# Representation In Fantasy



## saellys (Nov 30, 2012)

So my co-writers and I are all white, cis, (mostly) hetero people writing a novel that embraces multiple fictional cultures. On a readthrough of our first draft, I realized that I hadn't noticed that the single non-white race in the whole realm had darker skin, and that prompted us to make some sweeping changes in the second draft. 

We also noted that while one main protagonist is pansexual, a couple of our homosexual male characters were not the most positive representatives in the story, and we also had included no textually-acknowledged homosexual women. Partway into the second draft, we noticed that not only were our two main protagonists white men, but their respective love interests also had fair skin, so we made some alterations to another culture to change that in part. (Our two main protagonists are still white men, mostly because I want one of the characters' extreme white male privilege to continue being his most irritating trait.) 

Then a friend of mine interviewed us all about the project last week, and asked which character she, as a queer Asian, could identify with. We had to scramble for an answer and I felt deeply unsatisfied with the "We're trying our best!" copout response. 

Long story short, we're struggling to make this novel something other than the conventional whitewashed medieval fantasy that's out there, where gay people are persecuted, women are oppressed, dark-skinned people are stereotypical savages, and anyone with power is a white man, all justified with the equally unsatisfying copout response, "It's historically accurate!" But we're trying to balance that doing justice to the real challenges othered people do face, and not creating some race/gender/sexuality utopia. We want everyone to have something they're fighting for and/or against. 

Also, the goal is not just to check boxes, or adding a bunch of little details that we can point to and say, "We're not ____ist!" if someone calls us out. We're trying to do this in a holistic way, I guess, and go for an atmosphere that is coherent rather than just a bunch of disjointed details (while retaining cultural distinctness in the various regions, of course). And we're counting on our future test readers to tell us when we get something horribly wrong. 

All of that brings me to my question for you, fellow Scribes: How do you handle representation in your fantasy writing? Do you have a range of characters who differ from your own race, gender, and sexuality? Have you given them Earth-analog cultural backgrounds and challenges, or gone in completely different directions (since it is, after all, a fantasy world)? What research did you do for that purpose, and what real-world issues did you take into consideration? Have you received feedback on such things from test readers or editors or post-publishing readers, and how did you handle it?


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## BWFoster78 (Nov 30, 2012)

> All of that brings me to my question for you, fellow Scribes: How do you handle representation in your fantasy writing?



I don't.

I incorporate the characters that the story needs or the characters that I imagine.


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## Steerpike (Nov 30, 2012)

BWFoster78 said:


> I don't.
> 
> I incorporate the characters that the story needs or the characters that I imagine.



Yep. Going out of your way to consciously address these various possible social representations leads to nothing but a mess in most cases. It will be readily apparent to the reader if you've forced them all into the work.  As for the idea of whitewashed fantasy that doesn't address any of this stuff, that's a bit of an outdated view of the genre in my view. This stuff is out there, though in discrete units and not that I've seen where someone is trying to mold so much of it into one work.

It's not that I don't think you can successful do all of this in one work, but if your primary goal is to incorporate all the politically and socially correct elements, I think the priorities are wrong. The primary goal should be to tell a great story; if you're going for something bigger, then your great story can illuminate the human condition or these various social aspects of human culture. It still has to be a great story, though, or no one is going to bother with it. If your starting point is to cram as much social, sexual, and cultural representation in as possible, I think it is likely to lead to a less than great story.


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## psychotick (Nov 30, 2012)

Hi,

I don't either as the others have said. But I also don't generally give out much specific information about a person's skin colour - and just what colour are elves anyway? I try to let the reader decide for himself / herself as to a character's race.

Cheers, Greg.


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## Mindfire (Nov 30, 2012)

Okay, I've tried rewriting this post several times to make it sound just right and then finally said "screw it, there's no way to sugar-coat this". So apologies for any toes I may step on.

In general, I think that whenever you intentionally write something into your story simply for PC reasons, "representation", or with intent to promote some doctrine or philosophy, you're doing it wrong. You say you don't _intend_ to "check boxes", but in _practice_ that's exactly what you're doing. And because of that, it will never feel organic or natural. It'll feel like a more benevolent form of tokenism. And that's exactly what it is. 

I didn't set out to write my main characters as people of color for the sake of "representation", social equity, or brownie points. I did it because those were the characters that came to my head. Characters and plot are the yin and yang of storytelling. They balance each other, feed off of each other. But as soon as you introduce something foreign to that balance, like unnecessary political correctness for example, it botches the flow. Write the story and characters that come to you, not the story you think "needs" to be told with the characters that people "need" to read about.

