#ethnic coding

@pixiedustandpetrichor asked:

Hi! I am writing a novel with three main female characters in an interplanetary setting. They grow up as orphans in an Irish-coded country and as children are mostly exposed to solely that culture, but they leave after becoming adults. Character A is Tuareg-coded, B Mongolian-coded, and C is Germanic-coded. It isn’t central to the story, but I would like them to get in touch with/learn more about their ancestral cultures, especially in terms of religion. A does this by actually visiting the planet her parents came from, but B and C do not. What can I do to depict their relationships with said cultures and their journey to reconnect with them? Would it be realistic for each of them to have different mixed feelings about participating in these cultures and for them to retain some sense of belonging to the culture they grew up in as well? Thank you for your time.

Hello, asker! WWC doesn’t have Tuareg or Mongol mods at the moment, so we're not able to speak to the specifics of cultural and religious reconnection for these particular groups. Still, I want to take this opportunity to provide some general context and elements to consider when writing Tuareg-coded characters, or other characters from groups that have experienced colonization in the real world. My fellow mods will then share thoughts about cultural reconnection in general and with respect to Germanic heritage in particular.

Drawing inspiration from groups that have experienced colonization

As you’re probably aware, the Tuareg are an ethnic group indigenous to North Africa. As with many indigenous groups, they have experienced colonization multiple times over the course of their history. Colonization often leads to the loss or erasure of certain aspects of culture as the colonized people are pressured to conform to the culture of the dominant group. In many cases, it’s near impossible to say what the ancestral culture of a colonized group was prior to colonization.

When coding a fictional culture based on a group that was colonized in the real world, it's important to ask questions about:

Which aspects of culture you're portraying

Where these aspects come from

Whether you're ready to tackle their implications for the world you're building

It’s not necessarily wrong to use elements of coding that draw from cultural aspects influenced by colonization. As I said, it can be very difficult, even impossible, to portray a “pure” culture as it would have been had colonization not occurred–because we simply can’t know what that alternate history would look like, and because so much has been lost or intentionally suppressed that the gaps in our knowledge are too wide to breach. But it’s important to be aware of where these cultural elements are coming from.

Where is your coding coming from and what are the implications?

For example, while the Tuareg today are majoritarily Muslim, this was not the case prior to the Arab conquest of North Africa. Some elements of Tuareg culture today, such as tea ceremonies, are derived from the influence of Arab and Muslim culture and likely did not exist prior to the 20th century. As you’re developing the culture of the Tuareg-coded group in your fictional setting, you have to decide whether to include these elements. There is no right answer–it will depend on what you’re trying to do and why.

Is your setting in our far future, in which case we can assume your Tuareg-coded group is distantly related to today’s Tuareg?

In that case, they will probably have kept many cultural aspects their ancestors acquired through their interactions with other cultures around them–including cultural groups that colonized them. They may–let’s build hopeful worlds!–have reclaimed aspects of their ancestral culture they’d been forced to abandon due to colonization. They may also have acquired new aspects of culture over time. This can be very fun to explore if you have the time and space to do so.

I would recommend speaking with Tuareg people to get a better grasp of how they see their culture evolving over the next however many centuries or millennia, what they wish to see and what seems realistic to them.

Alternatively, maybe your setting is a secondary world unrelated to ours and you only want to draw inspiration from the real-world Tuareg, not represent them exactly. In that case, you need to decide which period of history you’re drawing from, as Tuareg culture is different today from what it was 50 years ago, and different still from 200 years ago or 1000 years ago. You’ll need to research the historical period you’re choosing in order to figure out what was happening at that time and what the cultural influences were. If it’s pre-colonial, you’ll probably want to avoid including cultural elements influenced by colonization from groups that arrived later on.

Finally, if the time period you’re drawing from is post-colonial:

Are you planning to account for the effects of colonization on Tuareg culture?

Will you have an in-world equivalent for the colonization that occurred in real life?

For example, will the Tuareg-coded characters in your world be from a nomadic culture that was forced to become sedentary over the years and lost much of their traditions due to colonial pressure to conform?

Where did this pressure come from in your world–is it different from what happened in ours? If so, how different? And what are the consequences?

Writing about colonization can be quite the baggage to bring into a fictional setting. I’m not saying it can’t be done, but it will certainly require sensitivity and care in portraying it.

In summary: think it through

I’m not saying all this to discourage you, but to point out some of the considerations at play when drawing inspiration from a real-life culture that has experienced colonization. Similar challenges arise for coding based on any other indigenous group in the world.

My advice to you, then, is to first sit down and decide where and when in history your coding is coming from, and what you’re trying to achieve with it. This will help you figure out:

which elements of contemporary Tuareg culture are pertinent to include

How much your coding will be influenced by the Tuareg’s real-life history

To what extent that will inform the rest of the world you’re creating

This, in turn, may help in deciding how to portray your character’s reconnection journey.

Again, I am not Tuareg and this is by no means meant to be an exhaustive list of considerations for writing Tuareg-coded characters, only a few places to start.

If any Tuareg or Amazigh readers would like to chime in with suggestions of their own, please do. As always, please make sure your comments adhere to the WWC code of conduct.

