There’s no way to introduce this week’s subject in a pithy way without coming across as someone who doesn’t take serious issues, well… seriously. And since my short story this week was sprinkled with racial epithets, I’m sure you can understand my approaching the delicate subject of race with just that: delicacy.
So, here’s the bottom line: racial stereotyping is wrong, m’kay? It’s unacceptable in real life, so why should we tolerate it in our writing? It doesn’t matter how supposedly flattering the stereotyping is, if you say that the Chinese are good with maths, the Germans with organisation or the French with love-making; you’re still painting an entire people with broad strokes of sweeping generalisation.
In modern society, it’s offensive to the race in question. In writing, it makes for shallow story telling.
And yet the fantasy genre, along with perhaps the science fiction genre to a lesser extent, is often woefully guilty of racial stereotyping. Last week’s issue of affirmative action goes hand in hand with this: many writers, in satisfying this phantom obligation to foist fantastical races upon their stories, end up portraying those races in broad, generalised terms. It goes back to the simple matter of resources: the more you put into your story, the less you can actually focus on. So, if you shoe-horn in Elves, Dwarves and what-else-have-you in, then in order to preserve space for your actual narrative any attempt to examine and analyse these races is going to be done in expansive terms. And your story is going to suffer for it.
I’ve always have a personal beef with fantasy stories’ depictions of Elves. They’re irritatingly good at everything as a race. They’re frequently the fastest, strongest, smartest, most magically competent race in a writer’s setting. But what I find intolerable is not so much their universal superlativity in all fields, but the fact that it seems to be something that applies to each and every one of them. It’s the broad stereotype that annoys me: each and every one is a superior elder being possessed of deep spirituality and, usually, some profound connection to nature. The same with Dwarves as gruff, recalcitrant blacksmiths with a penchant for drinking and a bad mood. Or Halflings as ebullient, gregarious farmers with a penchant for drinking and a seemingly irrepressible good mood. Or Orcs as single-minded, quasi-animalistic, blood-thirsty savages.
Starting to get my drift?
Now, of course a race is going to have generally shared characteristics. But it’s more than a matter of ‘Dwarves are gruff and surly because they are Dwarves’. If you want gruff and surly Dwarves they you need to give them a reason to be that way. Some rationale in their racial history, culture and/or psyche that makes them generally prickly towards others. And there’s the operative word: generally. It may sound obvious, but you cannot make, or more importantly portray, all Dwarves in this fashion. And you can’t just make the Dwarf attached to the protagonist group different and think you’ve gotten away from the problem either.
Put it this way: when you’re dealing with fantasy races, sit back for a moment and ask yourself whether you’d be able to get away with what you’re planning in the real world. Saying the Dwarves are generally mistrustful of outsiders and perhaps have a slightly grim outlook on matters is, in real life terms, similar to saying that Americans prefer more conservative politics or Japanese culture possesses a greater focus on law and order. But portraying each and every, or even a great deal, of Dwarves in that way is coming dangerously close to portraying a good deal of Americans as gun-toting, bible-bashing red-necks, or the Japanese as honour-bound subservients.
I guess that’s what I’m trying to get around to saying: culture is, by definition, a broad-stroke generalisation that will always have exceptions to the rule. As a writer, it’s your obligation to show those exceptions, to demonstrate that a race isn’t a single, uniform body that marches to the beat of one drum. Not all Dwarves are going to be surly and stand-offish, or be interested in mining or metallurgy, despite general cultural and socio-historic indicators to the contrary. That’s the difference between cultural statements and racial stereotyping: one provides a useful focal point to anchor a reader’s understanding of a race (if a reader is informed about certain cultural, social and historical predilections towards certain features, it frames any subsequent information the writer will give them about groups or individuals), while the other creates shallow, generic copy-and-paste automata.
This is something that, the more I think about it, the more I really ought to be worried about this operating on Crescent Knife. You see, it’s easy to say ‘I want this setting to be filled with humans pushed to the brink, caught in a life-long desperate fight for survival’, but that risks falling into what I’ve just described. It flirts with the boundary between a general cultural statement that mankind is struggling to live from day to day, and a quickly-tiresome clichéd depiction of each and every character in my story. The fact that a ‘fight for survival’ cultural paradigm offers a lot of different manifestations goes a small way, I think, to avoiding this, but nevertheless the danger remains. There always need to be exceptions, not to prove the rule but to actively disprove it. Even in a constant life-or-death, there will always be exceptions. Those who try not to give in to baser survival instincts, who rebel against generations of self-interest and the stand-alone complex.
The resistance, for example, is more than just a means to an end. It goes beyond an effort to survive by redistributing wealth and power. At its most fundamental, it’s an enraged cry that people should not be forced into a situation where they have to backstab one another, and an active demonstration that cooperation can still get something done. Or the last remnants of the Churches, clinking to their husk-gods and their dusty teachings, sacrificing their own well being to stay true to a higher cause.
Stereotypes go beyond being potentially offensive clichés. If everything is uniform, then there’s nothing interesting to examine as a writer. If every last human in Ivarda was a self-obsessed pragmatist driven by his/her survival instinct, then it all smears together into an unrecognisable blur. Variety is the spice of life, and it punctuates the population of a world. Culturally, I will certainly say that humanity is pushed to the bring, but to let that then inform each and every individual is shooting myself in the foot. It reduces the difficulty and tragedy of the struggle to something bland and commonplace. But if there are exceptions, groups and individuals who break from that cultural norm, then it makes those who haven’t all the more tragic, and those who do not necessarily heroic, but outstanding in the most literal sense. They stand out and interest the reader, they make him ask how and why they’re different.
Perhaps other fantasy races won’t feel this as profoundly as I’ve doe with Crescent Knife, but the point is nevertheless valid. Mistaking a broad cultural statement for a blueprint to even a majority of your race is going to lead to a people your reader doesn’t care about. They see one, they’ve seen them all. It takes more effort, no doubt, but a race needs to be, and be seen to be, full of dynamic differences. It may complicate the story with more conflicts than otherwise, and require more exposition to weave into the narrative in a subtle fashion, but in the end it’ll pay dividends.
Please, take this to heart. If I have to read about one more insufferably homogenous race of Elves I swear I will eat my laptop.