: 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

@Sarah872

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A phobia means unreasonable, illogical, and excessive fear.

It might have gotten diluted in recent years due to politics, where it is often used against opponents who have the slightest dislike against a group or just merely fail to openly support them.

Xenophobia means an excessive, unjustified fear of foreigners.
If an enemy army is really about to conquer you, it's not xenophobia to fear them.
If they really did commit atrocities against you in the past, it's not xenophobia to not trust them. Or maybe it is, depending on the circumstances, but it has at least some justification.

You can make both those unseen foreigners and the "xenophobic" locals sympathetic, by making those past conflicts be based on a misunderstanding, or at least having been forced by unknown circumstances. The locals really fear them, because they really believe those atrocities happened. Maybe they didn't happen, or they happened but were due to some misunderstanding instead of malice.

There are many cases of literature and other works depicting well-intentioned extremists, who occasionally might happen to be right. Care must be taken to leave some dilemma in the work, to not be seen as trying to drop a moral anvil on the head of the reader.

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