I don't support discrimination (duh), but I have no taste for affirmative action storytelling either. No author is "obliged" to include a character of any race, sexuality, or philosophical bent. Even if they belong to that demographic. If people complain, "but you don't have any (insert minority here)!" Apologize and move on. Scratch that. Don't even apologize. You don't owe them anything. Simply explain (kindly) that the character they want simply didn't sprout naturally from the story you wanted to tell. And if you're feeling especially generous, you may ask them what they would like to see in future books and make a mental note to include such a character IF AND ONLY IF it's a natural fit for the story you're telling. You can't please everyone.

Writing is not a democracy.


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## Mindfire (Nov 30, 2012)

Steerpike said:


> Yep. Going out of your way to consciously address these various possible social representations leads to nothing but a mess in most cases. It will be readily apparent to the reader if you've forced them all into the work.  As for the idea of whitewashed fantasy that doesn't address any of this stuff, that's a bit of an outdated view of the genre in my view. This stuff is out there, though in discrete units and not that I've seen where someone is trying to mold so much of it into one work.
> 
> It's not that I don't think you can successful do all of this in one work, but if your primary goal is to incorporate all the politically and socially correct elements, I think the priorities are wrong. The primary goal should be to tell a great story; if you're going for something bigger, then your great story can illuminate the human condition or these various social aspects of human culture. It still has to be a great story, though, or no one is going to bother with it. If your starting point is to cram as much social, sexual, and cultural representation in as possible, I think it is likely to lead to a less than great story.



You put it much more eloquently than I did. Perhaps it comes of being a lawyer? In any case, I'd like to underscore a point you made that I didn't mention in my original post: it seems to me that the OP is trying to do too much. Ambition is great, but realistically, you can't include _all_ the world's minorities, even if you're writing the next War and Peace.


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## Steerpike (Nov 30, 2012)

Mindfire said:


> You put it much more eloquently than I did. Perhaps it comes of being a lawyer?



Thank you Mindfire, I appreciate it. Given the way most lawyers write, I think it comes in spite of being one


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## saellys (Nov 30, 2012)

I can't reply at length right now, but I just wanted to clarify that our first draft is already done. The story is established. We're not setting out to be "PC" (and boy do I hate the glib derision of that term, though I know you guys aren't using it that way) from the start; we're setting out to take a story that happened to be almost completely whitewashed in the first draft and make it not whitewashed in the second. We did not go insert a queer Asian character after my friend asked us about that, but we did renew our commitment to presenting a realistically diverse world. 

My co-writers and I recognized our own tendencies to write predominantly white, cis, (mostly) hetero characters in our individual work and our first draft. The characters that come to us tend to have fair skin; that's how we visualize them. We set out to change that in the second, because we understood that it was an unnecessary kneejerk habit, and the fantasy genre has more than enough straight white characters in it. Yes, the other stuff is out there, but we want more. That's our motivation.


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## MadMadys (Nov 30, 2012)

So to help my understanding of this, when you say your motivation was to create a more 'true to life' type of world- one where there are many races, colors, sexual preferences, etc- was that the intention from the start or only after realizing things were as white washed as you say?  If it's the former, then you missed the boat right from the start I guess.  I mean, you were probably focusing on the characters, story, plot, and all the other things you should have been focusing on because that’s what is most important.  So if you really did intend, from the start, to create a true cornucopia of a world, your writing instincts did not seem to mesh into that.

Now if your motivation only recently changed once you finished, you would have to really ask yourself why it changed and what do you hope to gain from these changes.  I know with my story, my three main characters are all white.  If I were to change them at all by making them black or asian or anything else, it wouldn't make one lick of difference to the story so why change it.  Now as to the reason my characters are the race/sexes they are is simply because they're based on friends of mine so their descriptions match them.  Beyond that, I have characters of a lot of different races but I never created a character simply to fill out a quota.  Their actions make them the characters they are rather than anything else.

Now, I'm all for mixing up fantasy conventions.  There are certainly too many white-male stories with only some ancillary females (also white) hanging around the sides.  I would love more writers to push these conventions but I would prefer they do it from the very conception process of their story rather than after the fact because they felt bad for not doing it earlier.

At the end of the day, you have a simple question to ask yourself when it comes to changing characters from draft to draft.  Does the change need to happen?  Does making this change help the story?

