Controversial topic, "overdiversification"

[Isomedia]

There has been a trend very much visible in recent entertainment platforms, and it is something I personally call "overdiversification", it's when a show or a game casts ethnically and sexually diverse characters for seemingly no reason other than to have the selling point that they are inclusive.

Now let me get this out of the way first, I in no way am against media casting ethnically and sexually diverse characters, we live in a modern and educated society free from our barbaric past, where people have the right to enjoy themselves on who they really are without judgement of others, now with that said, some people seem to be taking this concept overboard, they just have to cram diverse characters in, very good examples of this is the recent Cleopatra "documentary" and the downright racist HBO series Velma.

People don't seem to understand there exists a time and place for diversification, yes, it would be a strong social message to cast different ethnicities, cultures, sexualities, a show that we've come a long way from that segregated society from years ago, not mentioning the strong psychological boost that this causes to someone that is afraid and depressed because of how they're treated for who they are as a person, but if I'm, for a theoretical example, am watching a movie set in WW2 Germany, and I see a gay black guy show up, I'm not having it, for the 2 previously mentioned examples, Velma was an already existing and beloved character that has existed in the TV screens and our hearts for many years, and Cleopatra was a real historical figure of Macedonian (greek) descendance, so why were they casted the way they were?

What I'm trying to say is, entertainment media is trying to hamfist the noble goal of diversity in an aggressive and down right unnatural way for us, the common folk, I just wish that this was broadcasted in a calm, thought out and natural way, not "here, have a black guy, here, have a lesbian, here, have an Asian", this doesn't help, it just shows that your low quality TV show has nothing but diversity going for it, and most likely when you receive rightful criticism, you'll simply claim the critics are racist, sexist, etc.

I really wanted to let this topic out, some seem to be abusing society's main issue simply for nothing but personal gain and the illusion that they're being inclusive, it is a very delicate matter that I feel absolutely must be discussed since sometimes, it feels like we're taking this idea and going backwards with it.

[Terminus Station]

You have a point, minority representation, particularly in modern society is important to reflect the time period we're in. It also doesn't make sense to have that same modern depiction of diversity in time period films that historically didn't. Sometimes it seems like a bunch of obtuse corporations are simply trying to pander to minorities and liberal audiences for the sake of money. There's a time and place for depicting gay black characters in films as per your example, but WW2 Germany is not it.

[Narland]

I haven't noticed any Bigtopians on the telly lately.

I prefer the characters to match the story. Witcher is based on medieval central Europe. I don't expect global diversity as much as I expect the diversity found in medieval central Europe. A medieval tribal story of Tutsi, would be very odd if half of the cast was composed of global samples. A contemporary American story I can expect the usual suspects. With Star Trek i expect Quadrant diversity from Terrans, Klingons, Horta, and even Ferengi. However, if a Nigerian theatre troupe is performing Hamlet, or a Montana performing arts center is using local performers for a pendet dance show more power to them. I don't think it should matter, and that is the problem I have with producers and showrunners who think it is more important than telling a good story.

[Stellar Colonies]

It would be cool if we dug into the untapped well of stories from Africa, the pre-Columbus Americas, and Asia instead of reinforcing the idea that they have nothing of worth to offer by recycling Western stories with diverse casts.

[El Lazaro]

Gay black men, statistically speaking, existed in Nazi Germany. If you mean in roles that openly gay black people wouldn’t have been allowed in, then I have no problem with this, and further, would be entertained by the 1940s version of the Sacred Band of Thebes in the D-Day landings or the entire Nazi high command being black for no reason at all.

We’ve already given up on any popular depiction of WW2 having an ounce of historical accuracy or refraining from spreading misinformation originating from propaganda, sooo…

[Terminus Station]

Gay black men, statistically speaking, existed in Nazi Germany. If you mean in roles that openly gay black people wouldn’t have been allowed in, then I have no problem with this, and further, would be entertained by the 1940s version of the Sacred Band of Thebes in the D-Day landings or the entire Nazi high command being black for no reason at all.

I admit, the idea of a Black, Gay, Jewish, Trans actor portraying Hitler would be kind of hilarious in a meta commentary sort of you.

[Heavenly Assault]

I think a big part of it is artistic ineptitude. The quality of writers is really going down, coupled with corporate pandering to political fads. There's good ways to represent characters of all backgrounds, but the reigns are often given to people with no business being in the creative field.

To contrast this, there's a Japanese show called Cherry Magic about a homosexual romance between 2 guys, pretty bold stuff even for modern Japan. It was very naturalistic and cute, with an emphasis on character development. Contemporary Western (especially American) writers probably would've bungled it with virtue signaling and inorganic propaganda.

