My Life As A Writer: No Friends In Pedowood

Friend of the Retreat Rawle Nyazi wrote a wonderful post regarding Reavers of the Void and its heroine, Countess Gabriela Robin. Read that here. What interested me most was what he put in at the end, where he quoted this article at Smithsonian Magazine, which said:

Recently, [Austin, Texas-based company StoryFit] used the software to analyze gender in some 2,000 film scripts and 25,000 characters from between 1930 and 2018. It looked at things like what the characters talked about, who they talked to, and what emotions and personality attributes they displayed.

The results give a nuanced picture of the inequality issues that have plagued Hollywood since the dawn of the industry. Female characters are much more likely to be agreeable than male ones – 80 percent of female characters have agreeableness scores of 85 percent or higher, compared to only 27 percent of male characters. Female characters are also less open (a measure of curiosity and receptiveness to new experiences) – only 6 percent of female characters have openness scores of 60 percent or higher, compared with 54 percent of male characters.

I knew it was bad. I didn't know it was this bad, or this incompetent. I made a good call in preemptively closing off any Hollywood adaptation of Star Knight in favor of being friendly to anime adaptations, because this sort of Looking To Be Offended abuse of statistical analysis is a giant red flag that you're dealing with the Crazy and we all know what not to do with the Crazy.

It's increasingly clear that #BrandZero will have to incorporate #ForkAndReplace of every element of the business to make the objective happen. Even if some of us do make it happen with getting manga and anime adaptations, that's still relying on a big corporate entity to get before an audience and as such remains vulnerable to pressures that any corporation has to contend with. Only by helping each other get the attention we need to succeed will this happen.

Fortunately we have some examples to show the way forward. It's just a matter of bridging these examples together and putting them before the eyes of those seeking them, and that's something we can do by and for ourselves with ease.

Such as recommending works worthy of that attention. Remember that friend of the blog? Rawle's got his own book out, Shining Tomorrow, available in Kindle and paperback at Amazon.