The White Male

[DoPo]

Also if you want to see more ethnic people in games why haven't you bought any.

Should I be a little bit disturbed that you seem to be well familiar with his purchase history?

 

[Erttheking]

Those gosh darned Americans! They make American movies, for a primarily American audience, and they have the audacity to cast Americans! And take them from the racial group that makes up two-thirds of the population! It's almost as though movie studios felt that exposing people to unfamiliar people and situations and alienate them, putting a commercial project that cost tens of millions of dollars at risk. How abominable of them. Marketing is marketing, folks.

In a broader sense, however, I think we might be making a big, big mistake here, especially when I read comments like this:

Nope. A Canadian Heterosexual white male is just as safe and boring as an American one. ...In fact...

Yup, just as boring

Nothing wrong with the archetype inherently , but let's not pretend it isn't a massive safe zone that gets treated as default for arbitrary reasons.

Supposedly, white guys are responsible for war, pollution, slavery, economic inequality, social injustice, global instability, the "oppression" of every other racial and social group out there, and they STILL qualify as "safe and boring"? What do they have to do to impress you people? More to the point, what is it you're egging them on to try to get them to DO!?

Yup. They're boring because they're a dime a dozen and I'm tired of them being the main characters in absolutely everything. Also, I'm not interested in your strawman arguments. (White man speaking here)

 

[Erttheking]

Snip

*Tilts head* Who said I didn't buy any? I said that the white man was a creative safe zone. I've got games like Far Cry 4 and Assassin's Creed 3.

 

[Neurotic Void Melody]

Aww, I was expecting this to be a David Attenborough style breakdown of biological notes from observing the white male in his natural habitat. Yet again, tinterwebs, you disappoint me.

OT. Yeah, the black haired, american white male protagonist is in so many damn games I own. Not good when the red haired community is never pandered for. All I get is bloody Ganondorf!

 

[Jack Action]

Both his parents are polish immigrants, though over all the games they tend to play up the American-ness more than anything, with the Polish part just meaning he speaks the language pretty fluently and sympathizes with the Polish pretty heavily.

Though this begs the question now, do we count his nationality or the nationality of his parents over anything? Everyone in game (well, don't know about the... 2rd reboot, never played that one) tends to refer to him as an American, soo...

Eh, fair enough. Would've been better if he was a Polish Pole though, imo.

 

[lord canti]

So if there was a black character who's personality and story was cliche and boring as hell, he or she would still be more interesting if that character was white?

 

[Mong0]

I know that everyone says they're sick of white male protagonists, but honestly I think you guys really just mean Americans. I mean, people from Germany, France, Italy, Netherlands, Canada, Russia, or where ever you can find people with melanin deficiency are hardly well represented in mass media. They're either the bad guys or stereotypes.

And if you don't mean Americans, then isn't having a problem with the color of someone's skin kind of, I don't know, racist?

I agree with you. I'm not sure how anyone can advocate for the removal of a character type based solely on race or sex and not consider it racist or sexist.

 

[Silvanus]

I agree with you. I'm not sure how anyone can advocate for the removal of a character type based solely on race or sex and not consider it racist or sexist.

Who's advocating they be removed? So far, people are only advocating that the proportions shift-- white male heroes would still be there (obviously).

 

[Popido]

Its not like theres much to choose from. You either get white or poc. All whites are white, all pocs are poc.

But when you tackle genders you start to see diversity with fluidragon dominate half-slaanesh and such. We need to ignore the boring pocs and white men, and instead go back to dragons, bears and bandicoots. The truly oppressed gender sexual preferences.

 

[Silvanus]

1. The white part is meaningless, it's just to pretty the demand for more female protagonists making that side seem more socially justifiable.

Who says? I want characters of different ethnicities sometimes. Am I just fibbing?

3. Female protagonist in all of fiction are considered sexist unless absolutely perfect in any way possible (AKA Guybrush Threepwood cannot be a girl argument)

Rubbish. Treat a female protagonist no differently (the same amount of clothes is a good start), and there wouldn't really be much noise. See Red (Transistor), FemShep, Yuna, Ellen Ripley, Faith (M.E.), Chell (to use modern examples).

 

[Bizzaro Stormy]

So quick question, how many of you having gaming buddies? Do you know people who play games off the internet? Why don't you politely and neutrally ask them if they care about the current state of video game protagonists. See how they react and then come tell us about it. But no cheating by asking them leading questions. Let them bring their own natural opinions to you.