I love analogies, so here is one I just thought up for this.  You move into a neighborhood and build yourself a nice house.  Once it's finished, you take a step back and realize it looks, pretty much, just like every other house around it.  You wanted this house to be more unique and a reflection of yourself so you're unhappy.  Now you don't want to just rip it down and build up again so you repaint it instead.  Now, if you do the paint job well you do have a new look but it's still essentially the same thing.  However, if the paint job gets botched, you end up with something that looks like you were trying to be different just for the sake of being different.

If you want to write a story that eschews from common views on fantasy, I highly suggest you do that but from the ground up.  It could make for a really good story, no doubt about it.  But while drafts are meant to be changed, you do it to make the story better for the sake of the story and not to fight a guilty conscious.


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## Twook00 (Nov 30, 2012)

saellys said:


> Long story short, we're struggling to make this novel something other than the conventional whitewashed medieval fantasy that's out there, where gay people are persecuted, women are oppressed, dark-skinned people are stereotypical savages, and anyone with power is a white man, all justified with the equally unsatisfying copout response, "It's historically accurate!" But we're trying to balance that doing justice to the real challenges othered people do face, and not creating some race/gender/sexuality utopia. We want everyone to have something they're fighting for and/or against.



All of what's mentioned above (persecution, oppression, stereotypes, global dominance) is a result of different people from different backgrounds coming into contact with one another.  Sparks fly in these worlds because opposing belief systems create conflict.  It's not about being gay or being white or being female.  It's about what is different between one group of people and another.  What does one race consider taboo that another race considers a civil right?  

Maybe your character is gay and that's just fine in your story, but there's something it wants that the rest of the world doesn't want it to have.  Your friend will identify with that struggle because she has been through it herself.  The only difference is the thing that is desired.


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## Anders Ã„mting (Nov 30, 2012)

My main characters tend to be white or white-ish*, and usually female. I don't create many characters of other races mainly because I've never know a lot of non-whites in my life, so I never seem to think about it during character creation. Trying to get better at that, honestly, but on the other hand I don't diversify my characters just for the sake of diversity. I don't really think I have a responsibility to do that. As for why they tend to be girls, I don't really know: I just find female characters easier to write for some reason.

As for sexual orientations, that isn't something I devote a lot of focus on. Again, I don't want to put gay people into my books just for the sake of having them. My heroes are exclusively straight, since I like a good romantic subplot and I'm not sure how to pull that off with a gay couple without making the book _about _gay romance. I don't think I've even had any gay male characters - I've played with the thought of hinting at it, but I'm not sure I'd devote a whole subplot to it since I'm not sure I'd trust myself to stay interested in writing such a relationship. I _did _throw in a lesbian couple in one of my more recent projects, though, mostly on a whim. (As a straight male, I have a much easier time staying interested in gay women than gay men. I don't think I need to apologize for that.)

*I had these pair of siblings in one story, sidekicks to the main heroine, who I think were supposed to be vaguely Romani.


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## Shockley (Nov 30, 2012)

I've never been much for describing a character's skin color unless it requires some mentioning (for instance, I have an entire race of red-faced, white-haired humanoids). Otherwise, it's not just something I deal with. Granted, I imagine the vast majority of the characters I write as white or vaguely semitic, but pointing out skin tone or race is not something that flows well with my particular writing style.

 That said, I think there's a flaw in your logic: An Asian won't identify with an Asian just because they're Asian, a homosexual won't identify with a homosexual just because they're both homosexual, etc. That identification happens when the character is believable, facing the problems of life, etc. It's far more important to create a realistic, likeable character than to create a character designed to pander to one crowd.


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## saellys (Nov 30, 2012)

MadMadys said:


> So to help my understanding of this, when you say your motivation was to create a more 'true to life' type of world- one where there are many races, colors, sexual preferences, etc- was that the intention from the start or only after realizing things were as white washed as you say?  If it's the former, then you missed the boat right from the start I guess.  I mean, you were probably focusing on the characters, story, plot, and all the other things you should have been focusing on because that’s what is most important.  So if you really did intend, from the start, to create a true cornucopia of a world, your writing instincts did not seem to mesh into that.



Our motivation was to deviate from the tropes of fantasy literature in as many ways as possible. Once we'd finished the first draft, we realized we'd created a fantasy world (or at least the portion we see in the first volume) that was almost entirely white, as well as not being particularly diverse in other areas. What you call a "writing instinct" is what I call a reflexive tendency to write characters that fall into categories with which we're familiar. That's all well and good for a first draft, when we were indeed focusing on putting together a compelling plot, but now we get to flesh it out. 



