Would you care for a slightly more organized and precise way to discuss representation in media? Do you promise not to reduce discussions of representation in media to just this method of organization? Yes and yes? Cool. Here’s a tier list. Casual media enjoyers may find it fun to mess around with. Critics might get a little more use out of it, though many experienced critics already have favorite rubrics of their own. But if you’re in the business of creating fiction, or especially of helping others deepen diverse and marginalized themes and content in their work—cultural consulting, for instance—this tier list especially goes out to you. Read on, I’ll show you how.

Caption: I needed a header image but I didn’t want to classify actual media according to this tier list because that’s not the point of this article so I just made an image with random things on different tiers — I needed a header image but I didn’t want to classify actual media according to this tier list because that’s not the point of this article so I just made an image with random things on different tiers

This tier list ranks media, characters, and narratives on an ascending scale of six tiers, according to certain criteria I set out in the article. High-tier work delights and empowers the community it represents. Low-tier work reinforces and perpetuates structures of harm affecting the community it represents.

Tier lists as we know them today originated in video games, where they’re used to rank characters’ effectiveness in combat, or hotness, or likelihood to pick you up from the airport, idk. At least, I think they originated in video games? Presumably our Cro-Magnon ancestors had some way to rank their favorite rocks, caves, or fertility idols, though they probably did not use an idiosyncratic scale going from S at best down through A, B, C, D, and skipping poor overworked E to go straight to F at worst. That seems like a recent thing.

If you follow online games discourse, you may already know tier lists are a trap, even before we apply them to topics as nuanced and complex as identity representation. You should remain suspicious of articles like this very article, which claim to quantify and systematize depicting marginalized populations in media. Tier list ranks cannot replace

discussing the details of how a work represents an identity
evaluating those details in the work’s particular context
considering the thoughts and feelings of marginalized people close to you, who may feel differently than I, or
hiring a cultural consultant.

The tier list also doesn’t measure whether anyone from a featured demographic worked on something—that is, whether it meets “own voices” (careful with that term tho) or “nothing about us without us” standards; or whether the product was any good. Many a work of staggering genius and masterful creative vision contains unconscionably hateful ideas, effectively punching down while wearing a knuckleduster encrusted with blood diamonds. We all got our problematic faves. (You know mine. Mine’s orcs.)

Wait So What Is This Even For Then

You could conceivably use this tier list to compare different media, as in “Blorbo from show X is A-tier representation, but Scrimblo Bimblo from show Y is only B-tier, so watch X and not Y.” I’m not sure how useful such comparisons will necessarily be. I’m not here to tell you what’s unproblematic enough that you should feel morally justified enjoying it: like I always say, that’s between you and your priest/your dom/your dom dressed as a priest.

Rather, I have found in this tier list most useful for comparing characters or works in progress as they are, to what they could be. For example: “Right now your depiction of Blorbo is a C, but I think this plotline would really pop if instead they were a B.” Or “I can tell you’re trying for S Tier by discussing the Bimblo family’s generational trauma impacting Scrimblo, but maybe it’s more appropriate to dial it back to A or B Tier in the context of this particular breakfast cereal box puzzle.”

I hope this tier list helps orient and accelerate your conversations about representation in media, getting everyone on the same page more quickly and easily. This list is not and should never be the end of any conversations, but maybe it can start some.

Let’s look at the tiers on my list and what criteria lead me to grade a piece of media thus. I’ll offer an example of a work at that tier, and suggest some action items if you find yourself creating something at that grade and you want to up your game.

F Tier: Negative Stereotype

At this grade, a work represents a marginalized community using negative stereotypes. Community members, or their fictionalized analogues, appear in the work and exemplify preexisting, pervasive, and harmful misconceptions or oversimplifications of who they are.

Q: What’s a negative stereotype?

A negative stereotype is a widely-held, insulting generalization about a community based on an untruth or oversimplification. Right now we’re mostly concerned with the ones targeting systemically oppressed communities.

Q: Why are negative stereotypes so harmful?

Skip to the next heading if you know this one already. Or maybe read it in case it provides a new line of argument to share during your next argument with a stranger on social media, or your offensive uncle at the stressful family-oriented annual gathering of your choice.

Not all bad things you could do to someone are created equal; and some bad things might be created equal, yet impact others differently. If we fight and I kick you in the side of your knee and injure it, that hurts and makes your life worse. If I throw an identical kick to your knee and your knee has a history of injury, then even though it might be the same kick for me, even though I might not have known you got a bad knee, the hit hurts worse and takes far more time to heal. I might do that by accident, or I might do it because I subconsciously notice your bad knee’s more vulnerable than the other. If I’m really scared of you, or I’m cruel, I might target that bad knee on purpose.

Mongolian sumō wrestler Terunofuji Haruo in the ring at a stadium, preparing to wrestle a lower-division match during an injury-driven slump in his career long before his eventual promotion to yokozuna. He’s wearing gigantic medical knee wraps and wrist bands.

When a negative stereotype afflicts a community, that’s like the community having a collective bum knee. The stereotype is widespread, it’s harmful, and systems and structures—laws maybe, or media tropes, or bad guys with a public platform—keep it alive and aggravate it, like when you have to keep walking or working on that bum knee so it can’t heal. If the bad thing I said about you has been said before, then it’s like a repetitive injury to your knee. It’s not just a one-off thing: people hear it and then, consciously or subconsciously or both, it confirms something already in their heads about you, and makes it more likely they’ll do the same. And if someone out there hears it who has it out for you, then you know that’s how they’ll target you next time they get the chance, just like how they’d go after your bad knee in a fight.

