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writingwithcolor · 4 years

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Magical person in history, on not intervening on human rights issues

I am writing a dating sim/visual novel set in the present day. A major (non-romanceable) character is an ancient sorceress who moved from France to the Pacific Northwest in the 1850s. She is white. She is shown to have powerful magic. She also works closely with the main characters and develops personal relationships with them as she teaches them magic, giving each character comfort and advice during their respective stories.

Considering the events in America around her move-in date, there’s no way she could have missed the horrible human rights abuses going on, and there’s no way she was too powerless to help, even when most of the fighting and slavery was so far away. So I’m having trouble balancing “don’t make her a white savior by having her personally fireball Robert E. Lee” against “Hogwarts University is cancelled because Dumbledorette didn’t care about slavery.” I had the idea that the magical regulating body back home in France didn’t want her to intervene due to political reasons, so she helped out in small ways that could safely fly under the radar. She later realized that she prioritized her social standing over the suffering of countless others, so she began making a point of reducing human suffering as much as she could.

I can’t imagine this will show up in more than one small scene, but doing it wrong could really sour the whole thing. Is this backstory still icky? Should I just not mention it and let readers headcanon what they please?

I’m wondering what you think was happening in the PNW at the time for the fighting and slavery to be “far away.” Washington State had the Cayuse War at exactly this time period, Oregon didn’t ratify treaties and was calling for the extermination of “the I*dian race” in roughly this time period, and California’s Gold Rush created the California Genocide starting heavily in the 1840s, picking up steam in the 1850s, which included slavery of California Natives thanks to a law enacted in 1850 that lasted for 13 years.

This is all from the top five results of googling “pacific northwest genocide 1850”, for the record. It’s not exactly hidden history.

So suddenly your character’s lack of movement in healing the poisoned populations as disease ravaged the area, in attempting to stop or at least buy and free the enslaved Natives being auctioned on their doorstep, or in attempting to get treaties ratified and honoured looks a lot more damning.

This is not counting any of the future events that happened at the turn of the century, including the Chinese Exclusion Act, the Hawai’i monarchy being overthrown, and Federal Order 9066, which is the WWII concentration camps (that included Japanese, German, and Italian individuals). This is just to name a handful of coastal issues in the next 100 years, completely ignoring Jim Crow, residential schools, the San Francisco Earthquake (which nearly had Chinese people relocated to the worst land imaginable for gentrification purposes, had the Empress of China not stepped in), and many others.

In short: she would have had hundreds of opportunities to end suffering, and focusing on a single event as a small scene feels disproportionate to how much she could have done.

And honestly? The French were no angels.

The Second French Colonial Empire was one of the largest empires in history, and it began in 1830, covering roughly a third of Africa. The First French Colonial Empire began in the 1600s, and had both India and North America, primarily Canada.

She was white. French. You don’t specify her birth year other than “ancient”, but considering the sheer amount of territory-grabbing France has been doing since Normandy invaded England in the eleventh century AD, I’m going to assume her birth year is somewhere more recent than that. Therefore, I’m going to assume she has been around the Catholic Missionary Attitude that France had; one could call that attitude the bedrock of its existence for at least a millennia (and is still visible in modern day).

So tell me: when did she break out of it? What made her even care about human atrocities, when she has likely grown up watching France commit them her entire life?

Because let me just say, she has had plenty of opportunities to realize she did nothing in the face of her neighbours’ hatred of people not like them, and she has never taken them before.

Did she (or her parents, if she was born around this time) decry Napoleon re-introducing slavery in France in 1802? Side with Haiti when it declared independence in 1804, and hate that the government forced Haiti to pay for the “theft” of slaves and land (that was only paid off in 1947)? Is she presently championing for France to pay Haiti the money it wrongfully took from the country? Did she hate the delays in stopping the French slave trade, which took 11 years to actually stop after it was banned on paper?

Unconditional emancipation was only reached in 1848, after all. I don’t care if she was born in 1830, there was some sort of major racial event happening in France all throughout the late 1700s to mid-1800s. Where did she side then?

