White Characters Dominating Fantasy Worlds

So, to be honest, before the thread veers slightly. I think you're (everyone in general) mostly pretty much fine writing about anything. I mean of course research things and such if the characters or plot demands, but writing outside your race isn't some great achievement and it isn't something to be sad about if you don't.

Is it good to take risks? Sure!

Is diversity good? Sure!

I encourage everyone to always try and explore new things. It makes for a great challenge!

But there is A LOT more to people than just race. If you write someone who is a different skin color than you that doesn't mean that you should write them any differently than any other character or they bleed a different color and feel different feelings. I'm not saying race doesn't play a large role in society or the lives of people. It does, but it isn't everything. One person who is a minority might have some heavy issues about how they fit into the world where as another person in the minority category might just be trying to get home in time for Christmas or trying to save someone from an evil king or struggling with a loss or something.

These things all fall under the individual person...the character.

You shouldn't feel bad or like a failure, if you're not writing the most diverse characters or you don't get into character description. You'll be fine. The sky will not split open, people won't be in tears, and the world will not implode. Things are getting more diverse everyday. It is happening. Your calling in writing might be to be innovative in a different way. So, don't go feeling bad or worried about not being diverse enough.

 

Ok, here is what happen to me: I'm drafting a new short story. The premise, during the Mongolian invasion of Europe, aliens attack and a group of Europeans and Mongols are force to team up. Automatically, my MC is a white European knight. I step back, shake my head, and change the MC to the Mongol commander. Suddenly, there is an energy there because my MC is someone new and interesting and not another retread.
Godspeed!

 

I hope this doesn't sound bad so I do apologize. Often times when we write about another race or gender/sex differences in books we are torn apart in the media for not understanding the people or the culture correctly. "The we just don't get it" comes to mind or we are told we are racist or pandering. From my personal experience I love diversity in my reading. I as a traditional artist, (I draw a lot) I love diversity because the familiar can become boring. (Familiarity breeds contempt and stagnation) To be a true artist I believe one must be open to all possibilities and racism has no place in true artistic expression unless of coarse, in some circumstances, that it is part of your story. A plot device to tell a moral or a political view point. Then its necessary to have evil in the world for opposition in story telling. But when it comes to the core of world building itself or drawing I think one stunts themselves not being open to differences. I hope I made sense.

Like what would you do if in a fantasy world racism was directed towards dragons. That would be an interesting plot premise. It could cause a war and destabilize a world.

 

I agree on the first two points.

It's extremely frustrating that all manner of artists get attacked when they create characters from outside their race/culture. Things like that are why people shy away from doing so, even when they want to and that's why we end up with so few other characters being created. I think most authors would rather be accused of a lack of inclusivity than accused of having a racist depiction of another race. All works will always be insufficiently inclusive for someone but if someone says your portrayal is actively racist then that's the sort of thing that can tar your career forever. I don't blame anyone for preferring to be damned if they don't and writing characters who they share a background with.

Equally, I totally agree that artists of all kinds should be open to creating whoever they feel like creating. But I don't think there's a direct analogy between writing and drawing. As a writer when you properly develop characters even very similar ones will be very different. It's in the nature of good writing to focus on the interesting or unique parts of a character and not on their similarities. When we're talking about something that doesn't especially determine character like race then it doesn't make much sense to say that a writer who only writes white characters isn't open to possibilities. What matters in character development is the overall picture of the character. A white detective and a black detective have more in common than a white serial killer and a black detective.

In fact most fantasy worlds with dragons already are really bigoted against dragons because dragons are really fucking dangerous and will indiscriminately kill all human beings that come close to them. It's like saying that humans are racist against sharks. They are dangerous creatures that can't be reasoned with and there's a good reason why people hunt and kill dragons when they can because they present a genuine danger to anyone around them.

Also, the problem with all forms of fantasy racism is that you're about 30 years behind the times; it's already been done somewhere. Elf-racism, orc-racism, gnome-racism, troll-racism and demon-born racism and even more than you can imagine. There's been a lot of fantasy written and while I won't say that this disqualifies you from writing these features into a world one does need to be aware of what's come before and what the genre conventions are. Especially now that the trend is towards 'nasty, brutish and short' in fantasy where everyone is horrible to everyone all the time it makes it somewhat challenging to show anything specific as being uniquely bad. When the non-oppressed characters are having their testicles dipped in boiling oil it's somewhat challenging to show racism as being something that's worth the book mentioning. The reader can probably presume that people in this world, all being jerks, are probably bigoted too but that lacks narrative impact when they've had someone lovingly craft them a little ballsack sized deep fat fryer encrusted with jewels. Maybe if they are enacting a literal genocide then that'd probably be bad enough but throwing in a few fictitious ethnic slurs just for good measure won't achieve anything.

