Diversity in Fantasy
Jan. 22nd, 2018 03:34 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ysabetwordsmithHere's a post about diversity in fantasy. Now I'm all for diversity, but I'm not in favor of telling people they MUST write a certain way. Let's explore why that's a terrible idea.
Ordering people to write a certain way tends to kill their muse. This is because everyone is called to write different things, which is good. Don't ruin the fun.
Also, intruding on someone's creativity is a good way to make them hate you and/or your goals. Which if your goal is diversity, that is the opposite of helpful.
Implying that something is wrong with everyone who doesn't write the way you do is pretty snotty, too. See above re: people writing all different things and the desirability thereof.
Demanding that people write things they don't want to write, if they follow through, typically leads to lousy writing. Seriously, look at all the shitty representations of women, people of color, etc. stuck in there because someone said they had to be, not because the writer wanted them there or the story needed them there. Do not make tokens pour out of the tokenism machine. Argh. No. A decent editor will just cut that crap anyway. Unless they commissioned it, in which case they are idiots, because if you want good copy then you assign it to someone passionate about Topic X, not someone who finds it boring or distasteful.
As much as it may embarrass modern, progressive folks ... a lot of history was pretty narrowminded. For a long time, the vast majority of people stuck very close to home, which meant there wasn't much diversity throughout large swaths of time and space. This is likely to repeat itself in speculative settings. That doesn't mean, for instance, there were no gay people but rather than they tended to hide for sake of survival. You didn't get a choice of religions if there was only one around you, unless you happened to have your own link to the Divine and/or packed your menu into this life via Farmemory. If you want to tell certain types of stories, you need an iconoclastic background; and if you want certain settings, you have to deal with the fact that they were boringly homogenized in certain ways.
Some other parts of history were really diverse. They often didn't get along with their more isolationist, monolithic neighbors. If you want to write that, great, but be prepared to do a lot of research -- or worldbuilding, if you're setting it in some other world. Because diversity just doesn't look the same every time you make it. People didn't always think about race, religion, sexuality, gender, etc. the way contemporary culture does. Which is actually pretty cool and a reason to write history or fantasy stuff in the first place.
Finally, unless you are paying for the privilege of telling someone what to write, you don't have it, so STFU.
Me, I like diversity, but that doesn't mean I put it in everything. Especially, trying to put ALL the types of diversity together is difficult to do well, unless it is 1) a really big work like a novel or series and/or 2) the kind of setting which is diverse by its nature like an an interdimensional hub. Big issues need plenty of room.
A Conflagration of Dragons is really about two things: race relations and disasters, and following from those, how race relations influence the way people respond to disasters. They all had contact with each other -- except that the dragons just woke up from lengthy hibernation -- but they didn't actually live together very much. Until they stopped having choices about that, because refugees have to take what they can get.
Diminished Expectations has a ton of diversity in body shape and even species, counting the created beings. But it's still a craptastic place to live. Being diverse doesn't necessarily make a society a nice place to live. I think this series has maybe 3 fans.
The Ocracies is a setting that I literally made to play with diversity, specifically in politics. I got bored with all the McMonarchies and started making up scads of little countries with all different governments. Other types of diversity exist in the setting but are largely incidental to trying to show how all these wacky systems could actually work.
Fiorenza the Wisewoman is one of my historic ethnic series, and it's fairytale Renaissance Italy. There's a little bit of racial diversity, but most of that happens on market days or in a city, because backwater Italian villages of the time weren't very mixed. The only religious diversity they really have is the fact that Italy is a palimpsest of old and new traditions, but it's not actually all that mixed because most characters go to church on Sundays and drop offerings at roadside shrines while on the road -- not two different groups each with its own religion. There's a little bit of sexual diversity but it only comes up in a few poems. Most of that just comes from Fiorenza and Giacinto each being just a hair off from strictly feminine or masculine. So there's a dab of diversity, but it's not really what this storyline is about.
Beneath the Family Tree (on the Serial Poetry page) just kind of smears over the whole issue of diversity. They have three possibly different species, possibly quite divergent races who wound up living together just find and not really making a big deal of it. They don't care about sex/gender diversity either. Gullwing seems unattracted to male bodies but happy enough with Cobble, who insists that he is a man instead of one-between. Nobody else is exercised about any of that, particularly once the two settle down together. Is it still diversity if people don't care about it the way we do? Is it even background parity? To me it just feels pre-differentiated.
