Specifying a ‘racist conservative’ is redundant.
No point fighting. Just remember its the same people that don’t understand a scholarship only for “people of color” is by definition racist. If a “white people” only scholarship is racist so is the one for people of color.
Are you pretending to misunderstand because you’re a racist, or do you actually misunderstand because you’re an idiot?
We just got the Canadian Future Party, and even though I’m pretty left leaning (both financially and socially), it gives me some faith for conservatives here.
The Canadian Future Party (CFP; French: Parti avenir canadien, PAC) is a minor federal political party in Canada that was officially launched in 2024. It describes itself as being politically centrist, campaigning on a fiscally conservative and socially liberal platform.
That made me audibly groan, along with this:
- Allowing the private sector to take a larger role in society with government oversight
- Simplifying the tax code to close loopholes in cooperation with the provinces and territories
- Ending corporate subsidies and supply management where a return on investment cannot be delivered
I’m happy to be proven wrong, but this seems like a recipe for laissez-faire capitalism that will eventually end in a collective shrug, a few golden parachutes, and a recession. Canada does not need more centrism.
Translation:
Allowing the private sector to take a larger role in society with government oversight
Privatise profits, socialise losses
Simplifying the tax code to close loopholes in cooperation with the provinces and territories
Lower overall taxes, austerity
Ending corporate subsidies and supply management where a return on investment cannot be delivered
End climate-protecting subsidies
I wish all representation was done as well as when it was done out of creative choice rather than trying to win progressiveness points
It’s kinda weird to try to include representation without it feeling shoe horned. The world of TES (of any fictional world) is entirely hand-created. There are no accidents, all of it is intentional.
This means that, no matter how it’s done, any character deviating from the “norm” was consciously chosen to be so. These things that need representation (disabilities, gender identity, sexuality, race, etc) are all things people don’t get to choose, so there’s an inherent disconnect between the hand crafted world choosing to include diversity, and the real world necessarily having diversity because of chaos.
Following this thread, there’s never been a case of inclusivity, or exclusivity, that isn’t shoehorned in. It’s always been entirely the will of the author to include or exclude these representations. With that in mind, I think it’s only a good thing to see more diverse authors bringing more diverse worlds and characters into existence.
That’s kind of a weird argument. I always took “shoe-horned” to imply that it is pressed into something by force where it doesn’t quite fit. So, in my mind just because something is intentional doesn’t mean it is shoe-horned.
Creative works always come from the authors lived experiences. The reason why we often find representation of minorities missing in media, is because these minorities don’t get to work on them. If there would be more diverse teams working on something we would naturally see more of their diverse experiences represented.
However, for this to be the case a lot would have to change in our society. It is way easier to just keep things more or less as they were and let people without minority experiences write and add minority characters. These, in turn, feel off, feel shoe-horned in, because they aren’t based off of lived experiences. They are just there to check a box.
Conversely, the reason why it feels like we used to have better (though less) diverse representations in media is because these actually came from people who had these experiences.
Eh, I think we just have different perspectives on things being short horned. In my view, anything that isn’t critical information to the story, it’s shoehorned in. If you tell me the main characters favorite food is pasta, and then don’t do anything with it, it’s shoe horned in. If you tell me a character is gay, and then don’t do anything they couldn’t have done the same with a straight character, changing a couple of pronouns, it’s shoehorned in.
To be clear though, I don’t think this is a bad thing. A story with only critical information will… Well, it’ll work, but it’ll be bland. Same if you make all of your characters blond, blue eyed, straight white men. Adding these details tends to be what makes us remember and identify with a character. That doesn’t make it any more strictly relevant to the story. Most characters people would view as “diverse” - even the ones people like - fall into this category, i think.
I think a better argument is, if these traits ARE shoehorned in, their alternative “normal” traits would be as well. If you go out of your way to state a character is straight, it’s just as shoehorned if everything else is equivalent. Do THOSE characters inspire the same ire? If not, we should examine the why of that specifically.
It only feels shoe horned when they don’t write the character well.