 

That's why I devour as much research as possible

In my world, racism is a uniquely human instinct that makes no sense at all to anybody else, and dragons are not only people (instead of just wild beasts) but also far more likely to be the heroes than the villains

That different enough yet

Also, fun fact: sharks are not the marauding monsters that people think they are.

 

I've seen artists and authors accused of being a racist because they tried to be inclusive but didn't "get it right". I've seen seen artists and authors accused of being racist because they weren't inclusive. You're damned if you do or don't, and nobody seems to take into consideration that maybe there's another reason for the author's decision besides whether or not they're a bigot. So just write what you want to write and forget about that double-bind.

God forbid you don't put blacks or women into a movie about the battle of Dunkirk.

But, I digress; that's a matter of historical accuracy, not about fantasy. The bigger elephant wandering these haunted halls is the fact that by worrying so much about melanin and genitalia, you miss the important parts of what makes for a good character. And it says something more about yourself than the author if you find a story boring because you can't get past drowning in shallow-water.

 

I don't know, "write something badly" and "don't write something" don't seem like the only options to me

The problem isn't that some stories are white male dominated, the problem is that most stories are white male dominated.

The problem with this train of thought is that the real-life readers of a story are at least as important as the fictional characters.

Again, the problem isn't that some stories are white male dominated, the problem is that most stories are white male dominated.

 

That's a fair point, but we tend to look askance at people who would march to stamp out anti-shark bias in society. My point is that sharks are just big carnivores doing big carnivore stuff and as small, weedy creatures that sometimes means eating us. It's not bigotry for people to be afraid of sharks. It might be illogical for land dwelling creatures to fear aquatic predators but since they can just tear your limbs off and not give a fuck it's at least a fear with some merit.

 

You have clearly never taught English to teenagers.

 

What do you mean by write something badly?

Why do you think that is?

The problem with the thought of appreciating something with more depth than appearance? Sorry, I don't think it's the author's job to appease superficial readers. If certain readers can't get into a character or a story because their personal gender or skin-color isn't represented, that's entirely their problem.

Why do you think that is?

 

I absolutely agree that it's not the authors job to pander to a certain type of reader who refuses to get swept up in a story because the character isn't just like them. We have a word for such people; children. Children need the prince in their bedtime story to be exactly like them so they can project themselves into it. But adults don't need that. Adults should be able to connect with characters as human beings; as people that share common traits of the human condition like love and loss and grief and joy.

I occasionally am unfortunate enough to read pieces in the media on similar subjects; pieces that make me slowly remove my glasses and rub the bridge of my nose. When someone poses a question like "Do you know what it does to grow up not seeing someone like you on TV?" then all I can do is wonder why they think that everyone on TV looks like me because I'm white.

I hate to speak in such terms of people that I don't know; but it seems very fitting that people who are unable to empathize with characters outside their ethnic group are the ones relish the opportunity to call everyone else racist.

I have heard (although not checked) that all English speakers of all races tend to write white characters as the default. At the very least I extremely doubt that those writing in Urdu or Mandarin have a problem with writing too many white characters. When native English speakers write they want to reflect the world they see around themselves and while for some people that is a world where most people are dark skinned for many that is simply not the case. But this is art imitating life stuff.

There can be literary value of challenging that this (ie the default English speaker being white) is the way that things have to be, but merely challenging it by itself does not constitute literary value.

 

You know why I'm going to put you on "Ignore" now? It's not your argument - I don't agree with you, but that's fine.

What's not fine, for me, is your arrogance and your rudeness. If you're reading a thread in a which a person has said several times that it was important to see people looking like him/her on the screen or in books, and you then say that people who can only identify with people who look like them are children, then you're being rude. And thinking you have the right to make broad declarations like that? You're being arrogant.

I'm not interested in reading more of that. See ya.

 

That's all I was trying to say, thank-you. Excellently put.

I have no problem with writers making a personal decision to challenge themselves and write outside their cultural or ethnic group. But that's far from the only challenge a writer can tackle.

I think it's great to make race or gender important if it actually serves the story.

Likewise, I was wondering if authors of other races tend to write their characters in their own image, or if they also write white characters. This is something I haven't researched either but would be interesting information.

P.S. Having done some quick Googling, it would appear most Japanese literature, written by Japanese individuals, has mostly Japanese characters. Shocking.

