I enjoy a well-done romance, but love and sex get shoe-horned into every show, every movie, and every book, even when they're superfluous to the plot, and I'm tired of it.
Argh, same here. I am not really interested in the first place, and am damned bored with "and now we'll pause for the obligatory romantic interlude" with violins and roses. I'm ever so tempted to poke the horny couple with the thorns. "You two! Enough of that!! Back to work!!!"
When I was a young adult, I discovered the band Rush, and one of the things that really drew me to them was the fact they had such damned interesting lyrics -- which were pretty much never about love or desire.
Same here with what I listen to (back then new wave and punk, nowadays industrial and aggrotech, which are seldom about sex or romance) -- it's NOT "My baby wants to rock, my baby wants to roll, all night long" which frankly I never want to hear again. Same with TV. Some of the appeal of Stargate was that people just did their damn jobs without making eyes at each other whenever the current panic allowed. In fact those episodes with a little romance, I'd peg as the weakest.
White, westerners will tend to
imagine people as white (and male in the absence of any gender cues) if race is not specified.
There was a study some decades ago that looked at choices in marriage partners vs skin shade. It found that compared to their own shade, men tended to pick lighter-skinned women, but women tended to pick darker-skinned men. It was interesting because it wasn't a single shift, but rather a circular continuum, and the tendency was not cultural, but rather was common worldwide. Meaning it's human nature, not "imitate the white man".
Oh, I've seen plenty of such descriptions for white males and females -- her sugar mounds, his candy stick, and various other food fetish body parts.
As the others have said. White, straight, cisgendered, able bodied males are largely regarded as "normal, default human beings" that anyone can and should be able to relate to.
If I read something set in Africa, or China, or North Dakota, I'm going to assume the majority are some sort of black, or oriental, or white, respectively. I'd say if the reader assumes "all white males" it's either a lack of experience in the reader (people with little experience, like kids, aren't going to assume something they don't know about) or it's a failure by the writer to get the picture across (eg. it's set in the Congo but it reads like London).
Tho if it matters to the story, I might want a little more to go on. No race is physically homogenous; Africans in particular have a wide range of physique (rather more than Caucasians).
But is there any reason not to have a realistic mixes of phenotypes in a fantasy world, just like there are in ours?
I became so irked at this whole thing that I have no physically defined "races" at all in my universe.
It's a problem for the kids, who are just as American as I am, who grow up rarely seeing anyone like them in books, TV, and movies
Not true at present; quite the reverse. In America, blacks and other nonwhites are represented in advertising, television, and film at more than double their percentage by population. (I can't find the numbers offhand but IIRC blacks are around 12% of the U.S. population, but are nearly 30% of the faces in ads and such; Asians are around 4% pop. and 10% of the faces in ads.)
The attitude I've observed (having lived 28 years near that well-mixed pot, Los Angeles) is that PoC are so "ordinary" in the average person's perceptions as to go unnoticed. If you don't think of $Random_Person as "different" in the first place, why would you imagine $Random_Person as looking other than yourself?
Aren't they adorable? And a very interesting example of how pigment accents features -- if they had the same pigment, they'd look almost identical.
And not because I don't like women in fiction. I just really dislike changing established characters/reinventing them this way.
Same here. Irks me no end. If you want to make a new character in your own image, feel free, but don't muck about with one that's well-established. (Mind you I had no problem with
The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, but all it did was extrapolate from the established Holmes.)
Exactly, but when someone says they think it would be helpful if more authors considered writing more diversity into their stories, someone inevitably screams about mind control and forced political statements in fiction. Because, you know, having nothing but white (and straight and able bodied) characters in a story isn't also a form of mind control or making a forced political statement.
I don't give two flips what diversity is (or isn't) in your story, if you just let them be whoever they are. But when you slap me in the face with One Of Each, I'm going to wallbang your book.
This was a special irritation with
Lost In Trek ST:Voyager, where the cast was real obviously One Of Everything To Demonstrate Diversity.
Actually, people in India are very biased in favor of whiter skin, to the point where
cosmetics that bleach one's skin are quite popular there.
Ditto medieval Persia (and Japan, IIRC), which hardly had a "white mentor" to copy. See the study I mentioned above. (It was from Before Internet which may be why I couldn't find it online, but I vaguely recall it was from some major university.) This isn't just an "imitate the whites" thing; it seems to be an instinctive human thing. I expect it originated with our primitive forebears as "successful female never has to go hunting" and "successful male spends a lot of time hunting", thus was a selection by the level of sun-protective skin pigment.
