: Re: Avoiding racist tropes in fantasy I'm interested in starting a pleasure project: a fantasy story, along the lines of a witch delivering a prophecy to a king about a dangerous and deceitful foe

@Murray831

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In one writer's group I was in we had a Turkish writer whose (fantasy world) character used the word 'boy' to refer to another character. And the American writer in our group went off about how you shouldn't use that word because it's racist.

At that point I think there's diminishing returns when it comes to trying to avoid racism. For instance if you put any kind of slavery in your fantasy medieval-equivalent world then someone is going to get triggered - Even if you portray the slavery as clearly bad and undesirable.

Anything to do with skin tones is going to be a minefield.

Feminism has similar issues - you can try to be sensitive but if you're writing a first person account where your protagonist is a man it's actually surprisingly hard to pass the Beschdel test.

To pass it your male protagonist basically has to be standing in the same room as two women who are having a conversation about their dreams and goals (with no mention of men at any point) - and he can't be part of it because that would automatically invalidate it. It's actually surprisingly difficult.

Partly that's because of the nature of conversations in first person - they tend to follow a star pattern, where everyone talks directly with the protag.

(Of course the Beschdel test is much more useful in some other contexts - I'm just pointing out that in first person it's not terribly useful and pretty much boils down to an auto-pass/auto-fail depending on the gender of the protag)

So having questioned the usefulness/applicability of BT in all situations, I've got some bad news. Racism doesn't even have the equivalent of a Beschdel Test, so as subjective as that is, racism is even more so.

With my Bronze Age book series - to pass BT I shoehorned in a section late in the book where I info-dumped some stuff about ancient societies by having the two women in the team sitting on the back of a chariot that the protag was also standing in.

With respect to racism, in one of the books they're travelling from the Mediterranean to the Orient, via India, and to keep interest up of course I was throwing tricky situations at the heroes. And that basically meant that they kept having conflict with the locals.

At some point I decided that I was uncomfortable with this - not because I had native brown people attacking lily white European explorers - (racially the breakdown of the hero group was Egyptian, Caananite and Arab, so I was pretty okay there - no Europeans in that grouping), but at the end of the day I decided that I wasn't representing any positive qualities of the local people groups or cultures.

So I had to do some more research and one of the ways I represented their culture in a bit more balanced way was talking about some of the things which they had invented or discovered.

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