{"id":20762,"date":"2015-12-28T19:38:13","date_gmt":"2015-12-29T03:38:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=20762"},"modified":"2015-12-28T19:38:13","modified_gmt":"2015-12-29T03:38:13","slug":"viewers-with-prosopagnosia-enjoy-tv-and-movies-and-plays-and-comics-with-diverse-casts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=20762","title":{"rendered":"Viewers With Prosopagnosia Enjoy TV and Movies and Plays and Comics With Diverse Casts"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"These<\/a>

These are two characters from “Sense8.” I honestly don’t know which two they are.<\/p><\/div>\n

Or, at least, I do.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve got prosopagnosia, aka face blindness. ((At least, I believe I have prosopagnosia. I’ve never been officially diagnosed.)) I\u2019ve recently started watching \u201cArrow,\u201d which is a TV show about a bunch of muscular, thirtyish, conventionally handsome, mostly white men plus a few really thin, twentyish, conventionally pretty mostly white women. And usually I deduce who I\u2019m looking at based on context, but it\u2019s common for a scene to begin and I\u2019m looking at some young fit short-haired white guy in some context that doesn\u2019t tell me who I\u2019m looking at, and I genuinely have no idea what character I\u2019m watching. There was an episode in which another hooded archer, a bad guy, unmasked himself at the end, and there was a dramatic musical sting to let the audience know that GASP!<\/em> this was a big shocking reveal, and I had no idea who I was looking at<\/em>.<\/p>\n

This happens to me a lot when watching TV or plays or movies or reading comics. When I started watching \u201cFriends,\u201d it took me most of a season before I could tell Joey and Chandler apart, or which one was Monica and which one was Rachel. ((For some reason, Ross and Phoebe didn’t look like the others to me – I think perhaps because both of them diverge, to at least some degree, from the usual cookie-cutter faces casting directors seem to prefer.)) And as diverse as it was in many ways, I had a very hard time telling Lito, Wolfgang and Will apart when I was watching “Sense8.”<\/p>\n

The more visually diverse characters are – in terms of skin color, age, body shape, facial characteristics, etc – the easier it is for prosopagnosiacs (not sure that’s a real word) to enjoy any form of visual storytelling. And current estimates are that between 1 and 2 percent of the population has prosopagnosia, which is millions of people.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not trying to make a big moral point with this post. I\u2019m just saying that, for 1 or 2% of people, it\u2019s probably easier to know which character is which when the characters are visually diverse. If all else is equal, that might be a reason for cartoonists and other creators to err on the side of being more diverse instead of less. ((I’m not saying I’ve been perfect in this regard. I’ve made a mental note to try and do better.))<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Or, at least, I do. I\u2019ve got prosopagnosia, aka face blindness. ((At least, I believe I have prosopagnosia. I’ve never been officially diagnosed.)) I\u2019ve recently started watching \u201cArrow,\u201d which is a TV show about a bunch of muscular, thirtyish, conventionally … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[62],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20762","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-popular-and-unpopular-culture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20762","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=20762"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20762\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20764,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20762\/revisions\/20764"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=20762"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=20762"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=20762"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}