Check your work - Let's talk about race!
Jan. 1st, 2012 02:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seriousficIt's a brand new year, yet another chance to be great. Hot tip: Those of you who went to a theater to see New Year's Day on New Year's Eve; not off to a good start. So I thought, what better way to ring in the new year than by reviewing the old? Namely, what stories I've written and how they deal with race, gender, sexuality, all that good stuff.
I won't be counting fanfic in this, since the fact that fanfic is derivative means you can't take away as much from it as discussing original fiction. If I don't write about the one black guy in Thor, is it because I'm a Klan member or because Heimdall is basically a doorman to the gods? Although Loki's character is pretty steeped in racism and even transgenderism (possibly not a word). I wonder if there's room in fandom for an AU in which Loki is a light-skinned black man who can pass for white...
But anyway, I don't think what you go for in canon necessarily says about you as much as what you write when you're trying to make something new. So, I'll go, and we'll see what flies.
Crusader - Well. I'll admit, we're not great here. People complain all the time about stories where minorities are sidekicks or girlfriends, so who are our POCs here? A sidekick and a girlfriend. To be fair, the girlfriend is more of a co-lead thing, but I'm sure every writer tells themselves that. I think a lot of times on this list we'll have to face the fact that everyone has to write what they know. I mean, it's set in Texas. There are a lot of honkies in Texas. This isn't a Friends thing where everyone is white and then you look at the real demographics and New York is more diverse than a Star Trek bridge crew.
Fight Like A Man, Die Like A God - Okay, stop me if I'm starting to sound like one of those weird people that think mixed-raced babies are a bad idea, but a lot of the cast is white here, with the Watsonian rationale that a lot of them are alien infiltrators into human society and so they want to take advantage of white privilege. It's hard to do a mission when you get pulled over by the cops every five minutes. So they take young, white, attractive forms. Of course, taking that idea to its natural conclusion, everyone would be white men, even the female shapeshifters would be "cross-dressing," but at some point you've gotta say Rule of Fun.
Now, would it be possible to give a shapeshifter character reason to look like, say, Idris Elba or Michelle Yeoh? Yes, quite easily. It might get a little awkward, but it could be pulled off. But here's the Doylist rationale. If you have an immortal impartial observer to human society who's lived for however many centuries as a black man, or an Asian woman, or whatever, they're going to have an opinion about race. Like, what would someone who lived through slavery think about Barack Obama, rap music, Tyler Perry? That'd be a very interesting conversation. And it's one I feel totally unqualified to write, because anything I say would not only be inauthentic, but get me screwed. If it's just some bland "we've come a long way, but we have a long way to go" homily, what's the point of having a black guy living for two hundred years in American society? If he says anything negative, it's going to be a honky using a black character (and not only a black character, but one who speaks from a position of supernatural authority and experience) to criticize black culture. Gets really uncomfortable just thinking about it.
Also, in the second book I'm planning to introduce a family of black monster hunters, and I changed one character, Ares, from a white man to Susanoo-no-Mikoto, the Japanese god of war. Since Ares is always the bad guy in Greek mythology stories, I thought it'd be fun to play him as the good guy for once, but I think I got a bit too far away from that subversion and now he actually has more in common with Susanoo, who is basically this crazy-awesome jerkhead that would never in a million years fit any Asian stereotypes (he took a dump in his sister's temple. I can sympathize). I actually head-casted him as Toshirô Mifune, then I found both a movie where Toshirô Mifune actually played Susanoo and a Catherynne Valente book about Susanoo. So I feel the universe approves of this choice.
Untitled Not A Legend Of The Seeker Book, Nope - Okay, it's basically a Cara/Kahlan serial numbers book writ large, but being me, there are some twists. Like you've got this (what amounts to an) AD&D adventuring party getting yanked out of their high fantasy book and brought to the real world, where follows lots of commentary on fantasy epics, the publishing industry, and so on. Anyway, I decided to make the Kahlan expy black, since the whole "noble Lady of War hottest woman ever" character never seems to be black in fantasy novels, plus I liked the idea of having a gag where her character is white in the cover illustrations, to her consternation.
