Supporting Writeblrs

This happened when the COO of a bank we shall keep nameless married the swimsuit model. They had an open bar at their reception. Because of that, nobody under the age of 21 could be in the main building. Usually, this doesn’t cause problems because people don’t bring their kids to wedding receptions that are effectively work things. Since none of us were kids you could leave alone in the house, the people planning the event had to come up with things for the kids to do while their parents listened to coworkers give wedding toasts. 

They split the kids into groups. Each group had two interns to chaperone the kids. Our group went ice skating. Our chaperones included Alex, an accounting major with the investment banking group and Verity, a computer science major working as a database developer. 

We got a nasty surprise when we arrived at the ice rink. The boys didn't even have to wear helmets while skating, most didn't wear shirts. The girls had to be wrapped up in just about every form of hockey padding under the sun along with a hi-collar life jacket. 

As you would expect, none of us saw that coming. They provided gear, but they didn't have enough gear for all the girls to be on the ice at the same time. We could only skate for five minutes at a time before we had to come back and transfer our gear to the next person. The time it took to do the transfer cut into our ice time.

Transferring our protective equipment felt like prepping to put out a wildfire. Abigail jumped off the ice, took off her gloves and helmet, and passed it to Cindy. She then removed her neckguard and life jacket and helped Cindy put it on so she could step on the ice.

Now that Cindy was on the ice, Abigail took off her chest plate and gauntlets and gave them to Cindy. Cindy took the chest plate under their life jacket and fastened the waistband on the life jacket once the chest plate was on.

Next, Abigail took off the shorts and the goalie pads. The tops of the goalie pads went up past Cindy's mid-thigh, and she nearly scratched a hole in the shorts with her skates. It took two of us to fasten the crotch strap on the life jacket once she got the shorts and the goalie pads in place.

Finally, Abigail passed Cindy the gloves. technically, we were not supposed to remove your gloves until the end, but it’s easier to transfer if you take your gloves off.

This whole process took four minutes and 15 seconds. Cindy took one look at herself and said, “Jesus Christ, I feel like a tick about to pop!”

“OK, you’re done,” Abigail said.

Cindy looked at Abigail from behind the face cage of the helmet. “Yeah, but I can’t put my arms down!” she whined.

Abigail pushed Cindy’s arms down and they sprang right back up. She looked around and said, “Well, put your arms down when you get on the ice.”

Cindy nodded and waddled away. 

“Nice change-up, Abigail,” I said as I slowly clapped

Abigail rolled her eyes and sulked, “Louise, do not get me started on that life jacket, it will not go around that breastplate.” She sat down on the bench in a way that looked like somebody threw her there. “No kidding, this is not what I had in mind.”

I nodded and chuckled. “By my calculations, Cindy’s going to have 45 seconds of ice time,” I commented, pointing to my watch, “She should make the most of it.”

Ellie overheard our chatter, turned around, and said, “You’ve been in a mood all day, Louise.”

“Well, not all the time,” I said, “this only started when we got out here.”

When I said that, I referred to getting caught off guard by a rule that the girls had to have hockey gear in a life jacket to skate. Ellie thought I meant I was afraid of skating because I had never been before. “So, have you been skating before?” she asked in a sickly sweet tone that tried to be sympathetic but just failed.

“Yes, but never with this much gear,” I said. I shook my head and grimaced, “It’s putting me off, to be honest.”

“OK,” Ellie asked, “what do you wear for skating?”

“You mean other than my skates and my clothes?” I shrugged my shoulders, “Just some gloves.”

Ellie looked at me like I had horseshoe crabs coming out of my nose. “That’s it?” she gasped, “No helmet?”

“No, don’t really need one,” I answered. My background is in figure skating and the first thing they teach you is how to fall so that you don’t hit your head. I fully respect that helmets can prevent catastrophic skull fractures, but learning how to fall safely prevents you from hitting your head in the first place. I tried to put this into words that Ellie would understand, but all I could get out was, “I already know how to fall”

Ellie didn’t appreciate this, but I didn’t expect her to get so upset. “You’re kidding me, right?” she said with one of those laughs it’s not a genuine laugh but you’re just using it to mask your discomfort, “Your ego is so inflated that you can barely fit through the door."