The Origami Mage is among my least diverse series. It's set in a fantasy Asia, so basically everyone there is Asian, because Asia has had a lot of its cultures go through very isolationist phases. Also the story is very inward, it's about Asian motifs, and mixing in other characters would just be a distraction. It's not big on exploring sexual or religious diversity either. It's about a rather fussy little division between how two young women work paper magic.
So there's a spectrum, and it depends on what I want to write about and where. I love diversity. That doesn't mean it's the only thing that interests me.
By all means, encourage people to try writing about more diverse characters. Prompt for it. Shop for it. Create resources to make it easier for writers to do it accurately. But don't try to force them. You won't make any allies that way, and you certainly won't make good literature. Don't be a dick. Tell ALL the stories.
Ordering people to write a certain way tends to kill their muse. This is because everyone is called to write different things, which is good. Don't ruin the fun.
Also, intruding on someone's creativity is a good way to make them hate you and/or your goals. Which if your goal is diversity, that is the opposite of helpful.
Implying that something is wrong with everyone who doesn't write the way you do is pretty snotty, too. See above re: people writing all different things and the desirability thereof.
Demanding that people write things they don't want to write, if they follow through, typically leads to lousy writing. Seriously, look at all the shitty representations of women, people of color, etc. stuck in there because someone said they had to be, not because the writer wanted them there or the story needed them there. Do not make tokens pour out of the tokenism machine. Argh. No. A decent editor will just cut that crap anyway. Unless they commissioned it, in which case they are idiots, because if you want good copy then you assign it to someone passionate about Topic X, not someone who finds it boring or distasteful.
As much as it may embarrass modern, progressive folks ... a lot of history was pretty narrowminded. For a long time, the vast majority of people stuck very close to home, which meant there wasn't much diversity throughout large swaths of time and space. This is likely to repeat itself in speculative settings. That doesn't mean, for instance, there were no gay people but rather than they tended to hide for sake of survival. You didn't get a choice of religions if there was only one around you, unless you happened to have your own link to the Divine and/or packed your menu into this life via Farmemory. If you want to tell certain types of stories, you need an iconoclastic background; and if you want certain settings, you have to deal with the fact that they were boringly homogenized in certain ways.
Some other parts of history were really diverse. They often didn't get along with their more isolationist, monolithic neighbors. If you want to write that, great, but be prepared to do a lot of research -- or worldbuilding, if you're setting it in some other world. Because diversity just doesn't look the same every time you make it. People didn't always think about race, religion, sexuality, gender, etc. the way contemporary culture does. Which is actually pretty cool and a reason to write history or fantasy stuff in the first place.
Finally, unless you are paying for the privilege of telling someone what to write, you don't have it, so STFU.
Me, I like diversity, but that doesn't mean I put it in everything. Especially, trying to put ALL the types of diversity together is difficult to do well, unless it is 1) a really big work like a novel or series and/or 2) the kind of setting which is diverse by its nature like an an interdimensional hub. Big issues need plenty of room.
A Conflagration of Dragons is really about two things: race relations and disasters, and following from those, how race relations influence the way people respond to disasters. They all had contact with each other -- except that the dragons just woke up from lengthy hibernation -- but they didn't actually live together very much. Until they stopped having choices about that, because refugees have to take what they can get.
Diminished Expectations has a ton of diversity in body shape and even species, counting the created beings. But it's still a craptastic place to live. Being diverse doesn't necessarily make a society a nice place to live. I think this series has maybe 3 fans.
The Ocracies is a setting that I literally made to play with diversity, specifically in politics. I got bored with all the McMonarchies and started making up scads of little countries with all different governments. Other types of diversity exist in the setting but are largely incidental to trying to show how all these wacky systems could actually work.
Fiorenza the Wisewoman is one of my historic ethnic series, and it's fairytale Renaissance Italy. There's a little bit of racial diversity, but most of that happens on market days or in a city, because backwater Italian villages of the time weren't very mixed. The only religious diversity they really have is the fact that Italy is a palimpsest of old and new traditions, but it's not actually all that mixed because most characters go to church on Sundays and drop offerings at roadside shrines while on the road -- not two different groups each with its own religion. There's a little bit of sexual diversity but it only comes up in a few poems. Most of that just comes from Fiorenza and Giacinto each being just a hair off from strictly feminine or masculine. So there's a dab of diversity, but it's not really what this storyline is about.
