#so either ferin isn't a big deal at all

[iriscasefiles]

a word of advice to anyone writing sci-fi or fantasy for the first time: take it from me, maybe don't come up with key worldbuilding details on the basis of making obscure jokes that are literally funny to you and only you

[comicaurora]

(Now I would have used Tumblr's handy dandy reblog function on my last ask, but I felt too self conscious making a long post Even Longer over a single section, BUT!)

'If I put Falst in a notably hostile and unjust city and then just… left him alone, that risked turning the in-universe established fact of people being casually shitty to ferin into a tell-don't-show thing. The last thing I wanted was for it to seem like Falst was being oversensitive, that things weren't that bad or that he could've been hanging out in cities this whole time. ... It was very important that I not shy away from showing the gross, bad side of his experience, because doing so could risk producing the opposite effect.'

Y'know as (half of) a black person, this honestly never occurred to me, like I just Instantly grasped from the way others talked about Falst in his intro arc when he wasn't there "Oh. Oh I Know That." And so seeing him in active peril in the city as opposed to him playing cards with Alinua in the one spot he knew was primarily safest didn't register to me at all as a big difference in presentation because you're not allowed to just Forget that people can and will treat you worse than you are due on sight when you're in Falst's position. But the audience watching a story is allowed and very likely to forget or not register danger levels unless they are being actively shown those things at prudent intervals. Like the silent pressure constantly on Falst is something I Fully Get without having to be given examples, but also it's a silent omnipresent pressure on top of all his other issues that he refuses to bring out of himself, so in crafting a story around All Of That, you gotta shake the jar or else the glitter at the bottom will become such a non-thing that people might just kinda go 'I mean it's just a jar with something at the bottom, I don't see what the deal there is.'

Yeah, it's… a tough balance to strike. I'm not a fan of stories that aggressively fire off nonstop reminders of in-story prejudice (netflix's shadow and bone went so hard on the in-universe anti-"shu" racism I kept cringing away from the screen wondering how this world seemed to be composed 95% of people with nothing else going on in their lives except being racist), but on the flip side you get stories with, as I like to call it, Elf Racism, where some demographic of gorgeous superhumans like elves or angels or catgirls will be allegedly discriminated against or hated by some specific in-universe group and it will usually either be brought up (a) only once in a Very Special Episode where someone is taught quickly and cleanly that Racism Is Bad, (b) literally never, except maybe the token elf/angel/catgirl will be like "you think my ears/wings/kawaii kitty vibes are beautiful? but……… all my life I was told they were hideous", or (c) solely in the context of Radical Anarchist Rebels whose reasonable points about "racism is bad" are obscured by their startling habit of committing random atrocities for our heroes to morally oppose without addressing their actual moral thesis.

My biggest complaint with these executions is that they are wildly, wildly unrelatable. "My life is hard because I have adorable kitty ears, angel wings or superpowers" is the kind of thing that needs supporting evidence before an audience will buy it. "This world is prejudiced, by which I mean elves and dwarves hate each other - but not THIS elf and dwarf, they're besties, but all other elves and dwarves hate each other and in those cases it's just a fun quirk we will never attempt to address" produces a setting that can't decide if prejudice is a moral failing or a funny quirk. "There is prejudice in this world, by which I mean all the bad guys are racist and all the good guys are 100% enlightened and unproblematic" isn't much better, because it's being used as just another flavor of Good Vs Evil - plus the execution on the bad guys' part tends to be so cartoonishly over-the-top as to be completely implausible.

This is a problem, because if the "prejudice is bad" story is trying to communicate, for instance, the complex moral message "prejudice is bad," the prejudice enacted in the story probably shouldn't be so cartoonishly implausible that the audience has no chance of recognizing it within themselves or within anyone whose flavor of bias is anything less blatant than foaming-at-the-mouth-and-cranking-the-hate-crimes-dial-up-to-11. Most people will accept the idea that "people being ridiculously terribly prejudiced is bad," but when the image of prejudice the story paints is so divorced from any sort of lived experience, they will not see prejudice as a harmful flaw that real human people are capable of perpetuating, and they won't recognize it when they see it from the outside in real life - they'll see it as another hypothetical flavor of evil villainy that some bad people intrinsically do.

Prejudice is such a widely experienced issue, especially the "omnipresent invisible uncertainty of whether or not I am safe right now" thing, that it's baffling to me that so many of these stories don't seem to… get it? While the specific nature varies in every case, there is fundamental overlap in the experience! Like, I absolutely do not experience it the same way a lot of other people do - I am very white-looking, and too blonde for the garden-variety antisemites to figure me out, so race-based harassment has never targeted me - but I've been an underage woman in creepy-older-male-dominated spaces, I spent about half my middle school years as the target of nearly-nonstop bullying (a lot of it from people who I otherwise got along fine with and knew were ultimately well-meaning with a blind spot for casual cruelty), and in the past I've been cyberstalked and harassed by random entitled weirdos for long periods of time. I am very aware of the feeling of "there is a target on my back, and I just hope nobody hits it too hard today," and it seems to me that that specific feeling cannot possibly be this difficult to communicate.

It's like these writers read about how prejudice worked and were like "some people hate people for how they were born, got it" and just put that in their world without any nuance. Actually, I say it's like that, but considering the demographics dominating publishing, that's probably exactly why it happens so much.