If One Piece, Bayonetta and Resident Evil debuted in the late 2010s or onwards, what improvements and downgrades in terms of character and plot do you think they would have? Especially in regards to female, minority and LGBT rep?
I think they'd be dogshit across the board lol. But I'll put all this under a read more so other people can skip by it.
Look, I know people get queer coding (good and done by people who are bending censorship rules as much as they can to show gay rep) and queer baiting (bad because it's hetero people doing "will they, wont they" with intent to make money off the gay fans they've accumulated and give no actual rep) confused with each other, but the 2010's was The Time for queer baiting. It was also the time where internet consciousness was getting a lot of new words for various genders and sexualities. Hell, I was a university student when demisexual started to spread around in online social spaces, and all these new flags were being created so fast none of the more adult gays I knew could keep up. Which is saying something!
The intersection of feminism, race politics, and queer politics were being highlighted and examined by a new generation of adults who were figuring out who they were and wanted to know where they stood. They were also being horribly shat on by people whether they were gay or straight or men or women. A fuck ton of racism was inescapable to all audiences as "reverse racism" and "blackwashing" were coined by every white person even slightly offended that a random artist they'd never met decided to draw an anime character with brown skin and the loosest curls of black hair. It didn't matter how popular these white content creators were either because they got away with the harassment with little to no consequences! In the 2010s I couldn't name a single fandom where people actually got a fuck ton of hate mail and death threats for being racist, but I could and can still name fandoms where black and brown folk get slurs in their inboxes for having taste and good design sense.
There's legitimately people who say cartoons which came out in the 90s that they enjoyed as children couldn't come out today in the exact same manner because they'd be "too woke". This means having any woman lead that didn't breast boobily where ever she walked is "catering to the evil sjws". Claire would get knocked down. Jill would get knocked down. Nami and Robin would "gradually improve" because Oda draws them and all the other women worse as time progresses. The infighting with Bayonetta would be it's own very special ring of hell.
I would murder people if I had to see en masse every white man shitting on the decisions to make Carlos and Luis visibly brown and call it "brown washing". I'd see blood as groups of terminally online white women would accuse both of these men as being aggressive and pushy towards Jill and Ashley who they would in the same breath romantically pair with fucking Nikolai and Ramon or some shit. I saw this happen with Dragon Age. I saw this happen with Fallout. I want blood! From a corporate perspective, you can also look at RE6 and understand corporations were at a point of trying to cater to a market of whatever is "most well received" at the time. Guess what? Every big game company was doing their best to make the same money as Last of Us and Call of Duty. You couldn't escape the yellow or pale blue camera filters unless you lived on the Steam page and only the Steam page.
Did you ever see that art of white Lucio and white Black Panther? Did you know that Homestuck fans had to make a POCStuck tag for their art in an attempt to avoid harassment? Did you know about the fanfic authors incorporating BLM into their fic for shits and giggles on ao3? Did you see the widespread posts of trans white women saying that trans black women were taking over the narrative? Did you see the fat-shaming and racist vitriol in the androgyny tags? Did you know about tumblr closing the accounts of black organizers online and saying they were russian bots trying to kill the election? All of this was in the 2010s! LIKE!!!!! IT WAS ABSOLUTE INSANITY!!!! And most of this was still just on tumblr! I wouldn't even know where to begin with reddit. And god, fucking Gamergate happened in that decade too. It was hell.
The 2010s was a time for a lot of change, and many vocal minorities did not like it and pushed back super hard. This lead to many artists and directors whether indie or corporate making changes in their media and stories for the worse. It is still frustrating and weird as shit watching tumblr white artists I remember from those days who were making real unscrupulous content now making money off the same crowds of people on here with "their change of heart". And by change of heart I mean pretending they never did anything. Did they apologize? I'll never know, and if I ask it could go normally with a private DM or extremely terribly for me if they make my ask public! I do know a lot of them got jobs in the industry though if they didn't start their own business, so there's that!
I think Resident Evil, One Piece, and Bayonetta came out exactly when they should have. Yes, a lot of concepts in them did not age well. Yes, they could be better about representation. Yes, there are changes being made now with both One Piece and the Resident Evil Remakes that would've been nice to have a decade ago. Yet had they came out into the world any later, they might not have gotten off the ground, especially with these corporations buying up each other as quickly as they have been.
I am by no means saying the 90s and 2000s were specifically better for queer rep, feminism, and poc rep in media. Sometimes we got really good shit, and sometimes we got horrible, harmful stereotypes. There were a lot of gray zones too. I was a kid during those times, and viewing the world from a child's eyes is different than viewing things from the eyes of the adult. I can look at media made from those decades and tell which ones aged well and which ones did not. I can determine intent behind narrative choices and see who put their heart into their works. However, these things were also made during a time where anyone could make a movie, tv show, or video game without it being a huge ordeal outside of making the damn thing. Today that is no longer the case because of executives wanting to shove their statistics for money making into every single development decision that's made, and a lot of people don't know how they can navigate their art away from that hollow tube of garbage to get in the door.
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can i get a fuckin uhhhhh mongolian/japanese mixed vriska with scars over her eye and a prosthetic arm?
here you go anon!
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hispanic (specifically dominican) eridan and black sollux mayhaps? just them chillin, maybe holdin hands :}} (also transfem eridan if that is not an issue!!)
happy 413 anon !!!!
[image description: a digital drawing in a cartoony style of humanstuck eridan and sollux on a walk. Eridan has light brown skin, long dark brown hair with a purple streak, and is wearing a blue off shoulder sweater along with a yellow skirt and black and pink boots. sollux who is next to her has dark skin and is wearing a grey tshirt with a yellow pin on it and green cargo pants. They are holding hands. /end id]
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