You can sum it up with one sentiment: "I know you are but what am I"
The longer translation is:
I'm not the one obsessed with gay and trans people and keeping them out of literature you're the one obsessed with putting them in and if you would just be un-obsessed like I'm not at all obsessed, then none of us would be obsessed because there would only be straight people in the books and movies.
If these woke writers would just understand that their entire audience is entirely straight and only wants to hear about straight things then we wouldn't have to have this conversation.
If these woke writers would just understand that their entire audience is entirely straight and only wants to hear about straight things then we wouldn't have to have this conversation.
This is a commonly overlooked component of their grievance. They think conservative chuds are the "core audience" or "real fans" of an IP. It's part of their "silent majority" delusion where they believe they're the default.
I see this most egregiously in the Warhammer 40k community, where the reactionary element of the fandom are a loud minority who genuinely believe 90%+ of the community is just like them. They have a conniption fit every time a character is shown or described as anything other than a straight, white, male and their rhetoric turns to "why would Games Workshop hate their fans so???" They fundamentally cannot puzzle out the company has not crashed and burned, and diversity representation is only growing, because there are more people in the community, than them, who are happy with such things or simply do not care.
Will Warhammer 40K is very appealing the masculine modern fantasy. Real men with real guns fighting real wars forever because rah.
I've never liked the grim dark for grim dark's sake fantasy worlds. It has always wreaked of some corner case of quote real masculinity quote. Not just Warhammer 40K but the entire subgenre.
This is also why it's terrible to try to play D&D or other role-playing games when one of the characters wants to be "the loner" . The dark and brooding character that's truly the main character even if no one else knows they're really the main character.
t's actually why I never had trouble understanding the concept of toxic masculinity. I watched it Express itself in statistics on a character sheet or measure the little distances between the dolls far too many times since I started playing these games in 1977.
And Lord save us from the anime cat girl characters "that only a true man can dominate" being played by a man child named Francis who can only dominate a cat girl by controlling her character sheet,
So with those as your gatekeepers and your loudest and largest paying demographic it's easy to overlook the tens of dozens of other demographics that cumulative reform the actual market.
Turns out there is no core demographic if your game doesn't blow donkey balls.
This is also why it's terrible to try to play D&D or other role-playing games when one of the characters wants to be "the loner" . The dark and brooding character that's truly the main character even if no one else knows they're really the main character.
Hahahaha you just brought up some memories of when I was DM for my gaming group back in the day. Thanks for the snort-laugh!
The other killer trope was that we had one guy who would wander in and out of our group who would join the game and then refuse to play the main conceit of the campaign.
For instance we play a campaign where the main characters find themselves drawn to each other from across the globe and this guy, this terrible player dude, bringing the entire time, talks about how he's not going. Like he wants to have an entire separate plot line where he was the smart one who didn't go or whatever.
I never understood why it kept letting that guy come back into any games. He just thought it was the cleverest possible thing to subvert the game.
You could be playing a dragon slayer campaign and his character just doesn't believe in dragons or something.
I was lucky not to have railroaders like that. If someone tried to go "off script" I'd spank them back on track. See, my leverage was literally no one else in our social milieu could be bothered to DM - they wanted to show off their edgy, brooding, outcast characters xD
It wasn't even about railroading. He was trying to subvert the inciting incident.
Literally the DM says "each of you has woken up with a strange ability or unexpected strength and you feel this urge, this compulsion to converge on St petersburg."
"Well I'm not going to go and you can't make me."
It's like refusing to go to the tavern where everybody is supposed to meet for the first time because my character doesn't drink or something.
DM: This is going to be a mystery and heist taking place on an interstellar Cruise ship. ... GRINNING TOOL: Well I'm going to stay at home because my character hates cruise ships and vacationing.
There was no railroad in the campaign, he was literally trying to fort the framing device and demanding that we keep cutting away to his character puttering around the house or whatever.
