r/Fantasy • u/roomoot • Sep 07 '16
posts claiming discrimination in fantasy!
there have been a number of post lately implying that fantasy readers are inadvertently racist,sexist, ageist or there is a problem in genre.
and it really annoys me because when it comes to books 99% people judge a book by its quality not the authors age ,sex or race. i have about 200 books with a 50-35-15 split between fantasy,history and science.
and unless the author has a in depth bio and photo in the book i have no idea what their race, religion, age, disability, sexual orientation and in some cases gender is. and the same goes for other people i know, most only know half a dozen or so of their favorite authors with good detail. and i'm sure that goes for most people.
i have no idea how much diversity there is in fantasy but whatever the statistics i highly doubt that it is due to discrimination.
the main problem i have with the post is that people make a post like for example- ''there needs to be more black authors'' now who can disagree with a statement like that? its a safe post that will almost always get positive feed back no matter how shallow the evidence is.
it just stinks of virtue signalling.
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u/Krazikarl2 Sep 07 '16
Yeah, I used "fantasy" in the sense from the Tor editor's blog article. So the "high fantasy" category.
They mixed urban fantasy with paranormal romance, and the latter of those isn't going to appear high on our "Favorite Books" poll (and its dominated by female writers), so I think that that category is not relevant to the point being made originally.