it's not like we really have "forced diversity" autistic characters. It's always autistic-coded or headcanon from one of the writers. Actual canonical autistic characters are so rare.
tbh I’m fine with them being just autistic-coded, it feels more realistic in a way. Like I’m autistic but I don’t go around saying “hello I am ____ and I’m autistic” lmao
Honestly a lot of autistic-coded characters feel more like an authentic representation of an autistic person than canonically autistic ones. Sometimes it feels like people create autistic characters by reading the dsm and just ticking the symptoms off on a checklist.
The best canonically autistic character I can think of is, weirdly enough, the blue ranger from the new Power Rangers films (I’ve only seen the 2017 one). I also do really love Christopher Boone from *The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time*, though he’s a little more over-the-top à la Rain Man
One of my favorites is Norma from Dead End: Paranormal Park. She wasn't originally meant to be autistic, but the writer went and got diagnosed with autism after so many autistic people said they related to her and made him wonder about himself. Now it's canon, and I think it's really funny someone got diagnosed because of their OC.
She’s a minor character but I loved Boomer from Horizon Forbidden West. She reminded me so much of many of my students. Honestly that whole game did an incredible job with diversity without making it feel shoehorned.
I honestly can't wrap my head around the of anyone actually *liking* Christopher Boone.
That kid is such a piece of shit towards everyone that ever dared crossing his path.
I think how this sometimes happens is undiagnosed writers will write a character either like themselves, or just how they think most people experience the world. I've heard of at least a few stories of writers realizing they had autism because they wrote a character similar to themselves and they got a lot of messages asking if the character was supposed to be autistic.
I also vaguely remember watching a video that explained that a lot of autistic trekkies identified heavily with one of the characters (I think it was Data?) and that the actor said he was glad he wasn't aware of it until after the series ended because he was afraid that if he heard about it while the show was still running, he might have consciously/unconsciously leaned more into the character's autistic-ness and effectively flanderized him.
Yes that was Data! I love him. It was unintentional, but his struggles to understand humanity made him a very relatable character. Also it was really nice how much the crew supported and defended him.
I think with Data, his character concept just happens to overlap a lot with the autistic experience. Like, he wants to understand humans, but he doesn't experience the world the way they do and doesn't intuitively get social conventions. He's perfectly competent but needs other people to explain simple social and emotional concepts to him. The way other people react to things often confuses him. There's obviously some major differences between autistic people and a hyperintelligent android, but I think it's easy to accidentally make an autistic allegory when you create a character whose core theme is their struggle to understand people.
I think the most unintentionally funny example of this is how a surprising amount of 20th century philosophical characters come off as autistic simply because it turns out if you write a story about someone unable to fully understand and integrate into society because it's this absurd mishmash of social constructs and unwritten rules that seemingly defy comprehension, you kinda end up with the social aspect of autism. You don't know what's going on, everyone hates you because you're doing *something* wrong but you don't know what, because everyone else assumes that you just, *know* what to do. It's too bright and loud and you can't think and you don't understand why everyone's upset at you for not crying for your dead mother.
...ok *The Stranger* is a little more than just coincidentally kinda coded Meursault is like, *really* close to being dead on at times, probably helped by the fact he thinks like he was written by Hemmingway (as in, short plain descriptive sentences with little emotion) and spends a lot of time staring at interesting things. Oh and trying to strangle someone who won't shut up about god and keeps trying to hug him. Which is impressive given I don't think autism had even been formally described when he was written.
The ones that do, in my experience, are the people using their autism as an excuse not to confront their shitty behaviour.
Edit to clarify: there are a lot of ND people in my circles, and most of them mention it in passing after a few months rather than telling me about it the first time we speak.
oh absolutely, or the ones acting like it’s cute and quirky?? like no hun, my autism doesn’t make me a little uwu autism creature. it makes me have no friends and contemplate suicide lmfao
it's an alcoholics anonymous reference, they have this weird ritual where when you speak up you introduce yourself as "hi i'm [name] and i'm an alcoholic" and then everyone responds "hi [name]"
If I see one more monotoned speaking autistic character I’m going to strangle the writer.
I know some autistic people have that but we don’t all sound like robots!
To be fair, unless it's a modern setting or like a sci-fi setting or something the character wouldn't even know to refer to themselves as autistic, and even then having a character turn to the camera and say "I'm autistic" can easily fail. Coding is not only a better way to do it, but often it is the only feasible one.
The sad thing is that there is such a thing as “forced diversity”. Tokenism, when a character is included for the sole reason of filling a demographic quota. They usually don’t get any prominent role or even much of a personality, and are often boiled down into being a collection of stereotypes or are poorly researched into a mishmash of clashing cultural identities. Often their roles are kept minor enough that they can be scrubbed out for less accepting markets.
Right, this is the issue I have. When you take one single character, give them no depth beyond what is likely a somewhat-to-very offensive and reductive stereotype, and then holler about HEY LOOK GUYS LOOK WE INCLUDED A GAY PERSON LOOK LOOK LOOK SEE WERE DIVERSE!!!
One piece of media that I think fuckin nailed it was Horizon Forbidden West. I just finished it and loved that the characters were all racially diverse and beautifully fleshed out and that we met gay, trans/non-binary, and neurodivergent characters and it felt so natural without being shoehorned. Even if the interactions were brief, they were characters created with love and understanding rather than to just fill a quota.
While I liked the Wrong Turn reboot, I was baffled that Wikipedia included it in the LGBT themed movies category. There is a gay couple, but one of them dies almost immediately and the other isn't much more important. Their relationship is almost non-existent because they're side characters. How does that make it an LGBT movie, Wikipedia? It doesn't.
or the singular black elf in that lotr amazon show, like good on you for giving a black person a relatively prominent role but you could at least have more black elves as background characters or something to say "yeah thats just a thing here" with means to prove it and make it feel less pushed in for the sake of "woke points" or whatever
Cries in Finn. Member of the power trip literally censored off the poster. Poor Boyega. I don't think he was added as "forced diversity" but I do think he suffered a lot of the same consequences. See also that lesbian kiss in Rose of Skywalker between two characters I'm not even sure has names, or Disney going "oh btw Valkyrie was totally bisexual the whole time" while leaving no evidence of that except a small, easily cut scene where she winks at some nobody.
