Anonymous asked:

Hi there. I wanted to write a Middle Eastern action story set in near future Kurdistan. These are 5 of the most important points:

1) It’s about a syndicate called “The Kurdish Order”.

2) My two heroines are a Kurdish woman and her Arab partner.

3) The reason for them living their lives as professional assassins was because their parents were survivors of a civil war in their country.

4) The supporting characters are the Kurdish woman’s parents who contacts her from the headquarters via a radio, and informs her about the targets’ whereabouts.

5) The main villain is an Arab woman whose evil plan is to distribute a lot of firearms to the mercenaries around the world. When the two heroines confronts her and asks, “What did your parents taught you when you were young?”, the villain’s response is; “You’re correct, my nemeses. This is not a ‘My mom and dad hated me for no reason when I was young’ type of excuse. It’s more of a ‘My mom and dad taught me that the world is about the survival of the fittest’ type of motive.”.

The issue here is that I want my story to take place in the Middle East, but I don’t want to perpetuate the “Muslims = Mercenaries” stereotypes. Would my story still work the same if my characters are coded as Christians or Atheists?

I don’t know enough about this topic to speak on it authoritatively but I do want to point out that Kurdistan isn’t currently a country. It isn’t clear from your ask whether you want to set your story in a near-future setting in which Kurds have gained independence and founded their own country, or whether you are referring to the geographic region that spans present-day Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran in which Kurdish peoples are mostly concentrated. 

Either way, it’s worth noting that Kurds are currently a marginalized ethnic minority in all of the countries in which they reside. Kurdish nationalism dates back over a thousand years and has a complex history including many instances of violent repression. If you are not Kurdish yourself, I would recommend doing a lot of research into Kurdish history and current political issues before attempting to write this story. 

-Niki

The Middle East is diverse in ethnicities and beliefs. Even though Islam is the religion that many people from the region follow, is not the only one. My suggestion in this case, to avoid the “Muslims = Mercenaries”, is to give your readers a clear image of how much of a mosaic the Middle East is. And this can only happen when the worldbuilding is correctly done and the focus is not only on the Muslims but on the rest of the people as well and their customs. As for the rest of your question, I agree with Niki that before you proceed with this project you must inform yourselves deeply about Kurdish history and especially the current political climate 

-Asmaa

We would like to turn this over to our Kurdish and Arab readers. How do you feel about the asker’s story premise? What advice do you have for them and which stereotypes would you like them to avoid?

@missdrarrydawn​ asked:

Hi! I recently joined a very diverse writing group in order to learn more about other races and ethnicities from people living those experiences so that I can include diversity in my own writing in a healthy, balanced way, and it has been a lot of fun, but then yesterday there was a conflict which resulted in me getting removed from the group. Most of the POC in the group are from the USA, but I’ve grown up in, and still live in, a small European country, so A LOT of the negative tropes and stereotypes about POC that are deeply rooted in the USA are things that are basically non-existent where I live (mostly because there’s not really any people of color living here). I had always been under the assumptions that POC characters are best written just as regular people with emotions and struggles and relationships etc., not reduced to just their race and treated more special/more negative for the color of their skin. They’re just normal people after all. 

My idea had been to write POC characters the same way I would write my white characters, with the same respect and depth and not treat their skin color as something special or exotic or anything like that. However, when I expressed that to the writing group, a lot of the people there got very upset with me, telling me that the way I viewed writing POC was disrespectful and that I couldn’t write any POC characters or POC coded characters the same way as white people because they are inherently different and therefore must be written in different ways. I could see I’d hurt a lot of the other writers from the group, and I tried to apologize but the damage had been done. Now obviously I’m not going to sit here and say they are all wrong and I am right, but I do wonder if this is a widely held opinion, because in my head, all races are equal and I wouldn’t have ever given writing one race more thought or care over another until this experience made me question that.

