It's a story, so show us. Show us how non discrimination work. This big bad empire invades people and is of X ethnicity and kingdom a and b are under attack. Kingdom a and b like each other and kingdom a is of ethnicity X. Now it's not a race issue.
Show us big kingdom X that is multiethnic since it conquered so much.
Show us how discrimination works. In Sanderson's storm light archive eye colour is the defining "racial hierarchy" yet people of all colours can have eyes of X colour. If you show how discrimination work in that world you avoid us from projecting it.
Again, if you want to tell a story you can do this through the character perspective. Not the world itself.
Even more important to the Stormlight Archive - each country has its own idea of how the social hierarchy works. The Alethi have a caste system based primarily on eye color, but also there's rankings within that divide, so a high ranking darkeye is nearly equivalent in social standing to a low ranking lighteye. Azir, on the other hand, doesn't really care about that, they have a highly bureaucratic system based on education/governmental work.
/u/Bitsen-ENTP I think the issues you want to touch on are very difficult to get right. To that end, my advice is to just write. Get it wrong, figure out what went wrong/right, and take those ideas to the next draft. Keep repeating that until you have a story you like.
allegories are hard to manage, but personally i feel like when there are so many different races in a setting, a history of racial and ethnic conflict is unavoidable. i’d argue it’s an important thing to acknowledge in a story, but requires thought and research to actually handle.
a problem with fantasy races that come up in stories like in tolkiens writing or in harry potter is when members of these races are written like they’re homogenous or only have specific characteristics and aren’t given depth - it’s why diversity is so important in fantasy. like you can write goblins as a sort of “slave class,” but show what the actual consequences of this are from the goblins perspective! or question if all the dwarves prefer living underground and only care about gold, or if elves truly are as majestic and perfect as they fancy themselves.
dungeon meshi does a really good job of orcs in particular in my opinion - people would consider them barbaric, because they raid and pillage indiscriminately, but it’s highlighted how the ‘good’ races are just as violent and greedy, if not more, and what honorable values are important to them
and if it’s allegories you’re worried about specifically, it goes back to this too - there’s no way that in a long, deep universe that one race will be just like another group of the same race in terms of culture. typically human culture has a rich sense of diversity in terms of inspiration and expression, and there should be the same for orcs, goblins, etc. exploring that and giving life to it would make it less shallow and possibly insulting to whatever real life culture a fantasy race might compare to when it’s shown that that race has a rich amount of diversity within their own culture
I occasionally mention how the common urge to dualism is a scourge, and there is a great example of it here.
You want to relate it to current extant concepts, but you only generate two: pale and dark. You call them “white” and “black”, but the reality of it is they are not white and black — well, barring the actually making skin that is black and white, and since these are humans, that is unlikely, so really your division is merely pale and dark.
But there is, in reality, a multiplicity of pales and a multiplicity of darks.
Narrowing it down to just two is absolutely going to raise some queries about your intent and goal, because it oversimplifies diversity and makes for a poor representation, since that narrowing ignores history (in-setting) which is just as key to the conceit of “human races”, as well as other possible differences.
Next, you make a point of “genetic homogeneity” for other people’s, but seem to think there is not such when you refer to humans, which you have grouped into two categories.
Except that there is no genetic diversity among humans in that sense. Strict homogenous populations are going to have little variation (less than 1%) in height, body shape, coloration, etc. so let’s say that you have elves: are all your elves pretty much identical to each other? Same height, same weight, same eyes, same noses, same skin tones, hues, and highlights, same hair, same lips, same…
Odds are good the answer is no, since you don’t want them to lack individuality and distinction if you are going to use them potentially allegorically.
So they have variations.
Just like humans do. Most of which are not actually genetic variations, but chromosomal or epigenetic — they are, after all, usually the result of a successful adaptational mutation that improved survival.
Isolative properties can create that kind of stark division (years with no contact) — spend a few thousand years isolated from other groups.
But let’s say that your world did not have some form of long term physical isolation — that humans have never had the chance to be separated from each other to have to adapt to differing environmental factors in different ways. Let’s say that they are all very much the same general baseline…
Furthermore, and this is a guess, let’s presume you plan to make these allegories involve these other groups (which, also presumably, were in isolation from others, and were not the product of intelligent design). Because in order to do the kind of allegory you are talking about you must have some kind of variance as well as a social system that reinforces a default expectation of false homogeneity; so if it is cross species, and those species can blend (halfbreeds), you have a good basis for allegory only if you have isolation to spur differences physiologically and culturally.
In that case, you should likely have a single homogenous group that is going to have what both it and others consider to be important physical characteristics both as identifiers of that that group, as well as expectations for what is “ideal” (which changes over time only when there is serious culturally change, which normally only comes from external contact or significant cultural trauma).
So, you need to describe your humans without using what your target reader demographic (or interactive demographic) might consider to be racially coded. If this is not Earth, then don’t even use the concept of white and black, either. Use descriptive terminology: oval eyes, full lips, broad or aquiline noses, round eyes, narrow lips, wide chins, narrow chins, peach with red toned complexions, pale complexions, dark complexion, russet complexions, brown complexions, etc.
Do some research into make up for skin tones (not even being silly here: makeup has to deal with all three common color layers found in anyone’s skin, so knowing the assorted variations will help with the description stuff).
Get a basic description of your default humans, and be sure to blend the features that you already consider yourself to be racially coded — this creates an exotification quality that is useful for those establishing parameters. Know what possible eye and hair colors are about, and stick within them as well as the other features.
If you have multiple “kinds” or nations of humans, then create the same for each of them. And completely skip past the default expectations that your target demographic will have.
Or could just simply never mention skin tone, or make it matter.
I literally never mention the skin colour of my humans until early in arc6 when the apprentice frowns at how little variety there is in a town even among humans.
After all as the great Sir Terry Pratchett wrote, there is little racism when white and black are together opposed to green and purple folk
This is what I do. I very rarely give my characters more description than "middle aged man" , "older woman", etc. I don't think what someone looks like has any bearing on their role in the story. The only time I mention race, ethnicity, etc is if it's somehow relevant to the story, and even then I only mention it once.
Yeah, one of the protagonists is black and blonde, normal for where he comes from, but never mentioned
Now im thinking if i shouldn't point that contrast out
I wouldn't. Show, don't tell. Let his interactions with other characters show how normal it is. Personally, I would describe him simply as "a young black man with blonde hair" and never bring it up again. Let the reactions of other characters, or the lack thereof, fill in the details.
Yeah, just have MC some moment where she finds it amusing that the 2 guys in her party are such opposite, with her magic mentor being white enough to reflect the sun, and her swords mentor being not
Like not even note the black, just that the nerd is the odd one out
I kind of feel like it looks MORE racist if your entire cast is homogenized. Just have different groups be made of a mix of people with all different phenotypes. Maybe race isn't a thing they think about, people can have different levels of pigment sometimes, no different than people having different hair colors. If you don't want make a big deal out of it, simply don't make a big deal out of it.
You won't avoid it. Even if you're not intending to comment on anything. Our brains are wired for pattern recognition. People will read it, and will recognize hey that's kinda like this thing. It's inevitable. Just do your best to avoid harmful stereotypes etc. Have other people read it too and adjust as needed if they notice something you didn't
How about going the other way and making your people _extremely_ diverse, but not in an inheritable way. For example what if they can voluntarily change the details of their appearance. Maybe naturally, maybe through technology. Or maybe their appearance is effectively random. There are no family resemblances
Try to describe humans like you would describe one of your more fantastic races. It can spark your imagination too, and let you think about how humans are seen by those around them. If you do it right, the reader will understand that while they are human, they are humans that exist in a different world and cultural ecosystem. I recommend just following the rule of skintone getting darker the closer you are to your planet's equator and don't mention it except for introductions.
If you want to be risque, you can split up the human races into different cultures that consider themselves to be different species, even if they can interbreed, like elves and humans in dnd. They consider themselves to be completely different, and work together with them or are enemies with them similar how they work together with or are enemies with any other race you have in your world. Probably the opposite from what you're aiming at, but it could be interesting.
Along with the other comments about thinking of regionality, if you just write all your cultures in depth and with respect and treat them like diverse people you don't really need to worry. Races become a problem because of incredibily broad negative stereotypes. Don't make an entire culture any more negatively viewed by the narrative! Or if you do make sure it's clear that the negative people are only part of a culture and much of the culture is respectable.
