Creating a Setting Without Bigotry

I think to create a setting without any bigotry, you have to be a writer without any or your real life bigotry and I don’t think we can be that even if we try, stereotypes and tropes sneaks in without noticing.

I certainly know I have my subconscious -ism’s, some I am conscious of and try to combat (Race can be an issue with me because the part of Denmark I live in is not racely diverse so I rarely gets to interact with people of colour thus I am not always as sensitive to words and stereotypes they are met with, which can make me accidentially step my foot in my mouth some times. I know I have a blind spot there, though. And try to be aware of it when writing.)

The worst parts are the bias I am not aware of. Because I am not aware I can’t make a choice if I want to write something delibrately problematic about the subject or not.

One way to try and be aware of one’s own bias is to reread what we write and notice if there is a pattern which tend to repeat itself. If nothing else the more conscious we are of our own bias the better we write, because we are then aware of what we are writing and can decide what we want to do with it.

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I love this comment! :thumbsup:

And I think one of the ways to do this is, as the Choice of Games’ guidelines suggests, is to make sure the perspective in question belongs to the character or characters in our story, and is not the author’s perspective.

So, here’s an example of misogyny from a character vs author perspective…

Character’s Perspective:

That employee of mine is sure lazy. She thinks she can come late to work every single day for a month just because she’s feeling tired? the manager thought to himself. “A woman’s time of the month does not last all month,” he wrote in his report to the General Manager.

Author’s Perspective:

“That employee of mine is sure lazy. She thinks she can come late to work every single day for a month just because she’s feeling tired?” the manager thought to himself. And rightly so. A woman’s time of the month does not last all month.

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I’d say if you have a historical setting having things like oppression of certain skin colours etc is good to have included if it used to have that in real life in that time period.

It’s never good to try to sweep what happened under the rug and pretend things never happened, history is there to learn from when moving forward, without it we’re bound to repeat the mistakes of previous generations instead of learning from said mistakes.

That’s my opinion on it, don’t pretend history was better than it was if you want to make a realistic book, game etc, that’s just insulting the ones that had to go through it and the ones that fought to make it better.

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Author’s vision comes first. If they want to create some egalitarian setting, I certainly wouldn’t tell them not to. Now, whether or not I’m going to like said story depends on how they go about it.

Obviously if it’s supposed to be historical (and not alternate timeline “historical”), then I’d prefer it to be more realistic. Anything else is fair game.

They don’t necessarily need to go into too much background of “how things got the way they are” they just to remain consistent or maybe even point out “anomalies” when they occur.

(Like, “While these sorts of attitudes among humanity were generally left behind after the cataclysm of 2105, they unfortunately still rear their ugly head from time to time”)

Personally, I don’t avoid it in my stories though how much it’s playing a part anyway (And it’s never been the sole focus), really depends on the setting I’m going for.

If it’s a scifi or fantasy setting, it’s usually easier since you actually have other races running about. So usually “racism” is taking a different form than the real life skin color one.

This can still range from low (A multi-racial empire and all sorts are living together, but due to differences, certain negative attitudes are still going to occur) to extreme (Humanity has united together to be bigots towards other fantasy/scifi races and probably vice versa)

As far as humanity goes in general I usual have stuff like women fighting on the frontline along side men and nobody is really batting an eye if someone’s gay or not, but that’s about as far as I go as far as making an “egalitarian” society is concerned. I don’t really make a point of saying certain attitudes are eliminated altogether, (in fact they may still be somewhat common in certain areas), it’s just more of a case that they aren’t the focus of the story and it only matters if it becomes part of a plotline or something.

Now if it’s a modern or “real world” setting, then it still matters where the story is taking place. Usually though, I’m writing about criminals and similar types so the characters’ sensitivity towards others isn’t usually a top priority so I’m definitely not avoiding bigotry in those instances, but again since I’m not focusing on that as the main point of the story, it’s more of a case that it’s just one aspect of the character’s personality.

One thing that I think is more interesting is to have a multi-layered bigoted character anyway regardless of the setting. Since just like in real life you can meet someone who freely just uses language that would be considered bigoted to some, yet surprisingly doesn’t really hold any extreme personal prejudices against any particular group.

So you could have a character that may still think elves are a bunch of lazy hedonistic tree huggers and refer to them by various slurs, but he still goes out of his way to save one from getting eaten by troll.

