I was looking for some content pablum and decided to watch the Hawkeye series. Hawkeye wears a hearing aid (which is canon, so fair enough), and the villain is a deaf, one-legged character (played by a deaf, one-legged actress, tbf), but then they stuck a literal one-eyed golden retriever in the show. I shit you not, every episode there's a dog essentially winking at the camera like "psst This is the one with disability representation!"
I have nothing against representation in media (I don't think it matters much either way), but when the whole thing is nodding towards a specific type of representation, it starts to feel offensively pandering. Having disabled characters and actors is great. What's not great is making a show that's like "Here, we made a thing for you disableds. Isn't that what we're calling you now? It's not cripple anymore, that much I know. Anyway, this has some of you people in it."
The show itself is dogshit except for the trick arrows. I'm a sucker for the trick arrows.
This is probably a terminally online thing (no offense), because when I watched the show it never occurred to me to feel anything particularly special about Hawkeye and the villain both being disabled, I saw it as being entirely normal because both were still able to function entirely well. As for the dog being disabled.....I hate pets so I didn't like the dog at all, but it also never occurred to me to consider I'd been looking at three disabled characters while watching the show. I think unfortunately this view of pandering to disabled people might be because a lot of the content we view on youtube these days talks about the importance of representation heavily.
Or maybe I have the attention span of a goldfish; I mean I watched black panther and didn't feel I was watching Disney engaging in representation (although comparing with Hawkeye, a far better form), just that I was watching a superhero movie.
Actually I might have the attention span of a goldfish.
Hawkeye having a hearing aid makes sense. He's around explosions all the time, his character in the comics becomes partly deaf, and Jeremy Renner is actually hard of hearing. No issue there. I thought it was a perfectly fine character development choice. Further, it's also common that if the hero has some sort of handicap, disability, quirk, etc., the villain might also have a similar quirk. It's a bit cliche, but cliches exist for a reason. There are narrative elements that can be explored with the dynamic. Plus, there's nothing wrong with writing deaf characters, nor with wanting deaf actors to play them.
The problem is the dog. The whole point of representation in media, as you imply, is that you aren't supposed to notice, or rather that your attention isn't supposed to be drawn to the representation overtly. It's not supposed to be a big deal that there are characters with non-normative qualities. They're just supposed to be characters who happen to have those qualities, and I would love to have watched the show and not really noticed.
But here's the thing: They wouldn't cast a one-eyed dog just because he showed up really well in the audition. You may not have noticed/cared that the main characters and the dog were disabled, but there is a zero percent chance that the multitude of people involved in the decision didn't notice that they cast a disabled dog to be in the show about the disabled hero and the disabled villain. That was an intentional choice, and it was a bad one. It telegraphs to the audience that the creators knew exactly what they were doing, which largely invalidates the purpose of media representation.
And again, I can't stress this enough, the dog has one eye. The dog is a superhero mascot character who is not only figuratively a wink and nod to the audience about what they were doing, but also literally looks like he was winking at the camera. It was too much for me.
You know goddamned well that there's a committee at Disney who had to calculate the exact number of frames that it would be OK to show the lesbian kiss in the background in The Rise of Skywalker.
I was looking for some content pablum and decided to watch the Hawkeye series. Hawkeye wears a hearing aid (which is canon, so fair enough), and the villain is a deaf, one-legged character (played by a deaf, one-legged actress, tbf), but then they stuck a literal one-eyed golden retriever in the show. I shit you not, every episode there's a dog essentially winking at the camera like "psst This is the one with disability representation!"
I have nothing against representation in media (I don't think it matters much either way), but when the whole thing is nodding towards a specific type of representation, it starts to feel offensively pandering. Having disabled characters and actors is great. What's not great is making a show that's like "Here, we made a thing for you disableds. Isn't that what we're calling you now? It's not cripple anymore, that much I know. Anyway, this has some of you people in it."
The show itself is dogshit except for the trick arrows. I'm a sucker for the trick arrows.
This is probably a terminally online thing (no offense), because when I watched the show it never occurred to me to feel anything particularly special about Hawkeye and the villain both being disabled, I saw it as being entirely normal because both were still able to function entirely well. As for the dog being disabled.....I hate pets so I didn't like the dog at all, but it also never occurred to me to consider I'd been looking at three disabled characters while watching the show. I think unfortunately this view of pandering to disabled people might be because a lot of the content we view on youtube these days talks about the importance of representation heavily.
Or maybe I have the attention span of a goldfish; I mean I watched black panther and didn't feel I was watching Disney engaging in representation (although comparing with Hawkeye, a far better form), just that I was watching a superhero movie.
Actually I might have the attention span of a goldfish.
Hawkeye having a hearing aid makes sense. He's around explosions all the time, his character in the comics becomes partly deaf, and Jeremy Renner is actually hard of hearing. No issue there. I thought it was a perfectly fine character development choice. Further, it's also common that if the hero has some sort of handicap, disability, quirk, etc., the villain might also have a similar quirk. It's a bit cliche, but cliches exist for a reason. There are narrative elements that can be explored with the dynamic. Plus, there's nothing wrong with writing deaf characters, nor with wanting deaf actors to play them.
The problem is the dog. The whole point of representation in media, as you imply, is that you aren't supposed to notice, or rather that your attention isn't supposed to be drawn to the representation overtly. It's not supposed to be a big deal that there are characters with non-normative qualities. They're just supposed to be characters who happen to have those qualities, and I would love to have watched the show and not really noticed.
But here's the thing: They wouldn't cast a one-eyed dog just because he showed up really well in the audition. You may not have noticed/cared that the main characters and the dog were disabled, but there is a zero percent chance that the multitude of people involved in the decision didn't notice that they cast a disabled dog to be in the show about the disabled hero and the disabled villain. That was an intentional choice, and it was a bad one. It telegraphs to the audience that the creators knew exactly what they were doing, which largely invalidates the purpose of media representation.
And again, I can't stress this enough, the dog has one eye. The dog is a superhero mascot character who is not only figuratively a wink and nod to the audience about what they were doing, but also literally looks like he was winking at the camera. It was too much for me.
You know goddamned well that there's a committee at Disney who had to calculate the exact number of frames that it would be OK to show the lesbian kiss in the background in The Rise of Skywalker.
From what I know about how Disney operates, that’s totally plausible.
I'm trying to remember but I think I completely missed that the dog only had one eye.😅
Good lord, that's ham handed
the dogs is in the hawkeye comic the show is based off of my guy, he wasn't there because of representation, but because he was in the comic