There are a lot of cases where the person isn’t allowed to have any flaws or character development because they’re too scared to make them look bad in any way, which also means none of their achievements feel earned. Ohers where they just don’t care enough to waste screen time on things that aren’t highlighting whatever group they’re a part of
Have been a fair few shows I’ve seen where they’ve done it right, recently Kaos had a trans character who actually felt like a human being instead of a token “hey look we have a trans person”
The recent doctor who special is one of the bad examples, most of the time the woman in a wheelchair is onscreen it’s because they’re drawing attention to the wheelchair (oh no, a ladder, oh no a set of stairs etc etc) and not to develop her character in any way besides that
I’m still taking that over no representation at all 🤷♀️
Seriously though, representation as a background noise is - imho - one of the most potent tools for normalisation.
And the persons who did good representation haven’t disappeared. They’re still doing the lord’s work.
Background noise isn’t an issue for me, if there isn’t an unnatural amount of attention being drawn and the pace of the story isn’t interrupted that’s just adding interest
The problem lies for me when said character isn’t fleshed out in other ways and their only defining trait is that they’re x, or that they don’t give them any character flaws because they’re too afraid to offend that group. Results in a character that doesn’t feel natural to the story
I see your point and don’t disagree exactly… but…
I will say it is odd that I hear this kind of criticism of flat gay/female/minority/etc characters but for some reason never hear complaints about the equally-flatly written comic relief characters, or best friend characters, or sage characters, etc. Video games and other stories frequently contain flat characters that are used more as props for the protagonist or other characters to react and respond to, yet complaints about these characters seem to only pop up when said characters happen to represent an under-represented demographic.
“They would have made it woke” is the dumbest fuckin attitude to take
I have been mistaken in this case
Sounds like you gotta brush up on your elder scrolls lore my dude. You completely missed the joke that TES was always “woke”.
Dude, you gotta check out elder scrolls lore, it’s fucking wild. The world runs on clockwork, vivec gave molag bal sloppy toppy while his toppy was sloppy (he was headless), the lizards lick trees to become argonians which are wifi-enabled (the Hist trees can remotely control argonians, which meant shit got real during the Oblivion Crisis and Mehrunes Dagon, a fucking daedric prince pissed himself in fear when he tried to invade the Black Marsh), there are like, 72 1/2 forms of khajiit, it’s heavily suggested that the elder scrolls is a post-apocalyptic fantasy game…
Also, every race in the elder scrolls has had a space program. The khajiit space program was literally just them standing on each other’s shoulders to reach space.
Oh yeah. And the dragon breaks. When time and space just kinda fuck up and every possible outcome happens at the same time before settling onto a single thread (in-universe explanation for why there’s one canon ending to each game despite players being able to get other endings; each game takes place during a dragon break).
So like, are you saying the fascists aren’t bad guys?
No they didn’t?
If I’m not getting whooshed from you playing the act:
The joke is that everything in the meme is already in the established TES canon. But capital G Gamers™ (which I hate that those assholes made that word negative), being media illiterate and being “anti woke”, often don’t see what their loved games contain, even if they complain about those things.
Let’s hear it for badly written caricatures of racists that are so over-the-top that they allow real racists to say to themselves “I’m not actually a racist, because I’m not extreme as this flimsy caricature of a racist, which is what racists are really like.”
I hate the idea that we have to write more well-developed racists just to get racists to recognize that they’re, you know, fucking racist, but god damn it, it needs to happen. Skryim is just one of many offenders, video games alone are just one of many offenders as well. Really its the whole US media landscape that has nothing but flimsy, weak caricatures of racists. I personally think these weak caricatures are part and parcel to why it’s hard to get racists to have self-reflection because we’re not actually doing the hard work of writing realistic racist characters who don’t start so extreme. Becoming a virulently violent racist takes time and doesn’t happen overnight, and those events that lead to it fall under the umbrella of what’s often called “character development.”
/end unrelated rant
Write a well rounded racist character and you get racists rooting for that character. Racists will never self reflect when they see a well written racist character. It’s like how there are men who don’t see that the characters in Fight Club and Joker are bad people, and rather see themselves in them.