"I know,” I responded. I meant this as I know you're upset, but Ellie took it to mean I know, it's hard being this great.

My ego had nothing to do with it. Everyone else seemed oblivious to what we were promised not matching what was delivered except me. 

Our conversation attracted the attention of one of the chaperones. Alex wandered over to us and said, “Is there a problem here, ladies?”

“Well, it's not really a problem per se,” I began. “I was just talking about how this does not meet my expectations, and…”

Ellie stood up abruptly. “Louise ice skates with no helmet because she thinks she's better than us!” she interrupted in a panicky tone. I now knew exactly what Grace and Jacinda were talking about when they said she looked like Veruca Salt.

Alex walked over to me and sat down. “OK, Listen to me,” she began, “I know you might think all that and a slice of pie, but until you have witnessed the horror that goes on in a trauma ward in a hospital ER, don't speak.” She closed her eyes and looked away towards the end of the sentence. she started to panic just as much as Ellie did and smacked the back of her right hand against her left hand if she spoke. “You aren't just hurting yourself here, you are making others who love you fear for your life!” 

“We have pie?” I asked. 

Alex got very stern and corporate with me. “We are not talking about pie, Louise,” she said.

“Then why did you bring it up?”

Alex got mad, left, and went to the viewing gallery to say something to Verity. “what do you think they’re talking about?” I mused out loud. 

Jacinda heard what I said and responded, “It's probably a bluff. I don’t think they’re saying much of anything.” 

I watched Alex and Verity gesticulate as they talked. “They’re moving their hands a lot.”

“I can see that,” Jacinda replied. She shrugged. “For what it’s worth, I’m like you. I don’t skate with a helmet, either.” 

“Because you’re vain?” Ellie snipped. 

Jacinda rolled her eyes at Ellie. She turned to me and said, “Honestly, what’s more important is knowing how to fall safely. I’m surprised they don’t teach kids that.” 

“That’s how I learned, but I learned from someone who had trained as a figure skater,” I said excitedly. Out of everyone there, I finally met someone who actually understood. 

Alex came back with Verity. “Hey, Louise,” she asked. 

I slammed my hands down on my thighs. “Is this about what I think it is?” I said. 

“Yes,” Verity said, “Alex told me everything.” 

I stood up and got ready to explain myself. “They should’ve told us ahead of time,” I said. 

Verity shook her head. “Well, you should know better,” she said. She brought her hands together gently and looked down at me, even though I’m about four inches taller than her. “A helmet is the bare minimum,” she said, “ and what do you think of somebody who does the bare minimum?”

“Well,” I began, “none of the girls expected to have to wear full hockey gear and a life jacket on the ice.” I did my best to be diplomatic, something that got harder as the dialogue became progressively stupider. “Quite frankly, that rule should apply to everybody and, as I’ve said before, you should’ve told us this ahead of time.”

Verity gestured for me to sit down. “I want you to slow down and think about how you sound,” she said, “Does it come off as, well, a bit Karen-ish?” 

“No,” I shook my head. 

Now, the smart thing to say next would be that you aren’t frustrated by the protective gear in and of itself, just the double standards, lack of communication, and unexpected reactions to expressing your frustration with the previous items surrounding it. Had I been able to put this in words, it would’ve been a lot smarter than what I did say, which was, “Why do you have to wear a life jacket while skating because it’s a flooded ice surface and not a frozen pond?”

Verity rolled her eyes. She probably thought I was stupid. “because ice is frozen water,” she said in total disbelief that someone could make it to age 16 and not know that, “if you fall through the ice, you hit the water and drown.” She condescendingly nodded her head. “People can fall through ice and drown, and life jackets stop you from drowning.” 

I blinked. “I get that, but this is not the same”

“how can it not be the same?” Verity said incredulously, “Drowning is drowning!” 

