D
Deleted member 4265
Guest
To be honest its hard not to feel some level of sympathy based on the fact that a person is...human. Maybe not all people share this though.
I couldn't portray a pedophile, rapist, abuser of any sort, etc. sympathetically, but I guess that racism seems to me to be culturally ingrained evil that its perpetrators often aren't even completely conscious of. Even if a person wouldn't admit to hating people of a different skin color, and not even believe they do, they still might hold racist beliefs that they can't or don't or won't confront as not okay. Deliberately abusing another person is somewhat different. I think racism arises from inherent evil only in the sense that all humans have some level of inherent evil. I feel like xenophobia is a human instinct that has to be consciously confronted and overcome. But that's another discussion. I'm not a sociologist, either. As repugnant as racism is, someone being a racist doesn't utterly dehumanize them to the point that no sympathy is possible. The only things that do that are those things that demonstrate that a character has no sympathy or human compassion for others. That's the line at which I can't portray a character sympathetically.
This is derailing the discussion though. I picked an unfortunate example; now it sounds like i'm making a comparison between writing an LGBT character and writing a racist character, and there shouldn't even be a comparison. O_O
That's the thing, I guess. I was thinking of this as "must a writer avoid writing characters that don't align with their personal views?" but some people (not referring to anyone on this thread, but i've literally heard people tell me this before) see writing an LGBT character as closer to writing a rapist; that is, not a matter of personal views but of utter disgustingness. In that case, I guess it's different. -_-
(No, really, I had someone tell me that if I wrote an LGBT character, that would be the equivalent of writing a rapist character.)
And this is the point I'm trying to make. In your worldview someone can be racist without necessarily being a bad person which allows you to portray characters who are racist but can still be sympathetic. But some people who've been on the receiving end of race-based discrimination might not be able to portray someone who is racist as sympathetic in their writing, because their life experience hasn't given them anything but completely negative experiences with racist people. They might not be able to understand why people would be so cruel to them unless those people were just cruel people.
Being able to understand why people do the things they do, not just at an intellectual level but at an emotional level is really key to writing well rounded characters. So its not that all the characters have align with the author's personal views, its just I can't see someone who thinks homosexuality is unnatural being able to empathize with a lesbian character enough to make them a well-rounded (and therefore not stereotypical in a likely negative way) character.