: Re: Can I bring back Planetary Romance as a genre? This question is about genre and reader expectations. I'm not trying to change my story to fit a mainstream genre. I have already taken steps

@Kaufman555

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Considering that George Lucas revived serial Movies and Space Opera with Star Wars and Serial Pulp Adventure with Indianan Jones, both genres that were long dead in theaters but given new life in the works. There were racial components in those genres as well but it was more product of the times and both works sort of eliminated them... India was not to happy about the Second Indianan Jones movie. That said there were some subtle moments that pointed out that Jone's ignorance of Local Cultures to the point of offense wasn't entirely out of character for him.

Others will address the problems of the genres and steer into the skid. In Deep Space 9's episode "Badda Bing, Badda Boom", the show's love letter to heist movies (Oceans 11 wouldn't be remade for the better part of a decade at the time of the original airing.), Captain Sisko (an African American) does not want to anticpate in the holosuite Casino Heist because he has problems with a historical piece set in 1960s Las Vegas, when Casinos weren't always open to African Americans and some discussion is had about the matter, which basically acknowledges that this was a problem then, but we're telling a story that celebrates the good parts of the genre, not the bad. In Archer Dreamland (A season long Parody of 40s Noir genre), one episode has Archer, Ray, and several members of a mostly African American club band (Ray is the only one who isn't black) are forced to sneak out of jail while disguised as as police officer. The uniforms stolen only fit the African Americans and Archer suspects that they'll get caught because the cops are black is a dead give away... only for the characters posing as cops to point out that LAPD was integrated pretty early in it's history and had a number of Black Cops serving at this point in history. To top it off, Archer tries to claim leadership because he had been in the Army during World War II... only for the every member of the band save Ray also having served, and while two were given jobs typical for the time (Cooks for their unit) the third actually outranked Archer and served in a unit that Saved Archer's own unit from defeat in one battle. And they actually make it out the door and are only discovered when one of their decoy cops is stumped on police jargon, which would happen to anyone in such a situation.

In scifi, the use of aliens can substitute for racial relations as a way of discussing it without discussing it. Star Trek was famous for doing this, as most recurring aliens have something in common with exaggerated national stereotypes in the real world. Deep Space 9 again (which is pretty much a Planetary Romance as a bulk of the plot revolves around politics of the space station and the planet nearest to it, Bajor, which was a recently released occupied planet that was under the rule of Nazi-like aliens that used Bajorans for slave labor and target practice. Here, the similarities to real life discussions allow for a mix of various types of racial injustices... while the Bajorans were frequently tied to the Israli's and Jewish people immediately after the Holocaust, they also had common themes with Native Americans and the Catholic Church (both in power abuses and presecutied religions).

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