Mentallyamoth asks:

CW: war, genocide, colonization

Hello, I am currently writing a book in a fantasy world setting centering a Lakota-inspired main character. In this world, the magic that you develop depends on your religious beliefs. A long time ago, two large groups with two different religious beliefs silmutaniously decided that their religion was the right one and that they had to convince everyone of it. They colonized smaller groups, fought each other and killed all those who wouldn’t give up their beliefs. Now fast forward, my main character is part of one of these colonised groups, living in a city full of the colonizers. 

She secretly still believes in her religion, which is Lakota inspired, but knows that openly trying to resist the system will kill her and everyone important to her. So, instead, her goal is to become the first one of the once colonized people to earn respect, power and success for herself and her people. She believes that will be enough to undo the injustice done since she’s been fed with propaganda that the war and genocide “wasn’t so bad”. 

She then finds out that there is still people who resist the system, living in secret and preparing for a war. Yet she doesn’t believe that they can do any change and instead originally plans on ratting them out in order to cast a good light on her and her family. Throughout the story, she slowly learns more about what truly happened to her people and decides that she wants to challenge the system she had always been told was the “right one”. In the end, she helps build a society where people respect each other and each others beliefs.

Now, I am a white author and neither me nor my ancestors have experienced religious colonization. However, the topic of religion and the harm it can do, while still being something beautiful and empowering, is very important to me. Still, I don’t want to profit off of other people’s suffering and know that (religious) colonization is a very sensitive topic.

Would it be possible for me to write this story if I do enough research, and if yes, what are some things I have to pay attention to?

—

Let me begin this reply with the story of a real life person: Jody Wilson-Raybould. She was Canada’s first Indigenous Minister of Justice and Attorney General. She joined politics specifically to change the colonialist Canadian society, as an idealist. 

Jody Wilson-Raybould. Photo by Erich Saide. image description: a dark haired, dark eyed woman with tan skin and a polite toothy smile, wearing a black blazer and red blouse

She was actually starting from a better position to change society than your protagonist—her grandmother persevered to maintain tribal governance, and her father was a hereditary chief. She was taught Indigenous leadership from birth, she grew up navigating the worlds of Indigenous and colonizer, and she wanted to be a lawyer, then prime minister.

It took fourteen years of lawyer positions, tribal counsel positions, and volunteer work for her to gain a seat in politics for the Liberal party. The next year, fifteen years after the start of her career in political positions, she was made the Minister of Justice, the third woman and first Indigenous person to hold the role. She accomplished some things in her tenure. She tried to change Indigenous rights, to make them better, but whether or not she succeeded is highly up for debate. She updated women’s rights and children’s rights. She passed cannabis legalization. She also passed MAiD legalization.

Under her tenure, a white man was acquitted by an all-white jury for murdering a Cree boy on his property in Saskatchewan, and people said she undermined the justice system by openly questioning the jury’s verdict on twitter. She had no power to change a Saskatchewan community with a deeply racist legacy.

Four years after she was made minister of justice, she was demoted to veterans’ affairs—likely because she pushed for reconciliation, and to change the colonial system. She was loud, and bold, and demanding, and she lost power for it. She openly called the inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women a farce.

Weeks later, she resigned when there was speculation Justin Trudeau had pressured her to rule one way or another when she was attorney general. She ran as an independent for a bit, but seems to have quit politics since. Burned out, chewed up, writes books about this time in her life and tries other avenues. She’s basically disappeared from Canadian pop culture life, unless you happen to be very interested in this sector of the country’s culture. I don’t know how many Canadians could tell you anything that’s changed for them, unless they directly interacted with her laws—and I don’t know if they even know those changes came from her. 

I tell you this story because here is a real life woman in a significantly better position than your protagonist. She had every single thing going for her, to create something. To change something. To create a middle ground society. And the system ground her down to the point she quit and functionally disappeared.

Indigenous communities are extremely divided on her, some saying she did good, others saying she’s a colonial shill who’s working far too much in the system to ever get land back. Either way, the main relevant thing for you to know is she failed.

The most fantastical part of the story you’re proposing is the fact there is implied success. That there is implied speed. But people like your protagonist exist in the real world. They are lauded and they are slandered. They move the needle slightly, sometimes in good directions, sometimes in bad. But one of the most universal constants in all of them is they fail at producing drastic cultural change. There is too much work to undo colonialism by a single person.