You can apply this same line of thinking to understand why a negative stereotype targeting a marginalized group can be so much more harmful than one targeting a group that’s in power; the knee injury is worse, and it happens often, and that group’s much more likely to be suffering from other injuries as well, with medical care less easily available.

These things build up. They affect us as well as the minds and choices of people who have the power to deny us jobs, to take away our personhood, to inflict legally sanctioned violence, to erase our history.

Q: So Why do they keep happening?

So if negative stereotypes are so bad, how come they show up in media so often?

Bad jokes. I thought we all learned this sometime around kindergarten, but in case someone forgot, appending “lol j/k” to an evil thing you said does not, in fact, make it materially better. Humor is hard. If a negative stereotype is all that makes your joke work, it’s a tired old joke by definition. If you want to lampshade or subvert a trope, you better actually challenge that trope, or else you’re still reinforcing it.
Falsehoods and oversimplifications mistaken for truth, in a misguided attempt at representation. Sometimes you’re trying to represent a group sympathetically (that’s B Tier or higher, in this article’s terms) or authentically (A Tier or higher) and you mistake an unfair statement for the truth.
Context errors. Maybe the statement you’re making about a certain group is fair or true when delivered with appropriate context in the form of explanations for how and why it happened, or environmental and structural pressures that give rise to it rather than inner nature; but the way you delivered that statement, it’s too easy to take it out of context. Or maybe the stereotype is so harmful that it can harm others even with the context you provide.
Attempts at critique. If you’re not a part of a certain marginalized group, you should not be trying to fix that group’s problems with your newspaper articles or video games or whatever. Hell, if you are part of a certain marginalized group, it’s still really hard to critique your own group in a way which doesn’t cause inadvertent harm or give ammunition to bad actors. Note to self: write a “How to Critique Your Own Marginalized Group Without Shooting Yourself in the Foot” article at some point. Another note to self: figure out how to do that before I write the article. We will return to this subject when we reach the last tier in this article.
Unconscious bias. If you’re like 100% of other humans, your subconscious mind has absorbed stereotypes. That problem’s unavoidable, but if your conscious mind watches out, you can catch them before they enter your work. Still, all our conscious minds slip up from time to time. By the way, if “unconscious bias” or “implicit bias” sounds unfamiliar, I got a video for you.

We’ll discuss positive stereotypes two tiers down from here, but the above reasons apply to them as well.

Example: ‘90s Vampire Clans in Early Vampire: the Masquerade

Suppose you’re worldbuilding for a game or novel or something. Your game has some factions—different kinds of supernatural creatures, different noble clans, different houses at magic school, that kinda thing—and you need some way to make them distinct from one another, interesting, and memorable. So you make some generalizations. That’s okay, right? If you’re characterizing different groups, you must generalize at least a little.

But you want a way to decide who gets to be brave, who gets to be smart, who gets to be mean, who gets to be sexy. You want those choices to feel evocative, understandable to your audience, so when they see one characteristic they can quickly pick up on several others which go with it. Isn’t it tempting to apply generalizations which already go together in your audience’s minds? Stereotypes which go together with other stereotypes? A few snobs might call your characterizations cliché, but you can always subvert those expectations later, right?

Setting aside the question of whether it’s lazy worldbuilding or not … this brand of characterization causes trouble when one ingredient in your cocktail of obvious tropes is a marginalized identity, whom you might even have included because you genuinely care about diversity. Now, those obvious, evocative associations you so innocently integrated probably reflect your and your audience’s unconscious biases. If the game calls for a faction to contain both good guys and bad guys—which is a cool, complex choice to make, right?—well, you probably ended up with some negative stereotypes up in there.

See how easily it happens? Good intentions all around, yet we still end up with bad things. Which brings me to the classic tabletop role-playing game Vampire: the Masquerade.

Vampire started in the 1990s. By the year 2000, it had already gone through three editions; in 2020 as I began writing this article, it had entered its fifth. One of the most exciting, engaging elements of Vampire is the diversity of vampire lineages in the game, each one descended from an ancient progenitor who may or may not still stalk the night, and each one representing a different vampiric archetype from pop culture and/or mythology. Members of each clan share supernatural powers, weaknesses, culture, personality types, even fashion. Pretty cool, right?

That’s not sarcasm. Vampire clans are genuinely cool and evocative, an effective and fun starting point for character creation and conflict generation. But for those same good reasons, we get these:

The cover of Clanbook: Assamite Revised, an older Vampire: the Masquerade sourcebook detailing a West Asian and North African clan of assassin vampires. On the cover is the clan’s name in a faux-Middle Eastern font, and an illustration of a brown-skinned woman in a headwrap, bikini top, and tights carrying several bladed weapons and standing over a corpse she has just stabbed to death. She looks cold.

The Assamites are not Assamese at all, but SWANA-based, with their ancient headquarters in Syria. Yes, that means that in this setting, the actual historical political party called the Assassins were all vampires, or maybe working for vampires, I forget. At very least they shared an office. The Assamites are professional assassin vampires with a history of addiction to vampire blood, which is more potent/stigmatized/magically powerful than ordinary human blood. They have a reputation for committing murder for money or blood to drink. In older editions of the game, they also got darker and blacker-skinned as they got older and more evil.
The Malkavians are insane vampires with the power to turn other vampires insane. Every single Malkavian is mentally ill. Malkavians in published material often act like clownish caricatures of mental illness.
The Ravnos are Romani-themed vampires with supernatural powers of trickery, misdirection, and illusion.
The Samedi are Caribbean voodoo vampires who look like pop-culture zombies and have necromantic powers to curse others.