- Niki

Pulling from diaspora and TRA narratives of cultural reconnection

Marika here: This ask plotline could also pull directly from diaspora and TRA narratives of cultural reconnection. Many diaspora and TRA cultural reconnection stories are, in effect, about navigating the difficult process of resuscitating, or renewing ties to culture using limited resources in environments that often lack necessary cultural infrastructure or scaffolding.

See this question here to the Japanese team for suggestions of how to handle such a storyline in a similar sci-fi setting.

More reading: Japanese-coded girl from future

-Marika

Reconnecting with German heritage

Hi, it’s Shira. I’m not sure whether German-Jewish counts as Germanic for the purposes of your post but since German Jews were more assimilated than other Ashkies, Germanness does feel real and relevant to my life (especially because my father worked there for approximately the last decade of his life.) NOTE: when I see “Germanic” vs German I think of cultures from 1500 years ago, not 100-200 years ago, so I can’t help you there, but I’d be surprised as a reader if a character focused on that for reconnection to the exclusion of the 19th century etc.

@ahivemindoftwelvecati​ asked:

How should I, a white person, avoid making characters fall into the vaguely brown stereotype in my fantasy books? I’m against coding cultures into this book, as I’m really trying to create a unique world (ironically by studying a lot of different cultures). By doing this though, am I doomed to remove characters from cultural context, or leave people wandering in vague color shades? Especially since some of my characters would fall into various indigenous ethnicities, but share nothing cultural

In an interesting way, I think the Star Wars novels kind of do an okay job about it (of course, others might differ, in which case I defer to them, but in my opinion they pull off something similar). For context, it all takes place in a galaxy where absolutely none of Earth’s cultures are present, but there are still human beings that are Latine-coded, Black-coded, etc, and they accomplish this through very simple descriptions of character appearances. For example, there was a Black-coded woman and her description ran something along the lines of “She had dark, rich brown skin and her hair was curled tightly, pulled back into a bun. She hated the moist heat of the swamp planet, but she had to admit her hair never looked better.” Through that, the audience understands that she’s most likely Black-coded (dark skin+tight curls), but they avoid cultural points (also the little detail of humid heat being great for curls is just a cute lil extra IMO, that’s something I hear people with 3- or 4-type hair saying a lot).

The pitfall here is that, since there’s no cultures analogous to what we have here in our world, each reader will have different interpretations of what each character might identify as ethnically. Who someone might headcanon as Korean, another might headcanon as Chinese, etc. That’s something you have to figure out for yourself if you’re okay with having--just that vague sense of ‘ah, this person must be from this vague region of the world’--or if you want to be more explicit.

--Sophia

So… to expand on the point Sophia put out that it’s up to the reader to determine what race somebody “really” is and how that’s a problem.

One of my best friends is mixed Japanese/white. Thanks to genetic roulette, they get approached by various Indigenous peoples asking what nation they’re from, because they look really Indigenous.

I’m mixed Mohawk/Mi’kmaq/white. Thanks to genetic roulette, nobody can tell where I’m from and I’ve gotten everything from West Asian, North Indian, and Great Lakes Native (basically, anywhere that golden-tanned skin + dark hair + no monolid is considered normative, I could pass for there)

My mom, meanwhile, looks very, very Mexican, despite being the same mixes as me at a higher percentage Native; she tans more pink/red and tans darker than I do. She also has a totally different face shape than I do. 

Aka, there are dozens upon dozens of groups that look interchangeable, and the only thing that separates us is our culture.

When you’re dealing with more “obvious” features like type 4 hair, monolids, very dark skin, very pale skin, and those stereotypical things, yeah, you can usually peg down a general region. You’re basically only going to have Black people with kinky, delicate hair (but, are they African, Australian Indigenous, or Black Native? Because Australian Aboriginals are also very dark skinned and have a similar hair texture; Black Natives sometimes inherit the level 4 hair texture). You’re basically only going to have Northern settled peoples with white skin (barring albinism/vitiligo) but are they Norwegian or Sami? 

What happens to all the people who are ambiguous in real life?

The trope has a basis in reality. Humans would like to think that a certain set of features = obviously from this place, but as soon as you expand your sample size beyond models, movie stars, and idealized art, you find that people look really different and you absolutely cannot rely on this logic. 

It’s even a known fact among the modelling industry that anyone vaguely not-white who looks like they could maybe belong to any other group of brown people is put in for casting calls for that group, even if they’re not part of that group. It’s messed up, but it happens all the time. A Latine person could be put in as Arab, and an Ojibwe person can be put in as Filipino.

Culture is the thing that separates these people in real life. So as soon as you take that culture away, you’ve essentially lost any representation you could get. You’ll get diversity, yes, but it will not be representation.

Sure, you perhaps gain some representation as people look at parts of their culture that might be incorporated (maybe by accident, maybe on purpose) and say “hey, that’s us!”

But you’ve also strewn infighting by having perhaps multiple groups be able to say the same thing, and these multiple groups could very well share a lot of phenotypic traits, so suddenly you’ve represented nobody because you haven’t put anything solid that would sway the needle one way or the other.

