Diversity in SF and Fantasy

[Ophiucha]

But I do also like the idea of just changing up the setting enough to account for the varying cultures, as we do with elves or dwarves. You could even just make elves or dwarves black/Latin@/Asian and skip a step in the middle.

I already said 'yes that would be fine too' to that?

I don't see why all of these ideas are mutually exclusive, though. I don't expect any one author to write 'the all-inclusive medieval fantasy novel'; I expect a bunch of authors to give us their worlds with regards to the fact that you can't paint the world in a single stroke. Worlds like ours, worlds with co-existing cultures of different races, or worlds where everybody is just a different colour and everyone just accepts that. There is no harm in having a character from 'a distant land', and there is no need to make a big deal of it. 'Mohammad, a trader from the Ibn-al Islands and a close friend of Rorik's, waved at the group as they entered the market.' You never need to make more mention of it than that.

It depends on what you're writing, who you're writing for, and who you are. I'm white, so it's not like I'm writing dozens of novels about the realities of racism. I don't have those experiences to share, nor do I think my voice needs to be heard. Since I write primarily about the social aspects of my world, I do often worldbuild in a bit of race relations, but my characters of colour are never defined by it and their stories don't revolve around it. I wouldn't tell any author they have to write about racism, because frankly most authors aren't qualified to do so. But it seems odd to me to write a story that doesn't have people of colour. It's not the world I live in, it's not a world I'd want to live in, so why would I create a world that reads that way? It's like writing a story that doesn't have any women, when everyone in the world lives somewhere where women make up half the population. It's... jarring, both from the modern perspective and from my perspective as someone who majored in Medieval Studies.

 

[Devor]

There is no harm in having a character from 'a distant land', and there is no need to make a big deal of it.

The character from a distant land is a foreigner, who dresses differently, speaks differently, behaves differently, believes different things, approaches society with an outsider's perspective, and probably wants to return home. The foreigner doesn't necessarily embody the racial experience of African-Americans or even 3rd-generation immigrants.

To create a character who embodies those experiences in a medieval society, you have to build your world around it. There's no archetype on hand you can slip in that even comes close.

 

[Ophiucha]

Oh no, you might have to do more worldbuilding. Wouldn't that be a burden.

Seriously, though, if you are just doing medieval European counterpart culture, then you could just as easily toss together a quick medieval Islamic counterpart culture for the sake of a single character; if it's not the setting of the novel, you don't have to spend hours on it (though feel free to; I spend hours working on the nuances of my straight white male characters). You don't have to develop the entire world, just make a few adjustments to the clothes (which you can google an appropriate analogue for in ten seconds flat), come up with a few different words that could be cultural (refer to the gods by a different name, similar to Allah v. God), you can create a character who is living here happily because he makes better money, done. Or give him a son who he travels with who grew up half in fantasy!Europe and half in fantasy!Middle East and wears clothes from both and has a bit of an accent but nothing you'd need to emphasize.

Again, it depends on the novel. Sometimes, yeah, if you'd want to have this character you would have to really work for it. In which case, either do some extra worldbuilding (after all, so often writers give their kings and queens silk gowns and spiced ham - where do those spices and garments come from? you'll have to do that worldbuilding anyway) or just go with the idea and build a multi-racial Europe in the style of the elf-dwarf-human Europes of other fantasy stories. But a lot of stories just don't have that level of realism or depth where you'd need that. Some characters just don't need that. Write what works for your style and your setting and whatever character this is. A comic relief poc!character would be better suited for a casual trader who likes Europe sort of character, whereas the main character or love interest - someone who gets a ton of development - could be made more interesting by giving them memories of home and a very strong sense of culture shock.

 

[Feo Takahari]

I just realized, is it "diversity" if you're not representing any culture? I've done a few short stories in a setting where desert nomads and hunter-gatherers encounter each other--they're respectively described in terms that could be called "Middle Eastern" and "European," but their cultures aren't based off of any specific society. (For instance, the nomads don't follow any religion indigenous to the Middle East, instead believing that water is a vital force that contains the souls of the dead.)

 

[Philip Overby]

I don't think this discussion has to be limited to gender and race. One thing Saladin Ahmed tweeted made a lot of sense as well:

Class diversity also needs to be part of #DiversityInSFF. I want fewer kings and starship captains, more coach drivers and space waitresses.