The other thing was that the fanboy narrator is an Amerind (we're going with that now, right? We're not on Native American anymore?). A lot of the banter in the book comes from him being forced to team up with one of those fangirls, and yes, it has been very cathartic to collect every instant of silly over-sensitive political correctness I've seen and turn it into a character trait. The narrator himself is a bit of a parody of the cliched 'darker, edgier' fan-thing thinking, so there's an interplay there, but I get how it could look bad to have a white guy constantly whalloping a white girl's kookiness. So with him being a PoC, you bring in the feminist movement's occasional history of throwing minorities under the bus, and there's an even playing field. The audience has permission to laugh at these two nuts.
Also, for all the themes of storytelling and fandom in the book, it just makes sense for his culture to reflect that subtext. And, well, no one would give a shit about storytelling in Dutch culture. Not quite as impressive.
Untitled post-apocalyptic story - I swear to Christ, I come up with good titles for these things, I just have them buried somewhere. So the story here is that, in the not-quite-zombie apocalypse, a young redneck gunslinger gets hired by a elderly black jazz musician for an escort mission. And our hero is at least self-aware enough to not be openly racist; he may not be winning any NAACP awards, but when he runs across the obligatory white supremacist survivalists, he mocks their talk about the white brotherhood and talks about how none of his "white kin" were helping his family before the apocalypse. I just think it would be cliched for the southern guy to be this racist fuckwit who has to learn to accept other cultures.
The jazz singer, obviously a big deal character. I tried to avoid any Morgan Freeman cliches, because he really isn't Morgan Freeman. I think a bigger deal would be the villains of the piece. I meant what I said about the obligatory white supremacist survivalists. It's been done to death, and I don't know if there's really anything interesting left to say. So the real trouble isn't a bunch of lone survivalists and militias who've magically congealed into a legitimate threat (wouldn't there still be the U.S. Army, National Guard, et al running around in any post-apocalyptic scenario? Wouldn't they have something to say about a bunch of Neo-Nazis taking over?). It's, well, gangs. And in case you haven't watched The Shield, in real life, gangs do not have one white guy, one black guy, one Mexican guy, and an Asian guy who has no idea what he's doing there.
One of the themes of the book is how when society crashes, what holds together will be people who have been excluded from society. And your average gang is going to be tight-knit, well-organized, and well-armed just from being a gang. If it weren't for the fact that they're a bunch of very non-nice people, they'd be the best hope for rebuilding civilization. So I think while the narrative is sympathetic to their circumstances and showing them as having definitely been wronged by society, it doesn't let them off the hook for doing bad things in the present. I'll come back to this, but for now, I've abused the LJ cut enough.
I won't be counting fanfic in this, since the fact that fanfic is derivative means you can't take away as much from it as discussing original fiction. If I don't write about the one black guy in Thor, is it because I'm a Klan member or because Heimdall is basically a doorman to the gods? Although Loki's character is pretty steeped in racism and even transgenderism (possibly not a word). I wonder if there's room in fandom for an AU in which Loki is a light-skinned black man who can pass for white...
But anyway, I don't think what you go for in canon necessarily says about you as much as what you write when you're trying to make something new. So, I'll go, and we'll see what flies.
Crusader - Well. I'll admit, we're not great here. People complain all the time about stories where minorities are sidekicks or girlfriends, so who are our POCs here? A sidekick and a girlfriend. To be fair, the girlfriend is more of a co-lead thing, but I'm sure every writer tells themselves that. I think a lot of times on this list we'll have to face the fact that everyone has to write what they know. I mean, it's set in Texas. There are a lot of honkies in Texas. This isn't a Friends thing where everyone is white and then you look at the real demographics and New York is more diverse than a Star Trek bridge crew.
Fight Like A Man, Die Like A God - Okay, stop me if I'm starting to sound like one of those weird people that think mixed-raced babies are a bad idea, but a lot of the cast is white here, with the Watsonian rationale that a lot of them are alien infiltrators into human society and so they want to take advantage of white privilege. It's hard to do a mission when you get pulled over by the cops every five minutes. So they take young, white, attractive forms. Of course, taking that idea to its natural conclusion, everyone would be white men, even the female shapeshifters would be "cross-dressing," but at some point you've gotta say Rule of Fun.