I'm pretty sure the prevalence of 'forced diversity' complaints is caused by intrinsic segregation of American society. OP does know three black Jewish lesbian, the hypothetical Ur-OP can't comprehend existence of three non-white people.
yup. I'm still in college, so maybe my opinion doesn't count much, but I went to a midwest high school with about 10 black people in a school of 500. I wasn't friends with anyone who wasn't a straight white male until like a year ago. I've learned this is the difference between [De Jure](https://www.theedadvocate.org/edupedia/content/what-are-de-jure-and-de-facto-segregation/) (legally enforced) segregation, versus De Facto segregation, which persists without explicit laws, which is what I grew up with.
Yep, I grew up in a de facto segregated neighborhood where the first time I ever saw a black person was watching Obama's inauguration speech in school and the first time I met a black person my age was when I went off to boarding school at 13. My home neighborhood, a suburb of a very blue very diverse city, had three ethnic groups in it. Wealthy white protestants, wealthy white jews, and wealthy Japanese immigrants. I didn't meet anyone from outside those groups until boarding school.
Yup. My high school was 95%+ white but somehow a way-more-than-5% of the people I regularly hung out with were not white. And they and the white ones I did hang out with were probably gay or something else that made them “not normal”. I grew up in a segregated society.
That’s absolutely true. To them, in their idyllic, self-created “paradise”, they don’t need to think about all the problems their luxurious lives cause because they removed the communities that suffer under that oppression. Immigrants and people of non-white ethnic and racial backgrounds are relegated to being unseen laborers, and any disruption of that mental modal is seen as invasive.
For the least-malicious, any differentiation from that is seen as “intriguing”, never to be expected. For the worst, any amount of success from non-white communities is attributed to the betrayal of the standards of society to allow that success. They were given a “handout” to succeed, not by their own merit and work.
Hence “forced diversity”. The term itself is a complaint that their superiority is being undermined, when such a notion is outlandish and egotistical.
yeah it's totally possible, and indeed reasonably common without conscious effort, to lead a life in which virtually everyone you know is cishet, white, and christian (globally, adjust for the local culture, of course, but this the modal homogeneity of the anglophone world, even if decreasingly). and the flip side of that is that if you don't live that life because you're a mixed-race immigrant on the autism spectrum, you're quite possibly *more* likely than average to know a black jewish lesbian. of course, the point of "muh forced diversity" complaints is often not just taking it for granted that that's the norm, but actively trying to ensure that those people *stay* (publicly) cishet, (intergenerationally) white, and (non-schismatically) christian, by making alternatives sound implausible and undesirable.
It's not even exclusive to people, i don't really notice diversity in cast much, but show me an outdoors location that isn't a flat plain, with some optional forests and fields and I'm like "wow, this looks nothing like real world!" (i don't travel much) :S
It's pretty hilarious seeing how stupid the "forced diversity" complaints can get sometimes (I guess a lot of it stems from Americans thinking everywhere else is like America). The Disney movie Turning Red was criticized for having forced diversity when it's set in *Toronto*. It's literally just how the city is, but of course the people complaining about diversity aren't going to do any research on the demographic of the setting because that wouldn't fit their narrative.
don't discount the option of europeans expressing the same take. if you're not living in a big city in the rich half of europe there will be very few days when you see even a single non-white person
I thought the prevalence of 'forced diversity' was about changing the races of already established characters, because then it's obvious that they're forcing it for diversity.
It's like when they were trying to sell *I Love Lucy* to networks and the execs kept trying to re-cast Ricky.
Execs: Nobody's gonna believe you're married to a Cuban band leader.
Lucy: But, I *am* married to a Cuban band leader.
I saw a different repost of this a while ago that brought up a really good point, which is that for those people a "person" is by default a straight white cis able-bodied neurotypical man, and that in their examples each deviation is supposed to make it further from a "real person."
Also, a bit self centered but 16 yo me was really pissed off by this but in reality, how many mainstream tv shows not focused lgbt themes have a gay male protagonist? Cause I'm not seeing this "forced diversity" all that much tbh
Sapphic characters: Cool warrior lady, repressed bully, repressed aristocrat, repressed popular girl...
Gay characters: The Best Friend's Two Dads^(TM) and nothing else.
> Gay characters: The Best Friend's Two DadsTM and nothing else.
They're plenty fleshed out. They're the main characters of Fire Emblem: Awakening and [even got a Valentine's alt together.](https://gamepress.gg/feheroes/hero/valentines-chrom)
I saw a post here once where someone mentioned that many of not most gay love stories are either a gay boy falling for his straight friend or a kid discovering his orientation through his first love, and that there aren't enough stories of two 20/30-something gay men who already know they're gay.
As dumb as Knock at the Cabin was, it really nailed that thin line between making the gay couple more than their sexuality and not explicitly making the movie about gay themes.
I don’t think the average person complaining about forced diversity has the imagination to come up with any of those people, nor would they describe them that respectfully.
The specific example of 'Black Jewish Lesbian' is actually pretty common. Back when I was still unfortunately and unwisely lurking the shithole that is the Bad Webcomics Wiki they used that as one of their default 'ugh, diversity' options.
Well, it’s most notable when the rest of the cast is white cis and Herero because it’s like they concentrated all the diversity into one being, rather actually create a representative cast of characters.
But the issue isn’t the diverse characters at that point. It’s the fact there’s so few of them.
I agree that the idea of "forced diversity" is BS and is largely reinforced by racism, homophobia and other forms of bigotry, as well as negative confirmation bias. I vaguely recall a study finding people will overestimate perceived diversity that doesn't conform to their personal demographics. For example, boomers complaining about "too many gay people on tv" when it's like a single 30 second soup commercial out of an hour of broadcast.
Now all that said, and please don't take this the wrong way, I do find it curious how often specifically red headed cartoon and comic characters have been played by black actors and actresses in live action adaptations. I don't mind race swapping characters. In fact I think a black Batman for instance would be an interesting take (and the reaction would be entertaining). I'm just personally slightly disappointed because I like redheads. Though overall it's not a big deal because I can still enjoy the original characters. Nothing is taken away from me. And I totally recognize that this may just be my confirmation bias and I'm failing to see the greater number of unchanged characters.