[Siornor]

Yeah, I fully agree with your analysis and all your points, OP. I would only suggest that "overdiversification" is not quite the right term for it. It's more like "superficial representation" -- inserting characters of particular identities into media for the sake of appearing diverse and representative without meaningfully engaging with those identities' realities or, indeed (as is suggested in your examples), even considering whether it makes sense to portray a character that way in the first place.

My favorite instance is the persistent tendency around Disney's newer Star Wars projects to declare publicly that a character is of a certain sexuality and then not have that aspect of their identity play into the story whatsoever.

It would be cool if we dug into the untapped well of stories from Africa, the pre-Columbus Americas, and Asia instead of reinforcing the idea that they have nothing of worth to offer by recycling Western stories with diverse casts.

Word. Underrepresnted groups have plenty of their own stories to tell and share; throwing them in as side characters in other peoples' stories should not be our standard for diverse representation.

[El Lazaro]

I think a big part of it is artistic ineptitude. The quality of writers is really going down, coupled with corporate pandering to political fads. There's good ways to represent characters of all backgrounds, but the reigns are often given to people with no business being in the creative field.

To contrast this, there's a Japanese show called Cherry Magic about a homosexual romance between 2 guys, pretty bold stuff even for modern Japan. It was very naturalistic and cute, with an emphasis on character development. Contemporary Western (especially American) writers probably would've bungled it with virtue signaling and inorganic propaganda.

Counterpoint: Japanese kids’ cartoons lack ‘Murican values like freedom and liberty

[Heavenly Assault]

I think a big part of it is artistic ineptitude. The quality of writers is really going down, coupled with corporate pandering to political fads. There's good ways to represent characters of all backgrounds, but the reigns are often given to people with no business being in the creative field.

To contrast this, there's a Japanese show called Cherry Magic about a homosexual romance between 2 guys, pretty bold stuff even for modern Japan. It was very naturalistic and cute, with an emphasis on character development. Contemporary Western (especially American) writers probably would've bungled it with virtue signaling and inorganic propaganda.

Counterpoint: Japanese kids’ cartoons lack ‘Murican values like freedom and liberty

Lol, counter-counter point: Metal Wolf Chaos in which you play as the President of America and pilot a giant mecha in defense of freedom .

[Wizlandia]

Casting a person because you believe they are the best fit for your story given your budget constraints is good. Casting a person because you want to advance your notion of social justice, pander to idpol ideologues, or curry favour with execs/directors/stars, is cringe.

[Neu California]

My opinion is simple: too little diversity in an area where more diversity should be expected is really hard on my suspension of disbelief.

For example, a series set in Southern California where everyone is white, or one set in San Francisco or West Hollywood where everyone is straight (or a series set in the far future where everyone is white, straight, and or male) is seriously cringe. Older shows (Star Trek through Enterprise concerning homosexuality, for example) get a pass just because of values dissonance, but modern shows that don't portray something that specifically needs a monochrome or one gender group (WWII, for example) are better off with a certain amount of diverse casting. If, for example, your show or movie does not meet the setting criteria for an all-white, all-male cast and fails the Bechdel test, that's a problem.

[Vikanias]

Diversity is good, but when it’s done to just pander to a minority or liberals its bad, and we don’t need to inject black or any other race for that matter characters into stores that they weren’t really in, there’s an absolute shit ton of Sub-Saharan African history and mythology that can be explored but instead they just take stories from the west and just recycle them with minorities instead, making it seem like culture of other races have nothing interesting or important when that’s not the case at all.

[Page]

In my novel series (work in progress but first two books done) I have characters who are gay, bi, trans, black, brown, Asian (well it's a fantasy so world so Asia doesn't exist but Asian-looking people), and I did not start writing it with any diversity quotas in mind, I did not create characters based on commercial viability, I just told the story I wanted to tell.

My starting point was actually just making a map of the world and deciding, okay, blue-eyed white people in the north, dark brown people by the equator, black people by the equator but on a different part of the planet, somebody has to live on this big ass continent over here so I guess they'll be Asian.

My gay character is gay because I wanted the initial villain to be somebody from the evil fascist country motivated by something personal, so I liked the idea that he's trying to find and reunite with his forbidden lover from his school days. My bi character is bi because she just felt bi while I was writing her and she is the most religious character so I thought it would be interesting to explore a very different kind of religion that does not at all concern itself with human sexuality. My trans character is trans because it's just one element of a gradually revealed back story full of secrets.

The story has a shitload of interracial relationships and it just ended up that way by accident. The white woman ends up with the black guy because the black guy is the foreign ambassador and she hates everything about her life so she is naturally drawn to an outsider. The brown protagonist is in a love triangle with an Asian girl who was simply his original girlfriend and a white girl who he falls in love with because he rescued her and she represents to him the cause he's fighting for that gives his life meaning.

