Re: Thoughts on Shoehorning unrelated content into works of entertainment.
@Alex, I can't speak for the series the OP mentioned not having seen it, but I have seen instances where unfortunately these days, characters are just getting stuck in whose only defining trait really is "look how awesome women or such and such minority is." rather than the author simply doing as Robin hobb does and creating awesome characters who also belong to a given minority.
A recent example I read was April Genevieve Tucholke.
See My review of it here,
The book was rather good for the most part, and I am definitely in favour of books with warrior women. However literally every female character in the book, even as far as a girl milking a goat was described in terms of how awesome or full of spirit she was.
No women, even down to random people passed on the street were grumpy or tired even just plane normal.
I'll not repeat my review here, but suffice it to say, what was in large part a rather good book was dimmed a little by author's slightly too obvious message, which was a shame since when the author was just writing awesome characters who were flawed and human and did awesome things, and also happened to be women, she did a pretty good job.
As I said, I also feel the same way about blind characters. If an author's going to write a blind character, give me a halfway decent, well written character who also happens to be blind, not just some awesome walking cultural "hurrah for blindness" slogan.
I would also be a bit careful about throwing around words like "privileged" especially on this forum.
Indeed, one problem I'm having recently, is that everyone is keen on saying how evil straight white men are, without actually considering whether someone is in a situation where they actually benefit from any of these so called privileged statuses.
Indeed, one of the most horrible examples of the latter is a book I reviewed in This blog article and be prepared to learn some things about me you might not have expected.
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