beccaelizabeth's dreamwidth journal

I was trying to find out the history of Chinese people in Norwich. But every way I google for it I just get a ton of Chinese restaurants. *facepalm*

"What did the Chinese do for us?" reckons "The Chinese population has been in Norwich for an estimated 50 years" and "Chinese population [...] in the 2001 demographic census was 1,399 - not including several hundred students at UEA" but it also reckons "Across Norfolk the Chinese community is one of the largest ethnic groups behind Indian and Asian."

... Chinese is not Asian? Bzuh?

The article is about (a) Chinese New Year dragons and (b) Chinese restaurants. "meals, mah-jong and of course firecrackers, gongs and dragons." Ah, and waaaaaay down the page it mentions "The Chinese population are involved with a wide variety of occupations, for example there are many Chinese Doctors at Norfolk and Norwich Hospital."

There's a mention of a couple of Chinese Associations which work to raise awareness, so they've probably got more information. I google for them.

... I find first something about illegal immigrants.


So,I guess I'm finding some things about usual portrayals of Chinese people in the media then.

So far, nobody mentioned martial arts. That's the only surprise.

More Torchwood numbers.
If I stick to just counting speaking parts then I can count how many speaking characters get dead, how many are women, and how many are people of color. I can also count black men, because there's a specific issue there. But must remember 'dead black men' is a subset of 'dead people of color'. Do I need a column for 'dead white men' or is that just the remainder? ...I need a column.
I can only count what I see, and may be inaccurate.
This being Torchwood many of these characters are either dead before they're speaking or die more than once. ( Read more... )

I did attempt to count corpses as well, but there's some crowd scene issues going on. I could freeze frame and have a go, but massive job much?

Right. Table under the cut. It may not be a very useful table, but I've made it now so I'll post it.

( Read more... )

And now for season 2:
( Read more... )
There's also longevity tests to play with: Who makes it through two minutes, who gets two seasons, who's still going? Maybe I do that later.


Okay, I have *tried* to make tables but I keep on thinking of more ways up to put the data. Is it one black man dead out of one black men ever, or one out of many? I need another column or something. Wait, I'll write it as fractions, so 0/1 means one black guy survived and 1/1 means there was one black man and he died.

There were 11 black men with words to say in the two seasons. Two died.
There were 13 black women with speaking parts, some of them in several episodes. Two died. Plus the woman in the recording was already dead.

So there's a pretty good chance of survival in Torchwood even for black people.
Win.

Under this next cut goes a list of all the dead speaking characters.

( Read more... )



I also made a little list of queer relationships in answer to someone elses post so I'll paste them in here because I have the window open.
( Read more... )


If there is any more counting to do someone else can do it. I have head of fuzzy and forgot both breakfast and lunch. *facepalm*

Have finished counting characters in Torchwood season one and two.
Those links go to my longer notes.

I did more tables later and more notes about race here.
And some about deaths.

I am counting speaking characters: male or female, white or of color, and Bechdel test pass/fail.
My count is likely imperfect. I can only count what I see.

According to the 2001 census Cardiff is 92% white.
I'm going to assume that men and women are 50/50. (I'll assume it because I *looked* for a number but did not find one. Google fail.)

I shall do math and draw conclusions, in pretty color coded tables.

First a recap on season one, now in one table:
( Read more... )

Green means there's at least the percentage found in Cardiff, orange means it's close (I chose 40% for women, roughly meaning one more woman needed to be even), and red means they've got some explaining to do.
On the Bechdel green is pass, an orange fail means two women talked about men, a red fail means no scene had only two women talking. Thankfully there's always at least two named women, they just don't always get to chat alone.

And now for season 2:
( Read more... )

So, general conclusions:
There's a consistently high percentage of people of color, helped along by the way that Tosh on her own is a representative proportion for anything up to 10 speaking characters, so with a maximum cast of 28 and most shows in the mid-teens then one or two other people of color keep the percentages quite high.
Season One averaged 17% people of color.
Season Two averaged 18% people of color.
Consistent, and consistently more than double the 8% wiki reckons for Cardiff and the UK.
I am not complaining, I'm counting. I think it's cool.
I had a thought, and looked up the USA: around 80% white. [ETA: Though different bits of wiki have different answers, and 80% white is the *highest* number; try here ] So Torchwood is actually reflecting [or closer to] the ethnic diversity of the USA. And Torchwood does quite well shown in the USA.
Interesting.

There's a very frequently low percentage of women. Over the entire two seasons only 4 episodes had 50 something percent women. No episode had more than 60% women, and 6 had only 20 something percent, with the lowest at 21%. The inequalities are not symmetrical, you never get a lot of women and very few men to the same extent you get a lot of men and very few women.
Season One averaged 37% women per episode.
Season Two averaged 39% women per episode.
An improvement, technically, and yet not a very large one.
2/5, or 40%, of the main cast are women... so at least they're consistent.
Which is odd.
Did we suddenly get outnumbered and me not notice?