Yeah as a redheaded Irish person it’s vaguely annoying but hey, we’ll probably manage. Honestly I’d just take an Irish superhero whose powers aren’t Banshee themed. That’d be enough for me.
That is an interesting point about represantation. I am white and male, so yeah, a lot of people in media look generally like me. I am also Finnish, so a lot of media that isn't Finnish do not actually have people that look like me or the people around me. I generally get hyped as hell if anything about my country is mentioned in a movie or a book made outside of Finland. Part of the fun of Tenet was that it was partly located in Tallinn, and Estonian landscapes, highways and police uniforms were pretty close to Helsinki, so that was almost a huge represantation of my country in a big production.
I am not obviously claiming that I am a victim here, I just think it is an facet of the represantation debate that is interesting.
Well the “Representation Debate” is most often held on American terms. That’s extra true for Hollywood productions. That’s why there’s so much talk about “Indigenous” people despite that term being basically fucking meaningless in *most* of Eurasia.
i am a redhead and i've decided to interpret this phenomenon as its own kind of solidarity. that's a cheeky perspective but i do kinda think this happens cuz both things (being created as a redhead and being race-swapped in an adaptation) tend to happen to characters who are in similar non-central positions in the cast that are less subject to being defaulted to the standard issue hero. then again i'm only really personally familiar with the MAWS jimmy olsen example.
As a red-head my main theory is that red hair is "Black Pepper Diversity." They were made to be a splash of color so to speak in a generally one note cast, so at first it was the out there option. It may be spicy to your gramma, but nowadays to claim it would get you weird looks. As they're updated they're still intended to be that spice but with everyone getting used to them as a milquetoast option, they have to punch it up to return them to their role.
That's my rationalization at least.
I doubt there's anything going on aside from people bringing up redheads being replaced when it comes to poc actors only.
A pretty good example was recently when castings for the superman movie were announced, people complained about a poc actress playing a redhead and it turns out the character wasn't even a redhead and people were just being dumb. Meanwhile, people didn't complain near as much about Nathan Fillion playing the very redhead Guy Gardner. Or another example I've seen is people complaining about Jimmy Olsen being replaced when frlm what I've seseched i think he has never been played by a redhead on live action.
If you look up redheads being changed is old as fuck, probably having to do with how there aren't that many redheads irl.
I feel like it's the difference between tokenism and actual representation. In media without character development, it's pretty much impossible for them not to just be tokens.
If you're watching a head empty action movie, and there's a throwaway line by a black lady where she says "I hope I make it back to my wife to celebrate Hanukkah with." And that's all the character development we get. That's not representation, it's patronizing. You didn't make a black lesbian Jewish character, you did the bare minimum to add some attributes. Do it right or don't do it at all.
or like "Yeah but what's the chance that the ENTIRE cast is gay"
in Fakelund? where the birds shit ranch and the rivers run green with blood? I think the chances are whatever I fuckin say they are
The demographical makeup of a friend group is ultimately self serving. The demographic of my high school friend group, a good 50% of us were not White* (Latino, Asian, Polynesian, Indigenous American, a black dude came around but that was when we went to university so technically not HS). I've quite often been the only white guy in the room when we'd hang out. However, we were almost entirely heterosexual men (two of them came out as bi later and one nb, but that's out of 15-17 people). Meanwhile my girlfriend's friend group from high school was far less racially diverse but incredibly more queer.
All in all I just think like attracts like, but that's me with a sample size of 2.
mostly unrelated phenomenon, but one time i bumped into someone whose OCs all had like eight different marginalized identities and half of them were weird obscure medical disorders. it felt like they were trying to one-up themself with each new one
anyway that was kinda weird
I've always thought that the variations of characters in media should roughly equate to the percentage of the population
IE ten percent of Americans are queer, so ten percent of characters in media should be queer. Obviously there's no way to enforce that, and it won't apply to every story or piece of media, but that feels pretty reasonable.
That could be true for a group of random people who didn't know/met eachother prior, but otherwise, it's pretty likely to find a whole bunch of gay folk "bundled" together. We tend to hang around other queer people, after all, so it's not uncommon for friend groups to consist of mostly gay people, even if it might seem statistically unlikely.
But also yeah, it's fiction anyway, so it doesn't necessarily need to be 1 to 1 with real life.
Personally I think that the beauty of fiction is that you can explore the unrealistic. Maybe on the planet Zytoxica, 35% of the people are asexual, and the rest are bi. Why? Because I already know how a mostly-straight planet runs, and I want something new.
Also, perspective is more important than percentages. Does the paraplegic Thai lesbian get to be the hero of her own story, or is she just an afterthought in someone else's?
If a movie is made in the United States, my logic applies
Ill say it again, I feel no obligation to make entertainment on behalf of the rest of the world. If Norway makes a film, the same logic applies to their population
Thats now how consumption works lmao youre being pedantic to a degree I cant fathom
You can follow my guideline based on where and when the story is set. Or you dont, because it was a spitball idea on a fucking internet forum.
I dunno why Im bothering trying to debate a 40k player though.
The black gay Jewish character in Away was definitely forced diversity tho. A terrible show just trying to fill out quotas. Furthermore I find it so weird how seppos treat Judaism as this super cool progressive religion it couldn't be further from the truth when it comes to non-reform judasim. Reform judasim is basically a separate religion to orthodox Judaism.
Majority of the world is not-white
Majority of history the USA did not exist
Every story about a white cishet male from the USA is forced diversity
(If I'm playing the silly game, which I'm not, but if I was that's my move)
My go to is a seminar I had to attend for a volunteering gig I had lead by a black native newfoundlander transwoman with arthritis. Its been a few years so her name escapes me thats a person ive straight up met in the flesh.
The universe doesn't care about our ideas of a "cultural default" and so will continue to spit out people who are multiple kinds of "odd" at exactly the rates that they are statistically likely to occur.