Abolitionism was not an unknown concept in France, so it is possible she had already been working towards it quietly, but that would mean she would have felt guilt at inaction much earlier, depending on when she began decrying slavery—if she was even delayed in decrying it, which I will admit is possible.

And if she was an abolitionist, would she have even listened to the French government in not at least easing the genocide around her? Because she would have watched nearly 100 years of the French dragging their feet on stopping slavery in their empire, and known how BS it all was… if she saw it that way.

That’s just abolitionism, and is not even counting the French relationship with the Native population in Quebec and the Great Lakes region, which is a giant tangle of proxy wars, colonialism, missionary work, and very, very, very complex relationships that started off good and ended terribly.

So I ask again: why did she only start caring then?

Speaking of proxy wars, the Napoleon Empire wanted a Confederate victory, because the Confederacy was its source of cotton and the American Civil War created a “cotton famine” in France that basically forced the textile industry into a massive downsizing. The Confederacy also tolerated Napoleon’s plans for expanding the empire in Mexico, which actually had begun in December of 1861.

So when it comes to how a magical board would rule—even though France was officially neutral in the war, the court of public opinion (among politicians and capitalists) was more on the Confederate side than the Union side. Many politicians secretly worked with the Confederacy, until they abandoned them when the Union showed signs of winning. The only reason France officially remained neutral is because a war with the British was inevitable if they acknowledged the Confederacy, and Napoleon didn’t want that.

I shall work under the assumption that because it was rather literally on her doorstep when she moved to America, she lost insulation to it (if she hadn’t thought about it before), but I will say how iffy that makes her look in the long term if she had so many opportunities beforehand (at the very least, seeing slaves in France).

My other option is the word “ancient” is liberally applied and she was only in her 20s or 30s when 1850 hit, and therefore had not had many opportunities to see otherwise (but she still would have seen slaves in France, likely).

Onto the white guilt and white saviour aspects

Strictly from a writing perspective, you have to determine if she changed the course of history, or not. This would not necessarily be within the realm of white saviour, seeing as white people were the only ones listened to at the time. You can see people who changed the course of history in this period by looking up the pastor who insisted Lincoln hold fair trials for the Dakota, which brought the execution count from over 200 down to 38. You can also look at Alice Fletcher, who made quite a few laws designed to protect Native people, but whether or not they were successful is up for debate (and she regretted some of the laws she helped enact).

If not, then you have the current tangle you’re dealing with.

Option 1

She was unestablished in America and relied on the magical regulations board to protect her, and she figured working small and under the radar would mean she could do more good long-term by not being killed, so long as you establish that such a threat is viable.

This option only works if she’s an active advocate for the slew of other racist acts that pass once she’s settled in America, of which I gave many examples above.

Option 2

She actually did change the course of history in perhaps a mixed way, or perhaps a positive way. She could have relied completely on being a white, well-to-do voice in the community, which would have granted her some privilege without using a drop of magic.

This can apply to any point in history, seeing as there were a lot of others to pick from. It would be particularly useful once suffrage was achieved, and if she was part of suffrage, did she call out Susan B. Anthony’s racism? Did she encourage allowing non-whites to vote?

Option 3

She was slow to care, and did not actually understand what a big deal it was that such atrocities were happening until it was too late. This leads to her dedication to atonement the strongest, but you have to be careful about white guilt. This option can go along with option 1.

This allows her to be a passive player in future racist events, but makes her an even more privileged white character who PoC will have a hard time seeing as kindly, and you should go out of your way to show white players how unkind and privileged she was, and perhaps still is.

Option 4

she doesn��t actually care much, because she has a president of not caring about atrocities happening in France, and her bigotry shows up in other ways in modern day and she’s just a kindly-but-bigoted character. She’s your wonderful grandma who you have beautiful memories with… she just doesn’t care about anyone not white.

This can go along with option 3, as she was so slow to realize that she is still bigoted and hasn’t done any work, but her racism is going to be more covert and you’ll have to do research on microaggressions and how to frame them.

Based off the way her lack of action is framed in-story and how little a plot role it plays, I would say that option 4 with a dash of option 3 appears to be the most likely interpretation of her character by PoC. She’s lip-service to progress, at present, but seems to have made no strides in losing her social standing to be an ally.