Bechdel Fail and Pass are about 50/50 over the two seasons, but season one was 8/5 in favour and season two was 5/8 to the fail. Episodes with quite a high percentage of women can still Bechdeil fail.

I did not count have now counted the hypothetical 'reverse Bechdel' where two men talk about something other than a woman. In the interests of technical accuracy I probably should. Since I'm not rewatching them all again right away I'll do it from the transcripts. And, also, do it later.
... later apparently meaning after 0330.
I have made blue 'pass' to mean two men talk about something other than a woman. I have made pink where there is no scene with no women in it. ( Read more... )
So, now I've checked, there's a difference between the two seasons. The first season has four episodes where every scene has at least one woman, and one that barely just barely has men alone; the first and last episodes are both all mixed, and it's about even on test fail between genders. The second season has two all mixed episodes, not the first and last; the fail is 2 m-m to 8 f-f. There's more times women are involved in interactions in the first season.

I've said before I liked the first season better for politics reasons, but this wasn't consciously what I had in mind.

Next, because clearly I need to do more math, I can take the full transcripts and the notes I've just made on categories of all those speaking characters, and I can figure out how many words they had each in each episode.
... this may take a while...

Have finished counting characters in Torchwood season one. ETA: Went on and finished both, please read completed tables instead /ETA.
I shall do math and draw conclusions. Would be easier if I could remember how to make a table... aha, auto generator to the rescue...
( Read more... )

So that's the numbers in a table with color coding.
Pretty. But revealing some problems. More with the gender than race though.

After exam, which I will clearly pass due to all my concentrating and studying and stuff, I will go and count season 2. I wonder if it's better.

ETA: Went on and finished both, please read completed tables instead /ETA.

I am counting characters that get to speak but with no weighting for number of lines or screen time or being series regulars. (Those would also be valuable, but require more math.) Are speaking characters: male or female, white or of color, and did they get dead (although the Dead count got complicated when I started counting corpses that never spoke first). Also Bechdel pass/fail.
My count is likely imperfect. I can only count what I see.

Wiki reckons Cardiff is "Ethnicity 91.57% White, 1.99% Mixed, 3.96% S. Asian, 1.28% Black, 1.20% Chinese or other."
http://www.icar.org.uk/4733/statistics/about-cardiff.html
seems to be Wiki's source and that's the 2001 census figures they're quoting.
So 9/10 white would accurately reflect the ethnic variety of the area.

I'm going to assume men and women are about 50/50 in real life without looking it up.

1-01 Everything Changes
( Read more... )

1-02 Day One
( Read more... )

1-03 Ghost Machine
( Read more... )

1-04 Cyberwoman
( Read more... )

1-05 Small Worlds
( Read more... )

1-06 Countrycide
( Read more... )

1-07 Greeks bearing gifts
( Read more... )

1-08 The Keep Killing Suzie
( Read more... )

1-09 Random Shoes
( Read more... )

1-10 Out of Time
( Read more... )

1-11 Combat
( Read more... )

1-12 Captain Jack Harkness
( Read more... )

1-13 End of Days
( Read more... )

That's the first season done, I'll do another post for second season.

Feel free to join in with later episodes.


Note on Bechdel test: I'm only counting it when the scene is about women, not when they're part of a mixed male and female group. This is because I want to see if women only exist when men are around. Bechdel failing movies do that a lot. Women exist solely in relation to men. When we're not observed by or observing men, we're schrodingered into voiceless invisibility. It's weird and creepy. So: if there's men around when two women talk, if they're part of the same group, it doesn't count. Other tests may vary.

It bugs me when people use RPGs to mean, basically, Dungeons and Dragons, or crit fantasy as being based on Tolkien.

RPGs are as varied as imagination makes them, D&D doesn't rule the world, fantasy can draw on any and every story.

If I want to RPG based on Buffy or DW or Star Wars or B5 or, well, probably anything else, there's a rules system, often official, and a lot of world background. All of them will have different issues. Some of them you probably wouldn't call fantasy, but they've got knights with burning swords, or mages (techno or otherwise), or a guy in a travelling box with a little magic wand. Not exactly hard SF. Big spectrum. And even if you rule out the SF trappings, you still get fantasy that isn't based on Tolkien.

Unless you've defined fantasy as Tolkien, and RPG as D&D, in which case what are the rest of us playing?

/irritation

This looks random just sitting here. But it's not relevant to the serious think-about-race post that set it off.

Thinking about race, as well as class and gender and ablism and everything else, applies in RPGs as well as more linear stories. Saying it's just a game works even less well than it's just a story, cause playing the game you make choices within it, and if those choices involve killing off a lot of dark skin people, well, that's a Thing.

