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.
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.
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.
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u/Bake_My_Beans 6d ago
Translation:
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.