The Eiger Sanction
May. 13th, 2015 09:24 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chris_gerribApropos of nothing, I found myself thinking about diversity in fiction. One of the arguments against having non Straight White Males in fiction, especially historical fiction, is that the non-SWMs are "not representative" of the era.
Well, here's a fact - prior to the arrival of the Industrial Revolution in any given society, 90% of the population was engaged in subsistence agriculture. They were farmers and herdsmen, poor and living hand-to-mouth. Everybody else in the society, from kings to knights to wizards to the village blacksmith, everybody, fit in that other 10%. So, any non-farmer in fiction is inherently unrepresentative, and any other occupation would be even more unrepresentative, consisting of maybe 1% of the population. Maybe 1%.
Yet how many historical fictions have you read about farmers? Even if the main character starts as a farmer, something happens to make him leave the farm. In short, pretty much any piece of historical fiction you've ever read is "un-representative."
Here's the truth - all characters in fiction are unrepresentative. In the zombie apocalypse, 90% of humanity are dead and zombie-fied, yet the story is about the 10% who aren't. If the characters weren't exceptional when the story started, they become so over the length of the story.
In short, anybody trying to tell you that we should only have "representative" characters in fiction is offering to make change for a nine-dollar bill in threes.
(with apologies to The Eiger Sanction)
Well, here's a fact - prior to the arrival of the Industrial Revolution in any given society, 90% of the population was engaged in subsistence agriculture. They were farmers and herdsmen, poor and living hand-to-mouth. Everybody else in the society, from kings to knights to wizards to the village blacksmith, everybody, fit in that other 10%. So, any non-farmer in fiction is inherently unrepresentative, and any other occupation would be even more unrepresentative, consisting of maybe 1% of the population. Maybe 1%.
Yet how many historical fictions have you read about farmers? Even if the main character starts as a farmer, something happens to make him leave the farm. In short, pretty much any piece of historical fiction you've ever read is "un-representative."
Here's the truth - all characters in fiction are unrepresentative. In the zombie apocalypse, 90% of humanity are dead and zombie-fied, yet the story is about the 10% who aren't. If the characters weren't exceptional when the story started, they become so over the length of the story.
In short, anybody trying to tell you that we should only have "representative" characters in fiction is offering to make change for a nine-dollar bill in threes.
(with apologies to The Eiger Sanction)
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2015-05-14 12:01 pm (UTC)I haven't found that the race of the characters affects that much. White-straight-male is done to death, of course, but it's still possible to come up with interesting plots that involve them. But by the same token, the werewolf book that was great with white-straight-males wouldn't become boring if it were done with black lesbians.
One of my musical friends once said "they still haven't come to an end of the tunes that can be written in C major." However it doesn't follow that there's something wrong with writing in D mixolydian, and I've come up with some very nice tunes that way.