Fictional Cultures: Repeating History VS Minorities, Disabilities, and The Gays™
You know what I'm annoyed with? Boring cultures in fiction that exist within the narrow range between edgy realism and a total rehash of history. Too often do I see fictional cultures and societies simply existing as our own does or has with only superficial elements that make it appear unique.
Now, this applies to the more boring cultures that don't use internal realism or appropriately implement their unique elements. This includes Harry Potter's Ministry of Magic simply being a vague government similar to the contemporary British one, with the only elements of magic being on the surface with devices and weapons and things that look cool, with the system itself not actually being influenced itself. This also more aptly applies to cultures such as the one in Skyrim where magic also exists and has zero internal realism involving that, especially when you consider they have a spell that anyone can learn that can turn any ore into gold, while also having an economy based on gold coins. Those cultures are also problematic in my eyes but I went on a different sociological rant involving those kinds of examples in a different blog that will be presented later this month here (https://bunbanteryoungplaywrights.blogspot.com/).
In this blog, however, I want to explore a different meaning. I want to explore why so many fictional cultures, often depicting an earlier technological point in time, that seems to reject modern ways of thinking. To put it more simply, where are all the Gays™ and People of Colour in my favourite fantasy shows?
Years ago, before I became the humble God I am today, I was an idiot writing idiot stories. It was 2014, I had just come across Game of Thrones, and I fell in love with this realistic kind of fantasy, so naturally, as a young inspired writer, I started to create my own story within a fantasy world. It was basically just Game of Thrones but with different names, let's not beat around the bush, but the fantasy element really fell to the side as I focused on the societies and monarchs and wars and heroes and agricultural revolutions.
I was writing a history, and the best inspiration for a history is another history, and luckily our real world just so happened to have one of those, so I trailed through websites and Wikipedia articles, going through the history of our own world to influence certain sociological turns that the people of my world would have taken; further trade leads to potential plague, environmental disasters leads to migration, a bad King leads to doubt leads to tensions leads to wars, technology influences culture and vice versa, and so on. It was a fantasy story so magic was thrown in and I went deep into the consequences that would have on these societies, as well as introducing some monsters here and there. I brought the timeline up to around a vaguely dark ages period, the typical fantasy setting of a feudalistic society.
I was really proud of my timeline, and so I should have been, it was detailed and I learned a lot doing it, even if it wasn't original in any way. I showed it to friends and family, and they all seemed okay with it, until one person asked me a question I was not prepared for.
"Where are all the black people?"
I was a white, cisgendered, middle-class, teenage boy living in rural Scotland so white was pretty much the default race in my eyes. There were very few black people in fantasy media and even fewer in my daily life, so when crafting a world I understandably focused on the white people. Black people did exist in this world, I gave them a whole continent... that was far from the main story... and had very little history... and was just a vague desert... that was all one county... that I called "Heat".
Again, idiot, but I still had black people in my universe. I also had a vaguely Chinese nation and a vaguely Japanese nation, and that was about it. But I did have people of colour in my universe. I told my friend that and they asked again with a bit more specificity.
"Where are the black characters in your story?"
I was confused, and unintentionally racist, as I responded that there just weren't any, no character of importance was black, that was just how it was. They were understandably offended by that and so I went on the defensive, with my main argument being that the story was set in a western Kingdom that had the climate and environment of northern Europe, you know, where the white people lived. Side note, neither of us at the time knew that medieval Europe did have many people of colour. I went on about how people don't get dark skin from being in cold climates, and my story was predominantly set in a cold Scottish-like Kingdom, so there just wouldn't be any people of colour in my fantasy story. Eventually they backed off, not really caring about the conversation that much and probably aware I wasn't gonna admit to making mindless and harmful assumptions, and I went on thinking I handled that well. I put a lot of scientific thought into my argument against having black people in my story about magic and scientifically impossible dragons. It's fine, and in fact encouraged, to put a lot of real-world thought into your stories, that fleshes it out more and makes it easier to become immersed, but you must ensure you're doing it for the right reasons. I, very much, was not doing it for the right reasons. I was just justifying why I didn't think of black people as characters in my story while using pathetic external reasons to seem like I wasn't doing a racist time. I wasn't malicious, just very lazy and stupid; you know, fourteen-year-olds.
