We live in a world that's pretty damn diverse. Especially if you're an American living somewhere other than Corn Field, USA. And as far as diverse societies go, we're pretty damn aware of our diversity. From the Civil Rights movement in the 60s to gay activism and current movements like the Women's March, the US is by far the most liberal place on Earth.

Sometimes people like to claim that European countries are doing it right with their free healthcare and plummeting economies, but what these Europhiles don't realize is that Europe is racist as all hell. Turns out it's really easy to claim you're an accepting place when everyone around you looks the same.

Now that I've thrown that garbage argument away, we can get down to business. And business is booming.

The Diversity Meltdown

As you may have noticed, the last couple years, both in terms of American politics and in media, diversity is the new chic. Nonstandard genders, non-white actors, and diverse body-types are all on the hitlist for everyone from video game producers to comic writers and especially Hollywood executives.

Star Wars got both a black and female lead. Thor and Iron Man both became women (in the comics) and Iron "Man" was black. Imagineer that!

Totally not dating myself with that joke.

Now Doctor Who is apparently going to be played by a woman, and while I haven't watched the show in years due to its continuous decline in quality, this was definitely a red flag for me.

Now don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that the woman cast isn't a capable actor nor do I believe she'll make the show significantly worse. My issue here is with the whole forced inclusion feeling, a related term is affirmative action.

To use a baseball analogy:

A Racist team would be a team that has only Green Players, Red players are not allowed to try out. A Fair Team, allows both Green and Red players to try out for the team, players with the greatest skill or sportsmanship are selected. Affirmative Action is basically when both Green and Red players are allowed to try out, but the Red players are given a t-ball set up instead of being pitched to. Probability states that by lowering the skill bar for players of a certain color, Red in this case, the team will be more diverse. Unfortunately this has the side effect of creating animosity between the players, potentially weakening the team and making selected Red players tokens. In the end nobody wins. It's a classic example of fighting the symptoms, not the disease.

And THAT is the problem. But what is forced inclusion, and why is it bad? I'm glad you asked.

Above we have the cast of characters from Overwatch a 2016 game that has already made a big splash in the gaming community. Now aside from being a technical success, the game is also an artistic marvel. The characters look awesome and are incredibly diverse. The game more or less borrowed the Pixar style and created a whole bunch of characters that are all different genders, races, and shapes and sizes. Now gameplay-wise, this has a purpose.

Each character has an ability that works sort of like rock-paper-scissors. No ability is unstoppable though, so identifying characters and their abilities at range, and doing so quickly is vital to success against the enemy team.

On top of this, it just makes the game more visually appealing. Normally, rosters this diverse are limited to fighting games like Soul Caliber and Super Smash Bros.

Hollywood has gone and made a run at this too with varying levels of success. Mainstream movies like Creed, Spiderman: Homecoming, Guardians of the Galaxy, Ghostbusters, and both recent Star Wars movies have all done this.

But what's the difference between this:

AND this:

Or These two?

One of each pair is the result of forced inclusion. Some cases of this are harder to lock down than others, but let's start with the easy one.

Ghostbusters (1984) was a classic comedy/sci-fi (probably the most underserved genre in all of cinema) that is both a timeless example of 80s film making and practical effects as well as a cult-classic that has more or less risen out of cultdom. It's universally acclaimed as a fun, funny movie.

This is what made the Ghostbusters reboot/sequel such a perversion. And people knew it.

After the trailer was uploaded the video soon became the single lowest rated video on youtube by volume. Over a million thumbs down clicks.

Now do I think that over a million users were a bunch of sexists who saw women and lost their minds? No. Some of them probably were, but I think the majority of people saw a moronic attempt to cash in on the changing social climate while scoring brownie points for a diverse cast. But the executives were obviously too nervous to actually put any faith in the project, so they dug up the corpse of the Ghostbusters franchise and put some lipstick on it. It's a disgrace.

