Re: Thoughts on Shoehorning unrelated content into works of entertainment.
Interviewer:
You have no fears about exploring non-conventional love stories and promoting same-sex relationships; how have readers responded to your open-mindedness?@Robin Hobb: I like to write about a variety of characters, and I think my readers enjoy reading about such characters. Again, it is what fantasy does best; it allows us to explore the 'what if' of very big questions, without necessarily offering answers to any of them. I think that in fantasy, sexual orientation, like race, culture and age, becomes but one facet of a character, and not necessarily the most important face of that character. If a character is a gay vampire with a gambling addiction, it's really hard to say what the most intriguing aspect of her is or which one will drive the story. And I don't think readers really want a one-note character who is 'the black one' or 'the gay one' or 'the child dying-of-an-incurable-disease' one. I like to read about characters with whom I share one key aspect that lets me identify with him, but at the same time is so different from me that I'm excited to journey with him in that adventure.
One of the super powers of fantasy is that we can write stories where something that is shocking or unacceptable or even just frowned upon becomes ordinary in the fantasy setting. Then, as we explore it in that setting, we may find ourselves asking just why it is shocking, unacceptable or rude in our real existence. Thus we have SF stories that look at euthanasia, radical population control, engineered babies, society controlled by artificial intelligence and ask 'what if'. And we have fantasy tales in which someone gets three wishes, or discovers a talent for magic or becomes a blood-drinker by preference, and we again ponder 'what if'. That's what our genre is about. No boundaries, and no holds barred.
I think Hobb said it for me in the above interview, which you can Read for yourself here
I am totally with Dan_Gero in that I am a fan of different ttypes of characters, but not a fan of characters just existing to tick a particular representative box.
I particularly dislike it when a character from a minority basically just becomes a succeedinator to say how awesome that given minority is, often complete with big speech or even on occasions hate speak against the so called privileged majority, just to say how awesome that given group is, rather than be a character in their own right.
To take one example, Calliope scuros in Tad Williams' otherland.
She's a very competent, if rather grouchy Australian cop, on the trail of what she believes to be a serial killer.
She has to piece together clues, interview different people, do all sorts of awesome police type things, whilst coping with a partner and an annoying bos, and of course we see said murderer, John Dread in the rest of the book and know what a scuzbag he is.
in all of this, Calliope is also gay, and has a crush on a local weightress and isn't sure whether her feelings are returned, however that is just one part of her journey, and a part anyone who has had a crush on anyone else can relate to, gay or not.
One really good character acid test I remember was the plinkit exercise, (a suggestion from noted starwars reviewer and part time psychopath Mr. Plinkit).
Can you describe a character without mentioning their physical appearance, occupation, gender, sexual orientation or what they do?
IE just describe their personality and over all attitude to the world. The more things you can come up with, the better and more 3d the character is.
This is easy to do with a character like Calliope. She's grouchy, she's tenacious, she's proud, she's slightly lonely, she's not quite as tough as she thinks she is, she's self deprecating.
Unfortunately, with a lot of recent characters this test is increasingly failing, which is a shame for writing quality.
I also am amused whenever I consider myself just how badly blind people are represented in literature, and that so few books have blind characters who aren't either "not really blind" or helpless tiny tim knockoffs, yet I am not going to automatically repudiate any book that doesn't have a blind person in there somewhere, though of course when a book does! have a blind character, I'll want them to actually be portrayed reasonably and will object when they aren't.
Of course, on the other hand, I confess I did wince when recently reading the Talisman by Peter Straub and Stephen King (a book written in the eighties), where there was absolutely no distinction made between so called "queers" and "Pedophyles", as if any man who is gay is likely to be a potential danger to little boys, which was quite irritating. However as in most things, there is such a thing as a happy medium here, but unfortunately at the moment the idea of people (of any stripe), actually being reasonable is, well an unreasonable one.
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