"Diverse" works that aren't woke - when diversity does not fuck a movie/game/book/show up

[Open Window Maniac]

Rugrats. Chaz and Kira are an interracial couple and the show doesn't blow it's own horn about that. The Carmichaels are black and that's never touted as something extraordinary. Suzie is a good character, being able to stand up to Angelica. Mr. and Mrs. Carmichael also have excellent jobs (tv writer and doctor respectively) and only Stu draws attention to it because he's a huge fanboy of the show Mr. Carmichael works on; not because Mr. Carmichael is a black man who works in show business. The Carmichaels are also far and away the best parents on the show because they actually supervise their kids and don't let them get in to and out of life-threatening situations constantly.

 

[Jumbo Gay Threat]

I’m shocked no one has mentioned the Dead Space series. I found it to be diverse with characters having wonderful relationships and conflicts with each other. But most importantly just depicting men and women working with each other. Also there was some pretty strong female leads and side characters who were strong, had their limits but were full of faults. Compared to be the woke trash “Strong wahmen” that writers try to push these days.

 

[Allanon]

90s cartoons had full 'token character' effect, but they also usually didn't overemphasize it beyond the fact that coincidentally the group of kids or people had one or more of every color, gender, and religion or cultural background the writer could think of or fit into the scenario. I was very aware of it in the 90s and found it annoying how the casts were all coincidentally a perfect mix of colors when that's just not how people are in reality, but in retrospect if the height of woke diversity in works now were 'every single cast is the ultimate physical representation of American multiculturalism' it would be fairly inoffensive. There are times it would be worse than others, but that melting pot concept is basically a baseline - at best - for all diverse works now anyway.

Also the reason for the change is because the 90s cartoons were basically trying to indoctrinate children into thinking the total melting pot where everyone around you is varying colors is the normal, expected reality. You can use nicer words for it, but that's basically what it was doing. It couldn't toot its horn about it because that would ruin the point of "everyone is different colors here and nobody cares". It's changed because the people involved in this have gotten impatient - They're not willing to wait to raise multiple generations into believing exactly what they want - which is the cleaner, more thorough route - they want to bully and pressure adults and teens into changing views they've already formed to coincide. You can decide for yourself what the exact reason is for why they've become impatient or the inciting moment for the change of tactics, but that's ultimately why we've gone from the passive representation mostly focused in children's shows into extremely in-your-face demands for the viewer to recognize the representation and form exactly aligning opinions with the shoe. Exactly aligning opinions that include "pressure and bully people around you into doing it."

You can decide for yourself whoever 'they' are or why that confirming viewpoint is so important, but the tactic employed is one they've openly admitted to in other cases: you can find commercials where they specifically tell children to badger their parents to buy halogen lightbulbs and shame them if their parents try to buy incandescent ones because the parents were, at the time, refusing to buy the new 'better for the environment' halogens filling up the stores.

 

[Newman's Lovechild]

Also there was some pretty strong female leads and side characters who were strong, had their limits but were full of faults. Compared to be the woke trash “Strong wahmen” that writers try to push these days.

I only went to find and watch Cowboy Bebop when all the reeing about the Netflix series started. Apart from the show in general being fucking amazing, I thought OG Faye Valentine was great for those reasons. Sharp and proactive, but hamstrung by her bad decisions and attempts to screw people over. Some of her expressions when she fucks up: dumb cartoony expressions that somehow make her more rounded. The creators weren't scared to treat her like the rest of the badass cast, and make her the butt of a lot of jokes.

Spoiler

Compared to what little I've seen of the current year LET'S GO MOTHERFUCKERS LESBIAN JUST BECAUSE TAKE THAT MALE GAZERS I HAVE NO OFF BUTTON version. No, just no.

Also, holy shit it's difficult to find screenshots among all the photos of cosplayers. A lot of women don't mind that costume, Daniella Pineda.

 

[trailcamwhore]

90s cartoons had full 'token character' effect, but they also usually didn't overemphasize it beyond the fact that coincidentally the group of kids or people had one or more of every color, gender, and religion or cultural background the writer could think of or fit into the scenario.

It was hard to tell cartoon casts apart because they all looked "like a Benneton ad," in the comedian/curmudgeon stock phrase of the time.

The main difference from a current_year cast is that each individual character was less stereotypical. Today's "representative" characters are all copies of each other. When you see them, you know what they'll do.

'90s cultural production was still somewhat rooted in everyday life (where almost anything can happen), not just in other media (where almost nothing ever does), so it wasn't just repetition (re-presentation), and it wasn't so gratingly false.

It only looked false.

 

[Jonah Hill poster]

Codename: K.I.D.S Next Door and Recess were filled with so many different kids that their personalities shined through the screen.

Same thing applies to the Little Rascals as well.

 

[Krokodil Overdose]

For a semi-mainstream show released in 2018, I’m surprised that it is. As I’ve said I haven’t touched the show but assumed from the interview with Cas Anvar that I had to scrub through for a video editing internship at the time that they were gonna frame a hyper mixed-raced future under a unified planetary government as a largely beneficial thing, because that’s exactly what I would expect from Hollywood under most circumstances.

