A brief worry about race and character design.

[shatterstripes]

This article about how Schulz added a black character to Peanuts has me thinking. I can sympathize with his fear of Doing It Horribly Wrong; I’m slowly dealing with a little of that myself as I work on finalizing designs for Drowning City.

See, while it started out being set in a generic city vaguely inspired by New Orleans, over the years it has

Comments

[growly]

I struggle with this as well. I can mostly get away with avoiding these issues since my cast are a bunch of cute animals but I have some other ideas that involve a cast humans set in this world. I want to be all-inclusive but not speak over the narratives of people of color. To show "you have a place in my world" but not "I am going to presume to know exactly how your life is and speak for you".
I think all we can do is try our best and really listen to what people are saying, and to get to know people from all walks of life so writing for them feels less alien.

[shatterstripes]

Yeah, animals definitely make it easier. It says there is a division but lets both creator and reader decide exactly what it means,

I feel like my technique is going to be to mostly ignore race when writing the characters, but sweat a bit over making sure their designs cover observed racial characteristics without being caricatures...

[kamenkyote]

This is how the furry folk get around this point. I specifically don't think of distinct races or cultures when I do animal people characters. Some, though squeak through. Tamino, in my mind, though Italian named is Asian. But it really doesn't matter. That's one of the reason I've kept with the animal people as long as I have, so that anyone could put themselves in my characters' feet. It's actually a sneaky way around it. I've seen a few people deal with racism while using animal people, Spiegelman being the easy example. You're using elves, at least partially. Would it be worth it to play about with fantasy races of some kind so that you didn't have to be quite so tense about it?

[shatterstripes]

I hadn't thought of using other fantasy races. It feels kinda important to the story that it's about Normal Humans; it's very much an urban fantasy story and that really depends on mixing with the real world. (And hell, even that can be fraught with racial issues - I've seen people take issues with D&D's Evil Black Elves, for instance, and the 5th Edition takes pains to depict pretty much all the species with a lot of different human racial characteristics.)

Mostly I figure that just by WORRYING about this I'm way ahead of the worst possible outcomes.