Beneath the Family Tree (on the Serial Poetry page) just kind of smears over the whole issue of diversity. They have three possibly different species, possibly quite divergent races who wound up living together just find and not really making a big deal of it. They don't care about sex/gender diversity either. Gullwing seems unattracted to male bodies but happy enough with Cobble, who insists that he is a man instead of one-between. Nobody else is exercised about any of that, particularly once the two settle down together. Is it still diversity if people don't care about it the way we do? Is it even background parity? To me it just feels pre-differentiated.
The Origami Mage is among my least diverse series. It's set in a fantasy Asia, so basically everyone there is Asian, because Asia has had a lot of its cultures go through very isolationist phases. Also the story is very inward, it's about Asian motifs, and mixing in other characters would just be a distraction. It's not big on exploring sexual or religious diversity either. It's about a rather fussy little division between how two young women work paper magic.
So there's a spectrum, and it depends on what I want to write about and where. I love diversity. That doesn't mean it's the only thing that interests me.
By all means, encourage people to try writing about more diverse characters. Prompt for it. Shop for it. Create resources to make it easier for writers to do it accurately. But don't try to force them. You won't make any allies that way, and you certainly won't make good literature. Don't be a dick. Tell ALL the stories.
Re: Well ...
Date: 2018-01-22 10:01 pm (UTC)I think we need *both* the organisations in place that teach people like Shiv and Kincade and Sanquez - and Calliope and Vagary, and Mallory, how to deal better *and* rules that when they get crossed you get invited to work someplace else - or perp-walked like Warden Daley if you cross them badly enough. (See also Travis Kalanick, who didn't get perp-walked but did get sued...)
That's a good idea, though. I'm not sure *how* to get a big melting pot of folks together in a reasonably safe space and show them how to live together... but I know *where*. University towns. Both big ones (Seattle, Boston, NYC, the Georgetown section of DC) but also small ones... your own Urbana-Champaign; Clemson, SC; College Station, TX; Moscow, ID... that last one may be tougher than usual, but... the combination of education (and the resulting openness to diversity), the extra brainpower, and the nimbleness of young minds can more than likely come up with the right ideas where this aging ex-goody-two-shoes isn't coming up with the ideas...
Something tells me music is the right approach, but... never was much good at design.
Re: Well ...
Date: 2018-01-22 10:31 pm (UTC)We already have laws against sexual harassment and so forth. They aren't solving the problem. If laws won't, then rules are unlikely to do any better. I've seen this with conventions adding harassment policies, and they run into exactly the problems I predicted when the whole craze started:
* People think that making a rule solves the problem. Tick the box and move on. It doesn't work that way.
* The people who make the rules usually have no idea what they're doing. They are neither trained in gender relations nor in policy formulation. This leads to poorly constructed rules. What's worse, once a few sets of such rules exist, most people will simply copy someone else's rather than make their own, which quickly propagates low-quality polices.
* And then what? What do you do when someone reports harassment? The people to whom it is reported are almost never trained in either survivor support or investigation. Why are we even trying to do this in every school and business? We have people trained for investigation, police. (If survivors don't want to talk to police, will they really be that much more willing to talk to someone else charged with policing sexual behavior?) We have people trained in survivor support, counselors and gender activists. Shall we engage them? Generally people do not wish to do this, as it costs money. So what happens when someone reports harassment tends to fall in one of three unsatisfactory categories:
** They can't prove the allegation, so they ignore it.
** They can't prove the allegation, so they summarily ban the accused without attempting to sort out what actually happened.
** They can't prove the allegation, so they ban both parties.
I've seen all of that play out at conventions. I'm not really eager to see it spread all over Hollywood too. I would greatly prefer to see more competent solutions, but nobody else seems eager to invest the hard work and money required to do it right. They just want to tick the box. That won't solve the problem, so it goes unsolved, and over the years it is picking up a lot of cruft from poor solutions that get dragged along for the ride.
>>I'm not sure *how* to get a big melting pot of folks together in a reasonably safe space and show them how to live together<<
Montessori does it by breaking things down into baby steps at preschool level. It works great. That's a hardcore scientific approach, though, and not everyone can afford it.
A club is a great way to start because it's simple to set up. The trick is finding a good mix of people to do it. Then you just do presentations on different interesting topics.
For living together, yes, colleges are the place to try that. Offer classes in homesharing skills. Gods know people need it, and few colleges teach that. Then they wonder why people fight. Get someone to teach intentional community, that's solve a LOT of problems.
>>Something tells me music is the right approach, but... never was much good at design.<<
For that, drum jams. All you need is at least two drums, and preferably some cheap things for random people to bang on. We like PVC drums because they are cheap and sound surprisingly good, especially en masse.