Quotes / Flawless Token

"Not all stereotypes are negative. But even a positive one like 'All Asians are good at math' is harmful to society."

— Tour guide for the Museum of Tolerance, South Park, "The Death Camp of Tolerance"

...There is a tendency in contemporary activism to start with equality claims appealing to the liberal conscience, but then move on to an explicit or implicit claim of superiority. This claim can sometimes sound like the original prejudice in reverse. For example, it was once held that women were unsuited to university education because they were less intellectual and more emotional. Feminism first rightly denied this ‘difference’ in a claim for equal access to higher education, only to reassert it in another form: the claim that women are essentially more cooperative, more supportive, more related, less competitive, less hierarchical and so on, and that institutions should be ‘feminised’ to reflect the superiority of feminine values.

— Humanism Betrayed, an essay excerpt by Graham Good

I started thinking about Wakanda. It's nowhere. It's a fictional African country. The most technically advanced society in the Marvel Universe. And the richest. For me it was all about T'Challa, the Black Panther. Not just 'cause he was a brother who was richer than Tony Stark. T'Challa was a leader, he was a president, he was a superhero all at the same time. He was all about justice. When I left Brooklyn, the only thing I wanted to see was the motherland and-and to witness that world up close. But instead of finding Wakanda, I found poverty, starvation, child soldiers, death squads.

—Sam Hanna, NCIS: Los Angeles episode "Parley"

"Annoying, recently wrote something with a rich African American psychopath conman and am being urged to make him white"
"It's like we need more roles for people of color but oh nooo they can't look baaaaad, it's just different racism"
"Let me write a fucking Black Lex Luthor for fucksakes"

— Max Landis

"Cochise could do one of two things–stand with his arms folded, looking noble; or stand with arms at his sides, looking noble."

— Michael Ansara on his role in Broken Arrow

"That quote, 'The only disability in life is a bad attitude'...the reason that that's bullshit...is because it's just not true, because of the social model of disability. No amount of smiling at a flight of stairs has ever made it turn into a ramp. Never. Smiling at a television screen isn't going to make closed captions appear for people who are deaf. No amount of standing in the middle of a bookshop and radiating a positive attitude is going to turn all those books into braille. It's just not going to happen."

— The late Stella Young, comedienne and disability advocate, at TEDxSydney 2014, in response to the Inspirationally Disadvantaged trope.

Do you know why there's so many white male characters in video games? Especially leads? Because no one cares about them. A white male can be a lecherous drunk. A woman can't or it's sexist. Sexualizing women and what all. A white male can be a mentally disturbed soldier whose mind is unraveling as he walks through the hell of the modern battlefield. A woman can't or you're victimizing women and saying they're all crazy. Consider Guybrush Threepwood, star of the Monkey Island series. He's weak, socially awkward, cowardly, kind of a nerd and generally the last person you'd think of to even cabin boy on a pirate ship, let alone captain one. He is abused, verbally and physically, mistreated, shunned, hated and generally made to feel unwanted. Now let's say Guybrush was a girl. We'll call her Galbrush. Galbrush is weak, socially awkward, cowardly, kind of a nerd and generally the last person you'd think of to even cabin boy on a pirate ship, let alone captain one. She is abused, verbally and physically, mistreated, shunned, hated and generally made to feel unwanted. Now, you might notice that I've given the exact same description to both of these characters. But here's where things deviate. While no one cares if Guybrush takes a pounding for being, for lack of a better term, a less than ideal pirate, Galbrush will be presumed to be discriminated against because of her gender. In fact, every hardship she will endure, though exactly the same as the hardships Guybrush endured, will be considered misogyny, rather than someone being ill suited to their desired calling. And that ending. She goes through ALL that trouble to help, let's call him Eli Marley, escape the evil clutches of the ghost piratess Le Chuck, it turns out he didn't even need her help and she even screwed up his plan to thwart Le Chuck. Why, it'd be a slap in the face to every woman who's ever picked up a controller. Not only is the protagonist inept, but apparently women make lousy villains too! And that's why Guybrush exists and Galbrush doesn't. Men can be comically inept halfwits. Women can't. Men can be flawed, tragic human beings. Women can't. And why? Because every single female character reflects all women everywhere.

