#biases

Quite recently, I've been seeing a lot of tropes about Black and Dark Skinned women so I've been sweeping my writing for that, and my little sister @goblinheartstolemyname actually has been able to rewrite a character who's a love interest.

The character, whose name I won't give so I'll call her Madea, is an African-American woman who I recall is from the state of Georgia. Madea originally had a buzzcut and was y'know, kind of just there. Me and my twin @leefelixsgaybestie when reading the book came with the review that Madea didn't have much to do and basically stayed the same from start to finish. Even though she's technically a side character, she didn't feel as fleshed out.

So, in conceptualising how the story is going to be rewritten, my little sister aimed to flesh out her character a bit more, which is easy. But she also made sure to avoid making Madea butch just because she was a lesbian, so she aimed to make her more feminine, and then I recently found out about the trope of Black women always having to be masculine so I double checked with her and she already knew about this and accounted for it. And she also changed her hair from a buzzcut to an afro, I don't know if it was because she found out about the stigmas against Black women having afros or if it was just to make her design more appealing but it's still an important thing to give her.

It's most likely partially because Madea was originally a bit of a Desk Lamp character but that should show how easy it's meant to be to fix biases in your writing. Madea was underdeveloped and only a love interest, so my little sister fixed her by working towards more of a character for her, then changing her design to be more attention grabbing and less stereotyped, and then getting invested in her character enough to do more with her.

There's another character in this same universe who's a Rastafari woman that I'm trying to figure out how to make her less of a hyper-masculine Calhoun from Wreck-It Ralph and a bit more like Jett Fillmore from Goat where she's a very clearly competent woman with a bit of an edge, but she's not militaristic and a fun-killer, especially since she didn't have a husband eaten by a Cy-Bug to explain why she would be that way.

Now, in both of these examples, somehow we've managed to swerve the trope of Black women being the Second Option or always needing to suffer or being Twice Exceptional, but what happens when we "need" those for a story? Well, that's where we get the Mother Goddess.

In a previous post where I talked about two characters whom I codenamed Ken and Ennef (who are son and father), I mentioned how both of them are meant to address tropes associated with Black characters like the Token Black Friend and Twice Exceptional. The Mother Goddess is Ennef's wife and Ken's mother and I've noticed how much she actually suffers in the story and it broke my heart.

Not because I was writing her incorrectly, but because like her husband and son her story ran into the trope of the Suffering Black Woman on accident and showed why she and Ennef became villains.

I was initially hesitant to write the Mother Goddess because I was a male writer and didn't want to be misogynistic with how I wrote her (I only made her a Mother Goddess because I couldn't find many other kinds of deities in Nguni Bantu cultures), but in developing her and Ennef's story I realised a lot about how she exemplifies what Black women tend to go through and then had to lean into it.

I had to specify in her personality profile that she was fierce, not aggressive. Her younger character design had straightened hair and her hair returned to its natural state when she had to leave the council. She was described as being the hardest working out of everyone on that council besides her husband. She was cast down from that council and demonised because of the fact that she didn't want to kill a literal baby (that was literally her son) even though she was literally the fucking Mother Goddess.

It broke my heart to realise how she had worked so much to become who she was and she got fuck all for it. It also made me realise that two other characters in the story who are also mothers are the only characters who can have an honest conversation with her and draw her away from being a villain because they've also experienced their own kinds of hardships for the sake of their children, one of them literally spending five years in a dingy apartment with a complete fucking idiot and a crazy bitch of a landlady.

To end on a somewhat light-hearted note, sometimes you can inadvertently swap biases cause I realised that I had a male character based on Hou Yi who was originally written to be a plot device to get a character pregnant and then get fridged, and I only decided to give any actual depth to his character and resurrect him once I started writing the romance.