It goes on like that. Similar examples show up in Werewolf: the Apocalypse, Mage: the Ascension, and other White Wolf Publishing standards. You get the idea.

The end of the twentieth century abounded in stereotypical vampires, although Blade personally killed many of them during the late 1990s, when more than a few of the undead in question attempted to ice-skate uphill.

To be fair, these tendencies began to improve after the 1990s ended (for which we presumably have Blade to thank, at least in part). More recent editions (including 5th, on which I’ve worked a little bit as a cultural consultant) have updated many clans’ characterizations to greater or lesser extents. But the way these clans used to work, the easiest thing to create if you looked at many vampire clans was an ethnic, national, religious, or ableist stereotype. You could do so completely by accident just by following tropes printed in the sourcebooks.

When my college roommate introduced me to RPGs, we started with the old World of Darkness. I have great affection for that game line. But it also demonstrates how a series of logical, advantageous creative choices can inadvertently generate harm.

Leveling Up

*Neon Genesis Evangelion’s* Ikari Shinji being confused at the unconvincing people clapping for him and congratulating him. Everyone else watching this episode is also confused.

Even with the best of intentions, even if you’re not a mustache-twirling villain intent on tying a subaltern population to the railroad tracks of your nefarious creativity, you can still wind up at F Tier by accident. You might feel tempted to limit your creations’ diversity, to tell stories which only include empowered demographics and/or those to which you yourself belong. But erasing a group from your work out of fear still only lands you at D Tier. The applause will be quiet.

Even if the risk of failure increases, I encourage you to aim higher. If you represent someone badly, then you can take criticism on your work and do better next time. You can’t iterate and improve if you don’t try at all.

Now, avoiding stereotype starts with understanding stereotype. If you’re representing a certain group in your work, go online and look up what kind of stereotypes plague members of that group. Read articles about them. I guarantee you can find half a dozen about any stereotype pernicious enough that you need to avoid it. I know you might be scared that learning a new racist stereotype about someone might make you more racist, but the stuff in your head that’s most likely to hurt someone is already there, living in the realm of unconscious bias. The insight into a community’s experiences you’ll get from reading own-voices articles about stereotypes is well worth the risk.

D Tier: No Representation

At this rank, a work omits a community entirely. The only thing it’s better than is straight up negative stereotypes, and at least those might be an indicator you tried to represent someone. When I’m on the job as a cultural consultant, I’d s o m e t i m e s rather you hit F Tier so I got something to work with. But when I’m off the clock, I often find myself yelling at the television, “please stop, just go back to the white people, I wish you’d just taken us out.”

That said, everything you make ranks at D Tier for something. You can’t fit everyone in your thing, unless your thing is the size of Doctor Who or Law & Order or something. That’s fine! But also don’t expect people from that absent group to get excited about it.

Example: Uh, Most Things. Firefly I Guess

Firefly abounds in Asian signifiers but has no Asian people. There’s Chinese language (or attempts thereat), Chinese and Japanese material culture, and other Asian inspirations, but no Asian main characters to be found. There’s even a song about it in the Doctor Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog special features, but unfortunately the song cannot introduce Asians retroactively to Firefly.

The main cast of much-cancelled science fiction television series Firefly, in costume on their ship. Not pictured: Asians.

Leveling Up

You need not fit every demographic into every work. However, if a certain demographic appears nowhere in anything you’ve made, you should probably think about that. Look at your normal life, too: do you have zero friends from a certain group? Or just acquaintances, no close friends? Look at the media you consume: is there nothing which represents that missing group? If you were working for someone and your boss told you you had to write a character from that group, would you feel scared or panicked?

Assigning different identities to extant characters is a start, but it only gets you to B Tier. That might be fine—that might be all that your work should do, depending on its scope. If your thing is an action movie that’s mostly flashy battles without much substance, maybe B Tier’s where you want to be.

It’s hard to give specific advice to someone at this tier, because the problem is so directionless, but again: finding some media about that community created by someone from that community to get them into your headspace is a good start. It’s easier and safer than making friends real fast. Also, don’t just look at fiction. Look at non-fiction, too, like news stories about that group from credible sources, especially if any regional media services from there publish in English.

C Tier: Generic Negativity, or Positive Stereotypes

At this rank, a work represents the community using “benign” or “positive” stereotypes, or negative tropes unrelated to stereotypes about the community.

Neutral and complimentary stereotypes might not fuel as many hate crimes as negative stereotypes, but in polite society they’re often more pernicious, since they’re easier to get away with or rationalize as “just a compliment.”

There’s a lot of reasonable debate about whether this kind of representation is better or worse than nothing. There are certainly examples of C Tier works which individually seem better or worse than nothing to me. If I have to generalize, though, then I’d say generically negative or stereotypically positive representation is more often better than nothing, even if it’s not good. As I mentioned above, if you’ve at least tried to represent someone, anyone from a certain group, even if you technically cause more harm than if you hadn’t done anything at all, at least there’s a chance that you might do something right by accident—and even if you don’t, then it’s much easier for me to criticize your work and suggest improvements.

If you’re not interested in listening to criticism from people who have good reason to be upset, though, maybe you’re not really better than the Fs and Ds after all.