If you start to assume too much that features = obviously this person is from x part of the world, then you really ignore a whole lot of human migration, diffusion, and people who just lived in really similar biomes so their physical features, skin tone, and hair type ended up being the same just purely because that had the best chance of surviving the region, or had no reason to change.

Diversity exists because of the environment. Skin tone, hair type, jaw shape, etc exist because of the food available, how it was grown/gathered (horticulture and “hunter-gathering” vs agriculture), the way food was eaten, the amount of sunlight, and the vitamins available in diet. This happened over tens of thousands of years.

But also, certain environments produced very similar coping strategies. There are only so many ways to survive a very hot desert, so unless you’ve really messed with the natural world in fantasy, you’re going to end up pulling from earth’s coping strategies for the very hot desert. Which means you could end up being kinda hurtful towards desert peoples who see their clothing and food growing ways used, with people who look like them because skin tone is environmental, but hardly anything else about their culture was taken.

Especially for Indigenous peoples, culture and land protection is what makes us Indigenous. How are you going to show us in your work unless you dig into our cultural principles (land protection) at the very least? Nothing about our facial features or skin tone are particularly unique to us, and assuming they are is how you get caricatures. There are Black Natives* to white Natives to mixed cultures with European and Indigenous practices (Metis) and everything in between. And that’s just North America’s range.

This isn’t even counting how there are Indigenous people everywhere, so when you say “Indigenous” do you mean the Mohawk? The San? Mbororo? Ainu? Sami? Samoan? There are literally thousands of groups that are primarily separated from the dominant group because of their way of life and maybe some subtle phenotyping. But primarily, they are separated by their culture.

I would suggest, at the very least, to have some degree of basic cultural beliefs to help differentiate groups of brown people who would otherwise be interchangeable. Land stewardship and using every part of the natural world for Indigenous groups, for example. You can’t really find Indigenous groups without that, so if it was missing I would raise an eyebrow. 

Distinct foodstuffs and diets are another way to differentiate and code; you know that this group that uses chickpeas, sorghum, barley, and wheat is probably from West Asia, and that group that eats rice at every meal is probably somewhere from East Asia. Food is a very fast way to differentiate between groups, because even far-reaching staples are fairly different across cultures.

You don’t have to 1 to 1 code a culture. But for actually differentiating between people, you’re going to need more than one point of reference beyond looks. Food, nomad status (as in, settled vs nomadic vs hybrid), basic religious practices (monotheist vs pantheist), and broad-reaching cultural attitudes (collectivism vs individualism, who you’re expected to be collectivist with) are all points that help break apart these groups and let them know you see them.

It’s important to note that even if you do fantasy, it’s read in the real world. It’s read by humans, who are pattern recognizing machines. We will see patterns. Niki points out ways to try and avoid this patterning below, but it’s going to happen regardless. 

It’s up to you what you actually want, out of not overtly coding anyone.

~ Mod Lesya

*Black Natives and cultural practice is a fraught topic (mostly because of slave-owning tribes) that is mostly summed up as: Black Natives are often barred from tribal participation because anti-Blackness is rife within North American Indigenous communities, but they have been tending the land just as much as if not more than their former enslavers; as such, they are members of the cultures/nations and should be recognized. They have been part of the land as North American Indigenous peoples for centuries, at this point, and the fact there is still enough anti-Blackness in Native communities that Reservation Dogs used nothing but Black caricature is… a problem to say the least.

This isn’t counting mixed Black/Natives who had their Native parent/grandparent cast out for marrying someone Black, who were raised in cultural practices without community ties because of anti-Blackness, who should also be recognized. If it’s valid to mix white culture with North American practices, it’s valid to mix Black culture (Black American and/or African Indigenous) with North American practices.

Do you want diversity or do you want representation?

Lesya raises a very important point that I encourage you to really think about. Why do you want to have diversity in your fantasy worldbuilding? Is it because you want your readers to feel seen and represented? Or is it because you want your fantasy world to feel well-rounded and realistic? These are two different motivations, which will require different approaches.

If you want representation, then go back and reread Lesya’s answer. Representation that’s only skin-deep isn’t really representation, and won’t help your readers feel seen. If, however, you want diversity for diversity’s sake--because diversity is realistic, and because it’s simply good writing to include it--then I have some more thoughts to offer.

In my opinion, there’s nothing wrong with creating a fantasy world that has fictional diversity that doesn’t directly parallel real-life groups and cultures, as long as you’re aware that that’s what you’re doing. This is arguably very common in high fantasy, though the effectiveness with which it’s executed varies wildly from author to author. N. K. Jemisin describes what she did for the Broken Earth trilogy in this blog post.

Unless you’re working with a very small subsection of the world (and even then--everything’s connected), diversity is natural, because people will be living in different geographical areas that each have their own climate, fauna and flora, which will shape both their physical appearance and their way of life. Thinking about the physical environment is a good starting point for figuring out what your population groups will look like and how they’ll behave.