Now, if you read this and think “okay, so I’ll scale back the idealism”, I would invite you to keep reading. Because you’re going to need to fundamentally change multiple parts of this in order to write a respectful story.

1- half of a reclamation character arc

I think this is where the plot falls down the most. Because you jump from “learning everything is a lie” to “and now things are rebuilding and I’m free”, which is how a lot of people think it goes—especially if they haven’t experienced religious colonialism and deconstruction work. 

You basically have the first half of a character arc here, and it’s a perfectly fine first half… until it goes into an altruistic dream instead of really sitting with repercussions.

What I feel like is missing is simple: what is she grieving?

The grief of growing up in a colonial system is staggering. Not just your life, but your parents’ lives, your community’s lives, the pieces of broken chain and disconnect you can see. 

One of my steadfast beliefs is that people need a culture that connects them to something. They have traditions, they have food, they make things, they steward things. They feel ownership over taking care of their families, their property, their community, their everything. 

To me, the root of colonialism is it strips you of that and replaces it with itself, leaving your world a hollowed out shell either fighting to get something, or numbing to stop the pain. It’s traumatic. It is nothing short of traumatic, and that trauma lives in your bloodline as pain. Abuse, addiction, and a disconnect from emotions because you don’t have anything to teach you how to process the world around you, anymore, with these external systems.

This has created breaks in chains that had survived for ages before, and the amount of chain you retain depends on where you landed after it was cut. Someone who lives on a reservation on ancestral land, who returned to the reservation after residential schools, and who has done reconstruction work and knows the language and rituals and crafts and food stewardship and survival strategies has a lot of chain. Someone like me, whose great grandfather left everything to try and become white, hardly has anything. I need to manually go and learn everything from scratch. A bunch of people are in the middle, for varying reasons with varying bits and pieces of what used to be.

The arc right now is the arc I see mirrored in dozens and dozens of asks: I have learned about injustice, and I will gain power to “fix” it. I will be Good. I will Inspire. Things Will Be Better.

Where is the healing? Where is the grief? Where is the time spent unpacking everything and learning to not be bowled over every time you’re reminded of something that was awful because people decided you were sub-human, all because of an idea and a god that told them it was okay to kill everything you loved?

When looking at this character and plot, there’s no real… understanding, on a narrative level, that this colonial system replaced something. It’s treating her secretly practicing magic as enough, when it’s not. She lost so much more than just magic, and she’s only managed to retain the smallest part of her ancestral way of life.

She’s also kinda recreating colonialism by trying to make a new, better thing to replace the present with, instead of reaching back to the broken chain and seeing what parts of it can be pulled into the future. She’s not doing anything to make space for other colonized groups to do the same, as well. It just… ends. With an unrealistic ideal, and a neat little bow that it’s simply realization of lies and injustice that’s enough to get your life back. It’s not.

We can’t go back to the “old ways”, no—the chain is cut, the land has been depleted by extractive processes, the people are traumatized. We do need a new system. But in the end, it’s just as colonial to go full replacement all over again. We need a set of systems informed by the past, before the chains were cut, that lets those colonized become whole again in a way that fits each and every one of them.

What parts of the chain does she hold, beyond magic? What does she want to grab that belonged to her that was stolen generations ago? How will she make space for that? What is fundamentally incompatible with the way the system is now, and what trade-offs will she make to get what she wants? Will what she wants change as she discovers there was an old way, or will she give up connecting fully to her history in the name of trying to move the needle?

I will caution you, however, this sort of story is getting extremely, extremely close to an identity story, and reclamation narratives are fraught in the best of times. I would not make your MC bipoc in this scenario at all, but instead an accomplice to help get the story out and move the needle. I’m simply explaining this in detail for you to understand why this narrative does not land.

2- you’re using a closed practice

Having a magic system implies that it will be used within the story, and will be a plot point. Either way, I’d assume her magic would be described, somehow, and your end goal would be to have it shown in its full Indigenous glory.

This is not going to be possible.

Keep reading

Anonymous asks:

I am working on a scifi dystopian story. In which musical artists are also turned into human weapons by the military to be used in an intergalactic war as part of their record deal, artists often being given or crafting elaborate stage personas to playone artist is a Black female rapper(L). Her stage persona is an unfeeling cyborg.
I want to use this zany premise to explore the dehumanization and exploitation popular artists face from both the public and the industry.

