Generally a wee bit more webbing between the toes than is standard, too...
SV has an Imaginary Number problem
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Generally a wee bit more webbing between the toes than is standard, too...
Reveen
Castro-Trudeauist
Alright, I know there were some posts upthread about the subject of fidelity in worldbuilding but I can't be bothered to go did them up to respond to someone directly. So instead of just going to go off.
One thing that always crops up in these kinds of discussions is the issue of worldbuilding, often with a lot of stressing how you can have POC in your fantasy story, but there needs to be some good and deep worldbuilding behind to to make it make sense from a geographical, anthropological, or cultural perspective. People tend to very deliberately stress the need for this thought and care put into the writing in order for a POC plentiful fantasy universe to be accepted.
My answer to this is to ask what the fuck PCP they've smoking that they think a fantasy world always needs to "make sense". Maybe to a small subset of readers this is super important, but for the most part it is really not that big a deal and isn't required for a fantasy story to be good or successful. Wheel of Time's world is stupid and dumb, and it's one of the most successful fantasy stories ever. Name of the Wind barely even has a world that's described in any real detail, and people love the shit out of that book. They eat it's ass. GRRM basically threw disparate European cultures at South America sized Britain shape, plopped a Conan the Barbarian setting beside it, and justified it by making it feel real. It got a wildly pilopukar TV show where the world makes even less sense. People nitpick these series, but the story's didn't fall apart and the books burst into flames by the lack of sense made of their worlds. It's achieving suspension of disbelief with good writing in your stupid-ass fantasy world that matters.
The fact that the subject comes out mostly strongly in these discussions says more about people's perceptions and biases about race and fantasy that it does about writing. To people medieval Europe is just fantasy, if you have that you barely have to world build shit. But if POC appear in a more than antagonistic, sidekick, or incidental role then the tendency is to question their existence because the ideological construct of fantasy that exist in people's brain meat doesn't include them.
They POC them almost like they would an anachronism like if a refrigerator or a chainsaw showed up. People may as well literally think that black people were invented in April 1861 for all it matters.
One thing that always crops up in these kinds of discussions is the issue of worldbuilding, often with a lot of stressing how you can have POC in your fantasy story, but there needs to be some good and deep worldbuilding behind to to make it make sense from a geographical, anthropological, or cultural perspective. People tend to very deliberately stress the need for this thought and care put into the writing in order for a POC plentiful fantasy universe to be accepted.
My answer to this is to ask what the fuck PCP they've smoking that they think a fantasy world always needs to "make sense". Maybe to a small subset of readers this is super important, but for the most part it is really not that big a deal and isn't required for a fantasy story to be good or successful. Wheel of Time's world is stupid and dumb, and it's one of the most successful fantasy stories ever. Name of the Wind barely even has a world that's described in any real detail, and people love the shit out of that book. They eat it's ass. GRRM basically threw disparate European cultures at South America sized Britain shape, plopped a Conan the Barbarian setting beside it, and justified it by making it feel real. It got a wildly pilopukar TV show where the world makes even less sense. People nitpick these series, but the story's didn't fall apart and the books burst into flames by the lack of sense made of their worlds. It's achieving suspension of disbelief with good writing in your stupid-ass fantasy world that matters.
The fact that the subject comes out mostly strongly in these discussions says more about people's perceptions and biases about race and fantasy that it does about writing. To people medieval Europe is just fantasy, if you have that you barely have to world build shit. But if POC appear in a more than antagonistic, sidekick, or incidental role then the tendency is to question their existence because the ideological construct of fantasy that exist in people's brain meat doesn't include them.
They POC them almost like they would an anachronism like if a refrigerator or a chainsaw showed up. People may as well literally think that black people were invented in April 1861 for all it matters.
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I think the idea is that worldbuilding is needed to justify black people who share some sort of black experience (whatever that is), rather than just writing regular sci-fi and pallet-swapping it. AFAIK the African Diaspora, Atlantic slave trade, and centuries of being an oppressed minority are pretty important to the African-American experience, so if you want to have that, rather than just flicking through Tolkien and replacing every mention of fair skin with dark, that requires something of the setting.
IIRC Zora Neale Hurston wrote in a way to exemplify the shared experience of Africans and mythic Israelites in her Moses novel, for example, and while I can't speak to any special resonance (not being black), afaik it was well received.
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OctarineShrike
Avatar of Mandos
People might think things like climate are relevant for skin color but they really aren't. Australia is a ways away from the equator, but look at the Aboriginal Australians for example.
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Then what would "white experience" be? The answer obviously isn't "the default."
OctarineShrike
Avatar of Mandos
For modern day white people? Whatever things can be clearly attributed to having won at cultural hegemony, at least for the moment maybe?
