Why Do People Even Care About Unfortunate Implications?

In regards to the OP: It depends. Some do it because it's fun (Discussing the horrors of the Potterverse, for instance, is one of my favorite past-times.) Others do it because it makes them feel uneasy (Like when it first dawns on you that the humans are probably going to nuke Pandora in the Avatar movie). And some do it to make themselves look smart, usually using ideas that they heard on some website by someone other than them ("Oh, clearly Twilight isn't a good role model for teenage girls." Gee, thanks. I never would have gotten that if you hadn't told me.) It depends. I mean, I'm summing it up pretty generally, so I'm sure there are some who do it for different reasons, but for entertainment, for eeriness and for ego are the main reasons.

Note that the anecdotes about this come from childhood. Children will definitely do things like this. A child that reads only picturebooks will write about picturebook realities, like with anthropomorphic animals and such, because they don't know how to do otherwise. It's just what children do.

One of the writers seems to have matured enough to see why this is so silly. The other one still seems stuck in that mindset.

I know the first author thinks that the "hey, then you have to do it!" is lame. But you do. You might not have the market, publishers may not buy it, but hey, there's an online market now. A significant chunk of the Indian population may not have internet, but you obviously do if you're blogging so prolifically...

The proliferation of Highschool AU fanfics suggests to me that nearly anyone, child or not, can write the setting with which they are most familiar or just most want to be in. Not necessarily well or anything like that, but they can. (Or perhaps they are transcribing the setting well and it's masked by the fact it's a fanfic and using different names for whom the actions make no sense. The thought disturbs me but it's possible.)

And let's be honest, the Western world soaks up that "authentic x experience" kind of lit fic, regardless of the quality of the storytelling, since we just assume it's cultural differences and let it go. (Sometimes it really is.) It was true when we had the "authentic African-American experience" or "authentic Chinese-American experience" and now we've recently moved on to Sub-Saharan Africa if my mother's reading is any indication.

edited 14th Apr '12 4:30:21 PM by Night

edited 14th Apr '12 4:35:03 PM by joeyjojo

There are many reasons to ignore them, even ignoring strawmen Moral Guardians.

They can offend and alienate part of the potential audience of the work, lessening the amount of people willing to read/watch or purchase the work.

They can often show a lack of laziness in a writer, relying on stereotypes and biased information rather than doing real research.

They can reflect badly on the writer both as an author and a person.

They can weaken, or entirely contradict the theme of a book.

And they can weaken or entirely contradict the nature of a character, group, plot event, or setting element in a book.

Writing is an attempt to communicate with other people. If there are Unfortunate Implications in your work, you risk communicating something you did not intend that makes you look bad. Simple.

It's one thing to show in universe unfortunate implications, because then you're just dealing with the -isms of what you're writing. On the other hand, the narrative itself should not have any unfortunate implications for reasons I hope I don't have to spell out.

No, the solution is to whine about how you can't do anything without the PC police getting on your case.

And yes, nrjxll said all that could possibly need to be said about the OP.

^ To expand on that: there's no problem with black characters helping white characters, but there's a problem with black characters existing solely to help white characters, with no characterization or goals. And there's no problem with white characters helping black characters, but there's a problem with having all your black characters be incapable of reaching their goals without the help of more enlightened white people who never need help in return.

I'm personally more scared that people will think I'm trying too hard to avoid UI.

I know what you mean. Not long ago, I had a bit of a panic because I thought that people would find my handling of my transgendered character offensive, only to realize that by treating him as transgendered rather than as a character was just reducing him to the level of a token.

It's true. My characters are from different cultures and ethnic groups, so I feel like I can't give anyone real negative traits because people will think it's UI.

I mostly care about this in my writing in that if I see people seeing something I'm not seeing then I'm concerned I'm not communicating the themes clearly.

"It's like the catch-22 of white people and POC helping each other...."

Yes, that. Thats why i hate the whole idea of the Magical Negro trope because if it was a white person with mystical qualities helping a mundane black person learn a life lessor or get through tough time, people will say its just Mighty Whitey at work.

I tend to advocate not carring if you offend people because someone will complain about anything you write.