MadMadys said:


> Now if your motivation only recently changed once you finished, you would have to really ask yourself why it changed and what do you hope to gain from these changes.



A finished novel we can be proud of. 



MadMadys said:


> I know with my story, my three main characters are all white.  If I were to change them at all by making them black or asian or anything else, it wouldn't make one lick of difference to the story so why change it.



Why not change it?



MadMadys said:


> Now as to the reason my characters are the race/sexes they are is simply because they're based on friends of mine so their descriptions match them.  Beyond that, I have characters of a lot of different races but I never created a character simply to fill out a quota.  Their actions make them the characters they are rather than anything else.



I agree with this completely. 



MadMadys said:


> Now, I'm all for mixing up fantasy conventions.  There are certainly too many white-male stories with only some ancillary females (also white) hanging around the sides.  I would love more writers to push these conventions but I would prefer they do it from the very conception process of their story rather than after the fact because they felt bad for not doing it earlier.



Interesting. I don't think that any stage in the creative process is off-limits for making changes like this.



MadMadys said:


> At the end of the day, you have a simple question to ask yourself when it comes to changing characters from draft to draft.  Does the change need to happen?  Does making this change help the story?



Again, I agree. 



MadMadys said:


> I love analogies, so here is one I just thought up for this.  You move into a neighborhood and build yourself a nice house.  Once it's finished, you take a step back and realize it looks, pretty much, just like every other house around it.  You wanted this house to be more unique and a reflection of yourself so you're unhappy.  Now you don't want to just rip it down and build up again so you repaint it instead.  Now, if you do the paint job well you do have a new look but it's still essentially the same thing.  However, if the paint job gets botched, you end up with something that looks like you were trying to be different just for the sake of being different.



I tend to think people should be able to paint their houses however they want, and being different for the sake of being different is not necessarily a bad thing, either. The changes we're making extend beyond giving some of our secondary characters a new paint job. 



MadMadys said:


> If you want to write a story that eschews from common views on fantasy, I highly suggest you do that but from the ground up.  It could make for a really good story, no doubt about it.  But while drafts are meant to be changed, you do it to make the story better for the sake of the story and not to fight a guilty conscious.



I'm not sure what to say to this. My co-writers and I like the story we've written so far, but it's not something we could be proud of if we just released the first draft as it is right now. That's for a variety of reasons--it has all the usual first draft problems, and also we're not happy with the lack of variety among its cultures. In my experience, altering drafts is something you do so you can be proud of the final product. If part of that involves realizing that we made choices in the first draft that go against our personal values, and that makes our different breed of fantasy novel look rather a lot like all the rest of the fantasy novels out there with all-white or all-straight or all-cisgendered characters, it should be our prerogative to make the necessary changes. I thought the whole purpose of the conscience was to tell me when I make, or am about to make, a mistake.

We have three great writers working on a great story and making it even better. We intend to make these changes in such a way that someone who hasn't read this thread would never know that things were different in the first draft. Maybe we'll fail miserably between now and the finished product, and get bogged down in all sorts of details, race and gender and sexuality among them. But I'd rather fail than not even try. 



			
				Twook00 said:
			
		

> All of what's mentioned above (persecution, oppression, stereotypes, global dominance) is a result of different people from different backgrounds coming into contact with one another. Sparks fly in these worlds because opposing belief systems create conflict. It's not about being gay or being white or being female. It's about what is different between one group of people and another. What does one race consider taboo that another race considers a civil right?



All well and good, but I'm tired of seeing the same old conflicts and oppressions (usually copied wholesale from the real world) in fantasy.



			
				Twook00 said:
			
		

> Maybe your character is gay and that's just fine in your story, but there's something it wants that the rest of the world doesn't want it to have. Your friend will identify with that struggle because she has been through it herself. The only difference is the thing that is desired.



Sure, but I don't think it's too much to ask to see oneself represented in one's favorite forms of media. More below...



			
				Shockley said:
			
		

> That said, I think there's a flaw in your logic: An Asian won't identify with an Asian just because they're Asian, a homosexual won't identify with a homosexual just because they're both homosexual, etc. That identification happens when the character is believable, facing the problems of life, etc. It's far more important to create a realistic, likeable character than to create a character designed to pander to one crowd.



When my friend asked that question, my first reaction was to tell her that she would identify with every character in the book, because they're all well-rounded with understandable motivations and sympathetic aspects. I'm a writer, and it's my job to be in love with all my characters. 