Generic Negativity Example: Central Asians in Northern Lights (aka The Golden Compass) by Philip Pullman

If you blink, you’ll miss them; but towards the end of Northern Lights, also known as The Golden Compass, the main characters run afoul of some mercenaries working for the villainous Magisterium. Those mercenaries happen to be “Tartars,” though it’s not clear whether that term means quite the same thing in Lyra Belacqua’s universe that it does in ours. They’re mean, violent, and mostly lacking in voice and personality, to the point where I can’t remember if they’re supposed to be Russian, Turkish, Mongolian, or something else from the Central Asian region. If I recall correctly, they’re also the only people who appear in Northern Lights who are called out as Asian (though there is another awkwardly-portrayed racialized minority present in the form of the Gyptians, the setting’s Romanichal/Traveler equivalent).

I pick on Northern Lights here because this situation is the most common example of generic negativity that I see: there’s a certain group, they’re not a big part of the narrative, they’re included in passing as generic antagonists, the author doesn’t seem to be trying to say anything particularly negative about that group. But you would probably be at least a little annoyed if you were, for example, a real-world Crimean Tatar and the only people in the book (or across a range of books) who looked and sounded like you were generic brutish gunmen.

Positive Stereotypes Example: Street Fighter II

Fighting games! They (and Astérix comics) were how I originally learned racial stereotypes. All the characters in fighting games are supposed to be cool people you want to play as, but … a lot of them are also just racial stereotypes, and at best they’re positive ones. To be honest I don’t think they’re materially better than, say, the Vampire ones—they just generated characters which polled slightly better in the represented demographics. Let’s look at Street Fighter. Man, who was your favorite?

We got Dhalsim, a caricature of an Indian yogi based on an even more horrific brownface character from The One-Armed Boxer and Master of the Flying Guillotine, perpetuating the positive stereotype that Indian people can punch you from across the room without moving their feet, especially if they wear skull necklaces.
We got Dee Jay, a Caribbean boxer who’s from, uh … I guess the whole Caribbean? All of it? None of it? He’s music-themed. Surprise.
We got Thunder Hawk, an Indigenous Mexican of the “Thunderfoot” nation who looks and acts like the American Indian guy Pocahontas didn’t marry in the Disney movie. He dresses in … okay, imagine an Indian Hallowe’en costume from Spirit Halloween, but with denim instead of buckskin (but still fringe). There. That. Dude even says “háu” at one point, which I didn’t think ever happened outside of Bugs Bunny cartoons and, y’know, conversations between actual Lakota guys. Again, this man is Mexican.
Imma be honest with you. I’ve been looking at the Street Fighter II wiki for about 20 minutes now and I no longer find myself capable of identifying what a racial caricature is. It all looks normal to me now. Sumō wrestler in kabuki makeup? NBD. Brazilian electric orc? Whatever. Ninja bullfighter? Sure.
Note that I’m not complaining about there being Asian martial artists here. Everyone in the game is a martial artist, which means the Asian characters aren’t characterized *just* by their martial arts prowess.

I think Street Fighter, like Vampire, exemplifies why stereotypes are bad *and* why stereotypes keep happening. They’re iconic generalizations which make it quick and easy for someone to think and feel a lot of things about a character, and to distinguish between different characters.

If we’re just looking at ways to make characters recognizably different from each other, racial stereotypes are amazing for this purpose. They’re so effective! Thanks to systemic racism, we already have these tightly woven sets of associations in our heads for what people from all these regions are like in jokes, caricatures, and the murky depths of our own mortal fears that make us irrationally cross the street when walking in front of them late at night. The context of games and fiction makes those ideas feel “okay,” allowing us to let them bubble to the surface so we can joke about them and talk about them explicitly and pretend we’re not reinforcing them or harming anyone.

Leveling Up

If you got villains from a certain disenfranchised group, try to have heroes from that community too. Ideally you have more than one, since if you have numerous bad guys from a group and then just one good guy from that group, you may have just created Drizzt Do’Urden. If you especially want to make me happy, then make sure that if there’s a threat to a certain community (esp. coming from within the community), the heroes outside the community help the community solve the problem themselves, instead of just white knighting it.

In the case of positive stereotypes: for sure change the characterizations of the characters to whom you gave positive stereotypes. However, I’d caution you against always trying to create the opposite of stereotypes, because sometimes creating the conspicuous opposite of a stereotype ends up highlighting the stereotype—looking at you, late 80s/early 90s cartoons with a weird preponderance of Black scientists and cops. Instead, try to find characterizations which are orthogonal to, thematically unrelated to, any negative or positive stereotypes; Jeffrey Robbins, a minor but impactful Gargoyles character played by Paul Winfield, remains my favorite 1990s-era example.

Also, the more characterization you’re able to give an individual character, the less impact individual positive stereotypes will have. If your Black American character is a great basketball player, that’s a positive stereotype, so if all you show them doing is sinking free throws, that’s not horrific but it’s also not particularly exciting. If basketball skills are one of many things they do, if they’ve got lots of other things going on in their life, like community organizing or being the president, then the fact that they’re good at basketball might be safe to include.

B Tier: Generic Positivity, and/or Kinda the Same

A work at this grade depicts the community as positive in a way that isn’t culturally specific, or as kinda the same as everyone else. The characters from the community are cool enough, but they could be from any community or have any identity.

If you’ve read my article, “May I play a character of another race?” this is your Step 1 character, the character who seems “just like everyone else.” I want to draw particular attention to B Tier because this is the grade everyone can achieve. This should be our baseline: no worse than this, and sometimes better. You’ll wind up with occasional Ds, but with practice, you can always avoid F and C. All you have to do to get to B Tier is write a person who’s just a person. You might still trip and fall into generic negativity or stereotypes you didn’t know about, but I feel confident all of you can make up a person.

