: 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

@Kevin153

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You say that food production isn't the (main) point in your environmental theme. However, if you are going to mention food in the story, it's almost inevitable that readers will wonder where it comes from, and why the characters make the ethical choices that they do.

Tokenism in fiction is generally having a character that "ticks a box", e.g. Black character (check), LGBT character (check), female character (check). In this case, vegetarian character (check), or even vegan character (check). The issue is compounded if that character is basically a stereotype of the group in question.

An example of going against the stereotype appears in Terry Pratchett's Johnny and the Dead, where the Black kid is nicknamed Yo-less because he is uncool and has no rhythm. (There are other details of his character that make him a character and not merely an anti-type of a stereotype.)

So if you make your villain a meat-eater and your hero a vegetarian, lots of stereotypes immediately come into play. (But fer gawds' sake please don't make the villain a vegetarian... if I hear that thing about Hitler being a vegetarian one more time, I shall explode. For the record, he ate chicken and avoided red meat on the advice of his doctor.)

So either avoid discussion of food altogether, or get your characters to have a nuanced discussion on factory farming, free range meat, indigenous hunting practices that respect the animals and the ecosystem, permaculture, mixed-use habitats, soya production, laboratory-cultured meat, etc etc. (There are loads of good articles on the internet about these topics.) Or have different characters who have made different ethical choices for good and cogent reasons, to show the complexity of the issue. And to avoid tokenism and stereotyping, make sure that they have some interesting internal contradiction that makes them a character instead of a stereotype, e.g. all their friends are vegetarian and they're not - how do they cope with the pressure to be a vegetarian? You should be able to write that one from personal experience.

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