Writing the Worst Nightmares of the Privileged...
This isn't specifically about writing characters of color, but it's certainly relevant. Sorry if this is not the appropriate place for this. The mods are, of course, free to remove it if it's not. Also, dang this comm has a lot of redundant tags. :l
Let me start by giving a little background (Note: Some knowledge of Harry Potter is necessary to understand this, but if you know nothing about Harry Potter, you can skip this paragraph and do fine in the rest of the this post.) on what got me thinking about this: Fenrir Greyback has been popping up in my fanfiction more and more often lately, and I've even become more interested in reading about him, but I've been pretty hard-pressed to find representations of him that I really like. In fanfiction where he's a major (non-villain) character, he either gets the leather-pants treatment or he gets painted as a mostly-decent guy who's just looking out for his pack. In either case, there's a tendency to sweep all of the unpleasant stuff (or which there is very, very much under the rug). When he's a bad guy, he gets roughly the same treatment that he did in canon, which also bothers me: He's portrayed as naturally a complete monster, usually placed in opposition to "good" werewolves like Remus, with either no acknowledgment at all or very little acknowledgment of the circumstances within wizarding society that almost certainly created that monster. Fenrir's a bad guy. No disputes there. He is at least as scary as if not scarier than Voldemort. I don't like seeing Fenrir portrayed as anything but a bad guy. But I also don't like seeing him compared to Voldemort as though their movements and the circumstances that gave rise to those movements are exactly the same.
So, I want to talk about, as I said in the title, the worst nightmares of the privileged. The sort of boogie-POC or -radical feminists that our oppressors like to talk about. This kind of POC character jokes that if we saw a white person get shot, he'd laugh (at the most mild version of this trope), or even (at the most extreme version) that he'd probably be the one to shoot him. This kind of gay character takes Michael Swift's "Gay Revolutionary" completely seriously. These are the fictional embodiments of claims that the privilege like to make to justify their cries of "reverse racism," "reverse sexism," "heterophobia," or "cisphobia," etc. These characters (with no exceptions that I can think of, but allowing for the possibility of exceptions) are very problematic for a huge number of reasons. But they exist, and many fanfic writers have their reasons for not ignoring them. Many original fic writers choose to write them anyway because, although such people are extremely rare, some of them do exist in real life.
(How) Should we, as writers, deal with writing not characters who are evil and of an oppressed class, but characters who are evil, in a rather inescapable way, because of the oppression they suffered? It's a very important difference. A woman who is seeking world domination and isn't afraid to murder anyone in cold blood to achieve it is not the same as a woman who was repeatedly raped and domestically abused and now violently assaults and kills men to get back at society. These characters can't be written in the same way. It complicates things even more when the movement is not exclusively about revenge, but rather about actually improving the circumstances of the minority group in question. A terminally ill character who just wants to become the wealthiest person in the world is not very much like a man with HIV who, tired of facing constant homophobia and ableism because of his condition, organized a Jack Chick style blood-terrorism movement to get more funding for HIV-research.
Most people are probably aware of the huge potential for harm in writing a character like the ones I just described, so we seldom see such blatant examples of this as that (though we certainly do see them occasionally), but it becomes a lot more frequent when we get into fictional "races" in the sci fi and fantasy genres, and things like Avatar and Harry Potter have definitely taught us that the way writers handle fictional races can say a lot about their views on race in the real world.
This begs two questions:
1. Is our society at a point where it is ethical to write characters of the second (Fenrir Greyback) sort at all, or are portrayals of these sorts always justifications for the persecution complexes and fear of the privileged, and innately harmful in our modern societal and political climate? If it is innately harmful to write these sorts of characters, does this also apply to fanfiction about these characters when they already exist, or is it possible to reclaim these characters through fiction?
2. If and when writers do undertake writing characters whose violent tendencies are a direct result of oppression (either because they don't believe it's innately harmful or because they're writing fanfiction and these characters already exist and they don’t want to ignore them), what sort of traps should they avoid falling into? In your opinions, where exactly is the fine line between behaving as though a history of oppression excuses the character's behavior and behaving as though the character is just like the oppressor?