“Unlike an ice layer on a natural body of water, there’s nowhere for you to go if the ice cracks except for maybe the padding that’s underneath the ice sheet. It’s pretty much a frozen puddle.” I couldn’t believe I had to say this to an adult. 

“But you can drown in a puddle!” she said defensively, “Or are you too stupid to understand that, too?”

“Not if it’s frozen,” I said without missing a beat. I burst out laughing. How could somebody think you could fall through a flooded ice sheet when there was no body of water underneath it. “the fact that you can’t seem to grasp but there is no risk of drowning on a man-made rink makes you closer to stupid than me”

Verity’s patience wore thin. She walked me to the door. “Go,” she scolded, “Now.”

I took off my skates, packed them up, put my shoes back on, and walked away. As I left, I heard Jacinda say, “She’s right, you know. 

Verity pointed at the door. “You need to leave, too, Jacinda,” she barked, “Don’t encourage Louise, here.” 

I don’t believe for a minute that I missed anything spectacular. As I left, I noticed that the boys decided to play some game where they knocked over the girls. The girls couldn’t get up when the boys knocked them over. Anyone who fell over had to wait for somebody to help them up, but they seemed to take their sweet time. Somehow, I can see this game making the top of the list of reasons that somebody's relationship ended.

Jacinda caught up to me as I left. “Louise, I’m going to ask you something and I don’t want you to freak out”

“Normally, I’d say please don’t, but have at. I’m kind of curious now”

Jacinda took a deep breath and asked, “Was everything that happened back there related to your autism?”

It looks an awful lot like my autism caused this fiasco, but it didn’t. This isn’t me struggling to cope with intricate social rules, nor is it about not foreseeing how things they do upset people. It’s not related to difficulty executing tasks due to poor motor coordination. It’s not even an issue of taking things too literally. 

“Jacinda, let me answer that question with another question,” I began, “Did they tell the girls we need to bring a life jacket and hockey padding to skate ahead of time?”

“No,” Jacinda scoffed, “and it should really be the other way around.”

I laughed because I knew exactly what Jacinda meant. if you put those boys in a padded cell they’ll still find a way to hurt themselves. “Yeah,” I chortled, “they’re stupid.”

“So, what you’re telling me is that this is not related to autism?” Jacinda asked

“Hell no!” I exclaimed, “The problem is that we were lied to!”

Jacinda tipped her head to one side, “Of course, if they told us the truth, we would say that they were insane and we wouldn’t show up, because none of it makes any sense.” 

Grace came power-walking in out of nowhere. “hey guys, we’ve got a problem,”

Jacinda’s eyebrows did their best impressions of Volkswagens trying to park. “And that is?”

Grace gestured to the clamp on the wheel on the bug-green luxury car parked at a 60-degree angle. “They’ve impounded my Mercedes.” 

Salutations! I go online by Summer Kid (S.K) but you can also refer to me as Elena. I am a young adult who loves storytelling because creating is what keeps me sane. Above all, I write original fiction.

What did I write up until 25 August, 2023? Through the link below are presented ten stories, free to read online (old and recent):

I wanted to update my writeblr intro so here we are. Also, I want to thank the community real quick for being - delightful. Really, I have learned a lot and still learning. Thank you for everything!

What's next? I have many creative projects in store which will take time (I am slow and also life is a tool). First on the list is a remaster of the Creation and Destruction series. I also have a WIP I plan to traditionally publish in my mother tongue. Fun... and terrifying.

I will keep everyone posted whenever I have something to show. I am mostly active on my second account: @writingingraves. On there will be thrown a lot of WIP stuff into oblivion. Hehe.