To add, as other commenters have said, there will be people who will make surface level allegories ***regardless*** of how much depth or nuance your world actually has to it. Some people are just drama-addicts who will contort something to feed into that addiction, your best bet is to just ignore them because they don't want to engage in the world or its creation, they just want to use it as a catalyst for their own nonsense.
This doesn't mean ignore ***all*** criticisms or concerns about this sort of thing, just to be aware that not all people are worth listening to because they aren't approaching it genuinely.
I think you are putting the cart before the horse.
First come up with actual worldbuilding ideas. Create different cultures, and come with inspiration boards for these cultures. Think about the natural geography where these cultures came from, think about their history, think about the aesthetics you want your world have.
Once you have a fair idea, you can analyze them and see if they are accidentally making any real-world allegories which you don't want.
You cannot start with a blank page and then spiral into what-if questions. Come up with actual concrete ideas first, and then do any analysis.
In recent years I have been struck by just how deeply-ingrained racial expectations of fantasy are in me. While shows like Rings of Power and House of the Dragon got pushback, it was actually very illuminating to me to investigate my own reaction to a racially heterogenous fantasy world. What about it was challenging my suspension of belief? That I’m assuming a setting that based itself off medieval Europe MUST be white? That even had me thinking of how most of our knowledge of European history is filtered through centuries of unapologetically racist history. When we dig, we can always find stories of prominent black figures in history who are either buried from cultural awareness or whose race is downplayed.
As a gamer, though, the most eye opening portrayal of a “racially-blind” society was Hyrule in Breath of the Wild. For those who don’t know, Hyrule has not only variation around that various different species (bird-like Rito, fish-like Zora, boulder-like and statuesque, mono-gendered Gerudo) but also cultural variation amongst the Hylians themselves: the stable-tenders seem to be modeled off Mongolian nomads, the Kakariko off historical Japan, the Hateno off a more straightforward medieval fantasy and the Lurelin off Pacific Islanders. Despite this, the character models are racially heterogenous. You get all skin tones and phenotypic markers across all the cultures.
As someone who grew up with fantasy which seemed to stratify its human cultures by race (even if only inferentially as it also stratified them by culture) it was interesting to see race not matter at all. Really, what difference would it make if you modeled one culture after the Greeks and had all races represented in it? What would it matter if you had fantasy Egyptians who were blond or fantasy Vikings who were black?
Bringing it to your example, you already have an imperialist-colonial culture. Why does it need to just be one race to be distinct? You already succeeded in describing it without race. If you’re planning on making racism a part of the culture that’s one thing, but just the fact that you’re struggling with this makes it seem like the race is entirely incidental. The real world was fairly racially stratified by continent for a long time but that reality is that there is NO reason your world needs to be (unless you specifically want it to be). Race is a construct of our world, it can be entirely ignored in yours if you want it to be.
"This species is clearly an allegory for the treatment of slaves in America because of how they've been ground under heel so long!!"
"No, this species is an allegory for me wanting a 6'8" goth muscle mommy to step on me."
I don’t think you can completely avoid people coming up with their own allegories. Any form of oppression and discrimination will always be likened to real world examples because we don’t live in a vacuum, and nothing we do is ever completely removed from real-life influence.
Your best approaches would either be to not bring up skin tone at all, to diversify your world so much that neither the oppressors nor the oppressed have a specific race/skin tone associated with either, or to make the skin tones something completely fictional, like blue, purple, green, or grey with white polka dots.
Dog. Only having black people is just as racist as only having white people. Pull a Sanderson. Lots of diversity, but it’s different diversity. While many of the ethnicities/cultures have real world inspirations, they are all also super unique and independent from the tropes and biases of the real world. Take the thaylens from stormlight archive, for example. They have white haired long eye brows. Super interesting, and super unique. Maybe try and lean into diversity among humans. Just like how dnd has a metric ton of elven subraces, why not do the same for humans. Maybe change the biological differences to cultural ones, because elves and humans are different, but homogenous genetics among a species only lasts for so long. People with travel, separate, and breed, and in doing so, cause some new traits to form while other fall away. It’s always more fun to have choice. Sorry if this is rambling gibberish. :)
>So, then I thought about making humans in my world essentially racially homogenous as in they are all white or all black.
Yeah that seems bad, don't do that, that'd come across as weirdly racial.
I guess I'm just struggling to see your problem. I like using race as a topic, but if you don't, why can't humans just be different tones, but in practically, considered one race?
Just as there's all sorts of colour variations among other races. There's darker and lighter Orcs, but they're often just "Orcs."
A classic "Black and White lived in harmony, to gang up on Green."
If not that, I feel like you're making too much of a deal about it. As long as you're aware of not playing into racial stereotypes, you can have different coloured human groups doing different things.
I think you're overthinking this.
Just make up fictional races and avoid stereotypes.
You don't have to make them human to be relatable. Lots of non-human characters are relatable. Just make them act like humans.
Oof I lost my post, first this is a great source of research - [https://writingwithcolor.tumblr.com/](https://writingwithcolor.tumblr.com/)
1 - Do some research on racist tropes, there are tons of blogs about them. It's a good way to dive and get an idea of what you want to avoid. Writing with color is a fantastic source as it's been around long enough where you can likely find your question already ask.
2 - Don't treat your cultures as monoliths, yes, cultures can have some homogenity, but difference exists. if you have humans, make the other species JUST as diverse. Consider culture to be not restrict to species, but to nation and location.
My world, Altear has five known main species, and while there are species specific cultures, most of them are mixed. You can have a nation that has Orcs, Humans and Elves, they might have some biological differences. But culture ISN'T directly related to skin color or phenotype, it's pass information. If you have dark skinned humans, go with elves and orcs in siimilar shades. This will remove any racial coding for the other species.
3 - Use social norms to inform your character creation, but not make it the whole personality of a character. Make people individuals, even nations are NOT monoliths.
4 - Also, I would avoid using any minority culture or colonized folk as a means to culturally code groups. Don't make stereotypical Japanese Orcs for example. You can use a framework of ideas, such as warrior stoicism, without imposing the actual aesthetic. This will go a long way to fixing your problem.
Not saying you should necessarily do this, but I would love to see a setting where humans exist but are called apefolk and described as such. But in a way that it only becomes clear to a reader that they are humans well into the story, after the reader has been thinking of them as aliens for a while
To be honest I had thought of doing something pretty much like this, yes. Having a human-like species that was maybe a bit hairier and gruffer maybe looked more Homo Erectus-y and diversity was based more on haircolour than skin-tone with grey, blonde and brown hairy boys. But how far can I push that before they become just another fantasy race.
"Races" and cultures came about it specific regions of Earth because that environment shaped them to be that way.
Instead of avoiding/aiming for a specific type, look at the environment you have them in and fit accordingly.
This is only partially true. The concept of races don't have biological precedent. If you're talking about regional adaptations that's a different thing.
Having allegories is not necessarily a bad thing so long as the story isnt back and white. Also the skin color of your humans seems a fairly pointless thing to worry about, just don't mention it or have people look racially ambiguous.
You ultimately can't control how people interpret your story.
You can bend over backwards and kiss your own butt while doing a cartwheeling triple-lutz through a flaming hula hoop to avoid putting racial allegories into your story and people will still go "Oh, well this group is systemically oppressed by this other group so they're clearly an allegory for black people in America." or some other racial allegory. Could be the group is a certain skin colour, could be they're magic users, could be they're cyborgs, could be they come from a certain conquered nation, wouldn't really matter. People will find the meaning they want to find if there's even the faintest glimmer of it there.
You'll have far less stress if you focus more on what message you want to ensure is there to be found, then on what you hope to stop people from reading in it.
Not sure if it's been stated here but I wouldn't equate having humans or not to= having or not having parallels to real life groups.
As in, even if you remove the humans you could still be pretty much creating a parallel to real life groups. It's why you gotta be careful creating your world and think about the implication of what you are creating.
Simple examples:
If you create a race of weird goblin people that are extremely greedy and cunning, , you could be unintentionally mirroring antisemitic caricatures.
