[ 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'll probably never read this because the discussion's gone cold (since I'm in a different time zone), but I'm going to reply anyway, to clarify my own thoughts.

Of course the characters I write aren't carbon copies of me. (Those would be self insertions!) But if I'm writing a murderer, say, when I've never committed a murder, I reach down into the part of me that's wanted to 'kill' someone for some minor annoyance -- you know, stole my parking spot on a bad day, or whatever -- explore those feelings in depth, and use them as the basis for my murderer, backing them up with research and with imagination, like every writer does.

However, and this is the point, I do have to have had those feelings -- in this case, the feeling of 'wanting to kill' -- in order to make sense of any of the research I do, in order to ground the character I'm creating in any sort of reality. And there are limits to my experience. I have a major OC -- I write murder mysteries set in the LOTR universe, so I create a lot of OCs -- for example, who is a psychopath. I tried very hard to understand what a psychopath is, and the character does kind of work -- people have told me they hate him -- but I'm not happy with him. I found it almost impossible to write someone with no empathy. All the time I was writing him, I was having to ignore everything my instincts were telling me about the way he should behave, having to ignore the pull towards giving him inappropriate emotions...

I am NOT saying, btw, that I think a person of colour is as 'other' as a psychopath!

What I am saying is that if I were to write a person of colour, I would blithely write their character (whatever function that character happened to be playing in the story -- male, female, hero, villain) by reaching down into myself for the appropriate feelings/experiences and supplementing those with research and imagination. If you'd be happy with that, great! I'd be happy, too. In five or ten years' time* I can see myself doing it. At the moment, though, I foresee that doing it could provoke a dog pile (assuming that anyone read my story, though, to be honest, they tend not to) which I'm not prepared to risk. In shying away from possible controversy, I'm aware that I'm privileging/respecting the views of some persons of colour over those of other persons of colour, aware that I'm not doing the thing I admire when I see it in film, TV and theatre (casting persons of colour in roles that were written as default!white -- in Shakespeare, for example -- without comment, simply because they're good actors), and aware that I'm retreating to a place where I am more comfortable, but that is what I feel I have to do, at the moment.

* I think we are currently in a transitional phase, where previously disprivileged persons are taking (and being given) room to express their anger, but that cannot last. But if, in ten years' time, it is still acceptable in online fandom to, for example, call a straight, white man 'scum' just because he happens to be straight and white and male, then we will have failed to improve equality, and simply have replaced one set of disprivileged people with another.

[(Anonymous)]

DA

For what it's worth, I read your comment and I enjoyed reading your view. Thank you.