White Characters Dominating Fantasy Worlds

To say that fantasy doesn't have diversity is very concerning. My story does, it's Fantasy. So does that create a loop in the space time continuum then?

 

Yeah, I'm thinking that when Amy started out as a serial killer (a couple of years before my book starts), she was more of a Rogue than a Fighter: using her "feminine wiles" to get her victims' guard down, then dazing them with something blunt before cutting them open once they're helpless.

After about a year of doing it like this, she hires herself out as muscle for Charlie's up-and-coming cocaine ring, and she loves working with the other enforcers in a more paramilitary fashion that allows her to use firearms and teamwork instead of having to rely on stealth and solo for everything.

My first book is about her and her friends discovering the existence of magic, and after she becomes proficient – over the course of the series – in spells of strength, toughness, and control over metal, I'm thinking that she's going to have a lot of fun beating down gunmen with medieval weaponry

So is one of my other favorite villains from the same series

True, but my understanding is that male Fs don't get as much trouble from the people around them as female Ts tend to.

And that neither one tends to get as much trouble for it as they used to. I wonder if the rise of MyersBriggs popularity has had anything to do with that

I do that all the time! It's really fun

Yes, and also for my female ISTJ main character.

 

This thread has generated several reports already. I don't want to start handing out warnings, because several members would receive them. So, this thread is closed for just a few days, as a cooling-off period. Look for it again on Monday. If it keeps generating warnings after that, expect some warnings to be handed out. If things get really bad, those warnings will take the form of temporary bans.

 

This thread is open again. It is also being carefully watched.

 

So, I wrote a response for this and then the thread went away, so elements of the response ended up in the following two posts. (Recycling!)

https://www.writingforums.org/threads/anyone-else-hate-harry-potter.152823/page-2#post-1583706

https://www.writingforums.org/threads/making-stories-out-of-the-abstract.153457/#post-1583893

The remaining bits are:

I think that you're seeing fantasy as like a Hostess Twinkie--a pretty and simplified and vaguely pleasing trifle.

But fantasy can also be like a dream--a thing that dives into your mind, drags things out, and presents them to you in a theater that allows you to see them in a way that you couldn't see them before. Instead of shoving away what's uncomfortable or hiding complexity, it can pull the thing in, scrape away the surrounding clutter, and shine a light on it, so that you can understand it and sometimes so that you can't escape it.

Maybe fantasy doesn't do that all that often, but it can. Dreams can help you see what's hiding in your head, and so can fantasy. And once you see reality, you're...OK, I didn't mean to take this full circle from the Wrinkle In Time part, but there it went...not trapped in it. I can, for example, point to two dreams that led to me looking at my mother and saying, "Nope. I'm done."

So I guess I'm arguing that fantasy can be Mrs. Who's glasses.

So there.

 

Definitely agree with that.

However, it doesn't happen often, certainly not in the books that generally make it into top fantasy lists.

 

I would, once again, suggest that you stop condemning "fantasy." By not modifying the word, you pretty much guarantee that you'll be misunderstood every single time.

 

@123456789 Would you like to start a new thread about what you consider to be the definition of fantasy?

 

For what it's worth, I'm sorry about my behavior on this thread. I apologize to anyone I may have hurt and ask for, though do not expect, forgiveness. I have better outlets for my anger and stress than hurting others. I'll do better in the future.

 

I'm writing a fantasy novel. Never once is the tone of skin of a character explicitly pointed out. It's not said that those guys are white (yeah, I just realized their all guys). Except for some highland freak that's pale as the moon. But that guy got struck by lightning as an infant and survived, so we'll forgive him that.

Sure, they all live in castles and villages with roofs of thatched straw, in a world that's damp and grey of weather. They go by Germanic and Slavic sounding names and fight with straight swords and drink ale, but I never said they are white.

One could imagine them as having an Indonesian-ish look for all I care.

My point being, of course, that any writer writes the story he/she wants to write, and that I won't put an Indonesian in a setting where that would be totally for the sake of putting in an Indonesian. If the OP only reads those books and is offended by the over-representation of whites, he is either reading the wrong books, or hasn't read enough fantasy. I, for one, have read about quite a few dark-skinned badasses in fantasy. Won't name them though.

 

True to a point for historical fantasy, but that defense doesn't really apply when a writer is inventing their own setting from scratch

Spoiler

Or why so little historical fantasy is based on non-white histories.

If it helps, nobody looks at any one story and says that it needs to be more diverse.

The problem is not that some stories in the mainstream are white-dominated, the problem is that the vast majority of the stories in the mainstream are white-dominated. If even 40% of mainstream fiction was more diverse, nowhere near as many people would be "offended" by the 60% that was white-dominated.

