[ SECRET POST #2637 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #2637 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 03 pages, 070 secrets from Secret Submission Post #377.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 1 - broken links ], [ 1 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 1 - too big ], [ 1 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

You know, maybe in an ideal world this is how it'd work out. But we're talking about fantasy worlds here (fantasy in the made-up sense, not just the Tolkien sense) and the cast of one's movie/book isn't going to be representative of the local population as a whole because the local population aren't all going to be dwarf warriors, wizards and adventurous hobbits. Main characters are usually marked out by being different than the people they're surrounded by-- that's why they're the focus of the story. So if a story about a race of halflings who find it slightly disreputable and suspicious to travel outside of your home village can have a hero halfling who defies the cultural expectations that are held as gospel by nearly everyone around him, why it is a huge stretch to the imagination that a mostly white community might have a protagonist who's not white?

That's just food for thought. My first reaction to your comment was to think yeah, but unfortunately to a lot of people "mostly white" populations are used as justification to have all-white casts, not as the basis for having a racially representative cast per the population breakdown. You'll find people whose logic leans in that direction in this very thread. "Oh well I live in a mostly white/all white place so why wouldn't my cast be all white?"

Uh... because it's your creation and you can do whatever you want? I can write a story about dragons rampaging my hometown even though there are absolutely zero dragons here, and there never have been. A writer can certainly choose to write only about white people, but let's not pretend like this is a decision that's totally out of their control, or that they're merely conforming to the guidelines laid down by their population because they have no other choice.

It is a choice. You get to choose whatever you want. And other people get to have opinions about the choices you make.

[(Anonymous)]

And other people get to have opinions about those opinions, especially when they are presented loudly as something All Authors Everywhere Are Required To Do.

[(Anonymous)]

If that's all you get out of a discussion like this, then I'm sorry and best of luck to you.

[mimi-sardinia.livejournal.com]

On the other hand, you are proposing with your hobbit analogy that we should believe one single POC hobbit can spring up in a community of all-white hobbits? You need to make the Hobbit community mixed race for that to be logical, and then your "One adventurous misfit" idea stops being about his skin tone because most of the other of his skin tone are still normal non-adventurous hobbits.

Besides, Tolkien did give race divides amongst the Hobbits, but unfortunately they are the reverse of the one you wish - Frodo comes from the whitest end of Hobbit skin tones, while the unadventurous majority are of the darker skin tones.

[(Anonymous)]

That would actually be fairly easy, make them adopted, just like Frodo. Or Magic changes coloration, I mean, no one bats an eye at the fantasy genetics like girls are exact copies of their mother and boys are exact copies of their father http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GenderEqualsBreed or it just happens sometimes.

Part of being creative means problem solving. Everyone knows all knights were men, so no one can ever write female knights ever. Most royal families had rules about marriage and who could marry who, so writing about a princess falling in love with anyone but the appropriate male picked out by her wouldn't be realistic. Dragons didn't exist at all, so lets leave them out altogether. Except that's not true anymore, because people went against the current tropes and established new ones and you can have a dragon appear and the reader will nod and accept it, but that wouldn't have happened if someone hadn't sat down a long time ago and said "You know what this story needs? A big flaming lizard."

Going with established tropes is easy, because you don't have to put in the effort. It's the fanfic of writing, I can say they're an Elf and people are going to pull up the template without any more work on my part. I can say the main character's name is the hobbit Frodo in my fanfic, and people are going to pull up their standard Frodo template.

"But... but I'm a writer! You want me to explain, and world build, and give reasons why this is this way, and that is that way? I'm supposed to do my job?! That's hard!" Yup. That's what set Tolkien apart and why he's considered so influential, he sat down and did all the work to make a world with magic, and he borrowed and stole and put his own views in and he wrote. Instead of just going "And then they spoke another language" he made the languages, and made the history. Was it perfect? No, but he didn't let "But you'd have to explain how..." stop him.