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Double Plus Good posted:The "black guy dies first" trope is real enough to be a culturally known thing. It's annoying because it's a way for studios to include their minority characters and nominally make quota, but without having to give them any real character development or arc. It's even better than that, as I'm given to understand. Many theatres in the American South wouldn't show movies that featured blacks as other than servants. The studios didn't want to look racist by excluding black actors, but rather than advise the Southern distributors to go gently caress themselves, they included featureless black characters who had no relevance to the plot. In this way they could appear politically correct, but still sell their movies in the South by editing out the black characters.
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Feb 13, 2015 11:33
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Jedit posted:It's even better than that, as I'm given to understand. Many theatres in the American South wouldn't show movies that featured blacks as other than servants. The studios didn't want to look racist by excluding black actors, but rather than advise the Southern distributors to go gently caress themselves, they included featureless black characters who had no relevance to the plot. In this way they could appear politically correct, but still sell their movies in the South by editing out the black characters.
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Feb 13, 2015 12:09
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Byzantine posted:The "mutants as allegory for minority X" has never really sat right with me, since (AFAIK) Jews can't obliterate a neighborhood by opening their eyes/make people's heads explode/eat your car. Haven't you heard of the IDF?
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Feb 13, 2015 14:23
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X-Men is p obviously a gay allegory thing. Though that poster made a good point in saying the public should be afraid of mutants because holy loving poo poo they're dangerous.
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Feb 13, 2015 14:30
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EmmyOk posted:X-Men is p obviously a gay allegory thing. Though that poster made a good point in saying the public should be afraid of mutants because holy loving poo poo they're dangerous. I'd be wary of X-Men mutants for the same reason I'd be wary of someone who went everywhere with a gun. They're essentially constantly armed. The allegory utterly breaks down because unlike gay people, mutants ARE highly dangerous. The worst thing a gay dude has simply by being gay is that maybe he might find me attractive for some reason, which isn't exactly the most threatening thing in the world.
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Feb 13, 2015 15:10
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Pilchenstein posted:I remember hearing a similar conspiracy theory about how most films with a black lead will have a hispanic love interest because if Will Smith ever kissed a white woman, america would burn. Production companies hire research firms to administer surveys asking what consumers like and don't like. Somewhere around here I've got an old advertising textbook with the exact numbers in it but I'll give you the gist of it: Surveys go out that ask something along the lines of "On a scale of one to five, how down are you with the idea of the following relationships being depicted on film and TV:" and they go down a list of "black man in love with a white woman," "white man in love with a Latina woman," etc. and also record the respondents' race and gender for analysis. You can already predict some of the results--across the board, everybody was cool with a man and a woman of the same race getting it on. What they didn't see coming, though, was that almost everybody was totally cool with a Latino in a relationship with someone of any race. There are a few theories that attempt to explain this, such as it being the result of the depiction of "Latin lover" and "sexy señorita" stereotypes in film and TV (which to this day are still very prevalent). So, it's not that people will riot if a black guy kisses a white woman on film, it's just that the data suggest people would rather see him kiss a Latina.
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Feb 13, 2015 15:42
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1redflag posted:I don't know, man, it kind of seems like you are talking out of your rear end here. "Partially invented by the audience"? What does that even mean? Obviously the black guy doesn't die first in every movie (e.g. , The Thing), but it does seem to happen a disproportionate amount of times relative to the ratio of black people in major productions. Umm, white people are not a minority-majority. They are 72% of the US population. If a TV show wanted to be true to population ratios, then 1 out of every 4 characters should be non-white. I don't deny that there usually more white people than this in TV's and movies though.
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Feb 13, 2015 16:42
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Slime posted:I'd be wary of X-Men mutants for the same reason I'd be wary of someone who went everywhere with a gun. It's way worse than that. Cyclops's sunglasses get knocked off his face and whoops, he just demolished a building. Some little kid brushed against Rogue and now he's in a coma. And those are just things that could happen by accident if all mutants were peaceful, law-abiding citizens. Mystique, Jean Grey and Charles Xavier can get into any place they want, get access to any information they want, get close to any person, undetectably pin any of their actions on anyone they choose. Shadowcat and Nightcrawler are almost as dangerous, though less able to get away with it. Even purely physical ones like Wolverine or Colossus are basically unstoppable by normal means. Normal people are absolutely right to fear mutants and want to know who they are and what they can do, and unfortunate as it may be for them, some mutants definitely should be restricted in their movements, because their mere existence is a threat to anyone they come into contact with.
