: Re: How to balance respecting diversity and avoiding tokenism at the same time My project has an environmental theme. My characters eat meals, and because of the setting, this includes meat and

@Kaufman555

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Great characters need not be perfect, but they will definitively strive to achieve perfection. If a reader is caught in the detail of all the meat and eggs that your characters eat, rather than dragged along by their enthusiasm and determination towards reaching their goals, then your characters are already tokens.

Unless you are scriptwriting for pantomime shows, your characters have to be believable above all else. Make them faulty. Make them human. Make them struggle for greatness, and make them change to reach what they dream. I would find it much more compelling that meat-eating characters would gradually stop eating meat to be true to their goals, than to believe that every vegetarian is a saint and every carnivore is devil incarnated.

I believe that you can best express and respect diversity in the choices that your characters have to make.

My suggestion is step back on your original track. Try to understand what made your reader so focused on the dietary habits of your characters rather than the story itself, and, to fulfill the goal, give your characters an arc compatible with your intended message (e.g. make them realize their need or wish to become vegetarians).

As for the villains, you can give them a similar arc, but make them refuse to change their habits. If you wish to avoid tokenization you may need to place them in a situation where they face a struggle in making their choice: for instance, it is a family tradition to eat turkey for thanksgiving, and their older grandparents are terminally ill and it will give them a heartbreak to not share that particular meal; or they have been borrowing large sums to run a (very profitable) abattoir and would be bankrupt if they give it up.

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