Marvel vs. Limits of Diverse Representation

I've written before on the numerous times Marvel comics has tried and failed to grasp just how diversity works. Seriously, just search the marvel tag. However,  the example that sticks out for writer Paige Allen isn't Marvel's continuing mishandling of Captain America. Nor is it Marvel's VP of Sales blaming attempts at diverse casts of superheroes for hurting sales. According to Allen, the most egregious example is the writing of Marvel's Invincible Iron Man. Penned by Brian Michael Bendis, Invincible  that introduced the world to a new Iron Man – a young black teen by the name of Riri Williams. Writing for Geeks of Color, Allen points out that "...some fans were skeptical of Bendis writing the experiences of a young black girl, especially since Marvel had no black women writers on its staff when the series was first announced."

Bendis has also written also wrote about another black teen assuming the mantle of of Marvel franchise powerhouse-- Miles Morales as Spider-Man. Bendis has also talked about the research he's done as an author and the perspective that raising two of his adopted African-American children have given him. Allen points that while Bendis is able to write about the challenges and loss Riri Williams faces as a black girl, his knowledge is reflected in a very narrow focus of the Black experience:

Unfortunately, this knowledge is the overall problem Bendis has in his depiction of Riri Williams. He knows about black pain and the various micro- and macro- aggressions that black people face every day, especially during these particularly fraught times of racial hostility... Basically, Bendis is like your white classmate that took one Africana class and now believes himself to be the purveyor of all knowledge on black life. However, because he acquired his knowledge as an outsider to the culture, the only way he really knows how to depict blackness is through identifiable aspects of The Struggle – all the negative social realities of being black that you see reported on TV, lambasted on Twitter, and through quickly cruising through activist circles in search of easily transferable knowledge about racism without any nuanced understanding of how black people deal with it.

This came to a head when scans from a page of Invincible Iron Man #8 appeared online recently, where it shows Williams in class trying to actively seek out marginalization as a motivator.

Allen reflected:

Never in my wildest nightmares would I imagine a black child seeking out racism to fight against in the pursuit of their dreams. Racism isn’t a Sailor Moon villain that waits for us to level up before trying to kick our ass; we are always aware of it and are always affected by it, but one of the best traits that black people have is our ability to bypass that negativity and live our lives despite it, not to specifically spite it.

This isn't the first time Bendis' writing for a black character has been criticized. The Nerdist pointed out that Bendis and other white writers writing characters of color often come off as tone-deaf and run the risk of alienating the very fans they want to recruit.

As I wrote in an earlier post, the real key is to actually hire diverse creators to write diverse casts. Otherwise we're just slapping a Band-Aid on the issue:

Looking at a diversity initiative as the beginning and end of what's needed to help improve the state of comics is short-sighted and wrong-headed. Instead of just having the same white men tell stories with some characters of color here and there, there should be structure in place for minority writers and artists and creators to tell the stories they want to a mainstream audience. Diversity as the final and only goal is a hollow act that does nothing but reinforce whiteness and the status quo as the default. That's not the world we live in, so why should worlds we get to make up have to be that way? Free your mind, and the audience will follow.

Hollywood Still Way Behind LGBT & Racial Representation

Description: Screenshot from GLAAD study that reads: Transgender
representation was merely one character in "Zoolander 2". The
character, played by Bennedict Cumberbatch, was used as the punchline
to a joke.

Two years ago, GLAAD released a video titled "Hollywood Must Do Better" that  was basically a supercut of the most egregious anti-LGBT moments from major Hollywood films from the past few years. It was a companion piece to studies the group releases every year that rate major Hollywood films on a "social responsibility index" that looks at the representation of racial minorities as well as LGBT characters. "Moonlight" won an Oscar this year, so that must mean things are pretty great now, right?

Wrong. As this year's study shows, Hollywood is still way behind when it comes represention people that aren't white, straight, or male. in a study of 125 major film releases from major film studios, only 23 films included LGBT-identifying characters. That's just 18 percent.