But as Lesya pointed out, it’s very easy, when doing this, to inadvertently re-create elements of coding that will remind your readers of real-world groups, even if that wasn’t your intent. If that happens, you’ll have two options:

1) Very deliberately alter the coding to make it clear that you’re not trying to represent a certain real-world group (in the post I linked above, Jemisin talks about what she did to avoid appropriating Maori culture), or

2) Embrace it and go the representation route after all, which will entail a lot of research and care to make sure your coding makes sense, is respectful, and doesn’t reinforce harmful stereotypes.

Assuming you’re going with option 1, there are still more issues to be mindful of. We said before that representation that doesn’t include culture isn’t really representation. Here’s the thing: This is also true of fictional diversity. Even if your fantasy cultures are entirely created from scratch, they still need to exist, and be distinct and thoughtfully portrayed, in order for your world to feel well-rounded and realistic.

Diversity is more than physical appearance

As Lesya demonstrated, physical appearance alone isn’t enough to make groups of people distinct from another. In order to avoid the “ambiguous brown” trope you’re worried about, you will need to give your different groups of people distinct cultures.

There might be some cases where it would make sense for an entire fantasy world to have a single, homogenous culture, within which people of various ethnic backgrounds exist, resulting in a variety of physical appearances but everyone sharing the same culture. But if you’re planning to do this, you need to give a lot of thought to why things came to be this way. If an entire world is made up of a single culture, that usually indicates something very traumatic happened on a large scale. Maybe an apocalypse, or massive amounts of forced assimiliation or genocide. I don’t recommend going that route unless you’re willing to grapple with all the trauma that entails, and all the potentially problematic implications. You’re much better off populating your world with a diversity of cultures. They don’t need to be coded based on real-world cultures, but they need to exist.

In my opinion, the main issue with “ambiguous brown” characters is that it makes it seem we’re all interchangeable. In real life, we're not. Make sure that's the case in your fantasy world, too. Craft your population groups so they're distinct, each with their own history, culture, language, and traditions. Your worldbuilding needs to be deep enough to counteract the absence of parallels to real-life cultures. We need to be able to look at it and say, "okay, this is not representing me specifically, but it's also not lumping me in with everyone else that vaguely looks like me."

And don't make the mistake of thinking one skin tone = one group. That's not true in real life, and it shouldn't be in fantasy either. Using skin color and a handful of stereotypical features as shorthand for ethnicity or culture is not only shallow worldbuilding, it also feeds into the racist pseudoscience that sorts people into four or five neat color-coded boxes and collapses the world's diversity into a handful of supposedly biologically determined races. If you're creating cultures from scratch, this is your chance to challenge those ideas and populate your cultures with people who don't all look the same. Within a single group, you can have characters with a variety of skin tones, hair texture, eye color, height and build, etc. Because this is what happens in the real world. Some groups include a lot more diversity than others, but variation exists everywhere.

This will partly depend on how interconnected your world is, and how much interaction exists between your various groups. More interaction and exchange tends to lead to a wider range of physical characteristics within each group, and it also results in similar features being found in multiple groups. Think about how that might play out in your fantasy world, and make sure you're being as specific as possible with your fictional cultures so that you don't have to rely on physical appearance alone to distinguish your population groups from one another.

Coding Fantasy Indigenous Peoples

You’re getting conflicting answers because there is truly no right answer to this question, as with most things when it comes to representation. Some people will prefer one thing, others something else. If you’re trying to find the Perfect Path Without Backlash, it doesn’t exist. Sorry.

Also, just as a note, a lot of nations cross the border between Canada and the United States, because that border is artificial and colonial. So you might very well be looking at Canada even if you’ve picked an “American” tribe.

In my personal, singular Indigenous opinion, my process would look something like this:

1- Pick A Region First

Region will give you the environment that the tribe(s) live in (I’ll get to that plural in a second), which will then inform basically everything about how they built their customs. A lot of Indigenous beliefs are tied to natural resources and constrains of the land, so it’s very hard to code an Indigenous society without figuring out what sort of land you’re working with.

This applies even if you’re working outside of the Continental US, because even just within the States they’re subjugating wide swaths of Polynesia (including Hawai’i), Alaska, the Philippines, etc. Not to mention how many Indigenous groups there are around the globe being erased by their local states.

Indigenous peoples are everywhere. You don’t have to include them all the time, but they exist beyond Turtle Island.

2- See Who Lived There

And now, the plural. Because unlike a lot of Western places, there’s a lot more nomadic groups when it comes to Indigenous peoples. 

So the region you picked could have multiple groups that cycle through the same landscape, and this will also inform the representation. Did they like each other? Or were they traditionally enemies? 

How about in lands that changed hands a lot? Because the borders of what Native population owned what lands are flexible, and you can find areas where the region changed hands a dozen times over even just a couple hundred years. How will you handle that?

Now here’s your first fork in the road: You can combine the groups that were friendly (key word: friendly) with each other into one large group, or you can have multiple Indigenous groups in the worldbuilding that are mentioned in passing, like how x cycles through in certain seasons, and y in another.