sick of using "very _____" ? : https://www.losethevery.com/

want to simplify your writing ? : https://hemingwayapp.com/

writing buddies / motivation ? : https://nanowrimo.org

word you're looking for but don't know ? : https://www.onelook.com/thesaurus/

need a fantasy name ? : https://www.fantasynamegenerators.com/

need a fantasy name ? : https://nameberry.com/

want a name with meaning ? : https://www.behindthename.com/

who wants a map maker! : https://inkarnate.com/

story building / dnd ? : https://www.worldanvil.com/

need some minimalistic writing time ? : https://zenpen.io/

running out of ideas ? : https://blog.reedsy.com/creative-writing-prompts/

setting a goal ? how about 3 pages / day ? : https://new.750words.com/

what food did they eat ? : https://www.foodtimeline.org/

questions on diversity within writing ? : https://writingwithcolor.tumblr.com/

now what was that colour called ? : https://ingridsundberg.com/2014/02/04/the-color-thesaurus/

coiling (up in a ball, in on themselves, against something, etc)

panting (there’s a slew of adjectives you can put after this, my favorites are shakily, weakly, etc)

keeling over (synonyms are words like collapsing, which is equally as good but overused in media)

trembling/shivering (additional adjectives could be violently, uncontrollably, etc)

sobbing (weeping is a synonym but i’ve never liked that word. also love using sob by itself, as a noun, like “he let out a quiet sob”)

whimpering (love hitting the wips with this word when a character is weak, especially when the pain is subsiding. also love using it for nightmares/attacks and things like that)

clinging (to someone or something, maybe even to themselves or their own clothes)

writhing/thrashing (maybe someone’s holding them down, or maybe they’re in bed alone)

crying (not actual tears. cry as in a shrill, sudden shout)

dazed (usually after the pain has subsided, or when adrenaline is still flowing)

wincing (probably overused but i love this word. synonym could be grimacing)

doubling-over (kinda close to keeling over but they don’t actually hit the ground, just kinda fold in on themselves)

heaving (i like to use it for describing the way someone’s breathing, ex. “heaving breaths” but can also be used for the nasty stuff like dry heaving or vomiting)

gasping/sucking/drawing in a breath (or any other words and phrases that mean a sharp intake of breath, that shite is gold)

murmuring/muttering/whispering (or other quiet forms of speaking after enduring intense pain)

hiccuping/spluttering/sniffling (words that generally imply crying without saying crying. the word crying is used so much it kinda loses its appeal, that’s why i like to mix other words like these in)

stuttering (or other general terms that show an impaired ability to speak — when someone’s in intense pain, it gets hard to talk)

staggering/stumbling (there is a difference between pain that makes you not want to stand, and pain that makes it impossible to stand. explore that!)

recoiling/shrinking away (from either the threat or someone trying to help)

pleading/begging (again, to the threat, someone trying to help, or just begging the pain to stop)

Collecting all of these in one convenient place! If you have any requests, questions, comments, and especially concerns about what/how I’m writing these, please let me know!

Writing Chronic Pain

Writing Deaf Characters

Writing Disability and the Idea of Cure

Writing Wheelchair Users

General Disability Etiquette for Writers

Overused Disability Tropes

Writing Blind/Low Vision Characters

Writing Facial Difference

Writing Seizures

Writing Visible vs. Invisible Disabilities

Writing Disability and Eugenics

                So recently I shared the first 30 pages of my WIP with my writing mentor, and she had some pretty brutal feedback. It was too slow, you didn’t get to know the characters very well, and she said my worst nightmare “it was hard to get into, and I didn’t want to keep going.”

                Oof.

                My first reaction was to think, well that’s because it’s only the first 30 pages. If she only read a little bit more the characters really start to shine in the next bit—and that question she had about the world is answered just a few pages later.

                Then I realized I was missing the point. It didn’t matter if I had the most amazing story after page 30 that would have brought her to tears. Because she would never know—she wouldn’t have read past the point that I lost her.

                That was the moment I realized I needed to completely rewrite my first 30 pages. The point was—the reader doesn’t know when it’ll get good. They don’t know that your characters are amazing once you get past a certain point, because in all likelihood, they won’t suffer through to get to that point.

                It has to be solid from page one all the way through to the end. Most books and authors don’t have the liberty to retain readers through anything less.

We get a lot of asks from people with lived experience in one aspect of marginalization— LGBTQIA+, neurodivergent, physically disabled, ex-religious people—and the asks boil down to, essentially: can I take all of my own trauma and put it on someone multiply marginalized?