Years later, after significant growing up and learning how shitty of a person I was, I recalled that conversation when binge watching a fantasy TV show that had, I think, only one black character in this Medieval Europe-like Kingdom. Why couldn't I have just had black characters in my story? I had used pathetic poorly-researched real-world examples to inform a fantasy world that I had total control over.
If I wanted a black person to be living in a cold region, I could have just written it so. If I really wanted internal realism, I could easily find an in-universe reason for it; migration. My original timeline had peoples migrating everywhere, sharing technology and science, but I only even considered the peoples who migrated to be white. I could have just manufactured a reason why a people from a hotter climate would have migrated into my Kingdom, and incorporated them into everyday life without question. If I wanted to go further, I could have stated that my Kingdom had a lot of land but not enough people and so desperately desired workers, thus the people, whom by human nature may instinctively hate the Other, would be thankful to the work efforts provided by these immigrants, boosting the agricultural output and making everyone's lives much more prosperous, ensuring very little reason to reject people due to skin colour or country of origin, and so allowing people's of different cultures and background to coexist within this one nation without issue. It's easy to achieve world peace when you're literally God.
This got me thinking about what else could be done, why there are so many fictional worlds are dark and depressing, and another reason as to why Avatar: The Last Airbender is one of the greatest shows of all time.
Too many Medieval Fantasy stories are a rehash of our own Medieval history, seeking realism through exact copying, but they often reject any aspects accepted in modern society since in our real-world Medieval period, those aspects were not accepted. This is one defence for why people of colour may not appear in Medieval-like media, as racism was a thing that happened in the past so that surely explains it. While it's true that humanity has a troubled past with the Other, someone different from the Self, it is also true that there are many nowadays who accept the Other, so it's not inherent to human nature and human culture to reject the Other. When creating a world, the creator makes active decisions as to what is in the world and what is not in the world, and having a story set in a world where bigotry is normalised and not crticised by said story, then that is not it being a product of it's time, it's a time it came from your head right now, it's a product of your own possibly unintentional preconceived biases about the world. Yes, bigotry existed in the past, but your story is not the past and is not beholden to any real-world similarities. This brings me onto the topic of; The Gays™.
In Medieval Europe, homosexuality was considered sodomy and was punishable by death. Quick fix for your own telling of this; don't. Well, it may not be as simple as that. It can be if you want, that's perfectly fine, but there may be more sociological difficulties with that line of thinking. Most importantly, reproduction was important. If you had a hereditary position, it was kind of important you get yourself an heir, and in the time before sperm banks and virtual families, baby-making had to be done the old fashioned way; the cursed heterosexuality. Furthermore, even the lower classes needed constant reproduction because those farms weren't going to farm themselves and your land had to be passed to someone, further disincentivising non-heterosexual relationships. However, in your own fictional world, this can also be easily explained away by including an agricultural boom that led to enough surplus of food that the people had less need to constantly breed angsty little workers and the culture slowly normalised the LGBT community expressing themselves openly, trickling upwards into the higher societies. This is one of many ways you can in-universe explain why this is accepted, another reason is to simply say it always has been, that it was never used as a tactic to turn people against one another and it was treated akin to eye colour, just a way things are.
Too often do fantasy stories simply take the grim and unfortunate state of things from history and repeat them in their own stories to seem more comprehensible, when not every history needs to be the same as our most basic Medieval European history. Our dark ages were notably 'dark' compared to what came before and what came after. Ancient Greeks couldn't get enough of the Gays™ and the Ancient Romans were the most ethnically diverse people in the world. There is no reason, other than modern day bigotry from creators and producers, as to why people of colour and the LGBT community cannot be represented in these kinds of stories.
What I'm saying is make Geralt and Jaskier fuck in season two of The Witcher.