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Feb 13, 2015 16:44
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Pilchenstein posted:I remember hearing a similar conspiracy theory about how most films with a black lead will have a hispanic love interest because if Will Smith ever kissed a white woman, america would burn. This was true for a while and may still be in some parts of the country. It's basically the reason Eva Mendez gets work.
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Feb 13, 2015 17:18
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Slime posted:I'd be wary of X-Men mutants for the same reason I'd be wary of someone who went everywhere with a gun. They're essentially constantly armed. The allegory utterly breaks down because unlike gay people, mutants ARE highly dangerous. The worst thing a gay dude has simply by being gay is that maybe he might find me attractive for some reason, which isn't exactly the most threatening thing in the world. I agree it's not exactly a perfect allegory, but a lot of bigoted people do find such minorities threatening in some way. I still know of people in the modern day, in non-southern states even, who'll avoid black people in broad daylight out of fear that they're criminals, unironically think Jewish people control everything, and of course feel threatened by homosexuals, either that they'll get them, or generally sow some kind of discord in family values forever. Sure, more enlightened people don't go around thinking X minority is dangerous, but a lot of people still do, and feel some kind of genuine threat because of them. So it may not be real, but "fear of a minority, and that fear turning to hate" is still a common thread between the X-Men and problems in the real world.
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Feb 13, 2015 17:26
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Sure, but comparing minorities to people who can kill you by simply taking off their glasses is pretty offensive.
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Feb 13, 2015 17:34
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Slime posted:I'd be wary of X-Men mutants for the same reason I'd be wary of someone who went everywhere with a gun. They're essentially constantly armed. The allegory utterly breaks down because unlike gay people, mutants ARE highly dangerous. The worst thing a gay dude has simply by being gay is that maybe he might find me attractive for some reason, which isn't exactly the most threatening thing in the world. That's why I really liked Morrison's run of X-Men. Not everyone could emit lasers or kinetically explode things with their brain. He introduced a bunch of mutants whose ability was essentially "is irredeemably ugly", and saw them be discriminated against, and let them bitch at people like Cyclops who looks entirely normal, his big weakness being "has to wear gnarly sunglasses". Marvel has plenty of mutants who only have an ability to change their tongue shape, or produce 1 cubic inch of mashed potatoes, or psionically discern where the closest toilet is... and it kind of sucks for them to be under the same canopy as Hulk or Jean Grey or Magneto as far as regulation.  Another thing I liked is that people started to emulate mutant "fashion" as a sort of counter-culture thing. Firstborn has a new favorite as of 18:08 on Feb 13, 2015 |
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Feb 13, 2015 18:04
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Midnight Raider posted:I agree it's not exactly a perfect allegory, but a lot of bigoted people do find such minorities threatening in some way. I still know of people in the modern day, in non-southern states even, who'll avoid black people in broad daylight out of fear that they're criminals, unironically think Jewish people control everything, and of course feel threatened by homosexuals, either that they'll get them, or generally sow some kind of discord in family values forever. "The bigots are right" is a pretty significant difference that kind of undermines the point. An irrationally irritating moment that stands out in particular: One of the X-Men movies opens with a senator arguing that mutants are dangerous, and in particular points out that one of them can walk through walls and that if she wanted to she could just walk straight into the White House and they wouldn't be able to stop her. The movie portrays him as an evil bigot conspiracy theorist for even suggesting this. But later in the movie, a mutant uses mutant powers to sneak into the White House and almost manages to assassinate the President.
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Feb 13, 2015 18:09
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Midnight Raider posted:I agree it's not exactly a perfect allegory, but a lot of bigoted people do find such minorities threatening in some way. I still know of people in the modern day, in non-southern states even, who'll avoid black people in broad daylight out of fear that they're criminals, unironically think Jewish people control everything, and of course feel threatened by homosexuals, either that they'll get them, or generally sow some kind of discord in family values forever. I remember seeing a study (though I wasn't able to actually read it because it was behind a pay-wall) that talked about how a certain percentage of white Americans attribute "superhuman" abilities to blacks that lead to overreactions because of fear they'll be overpowered. A white person will respond with greater fear or greater violence against a black person for a perceived threat than a person of another race because he may literally believe that if he doesn't the black person will be too tough or too strong or too violent to beat, and so overwhelming force is necessary. edit: "Superhumanization bias" of blacks was what I was thinking of. Here.