 Is the idea that POC characters have to be written with more care than a white character and treated better or with more respect or thought because of all the racism in real life a stance held by the majority or could this be a product of centuries of racism and oppression that caused a lot of POC people to request that they be written with so much more compassion than anyone else because of frustrations of never receiving equal treatment and finally being sick of it? I do want to clarify though that this wouldn’t apply to writing about a culture or religion, because those are very special and sacred things that I will always do a lot of research on before attempting to write about, here I’m just talking about writing POC characters on their own, not related to a culture or a religion, although I realize as I write this that that might be an issue all of its own, but that’s something for me to reflect on and ask about another day because this is getting really long and I don’t want it to get any longer. I know this isn’t a directlywriting related question and I apologize, but you have an amazing writing blog with a lot of perspective and thought put into it so asking you guys was my first thought after I’d gotten kicked out. Thank you for your time :)))

WWC Note: this ask has been edited down to just the points we’re replying to:

Colourblindness

The attitude you hold is called “colorblindness” and it’s a problem for multiple reasons, the primary one being:

White is not the default emotional experience of the world, and assuming we’re all the same is the biggest way ignorance-based racism persists. 

When you begin to assume that everyone has a generally similar life path that’s only faintly informed by race, you ignore everything that shapes a person. You currently view your own white experience as the default that anyone has the potential to live if they have the same class, gender, sexual orientation, religion (including cultural religion), and education as you.

But this is a fallacy, and a person’s race will modify everything they have experienced even if they are identical to you in every other way.

The thing about marginalized groups is, we have assimilation pressures. Native people have been forced to live like white people for centuries, and it’s resulted in a lot of bloodshed. A lot of critique of the adoption system is about how white saviour-y it is, and how much trans-racial adoptees (aka, adoptees that are different races and cultures from their adopted parents) suffer either because their white parents refuse to participate in their culture, or assume that because the child of colour is from a white family in a white-majority area, they won’t experience racism because, somehow by the virtue of having white parents, they’ll magically get access to white privilege. 

Aka, it’s traumatizing. Very traumatizing. Even if you weren’t directly being assimilated, the trauma just… lingers. It’s generational. Your body remembers, your bloodline remembers.

And the impact of writing colourblind is: a lot of PoC will feel assimilated into white society, when society already tells you that you should assimilate, and it hurts. One of my biggest points in writing diverse characters is: you have to be careful you’re not re-skinning your own values onto a different skin tone. Remember how I said culture and race are often interlinked, even in a diverse area? This is part of it.

Equity vs Equality

There’s a concept in social justice: equality vs equity. Equality forces everyone to be the same, while equity accounts for their differences. This comic illustrates: Equity vs equality vs justice.

For example, equality is having everyone wear the same sized hat. But if you have thicker, fluffier hair (either curly or coiled) then your hair won’t fit in the hat. As a result, many PoC (especially Black) are forced to wear their hair much shorter, because their hair won’t fit in the required hat. This is assimilation

Equity would acknowledge that people have a right to wear their hair however they want, and has multiple sized hats available for people of all different hair textures to wear. They might all be in the same colours or style, so you can tell they’re all from the same place, but they are varied and allow people the freedom of self expression. This is equity that results in actual equality, because it allows everyone the same level of freedom of self expression with their hair.

Intersectionality

Writing from a colorblind perspective is the fastest way to hamstring any research efforts for where to put equity, because you are assuming sameness and therefore not researching. Your assumption when writing any sort of character of colour should be assuming difference, because everyone—white people included—have a racialized experience.

This is the principle of intersectionality: that the mixing of any race with anything else will produce a unique experience. A Black Muslim will experience the world differently than an Arab Muslim, and both will experience the world differently from a white Muslim. A Native woman will experience the world differently than a Persian woman. A white trans man will have a wildly different experience than a Chinese diaspora trans man.