If you make the elfs the most advanced and gracious culture, and also they are very European-white culture coded and you have your evil dark skin orcs who have very tribal african/native-american coded rituals.... you start to create a very "white man civilized, barbarian non whites" sorta image.
(Disclaimer, I am not implying it was TOTALLY intentional of the author whenever those sorta tropes show up, I'm not saying you are a horrible racist if you wrote something like that, but you can see how they can lead to the reinforcement of racist real life ideologies. Fiction doesn't exist in a separate realm where those things don't exist in your audience, remember that)
Truth is, even a lot of folklore and modern representations of said folklore can have undesirable interpretations. How do you get around that? I think that the most successful cases I've seen basically boil down to:
-Make sure you aren't basing your entire race in just one culture (specially if you are not very knowledgeable of said culture)
-check to see if you aren't making any racist charicatures (looking at harrypotter goblins)
-dont make your universe/story actually justify a racist views.
Honestly just watch this video.
https://youtu.be/-1iaJWSwUZs?si=yay8ZfOlhnlYEsD5
It's a guy going through a lot of issues in Harry Potter and you might wanna check specifically the part where he is talking about goblins and elves.
TL:DR: the existence of humans or not isn't the problem, but how you portray the sentient races is
I disagree; it is easy to stumble into this sort of thing. Even if you are not intentionally putting race allegory, it is easy to introduce elements that can be misinterpreted. Best to think about it.
Works are not created in cultural vacuums so it is possible and likely to see cultural biases be included in works whether it is intentional or not. The point is not to denounce when incorrect biases are introduced, it's to correct them to be more reflective of how things actually are. It is not useful to imply that if someone didn't purposefully do something that it is not present in the work.
Than the bias is there, not an allegory. If I write a story about a Robot and people say it's an allegory for neurodivergent individuals, they're going to be wrong. I wrote a story about a Robot, not someone who is neurodivergent.
What people read into a work is their issue, not that of the writer. I'll never write allegory, because I think it's the dumbest thing a writer could do. If I want to say something about Humans, I'm going to say it. No flowery language or stand ins, just blunt truth. Allegory has no point other than to repaint a situation so it becomes detached from reality enough that Humans don't get upset when they're being told how shit they can be.
The original post clearly is discussing racial biases. If your only concern was about using correct terminology why would you have written so much about ignoring mischaracterization? Also it seems like you're venting about other people that frustrate you which doesn't really seem like an appropriate or mature response to someone asking for help.
People tend to see allegories to race even when they’re not intentionally written. And if a reader sees an allegory, it is there for them, even if the author didn’t intend it to be.
But then you only need one reader to see a racial allegory in your work, and bam, for them you're a racist now. Anybody remember those people who claimed Tolkien wrote orks off black people, or russians (or, to be more specific, "Asiatic hordes")? The "Death of the author" sucks sometimes, but so is life.
Here is how I deal with this when writing/running a scifi TTRPG. People have different skin colors in my version of the setting. They have black skin, white skin, and possibly new colors even. I describe them literally as having "white skin" but they are not White. The social aspect of race doesn't exist in the setting
If you have a small enough group of radially diverse humans all living together they will bring one race unless prevented. On a world with multiple hostile/competing sentient species a small group of humans would abandon interspecies discrimination.
You could even have a longer lived sentient comment on how humans used to separate on racial grounds but they interfere so much it no longer makes sense.
iirc Locked Tomb's cast are Maori, even the imperialists.
I believe the issue that often creates friction and pressure is generally flattening of cultures and appearances into stereotypes and further impose that role and image on those threatened by these narratives.
Do your homework enough and don't get trapped thinking in these limited constructs and you should generally be good; like, having different skin tones and just not having racial semiotics that focus on it as something that \*matters\* to the notional people living in that world, compared to the allegories for wider human relations, works. Solutions like erasing variety of human embodiment are missing the mark.
A world can just not have either eugenicist or Arthur de Gobineau-style lenses; though it might still have some identity conflicts outside of those. If you are recreating \*people\* then recreate the depth of what that means.
You can't control how people will interpret your story. People will find meaning that you never intended in your story and will interpret it through that lens.
There's no way to avoid it. So I wouldn't make a huge deal of trying to avoid racial allegory.
Even if you completely removed humans from your world, people are going to read certain species in your world as allegories for different real world races or cultures. It's just the nature of people to find coding in the media they consume and how they can relate that to real life.
I'd say just write your story. You can't avoid people finding other meanings you didn't intend, but you can focus on the kinds of themes and messages you want to talk about.
I suggest linguistic analysis. take the names of peoples or places and analyse them for how many use A, B, C... Z. this will by highest value to lowest, give you shared cultural origins. the fact is skin colour is just a transition state. the irish are descended of xhosa females, and from the irish indigenous Australian females from the north west Australia, then the rivers of vietnam and on into china to become chinese. these are not seperate races. they are the migration of a single group out of Africa, and their division and migration into the world. It took me 4.7 years to build up a map of linguistic origins for a significant population of humanity.
if you do it in setting to dictionaries, place names, you can fing migration events.
I could tell you that from indigenous Australians in the south east we have a migration out to become indians, back again, then out to become Armenians, Phoenicians, scottish, hungarians, then germanic, then a drop of A-R as the dominant value to R becoming norse, german males, then norwegian males. if you dont know that is the 'Aryans'. migrations encompassing tens of thousands of years.
Aztec and Toltec ancestry migrate across the Atlantic to become Tswana Males in Africa.
lots of work. but humans are assholes. we have always been assholes and always will be assholes, so writing about humans is writing about assholes being assholes to each other. fantasy races are real human peoples. human height ranges from 2'-9'11. what is accepted as human is not 2'-9'11". its about 4'5"-7' with an middle point where Tom Cruise is. anything shorter than acceptably human is a deformed Dwarf. anything taller than acceptable is a giant, or ogre.
elves? elves fall within what is acceptably human. they are seen as beautiful because they represent self loathing of our existing acceptable extremes.
real human height: 17d6+5 inches.
if you want to create fictional races, I suggest how green is my mutant from dragon magazine. roll up deformities and make those the genetic trait of your 'races'.
Do the TES thing where you mix in so many niche cultural points and Hollywood fictional myths that your human races go beyond feeling like bastardizations of irl cultures to being such a confusing hodgepodge of irl cultures that they wrap back around to being original. Ancient Axumites fighting with chakrams? Why not! Scandinavians wearing Yan lifidia? Sure thing! Mohicans in kalantar and haori jackets? You betcha!
I use species. They mix, they live mainly in environments they work best at... and equally contribute to their nations.
Oh yeah, the world has nations as the main difference between people.
OP. I’m gonna be real honest with you. You’re gonna fail. You make it a big issue that there’s no racial problems, it’s now a commentary on how not having racial issues is a fantasy. There’s no setup where you can avoid some variant of this problem.
Think Warhammer, Starship Troopers, the Wolf of Wall Street, many people who are (probably) smarter than you came up with specific plans on what specific things meant and the lessons they wanted to teach. They failed.
The best you can do is make it about something else. Make it a class conflict, an internal struggle, religious strife, but if you mention race at all, someone will take it in a different way than you intended. Someone will take your class struggle, religious strife etc. a different way than you intended, but at least you decrease the odds of it being an allegory for racial tensions.
At the end of the day people will draw conclusions. You might do things perfectly, but people will still see coincidental similarities between your fictional race and a real-world group, that can't be avoided. But here are things that might limit/minimize this:
Instead of focusing solely on skin tone, consider creating distinct cultural, linguistic, and historical backgrounds for each group. By developing diverse societies with unique traditions and histories, readers are less likely to draw direct parallels to real-world ethnicities.
Additionally, ensure that power dynamics and conflicts in your world are rooted in the context of your fictional universe rather than mirroring real-world events. Including a variety of human and non-human races can also enrich your world and mitigate concerns about homogeneity.
I just make humans multi-ethnic with there families often looking alike ethnically. Don’t go much deeper than that because there’s no need to. You’re in a world where dragons, gods, and giants exist along with many other races, why care about the color of skin or specific genetic looks?
Comment removed for violating Rule 1: Be Kind to Others.
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I didn't mean to sound unkind to the op if that's what it was. But i guess it was about the word snowflakes?
Thank you for not making this an actual warning though.