This movie suffers the same problem that every serious gender swap does (Adventure Time notwithstanding). Women cast in male roles is a transparent attempt to get credit where none is due. There's no originality, no effort, and no faith that women (50% of the human population mind you) could possibly support a movie on their own. So they're only allowed to come in after the groundwork has already been laid by a man.

So what makes the race and gender diversity in Spiderman: Homecoming acceptable? It's that it feels natural (with the exception of casting an Indian Flash Thompson, what?). Peter Parker goes to diverse school and this his classmates are diverse. The school is a school for smart kids and thus it wouldn't just be kids from his area, but kids from all over the city and maybe even farther away.

Now Creed and Star Wars are interesting examples because the problem is clouded by nostalgia, aka, the Dark Side.

Creed works because they're continuing a franchise with direct reference to the previous films. Rocky Balboa plays a major role in the movie and Apollo Creed's son is the protagonist. Done Ghostbusters style, the movie would've been Rocky recast as a black kid. It changes the character and warps the continuity by putting a block in it.

Instead, what we got is a great continuation of a good series. Creed is a great film and Michael B. Jordan is a fantastic actor.

Newly owned by Disney, Star Wars has had mixed success. Finn, in the Force Awakens was a likeable, relatable character played by Boyega. Rey is more of a blank slate, but she unfortunately has a kind of mary-sue fangirl thing going on. She's good a everything she does and is kind of unlikable. Compared to the incredibly meek yet skilled pilot that Luke was, It's understandable that the more critical of the viewers took notice.

However, Rey is NOT Star Wars' problem woman. Captain Phasma has a cool suit of armor, but basically does nothing the whole movie and then gets thrown in the garbage, literally. She's got a bit of a Boba Fett thing going on in that the fanbase loves her just because she looks cool. Neither character actually DOES anything. Just to clarify, there's nothing wrong with a cool looking background character, in fact, Star Wars in particular is full of these kinds of characters (just look at the Cantina scene from the original) but the problem here is that Phasma was all over the promotional material, she was everywhere, but had no right to be. She was such a minor character that there is no justification to stick all over cereal boxes.

And yeah, Boba Fett took Han Solo to Jabba the Hutt, but that's only after the imperials captured him. I'm not going to nerd fight any of you.

Next up we have another gender-swap (see my Wonder Woman review) in the form of Maz Kanata. This one is pretty straight forward, she's just a worse female Yoda. I realize Star Wars is a series built on archetypes, that's part of the reason it's so good, but this is just lazy. Yoda is one of the most likeable and important characters the to the franchise so you can't just paint over him with lip stick and score brownie points for being progressive. Not to mention, politics aside, she's ugly as all hell. Just bad character design.

Edit: While cleaning up this article I found the below on google, apparently I wasn't alone in thinking she was a waste of space. Good riddance.

However, Jyn Erso, the female lead of Rogue One is without a doubt the worst character that's ever been on screen in a Star Wars movie. She's not bad because she's a woman, she's just BORING. Her dad is boring too, but he's not the lead character.

The problem here is that Disney likely saw the praise they received for casting the bland, yet acceptable Daisy Riddley in the role of Rey and decided their next film needed a female lead as well, which got us into a kind of affirmative action situation. Disney sought out a woman regardless of acting talent and cast her.

Now this is speculation on my part, it could be coincidental, and it could be that she simply had bad directing, but I have a hard time believing someone so starved for charisma made it into the casting booth without a little help from Daddy-Disney.

The recent Star Wars games have been getting the millennial treatment as well with elderly women as Storm Troopers.

No doubt the reason for this monstrous feature was to make all the softies at home feel like they could relate with the stormtroopers whom they were playing as. But what the failed to realize is that nobody liked it. Yeah, turns out we want our space Nazis to look like space Nazis. They're even called STORMTROOPERS for goodness sake. Hell, even their weapons are based off of Nazi weaponry such as the Dlt-19 which is just a slightly modified MG34, one of the most feared Nazi weapons.