They will share similarities, yes, because people are people and anything shared will produce some sameness between experiences. But if you assume that the white experience is the default, you’ll miss all of those intersections and write something inauthentic. The amount of sameness is probably a lot less than you think of on first pass. And then on pass twenty, you’ll realize a bunch of similarities you probably never considered.

It is not reducing people to their race when you acknowledge that race influences every part of your life. It is respecting their unique experience as a person of colour.

Racial Influence

So yes, it is a commonly held view that you should write characters of colour as being deeply influenced by their race, because their race influences everything about them. This isn’t even getting into how a lot of things white people assume are constants aren’t; emotions, gender, sexual orientation, mental illness* and emotional expressions are all culturally influenced.

Racism has existed for five hundred odd years (since the concept of race was invented for European colonialist ends), but xenophobia has existed ever since people have existed. As soon as you are Other, you have a different experience than the dominant culture. You’ll probably make a new culture, or will have already had a new culture that made you the Other.

Assuming we’re all the same, while it looks kind-hearted, is actually the fastest way to invalidate everyone around you. It closes your ears to hearing about difference. Yes, we are all people, yes we all have feelings and likes and dislikes and interests and we can share many, many, many things. But our relationship to those things will still be influenced by where we came from. 

A person who listened to a certain band to survive a terrible time in their life will have a much different relationship to that band than someone whose parents were fans of them so they associate it with happy times. If you can understand the difference between those two people, and realize you should write their internal lives while listening to the same song differently because of that different experience, you can understand the difference that race and culture will produce in response to the same stimulus. 

~ Mod Lesya

* a cross-cultural study of schizophrenia showed that in two non-Western cultures (Accra, Ghana; and Chennai, India) auditory hallucinations aren’t seen as scary, and are instead seen as ancestors helping guide. This positive-to-neutral view of voices was not found in the American population of schizophrenics, who universally found the voices bad and destructive, indicating there is a strong cultural component to views of your mental illness even if you experience the same symptoms.

Placing Care

As to why you need to put more care into writing characters of color than you would white characters: it’s not because people of color want to be treated better in fiction out of some sort of affirmative action to make up for the racism we experience in real life. It’s because it’s always more difficult, on a writing skill level, to write about things that you aren’t familiar with, than about things you know well.

This principle applies to a lot of things. If you’re writing a story set in a location you’ve never been to before, it will require you to put in a lot more work to write it accurately than if it was set in your hometown. Same for a story set in a time period you don’t know well, versus a contemporary story. Or for a story about a character who has a highly specialized job you know nothing about.

Skill and Difficulty Levels

Think of it as a difficulty setting in a video game. The more you add variables that you are unfamiliar with, the more you’re raising the difficulty level. Writing a story set in your home town in the present day with characters who share your background and life experiences is playing on easy mode. (There’s nothing wrong with playing on easy mode. In fact, until your skill level increases, I recommend it.) Writing a story set in the 12th century on a different continent with characters who are nothing like you? That’s a lot harder. And will require a lot more effort, and care, and research. If you go about it carelessly, you’re bound to get things wrong, and the story won’t be very good.

This also applies to writing characters of color as a white person. Especially as a white person who has little to no interactions with people of color in your daily life.

You wouldn’t assume “well, 12th century South Africa is basically the same as present-day Europe,” right? Even if you don’t know how exactly it’s different, you assume the differences exist, and you put in the care and effort and research necessary to learn about them before writing. Similarly, don’t assume writing characters of color is basically the same as writing white characters. You might not understand what the differences are, but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist. It just means you can’t see them, and need to put in the work to learn about them.This is why you need to write your characters of color with more care than your white characters. It’s because there’s more that you don’t know, and it will be more difficult to get it right.

Authors of color aren’t exempt from this, by the way. Whenever we write characters whose background we don’t share and aren’t intimately familiar with, we need to put in more care than we would writing about characters who are just like us. It’s a question of competency. You have to be aware of what you don’t know, and be willing to put in the work to learn, in order to do right by your characters.