But that wasn't what she was asking, and I understand and respect that marginalized people want to be recognized and represented in media. (Hell, as a white cis straight woman I'm one step down on the totem pole of running the world, and I _still_ don't see myself recognized and represented in media.) I happen to be writing a book that is based in a large nation with over a dozen different semi-sovereign regions; why not make each of them distinct in physical traits and attitudes toward sexuality and gender as well as cultural features? Unless I'm the worst writer in the world, how can that possibly be a bad idea?

As stated before, none of our characters are designed to cater to one crowd. They're all three-dimensional people with their own agendas. Giving them particular backgrounds and secondary or tertiary conflicts based on particular traits is actually something we're doing to make them even more relatable. You can call it pandering, but I call it being conscious of what we're putting out in the world for people's consumption. 

I interviewed Magpie Killjoy, one of my favorite writers, a couple months back and he said something that really stuck with me. In a nutshell, every story reinforces and normalizes some things and challenges others, whether or not the authors intended it that way. Personally, I believe that every person involved with creating art has a responsibility to think very carefully about what they're representing. 

I'm motivated to make these changes because I would want to read a fantasy novel with this level of diversity, and I hope other people will, too. I'm surprised and dismayed that so many people here seem to think there's no point and the whole thing is doomed to fail. Thanks for the interesting discussion, at any rate.


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## Mindfire (Dec 1, 2012)

saellys said:


> I'm motivated to make these changes because I would want to read a fantasy novel with this level of diversity, and I hope other people will, too. I'm surprised and dismayed that so many people here seem to think there's no point and the whole thing is doomed to fail. Thanks for the interesting discussion, at any rate.



If that's what you're taking away from this, I don't think you've heard us correctly. The general consensus seems to be, if I may be so bold as to speak for the collective, that you should _tread carefully_. If you want a more diverse cast, that's fine. But be aware that readers will notice if you phoned it in. If it's not authentic, they'll know. Especially since you're not a minority, you'll have to put some time and attention into making sure these characters ring true. Which is worse? Erasure or tokenism?


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## Feo Takahari (Dec 1, 2012)

Keep in mind that race and sexual orientation, and to some degree gender, are themselves constructs bound by time and place. Go to Russia, and you'll find the Polish race stereotyped as pickpockets. Go to America, and you'll have a hard time finding anyone who conceives of Poles _as_ a race of their own, rather than as part of the White race. If you're writing in a fantasy world that has no connection to our own, there's no reason you can't have a society where intersexuality is common and considered a gender of its own, or a society where men who penetrate other men and are not penetrated by them are considered heterosexual instead of homosexual, or . . . Hmm, I can't think of a third example, but you get the idea, right?


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## Ireth (Dec 1, 2012)

Feo Takahari said:


> If you're writing in a fantasy world that has no connection to our own, there's no reason you can't have a society where intersexuality is common and considered a gender of its own, or a society where men who penetrate other men and are not penetrated by them are considered heterosexual instead of homosexual, or . . . Hmm, I can't think of a third example, but you get the idea, right?



Except that "heterosexual" and "homosexual" literally mean "of the other sex" and "of the same sex", so there's really no way you can just swap the names. No matter what you call the act of same-sex or different-sex unions, you'll still have the two distinct genders (or possibly more, in the case of fantasy worlds).


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## Feo Takahari (Dec 1, 2012)

Ireth said:


> Except that "heterosexual" and "homosexual" literally mean "of the other sex" and "of the same sex", so there's really no way you can just swap the names. No matter what you call the act of same-sex or different-sex unions, you'll still have the two distinct genders (or possibly more, in the case of fantasy worlds).



You misunderstand. In certain societies, men who penetrate are considered to be a certain sexual orientation, and men who are penetrated are considered to be a different sexual orientation. Who the penetrating men penetrate is not regarded as a distinction worthy of notice. (I'm currently trying and failing to find specific names--they're usually just casually referenced as "African".)

Anyways, the larger point is that there are a lot of different ways of thinking about race, sexuality, and gender, and writers from a specific place and time have a tendency to apply that place and time's categories to all other times and places. This is only truly fatal to understanding when writing about a real-life culture, but it can still be considered to be reinforcing a certain worldview when it's consistently applied to fantasy cultures.


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## Ireth (Dec 1, 2012)

Feo Takahari said:


> You misunderstand. In certain societies, men who penetrate are considered to be a certain sexual orientation, and men who are penetrated are considered to be a different sexual orientation. Who the penetrating men penetrate is not regarded as a distinction worthy of notice. (I'm currently trying and failing to find specific names--they're usually just casually referenced as "African".)