PhoenixMercurous
Soaring through the stars
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Having people who look black in a fantasy setting is easy. Given what we know of human evolution IRL, having a setting where all humans look black requires basically zero justification.
Having black-american culture in a fantasy setting is a potentially more complex issue. I think the first important question is, "can you reproduce black-american culture(s) in a fantasy setting without including in-universe racism?" I think someone said you couldn't early on in the thread and many of us went forwards with that idea but didn't examine it much. It's worth going back an examining that question. That said, I don't have an answer.
Edit: I guess the question isn't "can you do it" but rather "can you do it without unfortunate implication."
Edit 2: Or maybe not. Maybe the question is "can you reproduce the black-american experience without in-universe racism?"
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Considering how much of the "white experience" is made up of things appropriated/stolen from others I'd say no.
Like 0. Babylonians, Mayans, etc. were the ones to invent zero.
OctarineShrike
Avatar of Mandos
There are probably better examples given zero's independent conception on multiple continents.
*ponders anyway*
Assimilating while remaining unassimilated then? Depending on how you define cultural hegemony that one might work.
Remixing/Assimilating and providing units of culture for others to assimilate, without being distorted and assimilated yourself? That could be viewed as winning at cultural hegemony.
Nope. The worldbuilding has already been done for us, so we can stand on the shoulders of giants. That's the insidious thing about this issue. Not doing anything about it is easy. Doing something is not only hard, it may require you to put emphasis on worldbuilding details you don't feel like focusing on or mention complicated real-world issues that may not have anything to do with the themes of your story.
As has been mentioned, including black characters in a standard fantasy would be easy. Including African characters or characters who might otherwise count towards proper representation, is hard.
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I mean, the OP might claim to be sympathetic to other groups that don't often get represented in media, but they still continue to go:
So again I ask: what do you want me to do? Should I write fewer "Asian" characters in my stories, no matter where they come from? Should I just write fewer Japanese? There are barely any non-Asians (for human characters) in my stories anyway. But there are also very few blacks by the standards of the OP, either from the US or elsewhere.
(My last story set in a fantasy had a protagonist that was supposed to be fantasy-Malay, but one of the complaints I had was that she was too "generic", and not "exotic" enough.)
I am sympathetic to your general point that black people need more representation in media created by us. I am less sympathetic to the idea that this can only be accomplished by throwing my own representation under the bus.
So again I ask: what do you want me to do? Should I write fewer "Asian" characters in my stories, no matter where they come from? Should I just write fewer Japanese? There are barely any non-Asians (for human characters) in my stories anyway. But there are also very few blacks by the standards of the OP, either from the US or elsewhere.
(My last story set in a fantasy had a protagonist that was supposed to be fantasy-Malay, but one of the complaints I had was that she was too "generic", and not "exotic" enough.)
I am sympathetic to your general point that black people need more representation in media created by us. I am less sympathetic to the idea that this can only be accomplished by throwing my own representation under the bus.
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Pandemonious Ivy
Panties, Revolution. Big Drawers. Parachute.
I'm not sure why you quoted me and dragged me into this obvious bait for an antagonistic back and forth. I'm good, tho.
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Sorry, had another thing I wanted to say that I quoted you for, but I needed time to formulate the idea, and I forgot to remove the quote. I'll do it now.
EDIT: I mean, if you also want to reply to my post, that's fine too. I asked the same question back in the first page of the thread, and got no real answer, so I am essentially repeating it.
The basic idea I wanted to quote you for was that I think representation for representation's sake is only a short-term solution, and not much better than a band-aid over a pretty serious wound, but again, I needed more time to tidy it up.
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On one hand, I don't think we need less Asians in stories, even if they are highly signal boosted by things like Anime, Video Games, and K-Dramas and the like.
ON THE OTHER HAND, if there's any group of people that is just as dominantly represented in Fantasy and Sci-Fi than White Europeans, it'd definitely be East Asians. But that might not be fair to say, given how a good deal of that representation is going to be in your 80's THREAT JAPAN/JAPAN WILL TAKE OVER THE WORLD/INSCRUTABLE ASIANS style depiction as you might see in Samurai Cop/Battletech/Rising Sun; and how the other half of that is going to be "Asian stuff is cool" and "While you studied the book, I STUDIED THE KATANA" style stuff.
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Previously, you literally said the opposite (albeit mildly, as "a bit less"), so that was what I was going off of. Before that, you went the other way (ie the way of the post I'm now quoting), even acknowledged the point in your second paragraph (that "Asian" representation tends to be of a certain stereotype, or very carefully avoiding that stereotype by drawing attention to that stereotype as what the character is not).