People and Culture

Lastly, I want to draw your attention to this sentence in your ask: “I’m just talking about writing POC characters on their own, not related to a culture or a religion.” You said yourself that you realized as you were writing it there might be something wrong with this way of thinking, and you were right. Nobody exists outside of culture. Unless you’re writing characters who got their memories wiped before getting dropped on an isolated, uninhabited planet, they have a culture. They have been immersed in culture since the day they were born, and that has shaped who they are. You have a culture that has shaped you, and if you don’t think about it as culture, it’s because you’re so immersed in it that it’s invisible to you. And so you assume your cultural background is just what “normal” is, and you expect everyone to share it by default. Anything that deviates from it sticks out to you as “culture”, while everything that aligns itself with it is just the way things are. This is flawed thinking, and you only start realizing it when you become exposed to other people’s “normal” and notice how those are different from yours.

- Mod Niki

Historical Context for Colorblindness

A little background on colorblindness: It’s a deeply ingrained philosophy in Western spheres that emerged over the latter half of the 20th Century, with the Civil Rights Movement in the US and other activist movements providing a push to view people equally. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King’s quote from his I Have A Dream speech, “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character,” is a major backbone of the approach. Most of the people that preach this philosophy tend to have grown up in white-majority suburban areas, which shapes the culture surrounding race very differently from non-white majority areas.

From a racial-ethnic socialization (R-ES) standpoint, it typically emerges in children aged 2-5, as this is when they first start encountering children who look different from them–their parents tell them to treat everyone nicely and that it doesn’t matter what they look like. Psychologically, it changes attitudes towards race and reduces general capability of understanding the differences in experience based on race, like Lesya said before. Many adolescents discovering their own opinions on race can run into this barrier when confronting their biases and struggle with their conception of race in the absence of encouraged discussion of race and its related issues.

Internal Bias Because of Colorblindness

Racial Colorblindness can limit understanding of intersectional issues such as wealth inequality, sexism, queerphobia, etc., as race affects every part of a person’s life. One’s ability to empathize on common issues can also be affected. This approach to socialization affects perception of facets of identity in most respects. Many believe that they judge entirely based on merit or behavior, even when their unconscious bias proves otherwise.

Even though it’s really only been super widespread since the 60s/70s-ish, it’s everywhere in Western media. After the popularization of the approach, the representation of various groups and the messaging spread about race began to reflect it. This continued to the point where it’s being socialized into people of all races beyond the normal parental racial-ethnic socialization. It can affect how children of color approach racism and discrimination before learning coping skills. It can lead to isolation from their culture of origin because they struggle to reconcile the very real issues they see in their communities with their upbringing. In recent years the approach has started to fade, but its legacy remains, and the ill effects can be combated through education and extended R-ES. 

Writing characters with a colorblind eye means that character is probably not going to reflect actual experiences, and if the goal is representation, that isn’t going to cut it. 

 ~ Mod Abhaya

Published Nov 2021

@paulinainbookland​ said:

Hi!My question is pertaining to my upcoming YA contemporary fantasy series that’s gonna be modern retellings of certain greek myths. The series takes place in a fictional fantasy country called Olympius. I want my series to be diverse, especially with the characters. For example, even though race doesn’t technically exist, Hera is portrayed as an Indian woman, Hecate as an east asian woman, Amphitrite as a polynesian/tahitian woman while Persephone, Psyxhe, Demeter, and Aphrodite are all black as examples. I also want to integrate Greek culture into the stories. My question is, can this be done even with racially diverse characters??

I think a better way to think about this question is to ask yourself “Who were the Ancient Greeks?” Research the histories and economies of those city-states and empires, as well as the other civilizations they would have interacted with in the Mediterranean, Central Asia and South Asia. I notice that you are mixing racial coding with nationality and ethnicity, which I advise against.

• There was no “India” 2500 years ago.
  
