Look, a journal!

Okay, so, as you may or may not know, I've been volunteering as a medic at Occupy Boston a few days a week for the past 2-3 weeks. I will state up-front that I agree with the movement's goals, I feel it's important, and supporting it by volunteering is something I would very much like to continue doing. I also am pretty inarticulate and bad at arguing to support my views. I don't really like getting into debates because it always ends with me sort of waving my arms ineffectually and going "ARGH I haven't been saying what I mean to say, I don't know how I can get this across, I feel really dumb and am probably wrong anyway!". If you want to respond with "here is a list of reasons why the Occupy movement is ill-advised and stupid" or anything along those lines, you certainly can do that and I won't flip out or ~judge you~ or stop being friends with you. I just also probably won't respond.

I will also state that in the following post I am talking only about Occupy Boston, because that's the only branch of the movement that I have any firsthand experience with. For all the rest, I just know what I've gotten from blogs and news media, and I don't have anything really unique to say.

That being said! There are a few aspects of the... atmosphere, I guess, at Occupy Boston that really get to me, and I am frustrated, so now I am going to vent.

( At length. )

... and if anyone bothered reading all that, they're probably wondering why I still go down there at all. There are certainly things I like about Occupy Boston! I just... don't particularly need an outlet to express those things. Whereas I do need an outlet to complain about things that are minor and selfish (like smoking) or things that are big issues that I would have no idea how to broach within Occupy Boston itself (like the unwillingness to exclude anyone from anything). So that's where this comes from.

I like the TVTropes wiki. I really do. Some of the shine has worn off since I first discovered it, and I can go weeks at a time without touching it these days, but I can still spend hours wandering through it when I'm there. I find the categorization to be very helpful in talking about fiction, at least when you're talking to someone else who gets it (or are having the conversation online and can link the page or pages in question). Besides, the way things do and don't fit into existing patterns is one of my major interests when it comes to literature(/narratives in general), so the whole idea appeals to that part of me.

However!

Every now and then I am reminded that it is full of white dudes, particularly middle-class heterosexual nerdy-Nice-Guy white dudes, who are quick to go "omg PC police!" at any discussion of problematic trends in fiction (all the while complaining about double standards and discrimination against themselves)*. For example! I think my favorite comment is the one where the guy is like "well, you should write what you know, and you know your own race better than any other race, so it totally makes sense that no one would want to go to the trouble of writing a race they know less about!" (Probably half the reason that stands out to me is because I hate the "write what you know" adage to begin with, but that is only a fraction of the fail in that comment.) Also: Yes, Avatar takes place in a fantasy world where there's (technically) no Asia (so why should they be Asian?). Guess what, there's no fucking Europe either, so why should they be white?

And that discussion also links to this one, which only makes things better!

Really, there is one big problem with this whole "but anyone can accuse a work of sexism/racism/homophobia/etc. for having a female/black/gay/etc. character who dies/isn't the hero/whatever!", and I can't believe no one brought it up:

It isn't about the individual works. You could take any given work and explain why, in that particular case, it completely made sense and was not a sign of prejudice that the black guy died first, or the gay guy (or lady) was a villain, or there was only one woman in the movie (and she was mostly there for eye candy)**. If you looked at that work in a vacuum you could even, in many cases, be right. But these works don't exist in a vacuum. They exist as part of a long line of movies and TV shows and books and video games involving dead black dudes and evil gay guys (or ladies) and token chicks who don't do much. And these characters are disproportionate to the number of black, gay, and/or female characters there in fact are. No, I haven't done a survey, but you don't really have to in order to see that the majority of protagonists in mainstream stuff are straight white dudes.

And yes, there are straight white dudes who die, and straight white dudes who are villains, and even useless token straight white dudes (... well, I'm not sure there's in fact more than one, but there's at least Sean Bean in the Silent Hill movie, or so fandom_wank tells me). But there are huge numbers of straight white male characters in general, so the proportions aren't that bad. For every one that's crazy or evil or dead, there's another that's a hero and survives — probably even on the same show! Not so much for the minority characters. "But they're minorities!" you say. "It would be unrealistic to have more than one of them on this show!" Which, yes, some communities are very homogeneous, but in most cases minorities are not quite as minor as you think, and anyway probably no one is going to go "There are three Hispanic people out of ten characters on this show, yet the total population of Hispanic people in the US is only 15%! Clearly you have not done your research, sir! My suspension of disbelief is ruined!" Also you have no excuse re: women, because they only make up, what, over 50% of the population? (Also also, most of the stuff I read/watch/play isn't taking place in modern-day America anyhow, so there's no reason why the demographics would have to be the same on Space Colony Alpha, but that doesn't hold for all genres. Still.)

The point is this: If I talk about trends like this, I am not accusing any individual show of being sexist/racist/homophobic, nor am I saying that it is bad for any particular minority character to be anything less than a paragon of virtue and ass-kicking and... not dying. And while I can't speak for everyone, I think this is also true of the majority of people who complain about these things. A work can involve only one (e.g.) queer character and have them die and not, when looked at individually, be (e.g.) a homophobic show***. This also does not mean that the writer of the show is being accused of being actively (e.g.) homophobic. It's just that when you take all these works into consideration, a pattern starts to emerge, and it is not a pattern that I like very much. That's all.

Sorry for the rant, but if I didn't do it here I'd do it there, and I prefer to get my wanking done in private.

(* I am not saying everyone on TVTropes is like this, or even the majority — or else we wouldn't even have the tropes that point out the problematic trends in the first place. But it's not just one or two noisy people either.)

(** I'm using race, gender, and sexuality here as tropes relating to those seem to be the only ones that my good friends at TVTropes are taking issue with; I don't mean to imply that these are the only groups that are underrepresented or badly represented in fiction.)

(*** Then again, it might be — not saying that shows/books/movies/games like this can't be problematic in their own right.)