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The problem of writing POC characters
Jan. 6th, 2021 04:58 pmBefore you start yelling at me: no, of course I don't mean "but how do I even work in some POC characters" or "how do I even write POC characters".
No, what I mean is "how do I make clear this character is a POC without hitting the reader over the head with it or making it seem like I'm intentionally pointing out the POC characters against a white default (big can of worms)."
This particular pondering is borne out of a story on AO3 I was just reading where the author basically shouted "all these characters are POC, *** canon!" in the Author's Notes; and while I basically agree with their reasoning in that particular case and have zero problem with it beyond not sharing their opinions on which looks are the most handsome among their fancasts... :D
... I also felt like "okay, I also want to point out unambiguously that these and these characters I write are POC for the people who care as strongly about it and because I'd rather hate for my readers to default to white when I picture them this way; but I really don't want to go about it in such a forceful way."
It's a balance between "well, they look this way in my head, but will the reader know, or will they default to white?"and "I really don't want to describe the characters in a very explicit fashion if there's not a valid POV reason for me to be describing them like that since that way lie other cans of worms." (And since I tend to write mostly in character POV rather than as an omniscient narrator.) The third thing to weigh is - shouting that they are POC in an Author's Note like the aforementioned author did feels rather like the "Dumbledore is actually gay" sort of cop-out from my personal writerly point of view, in that I try to make the story stand on its own and make sense even without the Author's Notes (although I do often include more background info in there).
It's easier when you're writing in a Spare Oom environment and can just say where characters are from and people will form their own mental images. When you're writing in the Narnian world, that only works for all readers with Calormen, and even then I bet the mental images will differ (are they Arabic? Indian?). When you write in the Galaxy Far Far Away, it's... harder.
( Further elaboration of my mental processes )
It's also a pondering born out of my digging through my backup disk over the holidays and finding some old pictures of some characters I drew when I was a teenager and have largely forgotten about. Several years ago, I had copied them from my old desktop computer onto my backup disk, which was a very good thing indeed because shortly after father updated something on that computer and it crashed. (It may still be salvageable but he hasn't gotten around to full salvage yet.) The pictures were then sitting on my backup disk and I'd rather forgotten about them.
(At some point after scanning them I had decided it was a good idea to run them through a smoothing filter and only save them that way, so you can't really see how exactly I drew them. Our younger selves are often stupid that way.)
There's this lady whose whole story I've completely forgotten because I never wrote it down and it never progressed beyond some sort of backstory. I know her name because that's in the filenames, but that's it. Her name is Venus and I'm not sure I like it, but I think I'll keep it because people having names that don't go with them definitely is a thing so from that point of view I do like it (and it jumpstarted a sort of new backstory for her). She looks cool and needs to find her way into the Choruk'la Kajir universe at some point although I'm not entirely sure where to fit her. And she's almost certainly black (at least in the American sense; I think she's actually mixed race from the way she looks?).
I just designed a black character at some point in my life while trying out a new drawing technique, many years before that sort of thing became cool on Tumblr :D, and I didn't even think about it hard enough to remember anything about her backstory when I see her pictures years later, which hints to me strongly that the way she looked had nothing whatsoever to do with her backstory. The clothes she wears do (and the facial scars undoubtedly do); I'm fairly sure she was from the same space-opera-ish universe as the next character, which is why I think I can safely transplant her into the Choruk'la Kajir universe.
So there's this other lady. I do know who she is, she was from a story I wrote when I was about twelve or thirteen that was a rather clueless ripoff of Star Wars and some other things, and she got to be a big player in that universe though mostly in a behind the scenes capacity (but due to her shaping up entirely on her own as the sort of capable behind-the-scenes character who pulled off things before my floundering protagonists did, she's a character I'm still very fond of many years later). Her name is Arve; which turns out to be a male name in Scandinavia, fictional names can be funny that way. She is definitely Asian in her looks (I've now tried to pin it down and I think Nepali is probably closest to my mental image - but how exactly do you describe that when you're writing a character from a different planet in a fictional universe?). It's pretty funny because I found one picture of her I'd forgotten about right after I stumbled upon a Tumblr post on how (not) to draw Asian people (which I now can't find), and there she was, I got it down pretty well when I was a clueless teenager. :D (A bit more of an explanation why I did further below.)
Not that the pictures are anywhere near perfect, because my drawing skills as a teenager were not quite up to the task of drawing just from mental images (and they probably still aren't). But I think I captured all the respective features well enough that you get the idea, and if you combine the two images you could probably find a good "fancast" if you wanted to badly enough.
It's rather telling in this context that I had a pretty clear image of her in my head but somehow never even described her in the story. It's equally telling in this context that Arve never got a description in the story because that's exactly the kind of character she was - people overlooked her, and she made full use of that. She would be overlooked and underestimated, she would observe, draw her own conclusions, and then act decisively upon them.
Goodness gracious, I love Arve, but I'm not sure she could make the universe hop quite intact.
The third strike in this vein is another character, from a bit later, from what was already a conscious Star Wars fanfiction that never got too far but which will definitely find its way into the Choruk'la Kajir universe later, in some form. That character looks exactly like Sridevi. Not in the sense of "I fancast Sridevi in the role"; in the sense that I had this image of a dark-haired lady with huge dark eyes and a certain facial shape in my head (and attempts on paper), and then my sister showed me a video of Sridevi on YouTube years later, and then my mind went "whoa, that's Anadarya!" I can't look at pictures of Sridevi without going very emotional for entirely different reasons than her fans probably do.
The name started out as a bit of a placeholder because she's something of an Amidala expy (it is, of course, Anna + Darya, and a vague mirror of Amidala) - but it stuck so that's her name now. (And BTW in my Czech mind it's been up till now spelled with a J, not Y, until I wrote it down in this English text and realised you'd pronounce it differently.)
I won't show you the pictures of her because just like with Arve my drawing skills were not up to the task of capturing the mental image so mostly they would just show you various degrees of how much I could not draw Sridevi properly as a teenager. :D
And I think there lies my writing POC problem. If you asked me to draw the characters in my head, I would draw them a certain way because duh, that's what they look like - but how do I capture that in writing when I tend to intentionally just hint in my descriptions?
* * *
Of course I do succumb to the weakness of defaulting to white, too. But I think I can lay some credit at the door of Karl May, of all things, for actually having grown up with a more colourful world than there was around me in Real Life during my childhood. His books may suffer from the Mighty Whitey and Noble Savage complexes and whatever other accusations are being levelled against them at this point in history. But the indisputable fact is that a lot of his characters are not white, and the stories are never "whites vs The Other" - the protagonist groups are always mixed, which frankly can be quite progressive even for today, let alone the 19th century...
It's rather funny because when I look back at my old characters, I find out they were actually often more diverse than the characters I tend to write now... that when I was coming up with stories freely and still largely unencumbered with writerly concerns, that's what I came up with. The stories were a lot more silly, but the characters were more diverse. I had characters of colour, I had mixed race characters, and I don't think I even thought of it that way, they just looked a certain way, they just came from certain cultures, they just had parents from different cultures. And whenever I am reminded of all that, it feels so strange to compare it to all the discourse around POC characters I come across now, that I just... did that.
Also: We never had TV, so a lot of contemporary popular culture got to me only in variously convoluted ways, like articles about TV shows and films in magazines, or catching part of a film or an episode of a series here and there when visiting other people. I read rather a lot of travelogues when I was a teenager, books and a magazine (lots of isssues over the years), and there were all these people. Especially in the books, people living their lives, people the Czech authors did things with, and were on first name terms with, and were joking about Czech beer with, whatever. So my characters looked like people. In retrospect, I can't help but think that sort of travelogues is actually a lot better for casually exposing you to diversity than films and other forms of popular culture; but I also understand why people are pushing for diversity in popular culture because obviously most people don't grow up casually reading travelogues.
Anyway.
Right now, in the Choruk'la Kajir AU, I can get away easily with canonically POC characters with maybe brief descriptions (one would have to be particularly stupid to argue Aravis and Lasaraleen are not POCs, and Boba Fett has also been firmly cast for a while now).
