Not so great a start to the day

Inexplicably sleepy despite overheated, fanless bedroom. Ended up drowsing back to sleep for another hour despite having at least 8 of them unconscious already, and later in the day than I would have liked.

Also led to oddly unpleasant dream in which Earth's biota had been contaminated by alien life. Was given a gift of a creature resembling a small deer or a vicuña by my mother as a pet. Unfortunately this creature turned out to reproduce asexually and continuously, somewhat like a tribble (although tribbles were not referenced as a concept in the dream) and I was at a loss for what to do with it since I preferred not to starve or more directly kill it.

More disturbingly it turned out that due to the way this creature's neurology worked it would always viciously and emphatically attack anything which touched it only once. The tone of this information was that it meant death for any human who committed that error. I was amazed and relieved this had not happened to anyone in my family and that my own particular compulsive tendencies had led to my not triggering this behaviour yet either.

Not a pleasant dream that, about having to look after an unwanted and dangerous burden of an otherwise pleasant-looking creature.

Representation

Last night watching Eureka one of the guest characters was supposedly Australian, except his accent was awfully all over the place. Left us wondering why they didn't just cast an Australian for the role. That, and an earlier episode of Frasier reminding that the trend in casting for trans women is cis men for laughs, cis women for pity, gave renewed impetus to write this intended post.

There is a lot of under-representation in our fiction, and in AV fiction often when a member of a marginalised group is depicted the part will be played by a member of a dominant group. Women are usually no longer played by men, although roles are limited. People of colour are usually no longer played by white people (but still too often), although roles are limited and frequent opportunities are taken to white-wash works and replace characters of colour with white characters. Trans characters are nearly always played by cis actors - almost always a trans woman is depicted and if she is an object of humour or ridicule she is played by a cis man; if we are supposed to feel sympathy for her she is played by a cis woman. Disabled characters are played by abled actors faking a disability in most cases.

Consequently many people advocate for better representation, like the outcry against the Avatar movie being transformed from one inhabited by Asian characters into one where a small band of white heroes saves the world (the one being directed by M. Night Shyamalan, not the one by James Cameron, which looks to be Super Space Colonialism anyway), or that people with disabilities and trans people should be cast to play the roles which represent them. I've also seen some backlash against this from among the people in question. At least wert trans people playing trans roles, people have argued that if we have that happening the actors will get typecast as 'trans actors' and their careers will be stalled due to being restricted to trans roles in an industry where there nearly are no trans roles. I would be unsurprised if there were similar protests elsewhere.

I don't think that should be the case though. Would it actually happen? I suppose it might, although given the current situation where cis actors play cis roles and cis actors play trans roles, and so on, it still seems like an improvement over no representation.

What I would like to see, in addition to more representative casting for existing roles is more diverse casting for roles which are not specifically marked as 'minority parts'. I am not inclined to agree that, for example, the aspirational goal for trans actors should be to play cis roles. I don't see any problem with such casting, but nor do I see a reason roles shouldn't accommodate the actors cast for them. It happens a lot in response to protests against things like white-washing of characters of colour, so why not turn it around?

That is, they tend to say "This character doesn't need to be Asian (or disabled, or female, or whatever), the story has universal appeal, so why can't ey be played by a white man?". (and again, often when people are arguing for the universality of a character or story's appeal seems to be when they are reaching for a straight, white, etc. man to represent this universality) So why not the other way round? We don't call straight men typecast if they only play straight men. Nor white men, nor abled men, nor cis men... but most roles are written for them. Unless the story actually depends on the character being one of those things, what would be wrong with casting someone else and tweaking the role to fit? Explicitly not meant to be about turning characters into gimmicks, because being not a straight white abled cis man isn't actually a gimmick, it's being also a normal kind of person who happens to not be that kind, and there's plenty of variety everywhere. Very rarely does the character actually need to be that man, so it is suspicious ey usually is.

Since I don't believe any group of people other than 'talented and / or skilled actors' has a monopoly on better acting ability than others, this leaves the conclusion that there are other factors than 'ability to play roles' involved in why most people we see in films and television aren't women, a third of them don't have disabilities, less than one in ten is other than straight, or why most of all of these people are white. If we were casting strictly to acting ability and weren't so biased in our conceptualisations of what people ordinarily are, I think our working actor demographics would be very different.

And of course, we aren't yet in a position where changing things in the other direction would be fair. It is after all the problem at hand.

Things too ordinary to notice

Accommodation and accessibility are among those mostly unnoticed things. When they are brought to our attention our response might be approving. It might be a scowling grumbling about expense, inconvenience and 'whining'. Might be something else, probably - humans are varied, though sometimes they seem distressingly monotonous.

Perhaps that is a poor preface. I have been thinking about accessibility and the difficulty that is had, the resistance to introducing new accessibility measures and having them implemented and maintained, especially widely. There is a bit of grim amusement in my consideration of that, lately, because really we worked so did so well on some accessibility so far, enough for maybe most of us, but there is so much resistance to going any further with it.

A lot of us with visual impairments have access to corrective lenses. Not all of us; I'd be shocked if easy quality glasses access weren't mainly the domain of middle class and up citizens of nations that call themselves 1st World. We make doors that most of us can reach and open easily. Reaching elevated locations we often put in stairs and expect them to be sized for our common feet and gait. Inside we add illumination, though not all of us need it.

Our signs are displayed in EM frequencies we can see; we use colours we can clearly differentiate as markers. We use auditory frequencies we can hear. We make our clothes out of materials which do not irritate our skin. We provide ourselves with foods which do not make ourselves sick or kill us. We refrain from filling our environments with pervasive, irritating sounds. We do not decorate with odours like onions or faecal matter because these produce adverse reactions in us. We don't use strobe lighting in work environments and consider it a problem to fix when we cannot accurately perceive our environment because of how it is structured. When we build structures we size them so that most of us can get around easily inside and outside, with enough room that we don't become stuck or unable to proceed.

It is a very long list. I doubt I have been anywhere near comprehensive and a lot of people could probably find glaring omissions in what I managed to come up with. The point being aimed at is that humans put a lot of effort into making their environment accessible to a subset of themselves. Comprehensively enough and long enough that most don't realise that a lot of why people with disabilities can have difficulty getting around and accessing things it is because they weren't included among those people initially built their world to suit and now when they point it out and say they want it changed, many see it as an extra imposition instead of a continuation of the work and attitudes that went into making navigating the world so easy for them.

Accessibility isn't something extra. It is the demand an incomplete work be continued.