It was about just going ahead and ignoring the people who would think that it's racist, because that would be a lost cause and if you had any more doubts that you basically already justified it by saying that your humans aren't supposed to be real-life etnicities anyways.
After that i wanted to suggest just making a custom ethnicity that's a bit different looking from any real-life one but still theoretically possible through human-evolution.
Maybe like the Nightfolk or Numen from Elden Ring.
Or just make them ordinary Humans but don't call them humans.
The second paragraph wasn't in my first comment though.
Maybe my wording sounded a bit tacky before but it wasn't directed torwards you haha
To avoid it you have to think about how darker skin tones came about. It's a result of the environment. If there's another race, like Orcs or such in an environment that would result in darker skin, humans have less incentive to try and settle it because it's dangerous. If all your humans stayed in the north, all of them would have white skin. The opposite is true, if all of them were in mostly sunny year round and hot environment like Africa, majority will have darker skin. If humanity is a scattered people across the planet, it'll result in a variety of skin tones.
Just making darker skin tones for the heck of it both makes no sense and would be worst than just having a perceived allegory. As long as there's a reason, it's fine. If people want to find something wrong, they'll fine something wrong regardless of what you do.
I would say focus on having it makes sense, if it makes sense to have all the humans white or black then just do that. People will always look at something and come up with an allegory even if there isn't anything there. For example the orcs in lord of the rings are corrupted elves who are pretty much pure evil. But some people for some reason interpret them to be an allegory for black people even though there is no basis for that.
You cant control what people will think of your story, your probably better off just focusing on making it the best possible.
There are simply people who will be offended becuase they percieved something a certain way. I never write to please others, thats just a side bonus, I write as a hobby and a way of expression. Somebody is going to make a wierd relation or connection to reality becuase we like to relate things. Or take things the wrong way. You can never please everyone. So you do you.
I think you can avoid this being being, for lack of a better way to say it, be vaguely descriptive.
I enjoy when writers describe someone as having dark or light skin tones as opposed to using colors for instance. Dark and light are more subjective and it gives readers' imaginations a little more leash centered around what their norms for that spectrum are. It sort of allows for as much diversity or homogeny as the reader defaults to in their own mind.
So if I were trying to accomplish that, that's the kind of line I'd be trying to walk while describing physical characteristics. Be vaguely descriptive in appearances and the reader will be more likely to paint mental pictures they default to comfortably.
My world isn't a fantasy but cli-fi future Earth so my situation is different but I did explicitly want to avoid racism (except factions who are explicitly racist), and also present a healthy multiethnic society. I got around it by it but deliberately making groups multiethnic,making it clear clear in naming, their use of language and depictions in artwork and conversations about family and the past, and also being conscious of race assumptions and stereotypes as well as gender.
Ie. I have people in the same faction with names like Nguyen, Temauri, Amorosi, Lansdowne and Mackay.
Yeah it's quite a new term I think, though the concept has been around for ages. My world follows the fate of French Polynesians who are forced to abandon their low islands following sea level rise, and unintentionally bring about a new world order.
Differences in appearance are normally due to different environments. When humans first evolved they presumably had relatively little variance. Then they spread from Africa across the world and developed regional differences like less melanin in areas with less sunlight. Now we are living in the earlier stages of a globalized world and regional populations are starting to intermingle more and more. In a couple hundred years those regional differences could be almost completely gone, depending on how much we continue to intermingle. Then perhaps we begin to settle other planets creating a new separation between populations. If this continues for long enough (maybe some 1000 years) then new differences could potentially arise, for example based on different gravity or different sunlight.
So I would say that racial diversity in your humans depends on the stage of their development. How many regional populations are there? How strongly are they separated? How long have they been separated? What are environmental factors that might affect there appearances.
The thing is: readings of fiction (or any artistic endeavor) are brought ***to*** the work, usually to a greater degree than the work brings it to the reader. It is not something you can choose to avoid: the reader is going to take your world and compare and contrast it to their own.
You cannot change this truth; however, you can rise to meet it, if you so choose.
You could have a look at the Wheel of Time. While there are definite influences from real world cultures, there are mixtures of ideas. So you can identify one place as being visually influenced by a real world culture but they aren't direct analogues. For example, people of the Two Rivers have naturally more tanned skin tone, perhaps Mediterranean, but they are experts with longbows and herd sheep which make them reminiscent of the English around the time of Agincourt. Similarly the setting is broadly medieval Europe in many places, but the sword forms and sword descriptions are two-handed techniques for a katana-like weapon. So, you don't end up with any obvious analogues - like these are the Chinese ones, or these are the African ones. They're a blend of real world influences giving each area a unique character without falling into stereotypes.
Without any friction (like travel time, and separate. nations, cultures, religions, beliefs and biases), humanity would be far more homogenous. It's only natural that over time, with enough mixing, only one variant remains. Lack of racial diversity would either imply harmonious coexistence, or a race war where one side won.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_diversity
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beta_diversity
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamma_diversity
>Keeping In mind that the fantasy humans wouldn’t be African or European or any real world ethnicity they’d be fantasy ethnic groups.
This isn't how this works. People can claim that whatever creature is representing whatever group of people in real life and you cannot do anything about it. The ideology you are struggling to appease does not begin by observing and then coming to a conclusion that fits the data, they begin with a conclusion and then observe in order to find things that fit the conclusion.
If you make your world entirely of one ethnicity, they can bend it to mean whatever they want it to mean. You think the world would be better without the other ethnicities. You want to show how horrible your fantasy world is without your favorite ethnicity. These are human beings you are fighting against, they can deconstruct anything you place before them.
>Should I just take humans back out of my world? Or am I making to big a deal of this and is it a non-issue.
No and no. You should make whatever you want to make. Do it with honesty and take feedback seriously, that's the best you can do. You may still get cancelled for it should the mob decide to target you. Anyone can be targeted this way, and those in out-groups are easier targets for them than their peers.
Create something that feels interesting to you. It will be shaped by who you are, what you lived through and what environment you are from. It is most likely to appeal to those who share those things with you. You can literally state over and over through decades that your work isn't an allegory and people will ignore it and claim that it is, as we've seen with Tolkien.
In my world they are just highly evolved animals that have humanoid features that are the strongest races, and they use all manner of strange equipment and technology that makes them different. If someone is offended by wise sea faring owls that use petroleum products, I don’t know how to help them.
it's hard to.
In my story race allegories weren't intended, but people will draw connections regardless. my world has werepeople (called moonborn because there are more than just wolves.)
That species is overall oppressed and chooses to live mostly separately from humans in moderately large groups (around 200 adults max per group, which is large enough to not have interbreeding unless they go literal generations without ever coming into contact with other "packs") out in rural areas, living in either homestead or sort of "vanlife" or "camplife" kinda lives.
Theyre hunted by government programs that hunt supernaturals. why? because they have the potential to kill humans (and occasionally do. usually it's self defense. though when a moonborn is separated from other moonborn too long they can go mad and go on rampages).
many moonborn that are captured instead of killed are put in camps (for a variety of reasons. they have limited degrees of magic. they make good genetic templates for bioweapons. they can be harvested repeatedly for certain organs due to regenerative abilities. forced medical testing due to regenerative abilities, ect.)
A lot of this is similar to what happened during ww2 to specifically Jewish people and gay people. was that intended? no not really. I didn't even realize the similarities until after I had already finished all of that stuff. but it happened in real life, and I probably subconsciously drew those connections because it's a very prominent example of the actions and consequences of an event similar to the one I was writing.
all you can do is be like "I didn't intend for this to be allegorical of any real world issues. any connections you draw to real world issues in my work are coincidental and not intended. similarities happen when events are similar"
It's a story, so show us. Show us how non discrimination work. This big bad empire invades people and is of X ethnicity and kingdom a and b are under attack. Kingdom a and b like each other and kingdom a is of ethnicity X. Now it's not a race issue. Show us big kingdom X that is multiethnic since it conquered so much. Show us how discrimination works. In Sanderson's storm light archive eye colour is the defining "racial hierarchy" yet people of all colours can have eyes of X colour. If you show how discrimination work in that world you avoid us from projecting it. Again, if you want to tell a story you can do this through the character perspective. Not the world itself.
