*knocks on your door*
No response.
*bangs on the door*
No response.
*kicks the door open and storms into the room*
Did you know that diversity on Wattpad is still a problem? It's gotten a little better over the years (I'm talking about between when I joined in 2014 and now—I guess that's not a long time) but just go on the hot list and you'll notice that 90%—ok I'm being a little generous here—95% of the casts are comprised of white, middle/upperclass cishet able-bodied characters, namely, in more "realistic" fiction (aka Teenfic, Romance,
If you think I'm playin, why the fuck do we have all these projects supporting books with minorities springing up all over the place like daisies?
Presuming that diversity wasn't an issue (and I'm not talking only about racial diversity), then there wouldn't be a necessity for these community profiles to exist. They exist because authors whose works don't feature straight, blonde hair, blue-eyed able-bodied characters barely get any exposure for their writing for the mere fact that their characters stray from the "norm". Apparently the only people who read books are white, middle/upperclass cishet able-bodied people, the rest of the global population is illiterate.
Stories featuring minority protagonists that do hit it big and get millions of reads do so only because they adhere to every fucking stereotype in existence. There are exceptions, but I'll talk about these later.
Moving on.
There's really no excuse for you to not have any racial diversity in your stories unless it falls into this category:
1. The time period/setting requires you to have characters from the same ethnic background.
If your story takes place in Siberia, where the people are as white as the snow they freeze animal carcasses in, then it's completely understandable that the entire cast of characters is white. If your story takes place in a remote village in China, it's understandable that everyone would be Chinese. In both of these cases, I wouldn't expect you to include any other ethnicity because it just wouldn't be realistic.
Even then, there are MOST LIKELY still going to be a few individuals part of the LGBT community (whether they are in the closet or not) and a couple of disabled people. Unless you're writing about a utopia with a cast of characters of the Aryan race, I won't believe for one second that you cannot be inclusive.
Diversity is fucking inescapable, yet, we barely get any representation on Wattpad and out in the real world. Minority groups are like Lisa Simpson in that one episode of the Simpsons. It was a flashback to when she and her brother were younger—Marge was changing Lisa's diaper, when all of a sudden, Homer chases toddler-Bart into the room and strangles him. Marge has to abandon Lisa mid-change to go yell at her husband, so Lisa, being highly precious already as a one-year-old, had to finish changing her diaper herself, hopped off the table, and went to do her own business.
(I'm not sure about whether this is the best example, but it's the first one that came to mind.)
If we don't include ourselves in our own stories, then who will? We are constantly bombarded by the same cast of characters over and over and over (because a lot of publishers are white cishet male/females), and it's fucking bullshit because I personally cannot relate to Tiffany with her long brown hair and light blue eyes. Yet, that's all we seem to see on this site. Tiffanies and Williams. Ashelys and Rivers. Kylies and Jasons. Yet, books with protagonists part of minority groups don't get published/aren't popular because they aren't "relatable" enough. Alright.
YOU ARE READING
Salty Rants
RandomI like to complain, a lot. So much, in fact, that if I got a euro for every time I ranted about something, I'd have enough money to go on a cruise, at least twice a year. Salty is my middle name, so if your food is ever lacking that sodium chloride...