So back in my first post in this thread, I wanted to point out that just lumping all of us into "Asian" is probably not what you should be doing if you want to talk about minority representation in media. And then it happened anyway, at which point I didn't actually know if you were doing it on purpose.
I also have some trouble understanding the backlash against the idea of "writing what you know". Including fantasy-Malays and scifi-Bengalis in my stories isn't me trying to raise representation rates: it's entirely me writing about what I know. US culture in general is the "exotic" one for me, and I've added it for the same allure as I imagine US people writing about the Mysterious Orient do.
So I am not comfortable with the idea that I should be getting any sort of pass for "writing what I know" just because what I know happens to be from cultures that don't get much representation in SV-hosted stories. But if I follow the same advice of "write outside your comfort zone", that ends up meaning that there is less Southeast Asian representation, which you've just said is not a good thing.
vicky_molokh
Posthuman spidery thingy.
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- Kyïv, Ukraine
Hello, I'm a 'modern white people' person. My experience includes seeing attempts at erasing my language (with moderate success) which are ongoing for the last couple of centuries onto this day, seeing that pop-cultural depiction of religion is nothing like how it looks like when I look out the window, seeing the same unlikeness with food, and seeing that my nation's films are considered at best a small regional niche. Anything resembling imperialism perpetrated by my people is about a thousand years old (and there are strong and active foreign interests that want to sever that historical link anyway). But apparently such a state of affairs counts as winning the cultural hegemony, with all that implies. This is frustrating - the same people who see why it's wrong to just say 'Asians' and lump many different people together turn 180° and are totally fine with lumping 'modern day white people' as if it's some sort of monolith.
P.S.: And just to clarify, I'm posting not to be pitied nor for some sort of misery poker contest, but rather to remind people that broad generalisations make people blind to actual situations, no matter who the broadly generalised demographic is, and in the hopes that people will be less trigger-happy about judging the state of affairs by something as vague and broad-brush as skin colour.
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- The Midlands.
My current original fiction project is dodging this by just not specifying anyone's ethnicity at all, and setting it in a distant solar system far in the future, but still including a bit of exposition to establish definitively that not everyone in the setting is white. Does that seem like a reasonable compromise? I've actually noticed I have a bit of a diversity deficit in my own writing, but fixing it is somewhat difficult given that I have a bit of a diversity deficit in my personal life (largely due to circumstances beyond my control, I might add) and would probably get a bunch of stuff embarrassingly wrong.
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- The Hague
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Research and communication with others. Haven't we covered this already? I feel like I need to add it to a thread banner.
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- Hucknall, Notts, UK
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Research? Actually talking to people of that culture?
OctarineShrike
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Fair enough. Sorry about that. If a funny showed up on your ratings sorry about that too. The only thing I can say is I was phoneposting and that/reply are extremely close to each other.
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I feel obligated to note that while anime and manga do, to a degree, signal boost Japanese culture, it's mostly popular with a reasonably-sized but niche fandom that goes out of its way to look for it, Japan doesn't represent all of East Asia (much less Asia), and Asian actors and actresses don't tend to make it big outside their own regional spheres. Even with Japanese and Korean pop culture waves, and China aggressively pushing its own pop culture, it really doesn't translate to mainstream exposure. Even when Asian influences are used in a film, they tend to be appropriated by white actors; I'm thinking Kill Bill and The Last Samurai and - if you're old like me - The Beverly Hills Ninja.
Like, real talk, if you're not from Asia or if you don't have a specific interest with Asian cinema, without looking it up, try to name five black actors or actresses in ten seconds. Now try to name just five Asian actors or actresses who aren't specifically a martial arts actor or actress like Donnie Yen or Jet Li or Jackie Chan in thirty seconds. Like, you actually know their full name and some films they appeared in, not "this one Asian person I saw in a few TV shows but don't know the name of". Can be of any Asian ethnic heritage, not just East Asian. Feel free to include Indians or Kazakhs or even Kalmyks if you can do it. You don't even need to tell me about whether or not to can do it. Just think about it for yourself.
(For the record, I did the former in five. I did the latter in twenty seconds, and I'm literally in Asia right now.)
The circumstances that face the African diaspora are different from the Asian diaspora, and it's absolutely true that there are certain ways in which - for example - Asian-Americans, particularly those of East Asian heritage, have social advantages relative to African-Americans. And I'm not here to hijack a thread that was meant to discuss black erasure in media. But "stay in your own lane" is a guideline for social justice activists for a reason; while I myself don't have any emotional investment in representation (I support it intellectually, but I have never cared about me being represented, so it's more about what other people care about), I suspect some of us would appreciate it if you did not downplay the issues of other minorities that you may not be as aware about.
'Donnie Yen, Jet Li, Stephen Chow, Michelle Yeoh, and *tries to remember* Zhang Ziyi. Easy.'
