"Diveristy" in writing - The 50/50 Rule and More

[Yaoi Huntress Earth]

I wasn't sure where to put this, but with calls for diversity, the 50/50 Rule and for "strong and complex" female characters in art and writing, I'm curious what your feelings are. In case you're wondering, the 50/50 Rule is that there should be an equal number of men and women characters in your story or art. (And that includes main characters as well as minor/background.) Though its okay if the women outnumber the men or the pic only has one character.

I do have a few things on my mind...

• With the 50/50 Rule, there would be a lot of pressure to make sure you hit that goal, especially if you wanted to add a new character. Also, it would mean stifling creativity since you'd have to change things if you really had your heart set on making the character a guy. But, to SJWs, you get to be "more creative" by working around this.
  
• It feels like labels are more important than what is inside the character. Or there's more of an agenda to push than making a story. As Cody of The Other Side podcast said, "No kid is going to get the Stevonnie episode" (and all its gender politics).
  
• Since the goalpost will always keep getting pulled back, people feel like diversity is a chore than something that should be enjoyed. (Variety should be fun.) With people breathing down your neck, makes it harder.
• There's also the need to kick out established white characters or actors to fill a demand. A number of them act like being a white CIShet is the most disgusting thing ever.
  
• Worse yet, the naysayers never really buy the products they demand. Or if they do, they might not be satisfied.

 

[Pickle Inspector]

I think it's pretty dumb, writing or creating art is a personal thing and you should include whatever you want.

Also if you intentionally try to appease those obsessed with diversity you'll never win since it'll either somehow not be diverse enough for them or something else I've seen is people getting angry over a white person writing about a minorities culture since "It's not your story to tell", a recent example of this is JK Rowling writing about magic in a Native American setting - http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/jk-rowling-native-appropriation_us_56eac8ace4b0860f99dbb98e

 

[Dilligaff]

If someone tries too hard to be "diverse" it often degenerates into minority bingo and tokenism. I'm interested to read what others think about this because it's a topic I'm struggling with myself. Other creators have told me that it's nice to be as diverse as you can, but as @Pickle Inspector said, creativity is personal and people should tell their stories however they see fit.

In the end it seems the best advice is one of our many Kiwi sayings: "who cares what strangers on the internet think/say?"

 

[TsumTsum]

You should write for you and only you. If you love your work, then others will naturally flock to it. Personally, nothing irks me more than when someone tells me to be more diverse with my characters (aka shoehorn shit in for social justice points). I won't stop in the middle of my narrative to explain that Jane Doe is actually a tranny; it doesn't matter to the progression of the story.

Good luck with your writing Kiwis!

 

[AnOminous]

Obligatory diversity is just fucking dumb. Suppose you're writing about a specific subculture or even just a homogenous society?

 

[DuskEngine]

Obligatory diversity is just fucking dumb. Suppose you're writing about a specific subculture or even just a homogenous society?

I really liked Heart of Darkness' portrayal of the struggles faced by Native Americans during the Scramble for Africa.

 

[Tailypo]

Anyone who tries to force writers or artists to fill in a "diversity quota" in their work can fuck right off.

Yes, it's nice to have diverse characters, but that quickly falls apart when it's obvious that said characters only exist to pander to SJWs (who won't even read/support the work, anyway). These characters always end up uninteresting and soulless because their only characteristics are their gender/race/sexuality/whatever.

Good diversity happens when you don't add characters for diversity's sake. The way I see it, personality and characteristics should be thought of first, and then you can focus on things like race and sexuality. This is especially important if your story is set in a specific time period. Does it make sense to have an openly gay character in medieval Europe? Of course not.

 

[Malodorous Merkin]

I dunno. I think the Old Man and the Sea would be so much better if there was an empowered female character in the boat helping him land that fish.

 

[OtterParty]

You should write for you and only you. If you love your work, then others will naturally flock to it.

I know of a certain terrible incomplete TV Tropes space war opera that attempted to run on this line and failed miserably. It was so niche that everybody who wasn't the author looked into it and felt the autistic abyss looking back. You have to consider your audience too. Just make sure your audience isn't Those People because they'll never be satisfied, you'll always be problematic to them, and they'll pirate your work anyway because they're wannabe anarchist edgelords.

 

[Broseph Stalin]

I know of a certain terrible incomplete TV Tropes space war opera that attempted to run on this line and failed miserably. It was so niche that everybody who wasn't the author looked into it and felt the autistic abyss looking back. You have to consider your audience too. Just make sure your audience isn't Those People because they'll never be satisfied, you'll always be problematic to them, and they'll pirate your work anyway because they're wannabe anarchist edgelords.

I'm kind of curious as to what work this is you're talking about.

 

[AnOminous]

Just make sure your audience isn't Those People because they'll never be satisfied, you'll always be problematic to them, and they'll pirate your work anyway because they're wannabe anarchist edgelords.

You should almost gratuitously throw something in just to deeply offend those assholes if there's any possibility they'll like your stuff, because any time they do, they eventually turn on you for no reason.

 

[Ntwadumela]

Remember guys: Quality over quantity.
Case in point: the video game Dead or Alive, which includes more females than males, and yet most of the females have zero personality besides bouncing boobies. Meanwhile, there are some exceptions to the females and many of the males (not all of them) are well designed.
It's better to have one well designed female character in a certain form of male-dominated cast than an entire cast of bimbos.

