this post was submitted on 15 Jan 2026
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The comic may be a joke, but I feel like this is an issue in diversity.
Take an author who has three characters. They want better representation, so one white character becomes black.
But, it turns out that character gives a third-act betrayal. Now it’s playing up the theme that black people are deceptive and untrustworthy.
Or, they try making the second character a woman. In a key conflict, that character pulls a very stupid move that lets the bad guys get away and results in an exciting chase scene. Now it evokes the idea that women are stupid and ill-suited to detective/enforcement work.
I really want a world where we can safely set up characters for moments of failure, evil, etc, without large crowds either feeling offended, feigning offense, or worse, taking it as validation of their bigotry.
Weirdly, there's a relevant XKCD that summarizes this really quite well:
I don't get why it's always assumed that a particular character is intended to represent an entire gender or race.
One of the ones I remember the most is in the original COD4: Modern Warfare. A blog highlighted so savagely the fact that your squad is sent down to rescue a female chopper pilot who's been downed and wounded. Then, a nuke goes off, killing everyone, suggesting they could have gotten out of the blast radius if they didn't save her - meaning a woman in distress was the death of the whole squad. The blog lambasted Infinity Ward for giving such a horrible treatment to the game's only major female character.
Of course, that's a relatively disingenuous interpretation. That same mission has you rescuing whole squads of pinned soldiers moments before (all men). The chopper pilot gets her great moments of heroism in the process. And it's very likely the writers intended for the squad to be killed by a nuke no matter what happens.
And there have probably been COD games out there with NO notable women in them. So somehow, the move to include one in this particular game struck them as worse than if they'd done nothing at all.
That's crazy. She was a woman combat helicopter pilot? That sounds pretty bad-ass to me. I don't see how that's "horrible treatment".
COD is disgusting imperial propaganda. Absolutely zero surprise that it's also misogynist.
I think his point was that it WASN'T misogynist. The character is a combat helicopter pilot. That means she's intelligent, highly trained and skilled and of course brave. Those are bad things?
The fact that she was shot down doesn't reflect on her gender, it could happen to any pilot in that situation. It's war, it's inherently dangerous.
Yes, the world would be much better without racism, sexism, etc. That's why we resist.
I don't know if resistance should be restricting creative freedom to the point where every character MUST be considered a representation of millions of people.
That's less equality and more just a new form of racially-based control.
Yeah this tends to also create the problem a lot of writers fall into when having a more diverse cast where non white cis male characters come off as too perfect. They can't make mistakes, big or small, cause they're worried about the examples you gave (not saying you're implying this). I know I've heard from a lot of people on the topic of representation that they'd loveless perfect representation, but that's a hard thing to walk especially if funds aren't allocated to maybe get a consultant on the team that could help represent that group without it being stereotyped.
It's a real Heads-I-Win / Tails-You-Lose game, because the White Male Anti-Hero gets the exact opposite treatment. If you make a Sopranos or a Wolf of Wall Street or a Fight Club, the very obviously corrupt and villainous lead character somehow ends up being this celebrity icon for reactionaries.
The same people complaining that John Boyega and Daisy Ridley ruined Star Wars will come out cheering for Adam Driver while claiming Imperialism is cool now.
Anything that makes a story exciting or different - the ups and downs of the story arc, characters with personal flaws or quirks, foreign settings and distinct cultures, non-English languages, non-CisHet romances - become at once implicit indictments of the out groups and charming complements toward the in-groups.
And a lot of that just boils down to the critics themselves. Far-right media amplifying its megaphone year after year, until we're deaf from their screamed opinions. There's no right answer for a film maker or story writer when the designated state-sanctioned censors and corporate flaks are all patriarchal white nationalists.