When it gets published, I'm sure lots of people will accuse me of forced diversity for political reasons, but really it would just be boring to do it any other way.

[EuroStralia]

Overdiversification becomes a problem when people add minority characters to media with no personality just for the sake of "representation", or if there is an unrealistic amount of them.

[Vassenor]

“Why did you make this character black / gay / a woman when they didn’t need to be” is a pretty bad argument since it assumes the straight white male is the default and any deviation from that default must be extensively justified.

[EuroStralia]

“Why did you make this character black / gay / a woman when they didn’t need to be” is a pretty bad argument since it assumes the straight white male is the default and any deviation from that default must be extensively justified.

It being a bad argument depending on the context where it's presented.

[Nilokeras]

This thread really is the perfect example of how complaints about diversity are setting up an unwinnable standard.

If you create a story that centres a particular minority viewpoint, be it racial, sexual, etc. in a setting that 'pop culture' writ large has an interest in, you get complaints about 'shoving it in our faces' - or, as the OP put it,
'an aggressive and down right unnatural way for us, the common folk', with that very interesting formulation of 'us, the common folk' as almost explicitly a synonym for 'straight white males' given the example of a black gay man in WW2 they gave.

If you try and insert side characters who are minoritized inside a story centering said majoritarian viewpoint, you get complaints like the OP's about the story being 'unrealistic', either for having the audacity to show a minoritized person in a movie about 'the common folk' or for showing somehow too many of them.

You can't win, and these complaints about 'realism' are usually intensely selective and designed to provide the most paper thin excuse for why their complaints aren't just them being snowflakes. Casting Cleopatra as a black woman is an unacceptable intrusion of woke ideology - casting Craig Russell, a guy born in Cwmtwrch, Wales, as Mark Antony in that same documentary is beneath notice, despite their being as much ideology going in choosing British actors using RP accents to play Romans.

[Vassenor]

“Why did you make this character black / gay / a woman when they didn’t need to be” is a pretty bad argument since it assumes the straight white male is the default and any deviation from that default must be extensively justified.

It being a bad argument depending on the context where it's presented.

Why should a character's not being a straight white male need to be justified then?

[EuroStralia]

It being a bad argument depending on the context where it's presented.

Why should a character's not being a straight white male need to be justified then?

If an already established character is a straight white male but then their race, sexuality, or gendef is changed.

[Vassenor]

This thread really is the perfect example of how complaints about diversity are setting up an unwinnable standard.

If you create a story that centres a particular minority viewpoint, be it racial, sexual, etc. in a setting that 'pop culture' writ large has an interest in, you get complaints about 'shoving it in our faces' - or, as the OP put it,
'an aggressive and down right unnatural way for us, the common folk', with that very interesting formulation of 'us, the common folk' as almost explicitly a synonym for 'straight white males' given the example of a black gay man in WW2 they gave.

If you try and insert side characters who are minoritized inside a story centering said majoritarian viewpoint, you get complaints like the OP's about the story being 'unrealistic', either for having the audacity to show a minoritized person in a movie about 'the common folk' or for showing somehow too many of them.

You can't win, and these complaints about 'realism' are usually intensely selective and designed to provide the most paper thin excuse for why their complaints aren't just them being snowflakes. Casting Cleopatra as a black woman is an unacceptable intrusion of woke ideology - casting Craig Russell, a guy born in Cwmtwrch, Wales, as Mark Antony in that same documentary is beneath notice, despite their being as much ideology going in choosing British actors using RP accents to play Romans.

Same as if you'd cast an actual Italian actor to play Mark Antony probably.

[Point Blob]

The whole diversity thing is just a reactionary response to monotype collectives... and is equally stupid in isolation.
Any kind of forced quotas based on unimportant factors is counterproductive. The meritocratic approach is generally best.

[Forsher]

Let's use my favourite thought experiment... Forsher's School Days: the TV show. Well, I call it that. I'd make for a terrible main character... I was quite removed from all the cliche high school television show things that really happened. But the point is, I rather suspect such a show would be condemned for being
overdiversified. But observe this contemporaneous ethnicity breakdown:

New Zealand European/Pākehā 55%;
Māori 20%; Pacific 5%; Asian 12%; Other 8%

I dunno, though, would a presumably mostly American audience perceive a little over half the characters being "white" as being oversiverse? Perhaps not!

A different example is possibly needed!

Now, I've got no idea what kind of plotline you'd do, but let's move 16km northwest to where my (ever so slightly older) cousins went to school...