 

Pretty sure the most arrogant people here are the ones claiming that a story is boring, or there's some other "problem" because the characters are not just like themselves. If that's not self-important, I don't know what is.

It's pretty clear to me that it's easier for a child who is learning how to empathize, to identify with somebody who either looks like them, or is described in a way that still allows them to project themselves into the character. This is just the most basic form of creating connections and learning how to relate to another.

When one's more mature and has more experience, they can relate on a much deeper level in a way that makes skin color and gender less relevant, if not completely irrelevant. If one can't, they've got a problem.

There's more to a good character and story than what kind of genitals you have or what you look like. You're an asshole if you can't appreciate what Anne Frank went through because she's white and female.

I'd wager that ignore list is as long as a fresh roll of toilet paper, and probably just as useful.

 

Elsethread, I noted recently that the thing I'm writing keeps trying to pull itself into a specific direction: It keeps wanting Male to rescue Female. And that's frankly strengthening my view that it's valuable, rather than damaging, to try to break the usual patterns in fiction--including the usual pattern that most of the people who are interesting and do interesting things in the world are able-bodied Protestant straight white males between age 16 and 45.

That rescue push isn't the natural thing for the story. It isn't the thing that will make the story stronger or more interesting. It's the thing that I'm used to in fiction. It's cliched. It's the easy thing.

Breaking out of the cliched easy-thing pattern is, IMO, good. And my internal plotter's resistance to my saying, "No. My female character is not going to be steered through the plot by the male characters," and then finding other plot paths is highlighting, to me, just how much I've internalized certain cliches.

I'm now feeling that, yeah, choosing to have characters that don't fit the cliche, doing things that don't fit the cliche, for the purpose of challenging the cliche... is looking to me like a good thing for the writing, in addition to being a good thing for the people reading the writing. It's challenging those easy easy paths.

Nobody argues in favor of other cliches--in most areas of fiction, the goal is to find something new, a new path, a new idea. It mainly seems to be in areas of gender and sexual orientation and race that we're instead cautioned to be ever ever so careful about tokenism, cautioned to have a darn good excuse before we step off the cliched path, to fear that by not following the cliche, we might be letting our own creative souls down.

Nope.

 

Just because those are the only choices for many teenagers doesn't mean that those are also the only options for all adults.

I mean using lies that are easier and more popular rather than trying to dig deeper to find the truth.

Do you mean "Where do you think this pattern comes from" or do you mean "What makes you think that this is a pattern"?

Actually, as an LGBT reader, I'm extremely capable of getting into a story of only cis-straight characters and no LGBT characters.

I have to be.

Then why are you so afraid of stories being told that include characters different from yourself?

So when somebody says "I would like to see a mixture of white and non-white characters instead of only white characters," you think they're saying "I would like to see only non-white characters"

That sounds like an extremely natural consequence of people being told not to write non-white characters because "it's racist against white people to want a mixture of white and non-white characters in a story instead of only white characters."

If there were an Urdu-speaking country where 25% of the population was white, but only 5% of fictional main characters were, then would you be comfortable telling a white person in that country "you're racist against non-whites if you want a story with 10% white cast instead of a 5% white cast"?

How does a cast that erases the existence of non-white people "reflect the world" and "imitate life" better than a cast that acknowledges the existence of non-white people?

Is anybody saying that it does

Even if all of the stories that the person sees in their life are about everybody being of their own group, rather than a mixture of different people relating to each other?

Then why do you have a problem with non-white characters?

 

That's an impressively ambiguous response.

I mean, "Why do you think stories predominantly feature white males?"

Besides the fact that there are more of them, why are you so capable of getting into a story with no LGBT characters?

That isn't even based on reality.

 

That's only the first four letters in an acronym that is ever expanding. In the same way it's a lot more convenient to list the first few numbers of Pie.

 

I can't help pointing out that Anne Frank was

• Female
• A minority (minority status is not all about skin color)
• Not a fictional character!!

So I'm not seeing how she bolsters the arguments of the post she was mentioned in.

 

Hmm... I can see this thread is getting a little heated, so let's try to keep things civil and preferably friendly, yeah?

 

Because the reader might not be Jewish, female, or white, and so the reader won't be able to appreciate what she says in the diaries. The reader can't relate or empathize with her.

 

Bingo!

What if it was a fantasy novel? It still wouldn't matter, or be boring, even though you're not a white, Jewish girl?

If the race, sexual orientation, gender- if that doesn't matter, then this thread is a waste of time.

 

To quote Willow, when asked how she could tell that Xander's ID was a fake: "Lookin' at it."