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Torillian on 27 February 2016
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Jon-Erich said:
Torillian said:

This seemed like a fun math excersise to think about so I decided to find out how many movies have gay characters and whether that fits with how many there should be statistically.  

According to this article: http://variety.com/2015/film/news/glaad-report-gay-movie-characters-2014-tammy-get-hard-1201471698/

"The report, which studied releases from the seven major studios in 2014, found that 20 of the 114 movies (17.5%) that bowed last year had characters who identified as lesbian, gay, or bisexual."

So 17.5% of movies in 2014 had a gay character of some sort.  

 And according to this article: http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2015-05-22/americans-vastly-overestimate-size-of-lgbt-population 4% of the population is gay.  

That means 96% of movie characters should be straight.  Assuming that an average movie has 10 characters that would mean .96^10 chance that all the characters should be straight statistically or 66.48%.  So 31.52% of movies should have a gay character, but only 17.5% actually did in 2014.  Therefore if anything LGBT community is still underrepresented in movies.  

In my opinion, none of this matters. I think unless you're making a documentary or something based on historic fact, the movie makers should not have an obligation to represent anybody, especially when the movie is set in a fictitious universe where Earth's statistics and population figures have no relevance.

That being said, if they want to put gay characters in Star Wars, fine. But they shouldn't do it in a way where the character has to spell out that they're gay, especially when it is not vital to the plot. I hate it when movies and TV shows do that. This is why in 50 years, all the shows an movies that we see as classics right noware still going to hold up while the new shit we have today will be seen as dumb and unintelligent. 

Btw, has anyone else noticed that? The ONLY time we've seen any on-screen romance in the Star Wars movies was when it was essential to the plot? Gay or not gay, they should keep it that way.

Movie makers don't have any obligations to represent realistic diversity, but the post I was replying to seemed to state that minorities were being overrepresented in media which I wanted to look at from a math point of view since I was curious.  Any given single movie does not require a gay character but overall the trend seems to be that LGBT community if underrepresented and not overrepresented in movies.  



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