The decision was so universally disliked that the developer of the game actually patched the helmet-less stormtroopers out of the game, permanently. And this is a good thing. Star Wars is a series of icons and we want are bad guys BAD. And we want our good guys GOOD.

Ignoring the fact that the majority of Imperial troopers were clones until the middle era of the Empire, my and everyone else's problem with this sort of stuff is that we don't believe the evil empire is suddenly an equal opportunity employer.

But DICE it seems still hasn't learned their lesson because we have another lovely lady as a Storm Commando in the new Battlefront game.

Now I'm not saying that women don't belong in Star Wars because Star Wars has some of the coolest and most badass women in all of cinema (Aayla Secura, Princess Leia, Mon Mothma, Padme, Asajj Ventress HELLO) and I'm not saying women can't kick ass. All I'm saying is that it's hard for me to imagine these guys being super accepting of anyone. Not to mention the Evil Galactic Empire shouldn't be adopting our cultural standards.

But for the love of God, don't bring this up in front of any comment section because apparently we've reached peak intolerance when it comes to differing opinions. We are now so fragile that minorities and women can't be criticized without someone crying wolf.

This screenshot is from the Trailer for "Proud Mary".

Proud Mary, is the title of a black-lead action movie with a female protagonist. It looks like trash but trailers can sometimes mislead you... But you better not say that in front of any of these people because you might get called a racist. OR a sexist. Or hey, why not both?

I touched on this briefly in my Wonder Woman review but allow me to clarify here. Women are equal to men. They deserve the same respect, power and celebration that comes with being a man.

I don't believe that men and women are the same, because I'm not a lunatic, but they should be treated as equals, because they are.

In fiction women and minorities should be villains, heroes, cowards, leaders, and soldiers. They should be sexy, ugly, interesting, and boring. But they should never be the same.

There is nothing more insulting than giving women and minorities a participation award and then patting ourselves on the back for it. Women deserve parts written for women and minorities deserve parts written for them. They deserve to be taken seriously enough to be given difficult criticism, not babied.

Pretending to accept someone is worse than publicly ostracizing them. We shouldn't be blind to differences, we should acknowledge and celebrate them.

Not too long ago an Indian kid I used to babysit on occasion asked why the film Moonlight won an Oscar and Lion (a biographical movie about an Indian boy) did not. He had watched the awards with his parents and they had all enjoyed the movie Lion so much they were excited for it to win.

I told him that the reason was probably because the previous year some African-American's in Hollywood and many more non-blacks threw a temper tantrum because the Oscar's weren't giving enough awards to black films and actors. Moonlight won three oscars the next year. Seems like the squeaky wheel gets the grease, but it hardly seems fair to Lion, the superior movie.

At time of writing Moonlight has a 7.5 on IMDB and Lion has an 8.1.

I thought we were acknowledging accomplishment in filmmaking, not bitching and moaning.

Oh and if you're looking for uproar I'll direct you to the nonsense that was the Ghost in the Shell casting "controversy". I put the word controversy in quotes because it's only controversial if you're brain dead and completely uninformed about the source material.

The truth is Hollywood and American culture in general has a long way to go before we can stop having discussions like this, but it's always good to pump the brakes once in a while and make sure we aren't barreling down the wrong path. With media starting to wise up to the idea that "gee maybe white people aren't the only people that matter" it's no surprise that they're still continuing to aim for center mass. Nuanced characters and natural, inclusive writing is hard. It's a lot easier to just gender-swap a character (Doctor Who) than it is write a wholly new and interesting character (Creed).

Writers write what they know, and since most writers are men... well, you get the picture.

Hopefully soon the entertainment industries will start to look as diverse as this stock photo, and that's all we can hope for.

WAIT Where's the guy in the wheelchair!?

The Spill

"Progress" An Essay on Moving Forward

August 25, 2017Michael Scott

The Diversity Meltdown

-Discuss King-

The Spill

"Progress" An Essay on Moving Forward

August 25, 2017Michael Scott

The Diversity Meltdown