• Tahiti similarly wasn’t inhabited until the 11th century

Ask yourself what kind of people you are picturing when you use these descriptors and why? Thus, your problem is twofold:

1. Shedding notions conflating race with ethnicity and nationality
2. Doing actual research to better understand what level of diversity in physical appearance one could reasonably expect for a setting where the Olympus of Ancient Greece is transposed onto a modern setting.

- Marika.

@allmycolorsforyou​ submitted:

Hello! Thank you so much for your work here! So, I’ve read the posts in the fantasy tag, but I’d like to tell you about my plot just to make sure there isn’t anything wrong I’m not seeing. The fantasy setting of my books is totally inspired by Brazil’s culture, vegetation, mixed races, etc. My main characters are 3 girls and a boy and they’re on a journey together. They’re the same species (fae) but represent different types of people (brazilian japanese, brazilian polish, afro brazilian and a mixed race like European + Afro + Natives). The setting is a whole new world (a throne of glass diverse and gay, if you will) and nothing in particular about their origin culture will take place in the story bc the land is an extremely diverse place like Brazil so their culture is the result of many mixed ones. I’m not giving them Asian or Afro ou Native names bc there’s no Japan ou Africa ou Brazil. The enemy are humans who come in all shapes and races and an evil monster whose personification is… not figured out yet but for sure it’s not human. It may or may not possess humans along the way but I guess I just have to make sure he takes people from different races?

Overarching Notes on the Premise: 

This is a piece of information for you to look at further, and the first thing that I pinged about this ask: you’ve picked inspiration from a pro-colonial, pro-assimilation work, from an author who has some deeply misogynistic themes in her other books. Throne of Glass (and subsequent books) contains lines about how it’s fine that a single person rules the world with near-absolute power so long as they’re nice about it, and has pro-assimilation undertones the minute a brown person steps on the page ¼ into book one. It’s subtle, but by having a brown person want to learn the ways of her colonizer to maybe overthrow him, all the while being shocked the MC knows her language and treating the MC as special for it, was enough that it pinged a red flag for me; I was proven right in later books. Meanwhile, the Court series has all sorts of abusive men acting out of “love”, and sacrifices character development for the sake of m/f romantic pairings.

This isn’t to say a work inspired by such a setting can’t be good, but to illustrate some problems you might’ve missed when taking inspiration from it. The issues run way deeper than “it’s mostly white straight people.”

On “Diversity”

Diversity is much, much more than having characters of colour described in ways that shows they have not-white features and not-European customs. Similarly, crafting a diverse fantasy country/culture is much, much more work than simply copy/pasting modern cultural dynamics into a fantasy setting and handwaving the history to say “and stuff happened to create this.”

Modern (and historical) diversity came as a result of trade, cultural diffusion among neighbouring but different groups, migration, immigration, war, and colonialism.

You can’t approach fantasy diversity without at least some of those factors. It will ring so unrealistic it will pull the vast majority of your readers out of the story (especially your marginalized ones).

Culture (and things like skin tone) are determined by the natural world, history, and outside cultures rubbing (or smashing) against each other. No single culture exists in a vacuum, which means fantasy cultures cannot exist in a vacuum.

People had wars. People traded. People married. People decided to move across a continent and settle there because they liked the weather better. Countries took over other territories, stole stuff, traded stuff, had wars, had peace treaties, looked over the fence and went “and we’re gonna change it just enough so it’s firmly ours but anyone who looks at the two side by side can see they’re influenced by the other.” Nobility would marry from a trade ally and then those two cultures would intermingle.

This is just people being people. You can get some fantastic cultures out of these scenarios, but they come with the ever-present reminder that no one place creates a single culture.

Ergo, your basic assumption that a single landmass without external cultures can create Brazil—diverse, multicultural Brazil—is false. You need external cultures to engage with your primarily shown culture, because Brazil did not create itself; it is the product of its history, and that history includes the rest of the world.

Brazil’s History

Brazil in its modern form was created via colonialism. Sad, but true.