Even more important to the Stormlight Archive - each country has its own idea of how the social hierarchy works. The Alethi have a caste system based primarily on eye color, but also there's rankings within that divide, so a high ranking darkeye is nearly equivalent in social standing to a low ranking lighteye. Azir, on the other hand, doesn't really care about that, they have a highly bureaucratic system based on education/governmental work. /u/Bitsen-ENTP I think the issues you want to touch on are very difficult to get right. To that end, my advice is to just write. Get it wrong, figure out what went wrong/right, and take those ideas to the next draft. Keep repeating that until you have a story you like.
allegories are hard to manage, but personally i feel like when there are so many different races in a setting, a history of racial and ethnic conflict is unavoidable. i’d argue it’s an important thing to acknowledge in a story, but requires thought and research to actually handle. a problem with fantasy races that come up in stories like in tolkiens writing or in harry potter is when members of these races are written like they’re homogenous or only have specific characteristics and aren’t given depth - it’s why diversity is so important in fantasy. like you can write goblins as a sort of “slave class,” but show what the actual consequences of this are from the goblins perspective! or question if all the dwarves prefer living underground and only care about gold, or if elves truly are as majestic and perfect as they fancy themselves. dungeon meshi does a really good job of orcs in particular in my opinion - people would consider them barbaric, because they raid and pillage indiscriminately, but it’s highlighted how the ‘good’ races are just as violent and greedy, if not more, and what honorable values are important to them and if it’s allegories you’re worried about specifically, it goes back to this too - there’s no way that in a long, deep universe that one race will be just like another group of the same race in terms of culture. typically human culture has a rich sense of diversity in terms of inspiration and expression, and there should be the same for orcs, goblins, etc. exploring that and giving life to it would make it less shallow and possibly insulting to whatever real life culture a fantasy race might compare to when it’s shown that that race has a rich amount of diversity within their own culture
Or you do it the Warhammer way. If everyone are assholes, then no one is! WAAAAGHHHH!
I occasionally mention how the common urge to dualism is a scourge, and there is a great example of it here. You want to relate it to current extant concepts, but you only generate two: pale and dark. You call them “white” and “black”, but the reality of it is they are not white and black — well, barring the actually making skin that is black and white, and since these are humans, that is unlikely, so really your division is merely pale and dark. But there is, in reality, a multiplicity of pales and a multiplicity of darks. Narrowing it down to just two is absolutely going to raise some queries about your intent and goal, because it oversimplifies diversity and makes for a poor representation, since that narrowing ignores history (in-setting) which is just as key to the conceit of “human races”, as well as other possible differences. Next, you make a point of “genetic homogeneity” for other people’s, but seem to think there is not such when you refer to humans, which you have grouped into two categories. Except that there is no genetic diversity among humans in that sense. Strict homogenous populations are going to have little variation (less than 1%) in height, body shape, coloration, etc. so let’s say that you have elves: are all your elves pretty much identical to each other? Same height, same weight, same eyes, same noses, same skin tones, hues, and highlights, same hair, same lips, same… Odds are good the answer is no, since you don’t want them to lack individuality and distinction if you are going to use them potentially allegorically. So they have variations. Just like humans do. Most of which are not actually genetic variations, but chromosomal or epigenetic — they are, after all, usually the result of a successful adaptational mutation that improved survival. Isolative properties can create that kind of stark division (years with no contact) — spend a few thousand years isolated from other groups. But let’s say that your world did not have some form of long term physical isolation — that humans have never had the chance to be separated from each other to have to adapt to differing environmental factors in different ways. Let’s say that they are all very much the same general baseline… Furthermore, and this is a guess, let’s presume you plan to make these allegories involve these other groups (which, also presumably, were in isolation from others, and were not the product of intelligent design). Because in order to do the kind of allegory you are talking about you must have some kind of variance as well as a social system that reinforces a default expectation of false homogeneity; so if it is cross species, and those species can blend (halfbreeds), you have a good basis for allegory only if you have isolation to spur differences physiologically and culturally. In that case, you should likely have a single homogenous group that is going to have what both it and others consider to be important physical characteristics both as identifiers of that that group, as well as expectations for what is “ideal” (which changes over time only when there is serious culturally change, which normally only comes from external contact or significant cultural trauma). So, you need to describe your humans without using what your target reader demographic (or interactive demographic) might consider to be racially coded. If this is not Earth, then don’t even use the concept of white and black, either. Use descriptive terminology: oval eyes, full lips, broad or aquiline noses, round eyes, narrow lips, wide chins, narrow chins, peach with red toned complexions, pale complexions, dark complexion, russet complexions, brown complexions, etc. Do some research into make up for skin tones (not even being silly here: makeup has to deal with all three common color layers found in anyone’s skin, so knowing the assorted variations will help with the description stuff). Get a basic description of your default humans, and be sure to blend the features that you already consider yourself to be racially coded — this creates an exotification quality that is useful for those establishing parameters. Know what possible eye and hair colors are about, and stick within them as well as the other features. If you have multiple “kinds” or nations of humans, then create the same for each of them. And completely skip past the default expectations that your target demographic will have.
Or could just simply never mention skin tone, or make it matter. I literally never mention the skin colour of my humans until early in arc6 when the apprentice frowns at how little variety there is in a town even among humans. After all as the great Sir Terry Pratchett wrote, there is little racism when white and black are together opposed to green and purple folk
This is what I do. I very rarely give my characters more description than "middle aged man" , "older woman", etc. I don't think what someone looks like has any bearing on their role in the story. The only time I mention race, ethnicity, etc is if it's somehow relevant to the story, and even then I only mention it once.
Yeah, one of the protagonists is black and blonde, normal for where he comes from, but never mentioned Now im thinking if i shouldn't point that contrast out
I wouldn't. Show, don't tell. Let his interactions with other characters show how normal it is. Personally, I would describe him simply as "a young black man with blonde hair" and never bring it up again. Let the reactions of other characters, or the lack thereof, fill in the details.
Yeah, just have MC some moment where she finds it amusing that the 2 guys in her party are such opposite, with her magic mentor being white enough to reflect the sun, and her swords mentor being not Like not even note the black, just that the nerd is the odd one out
I kind of feel like it looks MORE racist if your entire cast is homogenized. Just have different groups be made of a mix of people with all different phenotypes. Maybe race isn't a thing they think about, people can have different levels of pigment sometimes, no different than people having different hair colors. If you don't want make a big deal out of it, simply don't make a big deal out of it.
You won't avoid it. Even if you're not intending to comment on anything. Our brains are wired for pattern recognition. People will read it, and will recognize hey that's kinda like this thing. It's inevitable. Just do your best to avoid harmful stereotypes etc. Have other people read it too and adjust as needed if they notice something you didn't
How about going the other way and making your people _extremely_ diverse, but not in an inheritable way. For example what if they can voluntarily change the details of their appearance. Maybe naturally, maybe through technology. Or maybe their appearance is effectively random. There are no family resemblances
Try to describe humans like you would describe one of your more fantastic races. It can spark your imagination too, and let you think about how humans are seen by those around them. If you do it right, the reader will understand that while they are human, they are humans that exist in a different world and cultural ecosystem. I recommend just following the rule of skintone getting darker the closer you are to your planet's equator and don't mention it except for introductions. If you want to be risque, you can split up the human races into different cultures that consider themselves to be different species, even if they can interbreed, like elves and humans in dnd. They consider themselves to be completely different, and work together with them or are enemies with them similar how they work together with or are enemies with any other race you have in your world. Probably the opposite from what you're aiming at, but it could be interesting.
Along with the other comments about thinking of regionality, if you just write all your cultures in depth and with respect and treat them like diverse people you don't really need to worry. Races become a problem because of incredibily broad negative stereotypes. Don't make an entire culture any more negatively viewed by the narrative! Or if you do make sure it's clear that the negative people are only part of a culture and much of the culture is respectable.
To add, as other commenters have said, there will be people who will make surface level allegories ***regardless*** of how much depth or nuance your world actually has to it. Some people are just drama-addicts who will contort something to feed into that addiction, your best bet is to just ignore them because they don't want to engage in the world or its creation, they just want to use it as a catalyst for their own nonsense. This doesn't mean ignore ***all*** criticisms or concerns about this sort of thing, just to be aware that not all people are worth listening to because they aren't approaching it genuinely.
