Sometimes I play videogames

Making real world culture equivalents while making them unique in fantasy

pokeblader3 said:

How do I handle coding cultures/religions after real world cultures/religions while still keeping them unique and not feeling like just being their real world equivalents? Some of my fantasy cultures have several real world cultural influences, which works fine with architecture, clothing, and names, but I feel like combining real world religious traditions is insensitive.

Is it better to just have a fully made up fantasy religions with a few dressing elements taken from the inspirational cultures’ religions, like temple architectural design or religious stories (like say a character retelling the story of King Solomon and the baby as a proverb)?

I recommend reading authors who have been praised for their culture-coding based world-building and taking notes about how they have represented a culture while also what is different from the culture(s) that serve as the original inspiration. I have already on this channel recommended Tamora Pierce, Nahoko Uehashi and N.K. Jemisin. I think the perfect balance of coding is when the reader can obviously tell the sources you are pulling from, but it’s not so exaggerated that it makes a member of that culture feel as though it’s their culture directly being portrayed in unflattering or unbalanced ways. Some creative extra bells and whistles that show you’ve thought about how fantasy tropes, plot devices and so on can be reflected in your coding are also nice. Beta-readers, to this effect, can be very helpful in instructing what is or is not offensive, as well as what resonates and what doesn’t.

- Marika.

Cultural diffusion is a thing— look up real hybrid religions that were made in deeply religiously diverse areas to see what sort of patterns you can establish, see how people mixed multiple kinds of traditions together for tension-easing ends. This can give you an idea of where to put in the fantasy tropes and what liberties have already been taken with any one religion while it was considered respectful enough to be practiced

~ Mod Lesya

How to decide on coding / story cultures

writerandstudent said:

How do you decide when a story would benefit from coding? Like which culture would be best to influence the fantasy world/characters? Like I have a lot of ideas for stories, but don’t want all my main characters to be the same or to be stereotypes/harmful to a culture. So far, my process for picking as been, is there a stereotype that could be seen in this character’s role/power in the book? Yes? Don’t use it. Which I feel isn’t the best way to do it. Do you create world, story, or character first? 

Answered here: https://writingwithcolor.tumblr.com/post/110647537818/i-am-a-white-writer-and-my-story-is-settled-in-a-made 

In addition, my very arbitrary bench lines are:

1) Will this particular coding make the story more interesting? 

2) Am I interested in these cultures? If I code a culture I don’t care about into a story, it will likely make for a boring experience from the reader’s perspective. However, I must point out that you are almost always employing cultural coding when writing fantasy or science fiction. The only metrics that differ are which culture(s) and to what degree of accuracy? Examples below:

Are you writing a King Arthur-style fantasy? Then you are coding that story based on Arthurian legend.

Are there fae/ derivations thereof in your story? You are employing Gaelic coding.

Lord of the Rings clearly pulls from Anglo-Saxon coding.

George Lucas used Buddhism when coding Jedi philosophy (albeit exceedingly poorly). Please see the response to the previous ask for further details.

- Marika

Coding without the culture in fantasy

helpmeobijuanyouremyonlyho said:

Hello! I’m helping a friend design a Dungeons and Dragons style world and she plans to give each race their own kingdom. She wants each kingdom to be loosely based on a real life civilization from history so I’ve been using your blog a lot to help her so far. However the big issue we’re running into is that you’ve discussed the issues of making an entire fantasy race look like one real life ethnicity, however wouldn’t it also be wrong to just take the culture without the people as well? I know that most civilizations are as homogeneous as usually portrayed, but it seems like erasure to make them “color-blind”. Is there a respectful way to do this?

How does one divorce people effectively from a culture? How can you portray the culture in a way that won’t make your audience think, “Oh, they used [IRL people] for inspiration?” Cultures are created by and for people, so I’m at a loss what you mean here. 

