So what is the line between DEI and just having diversity for story and variety? Eli and Alyx fit the setting and feel grounded, Chell being Asian and Glados being female doesn't send any red flags, Demoman doesn't seem out of place in TF2.
In the general case, Woke isn't really about promoting "minorities" (quotes because there are far more non-White people in the world than White), so much as knocking down existing culture. It's why despite it being entirely possible to create new stories and heroes with people of any colour or orientation, the drive is to repeatedly
replace existing ones.
So some common give-aways are:
1. Replacing existing characters (Aragorn is Black now).
2. Disproportionate quantities (this show set in England has a cast of 20 and 2 of them are White)
3. Needless racial or orientation requirements on hiring (e.g. the BBC openly specified non-White for a backroom editing job).
4. Absurdites that show DEI is more important than anything else (Cleopatra and Anne Boleyn are now Black)
5. The White Male is arbitrarily dumb-bad and corrected by non-White males (every sitcom since the mid-90s, Gillette razor adverts).
Once you realise it's not about promoting others but depriving some of self-respect and role-models, it becomes much easier to separate perfectly normal "this person happens to be X" from "this is DEI".
Three fantasy media examples:
- Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings triology? Not DEI. It's a Nordic mythic setting and the people look as such. The darker skinned people such as they are, are logically placed and handled (the Haradrim) and the strong female characters are strong in their own right, not at the expense of male character's standing (Eowyn is badass and should be badass. It's not required she be shown to be more badass than the male heroes).
- Dungeons and Dragons: Honour among Thieves? Borderline DEI at best. Despite having every possible ethnicity thrown together in one giant shaken jigsaw box, this is a High Fantasy setting with magic travel between continents, airships, magic as technology and is its own original setting (The Forgotten Realms). It doesn't knock down any culture and only mildly makes fun of the White male lead at the expense of non-White characters who themselves are treated humorously. Only in the context of a wider industry pattern does it very mildly drift into DEI/Woke.
- Rings of Power TV Show: Very woke. Nordic mythic setting suddenly filled with non-Nordic characters where it doesn't make sense at all, said characters are often arbitrarily badass as is female lead. Female lead's badassness is frequently done by showing superiority to males around her, existing heroic characters rendered foolish in contradiction to source material.
In short, it's not about who it promotes as much as it is who it knocks down. The reason being DEI proponents don't see people as individuals, they seem them as part of their assigned identity.
