#text posty

Inspired by this tweet here by game dev doll!

fantasy racism is so funny because authors and writers make that choice to include racism in a world where racism literally does not have to exist writing shitty racism allegories to compare it to real life racism in the worst way possible

TL;DR of my thoughts:

Fantasy racism has major pitfalls including weird voyeurism, risk of dehumanization, and bare-bones exploration that rarely tackles the more complex issues of how it functions in real life. However, completely disregarding it in all fiction and fantasy is not great either. Everybody has different takes on racism and those it affects (like myself) may want to explore how it affects us within the realm of fiction. Yes, fiction/fantasy does not have to have it, but it is also something you don't have to avoid exploring either. But, you don't need to have racism in a story to give it conflict. There is always more than one type of conflict/injustice. Discussing injustices in a fantasy society between two opposing groups does not have to be about racism. Not everything needs to be a 1:1 allegory about real-life struggles and societal issues.

My full thoughts:

I agree with mixed feelings. As a Black person, I do feel that there's too much focus on including racism but not really discussing its societal and cultural harms in fantasy worldbuilding. Most times it's presented as a minor character flaw with little effort to solve the larger problem or strange voyeurism over "this is the life of the other" while depicting the worst aspects of racism in the story's setting. Then there's the fantasy racism allegory of animals and creatures experiencing racism, which gets awkward when the in-universe depiction of racism does not make sense, or at worst, dehumanizes the people these characters/creatures are supposed to represent. I don't think OP is saying all fantasy should not have it, but its presentation is often problematic or harmful.

However, I don't want people to avoid discussing racism or other serious issues in their stories. Yes, fantasy is escapism and it does not have to discuss these issues. But fantasy, and all of fiction, also function as a reflection of real life. If a story has this in it, that means the author actively chose to do so and wants to explore it within their own story.

Like, I really want to vent about how my society treats Black people like me and I'm going to put my feelings into my story. Or I might want to discuss it, but within the setting of the story, "discrimination" as we know it may work differently in a fantasy setting. For example, in one of my stories for The Mundane Realm (See my carrd for World of Relics), my characters, the talking object people, have no concept of "race" or "racism" (nor do they have any historical concept of systematic/institutional racism) but they do understand "durability". Durability drives their society's version of discrimination against each other. Durability-based discrimination is never presented as a 1:1 allegory of real-life racial discrimination in my story. It is a form of discrimination inspired by my lived experience, yes, but something of its own that exists within the confines of the story's worldbuilding and my characters' society.

Outside of TMR, my other stories don't have discrimination or racism. One covers a rivalry between kingdoms, not driven by racism, but driven by a never-ending war over what their past rulers have done to each other. There are heavy themes of revenge and trauma as conflict. I also have another story about a young actor who is neurodivergent and has an overactive paracosm that they must reconcile with while living in a world of imagination. The main theme of their story is just living as a new adult (early 30s) struggling to find a job and sticking to it. Rise of Relics is a story about people, after experiencing permanent metaphysical changes to their bodies after a mass extinction event, fight to save what's left of their world while another group wants to restart it at the risk of killing all who survived. The main driving conflict of that story is adapting to the Death of Normal.

However, once again, my lived experience will still pervade my writing. This includes what I experience living as a Black person in a racist country. All my protagonists are either Black or Black-coded (Yes, I know. I hate this term for non-human characters, but I see myself in them. I'm welcome to a better term, please suggest one!). At some point, the characters in my story will face being othered. I want to discuss what that feels like. I should have the right to explore my feelings about that. Going full "I don't see color" in my stories is just not going to work.

If I was white, then yeah… But I'm not. I am Black. Everything I write, even if I remove any discussion of discrimination or other problematic issues of our society in my stories, will always be colored by my experience. Even a utopian society in a fantasy setting will always have this part of me. This is an unavoidable fact.