Her Twitter mentions is full of people saying stuff like “You have always been able to cosplay a Captain!”. They just Don’t Get It. Please, Tumblr Star Trek fandom – go to her tweet and give her some love.
well not every show needs 25 straight white carbon copies of the same characters from every other show ever aired in the history of television yet here we are with ten thousand of you on tv and one of me if I’m lucky
how dare you eat a feast, throw me a bone while I’m starving, and then tell me to be happy that I’m finally equal to you you spoiled entitled brat
Excellent article, Clexa mention – though it is what we’ve been saying for a long time – that the current state of ‘representation’ in media is little better than tokenism and how we need queer voices to tell our stories. The straight (white) male showrunner syndrome needs to end.
There’s a reason why Moana was neck-to-neck with Frozen’s record at the box office, Hidden Figures made more at the box office than Rogue One, and Ms. Marvel, Monstress and the upcoming America are bringing more fans to comics.
There’s incredible power in not only seeing yourself reflected in media, but seeing that representation done right as well. It reminds you that your experiences are worth being treated with respect, that there are more choices open to you than you might think, and that you can be seen as a whole person, not just through the flattened lens of white supremacy. Luke Cage broke Netflix because so many people were watching the series, after all (and yet frustratingly, predictably, Marvel decided to ignore every lesson from Luke Cage’s success in making Iron Fist but that’s a rant for another day).
Escapism isn’t truly escapism when you keep finding the same microaggressions, erasure, and stereotypes in the stories you love and are trying to escape into, and we ignore this truth at our peril because it’s never “just a story.
Not that Moffat will kill the lesbian, just that…it’s Moffat and he’s written some blatantly sexist stuff in his time, has not been big on racial diversity during his tenure for both Who and Sherlock, and he brings us a companion who is a queer woman of colour.
And, just so we know she’s a queer woman, she wears a rainbow-striped tank and her name is Bill.
Also: she isn’t the first openly queer companion the Doctor has had (Captain Jack, Clara). You think the BBC would know the show they’ve produced for the past 54 years.
I want to be wrong about all the things that worry me here, and hope yet another generation of Whovians, who have been craving representation on this show, aren’t let down. *Fingers crossed*
They shouldn’t be a big deal, no, they could be fun – but it’s the winning that feels good, not the poll itself. The fight for dominance divides, creates clashes where there need be none. It becomes a group ego experience and how is that helpful?
Polls are also temporary. If you hang on to that kind of ‘fame’ you may find it was a bit on the shallow side (not that polls don’t have their place in raising awareness, bringing attention to something, etc).
Fighting to create long-lasting change in a sexist, homophobic and racist industry? THAT should feel amazing. Would love to see all these fans uniting to do what started happening last year. Refuse to take their bait. Demand better.
i really like the advice “write marginalized characters but don’t write about marginalization unless you experience it”
absolutely i think cis people should expand their horizons and write trans characters, but they shouldn’t write stories about being trans. likewise i think allistic / NT authors should write about autistic characters! but not stories about being autistic.
represent us. absolutely. but don’t tell our stories. let us do that.
No it’s not. I’m so tired of this “Lol gay=good” mindset. Speaking as a writer, I was writing a story that had primarily straight characters. Why, because that’s how I imagined them. That’s who they were. This damn site guilted me into thinking I had to change my characters to make the story good. So I made some gay, some trans, changed the races of a few characters and names. And you know what, it fucking sucked. Not because the characters were lgbt or poc, but because I had forced them to be something they weren’t. I became disinterested with the story and depressed, and I came to the realization that the story didn’t need to have lgbt characters or poc charactes to be a good story, because a story isn’t about their sexual preference or color, it’s about who they are inside. I changed the characters back to how I originally had them, which was primarily straight and white, and the story was reinvigorated because I wasn’t forcing it to be something it wasn’t. I was allowing the story to be what it was.
So no, gay doesn’t equal better. Gay doesn’t mean good. And having this mindset can negatively impact stories when you force your characters to be something their not.
The Doctor Is Out 