Your problem, by the way, is easily solved. Give multiple kingdoms per race/ species with varying cultures/ ethnicities. Having each species remain confined to one physical location and never venturing from their stronghold seems unrealistic given that social, intelligent animals, including humans, tend to have large ranges and will often migrate. Please see “Fantasy with no humans” for more details. 

“I know that most civilizations are as homogeneous as usually portrayed.”

…Says who and on what grounds? The story of many civilizations is not one of homogeneity and isolation. Alas, I do not have time to provide you with a lecture on human migration, trade routes and diversity in the pre-modern era, but I suggest you use Wikipedia as the Internet intended.

In the event the above is a typo and you meant “I know that most civilizations are not as homogeneous as usually portrayed” (And I hope this was the case), I don’t think a color-blind approach is really an option as diversity does not mean peace. A civilization can be plenty diverse without being neutral when it comes to inter/intra-ethnic conflict. In fact, this is usually the case. I suspect this is why much of East Asia and Western Europe are currently quite desperate to preserve their own perceived homogeneity. One need not look far for current examples. The United States, Mexico, Philippines, Brazil, India: all diverse countries - none known for their domestic peace or functional governments. I believe the Roman Empire lasted for all of 500 years, but how many of those years would we consider peaceful? A friend who studied China once told me the median Chinese dynasty is 150 years. Diversity and conflict historically go hand-in-hand. 

Your friend is not thinking very logically. Most civilizations are not formed around a population that appears out of the blue. A particular set of circumstances like geography, resources and external events drive different groups to the same location where the sum of their interactions create a civilization.

- Marika.

I would suggest looking at something like Ancestry and Culture, a fan-made initiative to try and break DND away from the concept of homogenous fantasy races. I have not read it, but it appears to be a fairly solid attempt at giving people character creation freedom in a way that allows them to be coded in multiple ways, and gives much more interesting possibilities for playthroughs.

The royal family of Perach in their Purim costumes!

Queen Shulamit’s finally gotten that poofy foreign dress she always wanted, and she’s wearing it to play Queen Esther in the royal Purimspiel. Crown Princess Naomi is a butterfly, Princess Ilana is a banana, and tiny Prince Aram is a peapod. Aviva says “I’m dressed as the audience.”

A Purimspiel is when you and your buddies act this stuff out at temple as part of the general holiday celebration. Either during this or just a reading of the story (”Megillah reading”), every time the bad guy’s name–Haman–is mentioned, everyone shakes noisemakers to symbolically blot him out from history.

The costumes are just part of the fun. There are also usually little triangular cookies called hamantaschen, filled with jam, but Shulamit up there is gluten-intolerant so they aren’t part of this particular picture. You can see them here.

Anyway, I hope you find my story to be a good cross-section of Purim activities, from discussion of charity baskets to dressing up to practicing for the Purimspiel. I don’t run into Purim in fiction that often, especially not in my little f/f corner, but there’s also a Purim scene in Rachel Gold’s lesbian YA contemporary My Year Zero.

WWC Recommended Resources for USA: Race in LA

What is it like to be a Black woman in the 1950s rejected from a hospital job for the color of her skin?

How does a Latina cope with assimilation?

What does it feel like to be racially profiled?

How does growing up brown during America’s War on Terror shape a person’s beliefs?

What is it like to be East Asian during the pandemic?  

How does growing up mixed race feel when labels are all everyone else sees?

We get many questions on WWC asking how to portray racism and experiences with race for BIPOC in America. Many of our followers are understandably curious about experiences of which they have no personal knowledge. However, there is a limit to what our small team of moderators can tell you because race is personal. It is a phenomenon transformed by the prism of individual memory and environment. To that effect, we often recommend that people consume media about race from a wide variety of perspectives.

