I’ve gotta ask
Mar. 26th, 2016 12:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7via http://ift.tt/1RtZqF4:
danceswchopstck:
feathersmoons:
lemonsharks:
What’s the point of a character being a white able-bodied heterosexual cisgender man aged 18-38? Do any of those characteristics affect the plot in any way? Is his whiteness a Chekhov’s gun? His able-bodiedness, his orientation or gender or class?
The presence of all of these traits stacked one on top of another for no apparent reason is distracting–and there are just so many of them in books and movies and on television. They’re everywhere, even in completely made-up worlds that have nothing to do with earth and that bear only the very slightest resemblance to our own historical periods, places where we’re willingly suspending disbelief for dragons and werewolves and faster-than-light-travel and bipedal walking carpets and sapient tentacle-people who talk through glowy orbs and vast far-reaching government conspiracies involving alien abduction and supersoldiers, haunted hotels and small towns in maine with very bad diet pills.
Because if the answer is, “well, that’s the majority/default”: No, it isn’t. It isn’t, and it does not reflect reality that this be the fictional default, and when every characteristic has to mean something it is not reasonable to place that condition on every character but those who are white able-bodied heterosexual cisgender males aged 18-38.
I actually literally apply this to writing, especially when it comes to OCs in fanfic. (And yes, if you want to tell a wider plot, you will always have OCs. The door-person, the cab driver, the attendant at the fucking luggage rack: even in the ACTUAL SHOW there are a bunch of extras per episode, etc.)
I mean, sometimes there is in fact an answer. Sometimes that answer is actually “I do not want to deal with any of the complications that might come with what I want this character to be able to do if this character were from some other demographic.” Or “because this moment that I just cannot get out of my head won’t happen if this char is from another demographic.”
Or because “the reality is this field is dominated by said demographic and even if I want to make all my major speaking roles something else BECAUSE, there will be a bunch of them in the background, meh.”
(Sometimes the answer is “because I want to surround the XanderHarrisArchetype with people who DO NOT PUT UP WITH HIS SHIT, but that means that, you know, he has to be not just the type, but the ARCHETYPE.”)
But it’s still a question. And if it doesn’t have an answer, then I default to “anything but that demographic.”
Which is part of why at this point I do not believe I have, as yet, a single white able-bodied het/het-assumed cis/cis-assumed man aged 18-38 OC in YBEB. Oh wait I think maybe the Stark Security guy on desk at the Tower once appeared to be this, so that’s a fair cop. (I say “appears”, because I’m also sure that he’s the one with OCD, but that’s not on-page in anything posted yet, so to the stricter-minded doesn’t count.)* But I’m pretty sure most people don’t even remember him, as opposed to how many may remember Ms (Amelia) Stone, who is also Gabe Jones’ granddaughter and thus had to expend a lot of energy not having a hand-flappy MOMENT at the fact that Captain America was in front of her at the desk. (You’d think working at the Tower would make encounters happen more, but the Tower is VERY BIG and StarkSec is often lurking around less populated areas being Polite and Helpful and also very There, which means not so much.)
BUT I DIGRESS. The point being, canon has almost certainly provided me with more than enough white guys in that category, so, you know, let’s widen the interest here.
*I actually intensely dislike this, because it means that people will literally be arguing that one of my most definitely Autistic characters is not Autistic … because it’s set in an alt-1700s where this is literally not a concept yet so I cannot fucking put it on page. Ahem.
This? Is very cool.
I feel pretty much the exact same way. And it’s not like, “let me check off a checklist until I have one each of every kind of person that exists and have fulfilled some Diversity Requirement”, but I definitely am like, well, I could make this OC a white dude, but if there’s no reason for it to be one, I’m just not going to. And invariably by making the fictional world look more like my real world, I find unexpected character notes for my otherwise blend-into-background OCs that make them much more interesting. Plus, as a bonus, I generally don’t get them confused with one another? Even if it’s not a visual medium, they don’t blend together in my head as much.
danceswchopstck:
feathersmoons:
lemonsharks:
What’s the point of a character being a white able-bodied heterosexual cisgender man aged 18-38? Do any of those characteristics affect the plot in any way? Is his whiteness a Chekhov’s gun? His able-bodiedness, his orientation or gender or class?