Of those 22 films, 19 had a gay male character. Lesbian characters went from 23% in 2015 to 35% in 2016. 3 films had a bi character. Transgender representation in major Hollywood films last here clocked in at exactly one: a character played by a cis male actor as the butt of a transphobic joke.

Racial diversity in onscreen characters declined as well. From the LGBT characters of the last year, 48 of them were white (69%), nine were Black/African American (13%), four were Asian/Pacific Islander (6%) and one character was Latinx. Eight LGBT characters were identified as non-human.

The study also outlines a great thumbnail guide in looking at LGBT characters in films called the Vito Russo Test. A  film passes the Vito Russo test if:

• The film contains a character that is identifiably lesbian, gay, bisexual, and/or transgender.
• That character must not be solely or predominantly defined by their sexual orientation or gender identity (i.e. they are comprised of the same sort of unique character traits commonly used to differentiate straight/non-transgender characters from one another).
• The LGBT character must be tied into the plot in such a way that their removal would have a significant effect, meaning they are not there to simply provide colorful commentary, paint urban authenticity, or (perhaps most commonly) set up a punchline. The character must matter.

Similar to the Bechdel Test, it's a fairly low bar to clear. Sadly, even the above reasonable standards aren't met by most films. As the study says:

Only 8 of the 22 (36%) inclusive major studio films passed the Vito Russo Test this year, the lowest percent­age in this study’s history, compared to 11 of 20 (55%) inclusive films released in 2014, 7 of 17 (41%) in 2013, and 6 out of 14 (43%) inclusive films released in 2012. This is a significant drop from the previous year when just over half of the inclusive films passed. There is clearly much room for industry improvement. More films need to include substantial LGBT characters that pass this simple test.

Localization Editor Withdraws Name Rather Than Give Up "KKK" Joke

Akiba's Beat Game Over Screen

On XSEED's official forum, localization editor Tom Lipschultz posted a list of changes made in the English version of game Akiba's Beat. In addition to things like changing names of characters to reflect puns in the original Japanese, there was one joke that Lipschultz was changed that he felt was a bridge too far-- changing a background sign that read "KKK Witches" in the original Japanese version :

The original was a parody of "NKK switches," a Japanese light switch manufacturer based out of Akihabara. I personally felt "KKK witches" was pretty funny for its shock value, but when I mentioned it to my coworkers, they... were not as amused. 

Yeah, I can't imagine why a white guy going "LOL it says KKK roflcopter" would be a bad look or anything. Instead of pausing for a moment of self-reflection as to why the name of a domestic terrorist group was funny to him, or why a background joke might be worth changing, Lipschultz decided to double down.

 ...[XSEED was] insistent upon the name being changed. And of course, I fought this as best as I could, since I saw the forceful change of this as an act of censorship...

Yes, according to Lipschultz, changing a joke to avoid name-dropping the Ku Klux Klan is exactly the same thing as actively suppressing art! He was the lone brave white guy sticking up for the original intent. Like, what if the original Japanese developer really wanted to make the minor background company sign joke as some sort of statement about the USA right-wing hate group responsible for lynching about 3,500 black men over the course of its existence, right? Lipschultz continues:

In the end, however, it was Acquire themselves who voluntarily changed it to "ACQ witches"... [XSEED emailed the original Japanese developers] to let them know that the KKK is a well-known abbreviation for a hate group in America, and asking them if the name "KKK witches" had any specific meaning in Akiba's Beat... Acquire simply changed the sign text and sent us a new build. 

Oh. So since the original developers of the game made the change, this must mean they were cool with it. If the intent was to make some sort of political statement, they would have kept it. Censorship implies there's some sort of involuntary act, and Lipschultz himself said the original developers made this decision themselves. So that's why Lipschultz... asked for his name to be removed from the credits? Yep, he confirms it himself.

It is due to this change, and specifically due to my initial misconception that we'd directly asked the devs to change it, that I asked to have my name removed from the credits of Akiba's Beat... I feel it's a good symbolic gesture on my part, showing my commitment to my principles on this matter... I'm perfectly fine with being the "ninja localizer" of XSEED, fighting the good anti-censorship fight from the shadows. 