Speaking as someone from Los Angeles, a diverse city with many diaspora, a large mixed-race population and numerous complex stories about race and identity, I often find that while my personal story on race may overlap with others, but is never quite the same. Thus, I would like to recommend for your reading pleasure from Southern California Public Radio’s LAist: Race in LA

Prompted by the Texas El Paso Shootings in 2019, this weekly essay series contains the stories and histories of ordinary Los Angeleno residents as they talk about how race and racism continue to impact their lives despite living in an American city known for its diversity and visibility in popular culture. The series was launched after the murder of George Floyd in the spring of 2020 and is ending its run this summer. The current archive contains 58 essays.

Though specific to a city in the United States, I believe these essays can facilitate conversations on race that many of us will never hear because our social circles are often restricted to those we resemble. More importantly, these are real stories written by real people and vetted by real journalists.

For authors looking expand their understanding of the human experience, I hope you find it useful.

- Marika.

Hi! I’m making this post because I’d like to see better representation for Latin American Caribbean people in the media! The media and books usually have a very specific concept for Latine characters and I’d like to give you more options. I’m from the Caribbean region of Colombia, I’m half-Black and I immigrated to continental Mexico when I was a child. 

Race 

My mom is Black and my dad is a white mestizo. That means that he looks white but has heavy Indigenous ancestry. I have light brown skin, Black features and curly hair. In Latin America, race works a bit different than in the US. There’s three groups, white, indigenous and Black people, and people can be categorized in either of those categories and people who are mixed also get categorized depending on what you’re mixed with and how close to whiteness you look like. These are the vestiges of the racial caste system that was imposed on us during the days of the colony. 

All Latin American people still live and have the privileges or oppression within those terms, and live within them, though a lot of us (mostly the privileged ones) don’t give it too much thought. Also! We don’t really connect race and culture the same way USA people do, because of politics within our governments that tried to gaslight us into believing that race and culture are not connected at all.

Therefore, the conflicts mixed people with two Latin American parents have are a bit different. I don’t have to pick between my Black side and my white side because I’ve always been perceived as a half-Black person, people perceive me through my closeness to Blackness. 

I have a sister, and she looks like a white-mestizo, and she never has to pick between her Black and her white side because people will always perceive her as a white-mestizo person. It’s not about picking sides or identifying with a side more, it’s about the way you look and the experiences you will be bound to have because of the way you look. 

With that in mind, I’ll need you know that mixed race people can look like whatever both of our parents look like! I know mixed race people that look unambiguously one race, but people prefer to portray us as ambiguous looking people and that gives way to the prevalence of white supremacy in the media and fetishization of mixed people. There’s a lot of people here in Latin America that get into interracial relationships because they want ambiguous looking children and then make the child go through hell if they end up looking completely like a person of color. That’s fucked up, and I think portraying non ambiguous looking mixed race characters would help with that. Specially if you make them look completely like a person of color! 

Micro-aggressions, Racism

I moved from a mainly Black area of Caribbean Colombia to a mainly white/mestizo area in Mexico. When you’re the only person that looks Black in a mainly white area prejudice and racism is something you probably will have to endure. Latin America is blatantly anti-Black. And non-Black people are usually blind to their own anti-blackness. Every time I’ve had disagreements, or when non-Black people don’t like me, they spit out the most anti-Black stuff, and slurs.

People give me a lot of shit because of my features and my skin, people always tried to convince me that because of them I was uglier, I was less. Even people that are mixed with indigenous try to make sure that you know that you and them are not the same because you are mixed with Black.  Keep in mind that I also have privilege because I look like a light skin Black person. I’m lucky I’ve never been constantly bullied or physically assaulted. 

Also! Caribbean culture is usually despised or seen as less in Latin America because of its closeness to Blackness, continental Colombians usually see Caribbean Colombians as: 

Lazy. 

Violent

Ignorant. 

Vulgar, poor, uneducated, “hood" 

Overly loud people (yes a lot of us talk loud! And fast! And we’re joyful! But white and continental Latines usually see that as distasteful) 

They relate us to zoofilia and bestiality for some reason?

Caribbean men are seen as predatory.

Caribbean women are seen as overly sexual, insatiable. 

They see our culture as class-less. 

They see our accents, dialects as primitive and improper. 