 

[The Almighty Aardvark]

2. That being said, if you want a game with a black protagonist, buy from an african gaming developer (or movie studio), chinese, buy from a game company in china... etc. Guess what, the character's race is heavily dependant on where the company is located and the writers (AKA the high amount of jews in comics).

There happens to be a lot of non-white people in North America. In United States white people make up only 77%, or 63% if you get rid of the white hispanic or latino population. I don't think you see anywhere close to 1/4 protagonists being non-white. Maybe 1/10. That feels pretty optimistic to me.

Nobody's saying that it's not okay to have a majority of white protagonists, they're just commenting on the absolutely overwhelming majority that doesn't fit at all with the population.

3. Female protagonist in all of fiction are considered sexist unless absolutely perfect in any way possible (AKA Guybrush Threepwood cannot be a girl argument), I still remember some idiot saying Pandora (from the greek myth) is sexist.

Myths are stories made by people (Often people who're a lot more sexist than we are now) so I don't see any reason why they can't be sexist. (I don't know if you've noticed this, but there tends to be a theme in mythology of the first woman fucking things over for everybody else).

And as for your first part, I'm pretty sure that's bull. Yeah, female characters tend to get more scrutiny than male characters, but they by no means need to be perfect. Buffy the Vampire Slayer tends to be touted as a good female character, and she has a whole mess of flaws and weaknesses. Could you give some examples of female characters who are unfairly scrutinized on the basis of not being perfect?

 

[Silentpony_v1legacy]

Isn't it better to say people are bored of bad stories? I mean Dark Knight had an entire white cast, save the Gangstas, and the four main men where all straight white males.
Yet that fucker was amazing! Everyone loved it!

But Assassin's Creed Unity has a damn near all white male cast, and it was crap. And it was crap because it was a crap story, not the white men. I mean even with a Scooby gang of political correctness, it would still have been crap.

Dark Knight would still have been amazing if the Joker was black or Bruce was gay. It would have still worked because the story was amazing.

 

[ForumSafari]

Having a character who is a protagonist with flaws who is a woman or a visible minority and you're bound to get a massive ammount of flak from a specific group of people, which I won't name names but you all know who I'm talking about.

This is definitely true for women characters, people seem to confuse a realistic female character and a strong female character.

 

[Lightspeaker]

Don't really want to get involved in the main argument going on here but there's a couple of related things I want to comment on.

It's a trope that is often fine, I don't think most people making this complaint seriously want to see a Victorian era drama in London include a majority Japanese cast,

I'm not sure that that's the best example to use...because its effectively been done.

Black Butler, specifically the live action film version. If you don't know the series then in short its a manga-turned-anime based on a 13 year old noble called Ciel Phantomhive and his demonic butler, Sebastian (who his soul is pledged to be eventually consumed by), fighting the forces of darkness at the behest of Queen Victoria. Set in Victorian-era England.

For the live action version they actually totally rewrote the setting (moving it from Victorian London to 2020s 'unspecified eastern nation') specifically so they could cast japanese actors and actresses in it. And they changed it from a teenage boy to a young adult girl because...well I believe its because the relationship between Sebastian and Ciel gets kinda creepy from time to time and they wanted to avoid all of those implications.

It looks like they're going the same way with Attack on Titan as well actually. From what I remember (its been like six months since I watched the series) there was a big deal made about the fact that Mikasa has Asian heritage because its so rare. But the live action Attack on Titan stuff is exclusively Asian actors from what I've seen.

All I know was that this kinda thing was played for laughs to sell a car


Maybe mass media DOES have a point

I dunno tho

As a Brit I actually rather like that stereotype since its almost always portrayed as a very classy way; plus its a guaranteed way for Brits to get acting jobs in Hollywood. X-D

 

[visiblenoise]

Isn't it better to say people are bored of bad stories? I mean Dark Knight had an entire white cast, save the Gangstas, and the four main men where all straight white males.
Yet that fucker was amazing! Everyone loved it!

But Assassin's Creed Unity has a damn near all white male cast, and it was crap. And it was crap because it was a crap story, not the white men. I mean even with a Scooby gang of political correctness, it would still have been crap.

Dark Knight would still have been amazing if the Joker was black or Bruce was gay. It would have still worked because the story was amazing.

Good post.

I'm not terribly interested in cultural or gender backgrounds and how they color a perspective, least of all when I'm playing a triple-A videogame for the thrills of punching and kicking and shooting. Inserting such an element would just be distracting from the real point of the story.