(In such cases, the character probably isn’t so much of a hate filled bigot as he is a general insensitive dick.)

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Another thing I’ve seen in settings supposedly without bigotry is for groups of characters to remain disproportionately male… sometimes blatantly (just a mom and a love interest!), sometimes more subtly. If people really have the same opportunities and aren’t being brought up with the idea that certain roles are more naturally one or the other, then the writing should reflect that.

Another point is that bigotry could work in different ways from how it does in our world… and even in our world, has worked differently throughout history in different areas. For example, patriarchies don’t all work the same, and one could design a matriarchy as a setting as well. In a setting with its own history, racial discrimination and stereotypes may have developed along lines that don’t map up with ours. And people could discriminate on a different basis entirely. As we’ve talked about it other threads, there can be a risk of making something that’s just an awkward metaphor for real issues, which can then fall flat… but when done well it can stand on its own as a fuller part of worldbuilding.

All in all, I think that there’s value in settings without bigotry, settings with real-world bigotry, and settings with fictional bigotry, as long as the author really does the work and makes it consistent. It can engage with issues, it can show how things could be, and it can just explore what other settings might be like… especially in fantasy and science fiction, where one of the genre’s strength is exploring alternative possibilities…

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It is certainly interesting to think about! I’d be cautious when altering these sorts of things, though. I mean, personally, I’d be really uncomfortable with someone writing a story where straight people are the ones oppressed by gay people (as an example). Considering our own reality, it comes across as inappropriate at best.

However, as you said, settings throughout history have differed greatly from the present. Structuring a setting inspired by the former is always interesting. Especially with gender roles! Even in within fictional universes, gender roles are often extremely similar to or based on the present.

Take any aliens in fiction, for example. For the most part, they’re either humanoid in nature and roles (including sex as a method of reproduction–so of course any girl alien has to have two titties and wider hips and every other conventionally attractive feature) or they’re extremely far from it. As if aliens would view gender and gender roles at all like we do! The idea is laughable.

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Another issue worth noting is that often writers use settings with discrimination more as an excuse not to write about characters from those disadvantaged groups. Like having few or no women in a story because it’s a patriarchy. But it’s not that hard to have women as important characters even in a patriarchal setting. If anything, writing a bigoted setting should make it more interesting to write about the people marginalized by that than about those who benefit from it.

Hmm… I don’t think I’d feel the same way. I understand, of course, that personal discomfort is, well, personal, so I wouldn’t argue with your feelings. But I think such a setting could be interesting, even enjoyable, if the worldbuilding is done well. Admittedly, one would need to explain how reproduction sustains itself (alien biology? cloning? storks?) and probably also explain how the society got to be that way… but I’d feel more uncomfortable with the idea that, because gay people are underprivileged in our world, we wouldn’t be the privileged ones in an alternate world one could write about. (I do think a matriarchy or an alternate history where somewhere other than Europe became dominant might be easier to design, admittedly…) I sort of feel like that could end up treating gay discrimination as more normal, more expected than the exact opposite… when both are be bad… and I think efforts to explore and describe fictional societies that work on models differently from our own can be one of the strengths of speculative works…

Not that that invalidates your preferences! I just don’t think that such an effort would have to be inappropriate. (Could easily be inappropriate, sure, especially if written as a clumsy allegory…)

Also, seconding you with all that gender role stuff. Just look at how much variation there is across the world about which tasks are “naturally” more feminine or masculine… like how Sumerian bartenders were traditionally women… and aliens wouldn’t be bound by any if the same norms (especially if pregnancy works differently)…

Just about any modern-world bigotry line can, individually, be abandoned in your setting. Just to take history, racism is a fairly modern concept, while homophobia is primarily a concept of Western-derived cultures (which is the entire world now, but that wasn’t the case in the past). The only thing that seems to be universal throughout history is some form of gender roles.

However, I think some kind of -ism is universal. Human social structure is normally hierarchical, and there’s always that need to have someone beneath you to kick when the people above you are kicking down. A setting completely without hierarchy or bigotry would not only be hard to write, it’d feel distinctively unnatural. There’d still be some kind of lines drawn to create us-and-them distinctions and hierarchies.

As for gender roles always seeming the same even in sci-fi, I note that that’s shaped by real-world expectations. It’s a result of the expectation that women in any media of any kind must be attractive.

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