This question has many facets, which this guide is set to outline.

Power Dynamics and Intersections

Within any space centred around a marginalized identity, white supremacy and colorism still play a very large part within those spaces. Imani Barbarin of Crutches and Spice observed that white disabled people can only exercise the full extent of their white privilege within disabled spaces, because white supremacy has ableism built in and views disabled white people as lesser; white people are denied the ability to be completely white in abled society. As a result, the only opportunity they have to exercise the full extent of white privilege is disabled spaces.

The same goes with LGBTQIA+ spaces; they can end up colonialist because of white people in those spaces assume that their methods of coming out and living in their identity are the only way that exist, when people of colour can (and often do) have totally different but still perfectly valid ways of living in their identity. Again, white supremacy has homophobia built in, so white LGBTQ+ people don’t have full access to white privilege unless they’re with other LGBTQ+ people.

As a result: if you pick an identity that you have power over, you are bringing all of those power dynamics to the table in your representation. Even if you share a marginalization with the character, one aspect of discrimination does not an understanding of all discrimination make. Identities are all intersectional. 

Representing multiple axes of marginalization is much more difficult, because you will have to unpack your own power, realize how many other ways of existing there are, and leave your own ideas for how the story should go at the door in order to respect experiences you don’t have in full.

You have to listen to the people you’re representing, or else you won’t be writing representation for them. 

The Bias Game of Telephone

Insiders to any given group are taught a lot of “truths” about outside groups without spending much time listening to those groups, which results in a lot of problems. What might have been said or observed once or twice travels around people in a game of telephone, fanning xenophobia because it’s so much easier to critique people over there than ourselves.

So yes, you heard that Over There, the practice is x. Apply some stereotypes, spread it around as a societal “everyone knows”, and suddenly you think you know a lot more than you do about any one group. 

For example: the Public Religion Research Institute polled over a dozen religious groups in the United States on whether they support LGBTQ rights in 2019, and the results were that people who are Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, and basically every religious group you could think of except Jehovah’s Witnesses were in favour of legal LGBTQ+ protection. They even polled in Christian denominations separating out white, Hispanic, and Black—and all of them agreed: LGBTQ+ rights needed to be put into law. (Source: Broad Support for LGBT Rights Across all 50 States: Findings from the 2019 American Values Atlas )

Throws a wrench into “everyone knows that [insert group here] is homophobic”, doesn’t it?

The problem is, these biases are going to colour your initial research stage. If you “know” that x group believes y, then you’re going to “naturally” slot them into that role in the story, then come to us asking if that’s okay.

Instead, what you need to do is poke your own assumptions: 

Why did you make this situation happen that way? 

Do the numbers support this assumption? 

Have you actually spent any time in groups with these individuals to see how they live? 

Did you read even one multiply-marginalized person’s social media feed to see what they believe? Preferably multiple?

Once you’ve done those steps, you’ll be in a much better place to see if you’ve even made something realistic, or if you’re projecting your experience too much as a 1 to 1 in situations where it just wouldn’t happen that way.

White is Not Neutral

Any identity you have as a white person is going to look different for someone not white. Being queer, Muslim, and Black in America looks a lot different than being gay, white, and Protestant in America. Those combinations of identities will look different again if you’re in a Muslim-majority country vs Muslim-minority, Christian-majority vs Christian-minority. 

The traumas of being a certain identity in a society that doesn’t like you are racialized. White is not the default experience of how life happens, and a Hindu person with a strong connection to their family and wants to maintain some connection, just with boundaries, will have a much different set of priorities than an exvangelical who wants to get away from their family the minute they turn 18. 

Even if you get a Hindu person who wants to get away from their family the minute they turn 18, the logic for getting there and the hurdles to overcome will be different, because they’ll have been raised differently. If you start to assume that you know how they’ll reach that logic, then you’re probably playing a game of bias telephone, as detailed above.