I was not aware of that. Thanks for clarifying.


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## Philip Overby (Dec 1, 2012)

I don't have much to add from what others have already said, but I think I'll chime in.

I'm going to go the opposite route and say if your interest is to create a diverse world with representations of all different cultures, societies, and sexualities, then go for it.  However, what it sounds like you are doing is "painting by numbers" in a way.  For instance, this character is too white, so let's change his race.  Or this character is too straight.  If you've already written a first draft where none of these things played into the plot or story arc in any way, then has changing any of the characters' races or sexuality added something to the story?  Has it enriched the story in some way?  If you feel like it has, then good.  You did your job.  If it feels like you're just trying to make your friends happy by making people just like them, then it seems unnecessary.  

To add to what MadMadys said about Asians identifying with Asians, my wife is Japanese, but she doesn't only identify with Japanese people, nor just straight women.  Some of her favorite characters are the women on "Desperate Housewives" (none who are Asian), Walter White from "Breaking Bad" (who is neither Asian nor a woman), and Lafayette from "True Blood" (who is neither Asian, a woman, or straight.)  People just like characters they like for whatever reason.  They don't need to see someone who looks, feels, or acts just like them in order to identify with them.

If you want to have all these cultural and sexual elements to the story, then I think you should set out from the beginning to include these elements.  Really analyze how changing these elements of character is going to change the overall story.  Then, if you're happy with that (which it sounds like you are) then stick to your guns and keep it that way.  However, you run into that problem that others have mentioned if your characters' race, gender, and sexuality seem shoe-horned in to just be as diverse as possible.  This may come off as heavy-handed if it interferes with the reading of the actual story.  

So, in essence:

1.  Do what you want at the end of the day, but be conscious of why you are making these decisions suddenly after not making them initially.
2.  Be aware that readers may notice this as a way to pander to the widest audience possible.  However, you may find the exact audience you're looking for if you follow your vision.


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## ascanius (Dec 1, 2012)

Yesterday I came across racefail, if you don't know what it's about google it, then I came here and found this post.  I think the thing that needs to be said is be careful.  I think it's great that you want to mix things up, that always good.  

However there are two points that need to be made.  If these characters/cultures have a point in your story then they have a place.  If you want to add them for the sake of adding them then they don't.  Ask yourself this.  What purpose to the plot does changing the characters serve?  Is it important to the plot that the characters be the way you want to change them.  I think you have good ideas for future novels, something to keep in mind.  But for this one it is not, it sounds like your trying to force it, add it after the fact.  This leads me to my second point.

How many times are there one female character who is super woman, and can do everything.  This is a big problem but not with just female characters but minorities also.  Yes I know your intentions are to NOT follow stereotypes.  However by defining and wanting to include characters based on that alone that is exactly what you are doing.  A character should be just that, a character first and foremost, not a minority.  Just as a person is a person first not a minority.  Trying to push this aspect because you feel you are not being fair to minority representation can become insulting to your work and to those minorities.  There is a right way and a wrong way to do this. Is it important to your plot?  Are there cultural aspects that allow such things?  Does it define the character? Be careful with this.

You said you wanted to be proud of your work but it sounds like you stopped being proud of it only when you realized it was "white-washed."  That is not a good reason, sorry.  Minorities don't want your pitty.  Equal representation is important but they want you to write about minority characters JUST AS YOU WOULD non minority.  Not make special treatment for them, not stereotype them (at least this is what some friends have told me).  They want equal treatment.  They want the to be represented as well thought out, well rounded characters that have a purpose to the plot and have non stereotype roles just like any other "white" character.  Ask your friend how she would feel if you changed it just to represent her?  Or in the next book you keep the idea of diversity while you world build allowing it to come naturally.  Remember this is a touchy subject so you have to be careful how you approach such topics.

P.S.  I know your characters are rounded and thought out but I think a lot of this stuff is important to everyone.  And I do think writing could greatly benefit from such ideas.


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## Jabrosky (Dec 1, 2012)

I write explicitly non-white characters all the time, but that's mainly because my  interests have always gravitated towards the more "exotic" non-Western  civilizations. I don't advocate nonsensically inserting characters of color simply out  of political correctness.


saellys said:


> So my co-writers and I are all white, cis, (mostly) hetero people writing a novel that embraces multiple fictional cultures. On a readthrough of our first draft, I realized that I hadn't noticed that the *single non-white race* in the whole realm had darker skin, and that prompted us to make some sweeping changes in the second draft.


