My hope is that I'll be able to have well-rounded characters of colour who are also cool and kickass and good and brave. :) My fear is that I'll end up making the same mistake Joss Whedon did--having characters that are either cool or awful, depending on your point of view. That's a mistake I know I made with "Dauntless", and will try not to make again.
But really, I think the best and only thing to do is make them real. Because when they're real you're going to get exactly that: characters that are both good and bad, characters that speak to some people and maybe not to others. In your example you remarked on how you saw Inara as a "sophisticated and graceful courtesan" and your friend saw her as a "whore." Inara IS both of those things. (Though I think "whore" is a pretty ugly word for what she does, particularly in the framework of her world.) That's part of what makes her a good character. You could characterize the white characters the same way: Mal is a strong, principled and compassionate leader, or he's a washed-up controlling bitter failure; Simon is a gentle and devoted brother or a spoiled little rich boy who hasn't managed to pry out the silver spoon yet. Jayne is a knife-wielding backstabbing psychopath or a.... knife-wielding, backstabbing psychopath. ;D And I'll never believe anybody who tells me Zoe was anything less than 100% awesome. But they're all deeply flawed characters... that's why they're interesting. I think if Whedon had wanted to do himself a favor on the PoC front he'd have a) cast actors of color in an overwhelming majority of background and bit roles, since IMO his worldbuilding actually lends itself to that and b) given more main storylines to his PoC characters in the ensemble. But the CoC he did create were, IMO, great characters. Book, for instance, could've had fantastic stories written about his mysterious past. Given a longer run to the show, I'm sure those stories would've been told. (But that's an epic race fail there too, isn't it? Because CoCs never seem to be the MAIN character, and as such their stories come second -- they have to wait their turn. We could get thirty stories about Mal and his epic manpain before we got a single one about Book or Zoe or even poor underutilized Wash.)
A more genuine criticism, I think, of use of CoCs is Supernatural, where basically any CoC who turns up (pretty much always guest stars, since all leads and most recurrings are white) is going to be either a) evil or b) possessed by evil or c) dead by the end of the season (probably after having turned evil). That is a show that needs a kick in the ass and is blatantly racist in its casting.
For an example on the other side, though, you have a series like Now & Again, where the main lead was white and the secondary was black (the same awesome, awesome actor seen since in 24, The Unit, and a million All State commercials). The black character was to a certain extent plainly the villain, sort of the Dr. Frankenstein of the piece, and essentially stood like a brick wall between our hero and his happiness. But at the same time, that CoC was deeply lovable and understandable, and it was hard to see him as a "bad guy," even if logically he should've been painted as such. I dunno, somebody will probably come tell me that that was the worst CoC ever and totally insulting to the world at large, but I loved him.
Anyway, my point is, whether you write characters of color is secondary to whether you write them well. (I'd kind of rather never seen another CoC on Supernatural than have to watch them butcher a few more, frankly.) That doesn't mean they're always good people or strong people or morally upright people... just people. If they happen to be all that, awesome. If they happen to be all that and a bag of complexity, even better. Every character doesn't have to be a positive role model, though especially for an underrepresented group, it's always nice if they are. They just need to be genuine. IMO.
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26/3/09 08:29 (UTC)But really, I think the best and only thing to do is make them real. Because when they're real you're going to get exactly that: characters that are both good and bad, characters that speak to some people and maybe not to others. In your example you remarked on how you saw Inara as a "sophisticated and graceful courtesan" and your friend saw her as a "whore." Inara IS both of those things. (Though I think "whore" is a pretty ugly word for what she does, particularly in the framework of her world.) That's part of what makes her a good character. You could characterize the white characters the same way: Mal is a strong, principled and compassionate leader, or he's a washed-up controlling bitter failure; Simon is a gentle and devoted brother or a spoiled little rich boy who hasn't managed to pry out the silver spoon yet. Jayne is a knife-wielding backstabbing psychopath or a.... knife-wielding, backstabbing psychopath. ;D And I'll never believe anybody who tells me Zoe was anything less than 100% awesome. But they're all deeply flawed characters... that's why they're interesting. I think if Whedon had wanted to do himself a favor on the PoC front he'd have a) cast actors of color in an overwhelming majority of background and bit roles, since IMO his worldbuilding actually lends itself to that and b) given more main storylines to his PoC characters in the ensemble. But the CoC he did create were, IMO, great characters. Book, for instance, could've had fantastic stories written about his mysterious past. Given a longer run to the show, I'm sure those stories would've been told. (But that's an epic race fail there too, isn't it? Because CoCs never seem to be the MAIN character, and as such their stories come second -- they have to wait their turn. We could get thirty stories about Mal and his epic manpain before we got a single one about Book or Zoe or even poor underutilized Wash.)
A more genuine criticism, I think, of use of CoCs is Supernatural, where basically any CoC who turns up (pretty much always guest stars, since all leads and most recurrings are white) is going to be either a) evil or b) possessed by evil or c) dead by the end of the season (probably after having turned evil). That is a show that needs a kick in the ass and is blatantly racist in its casting.
For an example on the other side, though, you have a series like Now & Again, where the main lead was white and the secondary was black (the same awesome, awesome actor seen since in 24, The Unit, and a million All State commercials). The black character was to a certain extent plainly the villain, sort of the Dr. Frankenstein of the piece, and essentially stood like a brick wall between our hero and his happiness. But at the same time, that CoC was deeply lovable and understandable, and it was hard to see him as a "bad guy," even if logically he should've been painted as such. I dunno, somebody will probably come tell me that that was the worst CoC ever and totally insulting to the world at large, but I loved him.
Anyway, my point is, whether you write characters of color is secondary to whether you write them well. (I'd kind of rather never seen another CoC on Supernatural than have to watch them butcher a few more, frankly.) That doesn't mean they're always good people or strong people or morally upright people... just people. If they happen to be all that, awesome. If they happen to be all that and a bag of complexity, even better. Every character doesn't have to be a positive role model, though especially for an underrepresented group, it's always nice if they are. They just need to be genuine. IMO.