Example: White People in Almost Everything

Congratulations, white people! You have reliably achieved this level of representation across almost every medium you can possibly put a white person in. Maybe you’re still working on kabuki theater or griot performance. But I can think of any number of media which feature a white person characterized as, like, probably a pretty OK person. Many of these characters are depicted as being either kinda the same or generically positive for reasons that aren’t specifically tied to a white culture or white identity. Even if the main characters in white-focused media are doing something that focuses closely on their whiteness, there are usually at least some background characters just hanging around and representing whiteness less pointedly. I would like to applaud the white storytellers who have been struggling for several centuries to achieve this level of representation.

One of my favorite examples of own-voices white storytelling, featuring an all-white cast. Inspiring. (no seriously all jokes aside I love this episode)

Leveling Up

At B Tier, you might not want or need to level up. I repeat: you might not want or need to level up. It’s safe here. That’s good, and sometimes also bad.

You can’t level up everyone’s portrayal, because your work probably doesn’t have the space or time. Not every work is an ideal vehicle for cultural truth. But if your work has space to depict culture, you might want to bring in an element that feels real, that will make marginalized people feel excited and feel seen. I hope you do, anyway, because that’s a great feeling when it happens, for everyone involved.

If you’re here, this is one of the most efficient and effective places to bring in cultural consultants or contributors from the group you’re representing. They’ll be excited to work with you, and it’ll take comparatively little work on their part to take something kinda inoffensive and introduce their own understanding of their cultural identity. Cultural consultants aren’t all the same; me, I’m happy to start with something at F Tier, I don’t even blink an eye at that anymore, but a lot of my colleagues feel uneasy jumping aboard if they see little potential for improvement.

But as with learning to play as or write characters from different backgrounds, start with one signifier at a time. Don’t pick something too obvious; try for something across the spectrum of cultural expressions you haven’t heard of or seen before in pop culture. It could be an art form, a fighting style, an article of clothing, or a religious celebration; but I would recommend that you start with something positive and joyful as your first step toward A Tier.

If I’m learning to write about Jews for the first time, I probably shouldn’t start with something traumatic, even if trauma is a real part of the Jewish experience. So no Holocaust for your first time out. Save it for later, or if you get a cultural consultant. What about food? Sure, food’s a positive thing, but descriptions of marginalized people focus on food really often, so let me find something less common. Instead, try music and dance: they’re joyful experiences, they’re deeply important to Jewish identity, and there’s lots of information that’s easy to get about Jewish musicians and dancers across many different genres.

Rachel Bloom’s Crazy Ex-Girlfriend has just the song for this moment.

A Tier: Identity-Specific Struggles and Content

A work at this grade depicts themes, conflicts, and characterizations specific to a certain demographic. Again, to call back to “May I play a character of another race?” this is the Level 2 character, the character with some signifiers from their particular identity. At this tier, if you get it right, people from the group you’re representing get really excited about the representation. You see yourself reflected in the work and think, “oh hey! That’s that thing from my life! That thing that’s peculiar to this identity I have!” And, if you’re used to that happening—if it happens all the time—then I don’t know how to explain to you what it feels like for that to happen the first time, the only time it’s happened in your life.

Example: Starship Troopers by Robert A Heinlein?!

My favorite A Tier media are works written from personal experience like Cadwell Turnbull’s No Gods, No Monsters, or works from creators who engaged consultants and did good research—often after failing previously and struggling to do better—like Puerto Rico 1897. But I’m gonna highlight a weird edge case here here, hardly the best example, just because of how much it stuck out at the time.

The cover of the first edition of Robert A Heinlein’s *Starship Troopers,* featuring space marines in black ink hanging from stylized parachutes which look like orange sunbursts, against a tie-dye cloudy blue sky.

Reading Starship Troopers as a young high schooler was a weird experience. 9/11 had just happened, and I was starting to develop my identity as anti-war and anti-fascist. I started reading Starship Troopers because I heard it had influenced a lot of stuff I was into at the time (Warhammer 40K, Ender’s Game, StarCraft) and wanted to know what had inspired them. So then I start reading Starship Troopers which, well, if it isn’t fascist, is definitely fascist-adjacent …

… and the most surprising thing about it, to me, was the Filipino stuff. The book doesn’t even confirm that Juan Rico is Filipino until the last few pages, but before that it’s full of little details that make perfect, peculiar sense if he’s from a mestizo family in a former Spanish colony. The book doesn’t harp on them; mostly he’s a pretty average, if competent, soldier, and then the last few pages mention that he’s Filipino and it all comes together and makes sense. It was the first time I had ever imagined I would read something like that in a book written by a white man from the other side of the political spectrum.

I strongly suspect Starship Troopers only falls into this category for me in hindsight, but it was important to me as a young reader and a beginning writer, because I didn’t know until then that it went this way. I was used to being an Asian boy who had to figure out how to write white people. But I never thought it’d go the other way, that a white man would bother figuring out how to write such an effective Filipino character. But it did instill in me an early confidence that this was something white people could do.

It wasn’t some special wokeness that Heinlein had—like, I’d read Stranger in a Strange Land, I was intimately familiar even then with Heinlein’s catastrophic inability to write women, which made me uncomfortable for reasons I couldn’t place even during a time in my life when I still thought gender essentialism might be real. If I re-read Starship Troopers today, I’m sure I’d find something I wouldn’t like in the Pinoy representation (and plenty unrelated to nationality which I’d hate); but in high school when I read it, it hit hard.

