In Which I Get All Serious And Political, Part Two

[I promised I'd write a continuation of my thoughts, wrote it, then failed to actually post it.  But in that intervening time we've had Malorie Blackman getting abused for asking for more diverse characters in children's books, and the latest round of hate for Anita Sarkeesian looking at how women are portrayed in video games.  Clearly this is a conversation that needs to keep happening.  So here, at last, are more thoughts of mine.  But read Part One first, if you haven't already.]

When people aren't arguing that minority characters should be represented in fiction in the same numbers that they exist in real life, they tend to swing the other way. We shouldn't be including characters just to fill some sort of quota, or to make a point. People don't like to be preached at. They should only appear when it's relevant to the plot. Any number of characters could be gay, or trans, but it's just not mentioned because it's not important to the story. Just look at Dumbledore.

It's a seductive argument. Stories whose sole purpose appears to be to deliver a diatribe on a topic dear to the author are tiresome, whether one agrees with the message or not. And characters should always be connected to the plot, because that's the point. We leave out all sorts of things that don't move the story along, like visits to the toilet where nothing out-of-the-ordinary happens. We don't need to see a character peeing – we can just assume that it happens.

But these aren't questions of diversity. These are questions of storytelling. If you can't find a way to reference a character's sexuality without making it a message or an integral part of the plot then you're just not that good a writer. We talk about our lovers and our ex-lovers all the time, because they're important parts of our lives. These are people we willingly spend a lot of time with; why wouldn't they come up in conversation with other people? So unless you're writing a story set somewhere that a gay person would feel the need to hedge and say 'partner', it should be easy to include that information. And even if they are reduced to saying 'partner', the contrast with other people should still signify something to the reader.

I didn't always think like this. There's a tendency to be suspicious of the 'token' character who deviates from the norm set by the rest of the group, and of the 'rainbow' group where every member carefully fits a different demographic like a manufactured pop band. I would tell myself that it was enough for me to know a particular character was gay, without having to put it into the story and risk making them the 'token'. Drawing attention to their sexuality felt like shouting, "Look! I put a gay character in the story! Aren't I inclusive? Give me a biscuit!"

And then people who are much better than me at this sort of thing (I love you guys) pointed out that if you don't make these things clear to the reader, it will be assumed that they're straight. People don't read books and assume that anything unstated is open to any possibility. They assume that it's the default. If you don't mention that a character has a catheter up their hoo-hah, we'll assume that they pee like anyone else.

I've been using sexuality as the example here. Signalling the presence of non-white characters is easier, because it can be in their name, or the physical description when they first walk onto the page. It's not information the character has to volunteer. Sexuality has to be offered, if you're not including a lover in the story. And gender? That, I will agree, is tricky.

Trans characters are unlikely to reveal their status in normal conversation, if the story isn't specifically about their transition. Why would they? Who they used to be, or what's inside their pants, is unimportant. What matters is their own identity. But that doesn't mean we have to entirely ignore the possibility of non-binary gendered characters. Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice has non-gendered characters. Iain M Banks' Culture universe gives us characters that can and do change gender on a whim, and Player of Games includes a species with three genders (in which the female still gets the short end of the stick) Julian May's Galactic Milieu has intersexed aliens, and Iron Council by China Mieville has Qurabin, a monk who can access hidden secrets at the cost of losing something else in the process, and lost their own gender early on. No one knows if Qurabin is male or female, not even Qurabin. There are any number of options out there, if only we think of them.

Thinking is key. If you never come up with a character who deviates from the Cis White Straight Able-Bodied norm, you lack imagination. You shouldn't need 'quotas' for minority characters, because they should be showing up anyway. Especially in speculative fiction, where the world and its peoples can be anything you can think of. Why limit yourself?

In which I get all serious and political and stuff...