Now here’s why I don’t think you should let readers headcanon her however they want:

White players in particular are going to minimize her culpability in what happened, and think that she did all that she could, and she is a Totally Redeemed Character now. In fact, they’ll probably wonder why she’s even an Atoner, because she did something, right? She helped, right? And now she’s helping and that’s plenty. She’s good to the players, so she is a Good Person.

Meanwhile PoC players are going to see yet another white author ignore the fact that colonialism was happening en masse at the time, and that white people deeply benefited from it, and are going to see the “it happened in the past why do you keep bringing up racism?” defence continued.

Let her be flawed. Let her be on stolen land and acknowledge it every time she teaches them something, and let her sit and exist in the guilt that happens when she realizes she could have stopped the theft but didn’t. Let her not wallow in self hate, but acknowledge her mistake with every lesson the main characters receive, and let her work on righting that wrong by championing “land back” causes that centre Indigenous voices.

Let her dialogue options show every trace of how the past is not over because the past’s actions are still being felt and reparations have not been made. The settler state is still controlling the land she has made home and she knows exactly what they did to get it, and she passes that knowledge on.

Let players be uncomfortable with the knowledge that, if they sit by and “only do small things when they can, to not lose anything”, they are complicit. Let white people see they must well and truly denounce what has been given to them by their racist, colonial ancestors in order for PoC to “stop talking about racism.”

Make her use whatever income she makes be paid in part to Native causes, as rent for the land she occupies unfairly. Make her refuse to teach bigoted students who want “mystic secrets” that aren’t hers to give, that were appropriated centuries ago. Make part of her life’s work be hiding away Black and Indigenous spiritual leaders to minimize the loss.

Let her past be imperfect. And do not force redemption on her, but instead let her own the fact she made catastrophic mistakes that will not be redeemed until land has been returned to the Native population. Until all forms of slavery are abolished. Until colonial powers give back all the resources and finances they stole from their colonized regions. Until the privilege that white people spilled so much blood to secure is no more.

Because if you want her to truly be a good character who does not support racism? That is the level you have to step towards.

Everything else is simply whiteness trying to make itself feel better.

~Mod Lesya

#Writing question #submission #ask #genocide #colonialism #fantasy #witches #racism #white privilege #white women #white savior #white guilt #ally #asks #Long post

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xxmisty · 5 years

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Funny how someone who made fart fetish porn thinks he has a right to badmouth men

Oh boy, anon, you’ve really overpacked this suitcase, haven’t you??

Look, let’s just start by pointing out that there’s a contradiction between you having respect for my pronouns and yet an apparent prejudice against sex workers. I just don’t get that. Thank you for being more respectful than most and actually using male pronouns here, I think the rest of your message is seriously betraying the kind of person you are. Build on the good. You’re already head and shoulders above most people I know in that respect.

I was trying to work out what could have come across as badmouthing men and I found that two posts about Captain Marvel had come out of my queue. So that’s it. Anon, i’m not badmouthing men. But I will call out toxic masculinity where I see it, and there was a whole lot of it around the launch of that movie. Toxic masculinity hurts everyone, no matter who you are. It’s the kind of attitude that makes men feel they have to behave a certain way or they can’t be true men. As a trans guy that went a long way toward being terrified of coming out, and still goes a long way to not being accepted. It is also a master force behind the kind of behaviour that has left women vulnerable, scared and abused throughout history. I’ve been on both sides of that. I’ve had men roll down their car windows and cat-call me from the age of 14 upward. When I was 13 I took a term of piano lessons and quit because the piano tutor kept holding my hands and asking me if I ‘painted my nails red when I went out at weekends’. I’ve had parts of my body groped and touched in public because someone was drunk, being egged on by their mates or just thought it was their right to do it. I’ve had a z-list celebrity slide his hand into my crotch blaming ‘the train’ with a huge grin on his face. I spent twenty years blaming myself for being sexually assaulted by my cousin’s husband because I was wearing a dress the night I met him. No, not all men are like this, but if you’re offended by someone discussing it then perhaps there’s a reason why. Maybe you see a little of that in yourself.

