Complexity, stereotypes, and variation (spun off from "relationship dynamics" thread)

@Link the Writer The correct phrasing for the Gimli quote is certainty of death btw. thought you might want to know. Or did you paraphrase it intentionally?

 

It was intentional. 'Cause, y'know, it's more about the writing process and less about marching to Mordor on a suicide mission.

 

@LinkTheWriter: For a literature class, I had to read some writer who was very, very into "real" responses to suffering. His big point was that "real" people respond to suffering by becoming angry and bitter, and people who think other people can respond to suffering with sorrow or faith don't really understand suffering.

I put up with most of his stories, but the one that made me lose all patience with him involved a kindly old lady who claimed to be a genocide survivor. In the end, she turned out to be making it all up, and a bitter and hateful old lady turned out to be a real genocide survivor. The narrator implied that he should have realized sooner that someone who claimed to be a genocide survivor but wasn't bitter and angry was obviously lying.

The ironic part of it all was that he probably thought he was being tolerant. "Be nice to people who've gone through horrible stuff--they can't help being jerks!" In the end, all he was doing was making a little box and forcing people into it. There was no room in his stories for people to have varied responses, to be human beings rather than input-output machines in the service of his tidy little moral. (This was also spectacularly ignorant of authors like Primo Levi and Imre Kertesz who reacted to genocide in ways he thought were "fake," but that's another rant.)

 

Here's one more thing I gotta add, and it's a bit of a story. It has to do with shoehorning in a minority character for the sake of having one in the story.

See, two years ago I had this idea that I thought would be really cool for my sci-fi: one of the cadets that worked onboard my MC's starship would have albinism. Pretty awesome stuff, right? Helen Chert on the field while this character stayed on the ship and with other operators, kept tabs on what was going on out there. Well, yours disabled truly managed to cock that one up quite thoroughly. Instead of a competent character who just happened to be different from the rest of the group, she was this whiny girl whose entire character was: "Look at me! Look at me! I have albinism! Look at me! I have albinism!!" Please note that this was the same setting that had a black lady as a badass captain of a starship, so you'd think I'd know how to do it! I suppose I just assumed the rules changed because one character had a condition and the other just had dark skin.

Regardless, she pretty much killed the story. The same thing happened with my fantasy when I decided that my blind MC would not be a secret assassin of an assassin order leaping off tall buildings shanking fools.

In short, I looked at them as their disability, not them as characters. Perhaps by attempting to sound diverse and encompassing, I grabbed the camera and focused on merely one aspect of their character.

The same could be said of characters from any groups. In one of my mysteries, one of my main characters is black. We see his life, we see his family, we come to know him as a person. Now I could've bonked this up just as easily: focusing too much on the fact that he was black, that I had a black family in my story and they were just as important to the main plot as anyone else. They were black, and that's all they ever were. They weren't a family who just happened to be black, they were black. Same with my cadet from my sci-fi: she wasn't a crewmember who just happened to have albinism, she was albinism. She was the epitome of albinism itself. It had gotten so bad that I had to scrap her out of the story entirely. Fortunately, I seemed to have saved my fantasy MC from that sticky fate.

I think that in our quest to be diverse, we must take heed of why we're making our characters a certain way. Are we doing it for the right reasons? I would rather you not write a character who was half-blind and hearing-impaired, if that's all he/she is going to be, and the whole story revolves around that. If all he/she does is remind everyone of how he/she is different, not like the others, why do it? In our quest to say, "Hey, people from Group XYZ are just like anyone else!" shouldn't the last thing we do is prop up a character from Group XYZ and say, "Look how different this character is. Look how not-like-the-others my character is! Look how diverse I am because I have a different-looking character!!"

 

Yeah, I believe in celebrating diversity, but you have to make sure there's more to a character than what makes them different.

 

To me it seems stereotypes are born from ignorance (among other things, I'm sure) and -- like @BayView suggested earlier in the thread -- from our subconscious mind that has a "feeling" of what a character is like. These "feelings" can be tied to stereotypes, which certainly can hide a grain (or lump) of truth in them, as @Hubardo's example illustrated with the stereotypical behavior of black transgendered Americans. They aren't necessarily harmful either, like the OP's example of a bi pagan girl, but still, I think it's a good idea to examine these "feelings" when get them.

We're probably all aware that stereotypes can be quite dangerous (granted, I don't mean life-treateningly dangerous, not usually anyway) especially when negative as they can reinforce negative assumptions we have of other people, such as black men are violent and immigrants are rapists or that a white man can't accurately tell a story of someone non-white American because they don't know what oppression is because they're white (but then turns out they did their research).

This is not to say writers couldn't write a black man with a temper, an Iraqi immigrant who's been indoctrinated to view women as trash etc. but it is a good idea to be aware of possible "feelings" we hold and whether or not they're evidence of stereotypical thinking and ignorance (accidental or intentional). I don't consider this kind of awareness anti-liberal, by the way, or even self-censorship. I've scrapped several characters because my own "feeling" has been so rooted in ignorance the end result has been boring, trite or offensive, or felt like I'm not being respectful, say, towards the armed forces with some stereotypical sergeant character.

Do stereotypes have a place in fiction? Sure, but again, it's the way we utilize them that determines whether or not the end result is great or at the very least serviceable. If your beta readers complain your characters are stereotypical even if you see them as the very opposite, maybe it's time to think about it more deeply and see if you're hung up on that subconscious feeling after all (and, OP, I mean the passive "you", not you-you).

I think it's quite easy to "make" stereotypes with these kind summaries: "a young bisexual eclectic pagan girl who's shy and loves nature." I can do the same with most of my characters. A gruff soldier who has a hard outer shell and a soft core. A promiscuous hippie girl who plays with boys' hearts. A young woman with daddy issues. A young woman with daddy issues. A young woman with daddy issues. An impressionable, doofus-like woobie boy.

Based on what I've read, your character sounds fine. Also, some traits are more common in some sub-cultures than in others. E.g. pagans can often be sexually liberated or adventurous as they don't have to worry about sinning (but not all pagans). Perhaps in this sense there can be "truth" in stereotypes, or certain stereotypes "make sense."