What Feo said is also interesting:

I just realized, is it "diversity" if you're not representing any culture? I've done a few short stories in a setting where desert nomads and hunter-gatherers encounter each other--they're respectively described in terms that could be called "Middle Eastern" and "European," but their cultures aren't based off of any specific society. (For instance, the nomads don't follow any religion indigenous to the Middle East, instead believing that water is a vital force that contains the souls of the dead.)

I have similar issues in my work. I often have multi-racial characters, but if you asked me what they were based on I could only say in broader terms, not peg it down to one or two specific real world cultures. If I did more world-building I could develop these cultures more so I could see what they most resemble. This is something I prefer to do the text of my writing and not independently though (meaning months of separate world-building).

 

[Amanita]

A subject matter that has sprouted quite a few rather heated discussions over on the NaNo-forums.
Like other posters before me, I have to admit that I've mainly read fantasy by German, British or US-authors so far. The reasons are the same, availability and language even though I am curious about non-western works and try them out if I find them in a good translation, the less English or German speakers knowing the language, the harder this becomes of course. I've noticed some trend towards Russian fantasy recently at least around here.

I'm all for fantasy that goes beyond the usual clichés with white medieval European castle land but I'm wary about any attempts to implant the situation of minorities in 21th century US into a fantasy world if the story isn't explicitly about making a point about US society.

Anyway, at the moment, the situation seems to be such that you can freely write white characters and do whatever you want. (Barbarians, evil empires, corrupt city states, noble kingdoms and so on.) As soon as you include none-white groups or single characters, they’re interpreted as your version of all people with similar physical traits and people start to feel offended if you did something wrong in their opinion. With some African-American activists, it seems to be impossible not to do that especially if you’ve grown up in a different country. I’m still surprised by all the things that are considered racist clichés because I’m missing the background in American history to understand why they’re deemed offensive. (A recent example, the “strong black woman” from the other thread.)
There seems to be a similar problem with female characters actually.

I tend to make up my own history and cultural background for my fantasy peoples and I think most others on here do the same and I try my best to make them all multi-dimensional but reading many of those online-discussions, it’s clear that this isn’t deemed enough. So is avoiding non-white characters the less offensive path after all?

Speaking from my personal experience, I don’t expect a book to have German characters but do feel offended if there are badly done ones.

 

[Feo Takahari]

A subject matter that has sprouted quite a few rather heated discussions over on the NaNo-forums.
Like other posters before me, I have to admit that I've mainly read fantasy by German, British or US-authors so far. The reasons are the same, availability and language even though I am curious about non-western works and try them out if I find them in a good translation, the less English or German speakers knowing the language, the harder this becomes of course. I've noticed some trend towards Russian fantasy recently at least around here.

I'm all for fantasy that goes beyond the usual clichés with white medieval European castle land but I'm wary about any attempts to implant the situation of minorities in 21th century US into a fantasy world if the story isn't explicitly about making a point about US society.

Anyway, at the moment, the situation seems to be such that you can freely write white characters and do whatever you want. (Barbarians, evil empires, corrupt city states, noble kingdoms and so on.) As soon as you include none-white groups or single characters, they’re interpreted as your version of all people with similar physical traits and people start to feel offended if you did something wrong in their opinion. With some African-American activists, it seems to be impossible not to do that especially if you’ve grown up in a different country. I’m still surprised by all the things that are considered racist clichés because I’m missing the background in American history to understand why they’re deemed offensive. (A recent example, the “strong black woman” from the other thread.)
There seems to be a similar problem with female characters actually.

I tend to make up my own history and cultural background for my fantasy peoples and I think most others on here do the same and I try my best to make them all multi-dimensional but reading many of those online-discussions, it’s clear that this isn’t deemed enough. So is avoiding non-white characters the less offensive path after all?

Speaking from my personal experience, I don’t expect a book to have German characters but do feel offended if there are badly done ones.

It's a common mistake to treat offending a category--say, offending black people--as a binary "does offend" or "doesn't offend", when in truth you're more likely to offend a certain percentage of category members. If you want proof of this, just look at how often category members offend others in the category (for instance, LL Cool J's involvement in the song "Accidental Racist", which a lot of other black people thought was just plain racist.) Of course, another common mistake is to treat the approval of one person in the category as automatically meaning that criticism from others "doesn't matter"--just because one person's particularly thick-skinned doesn't mean that others don't have a valid complaint. (See, again, just all the discussion that sprang up about "Accidental Racist".)