With L(and others) i wanted to address how BIPOC artists particularly are more often victims of this and in ways different to what white artists experience, L has more cybernetics installed by top brass and is caged by a persona that paints her as unfeeling/“more machine than person” despite how at odds it is with reality and L pushing back against it. A persona crafted by her record label so as to play to the harmful idea Black people feel less pain.

My main concern is that by making it so this character has more weaponry installed in her body then other artists it is unintentionally falling into the trope of Black characters being “stronger” or more “dangerous".

Would making it so all music artists have the same amount of cybernetics help alleviate this issue?(highlighting the choice made by the label to assign this kind of persona to her specifically when all artists have these modifications done to them as being a choice rooted in bigotry and the idea of the strong Black woman trope) or is there more that could be done.

Your story is the social commentary - so lean into it

Is “ making it so this character has more weaponry installed in her body then other artists unintentionally falling into the trope of black characters being “stronger” or more “dangerous"?

Yes…but let’s go back to the word unintentionally. Are you sure it is unintentional of you? Isn’t it your whole point to be intentional about this?

You seem fully aware of the oppressive aspects of what is happening to these characters, and I understand hope to address them directly and make a social commentary. 

So is this not an intentional choice from you and regarding all of the other stereotypical characterization (Strong, unfeeling, dangerous etc.)? 

And do you plan on addressing this in your story and the exploitation that is occurring to your Black cyborg woman character?

Because you must for this to work.

Everything about her existence seems to be social commentary. A story like this, with a character like this, must engage with and acknowledge the racist tropes, stereotypes and storyline being inflicted on your Black character (and any other BIPOC in the story). 

You say you want to explore the dehumanization and exploitation of your characters, so do that. And do it boldly.

Ensure there is the narrative that this is abnormal, oppressive and wrong. 

Of course, there is the side that paints this all as natural and just fine, such as the government, but there should be a strong opposing side (that carries your voice) running through this novel. 

The Hunger Games for example

Think of The Hunger Games series by Suzanne Collins.

While people are fearing for their lives, the whole premise of children fighting to the death is wrong, and we feel that from Katniss, Peeta, and the other major characters. Reading the novel, we experience contrasting opinions, acceptance and resistance, but empathize with the cause for justice and freedom.

The Hunger Games, people of the Capitol 

Then you have the villains of the novel, the “neutrals” and complicit. For instance, the elites in the capitol, the sponsors, game makers. Some people had sinister motivations; authority, power, greed, ratings! Hate. Some cared only for the drama and romance, and painted real peoples’ lives as entertainment. And lo and behond, marketing for THG movies did the same thing!

Moviespheregold: Team Peeta or Team Gale?

But you do not just get one narrative that paints the games as acceptable. Through your characters, readers can see the truth for themselves – the injustice of it all which the author wants you to see and feel.

The Hunger Games has some parallel to your story topics, particularly on propaganda and weaponization of human bodies. One might say Katniss is used in a similar way. There are even deeper layers here when you consider that Katniss may be Native American coded (based on books).

Another aspect that may help your story to consider

Rina adds:

One of the biggest principal themes Suzanne Collins focused on was the power of televised entertainment to drive state propaganda & complicity in the regime—Katniss’s body is distorted and disguised through the cosmetics and costumes to tell a narrative the Capitol wants to tell, and then again her image is remade into that of a soldier and her disfigurement exploited by District 13 to recruit soldiers in the war they intend to win for themselves.

Research more and read to study

I urge you to:

• Research even more into what goes into writing a dystopian novel with strong social anti-racist, anti-oppression commentary. I know you’ve done some reading, but I’d advise reading even more from a point of studying the craft.
• Read well-written dystopian novels for how to give this social commentary in your narrative. I have not read enough dystopian books, at the time of this post, to recommend much, so I’m going to leave it to some of our excellent mods (and you readers) to give your relevant recommendations!
• See recommendations near the end of this post.
• Know your history. Delve into some more research. At the very least, these quite dystopian things that are happening in your dystopia are unfortunately just reality. History. 

