#I was gunna unionize the fucking room against that dipshit professor then they had the gall to email me asking if I could write her a rec f

[heart-forge]

I've always wanted to know your thoughts on White Feminism in writing vs regular Feminism. Hope more people talk about this because I'm honestly TIRED of white feminism in writing, it almost always makes some culture or religion the bad guy while the white female mc is always the good guy. And it does nothing but harm actual feminism especially for poc/lgbtq people.

I wouldn’t know what to say that isn’t fairly obvious !! I don’t come from a place of lived experience: I’m white, so my perspective is that of research and empathy for other people (and you know, eyes that are capable of observing that the system that hates one group of people tends to create this imaginary hierarchy where they rank how much they hate everyone else and it’s almost like no one benefits from this system and that trying to rank human beings is 1) BANANAS, and 2) counterproductive to what should be everyone’s goal of keeping humans alive and thriving).

A person does what they can to try and avoid the traps (filled with human misery) they see others fall into, though, and being hateful is always the worst imagineable look. It frustrates me when creators won’t engage with their audience, because a lot of very big banner “YOU DID IT BAD” mistakes in popular media have been dressed down extensively both by fans with critical thinking skills and by academics with clout and the words to say with big booming finality that what you did was bad. It’s INFURIATING to see all that energy brought to things that at some point just objectively stop deserving the benefit of the doubt, and the love and care that fans of colour and queer fans and every damn type of fan try to bring, only to get turned away because a creator is arrogant enough to decide that they don’t need the negativity of having to examine themselves?

Creating, whether it be writing or music or art or games or any kind of way that a human can say that they have made a thing, is a conversation. Sometimes the conversation stays between friends, and sometimes you let it out into the world and wait to hear back about it. If people are trying to engage with you, even if it’s embarrassing or stressful or confusing, you owe it to the people you’re sharing with and yourself to be better in whatever ways you can. That’s in general, not just for creating, but god. Social media has really let us watch realtime as these people rot from the inside out and revel in how terrible and hateful and evil they are.

But, to end on a positive note, it’d be nice for some wholesome recs. 

As always I have to recommend S.A. Chakraborty (a white Muslim convert who deeply and enthusiastically does so much research on her very history heavy fantasy stories, and Nahri is literally one of the best female protagonists I’ve ever read) and her Daevabad series (and I’m also very hype for her upcoming pirate book). Her Twitter account is also full of recs from all kinds of different authors.

R.F Kuang’s Poppy War Trilogy (TW for a LOT of violence of literally nearly every variety that you can imagine violence comes in: the power you must have if you manage to get through one of these books in a single sitting and don’t have to go take a walk) which deals a lot with colonialism, violence, and trauma. 

As an author, I’ve gotten a lot of general help from Writing With Colour which is a great resource for not only just lived experience sort of stuff from the associated mods and people contributing their own experience, but also a wealth of articles that will elaborate on a trope, stereotype, or just general topic that you don’t quite understand and how to approach it in your writing.

Also some generally sage wisdom is to examine the sort of stuff that you consume outside of your work. Look at your music, the YouTube Channels you watch (this is a big one as for a long time the only YouTubers I could name off the top of my head were white guys), the podcasts you listen to: if you notice that you’re really not consuming content that represents the broad diversity of the world, then the good news is that white people aren’t even usually the first to do a thing, let alone the only people doing a thing.