Now, would it be possible to give a shapeshifter character reason to look like, say, Idris Elba or Michelle Yeoh? Yes, quite easily. It might get a little awkward, but it could be pulled off. But here's the Doylist rationale. If you have an immortal impartial observer to human society who's lived for however many centuries as a black man, or an Asian woman, or whatever, they're going to have an opinion about race. Like, what would someone who lived through slavery think about Barack Obama, rap music, Tyler Perry? That'd be a very interesting conversation. And it's one I feel totally unqualified to write, because anything I say would not only be inauthentic, but get me screwed. If it's just some bland "we've come a long way, but we have a long way to go" homily, what's the point of having a black guy living for two hundred years in American society? If he says anything negative, it's going to be a honky using a black character (and not only a black character, but one who speaks from a position of supernatural authority and experience) to criticize black culture. Gets really uncomfortable just thinking about it.
Also, in the second book I'm planning to introduce a family of black monster hunters, and I changed one character, Ares, from a white man to Susanoo-no-Mikoto, the Japanese god of war. Since Ares is always the bad guy in Greek mythology stories, I thought it'd be fun to play him as the good guy for once, but I think I got a bit too far away from that subversion and now he actually has more in common with Susanoo, who is basically this crazy-awesome jerkhead that would never in a million years fit any Asian stereotypes (he took a dump in his sister's temple. I can sympathize). I actually head-casted him as Toshirô Mifune, then I found both a movie where Toshirô Mifune actually played Susanoo and a Catherynne Valente book about Susanoo. So I feel the universe approves of this choice.
Untitled Not A Legend Of The Seeker Book, Nope - Okay, it's basically a Cara/Kahlan serial numbers book writ large, but being me, there are some twists. Like you've got this (what amounts to an) AD&D adventuring party getting yanked out of their high fantasy book and brought to the real world, where follows lots of commentary on fantasy epics, the publishing industry, and so on. Anyway, I decided to make the Kahlan expy black, since the whole "noble Lady of War hottest woman ever" character never seems to be black in fantasy novels, plus I liked the idea of having a gag where her character is white in the cover illustrations, to her consternation.
The other thing was that the fanboy narrator is an Amerind (we're going with that now, right? We're not on Native American anymore?). A lot of the banter in the book comes from him being forced to team up with one of those fangirls, and yes, it has been very cathartic to collect every instant of silly over-sensitive political correctness I've seen and turn it into a character trait. The narrator himself is a bit of a parody of the cliched 'darker, edgier' fan-thing thinking, so there's an interplay there, but I get how it could look bad to have a white guy constantly whalloping a white girl's kookiness. So with him being a PoC, you bring in the feminist movement's occasional history of throwing minorities under the bus, and there's an even playing field. The audience has permission to laugh at these two nuts.
Also, for all the themes of storytelling and fandom in the book, it just makes sense for his culture to reflect that subtext. And, well, no one would give a shit about storytelling in Dutch culture. Not quite as impressive.
Untitled post-apocalyptic story - I swear to Christ, I come up with good titles for these things, I just have them buried somewhere. So the story here is that, in the not-quite-zombie apocalypse, a young redneck gunslinger gets hired by a elderly black jazz musician for an escort mission. And our hero is at least self-aware enough to not be openly racist; he may not be winning any NAACP awards, but when he runs across the obligatory white supremacist survivalists, he mocks their talk about the white brotherhood and talks about how none of his "white kin" were helping his family before the apocalypse. I just think it would be cliched for the southern guy to be this racist fuckwit who has to learn to accept other cultures.
The jazz singer, obviously a big deal character. I tried to avoid any Morgan Freeman cliches, because he really isn't Morgan Freeman. I think a bigger deal would be the villains of the piece. I meant what I said about the obligatory white supremacist survivalists. It's been done to death, and I don't know if there's really anything interesting left to say. So the real trouble isn't a bunch of lone survivalists and militias who've magically congealed into a legitimate threat (wouldn't there still be the U.S. Army, National Guard, et al running around in any post-apocalyptic scenario? Wouldn't they have something to say about a bunch of Neo-Nazis taking over?). It's, well, gangs. And in case you haven't watched The Shield, in real life, gangs do not have one white guy, one black guy, one Mexican guy, and an Asian guy who has no idea what he's doing there.
One of the themes of the book is how when society crashes, what holds together will be people who have been excluded from society. And your average gang is going to be tight-knit, well-organized, and well-armed just from being a gang. If it weren't for the fact that they're a bunch of very non-nice people, they'd be the best hope for rebuilding civilization. So I think while the narrative is sympathetic to their circumstances and showing them as having definitely been wronged by society, it doesn't let them off the hook for doing bad things in the present. I'll come back to this, but for now, I've abused the LJ cut enough.