Yes, this is the hill Lipschultz chose to die on. This also means that per XSEED company policy, he will no longer be credited on any future work he does for the company, and he took this stand being fully aware of this company policy.

It turns out that Lipschultz has many misconceptions, from what censorship is, to what it means to be funny to what it means for something to be "very Japan". Not content to dig a hole for himself on the forums of the company he works for, Lipschultz took to the comments section of a Kotaku article about his decision in what I'm sure he thought was a noble and well-reasoned attempt to defend himself. Here, let's watch him go and dig himself deeper:

[The KKK acronym] doesn’t make me chuckle on its own, but in the context of appearing on a sign in a busy part of Tokyo, where the business in question obviously had NO IDEA what it meant? That’s pretty funny, if you’ve ever been to Japan. “Engrish” exists as a concept for a reason, and a sign that says “KKK witches” is so out there, so WRONG, that it appearing on a sign is definitely worthy of at LEAST a chuckle, for the absurdity alone. 

I guess the idea is, I believe it would be funny to the game’s target audience, those being Japanophiles. Because it really is very “Japan.”

You see, a KKK reference is funny because... racism! Non-native speakers being ridiculed for not understanding a language is funny because, um... also racism? People that like Japanese pop culture think racism is funny too? I guess?

Honestly, I'm surprised Lipschultz still has a job considering he seems to have no grasp of optics, humor, or what localization is supposed to be. Posting on the Neogaf boards, Lipschultz once had this to say in his defense of anime boobs and fan-service:

Even if you consider content in a game to be perverted and classless... let the classless perverts have it! They deserve to enjoy their games just as much as the rest of us. And to say that it "taints" the game for the rest of us is no different than saying having someone of a different race, or sexual orientation, taints the neighborhood.

Yes, just like his withdrawing his name from the credits of Akiba's Beat and all future XSEED games he works on was his attempted to channel Evelyn Beatrice Hall (no, REALLY, he said so right here), standing up for sexualized female characters created by men, for men, is like speaking out against discrimination of marginalized people. That's totally not gross at all!

I think the best way to explain translation vs transliteration is by using a musical analogy. When a violin repeats what a piano just has played, it can't make the exact same sounds. It can only approximate the same chords.The violin can, however, recognizably make the same "music" as a piano, but only when it's faithful to the logic and limitations of the violin as it is to the logic and limitations of the piano.

Languages are like that, too. Each has their own "sound" and their own logic.The process of rendering ideas from language to language is really more like a transposition than a translation-- translation implies that there are word-for-word equivalents that exist from one language boundary to another. That's like saying piano sounds exactly like the violin!

And the idea of word-for-word equivalents of a story, of a language's underlying feeling strikes me as false to the nature of story telling.The best a translator can do is hope for is to come close as possible not to the text's literal meaning-- it's nearly impossible to drag a sentence's meaning across one language barrier to another completely 100 percent intact. What is more important in preserving, intent... even at the expense of making four strings do the same notes as 88 keys (i.e.English from Japanese). A translator should work to preserve a story's essence, the total feeling of the complexities.Literal translations, as outlined in today's earlier piece on Persona 5, are stilted, awkward and can seem more like transcribing than translation,

When the original game developer of Akiba's Beat was contacted about what the KKK initials of the "off brand" light switch maker sign meant for a US audience, they changed the joke because they intended to just make a silly company name reference, not name-drop a US domestic terrorist group.

Basically, what Lipschultz has done is mixed up the right of people to not be suppressed by the government or societal coercion with the tension that is part and parcel of the act of translation. Instead of pausing and reflecting on why a minor joke with unintentional racist overtones was something he saw as so essential he'd be willing to throw away credit for his work, Lipschultz decided that not keeping "KKK witches" was the molehill to die on.

Angry White Gamers vs Social Constructs: We Can Do Better

Rust is an indie survival horror game currently in alpha testing on Steam. In a thematic twist that's sort of a cross between Minecraft and Resident Evil, you start the game buck naked and have to craft everything you need to survive, from shelter to the clothes on your back, and try and survive as long as possible. It's a multiplayer game, so if the monsters don't get you, another player might!

