White Characters Dominating Fantasy Worlds

The truth is that straight white cismen are not the only people in the world.

Because people are told not to write about anybody else.

Are you saying that because I can feel empathy for non-LGBT characters, therefore I should be all right with only reading stories dominated by non-LGBT characters?

What's with the double standard?

There are extended acronyms that explicitly include more categories like "A" for "Asexual/Aromantic," but I prefer the shorter one where more of the specifics are implied instead.

No: Pi

Pi=3.14159...
Pie = 3.14159... * 2.71828... = 8.53973...

I can.

 

See, that's your strawman. Nobody's arguing that, so you're going to need to find another audience if you want to find someone to defend it.

 

OK, this touches some personal stuff, so bear with me on this.

Whenever someone brings up the colour and orientation of characters in fiction as a bar for how diverse it is, I often think about the film adaptation of Memoirs of a Geisha. When it came out in Japan, there was backlash because a western studio would use a Chinese actress to play a Japanese character, because it gave them the impression that the producers thought that all Asian people are interchangeable.

As someone of Irish descent, this is how I feel when I'm told that because I'm white, I don't understand the feelings of people of other colours in these arguments. I can argue that Irish people are equally under-represented, from anything that people struggle with the accent to the fact that older generations than mine remember when the IRA were blowing up memorials and pubs. Just as someone from Jamaica is different to someone from Sierra Leone, someone from Ireland is very different to someone from America or Eastern Europe.

It bothers me because I don't write my stories like I'm a combined scriptwriter and director. The characters emerge in my head and the skeleton is their doing. The real work for me is adding the meat to the bones, so to speak. As has been pointed out before, the final product is the tip of the iceberg, and it's frustrating to think that because the primary characters, who have not been sculpted painstakingly but just hit me like a rock, are possibly going to be ranted about like two conventions that are more common than most are what they follow when it has barely anything to do with the conflict that brings two opposing people close together.

 

I'm asking for a reason as to why there's predominantly white males as the characters is stories. Not how you know it is the case.

 

Because traditionally, white males have written the checks.

 

It's the only explanation I could manufacture as to why this would be a big deal.

 

Really? That's the only reason?

 

And so? I appreciate the creativity but it doesn't bother me whether they're Foxkin or if they're a guy who likes girls.

 

Because writers are told that if they were capable of feeling empathy for white people, then they would write stories with 100% white casts instead of "forcing" a mixture of white and non-white characters.

 

Well, if you listened, instead of attacking, it's possible that you might hear the other reasons. But I don't see that happening in the very near future.

 

Well, the other reason was self-importance, as per two people now.

 

Please, tell us your reason. Go right ahead.

 

What if the writers just don't care? They think it's irrelevant? Race, sexual orientation, and / or gender play no role in the story?

 

Try another one, because even you aren't able to maintain internal consistency with that one. If wanting characters like oneself were about self-importance and you regarded that self-importance as wrong, then you would surely just step back and agree that there's no need to ever see anyone of your own race/sex/etc in any fictional work, ever again. I don't see you doing that.

Edited to add: also, you conjured up that reason, too, so the listening thing isn't happening.

 

Conjured it up.

Yup, right out of a quote from Bayview on the previous page.

We're not even arguing whether or not it's okay to ***ever*** see anybody of your own race/sex/etc in fictional work. Right now it's just a bunch of arbitrary moaning and groaning about vague "too much whites" or "too little minorities" with no real argument. It's one big virtue signal, sort of like the Bat-symbol- in the night sky.

 

There are times when I stop and am fascinated by the phenomenon of people hearing what they want to hear, rather than what was said. This is one of those times. That is not remotely what Bayview said.

 

So there's actual story reasons for the diversity. Who would've thought?

@ChickenFreak I'm fascinated too!

"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..."

There are plenty of gays, blacks, etc. in media.

 

...everybody but you?

 

Nope. I've been saying that the whole time.

It's becoming clear to me that there isn't a real argument here from the very beginning. Just somebody's opinion that there aren't "enough" (whatever that means) minorities in media and there's too many of the majority.

No real reasoning to back it up. Just an arbitrary "I feel as if" that disregards the fact that, statistically, because of them being a minority, of course there'd be less of them in media. It's a no brainer.

No solid argument presented as to why there needs to be more minorities, or less whites. A character's race doesn't make a story boring, nor does their gender or sexual orientation. And melanin / genitals don't matter unless it actually serves a purpose in the story.

 

How exactly do you get "self importance" out of that? Do nonwhites want to feel as if they are human beings? Yes, I'd bet that, yes, they do. Does that make them self important? No, it really doesn't.

Maybe you're unclear on the meaning of the phrase:

self-im·por·tant
ˈˌself əmˈpôrtnt/
adjective
adjective: self-important
1 having an exaggerated sense of one's own value or importance."a self-important bureaucrat"
2 synonyms:
3 conceited, arrogant, bumptious, full of oneself, puffed up, pompous, overbearing, opinionated, cocky, presumptuous, sententious, vain, overweening, proud, egotistical; More​

 

So, if one group represented 51% of the population, and the other represented 49%, it would be totally cool for the second group to be represented by, say, 2% of fictional characters, because "less" is equal to "less"?

Or are you just running out of strawmen, and digging the soggy ones out of the bottom of the barrel?

 

That would completely depend on why they're only represented by 2% of fictional characters.

No minorities in the United States make up 49% of the population. Not even all of them combined.

 

We're all still waiting, tingling with eagerness, to hear your wisdom on that point.