this post was submitted on 28 May 2025
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omg they made lemmy political
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The only time I find “wokeness” to be an issue is when I’m watching a historical drama or a show based in the far past, yet a black character or gay character or a woman is looked at as an equal and treated as such by everyone. In that sense you’re using wokeness to erase the prejudice of the past and act like everyone has always been diverse and acceptant of it.
Wokeness by itself has never been an issue for me but the people who believe it's profitable to "be woke" often miss the point. I don't want a black character in place of an established white character. I want new stories that have that diversity from the foundation. I don't want things to be replaced, I want them to be phased out gradually by the introduction of more "woke" things seperated from current things.
Overcorrecting can be as bad as the problem originally was and in doing so can garner hate from an otherwise neutral party.
Agreed. People love Miles Morales and don't want a black reimagining of Peter Parker.
I get the decision to make Sulu bi in the star trek movies, but the problem was never that sulu wasn't allowed to be queer, but that George Takei wasn't. If anybody in TOS should be made bi it's Spock and Kirk. Sulu was just a straight character played by a gay actor.
Not looking to pick a fight, but imo nothing about TOS was (totally) straight, least of all how Takei played Sulu.
You literally described the opposite of wokeness. To be "woke" is to hold the belief there are systemic injustices in American society, and a need to address them.
Pretending that these injustices didn't (and don't) exist isn't woke.
Exactly, when you try to be “woke” but it’s not genuine, you end up with shit that just makes things worse. Like when you erase one minority by recasting them as a differ minority, or when you add a “woke”character that ends up making the issue worse.
There’s a video I saw recently about a critic taking Snow White apart and there are clear moments in that movie where they tried to be modern and woke but ended up shtting the bed and making the left hate the movie just as much as the right
If you're describing "colourblind casting" then I actually really like that, because it's like peering through a mirror brightly, where our ancestors somehow got it right.
I don't know how to explain it, but there's a right way and a wrong way to do it. Does that make sense?
Is it a period piece or not? The script for Alien was cast with no regards sex or race. It's a good example of what I refer to as Casual Feminism, where the plot has nothing to do with feminism, but normalizes strong female characters. In contrast, Wonder Women does not normalize strong women because she's not normal.
If you're doing a period piece where inequality is well recorded as being the norm, then there would be care taken to accurately representing that. You can have characters who disagree with that norm, but they should be represented as an exception. The Baroque Cycle by Neal Stephenson had a lot of good examples of that. Daniel Waterhouse definitely did not agree with slavery, but was powerless to do anything about it.
It does not.
Well work with me here. Can you imagine a case where it could be used to highlight how things should have been without erasing the experiences of racialized people?
I mean not really? It’s no different than white washing to the third race who had their character taken
Not every show set in the past aims or needs to be historically accurate. Our Flag Means Death, for example, takes some pretty big creative liberties in that regard, but without those liberties you wouldn't have a show.
If historical shows stuck to realism while being inclusive, that would mean a lot more sad, depressing stories that are difficult to watch. And there's absolutely a time and place for those sorts of stories, but practically speaking it's more likely that the show would simply chose not to include those characters at all, or if they did, then few people would watch it. Even marginalized people would often prefer to see a somewhat romanticized version where the character isn't defined by their race, gender, or sexual orientation.
To say it's trying to erase historical prejudices is a very surface level critique. When I see, for example, Watson from Sherlock Holmes reimagined as a woman or a person of color, the idea that the producers are trying to convince the audience that racism/sexism didn't exist at the time wouldn't cross my mind at all and sounds absurd. I don't think anyone's watching it and taking that away. If a show doesn't show people needing to use the bathroom, I understand that it's because of a mutual understanding that the writers don't want to show that and the audience doesn't want to see it, and if a show doesn't want to show racism/sexism, it's from a similar mutual understanding.
There are exceptions, where a show does aim to be (or pass itself off as) historically accurate, and when it's reasonable to expect it to handle those topics, then maybe. The one that comes to mind is Hamilton, which does whitewash certain things but even then I would say that having a diverse cast that doesn't personally experience racism is not the problem.
its just straight up disrespectful to those who had to face those horrors to try hiding it because people today wouldnt like it. people need to be made uncomfortable by the actions of the past or they have no reason to be better in the future
Yeah, that would piss me off too. It's the historical inaccuracy. Other than that, though, it's great that games are trying to be inclusive.
kinda like how everyone got mad at cleopatra being played by jayden.