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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   28174 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 26, 2022

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Do you feel particularly erased, seeing as you're the majority of your nation?

  • -14

The greater the percentage of some demographic in the country that isn't represented, the greater the number of people erased.

Only if the demographics of the books constitute "erasure" in the first place. You are begging the question.

Surely then nonwhite people shouldn’t complain about erasure of their experiences if people of their skin tone aren’t represented, then, if demographics of characters in books don’t count as erasure?

I was not aware that I had argued otherwise.

I assume you agree, then, that the progressive push towards showing disproportionately more minorities in media for representation and to combat erasure, etc etc., is similarly ill-argued.

I actually didn't express an opinion that the claim was ill-argued, but rather that it was not argued at all. I suppose that 30 years ago the existence of certain groups was probably ignored by children's literature, though I don't know that "erasure" is the best term to describe that phenomenon. Regardless, that is no longer the case. Nor is it likely to be the case that OP's demographic is ignored in the children's literature currently available for sale.

BTW, is it safe to assume that you agree that complaints about Halle Bailey being cast as the Little Mermaid are misplaced, as well?

On the Little Mermaid, I actually don't really have much of a slant either way on that issue. My first reaction was "who gives a shit?" and I didn't dig further afterwards; "Black Little Mermaid" is literally all I know about it.

On further inspection, I think explicit race-casting is cringey as hell, and that there's a little bit of dissonance with what is a very European trope - merfolk, esp. that particular sort -being brought into a deliberately race-agnostic environment.

At the same time, I believe history and mythology belong to the entirety of humanity, and really, as long as you can make it internally consistent (which isn't necessarily a given) who gives a toss? I'm not white, though, which gives me a different vantage point on this whole affair.

It reads much better than the travesty that was the Ghost in the Shell Hollywood adaptation, which was just schizophrenic in how it wanted to approach race, for example. I'd argue it's probably better than if you did a brownwashed Tale of the Bamboo Cutter, or whatever the Fate franchise does to historical figures.

Honestly my entire point is - I just think telling people who are complaining that they aren't being properly being represented that they make no sense, when the reason for that misrepresentation is due to a push by another group to overrepresent themselves for similar reasons, reads like intentional selective blindness with how the context is just ignored.

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