aesmael

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.

Originally published at a denizen's entertainment. You can comment here or there.

I like writing stories. You like reading stories. Do you like my stories enough to keep reading them?

This is not intended as a personal question. The 'I' is generic, so is the you.

Automated story generation. It is an idea I first picked up from 1984, where stories were mass-produced by machines to keep the proles sedated. Since about then I've considered such story generation a plausible, likely sort of eventuality. Included it in some stories no one yet has read. I don't see why there couldn't such production of stories unless we turn out to be living in a dualist or otherwise supernatural sort of universe.

Typically I see it as a bit of a personally bleak prospect. Writers as a set of humans obsoleted by an equivalent or superior source of fiction. Today I wondered about parochialism, and maybe for some time people would prefer stories written by humans because of the sort of prejudices that lead them to say only humans can make stories worth reading, humans have creativity, humans have something ineffable that sets them apart. Maybe some would like reading the stories of those they knew or liked. I wonder in such a scenario how likely it is human authors would still develop a following.

*meaning here stories made by (nonhumans made by humans to some degree of antecedence)

This was originally composed as a response to a guest post at Questioning Transphobia:

Lately I am increasingly inclined to be critical of 'empathy' as applied to autistic and neurotypical* people. We might say autistic people lack empathy because they often do not have an intuitive understanding of people different from themselves, thoughts, feelings, motivations and actions. But then, it seems to me neurotypical people display an equal lack of empathy toward autistic people - they say autistic people do things for no reason, are 'mysteries', are 'unable to relate'.

So I suspect neurotypical people are not actually more empathetic than autistic people, but most people are like them and so they have a lot of opportunities to be accurate in attributing motive, feeling, desire, etc. who operate largely similarly to themselves. But they also happen to be the majority, or at least are in power and presented as default, so 'empathy' becomes 'ability to relate to and understand me'.

Actually, given the way people are treated across borders of culture, identity, physiology, am inclined to question whether empathy as it is claimed to be is much expressed at all.


*here used to mean 'not autistic', despite my interpretation of neurodiversity as being broader than merely autism; such an interpretation unfortunately leaves me without the clear and easy way to express this which neurotypical originally provided.

The article is mainly about dyscalculia and models of how humans count. However, what I found most interesting was the boxed out bit at the end.

It suggests that people growing up under different counting schemes will perceive numbers differently. In the particular example given, people whose language counts only up to five appeared to relate to numbers in a logarithmic way, rather than the linear number line English speakers typically default to.

I am always nervous reporting from sources like New Scientist; I tend to be especially worried there will be inaccuracies or misleading aspects... but I am not so dedicated nor so competent / resourceful as to be able to investigate all that interests me thoroughly, so I trust other sources to process and present information for me for the most part. Like with the previous post and many details which could have been scrutinised more closely.

(especially without commentary)

However:

Most people like to imagine themselves big novels, 800 page doorstops that include forty fascinating characters buzzing around each other, major crisis and triumphs, maybe even a world scale event like a war or a natural disaster in the background. All of this preferably described with panache and poetry by a Russian master like Tolstoy or a French wordsmith like Proust. But the truth is most of us live 243 page lives, if that. There are only a few major characters in our stories, maybe a mid-level crisis or two, certainly some triumph or tragedy sprinkled throughout, but none of it profound or interesting enough to demand more pages, more explication, more background. Thoreau famously said most people live lives of quiet desperation. He could just as easily have said most lives can be summed up effectively in 200 page novels written by adequate midlist authors.

Sometimes I just want to show people stuff.

This is not right. A system that so fails and neglects those who have damaged themselves in its service, does deserve their service. It needs to be fixed. People do not deserve to be abandoned or fobbed off for financial convenience.

And the stigma surrounding mental health issues needs to go away.

It's a funny thing being an immigrant. If you get a job you are awful for taking jobs away from fine, upstanding members of [nationality], but if you have no job you are a worthless drain on welfare sucking the system dry. If you are a person of colour you do not even have to be an immigrant.

