How diverse is your cast?

Yes. And as I said previously, adding it is fine but it doesn't make the work any more diverse than if he wasn't if his behaviour is going to be exactly the same. That particular attribute would be unimportant and incidental rather than a defining feature of said character.

edited 23rd Sep '12 3:53:53 PM by peasant

I am thoroughly of the opinion that this idea that straight white males are "the norm" and every character that's different from that norm needs to be - to some extent - defined by that difference needs to die in a fucking fire. And every time I or anyone else writes fiction that doesn't buy into this idea of normative groups, it comes one step (no matter how slight) closer to doing so.

So yeah: you can write a personality-diverse cast without making them in any way demographically diverse. But that's not why I'd be writing the latter in the first place.

Agreed. Agreed so much.

Why would his behavior be any different, other than him liking other guys? Why does it need to be the 'defining' feature of that character?

To put things another way, I'm actually in complete agreement with peasant's position that making a cast which is "diverse" in the demographic sense doesn't make the cast "diverse" as characters. However, I'm not sure what the point of saying that in the first place is. If peasant's going on a crusade against the normal connotations of "diversity", this isn't really the place for it.

My original intention was to promote people to reflect on why they made the decisions they made with their characters lest they accidentally wind up committing Informed Judaism (or other non-Jewish variations that don't get their own page). However, seeing as how either I'm unable to articulate my point properly or others are uninterested in my message, I don't see the point in dragging it out any longer. I've said my peace and that's the end of it from my end.

P.S.: I agree that 'straight white males' being the 'norm' is a load of rubbish. Demographically speaking, they aren't even the majority. A random selection is closer to the norm. Hence, my view that simply having a character or two who is gay or black or uneducated does not automatically render something 'diverse'.

edited 23rd Sep '12 4:33:22 PM by peasant

Frankly, I think the whole idea of Informed Judaism is coming from this same mentality I've been complaining about. There are certainly cases where it is a bad thing, but a lot of the page reads like "doesn't go around figuratively yelling 'HEY GUYS IMA JEW!'? Informed Judaism!"

This. So much this.

Characters should be "diverse" as a matter of course (rather than just a bunch of interchangeable cookie-cutter characters who all act and sound alike anyway - even within a "homogenous" racial/sexual/cultural group.

Having, for example, all NZ characters liking rugby, drinking beer, watching Shortland Street and singing along to "Why Does Love Do this To Me" (by the Exponents) or saying "chur, bro" would be crap.

(For the record, I don't watch Shortland Street, I hate rugby, I seldom drink beer and I only ever say "chur, bro" as a parody. If "Why Does Love Do This To Me" comes on the radio, however, you'd best block your ears, cause I sing it loud.)

There is no "normal" and any depiction of characters as "normal" is flawed.

@Peasant. How would you have me depict a gay person? Running around giving advice on fashion? Mincing and saying "Fabulous" a lot?

If the character is gay then the character's partner is going to be of the same sex and the character is likely to take umbrage at any other character dissing gays.

Other than that, the gay character is just as likely to like or dislike "rugby, racing and beer" as anyone else.

Of the gay friends I have, very few are activists on the Gay Rights front, very few are campy, very few have any fashion sense to speak of, none of them like anti-gay comments (and their reactions vary from tuning out and walking away to getting visibly riled).

Other than that, they have regular jobs (or studies or are on the dole), watch movies, read, get into computers, and have a wide variety of interests that have absolutely nothing to do with their sexuality whatsoever.

You completely missed the point of my post in your haste to get into a tirade about "diversity".

I was responding to a comment about writing "anviliciously" about diversity, where the author's got an axe to grind about tolerance.

For me, including diverse people into a story is about having interesting characters who interact in interesting ways to keep the readers - er - interested. (Thesaurus failure)

It is not about ticking boxes or having an "X" for the sake of having an "X".

Hence my ensemble does not include a male homosexual - any attempt to shoehorn one into the cast to "collect the complete set" would be wrong. The mix I have - with various religions, socioeconomic groups, races, sexes, ages, sexualities etc - is there to provide a good mix of skills, outlooks and interactions to drive the story forward.

