Really? Have you seen Steven Universe? Not only do you not need “extra work” to explain to your audience that a couple is gay, but it provides an entire extra layer of context and meta-narrative. Or do you think it’s just a coincidence that Iceman “comes out” to his parents in X-Men 2? These things provide incredible value to the stories where they are used.
Because it enables interesting and meaningful stories that would otherwise not be possible, or at least far more difficult? Or maybe they feel like providing positive representations of homosexuality is important because doing so helps the many, many, many gay kids who have almost no positive representation in society or the media and are constantly told that they’re sick and wrong and evil just because of who they love. I’d call that important, given the outright insane rate of suicide attempts within the LGBT community.
How so? I have a character whom I plan, at some point in my story, to have a romantic relationship. How is it more work to show that character kissing a girl, versus that character kissing a guy?
I think the more difficult one is bisexuality. It wouldn’t be so difficult, except for the snag that bi people are already stereotyped as promiscuous or overly horny, often polyamorous, and if not that, serial daters.
It’s difficult to establish a bisexual character because you have to show them showing interest in both genders in a way that’s just frequent and obvious enough that it’s clear and not dismissed as subtext, but not so frequent as to fall into stereotypes.
There’s also the problem of characters that “become gay.” Willow from Buffy is a good example, she is a plausible bisexual character because she had deep, meaningful relationships with both genders that we saw scenes implying she was seriously sexually attracted to at least Oz as well as her girlfriends. However, it’s stated by the show, and Whedon, that Willow is 100% a lesbian. When stuff like that happens in stories so much, it’s hard to be sure if someone “became gay” or “became straight” or is actually bi.
It’s definitely not impossible, but it takes some care to establish. It’s relatively easy if you’re on a long running sitcom that’s going to run for seasons, it’s just going to be a slow burn. It’s harder if you want to establish it in one season in a show that isn’t heavily invested in romantic relationships.
If the show isn’t substantially about romantic relationships, I don’t know why you’d need more establishment than comes with just having a character say it.
If your view is that having a character be black or gay or Hispanic or disabled or Jewish or whatever is only (or should only be) done if those traits are an important part of the plot, you’re effectively saying that being a straight white Christian able-bodied male is the default and anything that deviates from that is, well, deviant. That may not be your intent but that’s the upshot of it.
Geena Davis has been spearheading a campaign to get more female characters onscreen. Does she want special token characters written in? No. All she suggests is that if you have a character whose gender isn’t material to the story, why not cast a woman? Hero gets pulled over by a police officer? Why not consider casting a female officer? Plumber comes to fix the sink? Why not a female plumber? For that matter, can the hero be a heroine? Etc etc. She’s not saying you should make every character female, but rather that there’s no reason not to break out the “straight white male” default mode occasionally.
And likewise with minorities and homosexuals and disabled people and so forth - if there’s no reason to exclude them, why not include them in a proportionate manner? Someone cited a statistic of 4% of prime-time characters being gay, which is roughly in line with estimates of the proportion of gay people in the general population. What’s wrong with that? And if the odd same-sex couple turns up in a children’s cartoon, as long as they’re not doing anything inappropriate (the same stricture applying to opposite-sex couples), it’s not going to traumatize the little dears.
Among my daughter’s classmates is a girl with “two mommies”. She also has friends and classmates from single-parent households, ones with divorced parents, ones who are Muslim, who are Hindu, who are of various colors, autistic and so on and so forth. Hiding away people who are different in some way doesn’t make your kids better-adjusted; it makes them less capable of dealing with the world later in life when they come across something new.
I don’t even know whom I’m responding to at this point but I feel better for saying all that.
I refer you to my final sentence. It was sparked by some of GulfTiger’s posts but went a bit broad and stream-of-consciousness so in the end, no, it’s more a general commentary than a specific response to someone.
I’m wondering how you measure/value utility. I’m pretty much a utilitarian, but well-being is the ultimate goal, and human dignity is a huge part of what I place value on.