“When I wrote The Handmaid’s Tale, nothing went into it that had not happened in real life somewhere at some time. The reason I made that rule is that I didn’t want anybody saying, ‘You certainly have an evil imagination, you made up all these bad things.’ I didn’t make them up.”
- Margaret Atwood

As for L, your “unfeeling” Black cyborg

Show the humanity in this cyborg character. There should be a chink in the armor, a crack in the picture of her being unfeeling. Perhaps a depth to the rap where there is allegedly “not supposed” to be. 

Research the history of rap and hip-hop and you’ll know how on-point it would be to use her music as revolutionary in the opposite direction that the government wants to use it.

Give us some contrast, some clear defiance of the stereotypes.

It’s important that your story is bold with the fact that your Black cyborg is an embodiment of racism and oppression. She is assigned this false stereotypical, oppressive narrative. It’s not meant to speak of a truth of these traits simply being a fitting role for a Black woman.

Another important note: Black people, especially women, have been leading social movements for change and liberation from the beginning. Black women leading the change, and in your case, your Black woman cyborg, fuels another social commentary of us being the mules for the world, doing the revolutionary work. This is something else for you to recognize as you write.

~Mod Colette

A veteran’s perspective

I can comment with an auxiliary perspective as a veteran and artist (writer). You’re also tapping something interesting with the idea of the military using BIPOC bodies to advance their agenda at the expense of the individual service members. Historically, while many service members got hazed and experimented on, BIPOC service members were far more likely to suffer these abuses, and to a much greater extent. 

The American intelligence apparatus also has a history of using artists to their advantage – The CIA even created American LiteratureMFAs as a means of peddling American soft power. 

-Mod Melanie

Recommended reading

Keep reading

Anonymous asks:

The Incas were pretty brutal imperialists themselves, on the level of Romans and Mongols. I’m 1/16th Maidu (The rest is Asian), and I’ve started plotting out a story about something akin to an indigenous Spartacus. The first book is about establishing the brutality the conquered peoples endure under Inca rule, the introduction of Spanish newcomers who may be able to help them throw off the Incas, and the beginning of the rebellion.

At the end, most of the rebels are killed, and the remaining flee to the Spanish for help. In the second book, the rebels and the Spanish work together to free the conquered tribes from the Incas, who, realizing that their empire is crumbling, tighten their stranglehold on their empire. In the third book, the Spaniards reveal their true colors, and now the tribes have to band together with the Incas to drive the Spanish out, and end up succeeding.

Since the rebels are allied with the Spanish in the first two books and the Incas are presented as brutal imperialists, how do I avoid coming off like I support the Spanish conquest, and how can I realistically and sensitively portray a group of people having to ally with the remains of the empire that had once subjugated them?I’ve done foreshadowing, I’ve shown the Spanish only helping the rebels because they get to help themelves to Inca gold in the process, and it takes a long time and a lot of work for the Incas to gain the trust of the other tribes when the time comes to kick out the Spanish.

A Matter of Craft (Narrative Framing and Plot)

Melanie will get into this more, but I just want to touch on the absolute utmost importance of how you frame dissent within working with the Spanish, and how you treat a plurality of opinions within the group of characters the protagonists interact with. You might also have to genre blend, pulling more from psychological horror so you can get a better vibe.

Because you’re going to want dissent, and you’re going to want to have a wide variety of opinions. One of the ways I can flag an author’s politics is how they handle differing opinions around a topic, because in a pro-colonial work, those dissenting opinions would be squashed out and everything would be fantastic and the protagonists would end up as allies of the Spanish and be “the good ones”, rewarded for their loyalty because that’s a massive fantasy for why people align with fascism.

However, you can foreshadow this really well by having those who dissent not be punished, narratively. They might be disagreed with in the story, but the narrative doesn’t punish them for having that dissenting opinion. By this I mean: have them not be killed, have the group not cast them out, have them be right and become an important figure later. 

I’d worry about making a character too much of a Cassandra, where everything they said came true but nobody believed them—but instead, really, really dig into how they might come to the wrong conclusion but be really close to the answer, or how their dissent will be handled in a way that allows for a psychological thriller bent where something is wrong, people notice, but it’s not going to get validated right away. 

Them not being directly on the nose and figuring out how they’d come to the conclusion is going to go a long way to make the book better, and to have those who understand the optics to see things.

