he surely thought was a gracious concession. ‘All right. Just take off the beads of sweat’. At that, Gaines and Feldstein both went ballistic. ‘Fuck you!’ they shouted into the telephone in unison. Murphy hung up on them, but the story ran in its original form.[18]
This is ao great! You nearly never get a dark skinned girl portraying a daughter of an interracial couple, hell black couples either. Omg, i hope everyone supports this production.
