: Re: Is no religion a bad thing? (I believe I've asked about a half dozen questions pertaining to this post-apocalyptic novel, including my "is this story too diverse" question. This sort of pertains

@Kaufman555

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Here's my thing about your series of questions that always bothers me: I don't care about these people. I'm bi. I'm in a homosexual relationship. I'm religious. I like superhero stories. I check a lot of boxes you're asking about and I couldn't give a rat's ass about these people. You're not telling me about them or why I should care. You're telling me about boxes they check on their census forms.

Here's the thing. There's no "right answer" to this question. Religion of your characters might help because at the end, it's the ideas your character represents that matters more than the minority that you include. Some of my favorite characters in works of fiction, I share no common characteristics with, but I admire them for their ideas. Hell, one of my favorite superhero films is Wonder Woman and I have nothing in common with the titular hero on the surface level. One of my favorite Disney Villains is Frollo from Disney's "Hunchback of Notre Dame" and I share a religion and specific sect of that faith with him. But that commonality does not make me support his side, I just have a better understanding of his very nuanced nature and an appreciation of his villainy because I understand where exactly he went wrong. But I don't have to be Catholic to understand this position and I'm not alone, he's a pretty top of the list mention for Disney Villians, normally ranking in the top 5 if not the top 3.

My problem with your question is that everytime you mention your characters, you fail the "Plinkett Test" as I like to call it. If you're not aware of the concept, the test was devised in the "Mr. Plinkett Reviews" series from youtube, specifically the most famous episode, a seven part review of Star Wars Episode One (The Phantom Menace) that goes into humorous but important characteristics of writing and one of his early complaints is about the characters in the film. To illustrate what his problem was, he had several fans take the following challenge: "With out describing any physical attributes or the character's role in the story, describe the following characters:" He then proceeded to list Star Wars characters, one from the original trilogy, followed by one from the Phantom Menace and have the group of friends react. His point was that you could do this with his original trilogy list of main characters, but that you couldn't do this with any of the Phantom menace characters he listed (and they were not the side characters, but people like Queen Amidalla and Annikan Skywalker who are critically important to the film. One person even balks with a "that's impossible and you know it" when asked to describe the former.).

If you're doing this to tick a box and include religious people, don't. I'll tell you right now that the people who care about it will likely not read and the people who don't care about it, well, your not changing their minds. But it's important that characters believe in something... it doesn't have to be God(s). It doesn't have to be about politics either. And it's okay to have your characters question their beliefs... hell... I'd even suggest have heroes that don't agree with you (so long as you write them in a way where the people who do agree with them think you do)... but unless this is a straight up romance, what genitles your character has, which ones they want to have, and which ones they want their romantic partners to have still doesn't telly me a use full thing about them or why I should care about them. As a writer of fiction, your first duty is to answer "Why should I care about these individuals?" If you can't answer that, then the reader will stop your story quicker then you want them too. And they won't pick it up again.

And I speak as someone who wrote two rough draft novels that both featured exactly one straight white male in the core cast by coincidence... You'd never know if I didn't tell you. And there are some characters I wrote that I'll straight up admit I don't know all their secrets yet, including their sexual preferences as a matter of course. There are a lot of authors who will say they didn't create the character, they met them and learned about them as if they were a real person who you met on the train one afternoon.

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