Last month, I discussed how Netflix has a tendency to give us queer clickbait–promo images with men staring at each other, despite little to no same-sex relationship content. I 100% hope that Netflix data scientists see that article, but I would never expect a useful public response. The reason is, we already know what Netflix said last time.
Netflix’s algorithm engages in queerbaiting. Whenever we browse movies and TV shows, Netflix has a clear preference for showing promo images with attractive men looking meaningfully into each others’ eyes.
I think many of these shows actually do have some sort of same-sex relationship, but they’re incidental or on the margins. Others, I have a suspicion that they actually don’t have any queer content at all! And then there are some that I thought must be a trick, with hardly any queer content to speak of, but after some research, I think are actually fairly queer. Netflix’s tendency to show the most homoerotic marketing material regardless of actual content sure makes it difficult to distinguish.
I’m very sorry but I’m going to have to show you some homoerotic imagery. Purely for scientific purposes, of course.
This is a review of both the TV series, and the webcomic. The reader should be aware that I greatly favor the critical review, so it should come as no shock that that’s what this is. However, this is a space where we are free to like or dislike things–or both, as the case may be.
Heartstopper (TV series, 1st season)
Heartstopper is a Netflix TV series based on the free online graphic novel (that is to say, webcomic) of the same name. The first season released to critical acclaim, and people have been talking about it as the hot new thing. I recently watched the series with my husband, and we both had the same reaction: The series is sweet and well-done, but extremely cookie-cutter.
Many viewers found the show to be novel and refreshing, but we found it to be very much the opposite. Why is that? It must have something to do with the sort of media we consume. My husband and I both watch a lot of gay movies, and I’ve read a lot of BL webcomics—including the original Heartstopper. Within that space, the high school coming out slash romance genre is extremely common, and Heartstopper is practically a tour of the most well-worn tropes.
Media that is specifically branded as Christian—such as Christian rock, or any movies that appear on PureFlix—has a reputation for being bad, to put it lightly. Why is that?
To contextualize this question, I don’t think there’s anything morally wrong with producing, consuming, or enjoying “bad” media. You could say I’m antagonistic to Christianity and Christian values, but that doesn’t necessarily imply that their media must be bad too. And saying that Christian media is bad does not necessarily argue that Christianity itself is bad. We can imagine a possible world where atheists didn’t like Christianity but had to begrudgingly admit that Christian media was high quality. In fact, atheists do tend to say positive things about a few specific Christian works, such as Jesus Christ Superstar.
To further motivate the question, I think a lot of media geared towards queer audiences is bad. I’ve watched quite a number of LGBT movies, and not only do they get lower review scores on average, I also have a subjective experience of lower quality. I accept the lower quality, because I’m interested in the genre and representation. But why is it bad? Could Christian media be following similar dynamics, or is it an entirely different beast?
It’s time for a critical analysis of the “equality vs equity” meme, a widely duplicated and mutated image of three people standing on crates to watch a baseball game.
I shrink images to fit this blog’s margins. For bigger versions, see my sources. Source
The linguistic island
Of all my complaints about this meme, my most significant is about its choice of words. On the surface level, the meme is educating us about the distinction between “equality” and “equity”. However, outside of the meme, that is not how the words are used. The equality/equity distinction, mostly just comes from the meme. The meme is not educating us about the meaning of these two words, it is establishing new meanings.
It is not illegitimate to create new meanings for words, of course. But the problem is that the meme masquerades as educational, and everyone takes that for granted. As a result, every discussion of “equity” eventually comes back to the meme. The meme is a linguistic island, and there is nowhere else for the discussion to go.
Much belated, let’s talk about Pickle Rick.
“Pickle Rick” was a 2017 episode of Rick and Morty, and the only one I ever watched. After I saw it, I thought to myself, I don’t need to watch any more of this show. For me, the episode represents a common pattern in fiction, where the intention is to satirize masculinity, but at some level, it fails to do so.
In “Pickle Rick”, Rick turns himself into a pickle to avoid going to therapy with the rest of his family. He sets up a mechanism to turn himself back as soon as his family leaves without him, but something goes wrong and hijinx ensue. He has to use his limited means as a pickle to pull himself through a sequence of over the top action scenes. Eventually, he lands in therapy, where the counselor explains the absurdity of his actions to him.
Content note: I’m not going out of my way to spoil the game, but I’ll mention some aspects of one of the endings.
Eliza is a visual novel by Zachtronics–a game studio better known for its programming puzzle games. It’s about the titular Eliza, an AI that offers counseling services. The counseling services are administered through a human proxy, a low-paid worker who is instructed to read out Eliza’s replies to the client. It’s an exploration of the value–or lack thereof–of AI technology, and the industry that produces it.
As a professional data scientist, media representation of AI is a funny thing. AI is often represented as super-intelligent–smarter than any human, and able to solve many of the world’s problems. But people’s fears about AI are also represented, often through narratives of robot revolutions or surveillance states. Going by the media representation, it seems like people have bought into a lot of the hype about AI, believing it to be much more powerful than it is–and on the flipside, fearing that AI might be too powerful. Frankly a lot of these hopes and fears are not realistic, or at least not apportioned correctly to the most likely issues.
Eliza is refreshing because it presents a more grounded vision of AI, where the problems with AI have more to do with it not being powerful enough, and with the all-too-human industry that produces it.