You seem to place value on what, exactly? How likely is a couple to create more humans? Why is that a value? Seems like it would go the other way: the world is overpopulated therefore we should assign less value to breeding couples.
I think they’re saying by implication that since heterosexual couples outnumber homosexual ones, then the default would be to portray the couple as heterosexual, and if you don’t then you’re making an effort to include them.
And I would reply that using that logic, it’s an extra effort to portray the couple as a racial minority, or making a character who is disabled, or anything other than white, heterosexual, Christian, etc.
The only objection that makes any sense to me is that the parents don’t want to have that conversation with their child yet.
In my case I’m not concerned about it - we’ve been taking the kids to Pride since they were born - but there are other subjects that I’d rather not be broached or forced upon us by a cartoon.
Why should that be anyone else’s problem? There might be parents that don’t want to have conversations about the existence of black people with their children, but that doesn’t mean that their objections to black people in cartoons are reasonable.
Because skin colour isn’t near as thorny an issue as sex and sexuality. Nor does it lend itself to follow-up questions that a parent (or child) may not be ready or able to answer / understand.
As a for instance (although this was not prompted by a cartoon) I recently got to discuss whether or not God made people with my boys. This is a problematic area here because my mom and step-dad are very religious (Christian), I am agnostic and my wife is Pagan.
To answer that God didn’t make people would lead to my filterless children announcing to my mom that God did not create us etc. This would result in familial unpleasantness. I was hoping to hold off a little until the boys have a bit better filter (ha! not bloody likely I know;) )
I think it is important that my boys know about Christianity (and Islam and Judaism) in order to appreciate our culture, history and literature but I didn’t think the time was now.
Other parents may have reasons to want to hold off on discussing sexuality for similar reasons.
Well, strictly speaking, you don’t have to discuss sexuality at all, to present same-gender romantic relationships. Cartoon or puppet characters don’t even have to be understood, by adults, as having sexuality, if it’s not stated in the work.
Why do Bert and Ernie live together? Because they love each other. Sometimes two boys love each other and want to be together, just like sometimes a boy and a girl do, or two girls.
yeah but they editied most of it out when it comes over to the us… Same in video games theres always the best friends who has a fight or gets upset with the other at some point that seems like too much argument for something that trivial and you sort of have to connect the dots …
like in Naruto the one chick that takes over is a big loudmouth well endowed blonde has this tiny Asian almost invisible girl who takes care of just about every aspect of her life following her around and they never said how or why except shes an assistant in the English version
There was one episode where everyone tried to find out whats in the case she carries around for her and theres a huge rigamorole to see whats in it and turns out its just all of the blondes gambling and bar debts … the mouse has peen paying them off slowly and secretly … and they have this big awwww scene …My 9 year old nephew turned to me and said " there basically married aren’t they ? "
Heck ya should of seen the discussion about the Disney show good luck Charlie a year or two
The little girl Charlie has a friend in school and they play together and such well the running joke was Charlie kept saying the girl had two moms and they kept trying to correct her until the little girls parents came over to pick her up and they finally her… you see yes her parents are two women theres a sec or two of stunned silence and then the girl comes over andf say hi mommies and then its oh thanks for having her over and nice to meet you and they all leave
The whole scene lasted maybe 2 minutes and you have half the world wanting to give Disney a metal or burn it all down …one news show asked the kids about it to most of them it wasn’t a big deal because they knew someone who was or had relatives who were ect
so maybe its all just adults making such a big deal of it …
If this is true, there were certainly times in the pretty recent past in which skin color absolutely was just as thorny (or even thornier) than sexuality is now. Does that mean that it would have been wrong to show black people, or an interracial couple, in a cartoon in the past?
This is probably true for any issue – some parents aren’t ready to talk about it. That goes for race and interracial couples as well… I think that’s a very, very poor argument to demand that cartoons not include interracial couples.