Jus to be clear, in my post I was trying to rationalize why there would be so many protagonists of a certain demographic group. I'm not implying that any other demographic is less important or not worthy of representation.

Again, I invite anyone to disagree with my analysis. As a(n aspiring) scientist I can safely say that we thrive on being proven wrong: it gives us an opportunity to learn. Only through the exchange of ideas can we move forward with a better model for viewing the world. After all, a scientific article with no peer review is worthless!

Jaster sums up pretty well how I feel about the issue.

That's what I've been trying to say, though not as clear as what you did.

I particularly like write for the story's sake, both the phrase itself and the message behind it. If you don't mind, I would like to appropriate that as a mantra of my own.

(Arguably the most important thing is to write consistently with your world/setting, and deviate from that only if you have a good reason. I'd like to add that if you are completely defining the setting yourself, it's generally a good idea to include the largest possible scope of experience to sample your demographics from (see lower posts), but again stick to that and sample without bias unless you have a good reason.)

Namely what, really, minority characters are supposed to add to a work? I agree that it's incredibly provincial and a bit condescending to assume that people won't be able to identify with a character unless that character shares whatever element of their demographic makeup. But I also think that minority characters can act as role models that can help convince minority readers that they can be whatever the characters are too.

I never liked diversity for diversity's sake because it implied that there's something fundamentally, irreconcilably different about the minority in question- that they are being given a minority demographic not because they are people who contribute by their character, but because they carry that inextricable "minority-ness".

I want characters in stories to properly reflect the demographic distribution of wherever the world is set (and partially the outside world too), and to treat minority characters just like non-minority characters because it shows that the world created by the author, and the author personally, are not *ist, and saves me from that vaguely queasy feeling I get when I read, say, Lovecraft, and realize the whole thing is subtly suffused with an ideology completely antithetical to my idea of what is even good in the world.

I'm not directing this at any particular other response here, as it mentions issues brought up in all of them.

This is the kind of mentality I was talking about: [O]ur instincts are therefore racist, misogynistic, homophobic, transphobic, and ableist

Just because someone writes a character that happens to be a White Straight Male who is fully able bodied does not make it wrong. I am saying that might be lazy, but not wrong.

Ultimately it comes down to this. You write for you. If you want to only right about the generic hero that people are accustomed to (like Superman, Luke Skywalker, etc.) you are entitled to do so. One does not need to include a character like Kamala Khan (Current Ms. Marvel) just for diversity's sake. If the author does not with to write a diverse cast that is their write to do so. For example the semi-controversy that surrounded the revelation of the new Thor. Now this is not the best example sense this Thor is actually selling quite well and has been at least accepted throughout parts of the fandom. Though there was a definite uproar when she was first revealed because many people saw it as diversity for diversity's sake.

That is, in my opinion, the bottom line. Diversity is all well and good, but it has to make sense. I think Diversity for Diversity's sake is just another form of lazy. It is saying "Look at me! I have a minority character in a majority role, for no other reason than I'm diverse and forward thinking." A viking raiding party would not have a quadriplegic in it, so unless the author explains it well, and adventuring party should not have one either. It makes no logical sense. Likewise, it would be difficult to explain an African in King Arthur's Court. It can be done. Bernard Cornwell's Sagramore is a shining example of that. He made it make sense that there was a Nubian in King Arthur's time. It was not diversity for diversity's sake.

Is this notion that people are incapable of relating to characters who are different from themselves. I understand how it could suck to never see people of your gender/sexuality/race/ability/etc. represented as a hero, but empathy is not limited to these things. Here I am, a woman, and most of my heroes are men. Is this kinda unfortunate at the societal level? Sure. Did it stop me from relating to them? Hell no.

What makes a character relatable is going through struggles that we recognize as analogs for our struggles, having emotional experiences that reflect our emotional experiences, and finding the inner strength to overcome their obstacles, which lets us believe we can overcome our obstacles. The exact nature of the struggle doesn't matter. The journey is what matters. And since that journey takes place entirely in the mind, the externals... I don't want to say they don't matter, because they do, but I'll never understand how they could be any kind of barrier. It just baffles me.

~Neshomeh

http://ppc.wikia.com/wiki/Tish_Jameson

As for my own cast, let's see...

- Jenni Robinson, pansexual white woman who is also a shape-shifting ethereal godlike being in her off-time. She could theoretically look like anything, but she picks her forms to blend in and has spent a lot of time in mainstream fantasy, sooo....