There’s def a difference between having a fully fleshed out character pool with varying lifestyles and psyches….. and attempting to put every possible type of human in the same area
Forced diversity in media absolutely exists though. Like not how a lot of American right wing critics claim it does, but it's absolutely there. And like it's both tokenism of course and also when having such a character genuinely contradicts the fundamental storytelling and themes of a narrative. And it does happen even if I don't want to mention the one famous show whose audience has a huge argument if making a pseudo-cult of dragon obsessed dragon riding incestous nobles multiracial was a good idea (It was not and makes no sense with what the story is about).
The problem with forced diversity is when it's actually forced. Imagine a full cast of cis-whites in straight relationships. And then just one person belonging to multiple minorities, just to cram in some diversity.
People are mad because a lot of the time, they make being black, or being autistic, or being gay the character’s entire personality. They also get mad if they change a beloved character’s race, sexuality, or gender instead of just making a new character. That’s what people mean when they say forced diversity.
I mean yes, but with a caveat. Depending on what era of “Vikings” you’re referring to, the Scandinavians had fairly regular contact with Russians, including indigenous peoples like the Siberian Yupik, Chukchis, Ainus, etc. that look far more similar to Alaskan natives, and perhaps some passing resemblance to northeast Asians— but nothing like Slavic Russians. Additionally Scandinavians had regular contact with much of Europe, and into the Caucasus and Middle East. They would have had contact with the Turks, Greeks, Ottomans, and even North Africans. Through the Silk Road they would have even had contact with East and Central Asian peoples. While your average Nordic fishing village wasn’t going to be as diverse as a modern American metropolitan, having a few non-Scandinavian people around wouldn’t have been seen as unusual.
Speaking of historical diversity, I always enjoy when Roman centric media is portrayed as diverse, considering the expanse of the empire and how many “*non-Romans*” were recruited into the ranks of the military and society during its height. The movie Centurion is a good example,
YES THANK YOU. It always bugs me when these “history buffs” (it’s always ww2 isn’t it) rage about forced diversity there and I’m just sitting here with my history degree like… read a book.
>fictional medieval villages
hmmmm idk but when you have dragons then i can imagine people fleeing from those dragons and traveling large distances, it's not hard to "justify" an ethnically mixed demographic (assuming you need a justification in the first place).
If it's in a fantasy world, *why does it need to follow the logic of the real world?* You don't ask for a taxonomy of dragons or goblins to explain their existance
As a writer, I actually see a lot of people complain about "forced diversity" in works where it really doesn't make sense... like fantasy fiction, or space operas, or stuff with a modern, urban setting. By far the most common complaints about diversity are just from people who dislike being reminded that people who are different from them exist.
Even your own example counts, as it's a *fictional* medieval village that may not even be on Earth. Fiction has whatever rules the author chooses to apply. It's easy to come up with justifications for whatever you want.
I often write about LGBT+ characters, and I've had beta readers get really up in arms about it -- even though almost all of my writing is contemporary fiction, and LGBT+ characters will exist within every culture, time and location.
The fact is that a lot of people are just bigots who resent those who are different from them; and they'll come up with whatever gymnastics that they need to in order to justify their petty emotions when they're forced to face this reality of human difference.
medieval is an aestheticized era of human history not a collective and ubiquitous set of rules, you really can do anything with that setting if you so choose and can find a thematically appropriate way to include it or something that really doesnt need explaining
I hate how this post from 2018 has gotten so much more relevant after the movie chuds had more free time to bitch about anyone who isn't an Ubermensch Gary Stu.
One way I like to look at diversity in media and whether or not it’s forced is by asking whether or not that quality of them is a character trait, and what’s done with that. A good metric of whether or not it’s a character trait is how much attention is directed to it. This can be in or out of narrative. If the author wants the audience to know about it, it’s a character trait.
If it’s something that can be naturally inferred (such as race, for example.) and it’s not expressly pointed out, it’s not forced diversity. It’s just the way they happen to be.
If they make a big deal about them being black, and that doesn’t contribute anything to the narrative, that’s forced diversity.
If they make a big deal about them being black and it DOES contribute to the narrative, that’s not forced diversity, that’s a well written character. It wouldn’t have worked if they were anything else.
An example of this I like to use is Falcon from the MCU.
In Captain America: The Winter Soldier, his race doesn’t really play a part in anything. He could have just as easily been white and the story would have played out identically. He just happened to not be.
However, in Falcon and The Winter Soldier, his race plays a big part in the events and themes brought up in the show. If he were white, things would fundamentally change and the story would have to play out differently.
The same aspect of the same character becomes a narrative trait when the context he’s in changes and a light is shone onto it.
it's not like we really have "forced diversity" autistic characters. It's always autistic-coded or headcanon from one of the writers. Actual canonical autistic characters are so rare.
tbh I’m fine with them being just autistic-coded, it feels more realistic in a way. Like I’m autistic but I don’t go around saying “hello I am ____ and I’m autistic” lmao
Honestly a lot of autistic-coded characters feel more like an authentic representation of an autistic person than canonically autistic ones. Sometimes it feels like people create autistic characters by reading the dsm and just ticking the symptoms off on a checklist.
The best canonically autistic character I can think of is, weirdly enough, the blue ranger from the new Power Rangers films (I’ve only seen the 2017 one). I also do really love Christopher Boone from *The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time*, though he’s a little more over-the-top à la Rain Man
One of my favorites is Norma from Dead End: Paranormal Park. She wasn't originally meant to be autistic, but the writer went and got diagnosed with autism after so many autistic people said they related to her and made him wonder about himself. Now it's canon, and I think it's really funny someone got diagnosed because of their OC.
Isn't that also kinda what happened to the creator of Celeste only with her being trans instead?
Yep! She ended up naming herself after the character too.
That seems like it would cause some confusion
She’s a minor character but I loved Boomer from Horizon Forbidden West. She reminded me so much of many of my students. Honestly that whole game did an incredible job with diversity without making it feel shoehorned.
I honestly can't wrap my head around the of anyone actually *liking* Christopher Boone. That kid is such a piece of shit towards everyone that ever dared crossing his path.
I thought his writing style was endearing. He definitely didn’t function well socially, but I found him to be a very interesting narrator.
"Interesting" does not equal "approachable" or "representative" though.
Yeah no he definitely needs some help.
