If we’re being honest, black and brown characters in fantasy are a minority. But most of the English speaking fantasy writers are white, and for the most part they’re writing about European lore and historical events. Maybe in your opinion adding improbable non-white characters is the most important thing, but most writers aren’t obsessed with social justice and they’re more interested in telling a story than being politically correct.
However, saying that there is a complete lack of black and brown characters in fantasy (especially in more recent books) is just disingenuous. You’re either purposefully ignoring those characters for the sake of your narrative, or you don’t read fantasy often enough to know what the fuck you’re talking about.
Nobody is saying that there’s a “complete lack” of characters of color. We’re saying that:
- People of color are significantly underrepresented.
- The “But Europe was white! We need to be *historically accurate*! Having characters of color would be *unrealistic*” excuse is bullshit. Not to mention that imbeciles often use it for fantasy books.
- Many writers and readers ARE obsessed with political correctness. Specifically, they throw a fit whenever there’s characters who’re of color, or female, or disabled, or fat, or queer, or…
Except they’re not as underrepresented as you think they are. Just because they’re not 50% or more of the characters in a book doesn’t mean they’re not represented. I haven’t read a book in recent memory that was written without important people of color, or that hasn’t spoken on issues of racism/sexism/homophobia in one way or another.
I’m sorry that you wasted your time typing this instead of reading my replies to other folks who have made that second point, but I’ll reiterate. I’m so over it. It’s cheesy, it’s overused, and it’s wrong. Fantasy books, while being known for using things like dragons, mermaids, faeries, magic systems and building whole knew worlds, countries and laws, often still use humanoid characters, real places and old lore & historical events as their base. What these characters look like is strongly influenced by the people who live around the author. It’s not about accuracy as much as it’s about your surroundings and cultural influences.
That being said, it won’t be surprising that a person who lives in a majority white country will write a book with a majority of white characters. Just like a writer who lives in a majority black country would likely write a book with a majority or exclusively black characters, or a writer who lives in a majority Asian country will write a book with a majority or exclusively Asian characters. This isn’t racism or discrimination or a lack of diversity for the sake of not being diverse. People like writing what they see and what they know, and I hate to break this to you, but if you look around and you see mostly white people, you’re probably gonna write about mostly white people. That doesn’t have to be true, and I don’t think it’s a problem (or rare) for authors to make a conscious effort to write black or brown characters as long as they’re interesting and help move the plot forward, but the fact remains.
I don’t know what you were trying to convey in your last point, but if your goal is to become a truly good writer, you should be focusing on writing the best story possible. If you’re a reader, you should be focused on the story’s plot, themes, messages, character development, etc. If you feel like there’s something missing in the books you’re reading, and if you have the skill to do so, you should be writing the books you want to see instead of demanding it from other writers.
Readers have a history of being entitled pricks, but we have moved into a territory where people like you are consistently trying to interfere in or alter someone’s creative process for your the sake of social justice and I find that egregious.
Also you can relate to a character even if they’re not the same race or gender as you. I relate to Tin Man from Wizard of Oz even though I’m not tin or a man.
If your character is just their race/gender/whatever and not their personality they’re boring and actually a token.
My favorite character from the book I’m reading right now is a Fae Prince. Am I a Fae Prince? No. But guess what, I still love that bitch.
Characters should be characters first and foremost.
Making a character “to be” POC, a female, etc. is how you end up with tokenized characters because the focus becomes less on them and how they are as a character, and more about how they are just a woman, POC, LGBT+, etc.
And given I am a woman, black, and bisexual… Those characters end up not even particularly liked by the people they are meant to represent.
If you make a conscious effort to include minorities in your story, cool beans. However, if your “conscious effort” results in the characters being underdeveloped tokens you need to focus on making them characters instead of POC, LGBT+, etc.
#also if a story doesnt have minorty characters or whatever#it isn’t a reflection about hte author hating those minorities or something#sometimes they just aren’t in the story#it isn’t that big of a deal#if it bothers you so much just read another story
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