Livre d'Or

It seems to me:

1. There's a ladder of representation. One rung is being represented AT ALL. Another rung is being represented reasonable positively. Another rung is being represented in multiple ways. The top rung is being represented so often it's not noteworthy any more. And someone who's in a group stuck on a lower rung can't really see the differences between two rungs higher than them, even if the differences are actually really important.

2. Following up that last sentence, it seems to be a matter of intersectionality. "Non-able-bodied people", "non-white people", "not-conventionally-attractive people" are all groups which don't get much representation at all. Someone who is eg non-white is likely to lump together everyone who looks white and say "you get more representation than people like me", without stopping to consider that some of those people fall into groups which are nearly as marginalised, or equally marginalised, or more marginalised, like "rarely seeing someone with your religion" and "rarely seeing someone with your level of attractiveness", whether those problems are larger or smaller than "rarely seeing someone with your skin colour".

3. It's funny what is "like me". In some ways, it's determined by what OTHER people think is important about me as much as what I think is important about me. If I don't care much about characteristic X, I'll be happy to identify with characters who do or don't have characteristic X and not even notice a potential problem. But when I DO notice, I'll suddenly realise that lots of people think people with characteristic X are not normal, and not an obvious choice for being family members, protagonists, managers, etc, and then every time I see a protagonist without characteristic X I'll be reminded of that. And even if I don't care about characteristic X for itself, if lots of other people are anti-X, I want to make the case that X is normal and positive, even if my ideal world, no-one cares about X at all.