Why not

Most of my favorite non-white fantasy action stars are from The Order of the Stick (if only because there are so many characters )

Roy Greenhilt, Durkon Thundershield, Julio Scoundrel, Bandana, numerous Paladins of the Sapphire Guard (Soon Kim, Hinjo, O-Chul, Lien, even Miko as a character that I love to hate)...

 

There were nonwhites in medieval Europe. I'm just saying. You don't have to include them, but "it's based on Germany" doesn't make it Not An Option.

 

No thanks.
I'm afraid it would be me preaching my ideas and all of you getting angry

 

First thread I ever posted to this site was like that, if that helps

 

Well, you could just start it in the debate room.

I don't know that I'd get annoyed about anything other than the use of the generic, unmodified, term "fantasy" to apply to a subset of fantasy.

 

I get the point I just don't see how anyone could be "offended" by this. Sure, it's something worth mentioning, worth talking about, and there are many chances to diversify the market as a whole in terms of characters. But getting offended about it? Why offended?

I loved Xaro Xhaon Daxos in ASOIAF, to name one.

I know there were non-whites in medieval Europe. Moors, Avars, Cumans, denizens of the Byzantine Empire's many African and Asian provinces, to name but a few. So of course it doesn't make it not an option. But that's part of the point I'm trying to make. A fantasy world doesn't have to be based on medieval Europe as it was, even if it draws most (if not all) of it's influences from medieval Europe. One could zoom in on a village in Scotland in the 8th century and base his world on that, and include dark-skinned people in it even if there weren't any in that particular area. One could also have sub-Saharan Africa in 20,000 B.C and include whites, even if they weren't there. That's the thing with fantasy, it doesn't necessarily have to include things that were as they were in the real world.

In my novel, I have intentionally chosen not to make any references to skin colour, even if it's blatantly obvious how the characters roughly look. I have also chosen to write about a homogenous population on purpose. In my novel, a people have fled "the North that became frozen" 8 centuries before, and they have come to realize that in the lands they fled to, there are no other humans. In the vast stretches of land that surround their land, there are also no humans. They aren't sure that they are the only ones, they just don't know and have not came into contact with any. This obscurity I have chosen on purpose, to see if I could write about a landlocked area and create a fantasy world which isn't mapped out to the slightest detail like so many others, and to leave it up to the reader's imagination to figure out what "the beyond" might include. Thus no mingling of any other peoples with them. To have to include a character trait that doesn't belong in this particular setting would break down the stories credibility in my opinion.

Now I do get the point, and I do get why people would notice the absence of non-whites in a vast amount of fantasy tales. I just don't get how this could offend someone personally. I do not mean to bash the OP with this, but in my opinion, being offended at this is a peculiar reaction.

I think this "issue" blends in perfectly with the question: "Why do so many fantasy tales draw their influence from medieval Europe, when there are so many other interesting places and ages in our history to explore?"

You see, many people just don't know that there were non-whites in Europe in the medieval era. This image is also prevalant among many writers, I assume, as the statistics this thread is based on seem to reflect.

 

All of my characters are anthromorphic animals. So it doesn't matter.

 

Imagine betting with a friend that he will give you a dollar if a coin lands on heads, you will give him a dollar if the coin lands on tails, and you flip the coin 100 times. With an average of 10 expected heads and a standard deviation of 5, you would expect

• a 68.3% chance of the result being between 45 heads / 55 tails (you pay your friend $10) and 55 heads / 45 tails (your friend pays you $10)
• a 95.5% chance of the result being between 40 heads / 60 tails (you pay your friend $20) and 60 heads / 40 tails (your friend pays you $20)
• a 99.7% chance of the result being between 35 heads / 65 tails (you pay your friend $30) and 65 heads / 35 tails (your friend pays you $30)

The problem is, this math assumes a fair coin. If the coin lands on 25 heads and 75 tails – meaning that you give your friend $50 – does that give you a lot of hope that the coin was fair, or would you think that your "friend" had cheated you?

If you were offended that your friend had cheated, would it makes sense for him to be counter-offended at you for being offended for being cheated (by him)? "You got heads 25 different times! How many more times did you want? Was I just supposed to give you $100 outright because you were so offended at the coin flipping tails once in a while and you wished that it had flipped heads all 100 times?"

It's not the numbers themselves that are the problem, it's what the numbers say about how hard the industry has to work to keep the numbers so. How hard the industry has to work to stop writers from writing stories in which straight white males (a 25% minority in America) do not dominate.

If the industry were not working to stop writers from telling stories about other people, then the numbers would not look the way they do in the first place.

Yes. Yes, it does blend perfectly.