Playing up the fear and terror and relief might also get you much farther, because by painting everyone as desperate, you end up in a humanized scenario where they are more willing to compromise morals they would’ve had if it wasn’t for the Inca. No teachings are followed perfectly, and it takes a lot to break people down, but people can definitely be broken. This also sets up a sort of reverting to morals once they’re out from under the Inca, where they’re safe from the old threat but… oops, new threat that they invited in.

On the Spanish side, I’d suggest a combination of “boiling the frog” and a certain extremism when it comes to what they expect in return. Because the Spanish won’t simply help. They’ll demand payment, and likely slaves themselves, and sure at first it seems like the necessary cost for getting rid of the Inca… but. But. 

You could also play with the Catholicism of it all, because there’s so so so much religious backing to the Spanish, and the way that it breaks their Indigenous practices could also be a source of alarm bells. People could willingly convert, “willingly” convert, or distrust this new religion. I’ve heard it said that some people will always convert to the religion that is on the “winning” side, or more powerful side, because clearly that religion is working for them. Not all, but some.

You’re going to want to have exceptionally strong character work where everyone is human, sometimes right, sometimes wrong, and there is so much plurality in everything with massive respect to those who disagree. Those two factors are your best bets, prose-wise, to get somewhere.

Because you might really have to create a scenario where the unease slowly turns to terror, and treat the first two books like a psychological horror that strings readers along because you’ve established the Spanish as gaslighting, terrible, and to be defeated later. They’re not officially a psychological thriller, but the beats established with them are that of a psychological horror villain—we know they’re evil; it’s up to the characters to realize.

A Matter of Reputation (Building Audience Trust)

This is going to sound very strange, but I’d suggest reading the book I’m Glad My Mom Died by Jenette McCurdy and taking note of the “before” section. Jenette does a very good job of capturing the obliviousness of childhood under an abusive parent in such a way adults are recoiling in horror while the narration doesn’t overtly condemn it. Fullmetal Alchemist might also be a good piece of media to examine, for how the heroes in the story all work for a very obvious literal Nazi analogue.

These books have the advantages of either a title that gives away the conclusion—all of the positives Jenette has about her mom are not as positive as they look at the time, because we know the title—or characters who have contributed to war and are haunted by it so the leadership is thrown into question right away. Fullmetal Alchemist also has a benefit of not following active war criminals.

You sound like you don’t have either advantage, and that’s hard.

Let me get it out of the way first: optics and nuance are not something you can guarantee will make people interpret a book “correctly”. There are many people and places where nuance goes to die, and you cannot erase that. There will always be bad faith takes about this story, forever. 

All you can control is the quantity.

There are ways to do it better so that the people in your audience who are able to critically think will look at things and realize that you’re being kind to people who are against working with the Spanish. There’s making it that maybe they’re refusing to use Spanish tactics and focusing instead on doing what they want, while the Spanish keep pushing for things that enrichen themselves. Side-quests, so to speak, like “yes we’ll rescue your allies but do they have gold?”

This is really going to come down to craft, nuance, and being willing to face the fear of being misinterpreted in a world that is committed to bad faith racist takes. 

That being said, it might be best to not have this be your publishing debut, even if you’re going indie, because it will be extremely hard for that audience to trust a newcomer.

I’m reminded of Seanan McGuire openly refusing to tell a story her dedicated fans are clamouring for—a delayed trans realization, where the boy didn’t always know he was a boy and his story would open with she/her and a deadname—because the series that character lives in (Wayward Children) was a huge breakout for her and most of the fans of that series would not trust her to handle it. She’s now added that a cis writer doing that story might not be the best idea in the current climate.

You are going to need to think extremely hard on how to build audience trust—and that very well could be something you gain over multiple books unrelated to this series to establish a pattern where you do side with the marginalized, or it could be done by having multiply-marginalized people within the books themselves that you treat kindly, like those early stragglers who might’ve been hurt by the Spanish and instead of brushing them off completely, you hear them out and build the dread of those early warnings.

I’ve definitely had to think about this for some pricklier topics I want to tackle. Sometimes books just aren’t meant to be debuts, and that’s okay. You can build up a fanbase and have people understand your viewpoint before throwing them in the deep end.

-Leigh

Present various perspectives, nuance and opinions

I deeply agree with Leigh’s point about perspective – it’s easy to look at a conflict from a distance or in hindsight and say, these guys are the good guys, those guys are bad. But people are rarely that simple.