And I got my headcanon racially ambiguous Peridan across very easily by way of describing him from the POV of a character meeting him for the first time. (Either he's the Peridan Chronicles Methos, in which case he's vaguely Near / Middle Eastern of uncertain ethnicity, or he's Telmarine, in which case he's mixed race Polynesian / Causasian, which I think is almost as good as canon for Telmarines anyway. I will probably have to do a whole post about my headcanon Telmarines one of these days.) In fact, since that's simply how I headcanon Peridan, funnily enough it kind of only hit me afterwards that what I did there was fairly explicitly describe a racially ambiguous character - so yes, therein lies most of my problem.
It happens organically when it happens organically, so what do I do when the story just meanders around it without my noticing? It's one of those "there's something that remained in your mind without making it to the page" things, but one that's more difficult to pick upon for, say, a beta reader (if I had anyone beta reading this thing), than things like plot holes are. How do I train myself to notice, and how do I divert the flow of the story to hit upon the necessary notes to get the point across, without derailing it? (Please ignore the mixed metaphors in the previous sentence.)
Current pondering: I now headcanon Corran Horn as basically looking like the German-Turkish actor Erdogan Atalay (just with eyes on the green side of hazel). There's this image of Corran, Corran is short, a former cop and a bit of a cocky pilot, and Atalay is short and plays a cocky Autobahn cop in a long-running TV series; it's one of those "can't unsee" things.
So, depending on how you look at it, my headcanon Corran is also a POC. The thing is, personally I probably actually don't really look at it that way? Make of that what you will. How do I make my readers see him more or less like I do without clumsily hitting them over the head with some stupid stereotypical descriptors, dangling a "look, a POC to feed your need for POC" before them? This is the Galaxy Far Far Away, it's just the way he looks, no big deal.
Before you start yelling at me: Don't worry, I think I've already found the correct POV character for pointing it out organically.
I'm wondering whether I should or shouldn't add the "Character(s) of Color" tag to the story currently in progress. They are there. Several of them are listed in the character tags anyway, so is that worth pointing out separately?
Just... I wanted to share this whole thought process, and maybe ask, how do you deal with it?
Also, oops, I wanted to finish the next chapter in the story but my thought processes and writing got once again derailed, by this. But I think it was worth addressing, if only because it's one of those things that should help me make the story better.
(Second oops, the post break got broken, but it's too late to think now, I'll fix it later.)
No, what I mean is "how do I make clear this character is a POC without hitting the reader over the head with it or making it seem like I'm intentionally pointing out the POC characters against a white default (big can of worms)."
This particular pondering is borne out of a story on AO3 I was just reading where the author basically shouted "all these characters are POC, *** canon!" in the Author's Notes; and while I basically agree with their reasoning in that particular case and have zero problem with it beyond not sharing their opinions on which looks are the most handsome among their fancasts... :D
... I also felt like "okay, I also want to point out unambiguously that these and these characters I write are POC for the people who care as strongly about it and because I'd rather hate for my readers to default to white when I picture them this way; but I really don't want to go about it in such a forceful way."
It's a balance between "well, they look this way in my head, but will the reader know, or will they default to white?"and "I really don't want to describe the characters in a very explicit fashion if there's not a valid POV reason for me to be describing them like that since that way lie other cans of worms." (And since I tend to write mostly in character POV rather than as an omniscient narrator.) The third thing to weigh is - shouting that they are POC in an Author's Note like the aforementioned author did feels rather like the "Dumbledore is actually gay" sort of cop-out from my personal writerly point of view, in that I try to make the story stand on its own and make sense even without the Author's Notes (although I do often include more background info in there).
It's easier when you're writing in a Spare Oom environment and can just say where characters are from and people will form their own mental images. When you're writing in the Narnian world, that only works for all readers with Calormen, and even then I bet the mental images will differ (are they Arabic? Indian?). When you write in the Galaxy Far Far Away, it's... harder.
It's also a pondering born out of my digging through my backup disk over the holidays and finding some old pictures of some characters I drew when I was a teenager and have largely forgotten about. Several years ago, I had copied them from my old desktop computer onto my backup disk, which was a very good thing indeed because shortly after father updated something on that computer and it crashed. (It may still be salvageable but he hasn't gotten around to full salvage yet.) The pictures were then sitting on my backup disk and I'd rather forgotten about them.
