February 2, 2016
Hello, blog, it's Neil. I was assigned to write about something that angers me this week. The thing that angers me the most, I guess, is something that many others would probably be angry with me for being angry about- and many other others would probably be proud of me for being angry with in a way that would make me a different kind of angry. It is something that is most commonly known as "political correctness". The overuse of this phrase by various parties has caused it to lose its meaning, as is what happens when buzzwords are used widely enough or in a potentially contentious context, so I wish there was another term I could use that still depicted it as more bad than good, unlike all of the other terms for it, but I suppose I'm stuck using a hollow term.
Look, I do believe that all people deserve equal human rights and opportunity in every facet of life that it is beneficial. What I don't believe in is using it as another form of oppression, which is basically what is happening, or if it isn't, it's on its way to. The way many people, particularly on internet magazines on news, politics, and culture; on blog websites such as Tumblr, and in college safe space culture, treat these issues oftentimes betrays the overall intended purpose of social justice activism. They have a tendency to talk about issues in such a way that they express the belief that those without power are fundamentally, morally, and logically better than those with it. This is one of the most counter-productive ways of going about the issues, and seems to express the belief that they would be happy if the tables were turned and straight white men became the oppressed ones. The issue at the heart of it all isn't that people of color are oppressed, or that women are oppressed, or that LGBTETC (the etc. meant ecetera, because of all of the possible sexual and gender identities that are being acknowledged nowadays) people are being oppressed, but rather that people overall are being oppressed. I feel that political correctness only creates more cultural barriers rather than tearing them down, as it wants people to take an alleged moral standard in seeing differences in people and use those to treat them not like people, but like expensive glass sculptures- fragile in constant need of praise and admiration, and held up on a pedestal for the world to see that it exists and that you need to find it just as good as those who put it there. That last aspect, of course, is referencing politically correct casting.
While I do believe that nothing as arbitrary as race, gender, sexuality, gender identity, body ability, political belief, or religious belief should affect casting or hiring for writing or directing in a media work, I do not believe in affirmative action or anything that says that there "needs" to be a certain amount of people of color or women employed on a work in order to be seen as a properly progressive creative workspace. This turns those people into statistics to be met rather than creative voices to be valued. Take what happened with some of the people on my favorite TV show and the TV show I have lofty, if not questionable, goals to work on if it is still airing in the 2020s, Adult Swim's Rick and Morty. At some of the conventions that the series co-creators, showrunners, occasional writers and directors (the creators of TV shows rarely become writers), and stars of the show, Justin Roiland and Dan Harmon, have gone to, the two of them tried to field questions about the fact that, at least for the first two seasons, all of the show's writers were men. This might not be as big of an issue if it weren't for the fact that, being a generally politically incorrect animated series on Adult Swim, it has a handful of scenes that could be seen as sexist, particularly plenty of comments made by Rick (which I find justified in that he's openly cruel to everyone more often than not) and the manner in which Morty fantasizes about his crush, a girl at his high school named Jessica (which I also find justified in that Morty is a fourteen-year-old boy, and nearly every heterosexual fourteen-year-old boy is going to have at least one inappropriate thought about a girl). Also, despite its target demographic of men ages 18-34, it has gained sizable attention from other audiences, particularly teenagers due to its teenaged-life-centric plots involving Morty and his older sister Summer and its slightly-more-mainstream-friendly nature than most of Adult Swim's other programming; women ages 15-45 due to its strong characterization of Beth, Morty's mom and Rick's daughter, and Summer, and the rise of geek girls in general (underground comedy musician Allie Goertz recorded a five-track digital-distribution-exclusive concept album called Sad Dance Songs, an EP with songs all relating to Rick and Morty); and older people due to its darkly realistic portrayal of getting older and more melancholic mood than any other comedy on Adult Swim (its fan slogan is the line from the show "Nobody exists on purpose, nobody belongs anywhere, everybody's going to die. Come watch TV?"). All of those unexpected audiences would make it seem like it might be a good idea to have more women on the writing team, right? Except it's not that simple. Roiland and Harmon have hired a few females to the writing staff for Season 3, which is expected to air in spring 2017 due to the very long production process of the show, but when this was first announced, Roiland stressed that all of the women that were hired were hired on merit because they had wrote good scripts and were not just hired as tokens, and Harmon, who was slightly less cynical about the whole ordeal, but not much, stressed that he wants the ratio of men and women writing to be 50:50 and not any more in favor of the women, as much as some more radical feminists might like. In an ideal world, they wouldn't even have to say this. No one would care, positively or negatively, about girls writing a TV show. And even with its unexpected demographics, Roiland and Harmon know that Rick and Morty is still a boys' show at heart. This leads into a greater social issue.