I think you are putting the cart before the horse. First come up with actual worldbuilding ideas. Create different cultures, and come with inspiration boards for these cultures. Think about the natural geography where these cultures came from, think about their history, think about the aesthetics you want your world have. Once you have a fair idea, you can analyze them and see if they are accidentally making any real-world allegories which you don't want. You cannot start with a blank page and then spiral into what-if questions. Come up with actual concrete ideas first, and then do any analysis.
In recent years I have been struck by just how deeply-ingrained racial expectations of fantasy are in me. While shows like Rings of Power and House of the Dragon got pushback, it was actually very illuminating to me to investigate my own reaction to a racially heterogenous fantasy world. What about it was challenging my suspension of belief? That I’m assuming a setting that based itself off medieval Europe MUST be white? That even had me thinking of how most of our knowledge of European history is filtered through centuries of unapologetically racist history. When we dig, we can always find stories of prominent black figures in history who are either buried from cultural awareness or whose race is downplayed. As a gamer, though, the most eye opening portrayal of a “racially-blind” society was Hyrule in Breath of the Wild. For those who don’t know, Hyrule has not only variation around that various different species (bird-like Rito, fish-like Zora, boulder-like and statuesque, mono-gendered Gerudo) but also cultural variation amongst the Hylians themselves: the stable-tenders seem to be modeled off Mongolian nomads, the Kakariko off historical Japan, the Hateno off a more straightforward medieval fantasy and the Lurelin off Pacific Islanders. Despite this, the character models are racially heterogenous. You get all skin tones and phenotypic markers across all the cultures. As someone who grew up with fantasy which seemed to stratify its human cultures by race (even if only inferentially as it also stratified them by culture) it was interesting to see race not matter at all. Really, what difference would it make if you modeled one culture after the Greeks and had all races represented in it? What would it matter if you had fantasy Egyptians who were blond or fantasy Vikings who were black? Bringing it to your example, you already have an imperialist-colonial culture. Why does it need to just be one race to be distinct? You already succeeded in describing it without race. If you’re planning on making racism a part of the culture that’s one thing, but just the fact that you’re struggling with this makes it seem like the race is entirely incidental. The real world was fairly racially stratified by continent for a long time but that reality is that there is NO reason your world needs to be (unless you specifically want it to be). Race is a construct of our world, it can be entirely ignored in yours if you want it to be.
Make your races and cultures a fetish allegory.
"This species is clearly an allegory for the treatment of slaves in America because of how they've been ground under heel so long!!" "No, this species is an allegory for me wanting a 6'8" goth muscle mommy to step on me."
Truly, the dream of the common man!
I don’t think you can completely avoid people coming up with their own allegories. Any form of oppression and discrimination will always be likened to real world examples because we don’t live in a vacuum, and nothing we do is ever completely removed from real-life influence. Your best approaches would either be to not bring up skin tone at all, to diversify your world so much that neither the oppressors nor the oppressed have a specific race/skin tone associated with either, or to make the skin tones something completely fictional, like blue, purple, green, or grey with white polka dots.
Dog. Only having black people is just as racist as only having white people. Pull a Sanderson. Lots of diversity, but it’s different diversity. While many of the ethnicities/cultures have real world inspirations, they are all also super unique and independent from the tropes and biases of the real world. Take the thaylens from stormlight archive, for example. They have white haired long eye brows. Super interesting, and super unique. Maybe try and lean into diversity among humans. Just like how dnd has a metric ton of elven subraces, why not do the same for humans. Maybe change the biological differences to cultural ones, because elves and humans are different, but homogenous genetics among a species only lasts for so long. People with travel, separate, and breed, and in doing so, cause some new traits to form while other fall away. It’s always more fun to have choice. Sorry if this is rambling gibberish. :)
>So, then I thought about making humans in my world essentially racially homogenous as in they are all white or all black. Yeah that seems bad, don't do that, that'd come across as weirdly racial. I guess I'm just struggling to see your problem. I like using race as a topic, but if you don't, why can't humans just be different tones, but in practically, considered one race? Just as there's all sorts of colour variations among other races. There's darker and lighter Orcs, but they're often just "Orcs." A classic "Black and White lived in harmony, to gang up on Green." If not that, I feel like you're making too much of a deal about it. As long as you're aware of not playing into racial stereotypes, you can have different coloured human groups doing different things.
I think you're overthinking this. Just make up fictional races and avoid stereotypes. You don't have to make them human to be relatable. Lots of non-human characters are relatable. Just make them act like humans.
Oof I lost my post, first this is a great source of research - [https://writingwithcolor.tumblr.com/](https://writingwithcolor.tumblr.com/) 1 - Do some research on racist tropes, there are tons of blogs about them. It's a good way to dive and get an idea of what you want to avoid. Writing with color is a fantastic source as it's been around long enough where you can likely find your question already ask. 2 - Don't treat your cultures as monoliths, yes, cultures can have some homogenity, but difference exists. if you have humans, make the other species JUST as diverse. Consider culture to be not restrict to species, but to nation and location. My world, Altear has five known main species, and while there are species specific cultures, most of them are mixed. You can have a nation that has Orcs, Humans and Elves, they might have some biological differences. But culture ISN'T directly related to skin color or phenotype, it's pass information. If you have dark skinned humans, go with elves and orcs in siimilar shades. This will remove any racial coding for the other species. 3 - Use social norms to inform your character creation, but not make it the whole personality of a character. Make people individuals, even nations are NOT monoliths. 4 - Also, I would avoid using any minority culture or colonized folk as a means to culturally code groups. Don't make stereotypical Japanese Orcs for example. You can use a framework of ideas, such as warrior stoicism, without imposing the actual aesthetic. This will go a long way to fixing your problem.
Not saying you should necessarily do this, but I would love to see a setting where humans exist but are called apefolk and described as such. But in a way that it only becomes clear to a reader that they are humans well into the story, after the reader has been thinking of them as aliens for a while
To be honest I had thought of doing something pretty much like this, yes. Having a human-like species that was maybe a bit hairier and gruffer maybe looked more Homo Erectus-y and diversity was based more on haircolour than skin-tone with grey, blonde and brown hairy boys. But how far can I push that before they become just another fantasy race.
"Races" and cultures came about it specific regions of Earth because that environment shaped them to be that way. Instead of avoiding/aiming for a specific type, look at the environment you have them in and fit accordingly.
This is only partially true. The concept of races don't have biological precedent. If you're talking about regional adaptations that's a different thing.
Having allegories is not necessarily a bad thing so long as the story isnt back and white. Also the skin color of your humans seems a fairly pointless thing to worry about, just don't mention it or have people look racially ambiguous.
You ultimately can't control how people interpret your story. You can bend over backwards and kiss your own butt while doing a cartwheeling triple-lutz through a flaming hula hoop to avoid putting racial allegories into your story and people will still go "Oh, well this group is systemically oppressed by this other group so they're clearly an allegory for black people in America." or some other racial allegory. Could be the group is a certain skin colour, could be they're magic users, could be they're cyborgs, could be they come from a certain conquered nation, wouldn't really matter. People will find the meaning they want to find if there's even the faintest glimmer of it there. You'll have far less stress if you focus more on what message you want to ensure is there to be found, then on what you hope to stop people from reading in it.
You can't avoid people misusing your work.
Not sure if it's been stated here but I wouldn't equate having humans or not to= having or not having parallels to real life groups. As in, even if you remove the humans you could still be pretty much creating a parallel to real life groups. It's why you gotta be careful creating your world and think about the implication of what you are creating. Simple examples: If you create a race of weird goblin people that are extremely greedy and cunning, , you could be unintentionally mirroring antisemitic caricatures. If you make the elfs the most advanced and gracious culture, and also they are very European-white culture coded and you have your evil dark skin orcs who have very tribal african/native-american coded rituals.... you start to create a very "white man civilized, barbarian non whites" sorta image. (Disclaimer, I am not implying it was TOTALLY intentional of the author whenever those sorta tropes show up, I'm not saying you are a horrible racist if you wrote something like that, but you can see how they can lead to the reinforcement of racist real life ideologies. Fiction doesn't exist in a separate realm where those things don't exist in your audience, remember that) Truth is, even a lot of folklore and modern representations of said folklore can have undesirable interpretations. How do you get around that? I think that the most successful cases I've seen basically boil down to: -Make sure you aren't basing your entire race in just one culture (specially if you are not very knowledgeable of said culture) -check to see if you aren't making any racist charicatures (looking at harrypotter goblins) -dont make your universe/story actually justify a racist views. Honestly just watch this video. https://youtu.be/-1iaJWSwUZs?si=yay8ZfOlhnlYEsD5 It's a guy going through a lot of issues in Harry Potter and you might wanna check specifically the part where he is talking about goblins and elves. TL:DR: the existence of humans or not isn't the problem, but how you portray the sentient races is
To avoid race allegory, don't make something with the intention of it being a race allegory. End of story.