I would not follow this fork if they were traditionally enemies. Because it’s just… not respectful to have two cultures that were incompatible enough they were enemies for large swaths of their history together. It does happen where traditional enemies sometimes live together for awhile, but if you’re an outsider, I’d keep them separate.

This does mean that if you’ve picked a region with traditional enemies, you’re going to need both groups. Because the “enemies” part will have also shaped the culture, like how many men were alive in ages where men were expected to be warriors. Cultures adapt for certain percentages of the population to die in war, after all.

This also provides an interesting avenue for your non-Indigenous population, because are they allied with one group? Both? How do they maintain relationships? If these non-Indigenous people are not colonial, then be very careful not to have them try to play both sides too hard, because helping both sides kill the other is a tool of colonialism. If they are colonial, they’re going to be doing this and it’ll be a villain move.

Personally, I’d toss more diversity instead of less because it helps avoid tokenism. Instead of having this One Token Nomadic Group, the One Token Indigenous Group, you have two, or three, and you’re showing a diversity of cultures instead of just throwing in Natives because you feel like you have to in order to be diverse.

But if you do want to blend (which might be useful, even if you just want to make a new culture that mixes “European” with Indigenous as people intermarry), I’d read this post: Pulling From Multiple Indigenous Legends

3- See what exists and what’s open

A lot of Indigenous practices are closed, meaning we don’t tell them to outsiders. At all. This doesn’t mean that those practices aren’t out there as appropriated pieces of “folklore”, but you need to be aware that some folklore is Indigenous and therefore should be closed.

Putting these closed practices in fantasy is generally considered a bad move (see: almost every non-Indigenous use of the w3ndigo ever), unless you can work closely with the tribe to figure out how to do it respectfully (see: Teen Wolf doing a Skinwalkers episode with the Navajo; ironically enough they did not work with the Cree when they had a w3ndigo episode, as far as I can tell)

I’d suggest reading this post: All Myths Are True, Native Spirits Invisible to Outsiders for how to include closed practices.

4- Magic gets its own point

The thing about fantasy is that you’re dealing with the supernatural, and in my experience on WWC, some of the biggest “uh” moments are whenever people don’t realize how culturally Christian their magic systems are, and how incompatible they are with Indigenous beliefs.

So you’re going to need a degree of research into Native mindset, and then extrapolate what sorts of things that make sense for them. This can fill in some blanks for not touching Native spirituality with a ten foot pole, but you are going to need extensive research to have it actually make sense.

Read through the tag and note every time I poke at the concept that Natives are more magically attuned, that there’s something like “the gods told me to”, or other little tiny “basic” things in a lot of fantasy that just don’t feel like they fit.

Or, come back after you’ve gone through steps 1 to 3 and can be more specific!

Still, I would suggest you do this sort of research anyway just to be respectful. Figuring out how magic works and dovetails with Native populations is just a nice side benefit.

Overall:

To very directly answer your questions:

Best way to respectfully include Indigenous cultures in fantasy: I’d prefer very little colonialism if any; no such thing as noble savage (aka: we are not “better” because we live closer to nature and don’t have the humdrum of Western society); complex, rich societies with social rules and the same level of care you’d give Western cultures; just generally considered valuable, complex, and sustainable.

Better to use one tribe and hard code or no tribes and blend: Whatever makes sense for the story, but I’d err on the side of trying to capture the feel of the area with the peoples who already populated it. Like, if you’re trying to work with an area that has a confederacy of tribes, you’d be better off coding multiple tribes within that confederacy because being part of a confederacy is usually pretty important to tribe leadership and general functioning of the group; if you’re writing an area with a lot of roaming nomads, you’d be better to have multiple nomadic groups; etc.

Some aspects but not whole vs the whole: Keep closed practices closed, and figure out where magic and your unique worldbuilding breaks how an Indigenous group would function in the world.

What’s the best approach: If you’re attempting to make Indigenous people feel seen in fantasy, then whatever means to that end is the best approach—while understanding there’s not going to be a solidly unified opinion that everyone will agree on, but at best broad generalities. In my opinion that is nailing down coding enough that the peoples from the region you picked can spot their own practices and mindset and know somebody cares enough to have found those details.

I personally err on the side of closer coding to irl than looser at least to start, just because the way my brain works I need a lot of details from the culture in the early stages of research, just so I can gain the confidence in what to put on the page and have it feel real. 

Especially if you’re trying to unlearn a colonizer mindset through writing, and really trying to broaden your worldview, going towards an initial goal of closer coding will really help break apart the base assumptions about How Things Work, and you’ll develop the mental flexibility to write about differences more easily.

You can loosen up coding later, if you want to, once you’ve learned enough to know what you’re consciously adapting to your fantasy world instead of just throwing your ideas of how you think the culture works into the plot and expecting it to be accurate.

Hope this helps!

Anonymous asked:

I think I've read myself in circles on handling coding and potential stereotypes. I'm writing a fantasy novel that has a bunch of magical humanish-oids that all go to school together.

