There Be Too Many White People Up In My Urban Fantasy!
by
, March 3rd, 2014 at 07:57 PM (4479 Views)
If you know me, or read my blog or my original works or even The Hound and the Blacksmith, you know I love my Urban Fantasy.
You know, to the point where I write it semi-professionally.
Anyway, our very own Moczo had a review of his work published in Fangs for the Fantasy an Urban Fantasy Review site. Our boy got a very positive four out of five fangs (seriously check out his work for free and vote), but one thing I noticed in the review was that the reviewer pointed out that there was a lack of GLBT and POC in the story.
Then looking through the reviews on their site I realized that there is a lot of Urban Fantasy out there that lacks positive GLBT and People of Color (POC) representation. Hell, even stuff I thoroughly enjoy like The Dresden Files and Kevin Herne's Iron Druid series have a severe "erasure". Which means a tendency to have pretty much every character be white. The more I thought about it, the more I realized about true this actually is in a lot of series.
Or worse, that people of color are written as stereotypes and there's the atypical Token Person (male or female). You know, the one person of color in a sea of white people.
I've secretly ranted about Native Americans and how they're portrayed in film, literature, and video games. Seriously, name me some Native American characters in video games. There's the lead in "Pray" which is very Native American friendly, T-Hawk from Street Fighter, and Night Wolf from Mortal Kombat. Sadly T-Hawk is a characture and while Night Wolf is slightly better, its not by much.
Then there's TV, movies, and books. There's the Mystical Native American trope- I've played with it before, but then again I am a quarter Native American. My father is actually a licensed Shawnee Holy Man and Medicine Man. I know what "shaman" actually truly means and not the spin that pop culture has given it.
When I do it, I'm spinning off my own personal beliefs and being respectful. There's no "how" bullshit from me and I know the actual lore and so on and so forth. There's wrestling with bears with poisoned claws; its pretty awesome. (Also, most Native American tribes didn't say "how", they said "Ahoe".)
Now that I've had my little rant about being an Angry Native American, I'm going to go back on point.
All of this pointing out of erasure and positive examples of POC and GLBT has really opened my eyes. I mean, other than Native Americans and Asians being main characters, I've got a pretty white cast. (While 1/4 is Native American, the rest is a slew of different white people.) I also have two very bisexual female characters. However all of this being thrown at me has made me reevaluate my work.
I don't know where I was going with this, but it was something that made me pause and thought that I should share.
Or something.