Believe me this is for Tumblr but they are too stupid to be allowed to have it:

[apiphile]

When I was a child I began making up versions of stories that I read because I wanted to be in the stories and I wasn't in them. There WERE little white girls, but they were little white girls with pigtails and two parents and good manners who never bit anyone, and I had fundamentally a very strong idea that I was the person sitting here and that

Comments

[wolfy_writing]

This is really interesting.

I know that I tend to write a great many characters who are Like Me in certain obvious ways (often women, nearly all attracted to women, some with certain very specific disabilities), and even more so in less-obvious ways (a fondness for nobility, a sensitivity to guilt, a desire to prove they're not nearly as weak as other people assume they are). But I've often been averse to what other people present as "Look! People like you!" stories (especially when it comes to disability stuff), because I hate being wrongly described, and who other people assume I am by looking is not who I am on the inside.

Most of my early stories tied in with my fondness for bizarre overintense stuff, and my tendency to come up with vivid and weird mental images and then try to write the rest of the details around them. This seriously confused some of my elementary-school teachers.

[apiphile]

who other people assume I am by looking is not who I am on the inside. YES THIS IS EXACTLY IT. I had this whole conversation with American Holly about this (I can't remember if I told you before because I have menstrually-induced amnesia at the moment and feel powerfully stupid) about how we're continually expected to identify with queermo ladies of poverty-stricken backgrounds as this is what we both are, but in her case it's more likely she'll identify with emotionally-repressed robot dudes who feel responsible for other people and are awful about it, and not a well-adjusted queermo lady who has worked her way up to a good job; viz I feel like I have a much closer affinity with emotionally volatile craptard men who get into a lot of fights and either fall in the "villain" or "antihero" category (occasionally female characters, Marla Singer etc) than sexuality or disability (for example, I like Saga Noren a lot but she's a very driven and hard-working woman who hasn't figured out how to lie to to her mother-in-law and that places

[wolfy_writing]

I don't remember that conversation. But yeah, in a lot of fannish stuff I tend to identify with one character because they're clever and kind of flaky and love travel and want to save people but are also deeply invested in finding opportunities for fun, and in another, it might be the guy who's considered relatively week because he's small, but has both a genuine love for excitement and a desire to prove how tough he is and get people to stop thinking he's so weak. And a character who's more demographically similar can easily leave me not relating if they're an organized person who takes satisfaction in order and routine, or never shows an impulsive side, or naturally gravitates to butch or femme gender presentation (my natural setting for clothing is "What's the easiest thing that counts as presentable and also fits?") or has lots of romantic relationships and regards them as a central part of life, or something like that. I can remember one character I've ever identified with on disability grounds, and she had a significantly

[apiphile]

Exactly, I do feel like... most of us don't answer the question "what kind of person am I" with "gay" or "white" or whatever.

[channonyarrow]

It's hugely reductionist to make the argument that you can pick one aspect of a person and now everyone who shares that characteristic must identify with the character and The Writer Has Done Their Job. I mean, I still think there needs to be more diversity on fiction, but not for the sake of saying "Look! I put in a character in a wheelchair! All you disabled folks can go identify with them and if you don't you can suck it!" Which I think is sort of where Tumblr would go with that, minus the suck it part

[wolfy_writing]

Yeah, there's a lot of reasons to encourage diversity in fiction which aren't "Look, there's one of Your Kind for you to relate to!" Diversity can make the parts that are meant to be realistic more realistic, it opens up the range of stories that can be told, and it can help push people's thinking further from categorizing Default Human as white, straight, male, cis, etc. None of that means that people in general, or people of a certain demographic, should feel obligated to identify with the disabled lesbian character, or to not identify with the nondisabled straight male.

[channonyarrow]

Now if people would stop giving themselves asspats for getting a "minority" character front and center in a book, it would be helpful. And stop assuming they've done their job by so doing. I MAY WANT TOO MUCH

[apiphile]

Pratchett just does such a good job with drawing characters who exist on multiple levels in multiple areas, who aren't defined by their flaws but aren't capable of obscuring them - I'm really grateful I grew up on his work, on a moral level as well as a creative one, I think - you learn a lot about the human condition from reading about the Discworld.

And now I know another reason Racefail pissed me off so much.

You mean APART from the bit where people started frantically attacking people of colour who didn't agree with their "this is how to feel about a thing" line as part of suddenly being champions of racial politics? :P

[klgaffney]

This reminds me of the times when I would go '...so write something else. something you do want? something that reflects your reality?" and everyone would just roll their eyes at it like this was the worst idea they ever heard, my god, what tripe

[apiphile]

The worst thing is I don't think the people who are complaining and who throw a fit if you say "yes, it's terrible that these stories aren't being told, YOU TELL THEM" don't even believe what they're saying because they are typically fandom people, and fandom people's raison d'etre is to create and tell the stories that they didn't think were told in the canon. It's not such a huge leap to start telling stories with the kind of characters you want to see as well, surely?

we wouldn't have had the Harlem Renaissance without that idea.

I don't quite get how they're missing things like this: do they think changes in literature and art just happened because the established authors had a new idea and felt like pursuing it? Because that's never been how anything works. Ho and indeed hum.

The kind of reaction I get to the idea of 'don't like this? create what you want to see' is one of those litmus tests that helps me decide if they're someone that's gonna be good for me to know. Well it does very neatly sort out the whiners from the