![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
The old neighbourhood
Of course there *is* one slight problem to all this mainlining Pratchett. All the main characters are white. Which is fine, but a bit disorienting as a steady diet because it's not what I'm used to nowadays.
I mean, it is what I'm used to nowadays if you look at my recent English reading, but that doesn't feel quite as WTFy, if only because if I'm reading books set in England during the Napoleonic wars I've pretty much decided to read about white Englishmen. It's still nice that Jack's crew comes from all over, even if it's the underdecks that does. (For that matter I'm also incapable of following the mid-east politics in The Ionian Mission and Treason's Harbour and remembering who's who in the Arabian peninsula. I treat it like the ship's terminology, which isn't explained either: OK, fine, that ship is abaft of the starboard beam and OK, these three local leaders are trying to edge each other out for reasons which remain obscure to me, and I hope neither of those facts is important. What amazes me is that *Jack* can keep the issues straight.)
But my English reading is usually interleaved with Japanese manga, to say nothing of Woxin and wuxia watching, and I just feel odd now that that's not there. Should return to the geisha world of Kurotsubaki where I was last week, a place where Susa-no-o will show up at the heroine's wedding and dance while reciting Yakumo tatsu. (I mean, she got married at his jinja. What do you expect?)
Fact is, I don't actually want Characters Of Colour in my reading any more than I want gay characters. Both terms reference this-world thinking, and specifically NAmerican thinking, and I find this-society thinking reductive, adversarial and unsatisfactory as a model for how humans actually work, let alone how they should work. Yes I know reductive and adversarial is how things get accomplished here, by defining a group and going to court to ensure that group's rights. It's how we got gay marriage, by and large- but I don't think it was Charter challenges that made most straight Canadians go 'shrug' over the issue. (So shrug is it that no one's bothered to update wikipedia to mention that Canada as a whole legalized same-sex marriage three years ago.) Legal attitudes make bad social attitudes, says the lawyers' child, because the law is a very blunt if-a-then-not-b instrument and human beings are far more complex than that. Alas, over here the legal approach is becoming a reflex.
For my not-gay-just-same-sex needs I have the realms of yaoi-ppoi manga. Not-people-of-colour-just-the-people is a bit harder to come by, at least in my own language.
I want something that isn't the mainstream white-as-default, but I also want it not to be anything special. Leguin does it, and a few other fantasy writers (I don't read SF, where I think there may be more examples?); but even the fact that their non-this-world characters are brown or yellow becomes a big deal simply by the rarity. (One exception, I guess, could be ancient Egypt. All of Pauline Gedge, all Paul Doherty and Lynda Robinson (dear god, do you realize how many mysteries are set in ancient Egypt? Yeah, and how all the modern ones are about western Egyptologists argh.) But otherwise to get that no-big-deal variety I guess one must stick to not-western and/or not-English-the-language; and not, as with Pratchett, an English-the-country fantasy that deliberately references real-world. Pratchett's a satirist, shou ga nai; satire references this-world by definition and Pratchett is (among other things) getting his digs in at modern-day England.
Ah well. Someone has to, I guess. And meanwhile I can wait for![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
nojojojo's books to come out.
I mean, it is what I'm used to nowadays if you look at my recent English reading, but that doesn't feel quite as WTFy, if only because if I'm reading books set in England during the Napoleonic wars I've pretty much decided to read about white Englishmen. It's still nice that Jack's crew comes from all over, even if it's the underdecks that does. (For that matter I'm also incapable of following the mid-east politics in The Ionian Mission and Treason's Harbour and remembering who's who in the Arabian peninsula. I treat it like the ship's terminology, which isn't explained either: OK, fine, that ship is abaft of the starboard beam and OK, these three local leaders are trying to edge each other out for reasons which remain obscure to me, and I hope neither of those facts is important. What amazes me is that *Jack* can keep the issues straight.)
But my English reading is usually interleaved with Japanese manga, to say nothing of Woxin and wuxia watching, and I just feel odd now that that's not there. Should return to the geisha world of Kurotsubaki where I was last week, a place where Susa-no-o will show up at the heroine's wedding and dance while reciting Yakumo tatsu. (I mean, she got married at his jinja. What do you expect?)
