Playing Devil's Advocate for the sake of poderousness:
How does one write perfect characterisations of people who aren't within your own circle of experience? Research does a lot, and any author who doesn't research the backgrounds of characters outside of their own... 'type' (can't think of a better word there) will almost certainly make some assumptions that are going to annoy people.
On the flipside though, are readers just asking too much of writers when all the writers are doing is attempting to create a character who's not from within their own cultural spectrum? I couldn't write a believable Balinese character, for instance. I could try, and I could go to Bali, talk to Balinese people and experience as much of the culture as I could. That'd improve the writing no end, but in the end the writing itself is still coming from a white middle class female me, and would be coloured by that. Such research is also costly and to expect everyone to do it is... frankly, ridiculous.
I guess what I'm getting at here is that it's a little presumptuous to expect that work coming from a particular cultural avenue is going to be able to represent culturally different characters as they should be represented.
Sheesh... my brain's a little mangled here. Also drawing a lot of parallels with artwork - I keep wanting to draw creatures from Asian mythologies, but I keep telling myself that if they're not 'authentic' somehow I'll post them and piss off everyone from those backgrounds who'll tell me I got them all wrong and call me a wannabe. I still haven't tried drawing them.
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How does one write perfect characterisations of people who aren't within your own circle of experience? Research does a lot, and any author who doesn't research the backgrounds of characters outside of their own... 'type' (can't think of a better word there) will almost certainly make some assumptions that are going to annoy people.
On the flipside though, are readers just asking too much of writers when all the writers are doing is attempting to create a character who's not from within their own cultural spectrum? I couldn't write a believable Balinese character, for instance. I could try, and I could go to Bali, talk to Balinese people and experience as much of the culture as I could. That'd improve the writing no end, but in the end the writing itself is still coming from a white middle class female me, and would be coloured by that. Such research is also costly and to expect everyone to do it is... frankly, ridiculous.
I guess what I'm getting at here is that it's a little presumptuous to expect that work coming from a particular cultural avenue is going to be able to represent culturally different characters as they should be represented.
Sheesh... my brain's a little mangled here. Also drawing a lot of parallels with artwork - I keep wanting to draw creatures from Asian mythologies, but I keep telling myself that if they're not 'authentic' somehow I'll post them and piss off everyone from those backgrounds who'll tell me I got them all wrong and call me a wannabe.
I still haven't tried drawing them.