White Characters Dominating Fantasy Worlds

So why are you apparently vehemently opposed to anyone else doing that?

 

Because I was drinking and misunderstood everything. That's why.

This is why you don't drink, kids.

 

Nope, I haven't switched positions. I still operate under the notion that people shouldn't tell individual writers what to write. However, Bayview has cleared it up in his previous post that "None of this is about individual writers."
In that case, we have reached the end of our disagreements because we're arguing about different things.

 

Okay, so.. your plots don't demand everyone is a white, Christian (?) male, do they? Problem solved.

 

Oh no.

Helen Chert is a black Scottish, Jewish woman and she is a captain of a starship.

Kevin McKinley is a Canadian-American who is hearing impaired like me.

Amos Garnier is a French orphan who is blind.

Mishu Jerni is a Rejormi (basically, she has dark skin) girl who is blind.

Really, I've got a shitload of blind characters.

 

How..

The...

How could you not have understood that from the beginning? Really? How?

 

In my defense, I was drinking.

Aaand no one really made that clear to me before until BayView did.

 

@BayView Chickens are dinosaurs

... Not even the gay couple and their kids

 

They had a gay couple? Huh. I never watched the movie itself.

 

When I was a 20-year-old man, I assumed that I wouldn't want to watch a Disney princess movie.

Then my family had it playing when I finished in the shower. My laptop was already in the room and I figured it would be rude to make a scene about taking my laptop somewhere else, so I told myself that it would only take me about five minutes to completely zone out the TV and focus on my computer. There's a pretty wide age gap between me and my youngest sibling, so I'd gotten pretty good at zoning out kids' shows.

I was hooked before the five minutes were up. Every single thing I thought I wouldn't like, the movie explicitly did something else, and believe me when I say that the two twists at the end have become my favorite spoilers of all time

You should watch it, and you should not read anything about it before you do.

Except for Stephen King's Firestarter. That book's a pretty good entry into the tone of the movie (except for going in the opposite direction).

 

In the fantasy world I created for my story, I have African inspired civilizations of humans in the center of the main continent. From there, humans spread east and west. So, you have your European inspired people in the far west and your Asian in the far east. Now, these groups are mixed in with an assortment of other races, so, this isn't a human dominated world. In fact, words like human, humanoid, man and woman are not used outside of a human a community. Being is used for what we would call a humanoid. Nissi is the elven world for female, while svane and vane are the dwarven words for male and female. Those are just for examples. Its been interesting having a world where for most beings it is an insult to be described as male, female, man and woman. Where the differences between humans pale compared to the differences between humans and other races.
Labels for people are truly false advertising. We are not cans of soup on a shelf that some are labeled gay, some straight, other Muslim and Republican because no two individuals are alike. God does not have an assembly line producing models of people. Each individual, you yourself, are a unique miracle that has never happen before and will never happen again. People talk about religion and the need to find God. For me, I see God in the person standing next to me.
Godspeed!

 

I don't know about dudes going fishing, but I do know that it has been highlighted before that in the Twilight books the entire cast is either white or Native American and diversity was added to the films (by making minor character Eric Asian and lesser antag Laurent black).

That said, it might be to do with Meyer's faith, the LDS has a history of not being friendly towards African Americans.

 

So what's the point that's trying to be made or not being made? I been reading the thread but if someone could just ya know? Tell me directly what the deal is. I'd absorb it a little better.

Where is the point of tension?

 

I think the gist of it is:

"It sure would be nice if there were more fantasy novels that had enough creative imagination to include, in their fictional world, complex races, countries, cultures, and ideas outside of the typical Dark Ages Brittan."

To which everyone has responded:

"It sure would be!"

 

It's a fantasy. You guys do realize that in non Earth worlds, like middle earth, or wheel of time, a white skinned man has absolutely no relation to a white skinned man in our real world?

 

Except when authors in the real world are policed against including non-white characters in those types of fictional worlds.

 

Then why are people so totally freaked out about the idea of fewer of them?

 

I understand where you're coming from, but I don't think I agree. Those fantasy worlds HAVE to have relation to our real world, because when we invent fantasy, we use reality--at least in some form--as a base.

The beautiful thing about fantasy is, if you're pioneering enough, you can invent, combine, alter, and change every single thing about it! As long as it makes sense in the confines of your world, that's good enough.

 

Do you want my honest opinion? You're smart so I know you do

Some people don't want to include them and others do because they're not *really* writing fantasy in the purest sense.

In a real fantasy, my protagonist Jean might have purple polka dotted skin or simply "no color" and his mother's skin might have zero relation to his, because I'm not bound by the laws of alleles.

But that's not what most people are writing. Most people writing fantasy do it because they either lack appreciation for the real world, for whatever reason, or because they're lazy and they don't want to have to color in the lines.

So they basically take our world, or someone else's cheap fantasy which is ultimately based on our world, and either they want to write all "whites" because they're white and their friends are white and their fantasy isn't really creative but more masturbatory and they're going to recycle most elements from the real world but in a juvenile sense, or they want to include all all minorities, because like their racist arch enemies, their fantasy world is simply a reduced version of our real world so of course things like ethnic diversity have meaning.


Where could I see all white representation particularly concerning? Speculative fiction. If all novels honestly predicting the future of our world assumed whiteness, that would be severely messed up.

 

I have a sixth sense for these things. You bring fantasy up around 123....





All in jest

 

Nobody's reading or writing fantasy in the purest sense. The fact that the fantasy includes human-looking bipeds, male and female, who function like mammals and give birth to live young, and countless other similarities to us, is already an unbreakable link to our human world.

Most fantasy is 95% our-world humans. It makes no sense to have all that but then abruptly say that skin color and culture have no place in that connection. In fact, in a way it's worse. We've created fantasy characters that look and act like humans are "supposed" to look and act. We start with prototypical humans and make itty bitty changes to them. And in so many fantasy works, those prototypical humans are all white.

So, no, I don't accept your argument at all.

 

What specifically don't you accept?

 

I don't accept the idea that skin color in fantasy is totally separate from skin color in reality. Was that not what you were saying?

 

Because it's not really true fantasy in most cases, yes I agree with you.

 

Then I'm not sure I get your point. I would say that it's not true fantasy in any case whatsoever--if it involves something that looks like a human, it's very reality-based. So your point is purely theoretical and doesn't apply, as far as I can tell, to anything at all.