But another often overlooked minority underrepresented in stories set in relatively primitive societies are those who are more understandably, but no less harmful, excluded; people with disabilities and additional support needs.
Near the end of the first season of Avatar: The Last Airbender, we meet a wheelchair user named Teo. This show is set in essentially a pre-industrial world, and a more 'realistic' show would have likely explored or touched on what it means to be a person living with a disability within a technologically primitive society. Take Game of Thrones, for example, which uses the guise of realism when in truth being more akin to edgy empowerment or depressing realism, as it constantly reminds characters with disabilities that they are disabled and are weaker for it so they must make up for it by either overcoming it, like Bran, or becoming important despite it, like Tyrion. Game of Thrones is the kind of show that constantly displays the worst of humanity with little to no goodness found within, acting as if a horrific and unfair existence is natural for all, a deconstruction of typical fantasy stories but worth critiquing in and of itself. If Avatar followed the same worldview as Game of Thrones and A Song of Ice and Fire, then Teo would have been presented in a depressing light, and would have probably only been allowed to survive with the help of his community if he were nobility, and even then would have probably died as some point in the story because he would have been portrayed as ill-equipped to survive in such a primitive society, very much taking the medical model of disability as inspiration. Avatar, however, does not do this.
Teo is introduced flying around on a glider attached to his wheelchair. Once our characters land with him, it's revealed that he is a wheelchair user, but it's not focused on. The characters don't react to this with shock, and they never pity him, and instead focus on the ingenuity of his glider. Teo isn't fetishised nor is he ignored, he is treated as a person who is differently abled but it, in no way, defines him. He is alive and well and one can easily assume that his community has supported him without it having to be explained. Furthermore, the way the main characters react and treat him shows us that the culture beyond this one place is also non-ableist in their attitudes, which does not need an in-universe explanation as to why people might be compassionate in their treatment of others.
If you want people with disabilities and additional support needs within your story, just put them in. If you're worried about the realism, make changes in your world to accommodate for that.
It is better to change the world to represent a people than to deny a people to simplify the world.
Furthermore, compassion and aid towards those with disabilities and additional support needs does exist throughout our history. The archaeology of healthcare, led by Lorna Tilley, shows that a skeleton of a man who lived 4,000 years ago had natural disabilities that meant he was paralyzed from the waist down and little use of his arms, and yet he survived for around decade with these conditions. This indicates tolerance and cooperation in the culture around him, as well as a sense of self worth and a strong will to live from the young man himself, this man was supported by the people around him, so surely a creator nowadays can invent a society that is equally compassionate (https://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/18/science/ancient-bones-that-tell-a-story-of-compassion.html). There have been many discoveries of relatively primitive cultures, ancient and recent, that have provided care and support and love and respect for others in their community that have additional support needs, so if anyone ever tries to explain the impossibility of having a character with a disability in your medieval fantasy story, don't listen.
One final note. I've referred to 'if you want these people in your story' a few times, but I need to state that this is less of an option and more of heavy encouragement to incorporate people of colour, people with disabilities and additional support needs, people in the LGBT community, and other minorities into your works. Firstly, diversity is really great in making a more visually enriching and fleshed out world, making it seem brighter and more lived in with plenty of history, as well as being different from the same all-white all-straight able-bodied milquetoast cast in a medieval fantasy show. Secondly, and most importantly, representation is vital. Fantasy is a genre that has a big problem with representation, leaving many people of colour feeling excluded in fantasy epics. Whenever the LGBT community is portrayed in this kind of media, it is, like in Game of Thrones, almost always with either harmful stereotypes or presented in sexualised and objectified manners. We can do better at representation, and the fantasy genre is sorely lacking. The Witcher is an almost all-white cast, with the only real LGBT themes being subtext read by fans and denied by the show-runners, and only harmful depictions of people with additional support needs and disabilities. Compassionate cultures shouldn't only be considered acceptable in children's shows, let's normalise more positive societies in our fiction. Let's not repeat our history.