A lot of these are prejudices that are perpetuated by white people in the US too. Anti-Blackness is global. 

A big part of my experience too was that people use to give me a lot of shit because of my accent, they tried to deem me as ignorant because of it and teachers and coaches used to spend hours when I was a child trying to “correct it”, even my white, Mexican dad at home said that my accent made me less than my white and indigenous Mexican peers. Caribbean Spanish dialects are heavily influenced by African tongues, the prejudice non-Caribbean have against it is, again, its closeness to Blackness. The fact that I was so pushed into correcting it both by adults and kids made me develop a stutter when I was a child, and overall messed with my ability to express my thoughts out loud. I think that’s a thing that other immigrants can relate to. 

People will try to strip you from anything that makes you you, even your own family. My customs were diminished too, Caribbean music, Caribbean ways of styling ourselves were diminished too. It’s a huge reason why I’m even closer to them. 

Fetishization

Caribbean women are usually sexualized a lot. Like- a lot. I’m AFAB so I gotta go through that. People see our culture as something exotic, they see the way we look as something inherently more sexual than other cultures. Caribbean culture is heavily influenced by African culture, Caribbean regions are usually 80% Black and mulato areas in Latin America, so this is intertwined with anti-Blackness. Be careful with that stereotype please. 

Things that I’d like to see more. 

BLACK CARIBBEAN LATINXS!!! There’s a lot of cultures within us, you can write someone from the islands (PR, DR, Haiti!!!!, Cuba) or people from the Caribbean region of Latin Countries ( Like Colombia, Venezuela, Panama!!) 

Immigrant Black and half-Black Caribbean Latinx people that love their culture and try to stay close to it. 

Smart, very smart Black Latinxs that are also bubbly and happy and joyful. 

Black and half-Black Caribbean Latinx people with close relationships to our family! We all are usually very very close to our family, even family that we don’t live close to. We take time to talk to them every day. 

Musical Black Caribbean Latinx people!! In our culture music is so intertwined with who we are, I’d love to see us portrayed as loving music, and loving Black Caribbean genres. Most of us looooove music and it’s a part of our daily lives, even if we’re not singers or musicians. 

MAIN CHARACTERS!!! You know how interesting we are??? Just talk to any Black Caribbean Latinx, you’ll see what I mean. Our culture is so full of joy and magic and color and full of anecdotes that I’d love to see portrayed more. Fantasy/ Black Caribbean Latinx people??? HELL YES. 

BLACK CARIBBEAN LGBT LATINX PEOPLE!! 

Please prioritize non-ambiguous Black people plEASE. Enough light skin people with no black features and slightly curly hair. There’s too much of that already. 

Superstitious Black Caribbean Latinx mothers and grandmothers. It’s really cute, it’s common in our culture and it’s not harmful! Just keep in mind that your characters are HUMAN, not just one cute little trait. 

Things that I’d like to see less.

Read the bullet points in the micro-aggression/ racism section. 

Names

Caribbean Latinx names are not the same as continental Latinx names! We have completely different culture to be honest. Here’s a cute little list that has common names. 

Love you, hit me up and follow me if you wanna hear more about my experience (for I am talking from MYY experience only, please don’t generalize everything that I say) 

Read more POC profiles here

We get a lot of asks from people with lived experience in one aspect of marginalization— LGBTQIA+, neurodivergent, physically disabled, ex-religious people—and the asks boil down to, essentially: can I take all of my own trauma and put it on someone multiply marginalized?

This question has many facets, which this guide is set to outline.

Power Dynamics and Intersections

Within any space centred around a marginalized identity, white supremacy and colorism still play a very large part within those spaces. Imani Barbarin of Crutches and Spice observed that white disabled people can only exercise the full extent of their white privilege within disabled spaces, because white supremacy has ableism built in and views disabled white people as lesser; white people are denied the ability to be completely white in abled society. As a result, the only opportunity they have to exercise the full extent of white privilege is disabled spaces.

