*Ahem* functional character problems

@denali-christianson

if it makes u feel any better….all my MCs are white too…except one. Who is an animal so that doesn’t really count XD.

BUT that being said it wasn’t done purposely and I almost changed the skin tone of one for the purpose of diversity and it didn’t work because I already had the idea of how I liked them in my mind.

plus, I have other, side characters who are diverse. ALSO, due to writing fantasy diversity comes in all sorts of different ways, not just skin color.

for instance, my MCs range from all sorts of different places.

4 are human, but one of the humans is a shifter (a human who can transform into an animal)

2 of the humans have elven blood in them and are half shifter, tho only one displays the shifter gene and the elf blood isn’t introduced till later)

one of my MCs is a wingless faerie

one of my MCs is an elf

and again one of my MCs is an animal

plus most all of them come from different places which equals different cultures. 

what does that equal?

Diversity. 

at its root diversity simply means-

“the state of being diverse; variety.”

or “the practice or quality of including or involving people from a range of different social and ethnic backgrounds…..” etc.

So, I hope that helps you out some 😊

@Denali-christianson You don’t have to add other skin tones etc. if, say, all of the characters in the story come from the same place. Look at how the world is separated. Yes, in America and a bunch of other places there’s mixed ethnicity all over the place, but for the longest time the light-skinned people were mostly concentrated in Europe, dark-skinned in Africa, sorta-in-the-middle-toned people in Asia and the Americas….Forgive me for getting any of that wrong, I am by no means an expert or even an amateur. Also, you can add multiple species to a fantasy world. My characters in one WIP are mostly light-skinned, but many have half-cat or half-dragon features like tails and, so…That’s about as “diverse” as you could get, in my opinion.

Also, @godlyfantasy12 Love your forum signature!

@denali-christianson,

I’ve only skimmed what other people have said, but I do agree with them for the most part. If you feel like your character needs to be white, that’s totally fine. Don’t push anything on your characters that feels unnatural; trust me, I’ve tried it. Just go with the flow and what feels right for your story.

That being said, my family is in the process of adoption, and my Mom recently discovered how few books on our shelves feature people of different ethnicities/skin colors. We have more than two thousand books, and while I don’t know the exact numbers, the ratio of white MC’s vs. other colors is… well, staggering. Thinking about my future siblings, I don’t want them to feel left out or unincluded because of their skin color. But I think that, if all they read are stories about white people, they will feel different. And honestly, that scares me.

So, ever since them, I’ve been trying to fit more color into my stories. The MC of my last book is white and will always be white, but I changed some of the side characters to look black, Filipino, and Asian. Most of my MC’s are white, but I’m trying to change that as much as I can.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that diversity in stories is best because the world is diverse, and statistically, writers have a tendency to only write MC’s of only their own color… but it shouldn’t always be that way. If only white works for your story, that’s fine, but in my opinion diversity is best.