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Feb 13, 2015 18:11
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/\/\/\ I posted a link to a similar article on the previous page. A combination of "racist super human" on Google led me to many pages. Lottery of Babylon posted:"The bigots are right" is a pretty significant difference that kind of undermines the point. So treat all of them like criminals because some are, right?
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Feb 13, 2015 18:11
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It's more that "maybe keep tabs on the guy who can mind control you and explode your friends". Man, if black people get all the super powers why the gently caress are whites considered privileged.
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Feb 13, 2015 18:15
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Lottery of Babylon posted:"The bigots are right" is a pretty significant difference that kind of undermines the point. Uhh. He says that and then Nightcrawler breaks in but is brainwashed and under Stryker's control. It's setting up the fear and then artificially confirming it.
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Feb 13, 2015 18:16
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Firstborn posted:So treat all of them like criminals because some are, right? Sure, there are good mutants too. Like Rogue, the movie's protagonist, she's 100% good and would never hurt a fly! And yet she still manages to put her boyfriend into a coma. It's basically down to blind chance that the world is still intact. Professor Xavier's powers alone could be used to take over the world within a week; the world as we know it only remains intact because by sheer chance those powers happened to be developed by someone kind enough to deign to allow civilization to continue. In terms of power, the stronger mutants are practically nuclear weapons with legs. It's not a situation that maps onto real life at all because in real life weapons are weapons and people are people, people can put down weapons and you can disassemble weapons without killing anyone. There are no real-life perfectly nice people who happen to be walking nuclear warheads but it's okay because they're doing their best to not detonate.
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Feb 13, 2015 18:33
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You are the dudes that Magneto warned me about. I'm joining the Brotherhood of Evil or whatever.
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Feb 13, 2015 18:42
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Inzombiac posted:Uhh. Senator Kelly says that in X-men 1 and Nightcrawler breaks into the White House in X2. He's a bigot, but he's not wrong! He wasn't involved in anything Stryker did.
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Feb 13, 2015 18:43
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Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:Senator Kelly says that in X-men 1 and Nightcrawler breaks into the White House in X2. He's not advocating genocide of mutants either, just vague "mutant registration". And nobody even suggests an alternative beyond the default "Do nothing, let's just hope things all work out on their own". If anything it's closer to an allegory for gun control than for gay rights. Big Gummint wants tighter mutant control laws with their registries, but in the end the only one who can stop a bad guy with a mutant power is a good guy with a mutant power. X2 is about how Sandy Hook was a false flag operation orchestrated by Obama.
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Feb 13, 2015 18:49
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Inzombiac posted:Uhh. I'm irrationally irritated that people don't realize that the Nightcrawler attack was the start of the movie. Frostwerks has a new favorite as of 00:06 on Feb 14, 2015 |
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Feb 14, 2015 00:00
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Meltathon posted:Umm, white people are not a minority-majority. They are 72% of the US population. If a TV show wanted to be true to population ratios, then 1 out of every 4 characters should be non-white. I don't deny that there usually more white people than this in TV's and movies though. This is true when taken across the whole USA but falls apart in a hell of a lot of places at a smaller scale. LA, NYC and Chicago are all sub-50% white.
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Feb 14, 2015 01:00
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Pilchenstein posted:I remember hearing a similar conspiracy theory about how most films with a black lead will have a hispanic love interest because if Will Smith ever kissed a white woman, america would burn.  I must have missed the Burninating.
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Feb 14, 2015 02:29
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Firstborn posted:So treat all of them like criminals because some are, right? Is this someone getting tumblr offended on behalf of imaginary comic book men?
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Feb 14, 2015 02:40
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kinmik posted:But...Hancock? 
