: Re: How to build suspense or so to establish and justify xenophobia of characters in the eyes of the reader? I am asking this as a general thing, be it a race that is never seen but heard about

@Megan928

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If you're referring to how to make a sympathetic character be understandably xenophobic, there's several ways to do it, but the common unifying trait is establishing the alienness of the culture they're xenophobic against and why it is the character doesn't understand them/takes issue with them.

Interestingly, I'm in the middle of writing a novel which covers xenophobia/racism (in this case, against orcs), and it comes from relatively few factors in the protagonist's life:

1: She was exclusively raised in a mage cult that values magical power over everything else.

2: Orcs cannot usually perform magic, and by the cult's value system are on par with animals.

3: She's relatively unexposed to ordinary urban life outside of infiltration, so she hasn't seen orcs sitting around and chatting like ordinary people.

4: She's been on many missions in the wild, where nomadic, raiding tribes of orcs are common. These orcs often do not speak the common tongue.

As such, the information the reader has on orcs is that they're a non-magical, warlike, savage, incomprehensible race that cannot be reasoned with. As such, the protag's xenophobia is perfectly understandable... until she ends up taken prisoner by a relatively gentle orcish tribe run by one of the rare few orcish mages in history (who can speak directly to people's minds, skipping the language barrier). This forces her to accept orcs as people, albeit with a lot of mental resistance along the way.

In addition, I made her expression of xenophobia/racism semi-sympathetic (but still requiring change) by having her react to a fellow cult member behaving sadistically to an eager orcish teenager under his mercy. He, as a necromancer, is taunting him in the common tongue as he dies, getting off on his slow acquisition of control over his body, telling him he's going to raise him and use him to murder his parents, et cetera.

Despite viewing orcs as savage animals, the protagonist's throat fills with bile and she demands that he 'put him down'; that is, kill the beast to stop it suffering. She reiterates that the orc doesn't understand common, and there's no point torturing him. This shows that though xenophobic, she's not doing it out of a place of hatred or sadism.

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