Avoiding racist tropes in fantasyX
I'm interested in starting a pleasure project: a fantasy story, along the lines of a witch delivering a prophecy to a king about a dangerous and deceitful foe who will overthrow him, and the king enlists three other witches to seek out and destroy this foe.
I want to draw on traditional, arguably "cliché" (?) fantasy species, like elves, orcs, goblins, dwarves, faeries, etc. However, I realize that many aspects of these races contain hidden racism--blonde-haired, blue-eyed, white elves that are completely superior, barbaric orcs with dark skin who just happen to be the only race that wears dreads/braids, banking goblins with hooked noses that totally aren't Jews.
How can I involve some of these older elements, while leaving behind the racist subtext some of them carry?
-
5How do you feel about subverting those tropes? Darker-skinned elves that hail from a great equatorial maritime empire, pale-skinned blue-eyed barbarians who live a tribal existence in the frigid boreal regions etc. – Arkenstein XII 8 hours ago
-
4Same thought here. Pale skin for cave-dwelling orcs and darker skin for outdoorsy elves makes sense. Also, you could ditch the word race; these are more appropriately defined as species (check dictionary definitions of "race"). – Thing-um-a-jig 8 hours ago
-
1Ditto. Build them as you like. The first time six foot elves appeared, there was a collective gasp. You may be too young to know that. Making elves diminutive and dwarves glowing (so that they can mine more easily) is simple enough. – DPT 7 hours ago
-
2Have you considered just not mentioning the skin tones hair colors etc of the different races? Unless if somehow having blue eyes blond hair and white skin is directly relevant to the plot I see no reason to mention it. – DJ Spicy Deluxe 2 hours ago
1 Answer
This is a great question. I think being aware of the problem is a good first step. If you really do want to use the traditional creatures but without the baggage, I think you'll have to take on the suggestion from the comments section, and subvert the tropes --either by inverting, replacing or mixing up the coded racial signifiers, or by revealing the inner heroism of one of the despised groups, or the inner villainy of what of the favored groups.
I've encountered it done both ways. Ursula LeGuin deliberately made her more civilized races darker skinned, and her more barbarian races paler in her famed Earthsea sequence (but it was so subtle that most readers and basically all illustrators and adapters just ignored it). For a more bold statement, Shrek is a revisionist fairy tale that recasts the ogres as the heroes and the prince as the villain (although it's only the donkey that is portrayed by a voice actor of color in the movie version). It should go without saying that there's still plenty of potential to offend people, however, if you do this wrong. Jar Jar Binks was on the side of the heroes in the Star Wars prequels, but that didn't make people any happier about his pseudo-Jamaican patois.
With that said, I would still encourage you to make the effort. When I was a young FF & SF fan of color, I was pathetically grateful on any of the --excessively rare --occasions that I encountered a legitimate hero of color in any of my favorite books. These kind of portrayals, whether or not you notice them consciously, do make a difference.
-
I'm actually working on a YA novel right now, set in an alternate history medieval world, where all the aristocrats are black... – Chris Sunami 5 hours ago