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Feb 14, 2015 03:06
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Danger Mahoney posted:Is this someone getting tumblr offended on behalf of imaginary comic book men? I'm not offended about X-men, dude. I was just partaking in a discussion. Don't be a dickhead.
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Feb 14, 2015 03:48
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Double post somehow.
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Feb 14, 2015 03:48
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Lottery of Babylon posted:In terms of power, the stronger mutants are practically nuclear weapons with legs. It's not a situation that maps onto real life at all because in real life weapons are weapons and people are people, people can put down weapons and you can disassemble weapons without killing anyone. There are no real-life perfectly nice people who happen to be walking nuclear warheads but it's okay because they're doing their best to not detonate. It's similar to a highly contagious disease. If you're carrying a disease that could kill millions of people and it can be spread just by coughing or sneezing or touching someone, you're going to get locked up because it's not safe to let you out. Sucks for you, but what else can we do?
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Feb 14, 2015 05:10
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I was also really disappointed because for a moment I thought they were going to go the dramatic change route with Darwin, like he adapts but sacrifices something to adapt like becoming permanently armored or looking like the crazy volcano surface thing he was before he died (like sunspot i think? who ends up constantly looking like he is on fire after pushing himself to save someone? I dunno comics anymore). That could have had a tie in with the whole look like mutant or not look like a mutant thing beast had going on but no just turns to ash and crumbles.
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Feb 14, 2015 05:23
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Lotish posted:edit: "Superhumanization bias" of blacks was what I was thinking of. Here. I took a look at that study, and it's not saying what you think it's saying/they want you to think it's saying/they want it to be saying. An IAT (implicit association test) is a word-categorization test where they have you choose whether a word belongs on a category they've mapped to one button on a keyboard or another category mapped to a different button, they then add two more categories, so now you have to decide if a word fits in to one of the two categories mapped to each button. For example, a common paradigm is mapping categories of white and black onto the two keys, having the participant go through a round of categorizations, do a round where you've mapped categories of good and bad words to those same keys one for each, and then do a round where you combine two categories onto one key and throw all the words at them (eg. white+good/black+bad or black+good/white+bad). What they're actually doing is building a reaction time profile of how fast you respond to these combinations, and the idea is that you react slower to combinations that are incongruent for you (such as black+good, if you're racist scum). The overall idea is that you have "implicit" associations that may go against the ones you make "explicit", like how many racists will profess they aren't racist in the slightest, and maybe consciously believe that. So, what you get from these reaction time studies is called an IAT effect and it is a robust one, as in, able to be replicated very frequently with similar results. A lot of the time, studies like these are used to gauge a population's "unspoken" attitude about certain things, which is how it was used in the study you linked. The problem with these kinds of studies is they don't always translate to real actionable behavior. The way they talk about attitudes usually involves teleological constructs, a common criticism of such social psychology, which are based on circular reasoning. saying somebody has a racist attitude because they say they hate black people, and then later explaining why this somebody says they hate black people is because they have a racist attitude. The whole thing is mired down in pre-assumptions about cognition, social interaction, and that doesn't really have much in the way of a central means of investigating any of these phenomena in the way you'd study chemical reactions. Also, you can churn these studies out like hotcakes because it's very easy to make something look statistically significant if you use general enough categories which effectively intrinsically clash with one-another. In reality, all they're studying is how quickly someone presses a button when presented with one semantic condition versus another, because they're just looking at reaction times without any fundamental framework for even how language is used past "categories". While it's totally kosher to go ahead and colloquially say that yes, white people will, especially under conditions of duress tend to view black people as more of a threat and maybe attribute super-human abilities to them (see Darren Wilson's testimony on Mike Brown being a giant hulk beast when in reality they are both the same height), it doesn't tell us much in the way of what's actually happening, or how to change it, it just gives us a newer, slightly more scientific basis to condemn racists for their weak spines and even weaker minds. In case you couldn't tell, I'm a psych major 
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Feb 14, 2015 05:59
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Lottery of Babylon posted:He's not advocating genocide of mutants either, just vague "mutant registration". You're literally complaining about a Holocaust survivor wanting to stop a group of people being registered by the government on the basis of genetics.