If this sounds a bit bewildering, the upshot of it is that there are two things to do about being offensive:

1): Know exactly why people are angry at you. "Because they're stupid" is not, in and of itself, a reason, nor is "because they're overly sensitive"--you have to understand the logic or pseudo-logic by which your work is considered offensive, and what sort of work they might consider to not be offensive instead.

2): Decide for yourself, with your own judgment, whether you're okay with those people being angry with you. (I do mean "those people," not "that category," since again, the whole category won't be angry.)

To give a personal example, I wrote a romance between a straight man and an agender bisexual. Quite a few readers misinterpreted the agender character as transgender, and consequently assumed that I had made "errors" indicating that I didn't know what transpeople were like. My mistake wasn't in writing an agender character, but in solely using the perspective of the confused straight man--had I also used scenes from the perspective of the agender character, it would have been more clear that he/she was in fact agender. (If, on the other hand, someone had bitched at me for even having an agender character, I would have ignored them.)

Edit: If you really want to see a crystal-clear example both of invalid criticism, and of others in the category rejecting the criticism and accepting the original work, look up Allecto's essay that argues that Firefly is misogynistic. From the get-go other feminists were arguing that Allecto was misrepresenting her case.

 

[Devor]

Oh no, you might have to do more worldbuilding. Wouldn't that be a burden.

Right now, in a medieval setting, it's easier to handwave a time-travelling Russian toothfairy than it is a black peasant. All I'm saying is, if the literature is going to be dominated by medieval societies, then how can we fix that?

 

[Ophiucha]

Raise the standards of American education so people are more aware of actual medieval history?

I just... don't think it's that hard to justify/handwave the presence of a non-white person in a pseudo-medieval setting given that they were in our actual medieval history and any number of alternate history and magical explanations could go further to justify it. If readers cannot accept black people in medieval England but are perfectly capable of accepting dragons and warlocks, then we've got a whole other set of problems to deal with and, odds are, those people are not my target audience. I mean, one of my current projects is set in actual Medieval Italy, not pseudo!Italy, and it has a Moroccan character as well as werewolves. I'd give a good long stare of shame to anyone who pulled the realism card on me over the Moor and not the shapeshifter.

@Phil, Yes, definitely! I get kind of tired of having the throne be every hero's reward for saving the world, or their talents (usually magical) being the result of royal blood. There are practical concerns that make the upper class more popular (ability to travel, for instance), but many of those would go away in a non-medieval setting. Disability is another one. For what few disabled character there are, they nearly all have a counter magical ability. Blind seer, deaf/mute telepath, and so on. It'd be nice to see a character with a disability that actually has a disability and didn't just sacrifice their human senses/limbs for more awesome magical versions.

 

[Philip Overby]

I honestly find enjoyment in all types of stories. I wouldn't necessarily say I get sick of novels that depict certain kind of characters over and over again, but I more reticent to read a story that feels like I've already read it before. I love A Song of Ice and Fire, but that doesn't mean I only want to read about medieval fantasy royalty. I love it because the characters are well done and I like the story. However, just because I'm familiar with these types of characters and settings doesn't mean I always want to read or write about them. Writing, to me, is about exploring some part of yourself that you want to share with the world. My sense of wonder about the world and all its people is what attracts me to read outside of what I've read so far.

One thing that attracted me to Throne of the Crescent Moon for instance, was the focus on a Arabian Nights kind of world with ghuls and djinn and such. I thought, "Huh, I haven't read anything like that" so it encouraged me to read it. Another example is The Wind-Up Girl which focuses on a 23rd century Thailand. Something about settings I've never seen before attracts me to the stories. I suspect if I'm reading about Arabic or Thai settings, that most of the characters are going to be more diverse than I'm used to reading.

Personally, for me, a certain kind of setting can attract me to a story, then when I read more about the characters in the blurb or sample, that is what gets me hooked. If everyone was publishing stuff about 23rd century Thailand, I'd probably be less inclined to check it out. However, the merits of blurbs and samples is what really makes me buy something.

 

[Devor]

I mean, one of my current projects is set in actual Medieval Italy, not pseudo!Italy, and it has a Moroccan character as well as werewolves. I'd give a good long stare of shame to anyone who pulled the realism card on me over the Moor and not the shapeshifter.

