That’s kind of a weird argument. I always took “shoe-horned” to imply that it is pressed into something by force where it doesn’t quite fit. So, in my mind just because something is intentional doesn’t mean it is shoe-horned.
Creative works always come from the authors lived experiences. The reason why we often find representation of minorities missing in media, is because these minorities don’t get to work on them. If there would be more diverse teams working on something we would naturally see more of their diverse experiences represented. However, for this to be the case a lot would have to change in our society. It is way easier to just keep things more or less as they were and let people without minority experiences write and add minority characters. These in turn, feel off, feel shoe-horned in, because they aren’t based of lived experiences and are just there to check a box. Conversely, the reason why it feels like we used to have better (though less) diverse representations in media is because these actually came from people who had these experiences.
flashgnash@lemm.ee 5 weeks ago
It only feels shoe horned when they don’t write the character well.
There are a lot of cases where the person isn’t allowed to have any flaws or character development because they’re too scared to make them look bad in any way, which also means none of their achievements feel earned, and others where they just don’t care enough to waste screen time on things that aren’t highlighting whatever group they’re a part of
Have been a fair few shows I’ve seen where they’ve done it right, the character just happens to be whatever group they are and that’s only one of many chatacter traits, rather than that person’s only defining character trait being that they’re LGBT or disabled or whatever
The recent doctor who special is one of the bad examples, most of the time the woman in a wheelchair is onscreen it’s because they’re drawing attention to the wheelchair (oh no, a ladder, oh no a set of stairs etc etc) and not to develop her character in any way besides that