They were just examples, I'm deeply annoyed at anything concerning acute political/social activism in entertainment because it's simply not what I wanted to spend my leisure time on.
Because it is.
I'm not trying to gaslight you, insofar as reason itself agrees with my proposition.
There's a good way and a bad way to have elements in entertainment. Using the "black man" example again, a good example are the Redguards in The Elder Scrolls games. I wasn't annoyed, the Redguards were a natural and very good part of the world building and lore and served to better entertain me.
A bad example on the other hand is literally any of the "obligatory black man" now seen everywhere. He doesn't serve any purpose other than to say that there's a black man.
I want more Redguards in my entertainment, not obligatory black men.
But! If I am like a techno-angel sent from the Heavens above, then what I can do is suggest to you that exit, as opposed to voice, is a sociopolitical act that you should consider. Exit from the mainstream culture is your best bet.
This also only means that any sociopolitical exit from the zombie invasion must at least be as high as considering a departure from common epistemology.
This would be exhausting, and people would rightly start to roll their eyes at it. And it would be fine for readers to object to it, even as short people are a component of reality. It wouldn't mean the complainant finds short people objectionable in themselves, but simply that they don't think height is a defining part of reality that all of literature is obligated to address.
Smart of you to have picked one of the few human characteristics that hasn't been used to justify discriminations and very unfortunate historical events... In our world it's not just literature that is very preoccupied with skin colour and gender.
> It wouldn't mean the complainant finds short people objectionable in themselves, but simply that they don't think height is a defining part of reality that all of literature is obligated to address.
You have it reversed, if it's not a defining part of someone's reality, why would one even care whether it's addressed in fiction or not? The person I was answering to does care, a lot, to the point that swinging one way or another can ruin their experience.
You'd find it exhausting. People similarly find the race and gender preoccupation exhausting. Your justification for the different treatment seems to be "for these categories, people are obligated to not find them exhausting, but not for other categories." But that's not well-motivated.
In a height-preoccupied literary world, can you imagine objecting to the height preoccupation? If you did, how could you justify it, if it's not a defining part of your existence?
Of course it has. That notions like “Napoleon complex” circulate in pop culture, suggests that society broadly considers short-statured people to be somehow disadvantaged and, moreover, it can be funny when the short-statured kick against the pricks. The demand that a suitable male partner ought to be over six feet tall, is absolutely widespread, both in match-seeking profiles on online-dating platforms and in dating fora where women give advice to each other. (Or, if you want to reverse the sexes, Truffaut’s gag in Baisers volés about dating a tall girl, wouldn’t work if people broadly didn’t feel that there was something weird about this.)
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-19674306
The 15th of each month is a big day for 36-year-old Yoshihiro Nozawa: it is the day he gets paid.
But every month, he hands over his entire salary to his wife Masami.
She controls the household budget and gives him a monthly pocket money of 30,000 yen ($381; £243). Despite being the breadwinner, that is all the money he can spend on himself over the next 30 days.
"The last five days from the 10th of each month are usually the toughest," says Yoshihiro.
[...]
47-year-old Taisaku Kubo has been getting 50,000 yen a month from his wife Yuriko for the past 15 years.
He has tried to negotiate a pay rise each year but his wife makes a presentation to explain why it cannot be done.
"She draws a pie chart of our household budget to explain why I cannot get more pocket money," says Taisaku.
[...]
So why don't men start controlling the household budgets themselves?
"I don't think many men hand over their entire salaries happily," says career consultant Takao Maekawa of FeelWorks.
"But they feel it's their obligation to earn money for the family even if it means they have to suffer themselves."
I suspect for the Japanese women who are putting in perspective the extreme conservatism on gender roles prevalent in their country, most Japanese fiction shouts at them about real life too.