The same goes with LGBTQIA+ spaces; they can end up colonialist because of white people in those spaces assume that their methods of coming out and living in their identity are the only way that exist, when people of colour can (and often do) have totally different but still perfectly valid ways of living in their identity. Again, white supremacy has homophobia built in, so white LGBTQ+ people don’t have full access to white privilege unless they’re with other LGBTQ+ people.

As a result: if you pick an identity that you have power over, you are bringing all of those power dynamics to the table in your representation. Even if you share a marginalization with the character, one aspect of discrimination does not an understanding of all discrimination make. Identities are all intersectional. 

Representing multiple axes of marginalization is much more difficult, because you will have to unpack your own power, realize how many other ways of existing there are, and leave your own ideas for how the story should go at the door in order to respect experiences you don’t have in full.

You have to listen to the people you’re representing, or else you won’t be writing representation for them. 

The Bias Game of Telephone

Insiders to any given group are taught a lot of “truths” about outside groups without spending much time listening to those groups, which results in a lot of problems. What might have been said or observed once or twice travels around people in a game of telephone, fanning xenophobia because it’s so much easier to critique people over there than ourselves.

So yes, you heard that Over There, the practice is x. Apply some stereotypes, spread it around as a societal “everyone knows”, and suddenly you think you know a lot more than you do about any one group. 

For example: the Public Religion Research Institute polled over a dozen religious groups in the United States on whether they support LGBTQ rights in 2019, and the results were that people who are Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, and basically every religious group you could think of except Jehovah’s Witnesses were in favour of legal LGBTQ+ protection. They even polled in Christian denominations separating out white, Hispanic, and Black—and all of them agreed: LGBTQ+ rights needed to be put into law. (Source: Broad Support for LGBT Rights Across all 50 States: Findings from the 2019 American Values Atlas )

Throws a wrench into “everyone knows that [insert group here] is homophobic”, doesn’t it?

The problem is, these biases are going to colour your initial research stage. If you “know” that x group believes y, then you’re going to “naturally” slot them into that role in the story, then come to us asking if that’s okay.

Instead, what you need to do is poke your own assumptions: 

Why did you make this situation happen that way? 

Do the numbers support this assumption? 

Have you actually spent any time in groups with these individuals to see how they live? 

Did you read even one multiply-marginalized person’s social media feed to see what they believe? Preferably multiple?

Once you’ve done those steps, you’ll be in a much better place to see if you’ve even made something realistic, or if you’re projecting your experience too much as a 1 to 1 in situations where it just wouldn’t happen that way.

White is Not Neutral

Any identity you have as a white person is going to look different for someone not white. Being queer, Muslim, and Black in America looks a lot different than being gay, white, and Protestant in America. Those combinations of identities will look different again if you’re in a Muslim-majority country vs Muslim-minority, Christian-majority vs Christian-minority. 

The traumas of being a certain identity in a society that doesn’t like you are racialized. White is not the default experience of how life happens, and a Hindu person with a strong connection to their family and wants to maintain some connection, just with boundaries, will have a much different set of priorities than an exvangelical who wants to get away from their family the minute they turn 18. 

Even if you get a Hindu person who wants to get away from their family the minute they turn 18, the logic for getting there and the hurdles to overcome will be different, because they’ll have been raised differently. If you start to assume that you know how they’ll reach that logic, then you’re probably playing a game of bias telephone, as detailed above.

Mental illness, gender, disability and basically any identity under the sun will have a different expression in different cultures. A cross-cultural study on schizophrenia’s auditory hallucinations showed that the voices people hear are shaped by culture. In Accra, Ghana and Chennai, India—people mostly reported their heard voices as a positive thing. Meanwhile in San Mateo, California, not one person did the same. (source: Hallucinatory 'voices' shaped by local culture, Stanford anthropologist says)

Different cultures will define “man” differently. Cultures might have third genders that are more widespread and accepted than non-binary people in North America and Europe. Expectations for a parent will be different. Expectations for children will be different. Expectations between friends will be different. Disability (physical and/or mental) accommodations that are built into culture will be wildly different depending on cultural values. Wealth and class struggles will also be different.

