Character design: Multi-ethnic/national Five Woman Band

If using the idea of a multinational team means that you can't do it without stereotyping all the nationalities, you shouldn't do a multinational team.

"Shit, our candidate is a psychopath. Better replace him with Newt Gingrich."

This, pretty much. Tropes should not be so plentiful in the character descriptions.

edited 20th Jan '12 6:31:03 PM by Firebert

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1) Am I the only one who thinks that you people are equating "stereotype" with "negatively exaggerated representation"? Tropes Are Not Bad, and that goes for National Stereotyping Tropes.

2) I think I've already said this, but nevertheless: Any national stereotypes that will be included may or may not have certain aspects of them played straight, averted, (double) subverted, justified, zig-zagged, deconstructed, reconstructed, et cetera et cetera.

3) I would like to note that, in hindsight, no matter which nationality I picked as the Token Evil Teammate, I am fairly certain that I would've gotten as much backlash as Milos had towards my choice of the Slavic/Eastern European member, because practically any nationality can be flanderized into being "evil" one way or the other.

4) The plentiness of trope pot holes in the aforementioned descriptions is a product of my personal fascination with Trope Overdosedness and Troperifficness, as well as having become accustomed to use them as a sort of "troper lingo" that can compress the general gist/essence of a long description in just a handful of words.

edited 20th Jan '12 7:03:04 PM by MarqFJA

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.

Hmm...what does Team Fortress 2 do right that you might be able to apply to your team?

I think one reason is that the stereotype each of the nine mercenary fill is only one minor part of a character.

edited 20th Jan '12 7:01:35 PM by chihuahua0

Well, Milos himself is East European so...

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Yeah, I figured that immediately from his first post. There is a reason why I picked Eastern Europe, though, and it's not because I hate Eastern Europeans/Slavs/Russians or believe that they are incapable of being good characters/people.

Team Fortress 2 has the problems of the whole group being composed of males, and not having any "good" motivations for working as mercenaries.

edited 20th Jan '12 7:07:57 PM by MarqFJA

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.

And that reason is...?

A stereotype is by its nature negative, as it ascribes unfairly a given attribute (regardless of whether or not an attribute is good or bad) to an entire class or group of people based on overgeneralizations from a select few.

There is no "this can be seen as a good thing" with stereotypes. They are inherently bad.

"Shit, our candidate is a psychopath. Better replace him with Newt Gingrich."

Is there really any reason why you couldn't put her in the sixth ranger's place (or any other of the places, for that matter)? Personalities aren't dependent on race.

Also, tropes are probably not the best to use for shorthand description, since tropes can be kind of vague. Maybe listing single words as personality traits might be more descriptive?

edited 20th Jan '12 7:14:05 PM by BlackElephant

I'm an elephant. Rurr.

Just my own two cents here, but I'd just like to point out that making a character of a certain race the only evil character in a group is not necessarily racist. It's only racist if they're the only evil character in the group because of their race, which is not at all the same thing.

Under the previous conditions, any evil character could be accused of being a racial stereotype, because whether they're good, neutral, evil, or something else, everyone belongs to some kind of ethnicity. While I agree that Unfortunate Implications should be avoided to the best of an author's ability, that doesn't mean that the author should be afraid to make a multi-ethnic cast just because certain characters in it would be evil.

edited 20th Jan '12 7:18:47 PM by Lennik

The problem isn't that it's "a person not from the West is evil." The problem is that it's "a caricature who is a stereotype of a person not from the West is evil."

"Shit, our candidate is a psychopath. Better replace him with Newt Gingrich."

@DW: Deconstruction, mainly. She is supposed to demonstrate one kind of the tragic background that would be required to create a Ultra-Sexy Ruthless/Sadistic Russian Female Super-Assassin/Spy (as usually depicted by Hollywood, aka The Baroness for KGB/GRU) in a Darker and Edgier (post-)cyberpunk world. A comparable example is Neon Genesis Evangelion deconstructing the previously taken-for-granted Mecha Genre trope of children/teenagers piloting war-machines.

There is also an element of making an allusion to the crapsackiness of modern Russia and the former Soviet Union, in different ways for each (crumbling economic state and rampant crime and corruption in the former, and the Police State oppression and totalitarianism in the latter).

@Flyboy: That is what Reconstruction is ther for; your take is pretty much the essence of Deconstruction, which isn't actually bad unless it becomes the sole focus of your analysis. That said, there's a reason why I said "archetypes/stereotypes". Yamato Nadeshiko, for example, is not a stereotype, it's a cultural archetype that is idolized by the Japanese. Point being: Stereotypes are not the sole defining points of the characters.

1. You are taking the "evil" in Token Evil Teammate too literally; see the passage that I had quoted on the previous page.