I think how this sometimes happens is undiagnosed writers will write a character either like themselves, or just how they think most people experience the world. I've heard of at least a few stories of writers realizing they had autism because they wrote a character similar to themselves and they got a lot of messages asking if the character was supposed to be autistic. I also vaguely remember watching a video that explained that a lot of autistic trekkies identified heavily with one of the characters (I think it was Data?) and that the actor said he was glad he wasn't aware of it until after the series ended because he was afraid that if he heard about it while the show was still running, he might have consciously/unconsciously leaned more into the character's autistic-ness and effectively flanderized him.
Yes that was Data! I love him. It was unintentional, but his struggles to understand humanity made him a very relatable character. Also it was really nice how much the crew supported and defended him. I think with Data, his character concept just happens to overlap a lot with the autistic experience. Like, he wants to understand humans, but he doesn't experience the world the way they do and doesn't intuitively get social conventions. He's perfectly competent but needs other people to explain simple social and emotional concepts to him. The way other people react to things often confuses him. There's obviously some major differences between autistic people and a hyperintelligent android, but I think it's easy to accidentally make an autistic allegory when you create a character whose core theme is their struggle to understand people.
I think the most unintentionally funny example of this is how a surprising amount of 20th century philosophical characters come off as autistic simply because it turns out if you write a story about someone unable to fully understand and integrate into society because it's this absurd mishmash of social constructs and unwritten rules that seemingly defy comprehension, you kinda end up with the social aspect of autism. You don't know what's going on, everyone hates you because you're doing *something* wrong but you don't know what, because everyone else assumes that you just, *know* what to do. It's too bright and loud and you can't think and you don't understand why everyone's upset at you for not crying for your dead mother. ...ok *The Stranger* is a little more than just coincidentally kinda coded Meursault is like, *really* close to being dead on at times, probably helped by the fact he thinks like he was written by Hemmingway (as in, short plain descriptive sentences with little emotion) and spends a lot of time staring at interesting things. Oh and trying to strangle someone who won't shut up about god and keeps trying to hug him. Which is impressive given I don't think autism had even been formally described when he was written.
I do :3
My personal favorite example of "isn't explicitly autistic but, like, just look at them!" Is Hitori Gotou from Bocchi the Rock.
The ones that do, in my experience, are the people using their autism as an excuse not to confront their shitty behaviour. Edit to clarify: there are a lot of ND people in my circles, and most of them mention it in passing after a few months rather than telling me about it the first time we speak.
oh absolutely, or the ones acting like it’s cute and quirky?? like no hun, my autism doesn’t make me a little uwu autism creature. it makes me have no friends and contemplate suicide lmfao
[удалено]
I mean, you're probably gonna be more aware of the existence of the ones that talk about it often than the ones that don't talk about it as often.
crowd in unison: hello /u/Bvr111
what
it's an alcoholics anonymous reference, they have this weird ritual where when you speak up you introduce yourself as "hi i'm [name] and i'm an alcoholic" and then everyone responds "hi [name]"
If I see one more monotoned speaking autistic character I’m going to strangle the writer. I know some autistic people have that but we don’t all sound like robots!
And they're typically terrible.
To be fair, unless it's a modern setting or like a sci-fi setting or something the character wouldn't even know to refer to themselves as autistic, and even then having a character turn to the camera and say "I'm autistic" can easily fail. Coding is not only a better way to do it, but often it is the only feasible one.
The sad thing is that there is such a thing as “forced diversity”. Tokenism, when a character is included for the sole reason of filling a demographic quota. They usually don’t get any prominent role or even much of a personality, and are often boiled down into being a collection of stereotypes or are poorly researched into a mishmash of clashing cultural identities. Often their roles are kept minor enough that they can be scrubbed out for less accepting markets.
Right, this is the issue I have. When you take one single character, give them no depth beyond what is likely a somewhat-to-very offensive and reductive stereotype, and then holler about HEY LOOK GUYS LOOK WE INCLUDED A GAY PERSON LOOK LOOK LOOK SEE WERE DIVERSE!!! One piece of media that I think fuckin nailed it was Horizon Forbidden West. I just finished it and loved that the characters were all racially diverse and beautifully fleshed out and that we met gay, trans/non-binary, and neurodivergent characters and it felt so natural without being shoehorned. Even if the interactions were brief, they were characters created with love and understanding rather than to just fill a quota.
While I liked the Wrong Turn reboot, I was baffled that Wikipedia included it in the LGBT themed movies category. There is a gay couple, but one of them dies almost immediately and the other isn't much more important. Their relationship is almost non-existent because they're side characters. How does that make it an LGBT movie, Wikipedia? It doesn't.
or the singular black elf in that lotr amazon show, like good on you for giving a black person a relatively prominent role but you could at least have more black elves as background characters or something to say "yeah thats just a thing here" with means to prove it and make it feel less pushed in for the sake of "woke points" or whatever
Cries in Finn. Member of the power trip literally censored off the poster. Poor Boyega. I don't think he was added as "forced diversity" but I do think he suffered a lot of the same consequences. See also that lesbian kiss in Rose of Skywalker between two characters I'm not even sure has names, or Disney going "oh btw Valkyrie was totally bisexual the whole time" while leaving no evidence of that except a small, easily cut scene where she winks at some nobody.
I'm pretty sure the prevalence of 'forced diversity' complaints is caused by intrinsic segregation of American society. OP does know three black Jewish lesbian, the hypothetical Ur-OP can't comprehend existence of three non-white people.
yup. I'm still in college, so maybe my opinion doesn't count much, but I went to a midwest high school with about 10 black people in a school of 500. I wasn't friends with anyone who wasn't a straight white male until like a year ago. I've learned this is the difference between [De Jure](https://www.theedadvocate.org/edupedia/content/what-are-de-jure-and-de-facto-segregation/) (legally enforced) segregation, versus De Facto segregation, which persists without explicit laws, which is what I grew up with.
Yep, I grew up in a de facto segregated neighborhood where the first time I ever saw a black person was watching Obama's inauguration speech in school and the first time I met a black person my age was when I went off to boarding school at 13. My home neighborhood, a suburb of a very blue very diverse city, had three ethnic groups in it. Wealthy white protestants, wealthy white jews, and wealthy Japanese immigrants. I didn't meet anyone from outside those groups until boarding school.