People only ever see one thing – a 25% minority (straight white men) dominating over everybody else – so they don't write anything else, either because 1) it doesn't occur to them that there are other people to tell stories about outside of this pandered-to minority, or because 2) they know that they're not generally allowed to write outside of the pandered-to minority (no matter how much they might want to).

 

Just what percentage of the German population in ~1,200 A.D. do you think were non-white?

The answer is < 1%.

There were lots of non-white people on the peripheries of Europe, but places like England or Germany had almost no racial diversity. There were no more Africans in Germany in 1,200 A.D. than there were Europeans in Rwanda.

So it makes sense for a character travelling to a place like Spain or southern Italy to encounter other racial groups, but seeing a black person in northern Germany was very unlikely, especially for commoners.

There was no usual immigration in medieval societies. Most people were born, lived their whole lives, and died without travelling more than 20 miles from their birthplace. The only times when we really see mass immigration during that time period is when an entire ethnic group are driven from their homes by invaders... Such as the Khwarezmians or Cumans fleeing from the Mongols. Mass immigration like this almost always took the form of a war, and the migrants either won the war and forced out the previous inhabitants, or were destroyed, dispersed, and assimilated with other populations. They did not really coexist peacefully.

Non-white people did not begin to appear in large quantities in central and northern Europe until the 16th century, when Portuguese ships began purchasing slaves in bulk from African slavers in sub-Saharan Africa. I am currently out of town, but when I get back, I might bring up some quotes from a history book I have which describes the surprised Portuguese reaction towards the first black Africans and Indians brought to Europe by Portuguese ships.

The book series I am writing is set in a fictional fantasy world, but it includes every race we have on our Earth... But the reason each race is represented is because the story follows about two dozen point of view characters, living in several different empires thousands of miles apart. Each empire has very little racial diversity- there are almost no non-whites in Marvend (northwest Europe), and almost no whites in Jahil (Middle-East + Asia). The less-traveled characters are very intrigued when meeting characters of other races, while the more-traveled ones are less-so.

Anyways, most fantasy is set in a medieval northwestern Europe-based setting, which had no diversity historically, and this carries over into fiction. Westeros from A Song of Ice and Fire is based on England during The War of the Roses. Middle-Earth from The Lord of the Rings is based on northwestern Europe during the Dark Ages.

Most English-speaking writers are familiar with the European middle ages and are familiar with the works of authors like Tolkien, which is why they write stories in a medieval northwestern Europe setting, and why thus most characters in fantasy are white by default. How many English-speaking fantasy authors are in the slightest familiar with medieval East Asia, Africa, or America? Probably not many, which is why they write what they know.

I really doubt most authors are sitting above their keyboard, laughing diabolically and rubbing their hands together treacherously as they scheme to exclude minorities from their works.

Last but not least, don't get offended by the lack of your racial or ethnic group in a medieval setting- those authors are not trying to insult you. I've explained above why these cases happen, but letting a political agenda rule your life won't make you happier, and expressing frustration at the works of others online won't change anything.

If you want to see a fantasy story set in a setting where the majority or even all of the characters are black, then write it. If a publisher refuses to publish your book based solely on it having black characters, then write a scathing letter about it, and send it out to news publishers and blogs, and self-publish your book. I will help fight that publisher alongside you.

But don't expect other authors to conform to your political agenda when writing their books.

 

The opinions of consumers seem to be relevant in a lot of other areas; why should we assume that they would be totally ignored in the area of fiction?

I don't think that any "insult" or "offense" is about authors. It's more about industries.

 

In this thread, has anyone linked to this blog yet? Probably, but just in case.

http://medievalpoc.tumblr.com

And one post from the blog on the "why does it matter?" issue:

medievalpoc.tumblr.com/post/161857019253/in-the-books-i-read-it-never-was-me-i-was-never

 

I have never heard of this blog before, but now I must read it

 

The speech in the video linked to by the second link is worth listening to. The quote is a tiny subset.

 

Another link:

uncannymagazine.com/article/learned-stop-worrying-eat-damn-eyeball/

 

I'm modeling my fantasy world, Triskele, on the Medieval world around 1000 AD through 1500 AD. From Spain to North Africa and all along the Mediterranean, the Medieval world is a diverse and fascinating place. By embracing the whole world I didn't have to force diversity into my story because the world is a naturally diverse place. My MC, Asylyn, is a woman of color who we would consider Moorish. My cast is a mix of people ranging from northern Urn (Europe) to eastern Unina(Africa). I have wizards from my version of Egypt and spies from my version of Byzantium. Asylyn's home, the Tumulus Citadel, is on the coast of France and is modeled after Vatican City.
I really love history and people. By embracing the world, and not just a part of it, I see myself painting from a larger palette of colors.
Godspeed!