— The Galbrush Paradox

What doesn’t help is that [Caitlin] Jenner rambles on for a ludicrous amount of bars, getting in way more disses than Hulk did and not having any of her negative qualities addressed, which is especially baffling considering her real life political leanings and manslaughter charge being ripe for mockery. It ultimately comes off as tokenism, like they were trying to force a win for the first trans character by handicapping her opponent and ignoring her flaws, which ultimately backfired as most people give the win to Banner/Hulk as opposed to Jenner.

— Michael Ford's review of Epic Rap Battles of History

If anybody’s ever been to the Special Olympics … they should call it the Joy Olympics. These are people who are incapable of hate or resentment – all they do is emanate joy!

— Matt Birk, pro-life activist

"There are certainly flaws in the way we talk about representation. There is this idea that yes, representation is good, but if there’s no sort of uplift, we’re reinforcing negative stereotypes. If half of your characters are despicable people, for example, suddenly you’re seen as anti-Black. I’ve gotten flack for it, and so have writers like Gayl Jones and Sapphire.

But representation doesn’t just mean heroes — it means the whole spectrum. We need the villains as well. It’s true we don’t want the villains as they’ve been in the past, where a Black villain or an Asian villain is just a projection of a white fear. That’s not going to cut it; we’d rather just not have anybody at all. When Faulkner talks about Black people in The Sound and the Fury, he just said, "They endured." That’s of no use to me. That’s of no use to us.

But if we want to show the full range of human experience, it must include the bad. It must include the difficult. That’s what I mean by representation. I want the characters I love, and I also want despicable characters, characters I really can’t stand, characters I have a deeply conflicted relationship to. I want heroes, I want villains, I want victims. I want the whole range. But I also want to believe they’re people, as opposed to types. Otherwise we’re just going to end up with a bunch of one-dimensional villains and magic Negroes."

— Marlon James, author of Black Leopard, Red Wolf, discusses the trope in an interview with Boston Review

"Maybe we think that, if we are to be accepted, we must be morally beyond reproach, or at least perfect in some sort of way. We can't be gay and average or, God forbid, below average."

—John Grant in the foreword to Straight Jacket: Overcoming Society's Legacy of Gay Shame by Matthew Todd

"For a character to be canonically bi you have to make sure and establish that they're attracted to multiple genders. Not all mediums allow you to get inside every character's head or show what they're thinking. Flirting can be read ambiguously, and god forbid they flirt with a character who's not into them and be read as pushy or predatory. So it can be super handy to just mention an ex or two! But you better not mention too many exes because that would make them a slutty bisexual which is (checks notes) bad, and you definitely better be careful about making them poly, because that might make them, uh... greedy. Oh, and those exes? They better be perfectly amiable breakups with no conflict or drama, because it's bad to represent queer people in toxic or abusive relationships (especially queer women! very bad), and you definitely can't have them have lost a partner if the partner was queer because that's "bury your gays..." You should probably also eliminate all trauma from their backstory, just to be safe. You should probably also make sure they're not involved in crime, deception, or anything of the sort, because that would make them "deviant" and a stereotype.
"But don't worry! Once you've carefully crafted your nice, monogamous, experienced-but-not-too-experienced Lawful Good bi character, you will be rewarded with your audience deeming them "boring" and quickly passing them over for other characters. :)"

—Tumblr user anneapocalypse

"I want every version of a woman and a man to be possible. I want women and men to be able to be full-time parents or full-time working people or any combination of the two. I want both to be able to do whatever they want sexually without being called names. I want them to be allowed to be weak and strong and happy and sad — human, basically. The fallacy in Hollywood is that if you're making a 'feminist' story, the woman kicks ass and wins. That's not feminist, that's macho. A movie about a weak, vulnerable woman can be feminist if it shows a real person that we can empathize with."

— Natalie Portman

---