beccaelizabeth's dreamwidth journal

I have seen a lot of argue about IM3 on a topic that didn't even ping me, despite being relevant to my interests
spoilers go under the cut
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this is an important topic and I want to go over this and make it make proper sense.
but it's five in the morning, so this is the best sense available right now.

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.

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And now for season 2:
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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.

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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.
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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:
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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:
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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...
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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
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1-02 Day One
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1-03 Ghost Machine
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1-04 Cyberwoman
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1-05 Small Worlds
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1-06 Countrycide
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1-07 Greeks bearing gifts
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1-08 The Keep Killing Suzie
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1-09 Random Shoes
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1-10 Out of Time
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1-11 Combat
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1-12 Captain Jack Harkness
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1-13 End of Days
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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.

I am a science fiction geek, and I am a cultural studies student, and when these things get together this usually involves words like 'discourses' and being very academic about science fiction. But sometimes it involves being very SF about culture. So, I have a theory:

isms suck, like gravity
therefore orbital mechanics is a good way to conceptualise the interaction of texts and isms

For the purpose of this theory an 'ism' is a big accumulation of ideas.
The ones that tend to bring things to grief are racism, sexism, ablism, classism, and heterosexism.
And probably some other things that don't end with ism, because language isn't convenient like that. But.

There are some signifiers that accumulate other ideas around them in complicated structures. ( Read more... )
Isms might look like these small compact things far away, but they suck so hard they probably pull everything you're saying around even from there. And there's lots of them, so they pull in lots of directions at once. And, because a metaphor is not physics, you can in fact crash into several of them at once.

So, I am studying up on this symbol system I find myself living in, and trying to find the sucky bits, so I can steer around them.

Going 'lalala I shall make a straight line! ...oops' is pretty much how those isms just keep on getting bigger.

I've been reading some more books that I think I liked ten years ago.
... I was a very different reader then.

They're very clearly written by someone who spends waaaay too much time playing level-based RPGs. The kind where you get a castle if you go up enough levels. And it treats women and children as Dependents ie sources of plot motivation and therefore jeopardy.

What it never actually does is treat the female characters as *PCs*. They're not players, they don't do things for themselves. Sometimes they don't even get any lines. There's one woman who exists to be called dangerous a lot and then killed. She never speaks a word. She just makes plot happen by her violent death.

I've had enough of that shit from comics, you know?

Women and children are not plot motivators. They're people. Sometimes mini people. But if they keep on getting killed offscreen to get the (rich white male) player characters into action then it gets all kinds of creepy.

And having a wider ethnic mix is cool, yes, *but* if all the non-white characters are effectively NPCs, if the only reason they ever do anything is because one of the pov PCs tells them to, that winds up mega creepy too. I mean at some time the author must have thought it was a cute learning experience to have a poor colored kid have serving a rich white guy as their highest aspiration, and the tragic death is a staple of the fantasy genre, but if you stack it all together you get something that kind of turns my stomach.

Furthermore simply identifying someone by their probable ethnic background, on first sight and all subsequent identifications, and never elaborating on any aspect of their character, comes across as way creepy. I mean for a start they're writing about cities where all these ethnic groups mix together, so they can get that exotic far off lands adventuring experience, but they're identifying them all as being from and/or of or fundamentally just being the ethnic group indicated by their skin color. So, no mixed race marriages in fantasyland in their few thousand year old empire then.

Having random color provided by inventing a race that keep their women naked and in chains is also not scoring any feminist points whatsoever. It isn't even like they're the bad guys, they just wander past to have people stare at them.

Then there's the other genre staple, the 'secret son of nobility' thing. It's that whole 'blood will tell' thing hiding in there. Add it to the 'I happily die for you master!' stuff and the 'crazy ethnic mystic' stuff and the 'dark skinned women who coincidentally happen to wander around with no clothes on and want a lot of sex and yet never produce mixed race offspring for reasons the text will never bother getting into' and...

The only reason I liked these books in the first place was I was reading them with my eyes closed.


