Does In the Shadows of Gods Meet Academy Award Diversity Requirements?
Does In the Shadows of Gods Meet Academy Awards Diversity Requirements?
A 100% Serious Study, by Jenson Doan
[It is highly recommended that you read this study to the song Spanish Flea, or any other similar funny song. Credit to https://www.flare.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/Academy-Awards-Oscars-2019-inline.jpg for the image.]
I. Preface
It was recently announced by the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences that, beginning in the year 2025 Anno Domini, for the 96th Academy Awards, films submitted for the award of Best Picture would have to meet minimum diversity requirements, reflecting a more diverse audience and encouraging more representation both behind the camera and in front of it. The Academy has established four total standards, two of which must be met in order for the picture to be eligible for Best Picture. Obviously, I am no filmmaker (yet), and I have no motion picture to submit for Best Picture eligibility (again, yet). But I thought it would be interesting to try and apply the Academy’s diversity requirements to my own large-scale project. My very own dumpster fire of a novel, In the Shadows of Gods.
It’s important to note here that two of the Academy’s four total standards are not applicable to In the Shadows of Gods, hereafter referred to as Shadows, on account of it being a novel and not a major motion picture (dare I say, yet?). Standard C, requiring paid internship opportunities to people of, quote, “underrepresented groups”, such as racial minorities, LGBTQ+, and women, in such departments as music, VFX, marketing, and publicity, is obviously not applicable to Shadows, an incomplete novel which has nothing to market and publicize and no VFX to be done. Hilariously, Shadows does have a music department, which consists entirely of one man. Myself.
Standard C also requires that the production, distribution, or financing company behind the motion picture provide training and work opportunities to develop the skills of those in the aforementioned “underrepresented groups”. As Shadows has no distribution to be done, no formal production company, and literally no finances to its name, I think it’s safe to say Standard C is just overall not applicable. Similarly, Standard D requires representation from the very same underrepresented groups in marketing, publicity, and distribution. The day that any of those three becomes a concern of mine will be a very, very good day indeed. So, since neither Standard C or D really apply to Shadows, I think I’ll just chuck them out the window and be done with it.
II. Standard A
Which brings us to the two remaining applicable standards. Again, the Academy requires that Best Picture-eligible films meet two of the four standards — since I’ve tossed out two of these requirements, it’s only fair to require less of myself. For our purposes, one out of the two remaining standards will do just fine for meeting the Academy’s diversity standards. Standard A is the only out of the four standards that concerns itself with those strange people that show up on screen during a movie — you know, the characters. Standard A has three different sub-standards, only one of which must be fulfilled in order to pass Standard A. Should be easy, right?
Well… Here’s the thing. All three of the substandards concern themselves with those pesky little “underrepresented groups”. We want to meet the Academy’s standards, but we also don’t want to engage in tokenism, the practice of including minorities for the sake of representation, not to be confused with Tolkienism, which is what happens when you read through all of Lord of the Rings’ appendices. Tokenism inevitably leads to characters that are present simply because they have to be, and often end up being merely racial stereotypes rather than strong characters in their own right. Tokenism, in short, is something we want to avoid.
Let’s run down the Academy’s standards, one by one. Standard A1, for “Lead or significant supporting actors” - and for our purposes we’ll just read that as “characters” - requires at least one of the lead actors characters or significant supporting actors characters be of one of the following racial minorities: “Asian, Hispanic/Latinx, Black/African American, Indigenous/Native American/Alaskan Native, Middle Eastern/North African, Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander, Other underrepresented race or ethnicity”. Basically, we have to have a token non-white… I mean, a completely legitimate main character that’s not white.
Shadows’ main character is a character named either Joe Meriweather or Joe Valeski, depending on whether you want the version of him that is so edgy you can’t touch him, or just edgy enough to dissuade anyone from giving him a hug. To explain his entire character would take more time than we have, but he’s basically an angry teenage ginger Batman Green Lantern. Can you guess which of these the Academy is most worried about?