2. The stereotype is only one aspect of the character; maybe I should've stressed that all of the Five Woman Band's members have Hidden Depths to them that go way beyond their ethnic/national identities.

3. I only applied Token Evil Teammate to her once I realized that I was missing a character who is willing to do whatever it takes to protect the group's interests in the setting's Darker and Edgier, Bloodier and Gorier Black-and-Grey Morality world. Demons and Eldritch Abominations from the world beyond aren't the only enemies the band will have to fight; there's the Corrupt Corporate Executive running a monolithic MegaCorp who is dealing in Things Man Was Not Meant to Know, an Ancient Conspiracy or two hell-bent on realizing a "perfect" world no matter the cost, a Knight Templar MIB-type Government Agency of Fiction that captures and "studies" (read: dissects and/or experiments on) superpowered individuals who have taken interest in our protagonists, and many more such "mundane" threats. For many of these, the band will end up having to grudgingly admit that the deadly and morally-ambiguous intrigues of espionage and assassination are too often the only ways to effectively combat those aforementioned threats.

@Black Elephant:

Role does not equate to personality, you know. And if I am to put either of the two in the group, I'd rather have them in roles that are flexible/appropiate enough to allow exhibiting other semi-typical aspects of their ethnic/national backgrounds.

Maybe you're right. It would certainly be no trouble for me to quickly remember how the trope plays into the character's design/personality/narrative role, since I am the one who is making the story and its characters to begin with, but that doesn't extend to other people who are not in on my plans, especially since "trope-lingo" isn't a standardized thing in the first place.

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.

Apparent misconceptions like this are why people should actually write out what their characters are supposed to be like beyond just trope bullet point lists.

edited 20th Jan '12 8:05:12 PM by Culex3

to the last I grapple with thee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee

<sigh> Yeah, I really should've realized that not all tropers would bother reading a trope's article to make sure that they understood all naunces of said trope completely if the title seemed obvious enough to them.

In other news, another troper had pointed out that I also could have avoided much of the controversy on the stereotype thing by pointing out that I was aiming for something similar to Axis Powers Hetalia's generally humorous and/or sympathetically-tragic portrayals of the Anthropomorphic Personifications of the world's nations.

edited 20th Jan '12 8:20:19 PM by MarqFJA

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.

Except that show isn't funny because it's offensively stupid in its basic premise and general execution, insofar as I can tell...

"Shit, our candidate is a psychopath. Better replace him with Newt Gingrich."

APH was intended to be a comedy that relies upon Refuge in Audacity. We're under the assumption that you're attempting to make this seem serious.

Your audience is not going to dismiss it and think it's okay just because of what the trope page says. It's the implication that is still offensive.

edited 20th Jan '12 8:23:37 PM by CrystalGlacia

"Jack, you have debauched my sloth."

Yeah, that's pretty accurate.

to the last I grapple with thee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee

One could turn this statement around and point out that you, rather than actually writing descriptions of your characters, posted links to descriptions of other, similar characters.

edited 20th Jan '12 8:28:28 PM by INUH

Infinite Tree: an experimental story

A huge amount of people find APH VERY funny. There is very little wrong with the formula used.

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Which is an appeal to popularity, AHR. Just because people find it funny doesn't mean that it isn't offensive in its basic concept.

"Shit, our candidate is a psychopath. Better replace him with Newt Gingrich."

And just because you find it offensive doesn't mean it's not funny to others. Hell, even if it is objectively offensive (which it can't be), that has NOTHING to do with the topic at hand, or it's inherent "humor"

Really, it just seems like you're dismissing things off of your own personal tastes, and it's getting really grating by this point.

edited 20th Jan '12 8:45:04 PM by MrAHR

Read my stories!

'Offensive in its basic concept' seems a whole lot like you projecting what offends you onto reality. I, personally, am not in the least offended by APH, though no doubt there's at least something about the portrayal of the US that I could plausibly jump on.

And the trope lists Marq is posting are making me want to read it just to find out how he's going to fit them all.

Shinigan (Naruto fanfic)

We usually call the act of trivializing races and nationalities into simple stereotypes "racism." Excuse me for taking it as a given that people agreed that this is bad.

"Shit, our candidate is a psychopath. Better replace him with Newt Gingrich."

...um? I think we may be using different definitions of 'racism' here. As far as I can tell, 'racism' is a statement or implication that individuals of X race/nationality are objectively different from and less than others, and should be treated accordingly. I don't actually see any racism in APH.

Shinigan (Naruto fanfic)

APH and concepts like it reduce complex cultural and societal systems to stereotypes and caricatures personified and important historical events to slapstick humor. I should think that this combination, if not racist by technical definition, is at least severely questionable for its trivialization of historical problems.

You damn well know they wouldn't get away with it so easily if they weren't doing very old historical events.

"Shit, our candidate is a psychopath. Better replace him with Newt Gingrich."