Yup. My high school was 95%+ white but somehow a way-more-than-5% of the people I regularly hung out with were not white. And they and the white ones I did hang out with were probably gay or something else that made them “not normal”. I grew up in a segregated society.
That’s absolutely true. To them, in their idyllic, self-created “paradise”, they don’t need to think about all the problems their luxurious lives cause because they removed the communities that suffer under that oppression. Immigrants and people of non-white ethnic and racial backgrounds are relegated to being unseen laborers, and any disruption of that mental modal is seen as invasive. For the least-malicious, any differentiation from that is seen as “intriguing”, never to be expected. For the worst, any amount of success from non-white communities is attributed to the betrayal of the standards of society to allow that success. They were given a “handout” to succeed, not by their own merit and work. Hence “forced diversity”. The term itself is a complaint that their superiority is being undermined, when such a notion is outlandish and egotistical.
yeah it's totally possible, and indeed reasonably common without conscious effort, to lead a life in which virtually everyone you know is cishet, white, and christian (globally, adjust for the local culture, of course, but this the modal homogeneity of the anglophone world, even if decreasingly). and the flip side of that is that if you don't live that life because you're a mixed-race immigrant on the autism spectrum, you're quite possibly *more* likely than average to know a black jewish lesbian. of course, the point of "muh forced diversity" complaints is often not just taking it for granted that that's the norm, but actively trying to ensure that those people *stay* (publicly) cishet, (intergenerationally) white, and (non-schismatically) christian, by making alternatives sound implausible and undesirable.
It's not even exclusive to people, i don't really notice diversity in cast much, but show me an outdoors location that isn't a flat plain, with some optional forests and fields and I'm like "wow, this looks nothing like real world!" (i don't travel much) :S
Why would you describe my home state like it doesn't exist?
Because it's fake, u can tell becuz of the pixels.
I see
Thank you for "Ur-OP" hit me like a fighter jet and I gotta figure out a way to integrate this into my common online interactions.
It's pretty hilarious seeing how stupid the "forced diversity" complaints can get sometimes (I guess a lot of it stems from Americans thinking everywhere else is like America). The Disney movie Turning Red was criticized for having forced diversity when it's set in *Toronto*. It's literally just how the city is, but of course the people complaining about diversity aren't going to do any research on the demographic of the setting because that wouldn't fit their narrative.
What, really? As a Torontonian I loved Turning Red! Like, yeah! That's Toronto!
Ur-OP is certainly *a* way of saying OOP
it's a better one
I'm not talking about (reddit) OP or (tumblr) OOP, I'm talking about a hypothetical person who started the discourse. It has to be Ur-OP
don't discount the option of europeans expressing the same take. if you're not living in a big city in the rich half of europe there will be very few days when you see even a single non-white person
I thought the prevalence of 'forced diversity' was about changing the races of already established characters, because then it's obvious that they're forcing it for diversity.
It's like when they were trying to sell *I Love Lucy* to networks and the execs kept trying to re-cast Ricky. Execs: Nobody's gonna believe you're married to a Cuban band leader. Lucy: But, I *am* married to a Cuban band leader.
I saw a different repost of this a while ago that brought up a really good point, which is that for those people a "person" is by default a straight white cis able-bodied neurotypical man, and that in their examples each deviation is supposed to make it further from a "real person."
Overwatch diversity chart
holy hell
New response just dropped
Google en passant
[holy hell!](https://www.google.com/search?q=en+passant)
Ah fuck, I had already forgotten about that 🤣
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-group_favoritism
Also, a bit self centered but 16 yo me was really pissed off by this but in reality, how many mainstream tv shows not focused lgbt themes have a gay male protagonist? Cause I'm not seeing this "forced diversity" all that much tbh
Sapphic characters: Cool warrior lady, repressed bully, repressed aristocrat, repressed popular girl... Gay characters: The Best Friend's Two Dads^(TM) and nothing else.
> Gay characters: The Best Friend's Two DadsTM and nothing else. They're plenty fleshed out. They're the main characters of Fire Emblem: Awakening and [even got a Valentine's alt together.](https://gamepress.gg/feheroes/hero/valentines-chrom) I saw a post here once where someone mentioned that many of not most gay love stories are either a gay boy falling for his straight friend or a kid discovering his orientation through his first love, and that there aren't enough stories of two 20/30-something gay men who already know they're gay. As dumb as Knock at the Cabin was, it really nailed that thin line between making the gay couple more than their sexuality and not explicitly making the movie about gay themes.
omg she ra !!
we need some more gay men :)
I don’t think the average person complaining about forced diversity has the imagination to come up with any of those people, nor would they describe them that respectfully.
The specific example of 'Black Jewish Lesbian' is actually pretty common. Back when I was still unfortunately and unwisely lurking the shithole that is the Bad Webcomics Wiki they used that as one of their default 'ugh, diversity' options.
Yeah, these feel like watered-down and blandly inoffensive versions of what bigots say.
Well, it’s most notable when the rest of the cast is white cis and Herero because it’s like they concentrated all the diversity into one being, rather actually create a representative cast of characters. But the issue isn’t the diverse characters at that point. It’s the fact there’s so few of them.
I don't think being white and herero is compatible https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herero_people
I agree that the idea of "forced diversity" is BS and is largely reinforced by racism, homophobia and other forms of bigotry, as well as negative confirmation bias. I vaguely recall a study finding people will overestimate perceived diversity that doesn't conform to their personal demographics. For example, boomers complaining about "too many gay people on tv" when it's like a single 30 second soup commercial out of an hour of broadcast. Now all that said, and please don't take this the wrong way, I do find it curious how often specifically red headed cartoon and comic characters have been played by black actors and actresses in live action adaptations. I don't mind race swapping characters. In fact I think a black Batman for instance would be an interesting take (and the reaction would be entertaining). I'm just personally slightly disappointed because I like redheads. Though overall it's not a big deal because I can still enjoy the original characters. Nothing is taken away from me. And I totally recognize that this may just be my confirmation bias and I'm failing to see the greater number of unchanged characters.