I've been thinking a lot about diversity in fiction recently. There's been a lot going on lately, what with Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice giving us non-gendered characters and picking up just about every award going, Ms Marvel getting praised for giving us a well-realised female Muslim teenager, and Thor causing outrage for daring to have a woman lift the hammer. But it was a thunderstorm a few weeks ago that finally started to crystallise my thoughts into an actual idea.

One argument that comes up again and again when the issue of diversity is raised is the question of numbers. If x percent of people are gay (or whatever), they say, then surely only x percent of fictional characters should be gay (or whatever). And if that percentage is particularly small, why then that would mean the majority of fiction wouldn't (and shouldn't) contain any characters who are gay (or whatever) at all! Too much diversity wouldn't be realistic, they argue.

Now clearly, this argument is bollocks. For one thing, the people who argue that, for example, transgendered characters should make up only a tiny percentage of the whole are suspiciously silent when it comes to the question of having more female characters. I mean, women make up half the population, so why aren't they arguing that half of all characters should be female? But there's more to it than that. I finally realised, during the storm, why it is that I'm in favour of a multitude of diverse characters regardless of their frequency in real life.

You see, Small Girl decided that the best response to this particular thunderstorm was to declare herself Storm from the X-Men, and run around pretending that every flash and bang was her fighting the baddies. Until that moment, I hadn't realised she even knew who Storm was. It turns out she's been playing superheroes with the boys at school, and they'd at some point given her the choice between being Storm or being Elsa from Frozen. And apparently she'd been in the mood to try something different, because she went with Storm. Whodathunk?

What struck me was not the fact that she'd been playing with the boys (that's always been pretty normal for Small Girl), nor the fact that she chose to be Storm, unexpected as that was. What really stood out for me was the idea that she'd been offered a choice. An actual, genuine choice between two characters, either of which would have something to offer in the fighting-the-baddies stakes. Not just "you can be Storm because you're a girl."

For me, this is key when it comes to diversity – the provision of choice. For Cis White Straight Male playing Avengers, there's Iron Man and Captain America and Thor and Hulk. For Cis White Straight Female, there's Black Widow and... well, that's it, unless you're happy playing the girlfriend or Maria Hill (who, admittedly, is gradually acquiring more things to do). And for Trans, or Non-White, or LGBTQ Person of Any Gender? Well, Non-White Male has the option of playing Nick Fury, but that's about it unless we expand out from Avengers to the whole of the Marvel Universe. And even that doesn't gain us anything in Trans, LGBTQ or Female characters.

Obviously I'm not suggesting that anyone should be restricted to only playing as characters from their own demographics. I have no issue with Small Girl playing at being Storm, after all, nor did the question of race stop her dressing up to play Doc McStuffins and give all her toys checkups the other day. But I do think there should be more variety out there, more choice for the kids in the playground, or the cosplayers at the conventions. Were I to cosplay, I wouldn't necessarily want to end up dressed as a male character, but neither would I want to be stuck as a leather-clad kung-fu chick, which is frequently the only option for female characters who aren't wives, mothers or girlfriends.

More characters means more choice. All of the "Mane Six" ponies in My Little Pony are female, and all are different. You can choose to be tough, or sporty, or glamorous, or bouncy (that makes them sound like Spice Girls, but the point remains). The ensemble in Agents of SHIELD has the requisite leather-clad kung-fu chick, but also the smart-mouthed hacker and the nervous scientist. The X-Men have a dizzying array of options, though there are still some gaps there, at least in the films.

I want more. Fiction gives us the opportunity to portray anything we can imagine. I want to be shown things I'd never even considered before. I want characters I can identify with, and I want to see what it's like to be somebody different. I want a full-on, glorious rainbow of possibilities to inspire me. Because it's not just about seeing ourselves in the characters on the screen, or between the pages. It's about seeing other people, and all the different things they might be. Like seeing a black teenager as something other than a threat, as just a kid who's walking in the road because the pavement is for squares.

I have more thoughts, because there are more arguments than just the question of numbers, but I'll marshall those in a separate post in a day or two. This one's gone on quite long enough.