 Last week, the developers of Rust issued an update to their game. It has some of the usual features one would expect: bug fixes and the like. It also added a new cosmetic feature: randomized skin tones.

As the developers explain on the official blog:

Everyone now has a pseudo unique skin tone and face. Just like in real life, you are who you are – you can’t change your skin colour or your face. It’s actually tied to your steamid... There’s a lot of skin colours in the world, and it’s really easy to appear racially insensitive when doing this. This is compounded by the fact that everyone is really used to seeing this guy as a white guy, so when you see him as a black guy it feels like he’s just “blacked up“. So we’re spending a lot of time trying to lessen that effect.

So what happened? Players lost their ever-lovin' minds! As Megan Condis writes:

The reactions to Rust’s unprecedented experiment were swift. Many gamers were aggrieved by the skin tone automatically assigned them. Others felt drafted into racial discourses that they preferred to ignore, and lamented the entrance of social justice activism into what they saw as a blissfully post-racial online world. But the backlash only underscored a disturbing reality: By insisting that race doesn’t or shouldn’t exist online, such attitudes ensure an online status quo in which people of color remain marginalized and invisible.

Yes, in addition to the sad but predictable racist reactions, there were also plenty of white gamers who insisted that they didn't have a problem per se with playing a black character, but thought that the randomized possibility of your in game avatar having black skin was forcing racial diversity or taking them out of the game experience by making them play someone that they couldn't identify with. This is a bit of a head-scratcher for me, because if that's how they felt about possibly getting a default character who's black... why wasn't there a similar outcry when the game's avatar was only a default white guy? What about a woman player who must play video games as a male hero? What about a gay or bi gamer playing though a game with romance options that can't romance characters of the same sex?

As Condis puts it, it's due to most white people just sort of unconsciously accepting "white" as "default" because that's also what society does:

The reactions reflect a failure on the part of some gamers to recognize that whiteness is a race at all. These players appear to think of whiteness as a neutral type of embodiment, the universal category of humanity against which all those who do “have” a race (anyone who is not white) are compared.

I agree. Default choices are choices. As a white guy, living in a culture that prioritizes white men, there are lots of things I don't actively have to think of or worry about because I see a lot of people who look like me as the default. I don't have to consider other ways of living in my day to day life-- what it's like to live as a black man, or a gay woman, for example. It's like the fish that lives in the ocean, surrounded by water, not realize what surrounds it. It's this sort of thing that leads to marginalized and minority groups not only being dismissed, but often just flat-out not even being thought of in the first place. As Tauriq Moosa writes in Polygon about the lack of people of color in current AAA title hit The Witcher 3:

Let’s look at a few uncomfortable facts. Almost every Witcher 3 review I came across was written by a white man — excellent writers and all of whom I respect. But games media itself is, like the tech world, a very white-male dominated area. This is why we got a hundred articles confronting the Witcher 3 devs about less pretty grass physics, but not a single article asking them about no people of color. As a person obsessed with graphics... downgrade questions concern me, too. But I’d hope more folk would be asking questions about entire races not existing in a game world and why. But the lack of persons of colour, and the lack of questions about our absence, comes from ignorance rather than animosity. It probably just wasn’t even considered. That is itself the major issue. It’s not just that people of color weren’t in the game, it’s that so few people in the gaming press noticed.

So how and why does representation-- making sure people of color can seem themselves in games matter so much? Why does leaving them out, even it's it's "just an oversight" become so harmful? As Moosa explains:

By creating digital representations of people who aren’t white, it indicates a culture and industry who view us as people. It counters the status quo that dehumanizes us by erasing us or casting us as a non-human. We want to be seen as people, too. There’s little more to it, for me. But seeing angry responses to this simple request speaks volumes about the kind of culture we’re creating by not diversifying races, genders and so on. Consider: In Witcher 3, all humans are white and every other being is non-human. That’s not exactly friendly or inclusive of people of color. A game can include diverse number of monsters, but not a diverse number of skin colours or races for humans? And then we see panic and anger when white gamers may be asked to play as people of color in Rust. The double standard is rarely addressed. Being white is apolitical, being a person of color, even simply by existing, is threatening to some players.