World building Context: 

A thousand years ago, all magic users were humans. Humans as we know them today separated from magic itself and wizards, elves, faeries, and dragons came to exist. The faeries practiced magic in a specific way for so long it became ingrained in their being and dragons spent so much time in dragon form (they used to be, for all intents and purposes, animagi) that became their natural state, and the human form is their second/animagi state, elves are an own-story creation not relevant at the moment. (I hope that makes sense). The MC is a wizard, her friend group has folks from each of these backgrounds. 

Since this happened all over the world there are dragons (DB) and faeries of all ethnic backgrounds. The main two dragon characters I have are black twins, there are other DBs at the school who aren't black but the main two are. The dragons aren't scary - they're traditionally the treasure keepers, bankers, and museum curators of wizard society because they have utmost respect for property and gold (as you would if you knew how damn hard it was to track down ancient relics and find gold after the humans started digging it up!). They aren't seen as scary, but powerful, and the twins are going to be well rounded distinct characters (high level: feminine, soft, but powerful in pink and her brother is queer, super smart/thinks reading enough can solve any problem).... but still Dragonborn. I have seen posts in the past where this type of casting (?) might be problematic - traditional to OUR world dragons are scary and the villains, these two are human but clearly non-human "animal" born - and others where the emphasis was on the importance of character and context.

The school itself is diverse because... that's life and also my reality in Canada. All of the magic/ancestral humans including the wizards aren't any one specific race and that will be clear/shown in the book  (wizards are as human/not human as the rest, non-magic humans are just referred to as Humans, everyone else is Fae, Elf, Wizard, or Dragonborn("DB")). 

My first question is: when world building these types of characters/elements and one comes up against a potential stereotype is context and character development actually able to be enough? Are there guidelines on how to ensure it is enough before beta readers/sensitivity readers? Are there things to avoid (non-specific to each type of magic human) that might be a confounding problematic Thing? (Naturally, I know there are limits, like there will never be okay Jewish coded lizards human for example).

More Context: The main faeries are going to be South Asian/probably desi - I haven't found anything in my research to red flag that yet re:stereotypes but I'm still looking. 

My second question is: With the separation of magic/human culture being a literal millennia ago, is there a way to know how "much" coding to include? The physical characteristics will be coded,  I was thinking that their names (Dragonborn too, also an ethnically indigenous wizard [I haven't done enough research to know their specific ethnic background yet]) should definitely relate to their homelands even separated from humans since they're still in the region, but things like cultural celebrations/values/formal wear that have changes so much in that time + these characters are at this school because they are in Canada aka at some point in the last XYZ years their families moved here + each magic human type having their own culture specific to their community... circles, I have read myself in circles on your wonderfully helpful Tumblr

Worldbuilding

There isn’t a cut-and-dry answer to your first question. Some stereotypes have a variety of means of representation, though they fundamentally tend to come from a sort of xenophobia. This can be expressed through jokes, through exoticization and sexualization, as well as through derogatory descriptions and associations. Understanding your confirmation bias and use of stereotypes is going to be based on your deconstruction and metacognition about your writing. Have you found yourself reflecting stereotypes in your writing? Have you found examples as of yet that you’ve gotten stuck on?

Contextual development can help with stereotypes to an extent. If you don’t make direct associations to stereotypes and actively work to limit them in your worldbuilding, you can limit some of what may pop up. Same goes for character development. 

Beta/sensitivity readers are there to help review your writing for parameters that you request. That is what you pay them to do. If you’re looking for stereotypes in your writing, you can ask your sensitivity reader to look over it with fresh eyes and evaluate whether you are or not. Keep in mind that whoever is working with you will have their own set of biases and experiences; the best way to evaluate your work for stereotypes would be to ask a variety of people to read through your draft and see what they think. Take a look at this post for more information.

There aren’t really specific guidelines for when you can or cannot give your work to a beta/sensitivity reader. I would suggest doing so after you’ve gotten through enough drafts that you have the narrative structure, the characters and their arcs, and the general tone of the story down to the nitpicky things, because it will give you more room to work on things you might not be able to see.

In terms of other stereotypes, avoiding sexualization, isolation, and demonization are always a good rule of thumb. I would caution you about potential demonization of the faeries and the dragons even if they are equally respected because of the common tropes that surround these groups. You can look here for our guides on specific tropes or search the archives for the stereotypes tag for more detail.

Coding and South Asian faeries 

As for your South Asian faeries, look here for Mod Jaya’s reasoning on why you’ll have to tread carefully in your coding: Characterization for South Asian-coded characters

Try to consider your bases; will they simply have the physical features? The Fae didn’t come from Hindu mythology, nor do we have a very transferable alternate mythology that would work for the circumstance. How do you plan on reconciling the different aspects of their background? Think about it as you design your characters.

The amount of coding you have is going to be dependent on the story you are trying to tell. Physical coding is great; make sure that you’re not doing so with stereotypes and derogatory descriptions. Check out this link for some background on coding with nonhuman characters. Think about what you’re writing and decide on the elements that will fit in with the flow of your narrative. 

You can probably include ‘national’ holidays that everyone celebrates, and then more specific holidays that relate back to your characters’ backgrounds. In terms of food/clothing, consider what they will have access to in a melting pot environment, and what they will have held onto, as well as their preferences for cultural expression. 