Mental illness, gender, disability and basically any identity under the sun will have a different expression in different cultures. A cross-cultural study on schizophrenia’s auditory hallucinations showed that the voices people hear are shaped by culture. In Accra, Ghana and Chennai, India—people mostly reported their heard voices as a positive thing. Meanwhile in San Mateo, California, not one person did the same. (source: Hallucinatory ‘voices’ shaped by local culture, Stanford anthropologist says)

Different cultures will define “man” differently. Cultures might have third genders that are more widespread and accepted than non-binary people in North America and Europe. Expectations for a parent will be different. Expectations for children will be different. Expectations between friends will be different. Disability (physical and/or mental) accommodations that are built into culture will be wildly different depending on cultural values. Wealth and class struggles will also be different.

All of these things will deeply impact a majority* character from a marginalized group, let alone one multiply marginalized. If you can’t answer how a majority character would behave based off cultural practices, then answer that before you work on a multiply marginalized person from that group.

* majority= cis, het, pale, financially stable, aka, somebody who has the most institutional power within that group even if they are marginalized in broader society (if they’re in a society where they are the dominant group, then they are privileged)

Healing, Distance, and Diversity

I know many marginalized people use fictional stories to be seen on paper, especially in a society where the stories for us just don’t exist. And you’re also aware of how white the representation of otherwise-marginalized people is, so you want to do your part to change that.

There are three paths you can take with this:

1- You are writing a story primarily for others, and have worked through your own stuff enough that you can use it as an influence instead of a story basis.

You realize you might not know exactly how a Buddhist East Asian person in a supportive family feels, but you know what it’s like to feel supported growing up and want to pull from that experience to show a loving Buddhist East Asian family. Or maybe you know what it’s like to love your parents but never, ever, ever feel safe coming out to them, and you want to show other people stuck in that place it’s okay, and it just so happens that the character this time around is Black.

This is a place where you can put aside your own desires and really dig into the research. Because it will take a lot of research. There will be so many little things that you don’t know. It will be diversity on hard mode. 

2- You are writing this story primarily for yourself, but it’s just so emotional to think of your own context you want to make it Different, somehow

If you are in this position, consider keeping the story private. Not a judgement, at all—we all need private stories. But until you’ve worked through your own pain, you’re going to be relying a little too heavily on assumptions and your own experience to do respectful research.

That emotional situation you want to write about is going to look so different once you change the racial demographic, you probably won’t get the catharsis you want while writing it. Which means the story and your healing will suffer, because you’re not able to do research and you’re not able to work through all of your feelings from running into cultural roadblocks.

Get catharsis first, then consider doing diversity once your emotions are less intense. You need to be able to put “you” aside, and when your feelings are too big, that just is not happening. That’s okay! Not all of your representation has to be perfectly done for others to consume. 

But that also means, you don’t have to ask WWC about it. Because you’re not writing a story for public consumption—you’re writing a story to process your own trauma.

3- You are writing this story primarily for others, but you’re simply trying to toss as much diversity in to “fix” the “everyone is white” problem and haven’t really stepped back to ask yourself if you’re representing them, or if you’re trying to show off.

This is a place you can very quickly be accidentally hurtful, because you don’t know what you don’t know. Maybe you’re wanting to toss in some background flavour, have some experience with death, decide to change the character’s race because they’re a smaller background part… and then you don’t look at what grief norms are in their culture over yours.

You could also find out that your experience has a lot of similarities and get lucky! Or you could get a few things wrong but at least you tried. Or, worst case, you could get it completely wrong and end up not representing anyone.

When in doubt, ask. If you’ve never seen x group handle y, then look it up before you go writing about it—same way you’d research any other component of your plot. Fear is not the place to write diversity from.

TL;DR

No matter how many marginalizations you have, it’ll still be different if you don’t share race

Marginalized spaces are often the only spaces where marginalized white people have full access to white privilege, so they can be extremely hostile to PoC

Groups grow, change, and evolve, as time goes on. Don’t assume that you know how they’ll actually handle any given marginalization unless you’ve listened to them at length.