“Basic” Brazilian culture is going to be influenced by slavery, Indigenous peoples, Portugal, and the fact most of these peoples settled in a continental rainforest when they’re (usually) not from one. It has deep roots in the African diaspora, was shaped from the top by the biggest slave trading nation in the period looking to maximize profit (look up how many crops got introduced to the region for trading ends), and by all of these people either killing off, enslaving, or working with the Indigenous peoples of the rainforest to either make space, or survive.

And even just among the Indigenous peoples, there were probably over two thousand of them, Pre-Columbus. Brazil is now down to a couple hundred, but there could be more because of how many uncontacted people there are in the Amazon.

Once you get beyond the colonialism, then you get into immigration. Japanese-Brazillian people are primarily from Okinawa, and are the result of Okinawan customs getting modified for the non-island setting, plus bumping into general Brazilian culture. Polish people will have a similar sort of tug of war: their customs probably got modified to account for living in a totally different environment with wildly different resources available.

This, as you can see, did not happen by accident. This was a set of very deliberate choices by outsiders, those choices eventually creating the Brazil we know today. 

You don’t have to go recreating the exact climate of colonialism to get to something that looks like modern Brazil (and, please don’t, your Afro-Brazilian and Indigenous readers will thank you for it), but you do need outsiders. 

I’m going to nitpick on the names here: it really doesn’t feel good to read that you want to recreate known cultural diversity, but don’t want to give people culturally-accurate names. Names are not only a good way to code characters as being from a certain culture, but names are often what diaspora populations cling to as reminders of where they came from. 

By flattening everything into a general concept of “everyone is Brazilian and comes from here because I say so”, what you end up doing is picking up the pro-assimilationist stitch I mentioned is present in Throne of Glass. 

Part of respecting diversity is acknowledging people might not’ve always lived here, but they’ve now made this place home and are making the best of it. This is especially true for those who were on the disenfranchised side of the colonialism power dynamic. (With colonizers, part of respecting diversity is having them stop being in power and give power back to those who they disenfranchised). 

So look at what made all these populations end up in Brazil, and see how you’re going to modify that (or copy it) to get all of these diverse people in the same place. Brazil has a great potential for internal diversity, yes, it had two thousand unique Indigenous nations, but it won’t create customs that had been codified on an island nation, like Okinawa, because it isn’t an island. It won’t create a people who had spent centuries living in primarily savannah and modified customs from there to a rainforest, like West African peoples.

And even the concept Brazil would only create people who lived in a rainforest, uninfluenced by the mountains or the coast or deserts, is ahistorical, because peoples would share borders, and trade, and talk, and marry, and spread ideas around. Rainforest peoples were influenced by mountain and desert people, because ideas spread from the mountains and the desert. And those peoples were influenced by Polynesians, sailing across the pacific. 

If you want advice on how to properly code people as being from different fantasy countries, check out my guide: Representing PoC in Fantasy When Their Country Doesn’t Exist

The Villain

Trying to diversify your villains is a hard thing to juggle, because most villains are already pretty diverse. That’s what was said to make them villains: the fact they weren’t white, straight, cis, and/or abled.

It’s why villains have darker skin and clothing. It’s why they’re usually theatrical and flamboyant and gender non conforming. It’s why they often have canes. These deviations away from “white upper class sound-minded physically fit people performing expected gender roles” were the subconscious clues to the audience we shouldn’t like them. 

Even if you only take villains that match the same race as your protagonists, you can still end up with problems like colourism (the system of oppression that makes paler skin within PoC groups more desirable), or a sort of bias that makes you describe the villains as just that little bit more not-white than the protagonists. 

Without skin tone as a factor, most villainous shorthands are still some sort of marginalized group: smaller eyes are stereotyped as an East Asian trait, large noses can be Jewish or Arab, dark curly hair can be Jewish or African, the list goes on. Anything that isn’t pale skin, average-sized eyes, a European nose, rosey cheeks, and blond or medium brown hair has probably been used as a villain shorthand to invoke some sort of marginalized group.