The presence of all of these traits stacked one on top of another for no apparent reason is distracting–and there are just so many of them in books and movies and on television. They’re everywhere, even in completely made-up worlds that have nothing to do with earth and that bear only the very slightest resemblance to our own historical periods, places where we’re willingly suspending disbelief for dragons and werewolves and faster-than-light-travel and bipedal walking carpets and sapient tentacle-people who talk through glowy orbs and vast far-reaching government conspiracies involving alien abduction and supersoldiers, haunted hotels and small towns in maine with very bad diet pills.
Because if the answer is, “well, that’s the majority/default”: No, it isn’t. It isn’t, and it does not reflect reality that this be the fictional default, and when every characteristic has to mean something it is not reasonable to place that condition on every character but those who are white able-bodied heterosexual cisgender males aged 18-38.
I actually literally apply this to writing, especially when it comes to OCs in fanfic. (And yes, if you want to tell a wider plot, you will always have OCs. The door-person, the cab driver, the attendant at the fucking luggage rack: even in the ACTUAL SHOW there are a bunch of extras per episode, etc.)
I mean, sometimes there is in fact an answer. Sometimes that answer is actually “I do not want to deal with any of the complications that might come with what I want this character to be able to do if this character were from some other demographic.” Or “because this moment that I just cannot get out of my head won’t happen if this char is from another demographic.”
Or because “the reality is this field is dominated by said demographic and even if I want to make all my major speaking roles something else BECAUSE, there will be a bunch of them in the background, meh.”
(Sometimes the answer is “because I want to surround the XanderHarrisArchetype with people who DO NOT PUT UP WITH HIS SHIT, but that means that, you know, he has to be not just the type, but the ARCHETYPE.”)
But it’s still a question. And if it doesn’t have an answer, then I default to “anything but that demographic.”
Which is part of why at this point I do not believe I have, as yet, a single white able-bodied het/het-assumed cis/cis-assumed man aged 18-38 OC in YBEB. Oh wait I think maybe the Stark Security guy on desk at the Tower once appeared to be this, so that’s a fair cop. (I say “appears”, because I’m also sure that he’s the one with OCD, but that’s not on-page in anything posted yet, so to the stricter-minded doesn’t count.)* But I’m pretty sure most people don’t even remember him, as opposed to how many may remember Ms (Amelia) Stone, who is also Gabe Jones’ granddaughter and thus had to expend a lot of energy not having a hand-flappy MOMENT at the fact that Captain America was in front of her at the desk. (You’d think working at the Tower would make encounters happen more, but the Tower is VERY BIG and StarkSec is often lurking around less populated areas being Polite and Helpful and also very There, which means not so much.)
BUT I DIGRESS. The point being, canon has almost certainly provided me with more than enough white guys in that category, so, you know, let’s widen the interest here.
*I actually intensely dislike this, because it means that people will literally be arguing that one of my most definitely Autistic characters is not Autistic … because it’s set in an alt-1700s where this is literally not a concept yet so I cannot fucking put it on page. Ahem.
This? Is very cool.
I feel pretty much the exact same way. And it’s not like, “let me check off a checklist until I have one each of every kind of person that exists and have fulfilled some Diversity Requirement”, but I definitely am like, well, I could make this OC a white dude, but if there’s no reason for it to be one, I’m just not going to. And invariably by making the fictional world look more like my real world, I find unexpected character notes for my otherwise blend-into-background OCs that make them much more interesting. Plus, as a bonus, I generally don’t get them confused with one another? Even if it’s not a visual medium, they don’t blend together in my head as much.