You and me both. Like I said I had no idea why he kept getting invited back. He was a nice enough guy but he just grinned the entire time he was trying to submarine the game. I wasn't the person in charge of the group so it wasn't like I had the ability to veto his presence.
Never near half, thankfully, haha but I did meet a few with cookie cutter character types; trench coats, shades at night, names like "Katana", mysterious dark past and no friends lol. It was the very early 00s, as well, so everything had to be edgy.
The Matrix was still wildly popular then. I wanted a trenchcoat so bad but my grandparents were like, "them columbine shooters wore those things. You're not getting one."
I'm glad I didn't because stoner, skater, punk hair, and an unbuttoned button-up and wife beater tank top combo made me popular... Lol
The message is “If you write queer characters you’re the true bigot, because you are incapable of anything else.” It’s just mindless stupidity, insisting that anything but stories about white men getting women is bad.
Might get me some hate here, but I could now stand Ender’s Game. It’s just an edgy, self indulgent/wish fulfillment fantasy. If Orson Scott had grown up in the 90s, I guarantee he would have had a Shadow the Hedgehog OC.
Yeah, as soon as his real face started showing I couldn’t read any more of his books.
I do have my originally bought copy of Enders Game still from 25+ years ago because it was so impactful for me.
LGBTQ characters are often written two dimensionally because the writers mistakenly believe that a character's queerness is inherently compelling enough to make up for shortcomings elsewhere in their characterisation. Audiences consequently dislike these characters and push back, not out of bigotry but out of distaste for the poor writing of these characters. Authors of these characters lack empathy because they are unable to empathize with audiences that push back on these characters. These authors fail to understand the failures of their character writing and instead place the blame on social forces like racism, sexism and transphobia.
I mostly disagree with this take, I am simply trying to clarify what I believe OOP was trying to convey. The only part I partially agree with is the first sentence, but that is typically in the case of straight/cis/white/male authors writing queer/trans/POC/female characters and failing due to a lack of understanding in regards to the characters they're writing. It's also something that you see from many amateur writers but that's simply because their writing has not developed yet. Neither case is the type of character the bigots usually point to though.
It's definitely interesting to flip it around and ask why, then, isn't the pushback on flat straight characters focused on their straightness?
Imagine a bad Uncharted game came out and this version of Nathan Drake was flat and uncompelling. Then critics came out of the woodworks claiming that if the writers/developers had only not assumed his straightness would be so compelling, they could have written him as a more multidimensional character.
Edit: Also, they're usually complaining before the game even comes out, so before the writing is even available.
Not to give the post any benefit of the doubt, but I do think straight characters who's whole personality revolves around flirting or pursuing the opposite sex are generally not well received?
I honestly can't think of one off the top of my head? The only ones that come to mind are Stirling Archer and Barny Stinson but both characters were pretty well received at the peak of their series' popularity
I wouldn't exactly call one of the most iconic characters in fiction and one of the longest running film franchises "not well received". Although there's a significant and vocal minority of people that detract the character and his writing for the overt misogyny (and at times racism) of the character and his stories, he is still well received by wide audiences and admired/emulated by many men today.
I agree this is what they think they mean, but the argument falls apart when they ignore that writing is just generally bad now across the board and hyper focus on just the ones with women or LGBTQ+ etc.
Two dimensional characters who look like (an idealized version of) me make it easy to insert myself into their lack of characterization. Two dimensional characters that look like people who I don't like are just badly written, why would I ever want to imagine myself in their position?
It reminds me of how people have explained the popularity of Donald Trump's word salad. It is acceptable that he isn't saying anything because he says just enough to let his adherents insert their own ideas and opinions in the gaps
Writing was always mostly bad across the board, as well as music, plays, paintings, etc etc etc. This isn't new. That there is so much of it available instantly online is the only part that is new(ish).
Most people who claim to be authors/screenwriters/etc don't have the skills to write three dimensional characters, of any stripe, including their own demographic. Empathy or lack thereof cannot be assumed, because they don't have the skills to write themselves out of a prison made of wet toilet paper.
