Recent content by saellys

Well, we've reached the "I just don't care enough about it" part of the discussion, which is exactly where I abandoned the diversity thread I started a year ago when I first joined this forum. Coming full circle feels like a good time to bow out, of this discussion as well as this whole forum...

Tor is great when it comes to this kind of thing. They're ahead of the curve; most publishing houses seem to be pretty content with the status quo. The thing is that merely by writing a story set in fantasy-styled Japan, you're deviating from what gets represented in much of fantasy. So yes...

Yeah, I'm definitely not saying that, and I have yet to encounter anyone, even in the most militant social justice circles on the Internet, who thinks that makes sense. I dig it when stuff like that gets inverted, actually, like in Jabrosky's example about one or two Europeans visiting ancient...

Yes. Your examples tell us a lot about the world around the woman, but not about the woman herself. You're talking about plot; I'm talking about character. We already had the plot--she doesn't want to get married. We hadn't addressed why, apart from "she wants to live her own life!" and an...

Ran out of space. Continued: I do that too. As stated in other threads, I would never ever encourage someone to approach this problem with the questions "would a woman say this?" or "would a black man do that?" Those are generalizations and they won't lead to well-rounded characters, and might...

I thought I made it clear that when I said "various kinds of people" in the context of this discussion, I was asking about characters' race, gender, and sexuality, not homogeneous behavior, but if not I'll just specify that now. Again, my hypothetical practice is meant to ensure diversity in...

I look forward to the day when people realize that a general call for better representation does not equal a checklist of what your story must include to be "inclusive enough," and also that "I don't want to mimic modern-day Earth" does not equal "Instead I will perpetuate a tired and inaccurate...

These statements fall onto a spectrum that goes from neutral ("I disagree with you," implying relativism and maybe even the potential to change someone's mind) to confrontational ("You are wrong," implying there is a right side of the argument and I know what it is better than you do). Hostility...

That's probably for the best, because I don't see the point of linking them all. I could dig them up too and point out how each OP had a different purpose, regardless of how each thread ultimately trod the same worn paths of semantics. I consider social inequality and compelling stories to be...

It's really important to have this discussion here for the reasons A. E. Lowan stated in the post immediately preceding yours. If I go to a forum that is dedicated to these kinds of debate, I'm going to see a lot of choir-preaching between people who aren't in a position to do much about the...

There's a difference between me drawing on my own experience interacting with straight white dudes about issues of oppression and marginalization for the purposes of examples, and straight white dudes drawing on their own individual experiences in order to invalidate others' experiences of...

To be engaged and effective in solving a problem, you first need to be educated about the problem. So far, what men consider "dialogue" has overwhelmingly been a demand to be educated about the basics of the issues then and there by marginalized people, coupled with dismissing and invalidating...

Could you do me a personal favor and censor "c*nt" next time too? (Alternately, if it was an automatic filter that censored them, moderators, could you add that word to the list?) Gendered expletives defeat the purpose of that comment--which missed the point anyway. I am fully in favor of...

The "Loki will betray Thor the second he gets the chance" angle is exactly what they ran with anyway, and it's what he ultimately did. He was thinking of himself the whole time. It was part of a much larger con. I'm not going to get too far into Loki's overarching motivation and what it really...

Yeah, loads of times. Exactly. This is getting into fridging territory, so I'll probably discuss it more in Feo's thread rather than clog up this one, but for now suffice it to say that there are lots of reasons to kill a given character, but if the character happens to be a woman and the only...