There have to be better books than these. Ones where women are fully featured player characters with motives of their very own. Ones where what happens to the babies is actually a Thing and not just a 'now we skip twenty years so we can write about more white male teenagers again' thing.

... every time I read more of this rubbish I'm rather put off going to look for them, you know?

I mean sometimes I try a new author and get something shiny, but sometimes I try a new author and find half way through the first book the strong female character I was quite liking at the start has ended up impregnated with shapeshifter babies who might kill her. By her half brother.
(I don't know how that book ended. I think I threw it away. The scary part is it seemed to be the start of a series.)


another thing: On the whole, babies don't kill you. I mean, difficult and dangerous pregnancies happen, yes, fine, but quite often the only thing that happens between 'start pregnancy' and 'baby arrives' is you get much bigger around the middle.
... er, people who've actually had babies can point and laugh now, of course.
What I mean is, demon babies? Really not the point.
Sometimes people have babies because they want to. And then they raise them because they want to. And there's no rape or incest or demonic shapeshifting lifesucking involved *at all*.


Yes, this even applies to males. Yes, even mpreg. I realise all that artistically wasting away as they prove their love via dying so the child of their union can live is... well, happening in plural of stories, so presumably worth the time to someone, but dear god is it annoying. Making more life is all about life! Where the heck did this =death bit come in???

Also, and I realise this ends up a swipe at the whole hurt/comfort genre but I'm on a roll now so I'll just be cranky in public... when I back out of this sentence and start over... ahem...

Also, I do not think that the thing where someone is dying and someone else is caring for them is in fact a good basis for a solid lifelong relationship. Granted, if the dying part actually happens then it will indeed have lasted for life, but I don't read deathfic if I can avoid it so I mean those miraculous last minute save times. The dying/caring thing - those are some pretty well defined roles there. And once they're out of those roles they're in effect in a completely different relationship. In any pairing I seek out they're back to a relationship of near-equals in a working partnership.

Having and raising babies? Plus the near-equals working-partnership thing? Could be incredibly cute.

I mean really, this is the kind of real life challenge that most people face - they've got all these skills and talents and this relationship that's rolling along pretty well with the two of them, and then there's a baby, and they're faced with a whole new challenge, being three with a whole new focus and work that maybe doesn't divide in convenient ways and all the compromises involved with that. And, oh yes, possibly defeating alien invasions or keeping the forces of darkness at bay and all that. Balancing the needs of the many against the needs of the few, or the one.

How is this not cool?

Why aren't there more stories about this?

I can understand on TV, because they'd have to hire babies and that doesn't work so very well.
But word-writers lack budget and time constraints.


But then there's the other thing, where babies exist for daft plot reasons. Like I read one where there's a time travel story a bit like Back to the Future where the kid has to go make sure her parents shag. I don't remember which set of parents those were. Given that I at least started to read it either they were two guys or I was really desperate for fic that day. But in Back to the Future the protagonist is the kid who travels and they have this whole arc... I think, I haven't watched it in an age, but a finding themself thing going on, yesno? But in this fic the character was not the protagonist and all she existed for was to get these two other characters together.

How messed up is that?
Because again: Women and children? Not merely motivation for others.


I realise making a baby or a five year old exist as a person in their own right is a tad bit difficult. But it bugs me. Not even tiny people should just be a means to an end! Especially the end of getting two parental units to get or stay together. I mean how often and how badly does that go wrong? Besides which, I've never found 'oops, pregnant, must marry!' a particularly romantic resolution.

My absolute least favourite though is when there's "oops, false alarm, no baby". Because then there's no baby. There was +1 person and now there's -1 person and just because they're fictional doesn't mean I can't get upset.

I haven't read that often though. And one time the presumed-baby had tentacles. Apparently getting rid of tentacle things is supposed to be different.

... I think I've read far too many stories where people come equipped with all kinds of parts, including tentacles, to actually feel that.

... this is also a drawback with the demonic pregnancy thing. Because if demons are people too, then it's just sad either way.




/rant
or more like slightly incoherent trailing off of rant.
I should probably sleep soon.