This is a huge part of why there are so many threads on r/fantasy and r/scifi (and r/metalcore and r/flashlights and r/ergomechkeyboards) asking for recommendations. This is putting aside everything to do with OOP's nonsensical statement - 90% of everything is garbage, most people would like to avoid the garbage, and some people come to reddit to look for ways to avoid that garbage. OOP might even have a legitimate complaint about whatever he was reading - without knowing the source material, it's very possible he was reading something with two dimensional characters or other bad writing, and that he has foolishly misplaced the blame for the poor writing and characterization.
That said, OOP's first mistaken assumption is that all writers want to write for mass audiences. There have been an increasing number of writers that are writing for their fans, or people like them, or some other particular group. I don't see it as a different thing when a writer targets a YA audience, or white women, vs when a writer targets gay men, or whatever.
While it would do all of us some good to read stories that aren't written for us, and attempt to empathize with the characters and/or story, a lot of e.g. gay/trans/lesbian authors (among others, but those are who the OOP was talking about) aren't interested in courting the broader public.
writing is just generally bad now across the board
This is probably just survivorship bias. You don't remember the garbage of yesteryear. It remains to be seen what works of today will be regarded as good 10, 20, 50 years hence.
I get what you mean, but I would say the standard of writing is generally lower in mass media even if there are still amazing shows and amazing writing on display.
Everything has become samey and some very bad writers (Abrams, Lindelof, Goyer) have all failed upwards and influenced the writing of those that came after in a way that is not good imo.
This is definitely survivorship bias! If you can find a secondhand bookstore, go in and look for older paperbacks written by authors you've never heard of. See how bad their writing is. See how many of them wrote multiple books.
Now, copy editing has become much worse lately, because publishers don't want to pay humans to do it.
Not to mention mention we live in an era with so much more media: TV, film, podcast, theater, novels, essays, and so much more. There's so many people doing creative work, and a lot of it will be crap.
I think your spot on in your interpretation. I also tend to think their is merit in the argument, just not as much as the op intended. Some writers make orientation or gender identity central to the character to the detriment of really developing them. Others are bang on and create richer, realer, and more rewarding narratives because of it.
Bad writers use gender and orientation as a crutch. Good writers make compelling characters - with identity taking a back seat to essence.
Yeah, it’s not like tokenism, Flanderization, etc. aren’t things that happen to “woke” characters… it’s just that people like OOP conflate cause and effect. Bad writers write bad characters, not because of whatever trait(s) they’ve assigned those characters, but because they’re bad writers. All that’s changed is that bad writers are now more likely to write characters from backgrounds they and/or the reader aren’t familiar with, which makes it harder to fill in the blanks and try to see depth in the character.
Honestly, it's not even just straight writers that fail to write compelling diverse characters. HUMANS fail to write diverse characters, in the majority. And often even if a character IS compelling to start...they get flanderized almost immediately.
My best example is Captain Jack Harkness on Doctor Who/Torchwood. He's initially created as "Omni-sexual". This was pivoted almost immediately into 99.9% gay male relationships exclusively. That entire series was almost exclusively "ok..but the twist is..they're gay in this episode."
Doctor Who in particular has had this issue multiple times even.
"Hi, I'm the Doctor's companion Bill. I'm gay!" Was practically a verbatim quote.
Yes, they lack empathy, because they can't understand what gamers enjoy, which is exclusively big titty anime girls. See, they're so blinded by their social issues, they can't see that if they go woke they go broke because I won't buy it. In conclusion, they're lacking empathy for other people, because they're thinking of people other than me.
They're saying that writers make a person's sexuality their identity, and that they find that makes for 1-dimensional characters - a person is more than their sexuality, and we should be interested in a character for those reasons, and not their sexuality. They're also saying that when writers do that, because they are displaying a shallow view of that character, it's not empathetic to that sexuality.