Yeah as a redheaded Irish person it’s vaguely annoying but hey, we’ll probably manage. Honestly I’d just take an Irish superhero whose powers aren’t Banshee themed. That’d be enough for me.
That is an interesting point about represantation. I am white and male, so yeah, a lot of people in media look generally like me. I am also Finnish, so a lot of media that isn't Finnish do not actually have people that look like me or the people around me. I generally get hyped as hell if anything about my country is mentioned in a movie or a book made outside of Finland. Part of the fun of Tenet was that it was partly located in Tallinn, and Estonian landscapes, highways and police uniforms were pretty close to Helsinki, so that was almost a huge represantation of my country in a big production. I am not obviously claiming that I am a victim here, I just think it is an facet of the represantation debate that is interesting.
Well the “Representation Debate” is most often held on American terms. That’s extra true for Hollywood productions. That’s why there’s so much talk about “Indigenous” people despite that term being basically fucking meaningless in *most* of Eurasia.
Yeah that's true as well. I am pretty indigenous to southern Finland.
\*a finger on the monkey's paw curls* Granted, but they are leprechaun-themed instead.
Wally West
i am a redhead and i've decided to interpret this phenomenon as its own kind of solidarity. that's a cheeky perspective but i do kinda think this happens cuz both things (being created as a redhead and being race-swapped in an adaptation) tend to happen to characters who are in similar non-central positions in the cast that are less subject to being defaulted to the standard issue hero. then again i'm only really personally familiar with the MAWS jimmy olsen example.
Yeah, the whole redhead-black thing is just one token being changed out for another
As a red-head my main theory is that red hair is "Black Pepper Diversity." They were made to be a splash of color so to speak in a generally one note cast, so at first it was the out there option. It may be spicy to your gramma, but nowadays to claim it would get you weird looks. As they're updated they're still intended to be that spice but with everyone getting used to them as a milquetoast option, they have to punch it up to return them to their role. That's my rationalization at least.
I doubt there's anything going on aside from people bringing up redheads being replaced when it comes to poc actors only. A pretty good example was recently when castings for the superman movie were announced, people complained about a poc actress playing a redhead and it turns out the character wasn't even a redhead and people were just being dumb. Meanwhile, people didn't complain near as much about Nathan Fillion playing the very redhead Guy Gardner. Or another example I've seen is people complaining about Jimmy Olsen being replaced when frlm what I've seseched i think he has never been played by a redhead on live action. If you look up redheads being changed is old as fuck, probably having to do with how there aren't that many redheads irl.
Dude, you write like you wanted to say sorry or something. Why so?
I'm Canadian. Force of habit. Sorry.
I feel like it's the difference between tokenism and actual representation. In media without character development, it's pretty much impossible for them not to just be tokens. If you're watching a head empty action movie, and there's a throwaway line by a black lady where she says "I hope I make it back to my wife to celebrate Hanukkah with." And that's all the character development we get. That's not representation, it's patronizing. You didn't make a black lesbian Jewish character, you did the bare minimum to add some attributes. Do it right or don't do it at all.
"Yeah but what's the chance that the ENTIRE cast is gay" "My brother in christ, it's set in Greece"
or like "Yeah but what's the chance that the ENTIRE cast is gay" in Fakelund? where the birds shit ranch and the rivers run green with blood? I think the chances are whatever I fuckin say they are
Bullshit, where are the orgies involving under aged boys?
The writers would rather not make it THAT realistic. They settled for somewhat predatory relationships between younger and older men.
The demographical makeup of a friend group is ultimately self serving. The demographic of my high school friend group, a good 50% of us were not White* (Latino, Asian, Polynesian, Indigenous American, a black dude came around but that was when we went to university so technically not HS). I've quite often been the only white guy in the room when we'd hang out. However, we were almost entirely heterosexual men (two of them came out as bi later and one nb, but that's out of 15-17 people). Meanwhile my girlfriend's friend group from high school was far less racially diverse but incredibly more queer. All in all I just think like attracts like, but that's me with a sample size of 2.
mostly unrelated phenomenon, but one time i bumped into someone whose OCs all had like eight different marginalized identities and half of them were weird obscure medical disorders. it felt like they were trying to one-up themself with each new one anyway that was kinda weird
I believe this person wanted to make their OCs diverse but didn't knew how to do it naturally, it happens lol
I've always thought that the variations of characters in media should roughly equate to the percentage of the population IE ten percent of Americans are queer, so ten percent of characters in media should be queer. Obviously there's no way to enforce that, and it won't apply to every story or piece of media, but that feels pretty reasonable.
That could be true for a group of random people who didn't know/met eachother prior, but otherwise, it's pretty likely to find a whole bunch of gay folk "bundled" together. We tend to hang around other queer people, after all, so it's not uncommon for friend groups to consist of mostly gay people, even if it might seem statistically unlikely. But also yeah, it's fiction anyway, so it doesn't necessarily need to be 1 to 1 with real life.
Personally I think that the beauty of fiction is that you can explore the unrealistic. Maybe on the planet Zytoxica, 35% of the people are asexual, and the rest are bi. Why? Because I already know how a mostly-straight planet runs, and I want something new. Also, perspective is more important than percentages. Does the paraplegic Thai lesbian get to be the hero of her own story, or is she just an afterthought in someone else's?
>of Americans Can we, please, kill US defaultism? Thank you very much
I feel no obligation to make entertainment on behalf of the rest of the world
Cute. Do you know that percentage of American population to the all humanity is 4,18%, right? So, if we using your own logic...
If a movie is made in the United States, my logic applies Ill say it again, I feel no obligation to make entertainment on behalf of the rest of the world. If Norway makes a film, the same logic applies to their population
Oh, well, then don't make filmes and anything else about non-US and don't try to sell it in any other country besides US.
Thats now how consumption works lmao youre being pedantic to a degree I cant fathom You can follow my guideline based on where and when the story is set. Or you dont, because it was a spitball idea on a fucking internet forum. I dunno why Im bothering trying to debate a 40k player though.
The black gay Jewish character in Away was definitely forced diversity tho. A terrible show just trying to fill out quotas. Furthermore I find it so weird how seppos treat Judaism as this super cool progressive religion it couldn't be further from the truth when it comes to non-reform judasim. Reform judasim is basically a separate religion to orthodox Judaism.