I’m the Latine mod, but I’m also a USMC veteran, and I invite you to consider this: in war and imperialism, relationships are complicated, and multiple conflicting truths can exist at once.

We know the U.S. military had no business in Afghanistan, and that the US military operates as an imperialistic force. Yet, at the same time, many Afghan people and U.S. service members became found family through their work together. Some U.S. service members committed war crimes. Some Afghan violent ideological extremists inflicted lateral violence on their own people during efforts to drive Americans out. Some Americans and Afghans thought we should be there. Some did not. None of this cancels the other thing out, it simply reflects the reality that within any group, there are different perspectives, motives, and actions.

Bringing that nuance and complicated diversity of opinion to your story will make it richer. No group, ethnic or otherwise, moves in perfect lockstep. Recognizing the complexity of human connection and the diversity of thought within the same group will go far to mitigate your concern. Good luck and happy writing!

-Melanie 🌻

@theparadigmshifts asks:

Hi, thank you for the work you do! I had a question about my story - one of my main characters, who’s Latino, works on his friend’s family’s dairy farm in Texas in the 70s. The friend is white, and it’s a small farm with about 50 cows, so it’s only him, his friend, and his friend’s father, plus some seasonal workers. The character and his friend end up falling in love, and I want to make sure I don’t play into stereotypes here. The character is not poor, but he is hardworking. He’s also gay.

There are a couple of other things at play - his friend offers him the job in the first place because it’s set during the Vietnam war, and if you worked on a farm you could possibly get a draft deferment. He could get more money working for his father, but he ends up staying on because he really enjoys the work. I do want to be careful with any sort of power dynamic here as well, though - he and his friend both work for his friend’s father, but obviously, one is the son and one is hired.

I’m not sure what your question is (#rubberstampapproved), but here are some thoughts on the premise. 

Latino man does farm labor to avoid war

This sounds like a great story, and I think you’ve steered clear of playing into stereotypes. Let’s explore what you shared:

Farm labor as an excuse to avoid Vietnam is a very compelling reason to volunteer to work on a farm, regardless of how hard the work is!

It sets up a valid motivation for the Latino-doing-hard-labor trope that otherwise is commonly unintentionally deployed and perpetuates negative stereotypes.

Also, when the Latino MC chooses to stay on, emphasizing his sense of agency and the things he enjoys about the work can mitigate some of that manual labor trope as well. 

The setting of Texas and having a mix of people around them like the seasonal workers and locals allows a good range of potential foils, and offers many opportunities to explore those power dynamics you mentioned. 

Consider cultural and gender dynamics

Additionally, consider cultural and gender dynamics around masculinity: If you’re writing queer characters in Texas in the 70’s, especially Latino queer characters, there will be more to be mindful of. I served in the Marines and my father and uncles have worked in different trades; the culture of masculinity around “hard labor jobs” like the military, trades, farm work, etc tends to trend towards straight passing “tough” appearances for better or worse.

It’s also worth noting that queer people can be, and often are, straight passing and thriving in these spaces - even if they do not announce it.

You may also want to consider Machismo culture, and how queer Latinos in spaces that center and celebrate straight-passing masculinity have to navigate that. Additionally, much of Latino culture is also heavily rooted in Catholicism from Spanish colonization, so that reinforces a culture of anti-queerness. These things may or may not factor into the MC’s relationship or development, but they are culturally significant enough to mention. 

Regardless of your focus, I think this is a fantastic setting and story premise and I’d love to hear back about the finished work. You did a great job setting up a story with lots of space for nuance and depth. Good luck! 

Melanie 🌻

[Note: this rubber stamp ask was submitted before the Masterpost rules took effect in 2023. We have chosen to publish it to prime our readers on Latine topics and tropes.]

Anonyomous asked:

Hi! I’m writing a story which is set in a fantasy version of our world. The main difference between our real world and my fictional version is that the spirits and fairies of each culture and folklore exist, and that the majority of them basically stop war from happening because they react very badly (and potentially violently) when invading forces etc try to start battles. 

