characters often are vehicles to advance a story rather than being there to represent literal fucking people or swathes of people

like pretty much nothing i read, watch, or play has a fat white autistic guy and y’know what? I manage to fucking deal cause I got basic empathy and can relate to people that aren’t like me or look like me. I can understand the roles characters can play in a story on an intellectual level, too.

people act like children about this-

no, not even children. children can relate to people that don’t look like them.

Samuel L Jackson is a massive fan of Nick Fury. the WHITE Nick Fury, the eyepatched immortal spy, and that’s why he had Marvel cast him as Fury in exchange for using his likeness for the Ultimate universe, cause Nick Fury’s fuckin awesome. dude loves Lone Wolf and Cub, even though the leads are a Japanese man and boy.

The politics that tell them they are classes and deserve and need this “representation” in “society” in order to be valid. And in turn, see works that lack this nod to them as ineffectual, or even as deliberate slights against them. The implication that artists are OBLIGATED to make their creative works reflect society. When that is not, nor has that ever been part of the package of being an artist. Artists make what they want, why they want, for whom they want.

The implication that “society” is a monolithic, objective thing that has objective coherent rules about how you’re going to conduct yourself or you are hands down wrong, especially when it comes to race and cultural differences. Like if your country is 1/10th Muslim, you’re expected to modify your story’s mythology to include them in it and not pretend like Islamic mythology has no bearing in your fantasy setting. And you HAVE to do this, because if not, you’re “homogenuous.”

All it boils down to is some mean girl getting the Karens of the world to know, there’s a new invisible rule set in place. It’s on bogus pretenses but if you cross that line, the other Karens are encouraged to and have the right to turn away from you or even spit on you, if they aren’t polite and decor women. It’s the exact same mechanism of peer pressure and delusion that makes women see themselves as ugly or obese if they aren’t toeing the line, it’s just used for a social justice bend to get people to embrace it wholesale and in turn buffer that message and expectation so other women feel obliged to do it, too. To the point where they don’t even realize the insecurity and denial involved, and it just becomes normal. The ability to de-person or de-importance something because it doesn’t meet some arbitrary, contemporary criteria.

They’re being taught to think this way by the same people that brought you privilege theory. And privilege theory plays into their hierarchy of whom deserves representation, and why. Taking it for granted that you tokenize groups by their racial category, their ability status, their sex and gender, their sexual orientation. Basically anything that this crowd declares as, “outside the norm” that they champion as underdogs being inherently oppressed by the majority. But only certain kinds of majorities, in certain parts of the world.