I’ll reblog posts about captain marvel until my fingers are sore because Brie Larson took so much abuse in the run up to its launch, most of it from a subsection of the population. And i’m not blindly backing it as a marvel fan, nor as a perceived ‘man hater’ - I didn’t think it looked that good from the trailers, but boy was I wrong. I still think the trailers were pretty bad and did the movie a huge disservice. The point is, I waited until I watched the movie to make up my own mind. Brie Larson spoke up on the press tour about how she was sick of looking out and seeing nothing but white men, and a whole lot of those white men took that very deliberately in the wrong way. She spoke of wanting diversity. She didn’t want to look out there and see no white, male faces, she just wanted to see a mix of them with POC and female faces too. You’d have to be extremely over sensitive to take that in any sense other than the one she’d intended it.

People flooded Rotten Tomatoes with negative reviews, days before the movie even came out. They hadn’t seen it, they just wanted to try to make sure that they stopped as many potential viewers from seeing it as they could. And that's why it’s so important to people who aren’t of that small subsection of the population to share the movie’s success. I’m so damn proud of Brie, and of everyone involved in the movie, and of everyone who has stood up for Captain Marvel when in doing so they’ve also opened themselves up to abuse.

The truth is, the world has been run by straight, white, cis men for countless years and that’s starting to change. The world is becoming a richer place for that. We need to hear all kinds of voices, especially as the world grows smaller. Anon, the world has changed more in the last twenty years than it had in centuries before it. But that means the truth is going to hurt sometimes.

I’m white, and i’m learning more about what that means from people of colour who share their experiences, their stories and their views. I understand a little better every day that it isn’t enough just to not be an actively racist asshole and that I need to use my privilege to speak up when I see it happening to others. I need to open my ears and listen to people from different countries, of different colours, of different religions, and hear about the struggles they face every day that i’ll never truly understand as someone born into a white family, in an area where there were very few people of colour as I grew up. I want to learn. I want to listen. I hope that the more POC speak out, the more that we can learn as people who haven’t faced the same prejudice. I’ll still never know what it’s like to walk in those shoes but i’ll be a little more mindful every day of what needs to change and how I can help.

It’s a similar thing existing in a predominantly cishet world. Something I realised recently is that, as much as I know it can take years, decades, sometimes a lifetime to really discover who you are, the cold hard fact is that when I was five years old I knew I wanted to marry a woman and call myself John but it’s taken decades to reverse the programming that a predominantly cishet world tried to write into me. We’re getting there, little by little. The world is changing, but a big part of that is from having the courage to find our voices and share our experiences as people of a gender and/or sexuality not defined as cis and heterosexual. I think trans folk have a unique point of view when it comes to gender wars since we’ve seen both sides of the coin to some degree. I’m just as scared of toxic femininity as I am of toxic masculinity. Both are dangerous and destructive, and they hurt everybody. It’s time they began to die and allowed people to be themselves without a gender-approved bar they have to reach to be a ‘real man/woman’.

Lastly, anon, I would really like you to rethink the way you view sex workers because most that i’ve met along the way have been the kindest, most genuine, most open individuals who work harder than you’ll ever know. Making fetish videos put food on the table, a roof over our heads and bought our boat when we were faced with being homeless. My health wouldn’t allow me to work a job outside the home any more and I wanted to make a living as best as I could. I feel like you would be just as critical if I lived by benefits alone. Plus making videos was a very important step in my own life. It helped me to love a part of myself that i’d always resented and felt ashamed of, and gave me confidence to appear in front of the camera which I could never have imagined some years ago. Plus I made a few wonderful friends that way.

Anon, you have a good heart, enough to not misgender me. I can’t and won’t apologise for reblogging posts that talk about subjects that affect me personally. This is, after all, my blog, and it’s important for people to see how many others have been affected by the same issues. It helps when you don’t feel so alone. If there’s something that triggers you about those posts then perhaps there’s something you recognise in it. This is a really good time to identify what that is and to work out why it upsets you so much. We can all learn to be better people, and listening to our discomfort is a good first step.

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