Welcome to the Skellingcorner, tumblr home of a 27 yo weirdo from Luxembourg.
Blog may contain : Films, Series, Books, Games, and the usual weird stuff. Feel free to come and say hi !
“My mission is to get them interested in Star Wars. My only chance is to get the big one hooked first because that’s how my kids work. I pitched Princess Leia as the most important character. I might have told a little lie and said that she was the princess of the entire galaxy. We had our first attempt the other day. I got whiplash checking to see if they were still awake, and I lost both of them before Princess Leia even showed up. I have faith in George Lucas though. We’re scheduling another screening with lots of candy. I think if we can just stay awake for the entire movie, we’ll be ready for The Empire Strikes Back.”
1/2 Hello! I'm writing a sort of fantasy story/series, and the (white) main character is Fae, which is a species of kinda ethereal non-humans. There's a subplot and a lot of little anecdotes about the prejudice she and her father face in mostly human London for being visibly fae. But of course, what my main character experiences may seem a lot like racism, but it isn't - especially because the Fae are literally not people, and feel compassion and emotions in entirely different ways, and are
simply not human, and a lot of the prejudice they encounter is based around that. How do I avoid drawing analogies which suggest that PoC are less human?Secondly, there are dwarves in this fantasy series. A family of dwarves who are quite prominent in the story are Black (originally Djerban, I think) and Jewish. I know that a lot of dwarf tropes in fantasy stem from stereotypes of Jewish people, and I’d like to know how to make sure I don’t stray into those tropes. Thank you for your help!
White-coded Fae + North African Jewish-coded Dwarves
I’d love for you to trace the thought process that led your imagination to come up with a plot where the “pretty” supernatural characters are coded white (and gentile) and the, well, less-pretty supernatural characters are coded as North African Jews.
The Rabbi’s Cat is by a Jewish author. I just wanted to put that image in your mind for a second.
“How do I avoid drawing analogies which suggest that PoC are less human?”
Human characters of color are the best way to establish that your Fae really are something else and not a metaphor for PoC. in my opinion.
>> A family of dwarves who are quite prominent in the story are Black (originally Djerban, I think) and Jewish. I know that a lot of dwarf tropes in fantasy stem from stereotypes of Jewish people, and I’d like to know how to make sure I don’t stray into those tropes.
Why are they Jewish in the first place, then? A piece without Jewish human characters doesn’t really need Jewish dwarves, especially if there aren’t gentile dwarves alongside them. Caveat that if you’re writing from inside the community I have less of a problem with it because this is our nonsense to reclaim if we want.
So, your options if you don’t want to have people go “….why….” are:
Add Jewish humans alongside the Jewish dwarves (or, alternatively, Jewish fae, we never get to be fae… we never get to be anything beautiful like mermaids or fairies or whatever. Dwarves. Lovely. *sobs into knitting project*)
Make the dwarves not Jewish – is there a plot reason they need to be Jewish?
The “dwarf=Jew” trope comes from these stereotypes:
short
hairy
clannish/unfriendly to outsiders without ever bothering to justify, oh, why a marginalized group might do that
avaricious/super into treasure and riches
And possibly a little harder to pick apart, but a weird smoothie of antisemitism/misogyny/transphobia in which our women are supposedly too hairy and too loud to be feminine (which is double bull because women can be as hairy as they want and still be feminine, and nothing’s wrong with being a masculine woman, either.)
So those are the specific tropes you’d want to avoid. But I’d say if you’re gentile, writing Jewish dwarves into a story that doesn’t have any non-dwarf Jews just seems like giving yourself a lot of extra work trying to stay out of the Sarlacc’s mouth. Ya know?
Another office only day. I´m starting to ease into it. It´s less fun than going to press conferences and the like, but it´s also less stress. I don´t dislike it as much as I thought I would.
I might be interviewed myself, as one of the broadcasts will cover the con I went to this weekend. Exciting!
5. make it about their individual mental illness when people of colour mention white anxiety surrounding issues of race as a fundamental aspect of white psychology, as if we’re talking about individual pathologies (which they assume to be innate) rather than how the structures of whiteness work as a whole
4. “yes this makes me so anxious bc I worry that I do this” handwringing whenever people of colour try to express how racist behaviour harms them, again making it about themselves and acting like mental illness has anything to do with it
3. assume that all people of colour (especially those who are talking about racism at the moment) are neurotypical, ignoring the potential of people of colour to be complex human beings as well as the adverse effects of white supremacy on our mental health
2. “i dinfd’t mean to be racisits and nwo eveyrons’s mad at me adn i’m so anxoisu [insert threat of self-harm]”
1. “I have anxiety so I have the right to be afraid of brown and Black people and if you tell me otherwise then you’re ableist”
WWC receive a lot of questions that fall into “white person desperately seeking reassurance they’re not bad people for perpetuating racism” (namely points 5, 4, and sometimes 3), which leads to:
- A lot of repeat questions because people want a rubber stamp that this particular situation is okay, even though they should be able to figure it out based on what we’ve answered before
- A lot of tripping over themselves to apologize and reassure us they just didn’t know they were being harmful when we call them out, derailing the conversation to whether or not they’re good people instead of continuing to discuss the way to stop perpetuating the microaggression
This creates a huge amount of emotional labour for PoC, because there is an expectation we will provide reassurance to people who prioritize their personal mental illness over systematic racism (perpetuating it does not mean you’re a bad person! Not knowing is not a personal fault).
It’s up to white people to create coping strategies to withstand white fragility, not PoC to reassure white people that they’re not terrible for making mistakes.
In my first two posts in this series, I wrote about tips to get you started and common themes in children’s fiction. In today’s posts, I want to write about characters in children’s books.
I'm working on a story about a combat magician, and in it, I need to create 4 unique religions that don't get along. Do you have any advice to give that could help? Thanks!
Creating a unique fictional religion is difficult, there are many bits and bobs involved when creating a concrete, finished religion for your setting, but there’s a sort of template you can follow for many of these things.
Consider: What are the main objects of worship? (e.g. deity, sacred text, sacred lands)
What morals does this religion teach, if any?
What sort of organization does this religion have, and does it have political power within your setting?
Is the religion ‘active’ in the sense that it divinely influenced recent events within the setting?
Keep thinking. What would make this religion harbor enmity for the others? Perhaps the religion is only accessible to a single ethnicity, and so xenophobia may do the rest when it comes to ‘not getting along.’
Even if religions have some things in common, small differences in belief may cause all out war between the two faiths. The theologies do not have to be fully unique, they can be four different versions of the same theology but with different views on some primary beliefs that are inherent to that theology, such as ‘who deserves to be in the sacred land’ and generally things that may be divisive in nature, no matter how small the difference is between two beliefs.
abschaumno1
writerswritecompany
marvellousbee
writingwithcolor
diyandorganization
sweetlittlevampire
fantasy-writing
yourfavouritedoll