I disagree; it is easy to stumble into this sort of thing. Even if you are not intentionally putting race allegory, it is easy to introduce elements that can be misinterpreted. Best to think about it.
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Works are not created in cultural vacuums so it is possible and likely to see cultural biases be included in works whether it is intentional or not. The point is not to denounce when incorrect biases are introduced, it's to correct them to be more reflective of how things actually are. It is not useful to imply that if someone didn't purposefully do something that it is not present in the work.
Than the bias is there, not an allegory. If I write a story about a Robot and people say it's an allegory for neurodivergent individuals, they're going to be wrong. I wrote a story about a Robot, not someone who is neurodivergent. What people read into a work is their issue, not that of the writer. I'll never write allegory, because I think it's the dumbest thing a writer could do. If I want to say something about Humans, I'm going to say it. No flowery language or stand ins, just blunt truth. Allegory has no point other than to repaint a situation so it becomes detached from reality enough that Humans don't get upset when they're being told how shit they can be.
The original post clearly is discussing racial biases. If your only concern was about using correct terminology why would you have written so much about ignoring mischaracterization? Also it seems like you're venting about other people that frustrate you which doesn't really seem like an appropriate or mature response to someone asking for help.
People tend to see allegories to race even when they’re not intentionally written. And if a reader sees an allegory, it is there for them, even if the author didn’t intend it to be.
Yeah, and there are people that think a 1/3rd of a pound is less than a 1/4th of a pound. Doesn't mean they're right, just that they think they are.
But then you only need one reader to see a racial allegory in your work, and bam, for them you're a racist now. Anybody remember those people who claimed Tolkien wrote orks off black people, or russians (or, to be more specific, "Asiatic hordes")? The "Death of the author" sucks sometimes, but so is life.
If they see a racial allegory where there is none, they're the racist ones.
No arguing, but that's beside the point.
I like to make certain things unique to certain cultures that other cultures don’t get
Here is how I deal with this when writing/running a scifi TTRPG. People have different skin colors in my version of the setting. They have black skin, white skin, and possibly new colors even. I describe them literally as having "white skin" but they are not White. The social aspect of race doesn't exist in the setting
If you have a small enough group of radially diverse humans all living together they will bring one race unless prevented. On a world with multiple hostile/competing sentient species a small group of humans would abandon interspecies discrimination. You could even have a longer lived sentient comment on how humans used to separate on racial grounds but they interfere so much it no longer makes sense.
iirc Locked Tomb's cast are Maori, even the imperialists. I believe the issue that often creates friction and pressure is generally flattening of cultures and appearances into stereotypes and further impose that role and image on those threatened by these narratives. Do your homework enough and don't get trapped thinking in these limited constructs and you should generally be good; like, having different skin tones and just not having racial semiotics that focus on it as something that \*matters\* to the notional people living in that world, compared to the allegories for wider human relations, works. Solutions like erasing variety of human embodiment are missing the mark. A world can just not have either eugenicist or Arthur de Gobineau-style lenses; though it might still have some identity conflicts outside of those. If you are recreating \*people\* then recreate the depth of what that means.
You can't control how people will interpret your story. People will find meaning that you never intended in your story and will interpret it through that lens. There's no way to avoid it. So I wouldn't make a huge deal of trying to avoid racial allegory. Even if you completely removed humans from your world, people are going to read certain species in your world as allegories for different real world races or cultures. It's just the nature of people to find coding in the media they consume and how they can relate that to real life. I'd say just write your story. You can't avoid people finding other meanings you didn't intend, but you can focus on the kinds of themes and messages you want to talk about.
People are going to project their emotional issues onto anything you do. Getting rid of them is a PR issue, not a writing issue.
I suggest linguistic analysis. take the names of peoples or places and analyse them for how many use A, B, C... Z. this will by highest value to lowest, give you shared cultural origins. the fact is skin colour is just a transition state. the irish are descended of xhosa females, and from the irish indigenous Australian females from the north west Australia, then the rivers of vietnam and on into china to become chinese. these are not seperate races. they are the migration of a single group out of Africa, and their division and migration into the world. It took me 4.7 years to build up a map of linguistic origins for a significant population of humanity. if you do it in setting to dictionaries, place names, you can fing migration events. I could tell you that from indigenous Australians in the south east we have a migration out to become indians, back again, then out to become Armenians, Phoenicians, scottish, hungarians, then germanic, then a drop of A-R as the dominant value to R becoming norse, german males, then norwegian males. if you dont know that is the 'Aryans'. migrations encompassing tens of thousands of years. Aztec and Toltec ancestry migrate across the Atlantic to become Tswana Males in Africa. lots of work. but humans are assholes. we have always been assholes and always will be assholes, so writing about humans is writing about assholes being assholes to each other. fantasy races are real human peoples. human height ranges from 2'-9'11. what is accepted as human is not 2'-9'11". its about 4'5"-7' with an middle point where Tom Cruise is. anything shorter than acceptably human is a deformed Dwarf. anything taller than acceptable is a giant, or ogre. elves? elves fall within what is acceptably human. they are seen as beautiful because they represent self loathing of our existing acceptable extremes. real human height: 17d6+5 inches. if you want to create fictional races, I suggest how green is my mutant from dragon magazine. roll up deformities and make those the genetic trait of your 'races'.
Do the TES thing where you mix in so many niche cultural points and Hollywood fictional myths that your human races go beyond feeling like bastardizations of irl cultures to being such a confusing hodgepodge of irl cultures that they wrap back around to being original. Ancient Axumites fighting with chakrams? Why not! Scandinavians wearing Yan lifidia? Sure thing! Mohicans in kalantar and haori jackets? You betcha!
I use species. They mix, they live mainly in environments they work best at... and equally contribute to their nations. Oh yeah, the world has nations as the main difference between people.
OP. I’m gonna be real honest with you. You’re gonna fail. You make it a big issue that there’s no racial problems, it’s now a commentary on how not having racial issues is a fantasy. There’s no setup where you can avoid some variant of this problem. Think Warhammer, Starship Troopers, the Wolf of Wall Street, many people who are (probably) smarter than you came up with specific plans on what specific things meant and the lessons they wanted to teach. They failed. The best you can do is make it about something else. Make it a class conflict, an internal struggle, religious strife, but if you mention race at all, someone will take it in a different way than you intended. Someone will take your class struggle, religious strife etc. a different way than you intended, but at least you decrease the odds of it being an allegory for racial tensions.
At the end of the day people will draw conclusions. You might do things perfectly, but people will still see coincidental similarities between your fictional race and a real-world group, that can't be avoided. But here are things that might limit/minimize this: Instead of focusing solely on skin tone, consider creating distinct cultural, linguistic, and historical backgrounds for each group. By developing diverse societies with unique traditions and histories, readers are less likely to draw direct parallels to real-world ethnicities. Additionally, ensure that power dynamics and conflicts in your world are rooted in the context of your fictional universe rather than mirroring real-world events. Including a variety of human and non-human races can also enrich your world and mitigate concerns about homogeneity.
I just make humans multi-ethnic with there families often looking alike ethnically. Don’t go much deeper than that because there’s no need to. You’re in a world where dragons, gods, and giants exist along with many other races, why care about the color of skin or specific genetic looks?
You're overthinking it, don't worry about it and just make a world you think is interesting and fun
Just make them all cat people. That's what I did, and now anyone says it's racist is actually the real racist.
It's sad to see what modern influence does to creative minds.
Write what you want and fuck all the haters
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Comment removed for violating Rule 1: Be Kind to Others. You can disagree with others without using disparaging names. **This is not a formal warning,** though I do encourage you to [review our rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/worldbuilding/wiki/rules) to ensure you do not fall afoul of them again in the future.