All of these things will deeply impact a majority* character from a marginalized group, let alone one multiply marginalized. If you can’t answer how a majority character would behave based off cultural practices, then answer that before you work on a multiply marginalized person from that group.

* majority= cis, het, pale, financially stable, aka, somebody who has the most institutional power within that group even if they are marginalized in broader society (if they’re in a society where they are the dominant group, then they are privileged)

Healing, Distance, and Diversity

I know many marginalized people use fictional stories to be seen on paper, especially in a society where the stories for us just don’t exist. And you’re also aware of how white the representation of otherwise-marginalized people is, so you want to do your part to change that.

There are three paths you can take with this:

1- You are writing a story primarily for others, and have worked through your own stuff enough that you can use it as an influence instead of a story basis.

You realize you might not know exactly how a Buddhist East Asian person in a supportive family feels, but you know what it’s like to feel supported growing up and want to pull from that experience to show a loving Buddhist East Asian family. Or maybe you know what it’s like to love your parents but never, ever, ever feel safe coming out to them, and you want to show other people stuck in that place it’s okay, and it just so happens that the character this time around is Black.

This is a place where you can put aside your own desires and really dig into the research. Because it will take a lot of research. There will be so many little things that you don’t know. It will be diversity on hard mode. 

2- You are writing this story primarily for yourself, but it’s just so emotional to think of your own context you want to make it Different, somehow

If you are in this position, consider keeping the story private. Not a judgement, at all—we all need private stories. But until you’ve worked through your own pain, you’re going to be relying a little too heavily on assumptions and your own experience to do respectful research.

That emotional situation you want to write about is going to look so different once you change the racial demographic, you probably won’t get the catharsis you want while writing it. Which means the story and your healing will suffer, because you’re not able to do research and you’re not able to work through all of your feelings from running into cultural roadblocks.

Get catharsis first, then consider doing diversity once your emotions are less intense. You need to be able to put “you” aside, and when your feelings are too big, that just is not happening. That’s okay! Not all of your representation has to be perfectly done for others to consume. 

But that also means, you don’t have to ask WWC about it. Because you’re not writing a story for public consumption—you’re writing a story to process your own trauma.

3- You are writing this story primarily for others, but you’re simply trying to toss as much diversity in to “fix” the “everyone is white” problem and haven’t really stepped back to ask yourself if you’re representing them, or if you’re trying to show off.

This is a place you can very quickly be accidentally hurtful, because you don’t know what you don’t know. Maybe you’re wanting to toss in some background flavour, have some experience with death, decide to change the character’s race because they’re a smaller background part… and then you don’t look at what grief norms are in their culture over yours.

You could also find out that your experience has a lot of similarities and get lucky! Or you could get a few things wrong but at least you tried. Or, worst case, you could get it completely wrong and end up not representing anyone.

When in doubt, ask. If you’ve never seen x group handle y, then look it up before you go writing about it—same way you’d research any other component of your plot. Fear is not the place to write diversity from.

TL;DR

No matter how many marginalizations you have, it’ll still be different if you don’t share race

Marginalized spaces are often the only spaces where marginalized white people have full access to white privilege, so they can be extremely hostile to PoC

Groups grow, change, and evolve, as time goes on. Don’t assume that you know how they’ll actually handle any given marginalization unless you’ve listened to them at length.

Context matters; the same identity will have a different experience depending on their level of privilege within their society/group

There are limits to how much you can extrapolate your experience to relate with others who share an identity (chronically ill, LGBTQ+, etc) with you

If you’re just taking PoC to make the story different from your lived experience, keep the story private and heal before you start to write for others

Simply trying to avoid criticism of writing all white people is a poor place to start writing diversity, and you need some basic research before you polish things

Literally Nirvana: