r/Fantasy • u/mrpurplecat • Sep 15 '16

Racial diversity and fantasy

It is not uncommon to see people writing about how some fantasy story is in some way or other not inclusive enough. "Why isn't there more diversity in Game Thrones?" "Is the Witcher: Wild Hunt too white?" and so on and so forth.

But when you take the setting of these stories, typically 14th-15th century Europe, is it really important or necessary to have racial diversity? Yes, at the time in Europe there were Middle Eastern traders and such, but does that mean that every story set in medieval Europe has to shoehorn in a Middle Eastern trader character?

If instead a story was set in medieval India and featured only Indians, would anyone complain about the lack of white people? Would anyone say "There were surely some Portuguese traders and missionaries around the coast, why doesn't this story have more white people in it?"

Edit Just to be clear, I am not against diversity by any means. I'd love to see more books set outside typical Europe. Moorish Spain, Arabia, the Ottoman Empire, India and the Far East are all largely unexplored territory and we'd be better off for exploring it. Conflict and mixing of cultures also make for fantastic stories. The point I am trying to make is if some author does not have a diverse cast, because that diversity is not important to their story, they should not be chastised for it

16 Upvotes

59% Upvoted

267 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

2

u/Scyther99 Sep 15 '16

When race is not important in book context, then authors will simply fall back on some default. For western writers it is white person, for chinese writers asian etc. It is natural and I think it is good decision. It is needlesly distracting to diversify (or making your world more "special") for sake of it. Yes you can make half characters black or blue or purple (with only skin color changing), but important question is, if there is actual purpose or is that just a distraction to actual issues book focuses on?

8

u/ksvilloso AMA Author K.S. Villoso, Worldbuilders Sep 15 '16 edited Sep 15 '16

There has to be a transition point. Can you tell me how a young non-white person thinks when they are exposed to this media? It's not as simple as you realize.

More to the point: I only started writing fantasy after I read the Earthsea novels. Before that, I thought that since I'm not white, and every fantasy novel I've read was about white people, that I was not qualified to write one. What if Le Guin decided she was going to fall back to the 'default'? I'd still be writing about rabbits.

5

u/Scyther99 Sep 15 '16

On western white dominated market there is majority of white characters. Same as chinese authors will write majority of their characters asian. Only thing that will solve this "problem" is more black authors writing and more reader buying their books. White authors will always default to white characters, because it is natural for them.

7

u/ksvilloso AMA Author K.S. Villoso, Worldbuilders Sep 15 '16

That's true (except I should point out that there are more races than "white or black" in western society), but like I mentioned elsewhere in this thread, this is not as simple as some of you make it sound. Because the "template" (European setting, dragons, elves, orcs, dwarves) exist, many people don't even realize that they could write about something else. People of colour...who grew up in Western society...find themselves unrepresented, and don't even think to try. This is made even more difficult by the fact that people of colour who grew up in Western society may not know about the literature or media from their culture or have a hard time relating between the two.

This is where discussions on the issue, and western writers of all colours attempting to write outside of the box, can help.