Unbound #2 - Sympathy for The Devil (Spoilers)

That's how I was thinking about it after commenting earlier: none of the characters are presented as being particularly likeable, even down to the acronym FILTH by which they describe each other. It's a story filled with people regarded by others as failures or outsiders in a setting where there's about to be a massive amount of disruption. And I totally agree about the writer probably not seeing it as his place to create Asian characters despite the region being something of an area of expertise. 

*nods* I think that wariness is a more common occurrence than we tend to give it credit for. I know a few writers who are deeply interested in the history and culture of what is, to them, foreign peoples. They have an understanding, but the clincher is that they don't have the lived experience. That's what stays their hand. One I know is a magnificent poet. Utterly brilliant at conjuring magic from verse. But there are some topics that, despite having that connection with her own life and that knowledge, she just won't touch. She doesn't feel as though she has the right which is, in equal measure, an unfortunate pity and immutably understandable, without contradiction.

Part of the hope of bringing in a more diverse range of voices for writers is, I think, establishing a sounding board for sorting out the authentic from the myth. Helping to bridge that gap. The reality of how people live is often far more interesting than the straight fantasy anyway, as it has to deal with the inherent contradiction of humanity. Our intrinsic messy humanness. It's really interesting to unpack and discover.

Um... 7 out of 10 is less than 4 out of 5.

And I'd like to point out that the hyperbole should have been quite obvious.

It is a common occurrence, but it's problematic. Writers need to be able to write characters that represent more than their own, lived experience. If you only write people like yourself, you're effectively imagining entire worlds where the "other" do not exist--which is itself horribly racist, even if done with the best of intentions. Writing outside of your social, ethnic or cultural worldview is essential for a writer, it just requires more work to avoid writing in caricature. If you're looking at that work as a problem and see the solution as just never writing diverse characters... you're passively participating in a racist system.

And "that work" can be made easier in a writers room, by including more diverse voices, but that's not really possible when it comes to more conventional literary endeavors -- and from everything I've read and heard, Big Finish solicits scripts form individual writers, and does not use teams. Saying, "I can only write characters that reflect my personal worldview" is, at best, the mark of an incompetent author, and at worst a sign of deep-seated bigotry. In this case it is always, always, always better to try and fail than not to try at all.

And in the case for Sympathy of the Devil -- we're dealing with protagonist and antagonist characters that are all decidedly Western, regardless of their planetary origin. The story is told exclusively through their POV so there's little room to really explore the other cultures. Doing so would likely only manifest in the form of accents and/or the occassional idiom. 

Which is a long way of saying that, based on the purported background of the scriptwriter, I suspect the real reason (assuming the best of all involved) may have simply been that Big Finish didn't have anyone on board would could pull off a Cantonese accent, and was either unwilling or unable to hire a Cantonese-speaking person for the role. And not everyone involved in the decision making may have had the best motives--who knows?

....

Anyway, I don't see myself having much more to say here (I think I pretty much exhausted everything in that first post TBH) but I do want to end my major involvement in this thread by saying this... I've done it. I've bought the first NABS set. Soon, I will return to the Unbound Universe for more David Warner! In fact, I'll be listening to the first episode in just a few minutes! I still don't quite have the words to describe just how much I loved Warner's Doctor in these two stories, even with all the potent hyperbolic armaments at my side, so suffice it to say that I am VERY excited!

I think it's pretty easy: you don't begin with the diversity. If a key part of your character's function in the story is due to their heritage... you've got a problem. Diverse inclusion -usually- works best as a secondary or tertiary aspect of character. EG, in Sympathy for the Devil, you could have taken the woman (who's name I've forgotten), had her claim a Hong Kong nationality (regardless of accent) and give her some line, any line, to reflect a non-Western POV. She does t have to speak for her culture or her island, just herself: how she feels living on an island being town apart by two foreign imperialist superpowers. Not much is required.

This minor, bare minimum of representation matters. It's not difficult to do, though it would be difficult to do -poorly-.

I'm sure there are reasons why this was t done, possibly more than one. And I doubt many, if any of those reasons, were motivated by any intentional bigotry. But I also don't think any of the possible reasons could have been sufficiently compelling to justify the decision they made.

Simply put, if you're unwilling to write Asian characters, you shouldn't be writing stories set in Asia. Full stop.

What you're describing is a well-meaning liberal culture of exclusion. Which is... certainly a thing I the publishing community. But at the end of the day there's no meaningful difference between saying, "We don't want stories that reflect your experience," and, "We're not comfortable writing stories that reflect your experience, because it's not ours, and also we don't want to hire you to write those stories or advise us on how to write them respectfully." No mater the words being spoken, the end result is the same: white heteronormative writers crafting stories about white heteronormative characters for white heteronormative audiences.

Yes... it can be immensely frustrating. Very often you'll see these hack writers take a single racial or cultural steroetype, reduce it to a single word, and make that single word (which--look carefully, they never bother to define) the central (or only) defining aspect of their character. See "honor" in the recent video game Ghost of Tsushima, or the Tom Cruise historical action vehicle The Last Samurai, or James Clavell's Shogun.

I'm about to dive into 1DA 2.2 sometime this week... and I've been pretty impressed by the line so far, but this problem is so pervasive that I'm pretty worried. Samurai characters? This... this could be very bad. I hope it's not, but that anxiety has had me puttering about with other things rather than finishing off the set for the past two weeks.

Thank you for that background, commonman: that really illuminates a lot things for me. It's also the best interview with a writer I've read in a long time.