Context matters; the same identity will have a different experience depending on their level of privilege within their society/group

There are limits to how much you can extrapolate your experience to relate with others who share an identity (chronically ill, LGBTQ+, etc) with you

If you’re just taking PoC to make the story different from your lived experience, keep the story private and heal before you start to write for others

Simply trying to avoid criticism of writing all white people is a poor place to start writing diversity, and you need some basic research before you polish things

This is all really good advice and definitely helps a lot. (Especially for trying to explain why it can be important to rework an entire character). I am having some difficulty figuring out how to apply it to most of my own work though.

Spoiler: I write secondary world fantasy pretty exclusively. All of this advice in both this reply and the original post comes from me writing and researching not-Europe, and how much I’ve had to watch myself to not literally make up Western attitudes within a non-Western secondary world fantasy.

Sci Fi

Starting here, because it’s going to be the most grounded in the post.

Sci fi, broadly, is creating what-if situations with usually a more solid foothold in the real world—either you’re twisting the past, or extrapolating the future. These what-ifs are grounded in what the author finds compelling, scary, peaceful, bad, good, or merely interesting.

It’s no mystery why alien invasion sci fi really took off in the early 1900s, when white people started looking at how they were treating their Indigenous populations (especially in North America) and went “wouldn’t it be terrifying if somebody did that to us?”

Borg type baddies came about during The Red and Lavender Scares when suddenly people were worried that every single person from a communist nation (Red Scare) was secretly in line with that organization’s politics and they went against American Freedom™, or if you were gay/lesbian (Lavender Scare) then you were a communist sympathizer and needed to be removed from government positions because you’d undermine America.

Same thing for body snatchers, as spying became much stronger during the Cold War and you never knew who was secretly working for the bad people over there. See Red and Lavender Scares. They just kicked it up a notch in fiction.

Star Trek is in many ways space colonialism, but trying to be “good” to the people they encounter.

Alien cultures are often pulled more heavily from non-European cultures to give them a “unique look” without any regard for the actual real people that exist on Earth that dress and behave like that, in turn kind of majorly equating “aliens” with “non Europeans” (Star Wars, for example, pulls heavily from Mongolian peoples for Padme’s formal wear; I know people debate endlessly if Star Wars is sci fi or space fantasy, but this is an easily searched* example that represents a general trend—the blue people Avatar does the same thing with mostly Native American groups)

When you start to deal with what the future looks like, then you’re picking and choosing what ways you think are most likely—whether or not those are grounded in reality. Example: how many people think that China, Japan, and Korea are going to blend together, when most of their very long histories are about how distinct they are from each other and involve a ton of dedication to staying separate. Korea has six thousand years of history where they are distinctly Korean, something they’ve held onto despite numerous invasions. They’re not about to give up a Korean identity six thousand years in the future.

Your what ifs are informed by world history. The inspiration has to come from somewhere. And unfortunately a lot of sci fi ends up pulling from very, very bad places while also painting the dominant culture as some sort of right.

In my opinion it gets worse when you start to get into dystopic fiction, because then you’re dealing very specifically with resistance, and rebuilding, and that tends to blatantly show when you haven’t listened to various marginalized groups about what sort of future they want. Sure, the government is overthrown, but the ‘good’ situation ends up looking like the status quo in the real world.

There’s a reason it’s so important to read Afro and Indigenous Futureism, because then you start to see what we want to happen in our future.

Which is where this post comes in. You are bringing your attitudes, taught to you by a usually colonial education, to what you think makes a good story. Your idea of what is terrifying is usually “what if white people were treated the same way as people of colour?” (Handmaid’s Tale, for example) and the resolution often involves returning to the status quo of the systems we have now being… somehow better to those we’re currently hurting? But there’s not been work to actually figure that out.

You need to break that down. You need to realize how much power and privilege you’re bringing to the table, and realize our ideas about how to handle common sci-fi concepts are different from yours, and if you want to give us space in your sci fi, you need to start listening to us and changing how you view the “natural way” to have a situation go.

You’re literally creating how you think a situation will go. None of your ideas are going to be neutral. If you want to show a diverse group of people handling a situation, you still need to listen to us.