Leveling Up

If you’re here, I don’t think you need to level up. You’re probably fine. I wouldn’t push it. If you belong to the community, and you want to bring in something personal to you that’s really intense, it might be safe to do so if it’s important to you. You should never try to exceed A Tier because you feel you have to. Instead, you should do it because you want to, because something in your heart tells you that only further will you find your own peace and truth. Because there’s a hidden tier at the end of this list:

S Tier: Constructive Criticism, Identity Trauma Narratives, and Reclaimed Stereotype

There’s a tier higher than A? Indeed there is, and it’s S Tier, the most contentious and affecting tier of all. A work at this tier highlights contentious issues within a community in a constructive way.

Or, it discusses systemic oppression directed at a certain identity in vivid and painful detail.

Or, it explores (and possibly reclaims) a negative stereotype.

S-tier content is hardest to craft, the kind of creative challenge which overwhelms even veterans. Your practice usually needs solid grounding in B- and A-tier content before you go into community issues most safely discussed as internal business, verbally, in private settings. In my cultural consulting, I often encourage even own-voices creators to tread lightly around S tier. Most works should not aim for S Tier. Hell, you’ll be hard pressed to find a large group of people from the represented demographic who all agree one work or character is S Tier.

… but I’m not gonna lie. When it’s good, it’s so good. But it’s hard to make something this good.

Constructive criticism Is Hard

Subaltern populations develop biases, prejudices, and cultural failings about as often as systemically empowered ones. Sometimes those harmful perspectives even turn inward, as the pervasive nature of kyriarchical marginalization trains us to see ourselves in the mirror with the oppressor’s eyes. I want us to be able to identify, discuss, and work through these flaws, but damn, art is a hard place to do so.

When we criticize members of our own communities, the safest and most effective medium is direct, private conversation. But we can’t always have those, especially if we want to address strangers for some reason, or a culture-wide trend. Public callouts, whether on social media or in art, raise the profile of everyone involved. This is not to say they shouldn’t ever happen; but they increase harm risk because they draw attention from outside the community. Bad actors who happen upon well-intentioned criticism like to take it out of its original context and reframe it to support their own oppressive talking points, as we’ve seen over the past few years with the right co-opting criticism of virtue signaling. Then, to avoid personal liability, they claim they’re just amplifying a voice from within the community.

For instance, let’s say I wanted to write something about anti-Asian racism in the American Jewish community, or about antisemitism in the Asian-American community. Both of those things are real problems, I had a Jewish parent and a Filipino parent, and I do this cultural stuff for a living, so I’m probably in a pretty good position to do either of those things, right?

Nevertheless, I still have to worry about my work getting taken out of context. I could write something really good, really incisive, and really fair, and yet I have to stay vigilant to make sure my work doesn’t get cited to support points like these:

You think white people are racist? It’s really the Jews/the Asians who are driving racism! Jewish privilege/Asian privilege are serious problems! Before you criticize us, why don’t you hypocrites solve your own problems? Behold this article by well-known Asian Jew, James Mendez, which proves my point!

It gets old fast.

Identity trauma narratives Are Hard

An identity trauma narrative dives deep into the nature and effects of systemic oppression’s traumatizing effects on marginalized people. Films like Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight, books like Murasaki Shikibu’s The Tale of Genji, and games like Julia Ellingboe’s Steal Away Jordan are valuable, necessary, and often great art. My favorite examples balance the pain by also exhibiting identity-specific joy in both S- and A-Tier style.

Eugene Lee Yang’s “I’m Gay” depicts both heteronormative oppression and queer joy.

These stories sometimes backfire when the work’s tone or format doesn’t match the trauma story’s gravity—say, if you tried to create a Captain Planet episode about the Troubles. These stories often come off as exploiting systemic oppression for pathos, a kind of misery tourism. Even when done right, they help some of us in the affected group feel catharsis, while others find the topic so overwhelming or painful they can’t engage with it at all for fear of getting retraumatized.

Deconstructing negative stereotype is hard

This category’s my favorite, and also probably the most difficult of even all the S Tier options. These works look directly at a harmful, pervasive stereotype and tear it to pieces through analysis, satire, and irony. To see stereotype deconstruction (as well as various other positive depictions from this tier list) at its finest, look no further than Gene Luen Yang’s comics, such as American Born Chinese, Superman Smashes the Klan, and the one I’ll analyze in the example below.

But we’re not all Mr Yang. These works have the potential to do great things, shining light on a stereotype’s origins and harmful effects, then weakening the effect of that stereotype on those it targets. But this kind of work falls within the difficult realm of satire, and—as I’ve mentioned before—when satire on this topic fails, it winds up at F Tier.

Neil Patrick Harris as a psychic space Nazi in the film adaptation of *Starship Troopers,* which sure did try to satirize the above-lauded *Starship Troopers,* with questionable success.

Example: Avatar: the Last Airbender: the Promise, by Gene Luen Yang and Gurihiru

So as you may have heard, I helped develop this tabletop RPG about Avatar: the Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra, and in preparation for that work I went back and read through all the expanded universe canonical material. My favorite piece in maybe the whole Avatar franchise is The Promise, the first of all the comics about Avatar, set immediately after the series finale of Last Airbender. Spoilers incoming.

The cover of *The Promise’s* collected edition, featuring Avatar Aang and Fire Lord Zuko side by side.