However, I see no point in bashing readers over the head with an anvil by having characters spouting off about "X Rights" and tolerance issues every second sentence and I have no desire to use stupid stereotypes - except to have the characters tear them down occasionally.

edited 23rd Sep '12 4:49:47 PM by Wolf1066

Quoted for truth.

This sort of thing always reminds me of a review I read of Inception where the reviewer pondered whether the Japanese businessman Saito was in the story as a nod to the Japanese cultural imperialism depicted in Blade Runner. To which my immediate mental response was: why can't he just be in the story because, guess what, some people in the world are Japanese, and some of them happen to be businessmen? Why doesn't the reviewer surmise that the American characters in the film are only in it as a nod to Karl May's cowboy novels?

edited 23rd Sep '12 5:08:35 PM by DoktorvonEurotrash

I just thought he was a Japanese businessman. It astounds me that someone would think there was some other meaning to it.

I can see where Peasant is coming from here. It's like the mentality that you should just write "good" female characters as male characters with boobs. Every person is raised differently, and their sex, race, and orientation is going to reflect that, however minutely, and it's a good thing to keep in mind when writing how a character would react to something.

Obviously with minor characters this would not be a good idea, since well, conservation of detail, but the deeper you go into a psyche, the more elements you should be weighing and considering.

I know my own gender, race, and sexuality has affected my life, albeit in small subtle ways (what I write, how I see media, what words I use occasionally, my values, etc. etc.) and I'm not exactly a strange deviation from the norm in terms of such things.

edited 24th Sep '12 7:31:37 AM by MrAHR

I'm trying hard not pick and choose all the individual statements people are saying that I agree or disagree with.

I have a question for Wolf, though:

That sounds very much like a false dichotomy to me. Are you saying that because very few individual people are stereotypical of their ideology, a person's ideology makes no difference to their behaviour? That, to carry on with your example, there are very few situations in which this character being Christian or atheist rather than Muslim would make a difference? Because that's what it sounds like you're saying, and I don't think that's right. That's just as much an aspect of personal history as the neighbourhood in which they were raised, to use your other example.

On the more general state-of-this-thread front...

edited 24th Sep '12 5:37:35 PM by Noaqiyeum

To quote from the much-referenced Informed Judaism:

Yes their ethnicity, upbringing, sexuality, sex, age etc are going to have effects on their lives but a lot of it is not transparent. You don't think "he's being kind, it must be because he's Christian/Muslim/Buddhist". You don't see the motivations/background etc behind the actions all the time.

The person is behaving in a way that's in accordance with a lot of factors, but you don't always get to see them in real life and, unless the person who's acting is the POV character (or you're writing very detailed Third Person Omniscient), you're not likely to see those factors in the story.

If you've crafted your characters well - on which Peasant and I are no doubt in total agreement - they will behave in a manner that factors in all their background and they will come across as "real".

However, a lot of it's not going to be "oh, he's doing that because he's gay/black/Christian/all of the above."

I'm not saying " there are very few situations in which this character being Christian or atheist rather than Muslim would make a difference", I'm saying that a lot of the time people aren't going to be able to tell the difference.

So we get into the fine line between "Informed whatever" and Anvilicious.

Tying everything they do back to "whatever" starts getting rather Anvilicious.

Having them (to use the Informed Judaism example) refuse to eat pork an account of being Jewish after having had a cheese burger and a shrimp cocktail, is Informed Attribute territory.

Having it known that they are "Whatever" and then just having them get on with their lives in the ways that are appropriate is the "place in between".

That way, when something turns up later that reminds the reader "this character is whatever", the reader doesn't get the "WTF? He ate a shrimp cocktail earlier" reaction.

A Christian does not have to be spouting God this and God that every couple of lines (unless that's the sort of character you're portraying) just to avoid being an Informed Christian.

Likewise, a gay character doesn't have to be active in the "Gay Community" or a "Gay Rights" campaigner throughout the story.

Sometimes "this is Rodney and his partner Frank" is enough, provided that the characters' behaviour is not contradictory.