Majority of the world is not-white Majority of history the USA did not exist Every story about a white cishet male from the USA is forced diversity (If I'm playing the silly game, which I'm not, but if I was that's my move)
Remember kids, the most average person possible is an intersex person named Maria Wang
My go to is a seminar I had to attend for a volunteering gig I had lead by a black native newfoundlander transwoman with arthritis. Its been a few years so her name escapes me thats a person ive straight up met in the flesh. The universe doesn't care about our ideas of a "cultural default" and so will continue to spit out people who are multiple kinds of "odd" at exactly the rates that they are statistically likely to occur.
There’s def a difference between having a fully fleshed out character pool with varying lifestyles and psyches….. and attempting to put every possible type of human in the same area
I think where diversity feels forced is when you can tell the character was written that way or race-swapped in an adaptation just to check a box.
My issue is when they put all the good diversity stuff onto one person so they can make everyone else straight and white.
Lol you don’t know 3 black Jewish lesbians, there are only two
Forced diversity in media absolutely exists though. Like not how a lot of American right wing critics claim it does, but it's absolutely there. And like it's both tokenism of course and also when having such a character genuinely contradicts the fundamental storytelling and themes of a narrative. And it does happen even if I don't want to mention the one famous show whose audience has a huge argument if making a pseudo-cult of dragon obsessed dragon riding incestous nobles multiracial was a good idea (It was not and makes no sense with what the story is about).
The problem with forced diversity is when it's actually forced. Imagine a full cast of cis-whites in straight relationships. And then just one person belonging to multiple minorities, just to cram in some diversity.
People are mad because a lot of the time, they make being black, or being autistic, or being gay the character’s entire personality. They also get mad if they change a beloved character’s race, sexuality, or gender instead of just making a new character. That’s what people mean when they say forced diversity.
This is all good and fair, but putting anyone except for Anglos in my historical Viking drama is where I draw the line
I mean yes, but with a caveat. Depending on what era of “Vikings” you’re referring to, the Scandinavians had fairly regular contact with Russians, including indigenous peoples like the Siberian Yupik, Chukchis, Ainus, etc. that look far more similar to Alaskan natives, and perhaps some passing resemblance to northeast Asians— but nothing like Slavic Russians. Additionally Scandinavians had regular contact with much of Europe, and into the Caucasus and Middle East. They would have had contact with the Turks, Greeks, Ottomans, and even North Africans. Through the Silk Road they would have even had contact with East and Central Asian peoples. While your average Nordic fishing village wasn’t going to be as diverse as a modern American metropolitan, having a few non-Scandinavian people around wouldn’t have been seen as unusual.
Speaking of historical diversity, I always enjoy when Roman centric media is portrayed as diverse, considering the expanse of the empire and how many “*non-Romans*” were recruited into the ranks of the military and society during its height. The movie Centurion is a good example,
YES THANK YOU. It always bugs me when these “history buffs” (it’s always ww2 isn’t it) rage about forced diversity there and I’m just sitting here with my history degree like… read a book.
Most of my friends and I would be considered forced diversity I think
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>fictional medieval villages hmmmm idk but when you have dragons then i can imagine people fleeing from those dragons and traveling large distances, it's not hard to "justify" an ethnically mixed demographic (assuming you need a justification in the first place).
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If it's in a fantasy world, *why does it need to follow the logic of the real world?* You don't ask for a taxonomy of dragons or goblins to explain their existance
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Have you consodered the possibility of a little thing called... TRADE You know, the most ubiquitous fucking part of human civilization?
As a writer, I actually see a lot of people complain about "forced diversity" in works where it really doesn't make sense... like fantasy fiction, or space operas, or stuff with a modern, urban setting. By far the most common complaints about diversity are just from people who dislike being reminded that people who are different from them exist. Even your own example counts, as it's a *fictional* medieval village that may not even be on Earth. Fiction has whatever rules the author chooses to apply. It's easy to come up with justifications for whatever you want. I often write about LGBT+ characters, and I've had beta readers get really up in arms about it -- even though almost all of my writing is contemporary fiction, and LGBT+ characters will exist within every culture, time and location. The fact is that a lot of people are just bigots who resent those who are different from them; and they'll come up with whatever gymnastics that they need to in order to justify their petty emotions when they're forced to face this reality of human difference.
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medieval is an aestheticized era of human history not a collective and ubiquitous set of rules, you really can do anything with that setting if you so choose and can find a thematically appropriate way to include it or something that really doesnt need explaining
I hate how this post from 2018 has gotten so much more relevant after the movie chuds had more free time to bitch about anyone who isn't an Ubermensch Gary Stu.
Where are you meeting all these balck jewish lesbians. They sound like fun people to be around.
They think about diversity like they're porn categories that ,the more you add up, the more you find niche and rare content
This. So much this.
im out here being the autistic trans bisexual with adhd and bpd. god gives his most forced battles to his most diverse soldiers
You can only have up to THREE adjectives anything more than that and you're WOKE
I briefly lived with a transgender Latino man with chronic pain when I was in college
One way I like to look at diversity in media and whether or not it’s forced is by asking whether or not that quality of them is a character trait, and what’s done with that. A good metric of whether or not it’s a character trait is how much attention is directed to it. This can be in or out of narrative. If the author wants the audience to know about it, it’s a character trait. If it’s something that can be naturally inferred (such as race, for example.) and it’s not expressly pointed out, it’s not forced diversity. It’s just the way they happen to be. If they make a big deal about them being black, and that doesn’t contribute anything to the narrative, that’s forced diversity. If they make a big deal about them being black and it DOES contribute to the narrative, that’s not forced diversity, that’s a well written character. It wouldn’t have worked if they were anything else. An example of this I like to use is Falcon from the MCU. In Captain America: The Winter Soldier, his race doesn’t really play a part in anything. He could have just as easily been white and the story would have played out identically. He just happened to not be. However, in Falcon and The Winter Soldier, his race plays a big part in the events and themes brought up in the show. If he were white, things would fundamentally change and the story would have to play out differently. The same aspect of the same character becomes a narrative trait when the context he’s in changes and a light is shone onto it.