Bored with that titling system. Let's leave it blank for now.

Dispatches from the Culture Wars

1. Thoughts on Day One of the DNC [Maybe I should amalgamate all the Scienceblogs postings under a single heading. I find something vaguely distasteful about this and the last post from here. Maybe it is an air of self-congratulation.]
2. Effete Hollywood Elitists for McCain

Google Reader Shared Items

1. The Future of Books [via soltice. Was expecting "E-books: Yea or abomination?" Instead, Pretty.]
2. Laser pointers banned in New South Wales after rash of attacks on pilots [via soltice. But I want one.]
3. Super Mario Girls [via soltice. Cute, yes. Not everything needs to be done with sex appeal in mind though. And since when are "fluffy clouds with faces and bubbly turtles and blocky landscapes" unmanly? But I like the picture.]
4. Cat 5 wedding rings help nerds couple [via soltice. I, uh, don't know what these actually do.]
5. Moe Angel with Headphones [via soltice. Cute cute cute! *save*]
6. Bioware devs debate whether Wii is part of gaming [via gentle_gamer. It seems an odd question to me, since the Wii seems clearly a device for playing games, but the post is just a quick summary linking to an interview. No, wait. That was a preface too. Interview here. There are lots of words there at the beginning but I am not entirely sure these people are saying anything... a bit like reading some Post-Modern discourse. It seems like an interesting question though: what counts as gaming? I want to say "playing a game". This talk of narrative... that seems like something else to me. Something called 'narrative'. Describing the experience of playing a Wii as "toy-like", or making a distinction with sports such as tennis, this seems to me like an attempt to mark gaming as a particular kind of experience, a particular approach to an activity. I think what is being gotten at is a degree of seriousness and immersion. I think it probably does constitute a bundle of approaches, any subset of which can apply at a given time, and what the Bioware folks are talking about constitutes one of these subsets. Although reading to the end of the page I think I misunderstood them a bit. I am being vague because I am tired. Possibly follow up later with input from others?]
7. Celebrate Mario Kart Wii with alternate karts, Wii wheel substitutions [via gentle_gamer. Funny.]
8. Working NES squeezed into ... an NES cartridge [via gentle_gamer. Wow, neat! This title messes with my ideas of how it should be pronounced.]
9. SIU responds to anti-feminist email [via gentle_gamer. Oh, wow! It feels so rare to see such a desirable response, it can get disheartening.]
10. The Fag Bug is back! [via gentle_gamer. That's a pretty creative and great response to vandalism. Interesting seeing the change in tone of people's responses between the first post, in which Erin Davies starts her mission, and the second post, in which it is revealed she is getting a book and film deal out of this.]

Gmail Web Clip clickings

1. David Wain Moves From Wainy Days to Role Models [Who is this guy? Why do I care what he does? I fear curiosity clicking from gmail has gotten the better of me...]
2. Time to "Free the Airwaves" [Google would like people to be activist on their behalf.]
3. Top Fun Date Ideas [These are not romantic? My idea of a going-somewhere date is to do something we will enjoy, so these seem more like standard date ideas than special fun ones. Admittedly I have been on very few dates in my life, but this makes it seem like something which is supposed to be very restrained in ways which are not interesting to me. At least now I know what an Interpretive Center is.*]

Respectful Insolence

1. "To kill and cure cancer, you must first understand it" [Orac is as ever verbose.]

Signout

1. The luxury of time [I've not encountered this blog before. This is... fascinating. Not much to say because processing.]

Uncertain Principles

1. It's 4am [Labs are not supposed to be flooded. Unless you work in underseaology.]

My assignment is as done as it is getting, so I sleep now. Test in five hours.

*This whole response reads like something which I would respond to in someone else with scorn, as if they are trying to show off how special and above ordinary concerns they are. Ah well.

"So good, you will want to share it with everyone."