There is also the tricky topic of mixed race or mixed culture vs mono-culture/ race people. You haven’t specified any of your villains’ ethnicities and it doesn’t look like you’ve even picked them, but let me give a warning: mixed people are fetishized, and are often put on a pedestal above mono-racial people; alternatively, mixed people are demonized, and are seen as far lesser on account of being mixed. Which it is often depends on the cultural context of the society, and what ethnicities the mixed-race person’s parents are.

Ex: in societies where colourism is prevalent, a child with a darker skin tone is often going to be seen as lesser. Genetics are roulette so being mixed race does not automatically determine what your skin tone will be, but if you end up with two siblings and one is notably darker, the darker skinned parent will often be blamed for it. This often goes into what marriages are approved or disproved, out of fear that the child will end up falling on the “wrong” side of the colourism spectrum.

I’m not mixed in such a way that’s weaponized so I can’t speak to it, but I am just putting a note that this exists. 

It is more than possible to have your villains be people of colour. But if you do that, then make sure they’re not the only member of that group, and make sure the villains are described in such a way that their villainy isn’t emphasized by features white people are seen as not having.

Also, the fact they are possessed can have some very unfortunate implications, either in the form of “these people are weak minded, [insert race trying to paint itself as superior here] would NEVER”, and/or in the form of effectively forcing a colonized people to act as a colonizer.

Which leads me to:

Fae vs. humans… or, “colonialism shorthand”

As the title says. Fae vs humans where humans are trying to invade fae lands is one of the easiest, quickest, and generally most obvious parallels to colonialism you can have. This goes double if you have a particularly forest-y setting, since most people assume North America was “untamed wilderness” before Europeans came and Indigenous people exclusively lived amongst the trees that were haphazardly planted.

Toss in the fact that the culture you’re basing this society off of was heavily influenced by colonized peoples, and the villains of this nation in real life are going to be white. This adds another aspect to “it can be really hard to write PoC villains”: the wrong angle, and you can absolutely paint victims of colonialism as just as bad as the colonizers, when this is not true.

Power dynamics are an important thing to consider, when writing villains. Because a lot of times, most villains are able to be villains because they are dominant in some way. Once you start to have villains be “marginalized people trying to do something to either fight structural inequality or get justice in a system that failed them or escape the system that failed them”, you are punching down. Hard.

So when you look at this spirit, ask yourself: what goals does it have for possessing someone marginalized? Will it be able to accomplish anything this way? Or will it get much farther by taking someone from a dominant culture and possessing them, instead?

The thing about Fae is, they’re already kind of… associated with Indigenous peoples. They have nature magic. They’re often akin to elves in terms of old guardians of the forest, especially in modern fantasy, and elves are heavily Indigenous coded.

On top of that, you’re making your fae analogous to a whole bunch of Indigenous groups (Indigenous Brazilians, Afro-Brazilians) and colonized people (Okinawan)—which makes the parallels more intense. Even if you make it that your Japanese-Brazilians are Yamato Japanese… you then make a colonizer (within Asia) into an Indigenous analogue. It’s going to be tricky.

It’s more than possible to handle this tactfully, but you first need to be aware of the power dynamics that come built into such a plot. The fact you did not indicate anything about the power dynamics on the humans’ side and were instead focused on adding in as many characters of colour as possible tells me that you aren’t aware of these dynamics.

They absolutely need addressing before you can write such a plot or a villain respectfully.

Overall

I think you need to solidly analyze the influences on your work, your goals, and the dynamics at play. Because right now, I’m seeing a huge emphasis on simply wanting to toss in a whole bunch of different skin tones and facial features and “cultures” into a single place, without actually putting in the work to make something realistic or representative of any given peoples except majority Brazilians. 

