#dear authors

The goal of representation is to not sell a more agreeable image, ie to make x minority a heroic, beautiful, loveable force. This firstly can other the group. Secondly it also tends to take the bite out of stories, limiting your scope and capabilities as a writer. Thirdly, it's not accurate! It's simply replacing fiction with another fiction. The result you want is understanding that this minority group is full of individuals, who can have complex, messy lives. They can be rude, can hurt others, can be in the wrong just as much as they can be kind, can heal, and can be fighters for a noble cause.

This can only be combated by variety. Ultimately a single creator can only do so much within their given scope and on a societal level we all have to consider our depicitions of others in fiction and in nonfiction, but that's no excuse for you as an individual to shrug it off. There is something you can do!

The usual first step is defying established stereotypes. This is the most common I see given, and I absolutely agree with it, but it's important to note that this can be wildly different across minorities, and conflicting stereotypes can come into play.

Another good way to help your cast represent a wide variety of people is to show a variety within a minority.

This is vital advice to writers with minority villains, and what can be what distinguishes a bigoted story from a diverse one. I don't think I need to clarify here but I will, you shouldn't have characters that exist in single traits to offset other character's impact on the text. Again, complex humans deserve complex stories about them. A story where a white cast fights against a black villain is a very different story to one where a racially diverse cast including a black character fights against a black villain.

You do not need to exclude minorities from having negative traits entirely. Context absolutely matters and ultimately your cast can always benefit from more diversity.

You may see posts who claim things like "we need more feminine lesbians, all lesbians I see are butch!" Literal accuracy of that statement aside for a moment, the two identities put into conflict here are both reflective of real groups who both require representation. A singular viewpoint of any group is always going to cause harm.

This is the cause of much infighting and struggle, and also why many people can see themselves more in 'bad' representation than 'good' representation. Some autistics do not experience loud and violent meltdowns, while some do. Both of these groups deserve to be treated in stories with respect, and if our communities totally ignore one of these groups to promote a single concept of a respectful depiction of an autistic person, then we are not creating good representation of autism.

While these arguments are usually unproductive, we have to understand these are real frustrations even if they are fighting over a small pond, and until our stories are as diverse as our realities we as a culture will continue to require effort to change this. Stereotypes are not static either, nor a thing of the past, and ideas we can form and create in our spaces every day by close mindedness and narrow representation. This is why we need respectful stories of all shapes and of all sizes. This sort of strife is the most damaging among internet spaces where narratives can quickly become extremely aggressive to some portrayals and become entirely hostile to populations of this minority. It's not a moral failing to see parts of yourself in these depictions, it's only a failing that there hasn't been stories written for you that aren't predicated on cruelty. The only way to genuinely soothe this divide is to provide space for all of us.

Those who are wheelchair bound and those who are semi ambulatory, those who were born without a limb and those who lost theirs due to a medical event, chronic pain sufferers who don't work and chronic pain sufferers who are athletes. Masculine black women and feminine black women, scholarly black men and athletic black men, black people who excel in both and black people who weren't educated. Fat women, fat men, transgender people who pass and transgender people who don't and gender-nonconforming people. Asexuals who have sex and asexuals who are sex repulsed. Psychotics, addicts, domestic abuse survivors, religious minorities, sexual abuse survivors, sufferers of eating disorders, the deafness/blindness spectrum, dissociatives, pwPMOS, the list goes on and on.