For example, I wear salwar kameez to dress up in my daily life, but I probably wouldn’t want to wear a lehenga to something like prom, just because I would want to make sure that the dress would be kept well for when I’m actually obligated to wear it.

@paulinainbookland​ said:

Hi!My question is pertaining to my upcoming YA contemporary fantasy series that's gonna be modern retellings of certain greek myths. The series takes place in a fictional fantasy country called Olympius. I want my series to be diverse, especially with the characters. For example, even though race doesn't technically exist, Hera is portrayed as an Indian woman, Hecate as an east asian woman, Amphitrite as a polynesian/tahitian woman while Persephone, Psyxhe, Demeter, and Aphrodite are all black as examples. I also want to integrate Greek culture into the stories. My question is, can this be done even with racially diverse characters??

I think a better way to think about this question is to ask yourself “Who were the Ancient Greeks?” Research the histories and economies of those city-states and empires, as well as the other civilizations they would have interacted with in the Mediterranean, Central Asia and South Asia. I notice that you are mixing racial coding with nationality and ethnicity, which I advise against.

There was no “India” 2500 years ago.

Tahiti similarly wasn’t inhabited until the 11th century

Ask yourself what kind of people you are picturing when you use these descriptors and why? Thus, your problem is twofold:

Shedding notions conflating race with ethnicity and nationality

Doing actual research to better understand what level of diversity in physical appearance one could reasonably expect for a setting where the Olympus of Ancient Greece is transposed onto a modern setting.

@marinerofthestars​ asked:

I’m working on a series of fantasy books set on nine different worlds mirroring the Nine Realms of Norse cosmology, which are broadly inspired in terms of magic systems and themes by the Elder Futhark (the world with the rune for “justice” has a magic system that require you to abide by certain guidelines, the world with the rune for “death” has a magic system that lets you interact with spirits and the afterlife, and so forth). However, in terms of how these broad themes are expressed in individual worlds, as well as the minutiae of how magic systems operate, I plan to draw inspiration from various non-European sources, such as Hinduism, Māori culture, and Japanese Buddhism.

I’m going to do extensive research on these cultures beforehand to avoid handling these topics in a way that could be offensive to real-world minority groups (while Japanese people technically don’t exist in this universe, there are people on one world with similar cultural elements and physical features to Japanese people, and I’ll make sure to avoid writing them as characters from this ethnic groups as stereotypes) and I’m going to strictly avoid using specific elements from closed cultures. For instance, although one of my magic systems revolves around a series of focal points for energy throughout your body, these points aren’t called chakras, and they don’t have the same symbolism as chakras do in Hinduism. The only similarity is that there’s a network of energy nexuses in your body, but would even this similarity be acceptable for me to use? Or is even the broad concept without any of the specific elements forbidden to outsiders?

Also, I know that having a fantasy world inspired by elements of different cultures (ex: Avatar the Last Airbender) that portrays them respectfully is fine, but is doing the same thing with cultures that aren’t from the same geographic region (ex: merging aspects of Norse and Hindu magic) acceptable? I read an ask from 12/13 where you said having a Sikh protagonist fight Greek gods would make the story inherently Eurocentric, but I’m unsure whether the same standard applies here since I’m writing an original world inspired by IRL religion and magic rather than our world with those actual religious and magical systems. (Note that in the few instances where I do have POC protagonists interacting with more specific European-inspired supernatural entities, I do want to explicitly acknowledge how race and culture factors into things. For instance, one of my planned books has a character from a nation inspired by Bihar culture and Hinduism fighting European-inspired faeries, which is meant to parallel India’s history with colonialism.)

Is AtLA a Useful World-building Reference?

I should inform you that AtLA does not enjoy the unanimous acclaim here at WWC as assumed by many non-Asian writers. This post explains why. For the purposes of world-building with disparate cultures, I believe many of the problems described in the linked post will help you determine what world-building assumptions to avoid. Personally, as an Asian Buddhist who has done martial arts, I thought AtLA succeeded in its presentation of Chinese martial arts, but I didn’t find its portrayal of Buddhist philosophy or coding of Asian Buddhist cultures to be especially compelling.

- Marika

Christian Supremacy and Norse Mythology

I feel like it is very important to keep in mind that Norse mythology only exists in a Christianized form. We literally have no idea what pre-Christian Norse myths were, because it was only the Christians who wrote them down multiple hundreds of years after the Christianization of Scandinavia. 

As a result, a lot of myths were almost certainly shoehorned into being Biblical allegories of some sort. When you strip them down to their bare bones, you get a lot of Jesus stories. For example:

The old gods were painted as terrible people

The result of Ragnarok was the cleansing the earth of such old evils and replacing them with good, new gods.

Loki and Baldur as Jesus figures: Loki as the cleanser and Baldur as the perfectly good new head god.

There was a political agenda to writing this down — to unify all Viking-settled places under a single king, while appealing to their old heritage and new religious beliefs.

One does not need an advanced degree to see the inherent bias of this situation.