I’m doing a lot of research into the histories of the various cultures that will be featured in the books set in this world so I can hypothesise how they might have developed without, for example, violent colonialism, and where trade and so on might have flourished in its place. However, it’s possible for colonialism to happen through more insidious ways, such as assimilation. In one of my books, I’m intending to use this as part of the plot, where Japan will try to colonise the Ryukyuan Kingdom through assimilation, but will be stopped by the Ryukyuan Kingdom making allies with other nations (amongst other tactics), but I was wondering if you had any advice for respectfully handling the colonialism that very much did happen in real life in a fantasy setting where it didn’t manage to occur, without erasing the history and ramifications etc of what actually happened?

Do fox spirits have citizenship? 

You mean well with this concept, but there are multiple key problems. 

One major issue with cordoning off spirits and folklore creatures by “patron” culture and have them fight said patrons’ battles is that there’s a lot of overlap. It’d be hard for there not to be a conflict of interest. 

For example, everyone knows about the kitsune fox spirit from Japan. But the story of the fox spirit was introduced to Japan and Korea by China, where they are called húlijīng. These foxes are remarkably similar, with their characteristics and stories almost borrowed wholesale. Are they all the same “species?” If so, when small differences emerge in the countries’ folktales, how do you resolve this? Do these spirits also morph and specialize, or does one interpretation win out? How about when kingdoms are unified, like the Korean Three Kingdoms–do separate versions of the kumiho reverse-evolve into a single variant? What side do they pick when these kingdoms and empires try to battle? If they live apart from humans or aren’t very friendly with them, why would they have a reason to care about invasions when they have no reason to be allegiant to said borders, or whatever name they’re called in whichever country whose land they live on?

Folkloric beings are never static, and are influenced over time by cultural shifts and exchanges, including shifting borders. Human history is stuffed cover-to-cover with events of what we called “conquest” then and “occupation” or “colonization” now. And through these changes, cultures diverged and came together, creating new stories. In other words: not even fairy tales are immune to colonization. 

Leigh can explain the rest. 

~ Rina

The Problem with Retconning War

A very simple question for you:

How are you going to rectify every single historical war that’s ever existed?

Like, the whole plot of the Trojan War as we know it is that the gods of the same culture were on different sides! And the gods made the war last as long as it did. Alexander the Great was a colonizer. Romans were definitely colonizers. Ottomans and Mongols, also colonizers. It wasn’t to the scale of modern colonialism, but it happened. If you look at census records from the 1800s of Indigenous populations in North America, you’ll find that the men 20+ have way lower numbers because they died in war! 

I’m not of the opinion that the basic state of humanity is war and we are barely contained by base instincts. But I’m also not so far in the other direction that I believe humans lack any sort of warring instincts. It shows up in chimps and other primates, so it shows up in humans.

In a way, it sounds like you’ve taken a very Christian-fundamentalist-centric view of things, which is: humans need religion to be “contained”. That humans are amoral without some sort of religion or folklore or spirits telling them to not do a “bad thing.”

This is ignoring how people have been using religion to justify wars since religion was invented. As Rina said, there can be overlap in groups’ beliefs and deities so there’s the side-picking issue, which as I mentioned is the whole plot of the Trojan War. Even when humans write about gods meddling in war, they have the gods not all be on the same side.

Humans have war. Humans try to take over other groups because they want the resources that group has. Alliances shift. Territories shift.

This is also treating humans as a monolith—there are populations within the colonized groups that agree with the colonizers because they get benefits. Claiming that all colonized groups hate all aspects of their colonialism all of the time is deeply ahistorical and flattened. Sometimes the benefits were only for a small group, but sometimes the benefits were far-reaching. It’s in the India tag on WWC, varying views of the Mughals. 

Also, how will you handle the Christianization of Europe? How will you handle all of this folklore that only got written down via monks and nuns making notes and modifying beliefs to fit the Bible? Will any area with only Christianity’s records written down not have folklore? 

And how will you handle folklore drift? Religions are not static. If you look at Greek myths, there are ten to thirty versions of each story and those are just the ones that survived. Each city-state had its own mythology, using the same gods, modified to fit the local needs.

And what about folklore that deals with war and thrives in war? What about the gods of war and destruction? I know Norse mythology is Christianized beyond recognition, but even in its Christianized form half of it is about war. Would the Valkyries, whose whole purpose is to find valiant soldiers slain in battle, not want war? Their whole purpose is war.

Also, on top of it—how will you handle revolution?

You say yourself, colonialism could still happen subtly. Colonialism and injustice can still happen. Will these subjugated spirits force an already disadvantaged group to exclusively use a rigged system to try and politely ask for their rights back? Or would these spirits want to be free and support the means necessary to take it back?