 

[The Almighty Aardvark]

Isn't it better to say people are bored of bad stories? I mean Dark Knight had an entire white cast, save the Gangstas, and the four main men where all straight white males.
Yet that fucker was amazing! Everyone loved it!

But Assassin's Creed Unity has a damn near all white male cast, and it was crap. And it was crap because it was a crap story, not the white men. I mean even with a Scooby gang of political correctness, it would still have been crap.

Dark Knight would still have been amazing if the Joker was black or Bruce was gay. It would have still worked because the story was amazing.

I think you're missing the point, and this is a misconception that seems to come up in every single one of these threads.

The point isn't that adding in a non-straight white male character immediately makes the character/movie good, or inversely that making a character a straight white male immediately makes him bad. It's just like how a movie passing the Bechdel test doesn't make it sexism free, or a movie failing the test doesn't make it sexist (or bad in general). It's about trends, not specific examples.

The idea is that diversity is a good thing that improves the quality of media as a whole, if only because you aren't cutting off whole ranges of characters out of fear to deviate from the norm. Hell, I'd say that it's a good thing even if it only gave you more aesthetic freedom.

There's also the notion that it's indicative of some greater problem. Why is it such a trend for non-white demographics to get either no, or just token appearance? North America has a pretty diverse culture, in the city I live in, only 2/3rds of the population are white. New York is 44% white. In Los Angeles there are fewer white people than Hispanic or Latino. Chicago has fewer white people than black. These are all cities where that get featured in media a lot, and yet still have an overwhelming majority of white characters.

Also, there's more women than men in the world. You wouldn't guess that by polling movies or playing games

Its inaccurate, it's exclusive in favor of the dominant (yet not always majority) demographic, I see no reason not to criticize it.

 

[EternallyBored]

Don't really want to get involved in the main argument going on here but there's a couple of related things I want to comment on.

It's a trope that is often fine, I don't think most people making this complaint seriously want to see a Victorian era drama in London include a majority Japanese cast,

I'm not sure that that's the best example to use...because its effectively been done.

Black Butler, specifically the live action film version. If you don't know the series then in short its a manga-turned-anime based on a 13 year old noble called Ciel Phantomhive and his demonic butler, Sebastian (who his soul is pledged to be eventually consumed by), fighting the forces of darkness at the behest of Queen Victoria. Set in Victorian-era England.

For the live action version they actually totally rewrote the setting (moving it from Victorian London to 2020s 'unspecified eastern nation') specifically so they could cast japanese actors and actresses in it. And they changed it from a teenage boy to a young adult girl because...well I believe its because the relationship between Sebastian and Ciel gets kinda creepy from time to time and they wanted to avoid all of those implications.

It looks like they're going the same way with Attack on Titan as well actually. From what I remember (its been like six months since I watched the series) there was a big deal made about the fact that Mikasa has Asian heritage because its so rare. But the live action Attack on Titan stuff is exclusively Asian actors from what I've seen.

In this case, that is more to do with Japan's much smaller live action movie industry not having the resources to really cast White people in those roles than any sort of demand to see Black Butler and Attack on Titan cast with exclusively Japanese actors.

Setting up Black Butler in Victorian England or Mikasa's heritage is easy to do in anime or manga simply because you can draw a character however you want, and audiences will buy that they aren't speaking the language you expect them to for their own convenience. Live action you end up with restrictions based on who you can cast depending on budget and location, the casting for these two shows comes more down to a lack of White actors that speak fluent Japanese that can be easily cast in the role.

It's acceptable to do so when working within limits, even for a much larger industry like Hollywood you are still going to run into limitations. The point I was trying to make is that people who criticize the use of White protagonists in Western media generally don't want to replace White roles in places where it wouldn't make any sense, just criticizing their general overuse in an industry that has enough diverse actors to support at least more main character roles going to non-White people, not all, not even a majority, just more.

Still, didn't know that they made a live action Black Butler adaptation, so I learned something new today.

 

[freaper]

No way I am reading all of that. I am not in college.

I must ask, do you need to write an entire essay to explain your point or are you a writer and the instinct to do that is just there and natural to you? I have always wondered.

I'm pretty sure writers know how to be succinct.

OT: I'm wondering, if we do get those games about lesbian, blue-haired, college students, will they be any good? And before anyone asks, I wouldn't be in the least bit bothered by such a protagonist as long as the game they are in is enjoyable and the fact they're whatever isn't just to please an overblown demographic.