I’d suggest looking at any video Overly Sarcastic Productions has made on Norse mythology where Red yells very loudly about how we’ll never know what Norse mythology was like before the Norse became Christian, unless someone invents a time machine, because all the old oral records around what the myths used to be are long, long gone*. She has done videos on Loki and The Poetic Edda, along with a handful of others. The two I linked are the loudest on how Christianized and politically-motivated Norse mythology’s original written records were.

You can’t separate out Christianity from the Norse myths like you can with a lot of other ancient religions, because unlike those ancient religions, none of the original pagan traditions left records. There’s nothing pre-Christian to go back to. Thus, even if the setting is using Norse gods, the way those beliefs are structured is inextricably and irrevocably Christian.

Indirect Christian Colonialism

I bring up the above for an important reason: Norse mythology’s Christianization and Christian parallels mean that forcing other, non-Christian religions into a framework of what is, and always has been since its writing down, only a Christianized framework, is pagan-rebranded Christian colonialism.  By placing non-Christian beliefs within that framework, you reinforce Christian supremacy and recreate Christian colonialism.

This means the story doesn’t exactly play well with any culture that hasn’t been Christianized willingly. Which means it doesn’t play well with most cultures, especially religions that have experienced missionary trauma at the hands of Christians, like the Maori and most Indigenous peoples. You’re basically limited to Europe, some West African kingdoms like Ethiopia (so long as their historical Christianity isn’t too wildly different from European Christianity), as well as pockets of cultures dotted around the rest of the world with localized traditions that haven’t been soaked in blood in the past 200 years.

I would very strongly suggest reading the world-building tag as part of your research. Many concepts you’ve presented here are addressed in the pages of that tag, up to and including how far apart cultures have to be in order to safely influence each other (hint: it’s not very far, and is limited to direct trading partners/neighbours), and cautions against making Fae, an Indigenous-coded fantasy concept that comes from colonized cultures (Gaelic, primarily), as colonizers.

~Mod Lesya

*There’s some etymology breadcrumbs for Loki in particular, but they aren’t enough crumbs to know what the loaf used to be, just that it was probably made of this stuff.

Further Issues with Fae versus Hinduism as a Colonialism Allegory

Echoing Lesya, I think the biggest issue with your proposed conflict between fae and Hindu supernatural figures as an allegory for colonization is it doesn’t fit with what happened historically.

Firstly, elements of Gaelic culture in Ireland, Scotland, Wales and other parts of Europe were either co-opted or quashed by Christian forces, much like how Muslim and Christian forces, respectively, tried to eliminate aspects of Hindu culture in South Asia from the Delhi Sultanate through the Mughal Empire through British and Portuguese colonization to Christian evangelical groups in the present day. I can sort of see the logic of West versus East as the basis for a colonization narrative, but given the above histories, it feels erroneous when neither mythology is based on a monotheist religion.

Secondly, as Jaya has pointed out before (see here), conceptions of morality and capacity for morality differ for Hindu supernatural entities and the fae. The former play by the same rules as humans. The latter don’t. Colonization is an economic choice often backed by maximalist beliefs of superiority. I have difficulty believing creatures from two mythologies that don’t even view humans the same way would have any reasons to compete over resources. To that effect, here is an old post by me and Mod Lydie (see here) where we discuss why colonization is not often necessary to depict conflict between opposing groups in fantasy settings.

Concluding Thoughts

Overall, like Lesya, I anticipate problems in trying to adapt Norse cosmology to sources that are removed from each other. See this post on blending mythos successfully. You are better off coming back to us after you have done your initial research and have a sense of which mythologies work together and which don’t. As I’ve iterated before, WWC is better consulted towards the end of the research process rather than at the start as there are multiple ways one could go with this. You are telling us much of what you plan to do. I’d much rather hear your ideas when you are in a position to tell us what you have already done, how you’ve done it and why you made the choices you did.

Coding BiPoC from blind characters perspective

We’d like to open this question up to blind followers.

We do want to note that coding isn't just about physical appearance. For example, you could have cultural diversity, such as what you’re doing with the names.

-WWC

Commentary

@blindbeta said: I was tagged in this, so I would like to offer suggestions. As WWC mentioned, cultural diversity is about many things and blind people pick up on these things.

For example, names, as you mentioned.

Culture also comes out in accents, dialect, and language, as in certain words or phrases used. Maybe your characters mention holidays or religious ceremonies or their favorite things to eat for breakfast at certain times, which can be cultural or holiday-specific. Or maybe foods they miss eating that their parents used to make when they were sick. Perhaps a character talks about relatives or traditions from their home/ancestral country, recipes they want to try, clothes they want to buy and any special meaning these may have. Maybe the characters discuss jewelry, hair, or other fashion topics and something culture-specific comes up.

There are many cultural cues blind people pick up on and they don’t have to focus on skin color, or hair texture/style, which may be impossible or difficult for a blind person with residual vision to discern. In fact, you can take this as an opportunity to show the cultures of your characters in a unique way. It can be freeing rather than limiting, especially if your character has more than one culture or a different skin tone than other characters coded for the same culture. This is also a chance to show that even totally blind people are aware of culture and cultural differences without relying on visual cues.