Blog/2025-05-28/I Can Relate To All: Difference between revisions
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The thing that's hard for me to face is the idea that people actually "can't relate to" a character not like them. There's lots of enjoyment in imagining yourself a character! And I certainly have spent my entire life like that: as a 10 year old I loved Jar Jar Binks (haha!), and over the years there are so many characters who I share very little with who I have nonetheless found it easy to relate to. Hermione Granger, Ishiguro's Stevens, Simba, and yes Phil Dunphy. Clearly everyone can do this as well or so many famous books would not be interesting so this is just a framing of a different conceptual issue. | The thing that's hard for me to face is the idea that people actually "can't relate to" a character not like them. There's lots of enjoyment in imagining yourself a character! And I certainly have spent my entire life like that: as a 10 year old I loved Jar Jar Binks (haha!), and over the years there are so many characters who I share very little with who I have nonetheless found it easy to relate to. Hermione Granger, Ishiguro's Stevens, Simba, and yes Phil Dunphy. Clearly everyone can do this as well or so many famous books would not be interesting so this is just a framing of a different conceptual issue. | ||
The thing that bothers me about the whole thing | The thing that bothers me about the whole thing is that we collectively tend to imitate the art we use to describe the world. With sufficient effort beliefs can become entrenched and through such collective belief they can become truth<ref name=orks/>. The most famous of these phenomena is that the mafia eventually came to imitate Mario Puzo's books<ref name=mafia/>. Personally, I think the present-day Secret Service imitates the ones of the past, perhaps best seen when Donald Trump was nearly assassinated<ref name=ss/>. And perhaps the most classic example of this is the belief that diamonds are essential to an engagement ring, an idea unsurprisingly modern considering the unachievable cost of such a thing in bygone days. | ||
It would be an absolute shame if everyone started subscribing to this idea that we can't enjoy films unless we ourselves are represented in them. The idea that media would be primarily created to subscribe to this doesn't bother me that much - that seems relegated to the area of remakes and it's possible that a future AI model could accurately alter movies so that others can have these tastes fulfilled. It's just that I want everyone else to enjoy these things too! | It would be an absolute shame if everyone started subscribing to this idea that we can't enjoy films unless we ourselves are represented in them. The idea that media would be primarily created to subscribe to this doesn't bother me that much - that seems relegated to the area of remakes and it's possible that a future AI model could accurately alter movies so that others can have these tastes fulfilled. It's just that I want everyone else to enjoy these things too! | ||
Revision as of 08:30, 28 May 2025
The other day we were watching the sitcom Modern Family about a large multigenerational family that has many relatably humorous moments. A friend watching with us remarked that I reminded her of Phil Dunphy, the goofy father and realtor. When I remarked that I did, in fact, relate to him she observed (in a tone that suggested it was odd) that it was funny for me to relate to a White Man from suburban California. But I do.
And to be honest, the entire diversity in movies online controversy strikes me as centered around this. I really enjoyed Harish Patel as Karun in the otherwise unremarkable movie Eternals and I got a kick out of Chris Evans's character referring to Dhanush in Gray Man as his "sexy Tamil friend" so I get that it's great fun to see yourself represented in movies. But relating to characters has never seemed particularly hard.
The typical thing to do at this stage is to pontificate about how cell-phone videos have made people the primary characters in the world and no one can imagine anymore a scene where they're not in it in some way and so on and so forth. But I think it's actually a different thing: the "relate to" thing is a memetically strong concept[1].
There is nothing novel or interesting about the phrase itself. It has strength because personal preference is nigh inviolate in our society[2] and can therefore be used to cloak other ideas safely. The actual thing I think people want to express is "I want people to see more of me" where "me" is some nebulous identification of "me"[3]. But that specific formulation of the idea is not particularly popular (for reasons unknown) so we have to form the alternative "can't relate to".
The thing that's hard for me to face is the idea that people actually "can't relate to" a character not like them. There's lots of enjoyment in imagining yourself a character! And I certainly have spent my entire life like that: as a 10 year old I loved Jar Jar Binks (haha!), and over the years there are so many characters who I share very little with who I have nonetheless found it easy to relate to. Hermione Granger, Ishiguro's Stevens, Simba, and yes Phil Dunphy. Clearly everyone can do this as well or so many famous books would not be interesting so this is just a framing of a different conceptual issue.
The thing that bothers me about the whole thing is that we collectively tend to imitate the art we use to describe the world. With sufficient effort beliefs can become entrenched and through such collective belief they can become truth[4]. The most famous of these phenomena is that the mafia eventually came to imitate Mario Puzo's books[5]. Personally, I think the present-day Secret Service imitates the ones of the past, perhaps best seen when Donald Trump was nearly assassinated[6]. And perhaps the most classic example of this is the belief that diamonds are essential to an engagement ring, an idea unsurprisingly modern considering the unachievable cost of such a thing in bygone days.
It would be an absolute shame if everyone started subscribing to this idea that we can't enjoy films unless we ourselves are represented in them. The idea that media would be primarily created to subscribe to this doesn't bother me that much - that seems relegated to the area of remakes and it's possible that a future AI model could accurately alter movies so that others can have these tastes fulfilled. It's just that I want everyone else to enjoy these things too!
Notes
- ↑ This is distinct from many of the Bozo Bit Phrases like enshittification or slop or "late-stage capitalism" which are just a particularly attractive thing to say with low semantic meaning. We should expect things like those because of Taleb's Ugly Surgeon. If a phrase hits a spreading threshold some of it is due to its quality as a signifier itself and some of it is due to what it signifies. Consequently, you should expect that for those phrases that hit virality, their inherent quality of shape and form and the inherent quality of the concept they reference are negatively correlated. Virality is the selection line there.
- ↑ As an example, racial discrimination is generally frowned upon - even in just personal settings. Saying "I only make friends with White people" would be met with expressions of disapproval. But you're much more likely to get away with "I only date White people", though strangely "I only date Asian women" wouldn't work so perhaps there's something wrong with this idea that personal preference trumps all. It does trump a lot, though.
- ↑ I enjoyed the depiction of Karun because such characters are real and (to me) humorous and I wanted them shared with the world so they could see some aspect of my identity. Of course, the Karun there is Indian but he's ethnically not like me and speaks a different language from me and in some not-so-far-from-alternative history of the World, India never unified and he and I would consider each other as different as a Frenchman and a Pole.
- ↑ "Can we put this Ork gestalt field argument to bed?". Reddit. r/40kLore. 2020-02-12. Retrieved 2025-05-28.
- ↑ Smith, John L. (July 7, 2004). "In mob world, life often imitates art of Marlon Brando's 'Godfather'". wikipedia:Las Vegas Review-Journal. Archived from the original on January 25, 2011. Retrieved December 7, 2010.
- ↑ When I watched the video of the Attempted assassination of Donald Trump in Pennsylvania, there were lots of moments where it seemed like agents were effectively 'posing' for the camera like the agents in the famous Reagan assassination attempt once the threat was deemed to have passed. The actual Reagan attempt and defence were chaotic but photos from the scene show calm-faced agents wielding firearms with aplomb. I think Trump's protection team was attempting to emulate this after he was taken off leading to the particularly confidence-damaging video of one member struggling to holster her weapon.
