#i've never felt so represented by fictional knight

[kumanikanna]

So I've binged this manga, and here's my one and only contribution to this fandom.

[writingwithcolor]

I'm a POC who writes mainly white characters but after seeing all the "diversity" posts on this site I'm wondering if I may be subconsciously prejudiced and now I don't know what to do. I feel like I've been doing everything wrong and yet I don't want to change my stories/characters to suit everyone else while not liking them myself.

To Write (or not write) with Diversity

No one can force you to write inclusive stories. Inclusive meaning media that consists of marginalized people, because that is what diversity really is - including people who have always been right there, but have been purposefully left out and erased from the pages of books and scripts. Those who are, when finally represented, are overwhelmingly assigned small, unflattering, and / or stereotypical roles.

Pages like Writing With Color are an offering. Our presence here is for those who choose to write with diversity. We aim to make being inclusive easier because we all believe in the importance of it. But as much as we know how enriching diversity can be, we cannot convince you to do something you don’t necessarily believe in.

Don’t do it because you feel forced

As you mentioned, you’ve read the posts. You know the facts. The decision cannot be forced upon you.  If anything, including diversity out of obligation alone could lead to bad representation. Forcing people to do things without motivation usually means it’ll lack effort, or be done with spite. Trust me when I say marginalized people don’t usually want to see themselves represented by someone who does not want them there. That unwelcome feeling shows. In short: Lack of representation hurts. Bad representation hurts worse.

I only ask that you have accountability.  

Now that you’re aware that your works default to white, you have a choice to make. I think a lot of us grew up reading and writing very white stories - both as PoC and white people - but once you possess the knowledge that things can be different, your next step is a conscious one. You’re not on auto-pilot anymore when you make everyone white (and/or straight, able-bodied, etc). You know better now. Own up to your choices.

So ask yourself: why have I chosen to write without diversity?

I’m afraid to write People of Color. 

Being uncomfortable writing People of Color is a big reason why people stick to writing white people, and only garnish their stories with PoC, if that. White people have long been the default, the everyman. White perspectives are “neutral” to approach. It’s daunting to go from feeling you can portray characters in whatever way you wish to suddenly having the weight of good versus harmful representation on your shoulders.

You don’t want backlash from getting it wrong. You also don’t want to be insensitive to groups. It’s easy to avoid writing them altogether, right? Sure. 

Be aware, though:

You’re making a choice to exclude people out of fear.

Of course, new things are scary. But that’s okay! Courage is the ability to do things that frighten you. Face your fears. Will you shrink away from the challenge, or use it to your advantage?

Let the fear fuel you to do better and to know better. Your concerns about writing PoC can drive you to get the research right in order to best represent people. If your fear is leading to more effort into thoughtful creation, you’re putting it to good use.

Let me tell you right now - you will mess up.

Maybe in small ways, perhaps in a big way. But mistakes will not kick start the apocalypse. Ideally:

Do your research to avoid the most obvious and devastating mistakes from the jump.

Equip yourself with the right beta-reader and sensitivity readers to catch those things. 

Even with errors, your story can be quite enjoyable for people who hardly see themselves represented. Yes, mistakes and all.

As a Black woman bookworm, if you write an exciting story about a Black girl on adventures and falling in love but mention a few questionable things about how she takes care of her hair…I will wince, but it won’t ruin the book for me. I’m willing to overlook some things, for the sake of my enjoyment, and let the author know how I felt about those parts in hopes they can improve.

Say you get something real important wrong. People call you out for it. I suggest you apologize, listen to their critiques, and do better. If possible, pull back the story and re-release when you’ve improved the piece. If that’s not an option, fix it in future works. Getting a finger wagged at you doesn’t mean lock up in fear and never write with diversity again. It means you improve.

Research PoC like you would on any topic:

For comparison’s sake, consider writing People of Color (or any group different from you) like writing other topics you’re unfamiliar with in-depth. 

For example: You may know the basics on Medieval England. The knights, royalty, and so on. But i’m sure there’s a lot of misconceptions mixed in there from television or unreliable sources. 

To write people from this perspective, you would do lots of additional research… right?  

If someone mentioned how you messed up on some of the facts, you would take note and dig into it more for the future…right? 

You might even have more experienced persons check your facts for accuracy beforehand to do the best job possible.

Approach researching PoC in the same way as other topics. There may not be hard facts on how to write an X character, but there are portrayals to avoid with explanations why, and roles people want to see themselves in.

I don’t like to be told what to write.

There’s this misconception that writing with diversity restricts creativity. I get it - there are things you’re being told not to do when writing certain groups. The lists of No’s can get dense. This reflects how poor representation has been for People of Color as there are a number of stereotypical portrayals folks are tired of seeing and has been detrimental to them.

Fiction simply reflects real life: People of Color being viewed through the lens of preconceived notions means being written on with those stereotypes in mind. It is a vicious cycle. Stereotypes are more than an annoyance - they can and do lead to real life consequences.

Being treated like a stereotype lowers our quality of life. Experiencing racism and daily microaggressions has a psychological effect - from insecurity, depression and PTSD - it is serious. (X)

Viewing People of Color by their stereotypes is what makes, say, a Black person who speaks with passion no matter what it’s about (and even if they’ve been wronged) too hostile and “Angry” to take seriously. If anything, they’re now a serious threat. And that’s dangerous for them.

Put yourself in the shoes of the overly typecast.

Think of a time someone misunderstood you. You had a bad day and acted grumpy. Well, being a grump defines who you are now. When asked, people describe you as crabby and humorless. Every new person you meet sees your every action through that lens.

Strangers tiptoe around you, as they can just tell you’re ill-tempered. Peers choose their words carefully, afraid of what might spark your wrath. Your children even inherit the title; teachers discipline them more and take other students’ word over theirs- your kids are snappy, difficult, and known to not play well with others, after all.

Wouldn’t that get old? Wouldn’t you feel it was unfair to be reduced to a label, and that you’re sick of being defined by it? Wouldn’t you have the desire to be seen for who you truly are, and can be? Perhaps you do get grumpy sometimes, which is just being human. You’re so much more than a grouch.

Stereotypes are not creative.

Writing outside of stereotypes open up so many more possibilities. How many times have we seen the Black Best Friend play out in media? You’re not being silenced when readers criticize your sassy sidekick. Your message has been heard, loud and clear - again and again and again. People are upset because it’s not anything new - in fact, it is quite old.  We want multiple portrayals. Why not create something new before you decide to write so closely to how we are always written?

OP said: I don’t want to change my stories/characters to suit everyone else while not liking them myself.

This should not be the case. Avoiding stereotypes has nothing to do with making unlikeable or even perfect characters. Simply make Characters of Color who go beyond stereotypes! Characters who are best friends without being arc-less doormats. Characters who are fierce and emotional and stand for something without being simplified to irrational, hostile, and angry. 

Knowing the difference between stereotype and culture is important, too. Don’t let anyone tell you you’re doing something wrong when their bias means they perceive your character as being stereotypical, or problematic, when they’re not. (See: Stereotyped vs Nuanced Characters and Audience Perception.)  

If anything, writing beyond hard labels leads to complex characters. Writing about new cultures is interesting and can be exciting. 

If you only like your East Asian characters when they’re geniuses or your Black girls when they’re angry without a cause…do some self-reflection. Why do your Characters of Color only seem “right” to you when they are flat, or confined to stereotypes? Why not allow them to be complex humans?

I’m not convinced that representation matters.

Well, representation does matter. A lot. While it has been written on so much, and there being countless studies, statistics, and personal accounts to support this, I would like to mention…

Representation (or lack thereof) lowers self-worth.

Studies show TV boosts the self-esteem of white boys. The confidence of People of Color and girls of all races, on the other hand, decreases when watching TV (X X). 

“If you want to make a human being into a monster, deny them, at the cultural level, any reflection of themselves.” -Junot Diaz

The Racial Empathy Gap.

I want to be brief (too late, right?) so let me just mention another point of research for you: the racial empathy gap. Stereotyped depictions and the limited roles for People of Color are internalized by society, leading to lack of empathy towards People of Color and the enforcement of stereotypes in real time. Lack of empathy actively affects how PoC are treated, such as the belief that Black people experience less pain than others and therefore are misdiagnosed (their illnesses and pain are downplayed) and under treated (X X X). 

Fiction Increases Empathy.

In addition to the racial empathy gap, look into the studies on how fiction improves empathy. For example: reading about vampires increases empathy towards vampires. Imagine what non-stereotyped, marginalized depictions in fiction can do for empathy.  (X, X)

The strength in which people are against representation speaks volumes. 

If representation does not matter, then why are some people so angry when it’s there? Let’s take book to movie depictions: 

A Character of Color depicted as white simply means they were the best actor for the job, according to a vocal presence in social media. 

However, even a verified Character of Color being depicted as such leads to boycotting, accusations of being “Politically-correct”, and wide complaints that they can’t relate to the characters and they are poor actors. Never mind that so many Actors of Color attend prestigious schools only to get so far.

The hypocrisy speaks to a need for more representation, and a prevalent lack of empathy. 

The People Want Diversity!

On a positive note: shows that reflect the real world, aka include diversity, continue to get high ratings despite many obstacles: those who don’t want them there, lack of advertising or inconvenient airtime for shows with diverse leads, the ole bait-and-switch method, and hasty cancellations. Not to mention media simply refusing to be inclusive even when they know “diversity sells” (X X). Gee, I wonder why….

Audiences are more drawn to projects that feature a diverse cast, a new study finds, though mirroring the population in the United States remains a problem.

“Less-diverse product underperforms in the marketplace, and yet it still dominates,” said Ana-Christina Ramón, the report’s co-author and assistant director of the Bunche Center. “This makes no financial sense.” 

-Diversity in Hollywood Pays Off in Ratings and Box Office, New Study Finds

Diversity simply reflects the real world accurately. 

There is nothing forced about diversity. People of Color exist in the real world, go out and about, and have lives. Creators including marginalized people only seems strange because media actively scratches them out as much as possible, pulling the marginalized out of focus to zoom in on white characters. That is what’s unrealistic. 

Ultimately, you, the writer, will write what you want. Just ask yourself why you have decided this is what you want to write. Are you okay with that reason? Despite all the progress that is being made, you’ll blend in just fine with all of the other mostly white books and movies out there. And as people become more conscious and bored with the same stories, we can and will choose to ignore whitewashed media.

The good thing is that there’s so much awareness and activism going on with representation; the path has been paved for you and it is not lonely! 

There are resources out there, and WWC continues to be one of them.

More Reading - Diversity:

Braving Diversity: How to Write Yourself (and others) out of your Story  (An early WWC post quite relevant to you, OP)

Diversity exists in the real world 

The Key to Moving Beyond checklisting is not LESS diversity 

Bad Representation vs Tokenism vs Diversity: just existing without justification like in the real world

How to research your racially/ethnically diverse characters 

–Colette

[gerryconway]

Stan the Man

Since the news of Stan Lee's death I've wanted to write something meaningful about my own feelings for him, what he represented to me as a creator and as a human being, and what kind of impact his life had on my life. For many reasons (I was dislocated by the Woolsley Fire and haven't fully settled down since our return) I haven't had a chance to give such an in-depth appraisal much thought. Honestly, I doubt I could do a full appraisal of Stan's importance in my life even under the best of circumstances. His work and presence as an icon and as a human being helped form who I am today. To write a full appreciation of Stan I'd have to write my autobiography.

Among my most vivid childhood memories is my discovery of the Fantastic Four with issue 4, the first appearance of the Sub-Mariner. I was nine years old, and I'd been a comic book reader for years at that point. I knew about Superman, I knew about Batman, I'd read the early issues of Justice League. I was a compulsive reader, voracious (still am)-- devoting hours a day to books and stories and comics and even my parents' newspapers. (Both my parents were avid readers. My dad read science fiction, my mom loved mysteries.) I vividly recall the astonished joy I felt when my mom took me to our local library and got me my first library card. I was six, I think, and the reality of a roomful of books just for kids seemed like a gift from heaven. I won all the reading awards at school-- any competition for reading the most books in a year was over as far as I was concerned the first week. By nine, I'd already graduated from "age appropriate" books for pre-teens to Heinlein's juveniles, Asimov's robot stories, and the collected Sherlock Holmes stories of Arthur Conan Doyle. I was a total reading nerd.

And then came Fantastic Four.

I've never been hit by lightning but I have to imagine the shock might be similar to what I experienced reading that early adventure of Reed Richards, Sue Storm, her kid brother Johnny, and Ben Grimm. If you weren't a comic book reader at that time you cannot imagine the impact those stories had. There's nothing comparable in the modern reader's experience of comics-- nothing remotely as transformative. (To be fair, I suppose both "The Dark Knight Returns" and "Watchmen" come close, but both remarkable works built on prior tradition and were perhaps a fulfillment of potential and creative expectations. The Fantastic Four was _sui generis_.) Over a series of perhaps five issues, a single year, Stan and Jack Kirby transformed superhero comics in an act of creative alchemy similar to transmuting lead into gold, and just as unlikely.

They also changed my life. Because Stan credited himself as writer and Jack as artist, he opened my nine year old eyes to a possibility I'd never really considered before: I could be something called a comic book "writer" or "artist."

Think about that, for a moment. Before Stan regularly began giving credits to writers and artists, comics (with a few exceptions) were produced anonymously. Who wrote and drew Superman? Who wrote and drew Donald Duck? Who wrote and drew Archie? Who knew? (Serious older fans knew, of course, but as far as the average reader or disinterested bystander knew, most comics popped into existence spontaneously, like flowers, or in some eyes, weeds.)

Stan did more than create a fictional universe, more than create an approach to superhero storytelling and mythology-- he created the concept of comic book story creation itself. Through his promotion of the Marvel Bullpen, with his identification of the creative personalities who wrote and drew Marvel's books, he sparked the idea that writing and drawing comics was something ordinary people did every day. (Yes, yes, to a degree Bill Gaines had done something similar with EC Comic's in-house fan pages, but let's be honest, EC never had the overwhelming impact on a mass audience that Marvel had later.) He made the creation of comic book stories something anyone could aspire to do _as a potential career_.

That's huge. It gave rise to a generation of creative talent whose ambition was to create comics. Prior to the 1960s, writing and drawing comic books wasn't something any writer or artist generally aspired to (obviously there were exceptions). Almost every professional comic book artist was an aspiring newspaper syndicated strip artist or an aspiring magazine illustrator. (Again, there were exceptions.) Almost every professional comic book writer was also a writer for pulp magazines or paperback thrillers. (Edmond Hamilton, Otto Binder, Gardner Fox, so many others-- all wrote for the pulps and paperbacks.) Comic book careers weren't something you aimed to achieve; they were where you ended up when you failed to reach your goal.

Even Stan, prior to the Fantastic Four, felt this way. It's an essential part of his legend: he wanted to quit comics because he felt it was stifling his creative potential, but his wife, Joan, suggested an alternative. Write the way you want to write. Write what you want to write. Write your own truth.

He did, and the rest, as the saying goes, is history.

When I picked up that issue of Fantastic Four, I was a nine year old boy with typical nine year old boy fantasies about what my life would be. Some were literal fantasies: I'd suggested to my dad a year or so earlier that we could turn the family car into the Batmobile and he could be Batman and I could be Robin and we could fight crime. After he passed on that idea I decided we could be like the Hardy family-- he could be a detective and I could be his amateur detective son, either Frank or Joe. Later I became more realistic and figured I could become an actor who played Frank or Joe Hardy in a Hardy Boy movie. In fact, by nine, my most realistic career fantasies involved either becoming an actor or an astronaut, and of the two, astronaut seemed like the more practical choice.

Stan and Marvel Comics gradually showed me a different path, a different possible career. By making comic books cool, by making them creatively enticing, and by making the people who created comics _real_ to readers-- Stan created the idea of a career creating comics.

Stan alone did this. We can argue over other aspects of his legacy-- debate whether he or his several collaborators were more important in the creation of this character or that piece of mythology-- but we can't argue about this. Without Stan's promotion of his fellow creatives at Marvel there would have been no lionizing of individual writers and artists in the 1960s. Without that promotion there would have been no visible role models for younger, future creators to emulate. Yes, some of us would still have wanted to create comics-- but I'd argue that the massive explosion of talent in the 1970s and later decades had its origin in Stan's innovative promotion of individual talents during the 1960s.

Nobody aspires to play in a rock band if they've never heard of a rock band. The Marvel Bullpen of the 1960s was comicdom's first rock band.

That was because of Stan.

For me, Stan's presence in the world gave direction and purpose to my creative life, and my creative life has given meaning and purpose to my personal life. I am the man I am today, and I've lived the life I've lived, because of him. From the age of nine on, I've followed the path I'm on because of Stan Lee. (So much of my personal life is entangled in choices I've made as a result of my career it's impossible for me to separate personal from professional.)

My personal relationship with Stan, which began when I was seventeen years old, is more complex and less enlightening. It's a truism your heroes always disappoint you, and I was often disappointed by Stan. Yet I never stopped admiring him for his best qualities, his innate goodness, his creative ambition and unparalleled instincts. People often asked me, "What's Stan really like?" For a long time I had a cynical answer, but in recent years I realized I was wrong. The Stan you saw in the media was, in fact, the real Stan: a sweet, earnest, basically decent man who wanted to do the right thing, who was as astounded by his success as anyone, and who was just modest enough to mock himself to let us know he was in on the joke. I imagine Stan was grateful for the luck of being the right man at the right place at the right time-- but it's true he _was_ the right man. No one else could have done what he did. The qualities of ego and self-interest that I sometimes decried in him were the same qualities needed for him to fulfill the role he played. In typical comic book story telling, his weaknesses were his strengths. And his strengths made him a legend and a leader for all who came after him-- particularly me.

This has been a rambling appreciation, I know. Scattered and disjointed. Like I said, trying to describe the impact Stan had on my life would require an autobiography.

When I started thinking about Stan in light of his death I realized, for the first time (and isn't this psychologically interesting?) that Stan was born just a year after my father. When I met him, as a teenager struggling with my own father as almost all teenage boys do, Stan probably affected me as a surrogate father figure. Unlike my own father, Stan was a symbol of the possibilities of a creative life. He was a role model for creative success, like other older men in my life at the time. But unlike them, he'd been a part of my life since I was nine years old. A surrogate father in fantasy before he partly became one in reality.

Now he's gone. Part of me goes with him, but the greater part of me, the life I've led and built under his influence, remains.

Like so much of the pop culture world we live in, I'm partly Stan's creation.

'Nuff said.