I tend to disagree, I think they are probably stopping looking at character development once they see the characters sexuality in a way that they do not do when the character is hetero. That second bit is just trying to justify that?
It means “I stopped paying attention and started screaming the second I found out that a character was LGBTQ, so obviously it is their only character trait.”
They hyperfocus on that one aspect, then claim the character has no other aspects of note.
This is a more succinct way to say what my comment did. Well put. Token characters absolutely are a thing, but these people don't seem to think a non white man can ever not be a token.
OOP is basically saying "I don't see color" but making it about queer people.
They get disinterested when stories have queer characters, but they are saying that is happening because the writers that address queerness don't have anything worthwhile to say. Regardless of the quality of the writing, it will break OOPs engagement because they will view it as a debate and get defensive rather than hearing what the writer is addressing through their queer characters. Basically he is saying you can have queer characters but don't have them talk about being queer in meaningful ways or ways that challenge the traditional worldview.
And that is what a Token character actually is. One who is there to show that they are cool actually with their place in society. They are seen but not heard when it comes to important things and they validate the main characters.
I think they are trying to say that writers think lgbt makes characters compelling and add nothing else of value to actually make them compelling and then are mad when people don't like LGBT characters.
I think sometimes something akin to this does happen, but more often than not, guys like this cry about LGBT characters (or minorities) existing before they have a chance to even find out if the characters are good or not because they see everything through the lens of a culture war.
If it was actually about character, they'd critique that instead of caring about their sexuality or gender identity.
They're saying that gay and trans characters are put in stories because writers think that simply being gay or trans is interesting. Gay and trans characters aren't interesting because being a complex, interesting character is only possible if the person is a straight, cis, White guy. Writers think they're being inclusive for writing about people other than straight, cis, White guys but actually they're being discriminatory because they're not thinking about all them straight, cis White guys who need more representation in culture because they're the only ones who buy novels/movies/video games.
they're basically just describing conservatives being conservative, and claiming that all the horrible lib game developers who have the temerity to write stories that include a black woman or a gay man approach the world in the same way that... all... conservatives... do.
to be clear: the notion that one can write a gay character or a black woman into a work FOR the pure purpose of having a gay man or a black woman in a work is real, diversity for diversity's sake is real, and it IS bad - but it's a STRETCH to say that this is all, or even MOST works that feature these characters. But, the right-wing antipathy towards ANY inclusion at all is definitely guilty of overstating this problem - to the extent that you'll find them raging at even historical dramas that TELL these stories that ACTUALLY FUCKING HAPPENED.
Like, there is credible evidence that Alexander the Great had homosexual proclivities, which weren't even that uncommon in Ancient Greece at the time, but that conflicts with their fetishized, macho masculine rendition of Western history, so they rage at it. There's credible evidence that Moe Berg was bisexual. It's a documented historical fucking fact that Katherine Johnson did officer work at NASA during the Apollo program in the 1960s, and these idiots rage at all of these things, which are rooted in historical evidence, not some writer's whims.
If they can't abide that, their "oh i just object to diversity for diversity's sake" "argument" falls apart. They don't object to "diversity for diversity's sake", they object to diversity. They want straight white men to be the main character, and anyone who doesn't meet that rigid, narrow identity must work doubly or triply as hard to get the gig or to belong - and even then, their honest identity will either be overwritten (the "gay" part of a gay man will be ignored and unmentioned) or subordinated ("yeah, she's black, but one of the good ones").
this is, I should add, conservative 101. they're very good at doing evil with some pizzazz. those hugo boss uniforms are sharp, those eagles look nice on buildings and hats - but they're pretty bad at art that actually SPEAKS to people's souls.
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u/DarthArtero 6d ago
I read that three times and I still have no idea what they're trying to say.
Are they saying that writers who use LGBTQ+ characters lack empathy? That's the part I can't wrap my brain around.
The same writers also actively refuse to understand racist transphobic incel chuds??