(At some point after scanning them I had decided it was a good idea to run them through a smoothing filter and only save them that way, so you can't really see how exactly I drew them. Our younger selves are often stupid that way.)
There's this lady whose whole story I've completely forgotten because I never wrote it down and it never progressed beyond some sort of backstory. I know her name because that's in the filenames, but that's it. Her name is Venus and I'm not sure I like it, but I think I'll keep it because people having names that don't go with them definitely is a thing so from that point of view I do like it (and it jumpstarted a sort of new backstory for her). She looks cool and needs to find her way into the Choruk'la Kajir universe at some point although I'm not entirely sure where to fit her. And she's almost certainly black (at least in the American sense; I think she's actually mixed race from the way she looks?).
I just designed a black character at some point in my life while trying out a new drawing technique, many years before that sort of thing became cool on Tumblr :D, and I didn't even think about it hard enough to remember anything about her backstory when I see her pictures years later, which hints to me strongly that the way she looked had nothing whatsoever to do with her backstory. The clothes she wears do (and the facial scars undoubtedly do); I'm fairly sure she was from the same space-opera-ish universe as the next character, which is why I think I can safely transplant her into the Choruk'la Kajir universe.
So there's this other lady. I do know who she is, she was from a story I wrote when I was about twelve or thirteen that was a rather clueless ripoff of Star Wars and some other things, and she got to be a big player in that universe though mostly in a behind the scenes capacity (but due to her shaping up entirely on her own as the sort of capable behind-the-scenes character who pulled off things before my floundering protagonists did, she's a character I'm still very fond of many years later). Her name is Arve; which turns out to be a male name in Scandinavia, fictional names can be funny that way. She is definitely Asian in her looks (I've now tried to pin it down and I think Nepali is probably closest to my mental image - but how exactly do you describe that when you're writing a character from a different planet in a fictional universe?). It's pretty funny because I found one picture of her I'd forgotten about right after I stumbled upon a Tumblr post on how (not) to draw Asian people (which I now can't find), and there she was, I got it down pretty well when I was a clueless teenager. :D (A bit more of an explanation why I did further below.)
Not that the pictures are anywhere near perfect, because my drawing skills as a teenager were not quite up to the task of drawing just from mental images (and they probably still aren't). But I think I captured all the respective features well enough that you get the idea, and if you combine the two images you could probably find a good "fancast" if you wanted to badly enough.
It's rather telling in this context that I had a pretty clear image of her in my head but somehow never even described her in the story. It's equally telling in this context that Arve never got a description in the story because that's exactly the kind of character she was - people overlooked her, and she made full use of that. She would be overlooked and underestimated, she would observe, draw her own conclusions, and then act decisively upon them.
Goodness gracious, I love Arve, but I'm not sure she could make the universe hop quite intact.
The third strike in this vein is another character, from a bit later, from what was already a conscious Star Wars fanfiction that never got too far but which will definitely find its way into the Choruk'la Kajir universe later, in some form. That character looks exactly like Sridevi. Not in the sense of "I fancast Sridevi in the role"; in the sense that I had this image of a dark-haired lady with huge dark eyes and a certain facial shape in my head (and attempts on paper), and then my sister showed me a video of Sridevi on YouTube years later, and then my mind went "whoa, that's Anadarya!" I can't look at pictures of Sridevi without going very emotional for entirely different reasons than her fans probably do.
The name started out as a bit of a placeholder because she's something of an Amidala expy (it is, of course, Anna + Darya, and a vague mirror of Amidala) - but it stuck so that's her name now. (And BTW in my Czech mind it's been up till now spelled with a J, not Y, until I wrote it down in this English text and realised you'd pronounce it differently.)
I won't show you the pictures of her because just like with Arve my drawing skills were not up to the task of capturing the mental image so mostly they would just show you various degrees of how much I could not draw Sridevi properly as a teenager. :D
And I think there lies my writing POC problem. If you asked me to draw the characters in my head, I would draw them a certain way because duh, that's what they look like - but how do I capture that in writing when I tend to intentionally just hint in my descriptions?