Let me start by giving a little background (Note: Some knowledge of Harry Potter is necessary to understand this, but if you know nothing about Harry Potter, you can skip this paragraph and do fine in the rest of the this post.) on what got me thinking about this: Fenrir Greyback has been popping up in my fanfiction more and more often lately, and I've even become more interested in reading about him, but I've been pretty hard-pressed to find representations of him that I really like. In fanfiction where he's a major (non-villain) character, he either gets the leather-pants treatment or he gets painted as a mostly-decent guy who's just looking out for his pack. In either case, there's a tendency to sweep all of the unpleasant stuff (or which there is very, very much under the rug). When he's a bad guy, he gets roughly the same treatment that he did in canon, which also bothers me: He's portrayed as naturally a complete monster, usually placed in opposition to "good" werewolves like Remus, with either no acknowledgment at all or very little acknowledgment of the circumstances within wizarding society that almost certainly created that monster. Fenrir's a bad guy. No disputes there. He is at least as scary as if not scarier than Voldemort. I don't like seeing Fenrir portrayed as anything but a bad guy. But I also don't like seeing him compared to Voldemort as though their movements and the circumstances that gave rise to those movements are exactly the same.
So, I want to talk about, as I said in the title, the worst nightmares of the privileged. The sort of boogie-POC or -radical feminists that our oppressors like to talk about. This kind of POC character jokes that if we saw a white person get shot, he'd laugh (at the most mild version of this trope), or even (at the most extreme version) that he'd probably be the one to shoot him. This kind of gay character takes Michael Swift's "Gay Revolutionary" completely seriously. These are the fictional embodiments of claims that the privilege like to make to justify their cries of "reverse racism," "reverse sexism," "heterophobia," or "cisphobia," etc. These characters (with no exceptions that I can think of, but allowing for the possibility of exceptions) are very problematic for a huge number of reasons. But they exist, and many fanfic writers have their reasons for not ignoring them. Many original fic writers choose to write them anyway because, although such people are extremely rare, some of them do exist in real life.
(How) Should we, as writers, deal with writing not characters who are evil and of an oppressed class, but characters who are evil, in a rather inescapable way, because of the oppression they suffered? It's a very important difference. A woman who is seeking world domination and isn't afraid to murder anyone in cold blood to achieve it is not the same as a woman who was repeatedly raped and domestically abused and now violently assaults and kills men to get back at society. These characters can't be written in the same way. It complicates things even more when the movement is not exclusively about revenge, but rather about actually improving the circumstances of the minority group in question. A terminally ill character who just wants to become the wealthiest person in the world is not very much like a man with HIV who, tired of facing constant homophobia and ableism because of his condition, organized a Jack Chick style blood-terrorism movement to get more funding for HIV-research.
Most people are probably aware of the huge potential for harm in writing a character like the ones I just described, so we seldom see such blatant examples of this as that (though we certainly do see them occasionally), but it becomes a lot more frequent when we get into fictional "races" in the sci fi and fantasy genres, and things like Avatar and Harry Potter have definitely taught us that the way writers handle fictional races can say a lot about their views on race in the real world.
This begs two questions:
1. Is our society at a point where it is ethical to write characters of the second (Fenrir Greyback) sort at all, or are portrayals of these sorts always justifications for the persecution complexes and fear of the privileged, and innately harmful in our modern societal and political climate? If it is innately harmful to write these sorts of characters, does this also apply to fanfiction about these characters when they already exist, or is it possible to reclaim these characters through fiction?
2. If and when writers do undertake writing characters whose violent tendencies are a direct result of oppression (either because they don't believe it's innately harmful or because they're writing fanfiction and these characters already exist and they don’t want to ignore them), what sort of traps should they avoid falling into? In your opinions, where exactly is the fine line between behaving as though a history of oppression excuses the character's behavior and behaving as though the character is just like the oppressor?