It is a good thing, in the sense that we've solved all our problems related to race, creed, and ethnicity. And replaced them with entirely different problems related to economics, class, and place of origin.

The main cast is two white guys, a Turkish guy (who counts as white too I guess, gets replaced by an Asian woman for the last season) and a black woman. Shockingly, that last is not presented as some paragon of virtue but rather too clever by half- she's a brilliant mechanic but tends to underestimate other humans, meaning she commits some of the biggest fuckups in the show. The beefy, blond, mildly psychotic blond guy is in fact the strongest character in the show and the only person who can match him is a woman... a Polynesian woman who's spent her entire life as a Martian powered-armor Marine, exactly the kind of woman that makes sense. And so on. It's not that the show isn't diverse, it's just that it avoids all the breaks from common sense (yes, men are stronger than women, no, "black girl magic" isn't a thing) that we've come to expect from "diverse" works.

 

[Wazzupnerds]

MCU does it well besides when it came to Captain Marvel.

Also Zach Snyder's DC movies handle it very well, I'm still pissed how WB butchered his Cyborg.

 

[Aunt Carol]

It's just a dumb sitcom, but I liked that "The IT Crowd" didn't make Jen perfect because she was a woman, the outsider and "not a nerd." Everyone was hideously flawed in their own special way, and that's diversity to me.

 

[Aero the Alcoholic Bat]

MCU does it well besides when it came to Captain Marvel.

Also Zach Snyder's DC movies handle it very well, I'm still pissed how WB butchered his Cyborg.

I assume before Endgame? It gets pretty bad after that.

And they didn't even allow Thor to defeat Hela herself, he had to summon some eldritch abomination to do it for him and to take down Asguard with her.

 

[The Nothingness]

I will echo the post by @LORD IMPERATOR on the Star Wars thread and say the Buzz Lightyear animated show had a number of diverse characters that were not cringeworthy when it came to social commentary. The main female character is a princess but dislikes her people's two-class system and plans on reformation when she becomes queen. It's ironic Mira is an empowered Disney Princess the company refuses to acknowledge while they destroy what made other Disney Princesses great in their original films (e.g. Belle, Jasmine, and Mulan).

 

[Basic Blonde Boy]

You know what, fuck it, I’ll take the shit.

Adventure Time did the diversity angle pretty well. The series was clearly held up on its very strong female cast. Bubblegum, Marceline, FP, LSP, Betty, I can go on. The show had a shit ton of female characters that had diverse personalities and backstories. Personally, I always like Bubblegum in the earlier seasons as she was certainly a force to be reckoned with. Flame Princess would also end up being a favorite as she got one of the best arcs of the series.

Then you have characters such as Ice King, or Simon, who are very clearly of a different race, even if not specified. A thought is that Simon is half Russian and half Hispanic given the Russian dolls in his crib and his pension for more Mexican traditions such as tortillas. Marcelina’s mom is also black And was given a pretty sad story. Mo is another diverse figure that built B.M.O. and was fun.

The show gets a lot of shit over diversity solely due to the lesbian scene, which is a bit unearned. The show was one of the few 2010s properties to do diversity correct, and honestly, even the lesbian scene was built up unlike Korra. Maybe not from the beginning, but the show certainly built PB and Marcy up in the second half and gave it time to actually seem realistic and not an ass pull.

 

[sasazuka]

Whatever else one may think about the Fast and Furious franchise (and about how Tokyo Drift in 2006 was really the last one to be rooted in "Car Culture" before the F&F movies started getting increasingly ridiculous), it was diverse from the beginning in 2001 and the diversity never felt forced or unnatural.

 

[Allanon]

MCU does it well besides when it came to Captain Marvel.

Also Zach Snyder's DC movies handle it very well, I'm still pissed how WB butchered his Cyborg.

I'll agree with you on the MCU front- though I'll add that Black Panther was a little cringe as well. Not nearly as bad as Captain Marvel, but it has its moments. The DC one though...I mean I guess you can say it's not woke but I wouldn't say it's good, either. Everyone's so shallow in Snyder's works that they can neither be woke nor well done representation.

 

[Chad Holdenford]

The titular Gargoyles are from Scotland, and one of them (Lexington IIRC) is confirmedly gay. They were brought over to Manhattan by not-quite-so-evil mastermind David Xanatos, a guy of Greek descent. Their main ally Elisa Maza is half-Latina, half-Black. Her mother is even a legit African immigrant.

Minor characters also tended to be fairly diverse with only the occasional mention of their racial background. One that always struck me well was the blind war vet who became a celebrated author and later taught Hudson how to read via Braille books. The guy was black, and that's it.

And there's quite a number of episodes delving with diverse cultures as well. For instance, they dealt with the tale of the Jewish Golem in the Czech Republic, a kid who could turn into motherfucking Cu Chulainn in Ireland, a native guy in the US-Canada border who was in doubt about the true value of his native heritage in the face of modern science, a former villain who went into the Australian desert seeking for redemption in the Aboriginal Dreamtime, so on and so forth. None of them bashed you over the head about inclusion or whatnot. It did have some incisive, lesson-to-be-learned shit here and there, but those were treated with actual care and came off as decent lessons as well. Read a book, don't play with guns, preserve nature, etc.