*if you can’t find articles directly comparing Mongolian traditional dress to Padme, just search “Mongolian traditional dress” separately and go to images.

Fantasy

To continue the theme of “you’re literally making everything up.”

You’re still going to need to figure out how different cultures with different cultural values are going to handle marginalization, and even what is marginalized.

This is where the paragraph about “different cultures define gender, relationship expectations, family, and disability differently” really comes into play. Because this is where most fantasy writers fall down.

Writers often take their usually American or European cultural values, paint a different aesthetic over it, and call it representation. It is not representation.

If you’re making up a new culture, you need to figure out a rough idea of their base, and then figure out how their unique system will create a fantasy culture. This is where it’s important to figure out what marginalization even looks like in non-European cultures, because you could end up in a situation where nobody would actually care if there were three or more genders, and all of the (modern day dominant cisnormativity) needs to get purged from your thought process before you can write it authentically. 

How many times have you played a video game or read a book where they say it’s a matriarchy, but the only values are battling in war and most positions of power are held by men?  That’s a sign the author hasn’t actually sat and wondered how matriarchies would look like in practical terms, and has simply re-skinned modern ideas of power into a new setting.

If women are allowed to fight in war, then they don’t need to hide their gender for it, and they don’t need to constantly be proving themselves if they’ve supposedly already done it. And if women are banned from war, the reason they aren’t allowed could be drastically different, so any sort of “prove women are just as strong!” motives that are hallmarks of western feminism would just fall flat. And maybe war honours mean next to nothing, and instead it’s about how much food you can provide that determines your place in power.

Fantasy is, in many ways, “this post but you have to work even harder to watch your own assumptions.”

When you’re working in the real world, you can double-check a lot more easily because if the history doesn’t exist that way, then the history doesn’t exist that way.

But in fantasy, it’s a lot easier to be lulled into “well there’s magic so I can change it, and it’s not really them so I can tweak this to make the plot work…” and you are at a much higher risk of accidentally painting different skin tones on white Europeans because you’ve changed stuff in accordance to your own thought processes and haven’t actually created a non-European culture.

You can make up literally everything! So why, if you’re trying to make a situation where trans people are accepted, are you porting in Western ideas about biological essentialism and people are still assumed cis until proven trans? If you’re trying to make a scenario with deaf people respected, why does sign language never come up among the non-deaf?

With fantasy, you really, really need to work on the dominant culture and marginalization at the same time. Because in fantasy you have room to change the dominant culture way more freely. So why are all of the real world’s biases still there, front and centre?

Overall

The things I mention, about needing to look at numbers, checking your assumptions, and ensuring you’re not playing a bias game of telephone?

They actually go double when you’re making everything up, not halved or quartered. Because you’re living in your head so much more than when you’re writing realistic fiction. By living in your head more, there’s more places where your own bias can colour it.

This is why I recommend taking five to ten years to research non-European fantasy, and the same could be said for how much research it takes for sci-fi. Because you have to figure out so much more about how society operates. You’ve got to run into enough research to break down your own biases about how people are expected to engage, what they value, and what power even looks like.

You obviously have the imagination to create whatever speculative fiction thing you want. But do you have the imagination to imagine a world structure that’s different from the way your subsection of society works now? That’s actually genuinely harder to break down.

Think about how many arguments there are about the “wrong” way to do dishes. Dishes! Something everybody who has reusable cutlery needs to do! And yet everyone has their own idea of what the “correct” way to do dishes is, the most effective way, and they often get upset at others for doing it “wrong” (even if it’s joking). Now imagine having to realize there’s a multitude of ways to do everything, and you start to realize how much you bring to the table and how you need to develop a certain degree of mental flexibility to write truly diverse spec fic.

There’s a reason so many wish fulfillment, “things are better here!” stories fall apart: they’re not grounded in how a group that genuinely believes that would actually work. The same goes for it being worse: it just reinventes the same kind of oppression, when it could actually genuinely look different depending on the culture.

Nothing you bring to spec fic is neutral.

You’ve got to to do the work to learn what you are bringing to spec fic, and realize other people will see it differently than you.