- Supernumerary, let's call him functionally asexual and aromantic. I almost exclusively play it for laughs, though, so I don't know if it counts.

- Ilraen-Aroline-Fothergill, a blue centaur-alien finding himself in a mostly-human society. I kind of think of him as an adopted kid being raised by parents of a different race. Picking which parts of his two peoples to identify with and adopt for himself is part of his arc. Andalites prefer blondes, this is canon.

- Derik is Pernese, and as such I imagine he's pretty mixed going way back, but since he also looks like Gerard Butler he's basically a dark shade of white. Suffers from mental trauma due to the loss of his dragon... maybe sorta-kinda PTSD-like? I dunno. Also straight and a guy.

- Gall is a HtTYD-verse Viking, but I keep wanting to make her more like a real-world Viking. *shrug* Either way, about as white as they come, and I think straight. If not, she hasn't told me yet.

- Nurse Parwill is an agendered white person from Starfleet. Dunno about their sexual preferences.

- Nurse Elms is a straight white gal who can kick your ass with a frying pan.

- Nurse Immac is dark-skinned, though not black-dark, and from somewhere on the Disc, though I have no idea exactly where. Four-ecks, maybe? I doubt she could've survived to adulthood in Ankh-Morpork....

- Nurse Mirrad is a Minbari from the Babylon 5 universe. Minbari sexuality at least sometimes involves three people, IIRC, but I haven't explored that at all.

- Intern Alex is some flavor of Scandinavian, so like Gall, pretty darn white. I guess he's straight?


I think that's everybody. Some types of diversity are easier than others, I guess.

~Neshomeh

He hasn't admittedly had many appearances yet, but James Pittman is black. Gremlin had a Chinese father and a white mother, although that hasn't really gotten a lot of play due to her also being a metahuman. As for the rest (that have yet been introduced), I've written two white women, one white man, and an artificial intelligence that projects itself as male.

Bulldog-- South African.

The Guardsman-- sticks to dark-skinned regenerations.



And not quite black but still not white:

Frédéric De Grasse: full-blood Chinese (Canton region).

Gaspard De Grasse: mixed-race (white-Chinese).

Nasir Beydoun: Arabic (Lebanese).

Penny Chang: anime!Chinese (Beijing municipality).

Meryem Balbay: Turkish (only mentioned in the recent Rudi's RP).

other than the ones people already listed. Oh, and the Notary, but does that count since she's a Time Lord?

Rina's me, so she's white, but Zeb in human form looks Japanese since Pokemon's a Japanese franchise. Then again, he's not human, so I dunno if that counts, either.

I know Indemaat's Agent Tasmin is black. Um . . . Keily Shinra is Asian, although, like Selene, her author is, too.

Yeah. Lot of white agents. I'm sure there are more non-white ones, but . . . well, I fall into the same trap of defaulting characters to white in my mind. :(

I've been trying to work on this in my spin-off. Doc is me, so he's white, but Vania is at least partly Asian. Séverine is New Caledonian, so of course she's black, and I've decided that Yoof has brown skin under his fur (as opposed to John Candy's brown fur over white skin in his role as Barf in Spaceballs). The kids I recruited from my Epic Mickey mission were initially going to be white, but then I realized since I was going to play with Mollie potentially having "ink powers" from her fic of origin, it made more sense for her to have dark skin anyway. and since she was black, might as well make Ollie black too!

Zee, though he's yet to get a published mission. You'd think after four and a half years with permission I'd have actually finished my first mission, but I keep changing it.

For that matter his current partner, Ecks, is half-Hispanic. Technically half-Mexican, but his family has lived in the States since the 1950s, and he's from the 2070s, and he's never even been to the country now known as Aztlan.

Terri Ryan (Dept. of Personnel, DOGA Archivist) is black, despite what the Multiverse Monitor would have you believe (though I think that did get updated in the end). I also have Selene, who's Chinese, but probably doesn't count because she was created by a half-Chinese girl.

I don't know of any others off the top of my head, though I'm sure there's at least some. Bear in mind, though, that most agents are either 'that really cool fantasy/scifi species' or 'me', so there's quite a bit of selection bias in there.

(Oh, wait, yes I do: Architeuthis is black. I don't know whether her author was or not, but I made an arbitrary decision to make her so)

hS