And why must the non-whites still be a minority in your world? I'm sorry, but this screams tokenism. You claim to seek diversity, yet you still surround your characters of color with larger numbers of white characters. Why can't the non-whites demographically dominate a setting for once?


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## saellys (Dec 1, 2012)

Mindfire said:


> If that's what you're taking away from this, I don't think you've heard us correctly. The general consensus seems to be, if I may be so bold as to speak for the collective, that you should _tread carefully_.



I started this thread to see if my fellow Scribes had any experience with and detailed advice for doing just that.



			
				Feo Takahari said:
			
		

> Keep in mind that race and sexual orientation, and to some degree gender, are themselves constructs bound by time and place.



This has been a really interesting challenge in itself! We've had to bite back our modernisms and try to get inside the heads of a pre-Norman-ish society where love and sex and gender and marriage and relationships mean radically different things, and give each region its own "flavor" of attitudes. 



			
				Phil the Drill said:
			
		

> I'm going to go the opposite route and say if your interest is to create a diverse world with representations of all different cultures, societies, and sexualities, then go for it. However, what it sounds like you are doing is "painting by numbers" in a way. For instance, this character is too white, so let's change his race. Or this character is too straight. If you've already written a first draft where none of these things played into the plot or story arc in any way, then has changing any of the characters' races or sexuality added something to the story? Has it enriched the story in some way? If you feel like it has, then good. You did your job. If it feels like you're just trying to make your friends happy by making people just like them, then it seems unnecessary.



Like I said, we didn't go add a female character with Asian traits and a preference for other women after my friend asked that question. We don't have a checklist. But while we're on that topic, MadMadys based characters on real life friends--is there a problem with that?



			
				Phil the Drill said:
			
		

> To add to what MadMadys said about Asians identifying with Asians, my wife is Japanese, but she doesn't only identify with Japanese people, nor just straight women. Some of her favorite characters are the women on "Desperate Housewives" (none who are Asian), Walter White from "Breaking Bad" (who is neither Asian nor a woman), and Lafayette from "True Blood" (who is neither Asian, a woman, or straight.) People just like characters they like for whatever reason. They don't need to see someone who looks, feels, or acts just like them in order to identify with them.



Sure. One of my favorite characters is Tyrion Lannister, and I am not male, nor do I have dwarfism. The fact remains that there are a lot of people out there who are underrepresented in all kinds of media, and this is a problem on its own. 



			
				Phil the Drill said:
			
		

> If you want to have all these cultural and sexual elements to the story, then I think you should set out from the beginning to include these elements. Really analyze how changing these elements of character is going to change the overall story. Then, if you're happy with that (which it sounds like you are) then stick to your guns and keep it that way. However, you run into that problem that others have mentioned if your characters' race, gender, and sexuality seem shoe-horned in to just be as diverse as possible. This may come off as heavy-handed if it interferes with the reading of the actual story.



Warning taken. Many times over.



			
				Phil the Drill said:
			
		

> So, in essence:
> 
> 1. Do what you want at the end of the day, but be conscious of why you are making these decisions suddenly after not making them initially.
> 2. Be aware that readers may notice this as a way to pander to the widest audience possible. However, you may find the exact audience you're looking for if you follow your vision.



I hope readers won't view this as pandering, since that's not what we're doing, and it is, in fact, part of our vision for the second draft of the book.



			
				ascanius said:
			
		

> However there are two points that need to be made. If these characters/cultures have a point in your story then they have a place. If you want to add them for the sake of adding them then they don't. Ask yourself this. What purpose to the plot does changing the characters serve? Is it important to the plot that the characters be the way you want to change them. I think you have good ideas for future novels, something to keep in mind. But for this one it is not, it sounds like your trying to force it, add it after the fact. This leads me to my second point.



All the characters we're adding and changing have an impact on the plot. The novel isn't finished yet, so this isn't after the fact.



			
				ascanius said:
			
		

> How many times are there one female character who is super woman, and can do everything. This is a big problem but not with just female characters but minorities also.



I assume you're talking about tokenism, in which case, yes, it's a huge problem that authors commonly write a single representative of a particular group, be it women or people of color or LGBT characters or what-have-you.



			
				ascanius said:
			
		

> Yes I know your intentions are to NOT follow stereotypes. However by defining and wanting to include characters based on that alone that is exactly what you are doing. A character should be just that, a character first and foremost, not a minority. Just as a person is a person first not a minority.



Agreed. 



			
				ascanius said:
			
		

> Trying to push this aspect because you feel you are not being fair to minority representation can become insulting to your work and to those minorities.