The Promise focuses on the Fire Nation colonies in the Earth Kingdom. As it starts, the newly crowned Fire Lord Zuko promises to disestablish the Fire Nation colonies in the Earth Kingdom. But when Zuko visits the colonies, he finds the process of decolonization is much more complicated than he predicted. The hundred-year-old colony of Yu Dao is full of mixed-nation Earth Kingdom and Fire Nation families and has a culture all its own which combines Earth and Fire cultures, not without its own complicated power dynamics. Uprooting the colony would mean uprooting multiple generations. Pro- and anti-disestablishment activists and protesters are at each other’s throats, generating strife within Team Avatar.

There’s also a subplot about Aang meeting some young Earth and Fire kids who are interested in Air Nomad culture, to the point of creating Air Nomad outfits and applying tattoos. Aang is simultaneously flattered that someone is interested in rebuilding a lost culture, and horrified at the way sacred Air Nomad traditions have been misused and decontextualized in the face of a recent genocide. He ends up having to make some really hard decisions about the cultural appropriation he’s dealing with.

I’m not going to tell you how it all shakes out, but none of these problems has a simple answer which makes everyone happy, even though everyone involved is doing their best. The execution of all these really complicated issues, which are really personal to me as a mixed-race guy who is in many ways literally the product of a history of violent imperialism, rings true enough that I can’t help tearing up when I get to the end.

Leveling Out

If you’re at this level, or you think you’re at this level, please run your work past someone else in the community (probably even if you’re in the community) before you publish or ship. You owe it to yourself as well as others—and if you have done right by the community, you’ll get to feel really good when they tell you how awesome your thing is.

If you’re pointing out an in-community problem, check to see if larger structures of power which are also in play which have an effect both inside and outside the community. For example, if I tried to critique anti-Asian racism within the Jewish community as I mentioned above, it wouldn’t be doing the problem justice if I didn’t explain the way that structures of systemic oppression stemming from larger-scale white supremacy, which draws Jews into kyriarchical structures that have more to do with whiteness than with Judaism, and convinces Asians that Jews are responsible for problems white Christian hegemony created. If these structures exist, if they’ve affected the negative dynamics within a community that you’re trying to call out, mentioning them is probably the right thing to do.

Also? If you’re working in this space, remember to take breaks, stay hydrated, and check in with your friends. It’s stressful work.

Variations on a Theme

If I haven’t seeded this article with enough caveats already: there are many individual works which technically meet my criteria for one tier, but which I end up liking or hating much more than other media at that tier for one reason or another. Let’s go over some examples of possible pluses, minuses, and complexities.

Variations Within a Work

Sometimes a work knocks it out of the park with one character and then drops the ball on another. More commonly, something which excels at one identity category won’t do justice to another. As an example, I adore Warrior, Cinemax’s Peaky Blinders-style action-drama show about warring gangs in San Francisco’s Chinatown, based on Bruce Lee’s notes. The show reliably hits A or better with ethnic representation. The one flaw I’ve seen is the show’s depiction of Mongols, all of whom belong to the Fung Hai gang. Their chaotic, violent, and treacherous nature is often described as related somehow to their Mongolian ethnicity by people who are only marginally more lawful, peaceable, and trustworthy. They also don’t look particularly Mongolian, dressing more like fantasy barbarians or Khal Drogo or something than actual Mongolians. They have extensive tattoos, but all those tattoos are in Chinese rather than Mongolian or Manchurian or anything like that.

This is kind of a problem because right now, China is exerting significant colonial pressure on Mongolia (not to mention Xīnjiāng). Mongolian expansionism in history, Mongolia’s history of oppressing China, or Mongolians’ general “barbarian” status are often brought up as justification for this kind of behavior. It’s totally reasonable that the characters in the show would have racist ideas about what Mongols are like, but then having every Mongol live up to literally all of them is pretty unsatisfying.

My headcanon for the show is that the Fung Hai are a bunch of Chinese guys cosplaying as Mongols because they think it’ll seem badass to the other gangs in town.

Speaking of colonial pressure …

Did you see the politics? They made me angry.

There’s a parallel topic to this one, which is large enough that I want it to get its own article eventually, but which I wanted to mention here, which is when plotlines or power dynamics in fiction end up paralleling things in the real world in ways that might be harmful. I haven’t played Raji yet, though I want to; but this Vice review highlights some ways in which what sounds like an otherwise A-tier work inadvertently fuels an uncomfortable fire having to do with the current construction of Hindu nationalism.

One of the most common examples of this problem are the presence of colonialist or imperialist themes. These are so widespread and common, and so easily and trivially gamified and valorized in games and fiction, that stripping them out is often a huge amount of work that we don’t realize we have to do until really late. But “is this a colonial/imperial narrative” is probably a good question to ask yourself early on in the process. I don’t think colonial or imperial narratives are totally off the table—like, I wrote a whole game about Warring States-era samurai, and those guys were frequently colonizers. But you want to make these choices consciously, actively, and intentionally.

Harmful Inaccuracy

One variant of this situation is harmful inaccuracy. There’s nothing wrong with a story having fantasy or fictional elements that diverge from reality, but certain kinds of inaccuracies should be avoided because they intersect with harmful tropes or negative stereotypes, or because they’re so widespread that they eclipse a culture’s ability to tell the truth about itself. The most obvious of these have to do with a religious concept that’s misrepresented, like golems or phylacteries; or with an important cultural concept where the falsehoods about it have eclipsed the truth—see the common idea throughout nerd games that a rākṣasa has a tiger face, which stems from a random episode of an old urban fantasy television show which an early edition of D&D canonized. Now the tiger-faced rākṣasa has eclipsed the actual Indian monster in gamer imaginations, which is kind of a dick move when you think about it.