That’s right it’s the fact that he’s a ginger. For the Academy’s diversity purposes, it doesn’t matter that Joe’s story is one of dealing with loss or trauma at a relatively young age, or that he represents a perhaps more realistic take on that kind of protagonist whose parents are always absent or dead or both. We’re only looking at his race here, and unless Irishmen count as an “underrepresented race or ethnicity” (which I’m certain they don’t), we can cross “lead actor character” off our list. So, what about the “significant supporting actors characters”?
The definition of this term is pretty loose, since the Academy doesn’t provide any formal clarification on who is or isn’t a “significant supporting actors characters”... so we’ll have to make up our own definition. Let’s go with, say, the top three non-lead characters. You can have a lot of supporting characters, sure, but how many of them can really be “significant”? Three is a nice, round number that’ll work excellently for our purposes.
In order to figure out who our top three characters are, we’ll run a simple, imperfect, but adequate test — we’ll count how many times each character’s name is said throughout Shadows, including variations such as adding up “Professor Ness” and “Prof. Ness” for the character of Robert Ness. Now, obviously, there are times when characters are referred to using pronouns, but I figure it’ll be alright. I don’t think it’ll affect the results too much when it comes to character appearances, and plus, going through every single use of the word “he” in a 125k page document to figure out who exactly “he” is would be way more work than I want to do for some joke research paper.
III. The Characters of Shadows
I think it might be prudent here to explain the many characters of Shadows, since exactly three of you have any clue of what Shadows actually is. You’ve already met the protagonist, Joe, who I consider as one of a Big Three of characters. The other two are Hunter Powers, a sort of teenage Deadpool who spends a lot of his time being cryptic and a jerk, and who from a certain point of view is a really really screwed up mentor, and Lewis Edwards, the requisite glasses-wearing smart kid, who is probably the most relatable among the Big Three in that he has zero self-confidence.
Now, Joe, Hunter, and Lewis are part of an organization called the Watchbirds, which is both Joe’s figurative D&D adventuring group in that their goal is to hunt the villain of Shadows, and Joe’s literal D&D adventuring group in that they literally played D&D in previous drafts (although not actually D&D because copyright is a tricky thing). There are three other major members of the Watchbirds, being: Archangelo Rossi, a confident leader among the group, Ni’kola Prytison, the introverted electrical expert of the Watchbirds, and Alphonse Taranto, the group’s Frenchman.
But it’s Alphonse we’re most interested in right now, since Alphonse is our most notable (read: only) character of color. See, his defining characteristic is that he’s French (this is a joke, it’s really more of his boisterous attitude and reverence for those who belong to legendary bloodlines) so when I was coming up with what he looked like, I modeled him after French footballer Kylian Mbappe, who is black (and he also ended up looking like Daveed Diggs, who is also black). Thus, we end up with our one (and only) character of color — if we want to meet the Academy’s standards, Alphonse will have to end up playing a critical role.
In the way of female characters, well, we do have Heather Rosethorne and Roxxane Svenheart, leaders of a rival gang in Shadows. They’re cool characters in their own right, one’s got a tragic backstory and an axe, the other’s got a tragic backstory and a Hidden Blade. As leaders of this gang, they have a lot of potential to really impact the story, but they never really get much to do, which the Academy will surely be concerned about. There are a bundle of staff members and such that you’ll find in Shadows, but for the purposes of Academy requirements we’re really looking at Alphonse, Heather, and Roxxane. Now, with that over with, we need to run the numbers. It’s a very simple command-F procedure, and once that’s done, we can take our characters and results, stick them in a spreadsheet, export that spreadsheet to a table, and…
Wow. That’s… It is not looking good for us.
Only one of our three sufficiently diverse characters even made it onto the board — Alphonse, at sixth place. This means he misses out on a “significant supporting” mark, which means that we’ve failed Standard A1. But let’s put that aside for a moment. Let’s look at the fact that Shadows’ top 10 characters by mention are all males, and mostly white (Shadows is supposed to exist in a world where everyone’s kind of mixed race-wise but that ended up being really hard to visualize).
