ism
Sexism and racism - or, at least, their elements - are prevalent everywhere, even in places that aren’t immediately obvious.
Pac-Man was designed around an eating theme (and given colorful, non-threatening graphics) because the designer was trying to appeal to female players, who were an untapped market at the time. He couldn’t come up with a good ( Read more... )
Wouldn't it be cool to live in a world where sometimes a random character's a woman and it's not A Statement About Women? When a random character is a man, it's not A Statement About Men, after all.
Telling the artist that something had offensive elements is a way of pointing at things that could be better; the artist isn't a bad person, but the art may have done something he (or she, but I'll guess he, here) didn't intend. And that's cool; that's okay. The artist lives in the culture; we can't expect the artist to see everything the culture does poorly at once. But we can poke the artist about it, and say "maybe you're saying something extra here. Maybe you don't mean to be saying it?"
And sometimes the creator didn't see it, and can improve it. And the art gets a little stronger, and the story's a little less about reinforcing things in our society we don't like.
Of course, it hurts to be the creator, and get told your work was doing something you didn't mean. (And if you did mean it, that's a whole different conversation, but presumably one you were at least somewhat expecting.) But criticism often hurts, and accurate criticism most of all. That doesn't diminish its value.
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