NZ European/Pākehā 32%,
Māori 3%,
Chinese 25%,
Indian 8%,
South East Asian 2%,
Pacific 1%,
other European 17%,
other Asian 9%,
other 3%

Majority Minority! Even if you lump "NZ European" and "other European" into one category of "Americans would perceive white" you'd get to 49%, which still counts!

(n.b. the percentages sum to 100% so these are probably prioritised ethnicity, i.e. if you're Maori + anything else, you count as Maori, if you're Pasifika + anything not Maori you're Pasifika, if you're Asian + Other or NZ European you're Asian, if you're Other + NZ European you're other. No, I was mistaken, Other and NZ European are the same level of priority; not sure they handle that. Prioritised Ethnicity is controversial, hence that particular link.)

Of course, it doesn't really work like that. Both in the sense that if these figures weren't (probably) prioritised, you wouldn't be able to add up these numbers to get to 100 and that a cast of characters focussed around a single individual isn't going to have the same make up as the school as a whole. Luckily, there's a reason why I described this as my favourite thought experiment... I have previously discussed this very concept, too!

So, let's say you're making a biopic about Forsher, right? I mean, God knows why, but you are. So, you're thinking, right, you've got to populate my class according to those percentages there, yeah? Wrong. In my class there was one Maori/Pasifika pupil... by the percentages there'd be 7. And you're thinking of having 3 Asian classmates? Ooh, boy. Let's try 7 (assuming that Asian included Indian... it's a valid question if you look at how much more detailed the breakdowns were for the other two schools). There was also some biasing towards certain primary schools... three of us went to my primary, at least three from another one and a whole bunch from two others.

But if we looked at the figures reported we'd come to the conclusion that there are too few Maori/Pasifika characters in our biopic.

Truly, there is nothing new under the sun. It is honestly insane that this thought experiment is so useful so often.

Of course, if I or the aforementioned cousins were the protagonists, we'd have a nice, unthreatening while male lead. But what if we made a biopic about my second cousins or my English cousin? They're people of colour! And two of them are, horrors of horrors, female! Of course, I have no idea where any of them went to school so it's entirely possible they were in otherwise overwhelmingly majority set ups. I doubt it, however. Firstly, because my cousin, to my understanding, grew up in London. Secondly, because MAGS is in roughly the right area for my second cousins and in 2013 it looked like this:

NZ European/Pākehā 46%
Māori 14%
Asian 14%
Samoan 8%
Tongan 5%
Cook Islands Māori 3%
Niue 2%
other European 3%
others 5%

And I checked... this also adds to 100%, but you can see that this is another majority minority school. And you can see that it's very different to the other two. Of course, if you were to combine all the European categories together due to a data deficiency in the recording of my school, they do look much more similar to each other.

Naturally, even more diverse examples will also happen in the real world. And we've really only considered one dimension of diversity.

(I was going to do a fiction example, but Page already did that. )

[Forsher]

Same as if you'd cast an actual Italian actor to play Mark Antony probably.

From a culinary perspective, I believe a Chinese actor would have been the best fit for Mark Antony.

Why would you choose the culinary perspective? Well, why wouldn't you? It just exposes the politics involved more obviously.

[Kerwa]

This thread really is the perfect example of how complaints about diversity are setting up an unwinnable standard.

If you create a story that centres a particular minority viewpoint, be it racial, sexual, etc. in a setting that 'pop culture' writ large has an interest in, you get complaints about 'shoving it in our faces' - or, as the OP put it,
'an aggressive and down right unnatural way for us, the common folk', with that very interesting formulation of 'us, the common folk' as almost explicitly a synonym for 'straight white males' given the example of a black gay man in WW2 they gave.

If you try and insert side characters who are minoritized inside a story centering said majoritarian viewpoint, you get complaints like the OP's about the story being 'unrealistic', either for having the audacity to show a minoritized person in a movie about 'the common folk' or for showing somehow too many of them.

You can't win, and these complaints about 'realism' are usually intensely selective and designed to provide the most paper thin excuse for why their complaints aren't just them being snowflakes. Casting Cleopatra as a black woman is an unacceptable intrusion of woke ideology - casting Craig Russell, a guy born in Cwmtwrch, Wales, as Mark Antony in that same documentary is beneath notice, despite their being as much ideology going in choosing British actors using RP accents to play Romans.

RP is used in English language drama to represent upper class status because it is universally recognized as a hallmark of upper class status. It would make little sense to have Antony sound like someone from Toronto for a global audience if the message you are trying to convey is that Antony is upper class. It’s not a random thing based on race. I suppose they could have gone with locust valley lockjaw but no-one really knows what that is the point would be lost.

(This is doubly true if you consider the attitude of India which is the second or first - depending on how you count it - largest English speaking population)