I keep seeing this in this thread, and I find it really strange. If this wasn't a motivating factor, what would compel us to ever change these traits? 



			
				ascanius said:
			
		

> There is a right way and a wrong way to do this. Is it important to your plot? Are there cultural aspects that allow such things? Does it define the character? Be careful with this.



Yes.



			
				ascanius said:
			
		

> You said you wanted to be proud of your work but it sounds like you stopped being proud of it only when you realized it was "white-washed." That is not a good reason, sorry.



No, I said we couldn't be proud of our first draft if we published it as it is now, and one of the reasons is that there were very few people of color. 



			
				ascanius said:
			
		

> Minorities don't want your pitty. Equal representation is important but they want you to write about minority characters JUST AS YOU WOULD non minority. Not make special treatment for them, not stereotype them (at least this is what some friends have told me). They want equal treatment. They want the to be represented as well thought out, well rounded characters that have a purpose to the plot and have non stereotype roles just like any other "white" character.



Yes. 



			
				ascanius said:
			
		

> Ask your friend how she would feel if you changed it just to represent her?



She wasn't asking us to do that, and we're not doing that. 



			
				ascanius said:
			
		

> Or in the next book you keep the idea of diversity while you world build allowing it to come naturally.



We don't want to save the "idea of diversity" for the next book. We want it in this one.



			
				ascanius said:
			
		

> Remember this is a touchy subject so you have to be careful how you approach such topics.



Yes.



			
				Jabrosky said:
			
		

> I write explicitly non-white characters all the time, but that's mainly because my interests have always gravitated towards the more "exotic" non-Western civilizations. I don't advocate nonsensically inserting characters of color simply out of political correctness.



As established earlier, neither do I.



			
				Jabrosky said:
			
		

> And why must the non-whites still be a minority in your world? I'm sorry, but this screams tokenism. You claim to seek diversity, yet you still surround your characters of color with larger numbers of white characters.



I was talking about our first draft, in which we had a single culture composed of people of color. That realization was part of the basis for the changes we're making in the second draft. 

That being said, the final balance will probably still be more than half white. This is actually story and character driven--our two main protagonists are twins, and white male privilege is a defining character trait for one of them, so making them a member of a predominantly white noble class was a choice we made. 



			
				Jabrosky said:
			
		

> Why can't the non-whites demographically dominate a setting for once?



In the second volume, when we start to see the wider world beyond the single nation that was the setting for the first book, they will! I'm excited about it.


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## Penpilot (Dec 1, 2012)

saellys said:


> All of that brings me to my question for you, fellow Scribes: How do you handle representation in your fantasy writing? Do you have a range of characters who differ from your own race, gender, and sexuality?



I usually don't consciously think about representation. The characters are the characters who happen to be of this race or that. With that said, my current work. My main character is Chinese, with a cast of friends that include a First-Nations Indian, a Russian, a Caucasian, a Hispanic, a lesbian couple, a couple of minor characters that are Japanese, and they're all Canadian. All this takes place in a couple of made up parts of Vancouver next to Asian dominated districts, one of which is Chinatown. 

I never set out to have these characters be of their specific 'types', but as I was writing I would come to the realization that they're of part of group 'X'. My First-Nations and my Hispanic characters, I doubt anyone will really notice what race they are unless they're really tuned in with the minor cues I drop. The reason I don't make it more obvious is because it really doesn't matter to the story.  On the flip-side of that my Russian character, had an accent, he was a immigrant, and his name was Vlad, so those were things that were just too in the face to down play in my opinion. 



> Have you given them Earth-analog cultural backgrounds and challenges, or gone in completely different directions (since it is, after all, a fantasy world)? What research did you do for that purpose, and what real-world issues did you take into consideration? Have you received feedback on such things from test readers or editors or post-publishing readers, and how did you handle it?



Well, mines an urban fantasy set in present times so obviously Earth based backgrounds. I did some research on some things I didn't know, but for the most part I just wrote. But, as I said my main character is Chinese, and well, so am I. I drew a lot from my own family's history and my personal experience.

As for feedback, my writing group gave me some feedback on my Russian character, and there was one thing I did that was really stupid. The worst part of it was I knew better. For some reason I tried to write in a Russian accent. Epic failure on my part. So I simply stated in the narrative that the character had a Russian accent and wrote his dialogue as normal.

Hopefully some of this is useful to you.


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## saellys (Dec 1, 2012)

Penpilot said:


> Hopefully some of this is useful to you.



Very much so! Thank you for sharing.


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