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rfmcdonaldA poster in Facebook's Gay League group shared Joseph Cain's article at The Mary Sue, "Nerd Guys, Pandering, and “Forced” Diversity". He adroitly points out that the bias in favour of the straight white male fans who have been the traditional cores of their audience has often been so profound, so deeply rooted in any number of art forms, that any break to examine new kinds of characters is seen as an insult. Indeed, simply making the effort shows that it has been forced.
That stories told with more characters and tropes in mind than the traditional ones can actually do really well is an added bonus, I think. If capitalism is known for anything it is for its development of new markets, and media forms which remain content in trying to reach only a small minority of their potential consumers are not going to prosper. Plus, I would suggest that too often critics undersell the potential of straight white male peers to feel empathy, to like other characters. These forms--games and movies and comics and books and the rest--all require imagination, no?
[B]ias in favor of the straight white male audience is so thoroughly ingrained into the heads of those it’s pandering to, that anytime it’s broken away from, it’s seen as a deviation, a betrayal. Or, in some cases, it’s seen as corruption.
This is where artistic integrity comes in. They’re not against diversity in their media, they’ll argue. They’re just against it being “forced”.
The main problem with this sentiment is that the guys with this mindset would honestly rather believe that poor, innocent developers or writers were forced to include women, LGBTQ+characters, or people of color in their work to please a cabal of slavering SJWs, than to believe that creators honestly want to tell those stories, or appeal to someone who isn’t them.
“I’m not against diverse characters,” is what they say outwardly, but what they say implicitly is “but why would writers ever want them?” Well, the reason they’d want to, apart from being more creative and telling a greater variety of interesting stories, is that diversity also sells.
Artistry is vital to creative media, but they also have to make money in order to be financially sustainable. Appealing exclusively to one demographic is one of the chief causes of the games industry’s many problems. Bloated game budgets, derivative stories with little depth, and general creative stagnation as we follow gruff white anti hero number thirty seven billion on his trite quest to avenge his murdered wife/daughter/girlfriend.
That stories told with more characters and tropes in mind than the traditional ones can actually do really well is an added bonus, I think. If capitalism is known for anything it is for its development of new markets, and media forms which remain content in trying to reach only a small minority of their potential consumers are not going to prosper. Plus, I would suggest that too often critics undersell the potential of straight white male peers to feel empathy, to like other characters. These forms--games and movies and comics and books and the rest--all require imagination, no?
