Yup, to the point of losing their shit in front of the victim because they weren't happy with the way the victim expressed his/her feelings regarding his/her trauma.
No, that's not what I said at all. I'm not interested in spreading racism. Not interested in going down the rabbit hole of subjectivity, and trying to generalize anecdotes as if they're objective fact. I don't care about the amount of racial representation in media, and I don't keep a tally when I watch TV. Unless you point out a specific case of racism, you have legitimate evidence for it, and you bring it to the courts, I really don't care. What I do care about, are all these new poorly written shows and movies preaching to me.
Because as we all know it's totally impossible to write a book with black characters that isn't about race in our society. Oh no wait, that's totally wrong. And again, it's offensive to suggest that "learning about race in our society" is a requirement for writing a black character. Oh and, it's your society thanks. America isn't the whole world, and over here we've managed to not have any race riots in recent times. Perhaps all the discussions of the reality of race in your society aren't working out the way you hoped. No, I've never heard that. I know that lots of men write romance for women under female pen names though. Do you think that's because men are exposed to female characters and romance stories?
When I'm reading, I imagine the main character looks like me unless otherwise described, because that's just an easy default. Not because I've been programmed. When I play Skyrim, I play as a Khajiit, not a Nord. Just saying. I choose to be a minority that is actually discriminated against in the context of the game. Where's my medal?
You know what was the best instance of prejudice I've ever seen in a video game? In Deus Ex: Mankind Divided. No, not the ghetto for augmented people. That was a bit heavy handed. The bit that absolutely blew my mind was just getting on the subway. I was just playing the game, exploring stuff. And I got back on the subway just the same way as I got there, or I thought I had. And I get out and there's two cops there telling me to stop, so I'm instantly on edge, ready to just start shooting if this gets ugly. And they tell me I'm not allowed to ride in the carriage for normal people. I have to ride in the back carriage. I didn't even think I did anything wrong. I just got on a subway and it just... Yeah that's pitch perfect. Just going about my business and walk into a gun in my face.
I know what scene you're talking about. That really seems to be a major factor: whether or not it's ham-fisted, or if it's *well-written*. Often times if the writer has a political agenda, it's the former. Often times if the writer simply wants to genuinely write about an aspect of the human condition because he or she has something of value to say, it's the latter. The fact that Deus Ex is a sci-fi universe allows the writers to explore race with that specific scene in a new way that any player can empathize with. That's the epitome of good writing. Boiling down an issue to the condition of being a living, human being. Admittedly, in Skyrim race didn't have any effect besides people just saying "mean" things to you. In Oblivion however, it could effect your disposition with certain people, and that might determine if you can get the necessary information out of somebody for a quest, or get a better reward. And of course each race was better at certain things than others, but talking about genetics and causal relationships can get pretty offensive.
This. Like a million times. No one gets to judge a victim's feelings, because then you're making them MORE of a victim. And the way the word 'victim' is thrown around, just fucking endlessly, pertaining to everything from abuse to the barista fucking up your order makes me want to punch people.
Yeah, that's very true. That one little scene was way more powerful than showing the other augmented people living in squalor because it's something that challenges your sense of who you are in that world, makes you very aware that you're just different, that you have to read the signs and make sure you're in your place. And it's just two seconds in the whole game but it really worked. Because it's just letting you feel what it's like for you, even as an awesome badass cyborg ninja. Seeing other people being discriminated against isn't a big deal, I mean it's a grimey nasty world in Deus Ex, you go to lots of horrible places. But when you are just going form your apartment to work, not doing anything wrong, and you get guns pointed at you that's... That's something special. But the hamfisted attempts to make you pity all the augmented folks because of where they have to live now comes off really flat to me. It's all just about pathos. Look at these poor people! Are you not moved? But then you kill lots of them anyway. So it's a bit out of place. A quiet little moment on a train was so much more effective in showing how something like that really feels. In the ghetto you are all cyborg ninja dude. But on the train you are suddenly just powerless. You don't want to kill these guys but you are instantly on edge and feeling like you might have to but then... Jesus am I going to kill every cop in town because I rode in the wrong carriage and they were just doing their jobs and... Yeah. It's probably still PC to say the cat people are better at jumping to be honest
My concern was mainly victim blaming. My character is the victim of teenage phyical and emotional abuse. The parent flew into a rage and threw a pot of boiling potatoes at her, leaving her permanently scarred. (That sounds over the top, but in my research I learned thrown pots of boiling liquids are a common form of teenage child abuse.) The parent is obviously a monster. But, the character is a typical teenager who lies to her parents, sneaks out of the house, and she's even hiding the fact that she's dating an older guy from her parents. So, I'm mindful about not accidentally implying that the abuse was the victim's fault, especially because a prosecutor won't take the case. But, I will think about your point that (paraphrasing here) if I'm writing it well, the sensitivity to the victim is in there.
Couldn't agree more. It's one of the reasons why I think it's more important to worry about whether you wrote it well and truthfully than to start making assumptions about who might be hurt by what. Treating people like invalids who you have to tiptoe around isn't better than being hurtful.
Agreed. A friend of mine experienced this sort of thing, with a lawyer who wanted him to press charges because he wanted to make some cash off of him being a victim. It always confuses me when people claim to speak for a group, as if that group needs their protection or representation. Unless you're their elected official, you can't speak for a whole group of people. You can speak *to* a demographic, but not for them.