I honestly believe that, contrary to what the media presents, progressives have won America since 2012. There will always be bigotry, but aside from a few voices, people have generally accepted that racism, sexism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, Islamophobia, and ableism are bad things. While most of the productions showing minorities and once-marginalized groups doing things once done by only straights, whites, and males will not be released for another few years, the fact that there is strong market demand for these things I find to be proof enough that this is a truly idealistic and progressive age and that things are always getting better... as long as you know how to suck up to the left. Discrimination is in human nature, and even without thinking, people try to provide more for those that match their biases than those who don't. Some even use political correctness as a backhanded way to mention someone's flaws to their face. I think that fifty years down the line, the patriarchal society will become a matriarchal society, and nearly every story of oppressed minorities and white saviors will be retold somewhere along the line in real-life but with the roles switched. A man in a position of law enforcement who is of color will shoot an unarmed white teenager and the same fallout as all of the white-man-black-kid shootings will happen, and "progressive" internet journalists will disregard all of the potential gray areas involved in the incident in order to make the white teenager look like nothing but a victim of an institutionalized racist society. And then, some time later, they'll realize that they're just restarting a cycle they thought had ended years ago. And without thinking, after "justified" discrimination against straight white males ends, people will find a new arbitrary reason to discriminate against other people, say, the shape of someone's nose, and the issue of accepting people with pointy noses will become as harrowing as the issues of race, gender, and sexuality have been for years. The faces may change, but the situation stays the same- people will always think of a reason to keep those different from themselves down. This is one of the central themes of one of the things I want to make.
"Fanz", the TV series I want to make, will be set in a progressive-utopia version of my hometown of Wyomissing. In this fictionalized version of the town, people of every race, gender identity, and sexual identity are out and proud across the whole town, and they are all in strong and respectful roles. And yet, it is clearly starting to become a dystopia. Plenty of people are using their "victim" status to get away with bullying and worse, and some kids are even being driven to suicide because it is being set in their mind that, since you can't say "all lives matter" as an all-inclusive alternative to "black lives matter", they genuinely believe that "white lives don't matter." This is what happens to the childhood best friend of the protagonist, Nelly Rushberg. She is a Samoan-American Jewish fourteen-year-old trans girl who underwent intensive hormone exposure and gender reassignment surgery at age six after a neurological study that resulted in the young boy turning out to have the instincts of a girl. Due to what happened to her friend and much of what she has experienced, she takes more right-leaning views on issues most directly affecting African-Americans, Jews, and transgendered people, and more left-leaning views on everything else. She is largely disgusted by politically correct culture, even when it wants to help her, and doesn't want to be defined by anything other than her love of anime and anime-influenced animation and how she treats other people. Her love interest for the first half of the series, a girl named Tahvah Bakaar, a bisexual Lebanese-American girl, likewise takes more right-leaning views on issues affecting bisexuals, females, and Muslim-Americans, and herself is even an atheist, though she doesn't outright detest religion, she just doesn't want political correctness to give cover for either Islamic terrorism nor the less-than-admirable aspects of Islamic and Middle Eastern culture. All of the six main youth characters, for a bit of ironic satire, take right-leaning views on the issues that most directly affect them and left-leaning views on those that don't. Nelly's best friend, Giles Bolton, is a half-Caucasian, half-Japanese trans boy; Carrie Christela, Giles' love interest, is a half-Puerto Rican, half-New Jersey Italian pansexual girl raised by a member of the San Francisco Bear Brotherhood; Jin Waz, Nelly's friend and surrogate older brother, is a Korean-American inter-sexual young man with first stage palsy; and Alex Pekin, Nelly's younger cousin, is a Samoan-American gender-fluid female that seems to identify heavily with Middle Eastern culture. And yet, this is all supposed to be unimportant compared to their respective fandoms of anime, auto racing, trading card games, iPhone gaming, Broadway musicals, and documentary filmmaking. Their direct mentors, who are the main administrative staff of the school and all based on myself and some of my childhood friends, try to teach them to follow their own path and not just support what liberal media outlet supports simply because they tout their moral superiority. They take their jobs the least seriously of any staff members at the school district, and will even criticize the politically correct and pseudo-idealist beliefs of many of their students other than the main six to their faces if it is clear that they're ignorant about various societal factors and are clearly making it more about themselves than the core issues at hand. With any luck, if my show manages to get out in the manner I want it to, it will make people think that whatever point of view people may take about both fandom and social justice issues, they're wrong.
Thank you for reading this, and I hope you might think about how this applies to your life in America and the world today.
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