A lot of people didnt like The Legend of Bagger Vance because it portrays a black person who may be god helping some white guy. Since the ancient mythical text the story is from has a man who is a slave in all but name being god and helping a royal updating it to the pre-civil-rights south makes perfect sense, but that doesnt stop people from whining about racism. (1)

Now you dont HAVE to write to offend people, but stuff like South Park suggests that doing so will get you rich and famous, but I think it would be better to have upright and deep personal morals and not care if random people just cant get it.

(1) In the movie version maybe people would have complained less if Will Smith suddenly turned into the avatar of annihilation and gave Juna a lecture on entropy.

Dude, Mighty Whitey isn't just "white people are protagonists" or even "white people are protagonists in stories with nonwhite people." Nor is Magical Negro "black people who help white people." These terms do have specific meanings.

And it's kind of dickish to say "Well, people will always complain, so therefore I will never listen to anyone's complaints, ever."

edited 6th May '12 10:35:10 PM by jewelleddragon

Agreed. I've yet to see a story where the white supporting character is only there to provide inspirational advice to the black protagonist and then die to save the latter.

Correct - a Mighty Whitey is not a supporting character, he's a main character who is far better than everyone else because he happens to be white. The Magical Negro, meanwhile, is a vehicle for a white guy's character advancement and very little beyond that - either way, the focus is disproportionately on the white guy.

Also there's an "othering" aspect to the Magical Negro (indeed, that's what ties virtually all minority tropes together)—black people aren't like us, so they must know things that we don't. Hence a black kid next door or a black nerd aren't Magical Negroes, even though both might help a white protagonist.

Mighty Whitey is the polar opposite: a character put into a story specifically so that there will be a white person audiences can identify with.

People care about unfortunate implications because they don't want to put people off from reading their story.

Iaculus hit it right on the head. To expand on the definitions a bit, a magical Negro will often be impoverished, disabled, or otherwise disadvantaged. If he/she has supernatural powers, then they will be unable to use them to better themselves.

Conversely, The mighty whitey will frequently end up more skilled at various activities - a better archer then the tribes' best archer, a better trapper, a better medicine man, and so forth.

Another thing that people tend to forget is the Values Dissonance that sets in as the years go by.

Take Star Wars. The original trilogy has exactly one human who is non-white, and his name is Lando Calrissian. However, this franchise started way back in 1977, which means that what was considered acceptable then became cringe-worthy now. The prequel trilogy did make the human characters more diverse, and kudos to them for keeping up with the times.

Say, have you guys ever played Knights Of The Old Republic II? I have, and I need to say that it portrays some characters in a questionable manner.

1. There is the Serroco gang, who look like they are made up entirely of Far East Asians, and they are thuggish, feared, and hated. On an interesting side note, Asian characters have made few appearances in Star Wars, and the only appearance I can think of besides this game is Splinter of the Mind's Eye, that had a miner sporting a Fu Manchu mustache.
2. There is Gerevick, a black guy with really dark skin. He has zero redeeming qualities, he speaks in broken English/Basic, and everyone pretty much says that he is like this scary beast who hurts and kills people for no real reason. Oh, and it's strongly implied that he's humanoid and not actually human. They couldn't have made the Scary Black Man trope more racist if they had tried! Or did they?

Why Do People Even Care About Unfortunate Implications? Well, here's an armor-piercing question: how would you feel if people considered you a bad person solely because of your skin colour?

I wouldn't go so far as to advocate a total disregard for so-called unfortunate implications, but I do believe that certain people will see those implications where none are intended no matter what we do. As writers and artists, we have control only on our own intentions when producing our work, not on how our audiences will interpret it. For this reason I wouldn't obsess over how politically correct or inoffensive our creations appear, at least not during the creation process.

And you get commentaries that Watto is portrayed as a stereotypical Jew and Jar-Jar is portrayed as a caricature of someone of African descent.

Technically speaking, Lando's not the only non-white guy in the Star Wars movies. He's just the only one with more than one line.

edited 25th Jun '13 10:27:15 PM by CorrTerek

Most of Jar-Jar's physicality (and his voice) was the product of his actor, Ahmed Best. When someone asked him about the Unfortunate Implications of his portrayal(specifically the voice thing), he said he wasn't trying for anything "black" and talked about how he didn't know that "Jedi were representatives of The Man". So there is that.

edited 26th Jun '13 3:23:27 AM by drunkscriblerian