I was thinking about representation in fiction [buckle in, this is going to be a ramble] and how there's such a clear distinction between media about a certain 'difference' and media where characters with those differences just are, without it being there defining trait.
I'll use autism as an example, as I'm an autistic writer who writes autistic characters.
Growing up, I read a lot of books about people who were autistic; The Thing About Oliver, Can You See Me? etc. but when I read books of other genres, mainly fantasy, suddenly there were no autistic characters, especially not canon ones [don't get me started on Luna Lovegood]. Even now, I struggle to think of a popular book series with a canon autistic character.
Rick Riordan [author of the Percy Jackson series]'s book Daughter of the Deep does have a canonically autistic character which, to my memory was done... alright? But not as well as it could have. Besides, I barely see anyone talking about that book at all, I constantly forget it exists despite reading it day of release.
Anyway, what I'm getting at isn't autism representation specifically, it's that a lot of the time in media and especially in popular novels, if a character is part of a marginalised group that the author is not, it goes one of two ways; either it's the entire focus of the book that this character is disabled, queer, trans, neurodivergent, a person of colour etc. or they are very obviously a 'hey look I put a character in here who's that thing you asked for! I did zero research into this topic and just went on stereotypes' that puts off people who see something they are in this character. It's infuriating, and part of the reason that I've been reading mostly queer and/or trans and/or BIPOC authors lately. [Though right now it's been mostly thoroughly dead Ancient Greek white guys because I'm a historian and the Iliad is hard to get through.]
These thoughts on how audiences recieve characters who are part of marginalised groups came up in part in my brainstorming how to introduce an alterhuman character into my writing. The difficult thing with alterhuman representation is that few people know what an alterhuman is, so I couldn't just have a character offhand mention that they're a therian, like I can, and have, had characters mention they're queer. An alterhuman character would require either the world gets real educated on alterhumanity real quick, or I have to pause whatever else is happening to introduce readers to the concept that not all creatures in human bodies are humans.
Regardless, I think we as a society need to get better at writing representation, or at least the cishet, allo, able bodied, white humans need to get comfortable with sharing spaces with minorities who will include well-written diversity in their stories.
