Totally feminist and antiracist, yet with 75% more cultural appropriation!
I continue to be a white Western twit. Dammit, I have worked so damn hard to STOP reproducing the problematic parts of this culture every time I open my mouth or set stylus to tablet, but it just keeps sneaking up behind my back! So I looked at one of the races of people in my novel yesterday and realized: Yup, I did it again. Check it out, they've got the carefully researched trappings of another culture, but under that... yeah, it's basically Western culture with some tree-huggy aspects. NOT what I was going for, which was the real feel of a totally different culture.
This is the problem: As far as I know, the only way to understand a culture's mindset enough to write about it is to completely immerse yourself in it. The internet is not working real well for that purpose this week. And if the alternative is completely fabricating a culture to do the job, I run the risk of letting in stereotypes, unexamined tropes or slightly-disguised Western stuff. Gah gah gah.
All right, back to working out the mindset from what I have learned offline, keeping in mind that it's being viewed by an outsider in the book anyway, though that's no excuse for if I screw up.
Also: Currently experiencing a certain dearth of spoons once again. Choosing between using this fragment of energy to reach the bathroom or trying to fetch that notebook from the study is SO much fun! No more writing today!
This is the problem: As far as I know, the only way to understand a culture's mindset enough to write about it is to completely immerse yourself in it. The internet is not working real well for that purpose this week. And if the alternative is completely fabricating a culture to do the job, I run the risk of letting in stereotypes, unexamined tropes or slightly-disguised Western stuff. Gah gah gah.
All right, back to working out the mindset from what I have learned offline, keeping in mind that it's being viewed by an outsider in the book anyway, though that's no excuse for if I screw up.
Also: Currently experiencing a certain dearth of spoons once again. Choosing between using this fragment of energy to reach the bathroom or trying to fetch that notebook from the study is SO much fun! No more writing today!