Anonymous asked: Hi there, I know you've written posts addressing white authors writing POC's, but I was wondering if I could get input on a narrower question. What are some common pitfalls or best ways to approach creating fictional races for a fantasy world that doesn't correspond to Earth? When you're not trying to represent the experiences of people or groups who actually exist, but want to acknowledge how race influences society and avoid perpetuating stereotypes, what's the best way to go about that?
OK, so: bearing in mind that I’m a white writer, and am therefore speaking from observational rather than personal experience - and also that I’m not sure whether you’re asking about fantasy ethnicities or fantasy species - here’s a few things that I think are important.
- It doesn’t matter how fantastic your setting is: both you and your audience are still going to draw parallels to Earth, because that’s where we live. You can come up with the most perfect in-world justifications for why a given culture operates the way it does, and you can sweat blood over making it as original and distinct as possible, and those things will help you to craft a better story, but at the end of the day, the fact that your fictitiously oppressed group (for instance) doesn’t actually exist won’t stop people from comparing their plight to that of real oppressed groups, and so you need to take that into account. You can’t erase the real, so work with it instead.
- Consider how people who belong to various real-world groups are stereotyped and vilified, and make an effort to weed out those biases from your own worldbuilding. This includes exoticising language, like continually describing dark skin in terms of food (chocolate, hazelnut, mocha), or only mentioning skin colour if the character isn’t white. Pay particularly close attention to your secondary or minor characters, as these are the roles in a story where it’s easiest to unthinkingly fall back on your cultural biases in order to fill a gap.
- Culture is key. Regardless of whether the fantasy race you’re creating is an ethnicity or a fictional species - or a combination of the two, more of which shortly - the group shouldn’t be a monolith. Behaviour is socially encoded, not genetically determined, and while there’s always a certain amount of nature for nurture to work with, it’s got nothing to do with race (or gender, for that matter). This is a mistake that gets made time and again in fantasy, particularly when it comes to justifying the inherent attributes of various fictional races, DND-style, as physical specifics are invariably conflated with behavioural, intellectual and emotional ones. To take a common example: the fact that your average elf might be more naturally agile/flexible than the average human doesn’t mean they’re all going to be naturally poised, graceful and calm, or prohibit them from being slobby or awkward. An orc might be physically strong, but that doesn’t mean all orcs are obsessed with strength. Particularly in writing traditionally brutish/evil races, like goblins, there’s a tendency to default to animal logic - to say something like, “oh, they have a hive structure, like insects,” and then treat this as inviolable, as though the animal kingdom doesn’t contain plenty of exceptions to its own rules. If there’s a monolith in play, remember it’s the *culture*, not the race.
- The way racial groups are perceived externally as opposed to internally is a very real divide. Where an outsider might perceive a single, monolithic faction, an insider might see multiple minority groups alongside an ethnic majority. Yet often, we’re given elves and dwarves as though there’s only ever one kind, cultural or otherwise, or a scenario where people in Country A behave identically in different cities, with no local customs or traditions to set them apart, and seemingly no history of trade or migration to make the various populations distinct. Think about what divides your group as well as what unites them, and how opaque or transparent those differences are to outsiders, and why.
- It should go without saying if you’re purposely trying to get away from deliberate Earth parallels, but don’t copy one or more Earth cultures wholesale. Take inspiration from different places, by all means, but think about the logic of how your new creation will hang together, because if you just try to Frankenstein it, you’re going to run into continuity problems. How does the language work? What influence does religion have on the way things are run? What are the sexual mores? Is the culture isolationist or expansionist, pacifist or aggressive? What sort of class stratification is there, and why? What are the gender roles? That last one is a big one, and it drives me nuts when people don’t consider it relevant. To glance briefly at Earth history, aristocratic women in ancient Sparta lived wildly different lives to aristocratic women in Athens, both of whom had different lives again to women in Egypt in the same period, and yet I’ve seen books inspired by those settings where the women are unilaterally assumed to live like women in Europe in the Middle Ages, except that’s not even accurate either, because the general fantasy consensus idea of what 1600s Europe looked like is deeply fucking wrong to begin with. If you’re going to create an original fantasy race of any kind, then please, for the love of god, give some actual thought to how that group performs gender. Especially if you’re writing a different species, there’s so much variety in the animal kingdom to choose from re mating and reproduction and family structure that, even before you layer the cultural elements on top, you can do something that’s about 9000% more interesting than a bland patriarchal default.
- Write your characters as though they have an identity beyond their race - by which I mean, don’t write them as though their race is the only or most relevant thing about them. Particularly if the character is the lone representative of their group in a given environment, consider who they’d be and how they’d behave around their own people, rather than just making them a blank example of difference.
- Just generally try to consider how different cultures function individually, and how they might clash or complement each other when brought together. Look for the why of things. Ask questions, do research, and always be prepared to try better next time, because regardless of whether you get it “right” or not, there’s always a new perspective to learn from, and what worked in one story won’y necessarily work in another.
Hope that helps, and thanks for asking!
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kittieslovekaties said: Can I piggyback on to this cuz I have a similar question? So I’m trying to adapt a fav RPG and in the source material EVERYONE is white but I want to add diversity. And racism btwn the fantasy races is a major story point. How do I help the audience to identify a certain fantasy race with a real world counterpart (especially with physical descriptions) without resorting to stereotypes or being accidentally offensive?
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