saellys
Inkling
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?
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?