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Feb 14, 2015 19:50
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Jedit posted:You're literally complaining about a Holocaust survivor wanting to stop a group of people being registered by the government on the basis of genetics. Magneto can want to do whatever he wants, he's the bad guy. The problem is that we're also supposed to unequivocally think that the senator is also just a bad guy, even though he clearly has a good point and the only proposed alternative of "Nah let's just cross our fingers and hope some random greengrocer doesn't accidentally blow up a city" is asinine. Incidentally, Magneto's plan is to further the gay agenda by using his gayness to recruit straight people and turn them gay, which is literally a fate worse than death. Wow what a great allegory!
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Feb 14, 2015 20:10
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Lottery of Babylon posted:Magneto can want to do whatever he wants, he's the bad guy. The problem is that we're also supposed to unequivocally think that the senator is also just a bad guy, even though he clearly has a good point and the only proposed alternative of "Nah let's just cross our fingers and hope some random greengrocer doesn't accidentally blow up a city" is asinine. That's taking a metaphor and seeing it as a straight allegory. Mutants aren't a stand-in for whatever minority, they are every minority in the sense that they are people who have been put in a position where society sees them as absolute Others. Senator Kelly's plan is bad because it asks for legitimizing this difference by force of law, claiming that those who are marked as Others are incorrigibly so. Magneto's solution is equally bad: the claim that he'll take away all difference by force, in order to abolish the idea of mutants as Others, means that he, too, is fully buying into this idea of duality and incorrigible difference. Thus, he isn't really all that different from Kelly (or, even more aptly since Magneto's plan would presumably kill the majority of those it effects: Magneto in X1 has pretty much the same plan and ideology as Major Stryker in X2). What separates the X-Men from Kelly and Magneto is that they attempt to do away with this duality by abolishing the idea of the Other altogether. Of course, there is the fact that one mutant can level a city. But it's not a straight allegory: the reason that mutant-registration is a Bad Thing is because it is an excuse for those in power to uphold the status quo over the suppressed: if we don't keep their rights in check, they could easily overtake us. You're supposed to recognize Kelly as the bad guy because, holy poo poo, that's a terrible way of reasoning. And the existence of the X-Men is meant as a counterpoint: finding out that you're no longer the most powerful party present can be terrifying, but the argument that it automatically leads to violence is faulty. Again, this all falls apart if you see the film as a straight allegory, but that's: a) Not the most interesting way to look at these films. and b) A really good way to take away an excuse for a film where Halle Berry can shoot Gandalf with lightening.
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Feb 14, 2015 20:36
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What's the alternative, though? Just accept that every now and then a whole neighborhood will randomly get flash-fried because some 13-year-old had a bad breakup?
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Feb 15, 2015 00:32
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John Wick was a good movie all around, but one part really stood out in a bad way. When the female assassin gets killed, the four people who shoot her are standing directly across from one another. Just ridiculous, unless they really wanted to shoot each other.
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Feb 15, 2015 00:37
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I wonder how Magento's mutant's only earth would even work because of the potential for unwanted explosions and all that poo poo. Would all young mutants have to go to "learn to control your powers or die" island or what?
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Feb 15, 2015 01:04
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On the subject of discriminated minorities having superpowers, I heard recently that apparently when the Japanese allied with Germany and read Hitler's writings on how the Jews were responsible for financial conspiracies etc. they decided "Wow, we should have these guys working for us!" so helped secretly smuggle a load out of Germany.
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Feb 15, 2015 01:23
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Elfface posted:On the subject of discriminated minorities having superpowers, I heard recently that apparently when the Japanese allied with Germany and read Hitler's writings on how the Jews were responsible for financial conspiracies etc. they decided "Wow, we should have these guys working for us!" so helped secretly smuggle a load out of Germany. This guy saved almost 10 thousand Jews from Lithuania, after he was recalled to Japan he was signing travel visas and throwing them out the window of his train car as it left the station.
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Feb 15, 2015 01:35
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Byzantine posted:What's the alternative, though? Just accept that every now and then a whole neighborhood will randomly get flash-fried because some 13-year-old had a bad breakup? Light Gun Man posted:I wonder how Magento's mutant's only earth would even work because of the potential for unwanted explosions and all that poo poo. Would all young mutants have to go to "learn to control your powers or die" island or what? If only someone would have a school for gifted children!
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Feb 15, 2015 02:01
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