So why have a character be gay or whatever ethnicity or female or pagan instead of straight, white, male or Christian if it's just about the character running into a burning building to rescue a child (something that the character would do regardless of sexuality, race, sex, religion etc)? Because I wanted an interesting character and this is how the character turned out. Not because it's the token "whatever" to please an exectutive or because I'm wanting to grind an axe of "[whatever] are just as good as "normal" people".

Or because there's no such animal as "normal" - we're each a minority of one, and I like my characters to reflect that by being a mottley bunch of interesting people from many different walks of life ("characters" in the colloquial sense).

Saying "well, since he's only going to be rescuing a child from a burning building, his sexuality/ethnicity/sex/religion is immaterial and you might as well have him being straight/white etc", seems to me to be buying into "normal characters are straight white Christian males and that anything else should only be used if you're making a point about tolerance and diversity".

You should be able to have a "black" character rescue a "white" child without somebody saying "did you make the character black to show that "they" are just as good as "us"?" or some other such crap.

That bit about the Japanese businessman in Inception being a prime example. "Hey, he's Japanese, there's got to be some significance in that." Ummm, yeah, it means he was born in Japan and studied business.

I do note that the Informed Judaism that people are concerned about is primarily a trope of long-running episodic shows where suddenly for one episode - in order to do a special on "diversity" or "tolerance" - a character is suddenly shown to be "whatever" despite this never having been a) mentioned or b)shown or adhered to in previous episodes - and then never mentioned again (unless the execs want to do another Anvilicious special about something.)

In the case of a single work (book/movie) this is less likely to happen unless the person's running about eating shrimp cocktails at the beginning of the book/movie and then it's suddenly revealed halfway through that they're supposed to be an Orthodox Jew. And in a movie or book, one would expect the writer to put in something that justifies the disparity (while in a series, the writers tend to act like the previous episodes didn't actually happen, especially if written by another writer).

I never said this, and in fact it's pretty close to the exact opposite of what I have been saying.

Oops, sorry. I think I misquoted or miscopied something somewhere and now I can't find what it was to begin with. So I just deleted it.

Oh - that's not at all an intuitive way I would explain it, but I think I understand now.

That was peasant (from page 3, I think), and on second thought I think it might be more accurate to say that I agree with the letter but not the spirit of it.

edited 29th Sep '12 10:24:15 AM by ComicConAwaits

Stuff like that bugs me. It's an example of how ludicrous over-analysis can get. Now, it's possible for an author to choose a race/ethnicity/whatever to make a certain point, but it's not necessary and can actually be pretty risky.

Personally, I'm more interested in a diverse group of personalities than a diverse group of circumstances, if that makes sense. I think something like "He/she is an X so he/she does Y" is a little bit backwards. I'm more likely to come up with the personality trait first and then come up with an explanation - so I'd think, "He/she is like this. Why is he/she like that? Well, maybe it's because..."

That method just makes more sense in my head, though the end result might be the same.

On another note...my main/largest work is a Star Trek fanfic with lots of alien characters. Where does that put me in terms of diversity? I'm not sure.

Also, just like you can over-analyze the reason an author chooses a certain race/gender/ideology/whatever, you can over-analyze the reason an author doesn't choose a certain race/gender/ideology/whatever. Having a male character doesn't mean I'm sexist. Having an all-male cast doesn't mean someone is sexist. The same applies to any given minority/group/whatever - just because an author doesn't include characters of that group doesn't mean he or she has anything against that group.

In-story, with certain genres, the advantage of appeasing your audience doesn't apply for your characters. If your cast for some reason is being chased or hunted down, it's gonna be really hard when every single one of you has a unique appearance.

Of course, this is only the case for certain genres, mind.

Since when should "appeasing the audience" factor into it?

What will "appease" some members of the prospective audience is going to alienate others - some might be pleased that one or more of the characters is black/gay/female, others may be put off by that.

And my take is "screw both of those groups".

If someone only wants to watch it if it has X it, they're just as much of a bigot as someone who won't watch it if it has X in it.