Fact is, I don't actually want Characters Of Colour in my reading any more than I want gay characters. Both terms reference this-world thinking, and specifically NAmerican thinking, and I find this-society thinking reductive, adversarial and unsatisfactory as a model for how humans actually work, let alone how they should work. Yes I know reductive and adversarial is how things get accomplished here, by defining a group and going to court to ensure that group's rights. It's how we got gay marriage, by and large- but I don't think it was Charter challenges that made most straight Canadians go 'shrug' over the issue. (So shrug is it that no one's bothered to update wikipedia to mention that Canada as a whole legalized same-sex marriage three years ago.) Legal attitudes make bad social attitudes, says the lawyers' child, because the law is a very blunt if-a-then-not-b instrument and human beings are far more complex than that. Alas, over here the legal approach is becoming a reflex.
For my not-gay-just-same-sex needs I have the realms of yaoi-ppoi manga. Not-people-of-colour-just-the-people is a bit harder to come by, at least in my own language.
I want something that isn't the mainstream white-as-default, but I also want it not to be anything special. Leguin does it, and a few other fantasy writers (I don't read SF, where I think there may be more examples?); but even the fact that their non-this-world characters are brown or yellow becomes a big deal simply by the rarity. (One exception, I guess, could be ancient Egypt. All of Pauline Gedge, all Paul Doherty and Lynda Robinson (dear god, do you realize how many mysteries are set in ancient Egypt? Yeah, and how all the modern ones are about western Egyptologists argh.) But otherwise to get that no-big-deal variety I guess one must stick to not-western and/or not-English-the-language; and not, as with Pratchett, an English-the-country fantasy that deliberately references real-world. Pratchett's a satirist, shou ga nai; satire references this-world by definition and Pratchett is (among other things) getting his digs in at modern-day England.
Ah well. Someone has to, I guess. And meanwhile I can wait for
nojojojo's books to come out.
no subject
Novik's world plays fair- it has its A/U apparatus up front. Our World + dragons, OK. Then she starts to push the envelope juuust a leeetle here and juust a leeetle there, and that's fine too. This could go anywhere. (Jonathan Strange does the same thing, even if Jonathan Strange was, like Pratchett I suspect, too British for your palate.) I think the Points world does A/U right too; better than Novik, perhaps, in that some very major differences between that world and ours aren't ever mentioned upfront; you have to deduce them from characters' attitudes.
In fact I'd almost say that a straight A/U set-up gives room for a deeper kind of strangeness just because most of the givens of the society are exactly the same as ours. One can concentrate one's imagination on the ramifications of the bits that are different.
But I was browsing through the fantasy section the other day and the names alone are a tip-off of 'nothing new here'. It isn't just a tweaked Here: it's a tweaked Western Fantasy Here, complete with identifiably Western Fantasy Names. Lots of two-syllabled l's and r's and apostrophes, unless people are sporting Celtic Variations to start with.
(The Japanese may have little use for new and different but by god, half the time when they do fantasy names, it's stuff never heard on land or sea. I've always wondered if they can pronounce it themselves, because it sure ain't euphonious, and you certainly can't write it in English.) (The other half they do eclectic 'using foreign language-words-usually-English', an approach I wouldn't mind seeing more of here except that it's frowned on.)
You can weave invisible sexuality in easily enough: you show your characters in sexual situations with varying genders, and don't comment on it. (Again, the Points series. Or Point of Dreams, rather. And I don't think Rowling expected anyone to pick up on gay Dumbledore, unless you mean it was left unsaid even in the last book? which I haven't read, but it certainly sounded pretty obvious from what I heard. For sure, Sirius/ Remus was distinctly there in the subtext for anyone who wanted it.)
Race however is a bitch to show in a non-visual text work; there you really do have to have a reason why someone would mention what colour someone else's skin or hair is. Clearly we should all be drawing manga instead...
no subject
Oh, what a nice idea!
See, this jumps out at me whenever I encounter it. It always feels like a Message, and not a very subtle one.
It *can* read like a Message, but I feel it's only if the writer's actually thinking ***gay character*** when she does it. Done right (Tanya Huff; Tanith Lee; again- Point of Dreams) it feels like shoujo manga's casual m/m to me, probably because I started my yaoi training with a canon that contained besuto furendo and buracon jokes. No teasing required; the text did it for you. And frankly the casual manga/ Mary Renault 'oh yeah, that' approach is the way I like things. (Much better than dysfunctional relationships between two unlikable Animus figures whom I'm supposed to find rivetting in their kewl homicidal/ petulant aristo fashion. If you must do animus, do it right ie Akio.)
Me, I doubt Rowling cares if people say that she didn't include gay characters. Nobody expects gay characters in a kids' series, even in England. Rowling's just lousy at any kind of in-depth characterization.
Well, having nude statues of both sexes in your house wouldn't say bisexual to me either, actually, unless it's an extremely prudish society where naked = sex. Art lover, certainly.
no subject