![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Mar. 7th, 2023 10:28 pm
Why My Main Characters Are Always White
Quick entry tonight because I want to get this down for the record before anyone accuses me of anything stupid.
One of the main tropes in my work is transformation. In fact, when it comes to my novels and novellas, I don't have a single one that does not include my main character involuntarily changing into a nonhuman being. This has been one of my favorite tropes my entire life and I don't think people utilize it nearly enough outside of horror circles and the fetish community.
Although this one did make me realize that I like scary personality-erasing transformations.
Then the early 2010s came along, and there was this awful trend of using my favorite trope as a way of indicating to an audience that people of color were subhuman. Specifically, the implication was that in order for black characters to be palatable to a white audience, they had to appear in an animal, alien, or otherwise less-than-human form for the majority of the film so that we didn't have to look at their blackness.
This is not a message I want anyone to read into my work.
I don't stand by racism and never have. Transformation, for me, is a way for me to play with ideas of what it means to be human and what it means to become a better version of yourself. So my main characters stay white in order for me to preserve my intended messages, and the supporting cast instead becomes my canvas for expressing the diversity of people I have known.
(Next time I'll probably talk about Sesame Street music again because why not?)
One of the main tropes in my work is transformation. In fact, when it comes to my novels and novellas, I don't have a single one that does not include my main character involuntarily changing into a nonhuman being. This has been one of my favorite tropes my entire life and I don't think people utilize it nearly enough outside of horror circles and the fetish community.
Although this one did make me realize that I like scary personality-erasing transformations.
Then the early 2010s came along, and there was this awful trend of using my favorite trope as a way of indicating to an audience that people of color were subhuman. Specifically, the implication was that in order for black characters to be palatable to a white audience, they had to appear in an animal, alien, or otherwise less-than-human form for the majority of the film so that we didn't have to look at their blackness.
This is not a message I want anyone to read into my work.
I don't stand by racism and never have. Transformation, for me, is a way for me to play with ideas of what it means to be human and what it means to become a better version of yourself. So my main characters stay white in order for me to preserve my intended messages, and the supporting cast instead becomes my canvas for expressing the diversity of people I have known.
(Next time I'll probably talk about Sesame Street music again because why not?)
Tags: