Nope, miss me with that. There is a very select group of people who a definition of "politics" which is VASTLY different to the majority of the regular population's definition of "politics". Now, these days it may seem the former's definition holds given all the infusion of political bodies, think-tanks, bodies etc into entertainment (we can just call this propaganda because that's basically what it is), but it doesn't change the fact that politics as the way we see it in today's environment, is not inherent to entertainment as a whole.
I’m not those people. Address what I actually said.
The people in this thread talking about “politics” are those in opposition of black, gay, strong women being in thematic situations they deem unrealistic.
From my perspective, that’s just as much “politics” as anything else.
Also there's a ton of conflation by those select cliques of people as to what is considered political, as they've retroactively designated many philosophical and idealistic concepts (which maybe had slight political musings into them but of a different time and era) as fitting the mold of what they consider to be political in current-year.
I agree. To me the existence of gay, black, buff, women in any setting isn’t “political” but here we are.
A lot of the stuff people refer to when they compare something to be a Citizen Kane equivalent is more to do with storytelling techniques and devices the work uses within its medium to tell a story/narrative effectively and, supposedly, in ways other work before it has not managed to do.
TBH I always felt that designation a bit much high praise for TLOU, because you can certainly point to survival-horror games with more engaging stories, or 3rd-person action/adventure games with better gunplay, gameplay loops, mechanics etc. Granted, it's also about a "whole great the sum of its parts" kind of deal, can't necessarily take all the elements in isolation from one another.
No way you could possibly argue the story to Citizen Kaine isn’t “political”
Same with TLOU. Think about our current reality with Coronavirus. TLOU definitely explored the moral and political implications of society dealing with such an event.
Look I don't want to get into the whole percentages BS (because some people use it as a means of asking why certain people should even be in a story, when that's something they don't hold against, say, dragons or gremlins, neither of which exist whatsoever in the real world), but you're dealing with a country that's 60+ % white. Most of the people in these positions are white, and it's just going to naturally gravitate that way...
I agree, but it doesn’t mean there’s some nefarious political agenda when other demographics are gravitated to.
...because that hasn't stopped me from enjoying plenty of media that had no minorities or LGBT people in it, or only had a small handful. My favorite war film of all time is Come and See, a Russian film. Not a single non-white in there, doesn't matter. One of my favorite cyberpunk films is Tetsuo; 100% Japanese cast, not even a white person in there, let alone another minority. Doesn't matter, movie is still all kinds of awesome.
I may not be white, but that doesn't mean I can't enjoy works with a majority or exclusively-white cast. I may not be gay, but two of Gregg Araki's movies (Doom Generation and Mysterious Skin) are among my (vast) stable of damn good movies. It also means I can still appreciate stuff that might be majority-minority without needing to somehow claim it's a sin when something comes out with few or no minorities in it. I can go from watching Squeeze or Juice, to something like Gattaca and maybe watch something like Pulp Fiction after that. Just treating them as three awesome flicks, I don't need some sudden influx of a bunch of white people in Juice, or a bunch of black people in Gattaca, to even consider enjoying those movies.
I’m not white and agree I’ve learned to enjoy plenty of media despite the fact that it purposely caters to people not like me.
In what, exactly? Because there's actually tons of media with LGBT people in them AND creating them, some of it quite good in fact. I mentioned Gregg Araki movies earlier, and you've got other movies like Dandy Dust too. Fun movies, very LGBT-focused at that. There's been quite a lot of LGBT themes and characters in games; you can even go back to the '90s and find games with gay characters in them like Phantasmagoria 2 (and the gay guy there is actually one of the best characters in the whole game, probably the most fleshed out too).
To me all this stuff about under/misrepresentation just seems to be due to people feeling they don't have "the big one". It doesn't matter to them if they can get all of that in arguably more creative, albeit smaller and less-mainstream, works. No, it ONLY matters if they get the big representation in the SUPER-mainstream stuff. Which, more often than not, tends to be the safest, least creatively engaging work out there (doesn't mean it can't be entertaining, of course).
There’s not even an argument to be made that straight white males aren’t over represented in the media. It’s what it is, you just admitted it yourself.
Everyone else just wants a piece of that.
No, because too many hack creators these days actually DO compromise a story's natural integrity for a forced political narrative, and they have a big tendency to do so when making a work revolving around some minority group. Actually just having minorities in a work would be no problem if said work didn't do so at the expense of putting down "the privileged", but with these hacks, they can't seemingly lift EVERYONE up.
This is what I’m talking about. When the story caters to white males it’s “natural”
When it caters to anyone else it’s “hack creators” and their divisiveness.
Why can’t it just be creators trying to tell different stories?
Nope, in order to lift up Group A, they have to put down Group B. It's all very intentional in these types of works, and it's called divide-and-conquer.
How is group A(presumably white males) being put down by group b(presumably black, female, gay,) existing?
There’s nothing in this game or any game I can think of that paints straight white males as inherently bad. But I could think of plenty that paint every one else as the villain.
Why do you only consider it “divide and conquer” when it goes in one direction?
Depends on if the groups involved just happen to incidentally be those things and such things aren't literally defining their existence in the score of a fictional piece of work.
If it doesn't, then no, I don't see the problem. If it does, then yes, it's a BIG problem. And that would go towards BOTH of your examples.
Storys can go both ways. Some characters are defined by their personal demographics. Some aren’t.
Both are valid in my opinion.
Reality is, one demographic has been over represented historically regardless if their demographic is integral to their story.