We've got Joe, who's mentioned so much his name takes up 1.9% of the book, so you literally could have 6 pages worth of just "Joe". Then we've got the other members of the Big Three, Huner and Lewis, which isn't surprising either. We also have the Watchbirds, plus Mr. Grimm, Joe’s therapist, a crucial role given the trauma Joe’s been through. Damon, Joe’s AI, is constantly with Joe, so it makes sense that he shows up a lot too. And Professor Gibson, a man widely acknowledged by all scholars as being a deity of safety, sneaks onto the list, as well. But Mr. Edwards, Lewis’ father, a man whose plot significance is literally to lie, then deliver an exposition dump, then never show up again, is mentioned more times than any female character. I don't care what universe you're from, that's gotta hurt.
Alright, so we failed Standard 1A. That’s fine. There’s still plenty of standards left to go around. What about Standard 1B, which mandates that 30% of the background cast be part of two underrepresented groups, be they women or racial groups or LGBTQ+? Well, here’s the tricky part. It says two of the aforementioned groups, where two is coincidentally the number of characters that meet that criteria. There are 27 named characters in Shadows, so 2 divided by 27 and converted to a percentage is… 7.4%.
OK! That’s fine! We failed the second part, too, but there’s a third substandard in Standard A, Standard A3, which requires that the main storyline be centered around one of those aforementioned groups… which, as we’ve established, are so underrepresented that one man in one exposition dump showed up more than them. So, as we’ve seen… there are not a whole lot of these underrepresented groups in Shadows, which is why they’re “underrepresented”, after all. Where did they go, you might ask? Did they ever exist in the first place? Well, yes, but they all got sent to a place I like to call…
IV. The Caleb Zone
So, the way Shadows works is that I get ideas, I write them down, I review them, I revise them, and sometimes I throw them out. Now, you might ask, have you ever made a character specifically for diversity purposes? The answer would be, if I’m remembering this right, yes. There are a number of female characters that I made just because I needed to, you know, not have all guys. Take Alexa, for example, from The Harsh Headmaster, the first draft of Shadows. She was short, wore glasses, and was genius level smart…
If you think that sounds like Lewis you’re exactly right they’re the same @$#!ing character.
Naturally she brought nothing new to the table, so she had to get Caleb’d out. With a snap of my fingers I erased Alexa from existence. I had another female character in HH, Brittany, who for reasons I will only briefly explain was very boring and very bland. I had to Caleb her out as well, but that left a void. Two female characters gone? Better replace them!
So I came up with a character named Jade, and by I came up with I mean I made my fellow editors do it. Jade was a character who was a bit of a spy, a planned traitor, who had some sort of a connection to a golem or something. These were dark days, OK? I don’t remember them that well. I don’t think I want to.
Anyways, Jade was in Shadows for about two months, and then immediately got Caleb’d. Because, while she may have been a female character, she wasn’t… really… a character. She had no interesting interactions with any of the other characters, she wasn’t engaging in any sort of way, she was kind of just a token girl in the story. So, I learned my lesson, right?
WELL THAT’S WHERE YOU’RE WRONG BECAUSE THERE WAS ANOTHER ONE. You see, before Jade and after the other two, there was another character, Kelly, who was also a female character and was also blander than vanilla ice cream. She was so forgettable, that I completely forgot about her while writing this. She had no defining characteristics, at all. Like, the only reason that she was there was because I felt that I needed a girl on the team somewhere. That's it.
Now, before you accuse me of being unable to write female characters, I’ll speak briefly about Kataryna Winter, generally agreed as being my best character. What makes her so good? Well, she’s got an interesting personality — kind of a positive, artistic person who’s unique among her world. (An oversimplification, but this research paper is looooong and I’m not even on Standard B yet.) She calls the other characters by abbreviated names, wields personalized shurikens called Snowflakes, and has unique dynamics with pretty much every other character. In short, Kataryna is a multifaceted, complex, deeply fascinating character. So why isn’t she in Shadows? Why isn’t she on top of the mentions list, as she rightfully should be?