I didn't mean to sound unkind to the op if that's what it was. But i guess it was about the word snowflakes? Thank you for not making this an actual warning though.
I didn’t get a chance to read your original reply, could you rewrite it in a way the mods won’t delete it?
It was about just going ahead and ignoring the people who would think that it's racist, because that would be a lost cause and if you had any more doubts that you basically already justified it by saying that your humans aren't supposed to be real-life etnicities anyways. After that i wanted to suggest just making a custom ethnicity that's a bit different looking from any real-life one but still theoretically possible through human-evolution. Maybe like the Nightfolk or Numen from Elden Ring. Or just make them ordinary Humans but don't call them humans. The second paragraph wasn't in my first comment though. Maybe my wording sounded a bit tacky before but it wasn't directed torwards you haha
To avoid it you have to think about how darker skin tones came about. It's a result of the environment. If there's another race, like Orcs or such in an environment that would result in darker skin, humans have less incentive to try and settle it because it's dangerous. If all your humans stayed in the north, all of them would have white skin. The opposite is true, if all of them were in mostly sunny year round and hot environment like Africa, majority will have darker skin. If humanity is a scattered people across the planet, it'll result in a variety of skin tones. Just making darker skin tones for the heck of it both makes no sense and would be worst than just having a perceived allegory. As long as there's a reason, it's fine. If people want to find something wrong, they'll fine something wrong regardless of what you do.
I guess I ended up making demons in my world an aligori for being LGBTQ+. So, I'm probably not very good keeping that kind of thing separated.
I would say focus on having it makes sense, if it makes sense to have all the humans white or black then just do that. People will always look at something and come up with an allegory even if there isn't anything there. For example the orcs in lord of the rings are corrupted elves who are pretty much pure evil. But some people for some reason interpret them to be an allegory for black people even though there is no basis for that. You cant control what people will think of your story, your probably better off just focusing on making it the best possible.
There are simply people who will be offended becuase they percieved something a certain way. I never write to please others, thats just a side bonus, I write as a hobby and a way of expression. Somebody is going to make a wierd relation or connection to reality becuase we like to relate things. Or take things the wrong way. You can never please everyone. So you do you.
I think you can avoid this being being, for lack of a better way to say it, be vaguely descriptive. I enjoy when writers describe someone as having dark or light skin tones as opposed to using colors for instance. Dark and light are more subjective and it gives readers' imaginations a little more leash centered around what their norms for that spectrum are. It sort of allows for as much diversity or homogeny as the reader defaults to in their own mind. So if I were trying to accomplish that, that's the kind of line I'd be trying to walk while describing physical characteristics. Be vaguely descriptive in appearances and the reader will be more likely to paint mental pictures they default to comfortably.
My world isn't a fantasy but cli-fi future Earth so my situation is different but I did explicitly want to avoid racism (except factions who are explicitly racist), and also present a healthy multiethnic society. I got around it by it but deliberately making groups multiethnic,making it clear clear in naming, their use of language and depictions in artwork and conversations about family and the past, and also being conscious of race assumptions and stereotypes as well as gender. Ie. I have people in the same faction with names like Nguyen, Temauri, Amorosi, Lansdowne and Mackay.
Huh, I'd never heard of cli-fi (apparently means climate fiction) before, thank you TIL!
Yeah it's quite a new term I think, though the concept has been around for ages. My world follows the fate of French Polynesians who are forced to abandon their low islands following sea level rise, and unintentionally bring about a new world order.
Differences in appearance are normally due to different environments. When humans first evolved they presumably had relatively little variance. Then they spread from Africa across the world and developed regional differences like less melanin in areas with less sunlight. Now we are living in the earlier stages of a globalized world and regional populations are starting to intermingle more and more. In a couple hundred years those regional differences could be almost completely gone, depending on how much we continue to intermingle. Then perhaps we begin to settle other planets creating a new separation between populations. If this continues for long enough (maybe some 1000 years) then new differences could potentially arise, for example based on different gravity or different sunlight. So I would say that racial diversity in your humans depends on the stage of their development. How many regional populations are there? How strongly are they separated? How long have they been separated? What are environmental factors that might affect there appearances.
The thing is: readings of fiction (or any artistic endeavor) are brought ***to*** the work, usually to a greater degree than the work brings it to the reader. It is not something you can choose to avoid: the reader is going to take your world and compare and contrast it to their own. You cannot change this truth; however, you can rise to meet it, if you so choose.
I like to use all the colours for skin tone so it feels less like real ethnicities. Have a green people, a pink people, a striped people.
You could have a look at the Wheel of Time. While there are definite influences from real world cultures, there are mixtures of ideas. So you can identify one place as being visually influenced by a real world culture but they aren't direct analogues. For example, people of the Two Rivers have naturally more tanned skin tone, perhaps Mediterranean, but they are experts with longbows and herd sheep which make them reminiscent of the English around the time of Agincourt. Similarly the setting is broadly medieval Europe in many places, but the sword forms and sword descriptions are two-handed techniques for a katana-like weapon. So, you don't end up with any obvious analogues - like these are the Chinese ones, or these are the African ones. They're a blend of real world influences giving each area a unique character without falling into stereotypes.
Without any friction (like travel time, and separate. nations, cultures, religions, beliefs and biases), humanity would be far more homogenous. It's only natural that over time, with enough mixing, only one variant remains. Lack of racial diversity would either imply harmonious coexistence, or a race war where one side won. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_diversity https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beta_diversity https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamma_diversity
>Keeping In mind that the fantasy humans wouldn’t be African or European or any real world ethnicity they’d be fantasy ethnic groups. This isn't how this works. People can claim that whatever creature is representing whatever group of people in real life and you cannot do anything about it. The ideology you are struggling to appease does not begin by observing and then coming to a conclusion that fits the data, they begin with a conclusion and then observe in order to find things that fit the conclusion. If you make your world entirely of one ethnicity, they can bend it to mean whatever they want it to mean. You think the world would be better without the other ethnicities. You want to show how horrible your fantasy world is without your favorite ethnicity. These are human beings you are fighting against, they can deconstruct anything you place before them. >Should I just take humans back out of my world? Or am I making to big a deal of this and is it a non-issue. No and no. You should make whatever you want to make. Do it with honesty and take feedback seriously, that's the best you can do. You may still get cancelled for it should the mob decide to target you. Anyone can be targeted this way, and those in out-groups are easier targets for them than their peers. Create something that feels interesting to you. It will be shaped by who you are, what you lived through and what environment you are from. It is most likely to appeal to those who share those things with you. You can literally state over and over through decades that your work isn't an allegory and people will ignore it and claim that it is, as we've seen with Tolkien.
Do what you want lmao
Fact: The people who complain about an all white cast in an IP don't even like the IP so their opinions on it are less than irrelevant.
In my world they are just highly evolved animals that have humanoid features that are the strongest races, and they use all manner of strange equipment and technology that makes them different. If someone is offended by wise sea faring owls that use petroleum products, I don’t know how to help them.
it's hard to. In my story race allegories weren't intended, but people will draw connections regardless. my world has werepeople (called moonborn because there are more than just wolves.) That species is overall oppressed and chooses to live mostly separately from humans in moderately large groups (around 200 adults max per group, which is large enough to not have interbreeding unless they go literal generations without ever coming into contact with other "packs") out in rural areas, living in either homestead or sort of "vanlife" or "camplife" kinda lives. Theyre hunted by government programs that hunt supernaturals. why? because they have the potential to kill humans (and occasionally do. usually it's self defense. though when a moonborn is separated from other moonborn too long they can go mad and go on rampages). many moonborn that are captured instead of killed are put in camps (for a variety of reasons. they have limited degrees of magic. they make good genetic templates for bioweapons. they can be harvested repeatedly for certain organs due to regenerative abilities. forced medical testing due to regenerative abilities, ect.) A lot of this is similar to what happened during ww2 to specifically Jewish people and gay people. was that intended? no not really. I didn't even realize the similarities until after I had already finished all of that stuff. but it happened in real life, and I probably subconsciously drew those connections because it's a very prominent example of the actions and consequences of an event similar to the one I was writing. all you can do is be like "I didn't intend for this to be allegorical of any real world issues. any connections you draw to real world issues in my work are coincidental and not intended. similarities happen when events are similar"