 

[TsumTsum]

I know of a certain terrible incomplete TV Tropes space war opera that attempted to run on this line and failed miserably. It was so niche that everybody who wasn't the author looked into it and felt the autistic abyss looking back. You have to consider your audience too. Just make sure your audience isn't Those People because they'll never be satisfied, you'll always be problematic to them, and they'll pirate your work anyway because they're wannabe anarchist edgelords.

I was assuming that everyone here wouldn't write something completely autistic. There is usually a market for everything (if you're a competent writer) unless you write something totally and completely weird.

I'm curious about this space opera now...

 

[Loxiozzz]

There's noting wrong with adding diverse characters. But it should be your own choice. If you're pandering to an audience who most likely aren't reading what you wrote anyway, you're not gonna want to write anymore. And if the story is centered around a different culture, you should do research. Even if it's a fantasy, it should still have a bit of reality.

Edit-spelling errors. Spelling errors everywhere.

 

[OtterParty]

I'm kind of curious as to what work this is you're talking about.

I'm curious about this space opera now...

I present Endless Conflict by Major Tom. Comes with a Tropes article by the author himself. Features blue haired space nippons having a sushi picnic in the space cherry blossom park, giant robots, giant robots with swords, utterly meaningless radio chatter, and some place called Elysium which was more likely to have been ripped off from Mass Effect than Greek mythology. Also loads and loads of pointless shoutouts to Touhou because good stories contain tropes therefore you can build an entire good story from the ground-up with a few good volleys of trope bukkake. Some blogger wrote a criticism about it here. SomethingAwful needled it somewhere inside this document making fun of other tv tropes autism.

I was assuming that everyone here wouldn't write something completely autistic

Are you new here

 

[Broseph Stalin]

I present Endless Conflict by Major Tom. Comes with a Tropes article by the author himself. Features blue haired space nippons having a sushi picnic in the space cherry blossom park, giant robots, giant robots with swords, utterly meaningless radio chatter, and some place called Elysium which was more likely to have been ripped off from Mass Effect than Greek mythology. Also loads and loads of pointless shoutouts to Touhou because good stories contain tropes therefore you can build an entire good story from the ground-up with a few good volleys of trope bukkake. Some blogger wrote a criticism about it here. SomethingAwful needled it somewhere inside this document making fun of other tv tropes autism.


Are you new here

But no, seriously, if it wasn't the writing and overused scifi names (Though "Terran" I can kind of forgive in some cases) that made me stop, it was the Japanese swordsman sensei dude whatever in the far future and weeb shit scattered throughout.

 

[Sanae Kochiya]

Diversity for the sake of diversity will always feel shoehorned in. If you feel that you can only succeed through shoehorned diversity, that says more about your writing than the actual writing.

 

[DatBepisTho]

Kurt Zonnigut said that a writer should write for one person and one person only. "Opening the window and making love to the world will give your story a cold" or something like that.
-It's is probably Kurtese for don't do it it's a stupid fucking idea to try to appeal to the masses. (Tumblr or any other stupid fandom haven could probably be substituted as the unwashed masses tbh.)

That being said, shoehorned diversity is almost as flat and lame as racist propaganda writing and the characters really suffer for it. Want a brown person in your story? Make them the tumblr-feared-and-reviled ambiguously brown by not focusing pages upon pages on their proud peeohcee heritage that has nothing to do with the scene much-less the rest of the story. Also avoid going on about their sexuality outside of "X's attempt to be seductive failed entirely" and that's it. The beauty of characterization is showing, not telling.

 

[Mungo]

To paraphrase someone else, I think that making a character have some "diverse" qualities is fine if it serves the character, if those traits are the glue that holds a model airplane together. If you make the character completely subservient to their character traits, that's like grinding up the model airplane parts to beef up the glue.

There are ways to make a character gay/trans/a minority without making them a bad one. Take, say, Arcade Gannon, from Fallout: New Vegas. For those that haven't played the game, he's an intelligent scientist that serves as an NPC companion. Some of his dialogue hints at his preference for male company (for instance, he describes a platonic female friend as the "only woman in his life") and, if you have the Confirmed Bachelor perk (a stat bonus exclusively for male Couriers that opens up extra conversational options with people that are attracted to men,) he will flirt with you.

That's it.

His biggest character trait isn't his homosexuality, he isn't defined by it, and he treats his relationships with other men confidently and with discretion, like a real person. He's a very well-written character who has a lot of depth and emotional range and can end up in all sorts of places in the ending. In a medium where good writing is considered optional in many cases, and especially as part of a minority group in that medium especially plagued by retardedly "diverse" characters, Arcade Gannon stands out as an example of how to make a character diverse without dragging real world politics into the issue or compromising the quality of his writing.

 

[waffle]

This is mindblowingly retarded. What if I'm writing a war story about a WWII infantry company, am I covered if a guy has a memory about home and his ~250 sisters? Or a story in a men's prison, Or a women's prison for that matter (is that OK and inclusive now, even if it turns into lesbians in prison smut? The rule said it's ok if there are more women. And hey, it's got LBGTQLMNOP people in it, it's gotta be good and inclusive!)