why do people make shit arguments against queer representation by saying things like “the percentage of lgbt people in the population isn’t that high” well neither is the percentage of vampires but we see plenty of them in our media dont we
I dislike a lot of weirdly snarky pro-representation arguments but i am kind of okay with this one
Today, in Serious Answers to Not-That-Serious Questions:
It’s true, the vampire demographic is not large. Vampires are fake. Therefore they can be whatever we want and need them to be; therefore it’s not a problem when we use them to tell the stories that are relevant to us, all of us, in any circumstance where the “vampire” metaphor seems to pack any punch.
It turns out that comes up a lot. “Vampire” can mean “sexy predatory man” (or, less often, “sexy predatory lady”). “Vampire” can mean “glittering untouchable elite who’s part of a secret conspiratorial world.” “Vampire” can mean “leech who is stealing our Precious Essence.” Those all seem to be stories we really like telling, right now. And when we tell such a story, and slap the “vampire” label on it, nobody gets hurt and nobody gets mad.
We could totally do that thing with LGBT people. In fact, within certain genres, we totally do. Not so much in mainstream American media, but…
Yuri anime is huge. This is partly a fetishization thing, but it’s also partly because male geeks want stories about complex emotional interactions between sympathetic compelling characters, and for that audience it’s easier to keep all the characters sympathetic and compelling within the fantasy of “they’re all cute girls, no really, all of them, your defensive social instincts don’t have to kick in here.” Yaoi, which is also huge, does precisely the same thing for a different audience. Hell, even classic Western slash fiction runs on a roughly-similar engine.
Of course, this is not any kind of real representation. All those gay characters aren’t very much like actual gay people, and if ever they are, it’s mostly by accident. They’re like vampires or elves or orcs: they represent fantastic unreal character-types being used to construct myths that are meant to resonate, at least amongst a specific audience. Real-life gay folks, unless they happen to be into the relevant genres for independent reasons, tend not to be very impressed.
If you’re willing to be folded-spindled-and-mutilated into something mythical, you can get a lot of widespread traction. I bet, with proper marketing, you could get some yaoi-like or yuri-like genre to catch on in the West. Y’know, in the same way that we got Low Fantasy and Paranormal Romance and Softcore BDSM Erotica to catch on.
But if you really care about representation, you probably care about it being halfway decent. You probably don’t want your subjects to be folded, spindled, and mutilated for the sake of fitting into easily-accessible narratives.
And good representation, on its own, does not have tremendous widespread appeal. The appeal is mostly limited to…members of the group being represented, and their closest associates / fans. So, yeah, it makes sense to take note of the size of the relevant demographics.
(NOTE: This doesn’t mean representation can’t be popular, or that it can’t be good in a mainstream-ish way! Obviously it can. But the representation itself probably isn’t contributing much to the popularity or to the mainstream quality.)