Many geeks and gamers want to uphold the idea of gaming as a welcoming and inclusive hobby. But when when can have a AAA title released with humans and dragons but not a single person of color, or when gamers act like they feel threatened for even having a character avatar whose skin might be a little brown... we're obviously a long ways away.

Fellow white folks: listen to gamers of color. Work to include them. We may not be able to change a bigot's mind, but we can certainly do what we can to make gamers of color amd other marginalized people considered, listened to and welcome so that just existing in this gamer space isn't considered some sort of radical act.

Jake Gyllenhaal Stole Gamer's Video Game and Identity

... metaphorically.

Sara Haghdoosti is a 22-year-old Iranian-Australian feminist writer, active with GetUp! Australia, and has been a lifelong fan of the the Prince of Persia video game series, ever since the very first game for the PC.

So she was very excited when the Prince of Persia movie was first announced... and then very disappointed when the movie was first released.
Why does she feel the Prince of Persia movie took computer games the she loved as a child and ruined them in a movie based on those video games as an adult?

She explains:

"As a child I loved the computer games. They weren’t just fun, they gave me an easy way to talk to and relate to others over something that was special to me and my heritage. As an adult, I feel like the movie has totally wiped out that aspect of it. The movie has reduced my identity, my heritage and my cultural background to lighting and make up.

Why should we care about the casting of the latest Hollywood epic action film? Castings of movies like the ‘Prince of Persia’ are important because we know that media images have profound impacts on our identities. "

Nick Mahatmas also explains and points out that the physical and cultural identities are whitewashed or papered over in his review of the film. To wit:

"Are non-white characters being played by white people? Of course! Everyone already knows that Jake Gyllenhaal is the titular Prince Dastan, but he's not the only blue-eyed Persian in this flick. There's two older brothers, one a blue-eyed guy who looks sort of like a Mormon Jesus Christ, and another, angrier brother who is at least dark-complected, but he looks more like Zack de la Rocha than anything else. (Next up for Disney—Martin Mull IS Barack Obama in The Audacity of Hope: The Imax Experience.)... Persia is a pretty neat place, actually. Maybe one day someone will make a cool fantasy movie about it. "

M. Night Shamalyan-directed The Last Airbender, the live-action movie based on the Nickeloden cartoon Avatar: The Last Airbender, has encountered similar protests and charges of erasing and whitewashing all of the pan-Asian influences of the show-- changing the Chinese calligraphy to nonsense glyphs, and casting all of the principal lead characters, who were Asian in the show, white white actors instead. There has even been an activist group, Racebending that has been writing about and addressing the controversy for nearly two years.

What do you think we can do, as gamers and as activists and people who care, about the distressing tendency of whitewashing or under-representation? Will you vote with your wallet? Write letters? Speak out to your friends? Or if it doesn't affect you, do you say it's not a big deal? Why does or does it not matter to you?

You left me outside and now you want in

Blogger yeloson talks about some of his personal frustrations regarding fandom and racial cluelessness. An excerpt:

A few years back, I went to GenCon, the largest tabletop roleplaying convention in the US. I arrived excited and eager to play, and a little sad my friends whom I had attended ComiCon weren't with me. I had just gotten out of the registration line and saw a person dressed up in blackface as a drow/dark elf. I flashed back just about 4 days before when a friend of mine had to leave ComiCon, completely shaking with hurt because someone thought it would be cool to get in blackface to dress up as Storm from the X-men.

The day before I flew back, I saw a newspaper headline, "Blacks are leaving Indianapolis, feel unwelcome". I wonder why?

I began to start looking hard at my hobby. Everything from artwork to social circles and the behaviors around it. I tried to start up conversations. Conversations with people who were intelligent, who I knew personally, who had no problem analyzing social behavior and how it affected play (after all, a roleplaying game is nothing but a group socially deciding imaginary stuff...).