War has happened to upend the divine right of kings. War has happened to free slaves (Haiti). War has happened for basic workers’ rights (some union strikes have resulted in war). 

You’re basically removing a whole toolbox in the fight for a better world. Yes, not being able to colonize because of fantasy AU sounds fine, until you realize that pretty much all of human history from the Romans has been created via war to some degree.

You’re basically just saying “violence is bad and humans need fantasy babysitters to not dive into it”, which really doesn’t sound that great once you sit with it. It removes human agency, removes human nature, and ignores the entire history of the planet.

-Leigh (Lesya)

Marika interjecting here:

We had an ask (Linked here) envisioning a story set in a de-colonized Hawai’i and the socio-political issues with that. Same problem.

@writergeek-cos asked:

Dear writingwithcolor,

I’m writing a story about a girl from the year 3026 who travels back to 2026 to save the world from a disastrous future. She is Japanese, but was not born on Earth. How can I acknowledge her Japanese heritage, while at the same time conveying that she is from the future, having lived off-world her whole life?

Basically in her timeline, a giant weapons manufacturing company takes over the world in a massive attack in 2026. The attack forces much of humanity to move off world, its damage was so catastrophic. However, the war follows them into space, and the conflict turns into a war between most of humanity and this giant corporation. In 3026, the character decides she will travel back in time to prevent the initial takeover from ever happening.

Given Japan’s relationship with WMDs, it is realistic to have a Japanese character who opposes military armament proliferation (Even with the rise of the pro-military Japanese far right, the majority of Japan still opposes an alteration to Article 9). Though Japan censors their war crimes from textbooks, anti-war and pacifist ideology are still important to mandatory education curricula. For form’s sake, I would love for you to do more research into civilian grassroots organizations (particularly in Hiroshima and Nagasaki) for hibakusha and other stakeholders to get a cultural sense of how loud Japanese opposition would be to these companies.

There is concern that as more veterans and WWII survivors pass away, the younger generations will become increasingly ignorant about the necessity for Japan’s pacifism, however the Nikkei* communities and the multiracial Japanese communities within Japan have a high social media presence and talk to each other a fair deal. My grandparents were doing forced labor for the Imperial Army as middle school students and my conversations with my Okinawan counterparts of their family experiences with genocide have hardened our collective hatred of the Japanese right. We (multi-racial and Nikkei Japanese) are also the only growing segment of the Japanese population, so I can envision futures for either an increasingly pacifist OR an increasingly hawkish Japanese society. The one thing I request is that you do not make Japan the country that causes the cataclysm. We may be war criminals, but the legacy of the A-bombs runs very deep even to this day. I don’t think a non-Japanese person has the cultural competency to envision a Japanese society that OKs WMD use.

As to heritage, I don’t think you need to look far to realize that you don’t need “Japan the country” to be “Japanese” (by whatever metric one measures that term). Firstly, our Nikkei diaspora prove this. You are essentially adapting a diaspora narrative to space. Secondly, and arguably more importantly,  please be mindful that Japanese is a national heritage designation, not an ethnic one, so you’ll need to delve into your character’s background a good deal. What is her ethnicity? Where is she from? Does she speak a dialect? Please see the 2020 report for the Nikkei Global Research Project by Nippon Zaidan on Nikkei and Japanese cultures to get a sense of how Japanese diaspora preserve their culture and sense of Japanese-ness. I also recommend heading over to @wearejapanese, a tumblr blog dedicated to Japanese diaspora, including those from minority groups. 

For me, personally, the real fun of reading your story will be to see how you adapt Japanese cultural values to life in space via your world-building. I imagine different cultures will bring different skills to the table depending on their values. For humanity to survive, I imagine that a society focused around inclusion and harmony would make more sense, so I look forward to this story. 

I have a big question mark when it comes to how the 2026 portion of the plot will work, so I advise you to come up with your future world-building first (including factors that lead to the cataclysm and humanity’s evacuation from Earth) and write us another ask when you’ve got more of the story under your belt. 

- Marika

*I’m not dismissing the right-wing history of many Nikkei American and Peruvian organizations, however, I think it is fair to say the majority of the younger Nikkei Japanese oppose Japanese imperialism because imperialist movements tend to be exclusionary.