You’re at a huge risk of punching down in multiple locations, especially in regard to your human characters. Even with your fae, you could very easily wind up disrespecting the people you want to represent, because you are overtly erasing their homelands and not even giving them a name to signal where they came from. 

Diversity is way more than tossing in a bunch of cultures and physical features into a fantasy world. Diversity means representing people, including their immigration status. It’s not a checklist of “oh I should have these people here because then I’m showing I know humans come in different skin tones”. That is how you get tokenism. 

That’s also how you get assimilationist homogeneity, where everything gets shoved into a single culture that’s assumed to just… be this way, without outside influences. It really doesn’t feel good to have your cultural history stripped away because of wanting to show one culture as just being so special that it produced your culture from itself—when it couldn’t have.

This is on top of the fact you’re basically taking a diversity paintbrush to a very assimilationist and pro-colonial work, which is something that seems to have carried over in your worldbuilding. You’re so focused on simply trying to diversify a work with mostly white people that you haven’t asked: could this plot even work with racial diversity at play?

Because the thing about plots where you take down colonialism is: they don’t work unless you use pre-established colonial forces as the villains. And when you’re talking Brazil, those historical villains were primarily the Portugese, who are white.

Diversity isn’t as simple as this.

Your work should reflect that.

~Mod Lesya

Race and Mixed-Ness

It’s unclear to me based on your description whether your Japanese-Brazilian coded character and Polish-Brazilian coded character are monoracial or mixed. It’s strange to me that your last mixed race person is described as “a mixed race like European + Afro + Natives.” Did you mean to describe a Pardo Brazilian and fail to research/locate the appropriate terminology? And furthermore, why is that character described in racial terms and the other two in national terms? 

The reason this ambiguity is an issue is this: what does Brazilian-Japanese look like, racially? The answer: ANYTHING! Brazil/Japan/Poland/etc. is just a designation for a nation-state drawn on colonial borders. It says nothing about how, specifically, its people should look; to suggest that it does is ethnonationalist. 

Following the assumption that your fae are mixed, Mod Lesya is also right about the potential glorification of mixed-ness. I, on the other hand, am the kind of mixed that, in one majority culture, is considered inherently “cooler.” It’s an awkward feeling to know that when passerby explicitly connect my double eyelids or English-ing Good to being hafu, my identity is being leveraged to further some kind of agenda (eg. westernization, pushing of homogeneity through Othering) Don’t make your mixed people part of an agenda, even if you think it’s a well-meaning one (eg. diversity, progress, etc.). 

~Mod Rina

Further Recommendations

I think it’s possible to write a highly mixed race neutral world (e.g. Earthsea Universe, Broken Earth). Ursula LeGuin and N.K. Jemisin have both written extensively on the conscious narrative choices they took for how to handle the issue of race in a manner that subverts notions of racism, but nevertheless draws attention to the variation in human appearance for their characters. To paraphrase another favorite fantasy author of mine: Don’t hesitate to steal from those more talented than you. That said, I agree with Lesya. You can’t code a country like Brazil, where the very fabric of the culture is so interwoven with race relations, colonialism and imperialism, and create a race neutral society without removing lots of what makes Brazil “Brazil.” You are better off using a diverse civilization that existed prior to the onset of race-based imperialism and colonization.

-Marika.

strawbebebby asked:

What are some harmful stereotypes to avoid when writing Vietnamese characters?

Two specifics are Vietnamese names as a whole (see our Hai Chen post with additions from Vietnamese readers) + “Asia is just China/Japan/Korea”. Nothing specifically about Vietnamese people comes to mind, but input from our Vietnamese community would be great. 

Also not necessarily a stereotype about Vietnamese culture, but the mish-mash of Southeast Asia into one monolith in a lot of Western media definitely pertains to Vietnamese representation that I’ve seen! That’s one thing that’s been bugging me with cough a certain animated film released this year cough.

~ Mod Em

Vietnamese followers, feel free to chime in.