Yes, exactly. You are just writing the truth of what happened, and it certainly wasn't her fault. It may also be the truth of what happened that some people blame her, she might even blame herself. And that's ok. Because it's not the book who's saying it's her fault. It's all these assholes who are telling her that, and god she even thinks that herself and that's really awful and sad. That's just what's there to be written. And I do understand your desire to not accidentally say the wrong thing, but it's hard to imagine how you could write that sequence of events and have that happen. No-one is going to read her being a kid and sometimes pissing her parents off as being okay for them to wound her.
Does she feel like it's her fault? Because if she does, then you're not implying it, and by leaving it out you're making a kind of judgement call on how she's allowed to feel. By writing something from the perspective of 'it's not okay to feel like it's your fault' you're making her fake. She's going to (likely) feel like, at the very least, there was some way she could have avoided it and acting like that is a thing that doesn't happen, is, in my humble opinion, a disservice to the people who have experienced such things. You don't avoid it. You let her feel the way she feels and you trust the reader to have a brain and recognize that this is the reality of what it feels like for someone who has lived it.
Just to be clear again, my comment about victims sometimes being at fault was not in any way directed at your story. It's pretty clear that your character is not at fault for their abuse. But as mentioned above, many victims do *wrongly* feel like they are at fault.
Why tip-toe round an invalid when you can dance across the wheelchair? Can we put that quote of mine on a mug or something shiny?
Give that woman a coconut. Exactly that. Just the truth of the scene, the truth of the character. Lots of victims do blame themselves. Maybe your character does, maybe she doesn't, but to say that you can't show her blaming herself in case it's hurtful to other people is almost missing the point. Some things are hard and ugly and difficult and that's ok as long as you write it as truthfully as you can.
Right, and again that's important. There's a difference between a character who is prejudiced or offensive and a book that is. A character can be a bigoted, violent, asshole and that's not offensive. What's offensive is when the book is telling you that all the cool kids beat their partners. To be honest I join you in hating that kind of writing, no matter the context. It's facile and cheap and it's not even a good fantasy. And I don't even think you need to talk about offence to say why. Because it's bad writing. Because these aren't like real people and I'm wishing for the characters to get thrown into a threshing machine.
Thank you for clarifying that. Because although, yeah, it should be obvious, but there are people who believe that child abuse is always somehow the child's fault, particularly when the victim is a teen. There are also others who believe that thing about children being born bad, with the devil's influence inside them, and that it has to be beaten out of them. Those were common justifications where I grew up, and are the justifications of the abusive parents in my WIP.
There are people like that out there, but there's not a lot you can do for them. Neo-Nazis love watching American History X even though the whole point of that movie is that they are wrong and awful. I'm sure that some people might say that your character clearly deserved it but they'll do that no matter what you do. And, notably, they aren't abuse victims either. For those who are determined to see whatever interpretation they want then just forget them because they'll see what they want to anyway (see the people who think Harry was supposed to end up with Hermione). For those who have suffered similar things I think that the best thing you can do is just tell the story honestly. Lord knows that people who were abused by their parents know that it's just fucking awful and the best thing you can do is just show that's true. The one thing you definitely can't do is end up giving the impression that it's not that big a deal. If you make it too harrowing, at least it's still harrowing. But if it's not enough, even if that'd make it less upsetting to read, then you end up saying exactly the wrong thing.
Actually, that's most likely not true at all. The people who believe those things and prescribe to "Spare the rod, spoil the child" were likely raised exactly the same way. That's why it's acceptable to them. They survived it, and this is just how you raise children to them. It's as normal as making coffee when you get up in the morning to them.
You're right on that. I suppose I more meant to say "The people who will think it's her fault probably aren't the ones who'll be upset at seeing her blaming herself".
So you don't believe in advocacy then? What if that person is one of the group they're representing and happens to have resources that can help get a message across? Of course a group has varying opinions, but that doesn't mean there aren't common ideas. What you just said can read dangerously like sit down and shut up, which is yet another form of censorship. Just trying to understand what you're saying here.
I guess that depends on who's reading it, and how dedicated they are to being offended, because I didn't read that at all.
Honestly? No, not really, or at least not on the kind of scale that we see it happening in these days. No-one gets to just stand up and say "I am X and X people all think..." and it's even worse if they say "I'm not X but X people need me to speak for them!". If people want to say what they think, then by all means. If they want to say that their family or their local community would be helped by something, that's fine. But not to just appoint themselves spokesperson for an extremely large and extremely diverse population. We now live in an era when people clamour that their local representative "doesn't speak for me!" but then immediately stand up and claim to speak for millions of people who didn't ask or want them to do so. Just proclaiming that you are speaking for people, even if you are one of those people, isn't enough.
I don't pay much mind to what things I write that could be taken as offensive. I'm not committing gratuitous offenses like writing about characters with PTSD without researching the condition first, but I'm also not researching what it's like to be a poor, black, crippled girl before I write a poor, black, crippled girl. Or is she an "economically deficient differently-abled womyn of color?" I write characters -- not poster children for "diversity." If I put a poor black crippled girl in my story, it's because she has a point beyond being a purse puppy. That said, I've never even mentioned race in all my writing. It's not important. I write the stories I want to write, and I couldn't give two shits what offense people take. They can sack up or move on. That's the glory of freedom. I'm free to say offensive shit, and other people are free to react to that with laughter, disgust, or any emotion they want.
