I work it in whenever I can. After my first novel I received an email from a 14 year old girl in South Africa who wanted to know why there were no black characters. I’d picked people from my real life, which was mostly Latino and white.
My casts got a lot more diverse going forward, and will continue to be. I added a gay dragon to Spellship, and as expected lots of people liked him, but almost no one cared he was gay.
I haven’t seen Pelagos, but I am intrigued. The Wheel of Timr did something similar with one of the forsaken. MTF
I seriously think the average reviewer on RT didn’t bother to send in proof of their ticket, yes, and so the average % of verified reviews did not change much as a result.
I’m not even saying the system is a good one. I don’t get why you think user review scores matter when we’ve seen time and time again where angry folks have orchestrated review bomb campaigns on movies, shows, and games.
I disagree, life is not a weighted average nor should this game be. I am in favor of treating everyone with respect, and kindness, but I do not think that the voice of 1 is equal to that of 5 or vice versa. I think that it makes sense to be inclusive but not to falsely represent any group simply “because.”
Cool stuff, yea I remember once some authors checking out lgbt forums to get some suggestions on how to write a gay child growing up, (but nothing obvious) so I am curious as to how authors create characters and if they actually talk to the demographic they are writing for!? So yea I can relate to that girl in some way growing up I didn’t see gay characters and I wasnt really familiar with the concept until I started getting feelings in puberty. But thinking on my childhood their were some hints.
Im glad your writing is inclusive though as I enjoy scifi for themes ofba better future. I recently am enjoying the expanse at least the show enough to want to read their books. I may check out your books as I am on the look out for cool worlds to delve into.
Except, again, reviews now have to be verified and approved before they can alter the score. So if there was a backlog, or something got messed up with the system, the score’s not gonna budge.
Btw, sites like the one you posted, are not reliable, they are the same.
The best example being the situation with the absolute disaster that TLOU2 was, there was this drama where Naughty Dog started applying fake DMCA strikes to silence criticism of the game, which they themselves admitted, the situation got stupid enough that they stroke the official Playstation channel.
Well, none of those sites reported on this, all they did was insult people that hated the game, calling them man-babies, that they are intimidated by woman, that they are transphobic, etc.
Thats why youtubers are far more reliable than them, cause mainstream media is full of liars that only care about woke agendas.
It also kind of depends what’s good about it. TFA was coming off a very long hiatus and a lot of people had hype surrounding it. This does also factor into reviews, but I haven’t taken reviews seriously since seeing the Captain Marvel and Death Stranding review culling in order to artificially balloon their scores.
Can’t think of any relevant movie in general, politically motivated or not that hasn’t recently suffered at the box office, then had a ton of user reviews culled because “troll campaign.” As the sole means to explaining the difference between 90%+ critic ratings and sub 15% audience ratings.
For what it’s worth TFA wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t great either. Though that’s just my opinion. I felt Star Wars was over and done with prior to the prequels. Everything else was to either flesh out aspects or rake in money. I could have dealt without a lot of the Mary Suing of the main character but eh, that’s a different argument entirely.
I’ve spoken about this before maybe in this thread maybe not, but a big sign for me was Dragon Age 2 in particular. All the critics gave it amazing scores and said it was a perfect game. You actually play Dragon Age 2 and it’s like “Uhh, is this even the same game as Origins which is why I was hyped?” Like everyone seemed to hate that game except the critics.
That was kind of what GamerGate was initially prefaced on addressing was there was a serious problem with video game journalists giving horrid games insanely high reviews due to personal reasons, most of which being monetary rather than rating the games as they should have been rated. An event in particular sparking that whole fiasco being Zoe Quinn’s “Depression Quest” being given stellar reviews and scores, by a guy who was in the credits for the game and was alleged to have been sleeping with at the time. Yeah no conflict of interest on that, clearly he would be utterly honest. . . and on that the next time you find yourself in one of those overused tropes where your spouse asks if that dress makes her look fat you’ll probably answer that honestly too.
Now it later morphed into what we now know it as which is basically “Woman criticizes game design for being sexist, a bunch of angry males got toxic and tried to chase her out of what they deemed as their space.” However the whole premise prior was hinged on unethical behavior with regards to video game journalism.
Movies have it just the same, again as I stated, Captain Marvel. Apparently the only people who liked that movie were the critics because most of the fans hated it. Sure, obviously there were a few people who said something like “I don’t like the lead, I’m giving it a 1.” But that is in no way the vast majority of people. The movie was just bad, it also didn’t help when your actor is literally telling people “My role in this movie is strictly for my own politics, if you don’t like that then don’t see the movie.”
That’s also become sort of a recurring trend because now Hollywood after telling who would be their primary audience to just not watch the movies, or accept the agendas wholesale and not complain if they do, their movies have been bombing. Now a bunch of producers are signing some petition that they should be given taxpayer money to bail them out for engaging in idiotic business practices. What’s that saying people are throwing around these days? “Get woke, go broke.” I believe? Yeah, it’s an actual thing and not some troll campaign. Every company in the last 5 years who has been virtue signalling this hard has suffered for it. People have spoken they do not want these agendas.
as I enjoy scifi for themes ofba better future. I recently am enjoying the expanse at least the show enough to want to read their books. I may check out your books as I am on the look out for cool worlds to delve into.