 

[The Token Ethnic]

I always thought Johnny Quest was diverse when I watched the reruns as a kid. Hadji was smart, knew martial arts and had some type of mystical power. My sister loved watching Pepper Ann and that show had a tomboy, some vaguely ethnic friend, but the mom was a weird feminist. As for movies, there's one from the 90s called Hangin' with the Homeboys that I really liked. Four friends that are Black and Puerto Rican have a guys' night out only for it to go horribly wrong and they end up growing apart because of it. There is one character that pretends to be Italian because he doesn't want girls to know he's a Rican. John Leguizamo is in it as well, but it's way before he got annoying with his political nonsense.

The same could be said about movies such as Judgement Night and Tresspass that have diverse casts, but are first and foremost action thrillers meant to entertain. Even the Judgement Night soundtrack had hip hop and rock bands collaborate together on a song. But these are older examples from the 90s. As for somewhat recent stuff? Lowlife from 2017. It has a Mexican wrestler, a black woman and a black and white friend/criminal duo. This movie is Tarantino-esque with lots of offensive content and it's pretty damn entertaining and funny.

 

[P. Barnes' THOT]

One of my kids is rewatching Malcom in the Middle, and it wasn’t until the third season or so that I realized how diverse it really was. All of Hal’s friends are black dudes and aside from a joke or two about it, it’s never mentioned

 

[do you like my hat]

People have already mentioned Arcane. It's insanely good all around tbh.

The new Voltron series wasn't perfect, but the diversity wasn't a problem.

Disney's Atlantis, which is criminally underrated imo. Also Lilo and Stitch.

Winx Club. The "problematic cartoon" was effortlessly more fun and more diverse than the tryhard Netflix adaptation, which is funny.

As much as these have been co-opted by annoying people, Sailor Moon and Utena by themselves are alright.

 

[Weeb Slinger]

The World of Peter Rabbit and Friends is a BBC adaptation of Beatrix Potter's illustrated short stories, all of which focus on anthropomorphic animals getting into minor scrapes and hijinks (though one character is almost eaten by a giant fish which, I think you will agree, is a pretty big deal). It first aired in 1992, and stands as a relic of a more wholesome era of children's television before the genre went full groomer.

There is absolutely no fucking around or cock teasing. The producers get right down to the business of telling the story of how Peter Rabbit and Benjamin Bunny fucked with the livelihood of smallholder, Mr McGregor. By the end of it, you are thinking to yourself: 'Okay, it's a show about rabbits who are petty criminals - a sort of gateway to the Nazi rabbits in Watership Down.'

Sorry to shatter your dream of an all-white rabbit utopia, Mr Fuentes, but, in the next episode, they hit you up with the story of a litter of kittens, who lose all their clothes prior to an important tea party. This isn't degenerate underage kitten nudity of the kind that might be recommended to you on Netflix. This is classy kitten nudity like you might see in an arthouse film produced by Studio Canal. The kittens' mother gets her brood out of their social engagement by claiming they have measles, which was a serious fucking illness that could kill you in the time when Potter was traipsing around Yorkshire painting the portraits of foxes.

Next there is a story about a duck, for fuck's sake.

In the space of literally an hour and change, the show has advanced from rabbits, to kittens, to a puddle duck, which I envisage as a very poor duck that can't afford a proper pond to dabble in. If that isn't diverse enough for you, then you can remove the miniature velvet waistcoat from my dick, and suck it like a diesel dyke attempting to draw a golf ball, autographed by the line-up of the 1997 Lilith Fair, through a Wentworth Prison promotional drinking straw.

But that's not all: A band of mice assist in the tailoring of cherry-coloured silk coat for the Mayor of Gloucester, because #notallmice.

Then BAMN!

A hedgehog washerwoman launders three pocket handkerchiefs and a pinafore.

Then, in a nod to the conclusion of Jaws, which hadn't even been written at this point, a frog engages in a battle of wits with a giant fish.

There are pigs, and a pair of mice who vandalise a dollhouse because #SomeMice. The cultural differences between rural and urban living are explored by a different pair of mice. There are cats, rats, and a goddamn fox

A notable omission is Squirrel Nutkin who, along with his squirrel friends, paddles to an island to torment the resident owl, until the owl goes full-Rambo on Nutkin's russet ass, and attempts to skin him alive, but only manages to bite off most of his tail and induce long-term PTSD.

When I read this story to my young niece and nephews, I was always careful to impart the cautionary moral: "Do not fuck with owls."

DO NOT FUCK WITH OWLS!

Anyway, it's a pretty diverse set of short films, but at no point could you call any of them woke.

 

[Jimjamflimflam]

Old one but MTV Downtown was a solid diverse cast. Urban young adult (other then Goat) and teens with their NYC shennigans. I miss that show so much.

An odd one is commericals from the 90 and earlier. I put on retro holiday commerical montages during the holidays to play in the background (don't judge, its wholesome!) And they tend to be surprisingly diverse.