I liked best the RPGs set in urban fantasy settings, preferably with less forced levelling and packaged characters than some systems insist on. I don't want to buy a category pre-paid, I want to make a character however they develop. But I can see the appeal of the other way. I suspect it lends itself poorly to -isms though, since a package plus a picture can be a stereotype rather more easily than someone you have to spend a few days designing. Still, for those who don't find character design worth a whole weekend...

But then: urban fantasy. World basically like this one. You could end up with a Buffy-esque oddly white world with a few black vampires, or an Angel problem where The Black Dude stops hanging out with other black guys once the white party turns up. It don't get away from having -ism issues to set it in a world structured by them.

I've been thinking on how I'd design a fantasy world, especially now I'm reading up on Banestorm Yrth and also have the Infinite Worlds campaign book. There's a lot of rich variety to draw on from history and mythology and fiction, but doing so without importing the structuring -isms of the originals is a right tricky task. Like writing pirate movies without importing the racism was tricky, apparently invisible, and rather fail. Or like noticing that even thousand year old stories might be talking about other races and being rather racist about them under skinny covering of myth. Sometimes the symbols used have drifted so much they might not be first glance obvious, other times the symbols are still with us and hence as invisible as most common-sense and agreed-with culture. Sometimes you end up in a tangle of 'but it's historical fact!' and running full tilt into all the mass arguments about who writes history and all the advocates for write it better.

I'm frustrated to find thus far a fantasy world where women don't get to play. Sure, they're drawing on historical cultures, postulating a world populated by people scooped up by magic and dropped on Yrth a village at a time, and there was a lot of sexism going on in history. But we watched a video in the Medievalism bit of last semester where they revisited the position of women and showed how actually right after plagues there weren't enough workers to fill the jobs so everyone's labor was in demand, women included, and for a while women owned and ran businesses with something like equality. Sudden isolation and colonising a world from scratch would seem like an all-hands scenario to me. Perfect opportunity to equalise the roles of women. And then there's the impact of magic. One section, about dwarf society, has the classic biological justification for hiding the women at home cause they can have babies and men can't so they can afford to lose men. But this is in a RPG that has spells for putting babies in males, or starting them from scratch, from whatever species you want if you pour on the advanced magery. Different setting, granted, but the spells are in the book. Why not use them to reshape the assumptions?

And maybe they do in a different bit of the book, but I'm not holding my breath.

I'm looking forward to the Vorkosigan game 'verse partly because biotech difference are so central to shaping Bujold's worlds, and the planet descriptions will have to deal with that. Plus, herm characters! Take that, stupid patriarchal game 'verses.

But I also want to strap on some armour and go smite dragons in a party of my sisters in arms, in a medieval sort of world where this is business as usual.

... it might help if I could find an RPG group to play with where I wasn't The Girl.
... actually it might help if I could find an RPG group. Sort of in general. I'm really out of the habit lately.
... given that I used to play clerics that's kind of a pun.

okay, going now.

there's a poem in one of the books I read recently
I remembered it from a bit that said I am not your bridge
it kind of says why I feel so hesitant to ask questions about some stuff. Because it's nobody's actual job to translate experiences for me. Bouncing up to someone and asking "hey, tell me all about your life!" might work in some situations, but in others it's kind of like the bit where Neil Gaiman puts in his FAQ that he won't do people's homework for them. Only more so, because it's like the homework question isn't even one that someone can answer as their one and only individual self, because they're being asked to have many voices and translate all of them.

But the flip side is, some people have answered that stuff already. Figure the question right, figure out how to google it, and you can find people talking about what it is to be Indian in Britain or Black in Canada or White in Singapore or whatever else it is that you don't know. Because people have been coming on this big interweb thingy for years and years already, and telling us all about their life.

The trouble comes with lesson the first, ask the right questions.
What if I don't know enough to know what it is I need to know?
Ignorant of my ignorance, bouncing along committing stereotype or something.

... I don't like that idea at all.



Sometimes I think I'd like to know everything about everyone in the whole world and then maybe Understand stuff. But then I remember Files&Records or the Bard who wished to know all the stories and I think I quite like being people still instead. But by that definition people are defined by their ignorance, making them one particular individual instead of a whole hive mind kind of thing. Which seems odd, with the other ignorance is poison view.

Being individual is poison??? Weird.


I think I'd like to know a whole lot more than I do. I read and read and read, but even if I poured the whole internet into my head I still wouldn't know enough. And I'd have to do more than a lifetime of thinking to connect it all and make sense of it!


People have lots of individual points of view. We are the universe seeking to understand itself. I think maybe trying to understand *all* itself at once is not so much the place to start. Understand this bit standing here, maybe. Then the bits it touches.

Lots of things touch us that we don't even see. Life complicated that way.

Is why I write ghost stories actually. Can touch us, we can touch them. Like memories, like the past (without a TARDIS). No changing it from here. But much to learn from it before it can rest.