Also, a lot of Representation Discourse seems to, I dunno, project children’s mindsets onto adults in a way I find off-putting.

I completely understand the value of diversity in children’s media. Children tend to be both more literal and more black and white in their thinking than adults. When you’re in third grade and still working out critical thought, it’s all too easy to internalize that girls can’t do [x] simply because you’ve never seen them do it. It can also be harder to empathize with characters who aren’t like you if you haven’t figured out theory of mind yet.

I understand that it’s difficult, when you’re ten years old with a limited attention span, to engage with media that isn’t making any effort to reach out to you. I am fully in favor of initiatives like We Need Diverse Books; kids from all walks of life deserve to know that their stories are worth telling.

But I’m not convinced that applies to adults in quite the same way. It’s not that I don’t think diversity in adult media is important: it is, but for different reasons. It’s important because content creators from all backgrounds deserve the opportunity to capitalize on their talent. A world in which all people are able to tell the stories they want to tell will naturally result in more perspectives heard and more variety in content.

That’s great! But it’s not the same black-and-white stimulus in/result out calculus that applies to children. It’s not, and frankly it feels infantilizing when people speak as though it is. “Women can’t relate to this unless there’s a female character” is terribly patronizing. It’s a punch right in the cognitive empathy.

If a grown adult, absent any kind of empathy-impairing cognitive difficulty, cannot relate to characters who don’t resemble them in some way - honestly, that sounds like a personal problem. It doesn’t sound like something that should be encouraged or celebrated. It’s a big part of what’s wrong with media reception today, actually - everything is so goddamn ghettoized. People are not encouraged to relate across demographic lines, and hammering home that “we need female characters to Appeal to Women” reinforces that.