I think you're still missing something about what I'm trying to say - that's still a Moroccan character. There's a tremendous gap between the experiences of a Moroccan in medieval Italy and of anyone dealing with racial issues today. If we can't get over the handful of foreign-based tropes and find a more inclusionary way of dealing with race, we're never going to have real fantasy diversity.

That is, we shouldn't have to work so hard finding a way for a person of another race to have a starting position of knight. Or peasant. Or Lord. Instead of foreigner or immigrant or traveler or outsider.

 

[Chessie]

Right now, in a medieval setting, it's easier to handwave a time-travelling Russian toothfairy than it is a black peasant. All I'm saying is, if the literature is going to be dominated by medieval societies, then how can we fix that?

Your comment is one of the reasons why I love these forums. The writers on here are forward thinking and aware that our beloved fantasy genre is getting stale. That said, I agree with Ophiucha in that characters of color are included and a big deal isn't made of them. Its fantasy, no?

This discussion has gone in an interesting direction. I'm Hispanic but that doesn't play into my world-building. My WIP is a Victorian setting based off Russian and Canada's New France cultures. My protagonist is the member of a tribal nation, though she is married to a 'white guy' for certain purposes. A flicker of information is given as to why that is acceptable, but then the story continues. Racism is seen in one scene towards the protagonist, but its really by someone that is already a jerk.

Anyway, I like the idea of having tribal nations in my 'Last Frontier' novel. But what about other races? Well, my story isn't based on planet Earth. Its a completely different land with different customs. But I still have a hard time deviating from the norm...and I'm with Devor on how do we change that? By no longer writing elves and orcs and dwarves that simulate other races, is my vote.

One day, I'm going to write a fantasy novel based off Indian culture. One day.

 

[Ophiucha]

I have said, multiple times, that I am also in favour of stories that just handwave having completely European non-white people casually living in the towns and that I am also in favour of stories that just sort of condense the world into Europe but with all the racial diversity of the real world. But I am also in favour of stories that deal with the fact that the world is large and not a monolith, stories that deal with racism - either Medieval-style or modern, and stories that are more realistic, for better or worse. None of those last ones are non-inclusive. You don't need to have a wondrous ethnically diverse yet culturally bland utopia to be inclusive. Nor does said utopia need to have arbitrary justification for its existence to keep people from whining about a few more black characters than they'd see on Game of Thrones.

If you want to have a black knight, have a black knight. You don't need to build your novel around the justifying that. You just say 'Sir John, with dark skin and dark eyes, strode into the tavern' and that is perfectly fine. If you don't want it to be more than that, don't make it more than that. If some readers have a problem with the mere presence of a black person, see my previous comment regarding Moors and werewolves.

 

[Feo Takahari]

I think you're still missing something about what I'm trying to say - that's still a Moroccan character. There's a tremendous gap between the experiences of a Moroccan in medieval Italy and of anyone dealing with racial issues today. If we can't get over the handful of foreign-based tropes and find a more inclusionary way of dealing with race, we're never going to have real fantasy diversity.

That is, we shouldn't have to work so hard finding a way for a person of another race to have a starting position of knight. Or peasant. Or Lord. Instead of foreigner or immigrant or traveler or outsider.

In a couple different threads, I've seen you talk about the "tropes" of this character and that character, and having to start from scratch when making a character who doesn't have a "trope." As best I can tell, you seem to mean archetypes, but that doesn't make a lot of sense to me--why would race and sex determine what archetypes you use?

To give an example outside the standard race and sex stuff, one of my protagonists is from a very rich family, but she doesn't follow any of the archetypes associated with "rich kids." I built her around the "friendly nerd" trope, and then modified it according to what sort of life experiences wealth would make a nerd more likely to have. I don't think the relative paucity of positive rich-kid archetypes made it any harder to create her, since "rich kid" wasn't really her defining trait--it was just something that impacted her.

 

[Devor]

In a couple different threads, I've seen you talk about the "tropes" of this character and that character, and having to start from scratch when making a character who doesn't have a "trope." As best I can tell, you seem to mean archetypes, but that doesn't make a lot of sense to me--why would race and sex determine what archetypes you use?

I've used both sometimes somewhat interchangeably. I switched a few posts ago because I don't think, right now, that archetype is the right word for what I'm referring to here. Here I'm talking about wanting to put diverse races into your standard archetypes, without having to pick one of the two:

- Handwave the fact that they are separate races, with separate ethnic origins, and somewhat different perspectives on life.

- Spend a great deal of time and wordcount trying to justify why people of many races are mixed in a medieval society.