Within fiction, of course it’s okay to do stuff that’s unrealistic or inaccurate; but you want your unrealisms and inaccuracies to be well-reasoned choices, and choices which improve the story and make the people who have something to lose more excited about it. This is another “deserves its own article” topic, but as a quick preview, my favorite ways to do unrealism or inaccuracy include

highlighting and overemphasizing things about a culture or mythology which are often forgotten
prioritizing marginalized and underrepresented narratives
“adjusting the dials” on how important or influential different aspects of something are relative to one another, or
concentrating on one or two major changes (that feed into no negative stereotypes or pernicious inaccuracies) and seeing how those changes modify other things.

But yeah, hold me to writing an article about when and how inaccuracy is good, sometime in the future.

Is It Any Good?

Potential critics will probably be less angry at you if the thing you make is good art, or a fun game, or something. To be clear, whether something has good representation is related to whether your thing is good, but it’s also possible to make something staggeringly beautiful or deeply compelling which is also full of offensive disasters. Like I mentioned at the beginning, this is where problematic faves come from.

Usage Instructions for Editors and Cultural Consultants

If you make stuff and you struggle with how to calibrate identity representation in your work, I hope this tier list helps clarify that task for you a bit. But if you help other people make stuff—if you’re a cultural consultant, sensitivity reader, editor, or beta reader—and you’ve struggled, as I have, to explain to baffled creators what you mean by “good representation,” I especially hope you can shorten some otherwise long and repetitive conversations by saying things like, “I need you to read this tier list, and then we can talk about how this culture you’ve made up needs to be at least a B.” It won’t do all your work for you, but it lets you accelerate the boring beginning part of the conversation with a new client.

The tier list may also help you assess, based on early conversations with a client or potential client, where they’re likely to start on the tier list—and, accordingly, how much and how difficult your work will be. Sometimes you can even begin the assessment before you see the work. Clients focused on not causing offense, rather than taking a more positive approach and aiming to bring identity-based joy, tend to start lower on the tier list and need more handholding on their way up. You might have to show them that “not causing offense” only gets you above C level, while three entire grades of actual good representation await above. Clients who discuss the problem in terms of political correctness, or who understand the cultural consulting process as “appealing to the left/progressives/wokeness” rather than avoiding harm and creating euphoria, may also have a longer way to go.

The more letters between the work’s starting grade and its intended final grade, the more time and intellectual/emotional energy you as a consultant should expect to spend on it … and, ideally, the more money the client should pay for it. If one of the grades involved is F or S, you may find the work especially taxing or even traumatic. Pace yourself, take breaks, and check in with interlocutors you trust about how it’s going. If the work has you in your feelings, that’s not uncommon, but you should take those feelings seriously, for both your own sake and your client’s.

Frequently Asked Questions

If you’ve worked in cultural consulting or sensitivity reading before, you’ve probably noticed certain questions and anxieties coming up in conversation with multiple clients. If you ask your client to familiarize themself with this tier list, you can make reference to certain tiers to respond to common concerns.

“I want diversity in my work, but how do I know I’m not tokenizing?” As I define it, a token character visibly represents a marginalized population, but has little to no voice or agency in the narrative. Point your client towards a combination of B- and A-tier characters and content, and remember to give them enough spotlight to feel like real people and narratives rather than set dressing.
“I want diversity in my work, but how do I know I’m not appropriating? Am I even allowed to tell this story?” Teach your client how to avoid F- and C-tier stereotypes, as well as S-tier content best left to internal perspectives. Focus them on tier B, with occasional consultant-guided ventures into A. If they really want to hit S Tier, connect them with not only consultants, but also creators from the community to contribute to the narrative.
“With so many conflicting voices, how do you stay objective in your analysis?” I personally describe cultural consulting as a broadly subjective process rather than an objective one, but I made you a scale that might count as an objective measure.
“How do I know when I’ve done enough?” I understand this question comes from a place of legitimate concern, though I usually want to lay hands heavy as cinderblocks on their shoulders and stare dead-eyed into their eyes and say, “Never. Your work is done never. You will be doing this until you die and when you see death, you will stare into their fathomless eyes and say, ‘Huge fan of your work but I have some concerns.’” I recognize I probably should not do this in real life, so this tier list is my second try, after the less detailed Giant Robot of Offense, at a more precise answer. In tier list terms, I think everyone’s capable of B tier as a baseline for any group they represent. If your client actually wants to impress members of a certain group, they should aim for A. S is usually too much. Usually.

Cultural consultants: please, sound off in the comments if you have other questions about what your clients are saying to you and how the tier list might help! I’ll update the post or reply to the comment with answers.

Please Argue Now

You can’t have a tier list without arguments about what goes where, can you? It’s traditional. I now invite you, beloved readers, to argue about where your favorite and least favorite media fall on this tier list, as well as whether tier lists are any good or not. Argue in comments sections, argue on social media, and especially argue with your friends. I’m particularly interested in examples which “break” the tier list: are there works with positive stereotypes which, for one reason or another, are worse than the ones with negative stereotypes? Is no representation better or worse than bad representation? Did the devs nerf generic positivity in the last patch, irrevocably changing the meta?

Also, before you ask: I can definitely assess your work and let you know where on the tier list it ranks, but that process is called “cultural consulting” and it is, as I have been forced to admit on my taxes, a real job.