The reason all comes down to story.
You see, the story of Shadows is in many ways a tragedy, one of self destruction and rehabilitation. Kataryna is so pure and so goodhearted that if she was present in Shadows, the story doesn’t work. She wouldn’t allow it to. Archangelo, as a (work in progress) foil to Joe, is a crucial voice of reason but even more crucially an ignored one. Ni’kola’s skills are needed, but more importantly his friendship with Archangelo and Alphonse, and his contrast with Lewis, are fundamental character dynamics. And, of course, Alphonse is just a fun character who stands on his own, regardless of the fact that he’s the only character of color. Heather and Roxxane... I'm still figuring out what to do with them. But rest assured I'll find some way to expand on their role in a way that makes sense for the story and the characters, not just for the sake of expanding their role.
Now, Brittany, Kelly, Jade? They had no place in the story. They weren’t anything more than just tokens, thus it was necessary to cut them all. And this is perhaps the most concerning part of the Academy’s new regulations — characters like the three I’ve just mentioned, who are nothing more than a checked diversity box, may now be making it into stories that they shouldn’t be in. Not because representing minorities is bad. On the contrary, in fact. But if characters are simply there to represent, and nothing else, then that’s just bad storytelling. The best characters - even just ordinary, good characters - are more than simply the group they represent.
V. Standard B and Conclusions
Which brings me to Standard B. This one is also one of the Academy’s behind-the-scenes requirements, as creative leadership positions from director, editor, writer, and so on are required to be filled by underrepresented groups. Unfortunately, that doesn’t really apply, and neither does the requirement to fill technical positions with the same groups. So that leaves us with the very last part of Standard B. B3, which mandates that the crew be composed of at least 30% people from underrepresented groups. This is our last chance to meet the Academy’s diversity requirements.
And actually? In the end, it was easy. It was easy.
Because the percent of my crew that falls into one of those underrepresented groups is more than 30%. More than 50%. Somehow, it’s 100%. Which is almost entirely because “Asian” was one of the underrepresented groups named and, if you count Indian as Asian that’s pretty much all of us. So, I wasn’t even trying to put together a diverse team. It just ended up happening because of the demographics that live around here.
In short, I guess Shadows does meet Academy Award diversity requirements! Does this mean that it’s a good story? No, and I think that’s precisely the point. Representation is good, but only if it’s thoughtful and the characters are genuinely good, interesting, layered characters. They should be like onions or Shrek, in other words. Just having diverse characters won’t automatically make a story good. It all comes down to story, as it should — if you can have characters that are both nuanced and diverse, all the better. But in the end, I think the real diversity is all the friends you made along the way.
Oh my god I really couldn’t figure out how to end this could i
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Author’s note: Thanks for reading this complete joke of a “research paper”, man did that not turn out the way I was expecting it to. I know there’s a lot of representation on this site and I definitely feel, like, not good for the stats above concerning diversity. But hey, I think things will get better. Hopefully I can find a place for Heather and Roxxane that is actually justified in the narrative of the story, they’re solid characters that I just don’t know what to do with sometimes. [Update: I did! In my recent review of Shadows I actually found a solid place for Roxxane to fit into the narrative, even if I still have to practice writing her since of course I haven't written her so much... or at all in the past, but she's there! And Heather will have a spot, too. So, good news?] No Gatekeeper this week because Mandalorian Season 2 is coming out in like 50 days and I need to stall until then. But in other news, I may start another series on this site soon — the Winter Winds, starring the one and only Kataryna Winter! I’ve already got two months of it written basically, so that may be up here soon. That is all, I hope you enjoyed this!
It does take a lot of courage to admit that your work needs improvement. Great job on this 'study'!
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