* * *
Of course I do succumb to the weakness of defaulting to white, too. But I think I can lay some credit at the door of Karl May, of all things, for actually having grown up with a more colourful world than there was around me in Real Life during my childhood. His books may suffer from the Mighty Whitey and Noble Savage complexes and whatever other accusations are being levelled against them at this point in history. But the indisputable fact is that a lot of his characters are not white, and the stories are never "whites vs The Other" - the protagonist groups are always mixed, which frankly can be quite progressive even for today, let alone the 19th century...
It's rather funny because when I look back at my old characters, I find out they were actually often more diverse than the characters I tend to write now... that when I was coming up with stories freely and still largely unencumbered with writerly concerns, that's what I came up with. The stories were a lot more silly, but the characters were more diverse. I had characters of colour, I had mixed race characters, and I don't think I even thought of it that way, they just looked a certain way, they just came from certain cultures, they just had parents from different cultures. And whenever I am reminded of all that, it feels so strange to compare it to all the discourse around POC characters I come across now, that I just... did that.
Also: We never had TV, so a lot of contemporary popular culture got to me only in variously convoluted ways, like articles about TV shows and films in magazines, or catching part of a film or an episode of a series here and there when visiting other people. I read rather a lot of travelogues when I was a teenager, books and a magazine (lots of isssues over the years), and there were all these people. Especially in the books, people living their lives, people the Czech authors did things with, and were on first name terms with, and were joking about Czech beer with, whatever. So my characters looked like people. In retrospect, I can't help but think that sort of travelogues is actually a lot better for casually exposing you to diversity than films and other forms of popular culture; but I also understand why people are pushing for diversity in popular culture because obviously most people don't grow up casually reading travelogues.
* * *
Anyway.
Right now, in the Choruk'la Kajir AU, I can get away easily with canonically POC characters with maybe brief descriptions (one would have to be particularly stupid to argue Aravis and Lasaraleen are not POCs, and Boba Fett has also been firmly cast for a while now).
And I got my headcanon racially ambiguous Peridan across very easily by way of describing him from the POV of a character meeting him for the first time. (Either he's the Peridan Chronicles Methos, in which case he's vaguely Near / Middle Eastern of uncertain ethnicity, or he's Telmarine, in which case he's mixed race Polynesian / Causasian, which I think is almost as good as canon for Telmarines anyway. I will probably have to do a whole post about my headcanon Telmarines one of these days.) In fact, since that's simply how I headcanon Peridan, funnily enough it kind of only hit me afterwards that what I did there was fairly explicitly describe a racially ambiguous character - so yes, therein lies most of my problem.
It happens organically when it happens organically, so what do I do when the story just meanders around it without my noticing? It's one of those "there's something that remained in your mind without making it to the page" things, but one that's more difficult to pick upon for, say, a beta reader (if I had anyone beta reading this thing), than things like plot holes are. How do I train myself to notice, and how do I divert the flow of the story to hit upon the necessary notes to get the point across, without derailing it? (Please ignore the mixed metaphors in the previous sentence.)
Current pondering: I now headcanon Corran Horn as basically looking like the German-Turkish actor Erdogan Atalay (just with eyes on the green side of hazel). There's this image of Corran, Corran is short, a former cop and a bit of a cocky pilot, and Atalay is short and plays a cocky Autobahn cop in a long-running TV series; it's one of those "can't unsee" things.
So, depending on how you look at it, my headcanon Corran is also a POC. The thing is, personally I probably actually don't really look at it that way? Make of that what you will. How do I make my readers see him more or less like I do without clumsily hitting them over the head with some stupid stereotypical descriptors, dangling a "look, a POC to feed your need for POC" before them? This is the Galaxy Far Far Away, it's just the way he looks, no big deal.
Before you start yelling at me: Don't worry, I think I've already found the correct POV character for pointing it out organically.
I'm wondering whether I should or shouldn't add the "Character(s) of Color" tag to the story currently in progress. They are there. Several of them are listed in the character tags anyway, so is that worth pointing out separately?
Just... I wanted to share this whole thought process, and maybe ask, how do you deal with it?
Also, oops, I wanted to finish the next chapter in the story but my thought processes and writing got once again derailed, by this. But I think it was worth addressing, if only because it's one of those things that should help me make the story better.
(Second oops, the post break got broken, but it's too late to think now, I'll fix it later.)