But those conversations failed.

At first I thought I wasn't approaching it correctly, I tried different tacks, from talking about the raw representation of the artwork, to the historical issues of blackface, to, well... everything.

But see, my mistake wasn't that I was talking to intelligent, well read people - it was that I was continuing to mistake ignorance on the part of intelligent, well read people as unintentional. I was giving benefit of the doubt to the people who had the least excuse to be ignorant of both history and media. It wasn't not knowing, it was choosing not to know.

Instead of turning their minds to a legitimate question, "Hey, how did I NOT notice that all the bad guys are dark, or that the language used around orcs = the language used on native populations, or that even POC heroes are dehumanized with glowing eyes etc.?", instead the response was "You're crazy/reading too much into it/it's just a game/why do you care/you should find another hobby!"

That's right. "If you don't like it here, you can leave." And then they turn around and ask why there's so few POC in their hobby or their numbers are shrinking. (I went to GenCon SoCal that year, and all I saw were asian and hispanic kids playing Yu-Gi-Oh. I guess people of color aren't into geek stuff, right?)

But my story is not unique.

Read the whole post here.

A qucik summary of RaceFail '09

What is RaceFail '09? daedala provided the shortest summary of RaceFail '09 here and it is as followed:

1. Elizabeth Bear writes a post about "how to write the Other"
2. Avalon's Willow critiques one of her books on racial tropes
3. Bear agrees unequivocally in writing
4. Commenters defend Bear in increasingly racist language.
5. Massive fail all over the internet.
6. Bear says that she was lying in 3. in order to model appropriate conversation.

But daedala's summary barely scratches the surface. Here are other more detailed, but still brief summaries of events:

» A reader's digest of RaceFail '09 by white_serpent, which dmarley kindly provided some contexts here.
» A summary of RaceFail '09 by withdiamonds.
» A Timeline (of the Great Cultural Appropriation Debate of Doom '09) (a summary of the beginning of RaceFail '09) by Willow.
» Because "tl;dr" shouldn't be an excuse (a summary of the middle and later part of RaceFail '09) by rydra_wong.
» Endangering somebody is okay when you do it under your real name (a summary of later events of RaceFail '09) @ unfunnybusiness.
» Racefail09: Just This (a summary of the beginning and later part of RaceFail '09) by mpoetess.

And here are a few longer overviews:

» A themed summary of RaceFail ‘09 in large friendly letters for those who think race discussions are hard by Ann Somerville.
» O HAI RACEFAILZ: Notes on Reading an Internet Conflict by tablesaw.
» I have stayed quiet about something for too long, and I am ashamed by popelizbet.

For a comprehensive overview though, rydra_wong has provided an almost chronological link list here and you could follow the discussion at her gcadod 09 tag. And among the many, many people who have spoken up about RaceFail '09 are asim, bossymarmalade, ciderpress, coffeeandink, deepad, helsmeta, inalasahl, nojojojo, oyceter, Seeking Avalon's Willow, shewhohashope, sparkymonster, spiralsheep, vito_excalibur, vom_marlowe, yeloson and zvi_likes_tv.

The reason it’s called RaceFail ’09 is to distinguish this from past incidents, and also to acknowledge that not only it is ongoing, but that this could happen again.

Does that worry you, too?

To quote Nick:

If the Fail is happening anyway—if havoc is already being wrecked in the hearts of authors and fans of color, if people who shouldn’t be driven out are already being driven out (or at least too damn close to out)—then I kind of want it to impinge on the space of as many white fans and authors as is humanly possible. Yes, it IS too high a price for mere education, but if the price is being paid regardless, let’s goddamn GET something for it. The more clueless-but-well-meaning white folk (I firmly include myself in this category) see the hurt being caused and start reading, thinking, and trying to understand the things being said by the myriad brilliant fans/authors/theorists of color (and allies!) involved here, the more likely it is that something will have changed by the time the next high-profile racial screw-up rolls ‘round.