And I've got no desire to pander to bigots. I'm writing a) to entertain and b) because I enjoy it - so my characters are going to be whatever fits the story best and makes for interesting dynamics and interactions.

If you're writing for some publisher/broadcaster who says "I want you to put in X because we want the work to appeal to a certain demographic then a) "you poor bastard" and b) it's their money so you're stuck with it.

If you're writting a character to "appease the audience", it's going to be obvious to anyone older than about 13 that the character's just a token whatever to attract a particular audience - just as it's obvious in all the TV series where a token minority has been inserted.

I got three brunettes and a redhead.

Okay, in one story, I have the auburned hair asexual heroine, her female African American best friend, and her brunet guy friend who has some undiagnosed personality and mental disorders, along with their diverse classmates, two are who is multi racial, three who are Chinese (one of them being adopted), another African American student (this one is male) and two closeted gay males.

Another story I'm thinking up has a full blown Cast Full of Gay, with only one, maybe two straight characters.

I generally don't worry too much about diversity.

My description of, I don't know, the love interest might refer to her skin tone as a dark mocha or something, and maybe a character will make an offhanded mention to his partner's birthday coming up, but I tend to just include it because that's how I view the character in my mind. I don't really care unless it comes up, which happens occasionally with sexuality (Normally if they're in a relationship and relatively important—it's weird to not bring up a friend's significant other in a conversation when making small talk, unless something more pressing than, "How's the wife?" is on the table. Obviously this isn't as frequent if the character pops in for one second and then leaves forever, or isn't friendly with the protagonist, but hey, it's acknowledged every once in a while), uncommonly with religion (It might get more focus here, like if they're discussing it. Normally it'd be expressed when necessary—passing mentions, vocabulary, and trends for the subtle things, with maybe an unremarked crucifix necklace or prayer in such and such language when appropriate), and practically never with race (Well, culture and class might be mentioned, but honestly that's not a race thing).

My point is mostly that while you might come to know the various groups those around you identify with, you won't really care. They are who they are. When you're talking to a friend, you don't include in the conversation, "By the way, I am still Black," now, do you? It doesn't come up in conversation and people don't generally think, "That is my friend Arnold Brunhild. He is a heterosexual. He is of three quarters italian descent. He is of one quarter Latin American descent. He is a member of the United Methodist Church, but his beliefs are slightly different from the standard United Methodist Church doctrine. I will now explain how his beliefs are slightly different from the standard United Methodist Church Doctrine. The first difference is: ..."

People tend to be colorblind to what they're accustomed to seeing. It's not something worth being proud of or anything, it's just how we work. Unless there's some reason to acknowledge diversity, it shouldn't be mentioned, because there are a billion different potential things to describe about a character that contribute just as much to the story, and nobody cares about how many hairs they have on their head, now, do they?

If a character notices it or it makes a difference somehow, then sure, mention it. You might not want to be specific, but it shouldn't be ignored either. But mostly there's no point in even deciding these things about characters—you might make a decision later on, but unless you can come up with a good reason to mention it, don't.

...I went off tangent there. Sorry.

Some of the relationships between my characters are such that such things as religion and sexuality are obvious, but other things (such as one of the characters having Maori, Scots and Chinese ancestry) are only going to become evident if something happens in the story that gives a reason for it to be made known.

Some of the differences between people may create conflict in story and so the aspects may become evident that way, other things might be relevant to the plot, and other things might become evident because that's the way the conversation goes.

Still other stuff may never become evident in story - but will be part of the character's background/motivations and therefore will affect the way the person acts as a unique individual. The readers just won't be told "he did this because it was in accordance with his religious/philosophical views".

edited 30th Sep '12 12:31:39 AM by Wolf1066

I'm a bit confused as to why some people in this thread say that they would rather have a cast that's diverse in personality than in ethnicity/culture/etc. Who's to say you can't have both?

That said, I could do a lot better in terms of diversity in my writing. Granted, my stuff is set in Sweden, which is a fairly ethnically homogeneous country, but my casts are rather extremely homogeneous. I'm working on it, though.

edited 30th Sep '12 7:10:41 AM by DoktorvonEurotrash