#such things

Sorry for another long wait. As always, please review & reblog! 

You make a really good point! That was honestly part of my consideration when I started out writing. I definitely don’t want to take any limelight away from POC who have their own stories.

At the same time, I have to admit that my OC (Mint) kind of leapt from my head fully-formed. From the moment I saw her in my mind’s eye, I knew she was mixed race. And the writer in me wanted to be true to that.

I do agree that writing a story about a white man (well, multiple white men) abusing a black girl is definitely treading on a very fine line. With that in mind, I’ve done my best to be respectful of Mint’s (and her mother’s, and the twins’) race. I also wanted to keep her as mixed race, both because it more deeply explores racial subtexts in the film (Joe and the war boys are explicitly meant to be read as a ‘rebirth’ of the destructive white man subjugating everyone else), and because I realised it created additional, interesting tensions in the story. How is Mint, a mixed race girl, going to react to her abuse compared to the twins - who I explicitly wrote as Indigenous Australians? How is she going to react compared to Caucasian characters like Kindest (an OC), Capable, and Angharad? Most importantly, how is she going to react to it compared to her own mother, who is also a mixed-race woman?

Race admittedly wasn’t the foremost consideration in my writing process - I spent more time exploring the dynamics of gender and emotion, as that’s also my academic speciality - but it was something in the back of my mind as I was going into it.

Part of this was something of a hope to add a little more diversity to Miller’s world. Though MMFR already is fairly diverse, it’s still overwhelmingly white. I refuse to believe that the majority of Immortan Joe’s previous wives would be white, especially in Australia, which has such a diverse population. I absolutely believe that there needs to be more diverse representation in media, fan media included, so I hoped to do my part, at least a little bit, by making Mint a three-dimensional character instead of a stereotype. I believe that white writers have a responsibility to write diversely, too, even if it involves writing from a perspective we’ve never experienced.

There have been some claims that “this isn’t my story to tell” as I’m not a black or mixed race woman myself. My question is, then, whose is it? Do I sell the story idea to a WOC? Do I ghost write for her? What I could not do was just sit on it silently - this was a story that, as soon as it popped into my mind, was screaming to be let out. So I let it out, as carefully as I could. In large part, Such Things has been my own exploration of things that happened to me. I definitely was never a sex slave, but the emotional abuse and gaslighting? A lot of that is autobiographical. 

I admit, I’m not perfect. I definitely struggle with inherent racism taught to me by a racist society - as all white people do (or at least should). But I did try to keep a firm line between writing a character who happens to be a WOC, and writing some kind of fandom version of blaxploitation. 

Regarding some of the accusations I’ve been getting, I certainly don’t think that black women’s suffering is my own personal toy. I also certainly don’t “get off” on what I write about in Such Things. Yes, I have a big thing for Immortan Joe, but all my shameless pwp is strictly confined to the limits of my other fic, Roadside Find - whose OC, by the way, is a white girl like myself. Such Things is not about my personal sexual preferences or masturbatory fantasies, even though sex is  a big part of it. Sex, both the healthy and unhealthy aspects of it, is a big part of almost all my writing. It’s a way for me to explore emotion and communication that doesn’t have much parallel anywhere else in human interaction. That certainly does not mean that if I’m writing a sex scene, I am getting off on it.

Ultimately, I 100% agree that, when writing stories about POC, white people need to be careful not to take the spotlight from actual POC. We also need to be respectful, and actually write POC characters as characters, not stereotypes. That’s what I’ve been trying, and I hope succeeding, to do with Mint. But I don’t think that I should necessarily stifle myself if a story is born in my mind and happens to involve a POC character. Of course, this would be a very different story if I were writing about, say, slavery in premodern America. That would be a lot more delicate, because those black women actually existed, and using them to write fiction, even fiction that helps me rid myself of my own demons, would be incredibly selfish. But Mint doesn’t exist. Neither does Immortan Joe, or the Citadel, or the world of Mad Max. Thank God. So I’m very uneasy about dictating what writers can and can’t write based solely on modern identity politics, especially when it comes to fantasy and sci-fi genres. That silences a lot of stories that may have some value, even if the writer is of different demographics than their subjects.