There's a third consideration, which is that the common archetypes for using diverse races tend to involve things like tribal people and foreign travelers, who don't really represent the racial sentiments a diverse modern readership actually experience. Those tropes don't do the situation justice, but they're the ones that represent race in a medieval society.

What I want to see in this case is a set of common tropes develop which writers could refer to when they want to do better by racial issues without dedicating a significant portion of their work to rewriting the medieval experience.

For instance, let's say we did the following:

- Create a colony of a civilized non-white nation which invaded "medieval Europe," waged years of war and after years of racial tension, was integrated into the nation (or some other history - that's just a first thought because someone mentioned Viking settlements).

- Create a new archetype for how this nation is portrayed which actually speaks to a modern fantasy readers and isn't bogged down by the stereotypes and common portrayals of Moors and tribesmen and what-have-you. That is, how would people of different races want to portray themselves in modern fantasy?

- Develop a set of terminology which people could refer to in their writing to say, "This happened in my story," which became common enough that you didn't need to redevelop the wheel every time you wanted to do it.

Wouldn't something like that be beneficial to the genre?

 

[Feo Takahari]

It's not like we're writing historical fiction here. If you want to create a feudal society that has a great deal of trade with other regions, you can easily convey that through flavor (e.g. markets filled with chatter in a variety of languages.) If you want to create a fantasy society that's totally insular, I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with that, but don't then give your society trade goods from all over the world and familiarity with a great many philosophies.

(It's not medieval, but I think I introduced an outside culture pretty quickly in The Seal Breaks. A classful of Blessed are studying a style of magic invented by the Scorned, and the one Scorned student is singled out by the teacher. A lot of elements of their interaction are never explained, but there's a general implication of colonialism.)

Edit: maybe the difference here is how much worldbuilding I don't do. There are a lot of details I never quite explain, so while I try to create a feeling of cohesion, I focus more on tone and character than on the mechanical bits.

 

[Lawfire]

From a 'realistic' 'earth-like' world building perspective, it makes sense that people (humans and non-humans) native to areas closer to the equator would have darker skin and those nearer the polar regions would have lighter skin. People in hot areas would tend to wear less clothing (including heavy metal armors), those in cold would have to wear more clothing. In our world natives of Scandinavia, Japan, and Alaska tend to have lighter skin than those of Greece, Thailand, or Peru.

If there is a culture that has developed a reliable mode of transportation, or simply began wandering, there are many reasons they may have spread beyond their homelands. Perhaps the homeland could not support the population growth. Maybe they wish to spread their religious or cultural beliefs throughout the land. Maybe the simply wish to expand their empire.

In a fantasy world, anything is possible. If orcs can have green skin, why couldn't the humans in a temperate climate have dark skin? I don't think it has to be a big issue.

 

[The Dark One]

I've said it before and I'll say it again...push your personal agendas by all means, but do it subtly. Let the agenda be expressed as a backgound corollary rather than as an upfront issue. Overthink something, or get too PC and you'll come across as preachy and boring.

Do it tastefully, subtly and enable readers to come to their own conclusions, and you might just change the world.

A bit.

 

[Amanita]

I think a society that resembles modern American one as far as race relations are concerned could maybe be achieved in the context of a larger empire inspired by the Roman empire with black people starting to rise into positions of power in the senat after years of white domination or similiar.
I can't see it with a typical medieval society where positions of power are inherited and people even believe they're granted by God. This kind of change would be difficult to achieve there without massive violence to bring it about which might send problematic messages once again. I wouldn't mind seeing more fantasy with different political systems at all but most readers and writers seem to fixated on the kings and queens.
Many countries are still linked to ethnicity nowadays though and I don't quite understand why that has to be different in fantasy stories to make them "diverse." The need for international cooperation in face of a common enemy has been a staple of fantasy since Tolkien at least. Why not make it different human "races" instead of elves and dwarves who have to akindle different beliefs to achieve a common goal. That's what I'd like to read and what I'm trying to do as well.

Phil, the book "The throne of the crescent moon" really sounds interesting though I have to admit that the description where they "are forced to save a tyrant's life to keep worse things from happening" did strongly remind me of recent events. I'm going to check it out though.

 

[Feo Takahari]

I know I've been posting a lot in this topic, but Jimquisition did an episode today about representation and freedom of expression in video games, and a lot of the points it made relate to what we've said in this thread. I think it's worth a watch.