How can one introduce diversity without it looking forced?

NEGI RK Sunday, January 17, 2021

How can one introduce diversity without it looking forced?

It’s fairly simple. Don’t bother writing diverse characters at all. Pay it no mind.

Write good characters. Some of whom happen to be “diverse”, whatever that means in context.

That’s not to say that you have to ignore race, sex, what have you. But don’t break your arm patting yourself on the back for it or calling it out.

Take Ellen Ripley.

The way I heard it, the original version of the script only listed characters by surname. Sigourney Weaver liked the role of Ripley and read for it, was cast, and that’s how Ripley became Ellen Ripley. You could have cast any race or sex as Ripley and it would not materially affect the story.

So Ripley just happened to be an Ellen, and that just doesn’t matter. It’s not what makes her an interesting character.

Or look at Captain Raymond Holt.

The fact that he is a gay black man is actually incidentally relevant to the story sometimes. It does inform his character. But “Gay Black Cop” is not who Raymond Holt is. His character is far more interesting than that. He is, first and foremost, a strait-laced foil for goofball Jake Peralta. But even that is not all of who he is.

And the show never goes out of its way to pat itself on the back for having gays, blacks, or women cops. Further, the show allows all of them to be real people, with good qualities and bad qualities. In fact, every single major character in the 99th precinct is a mix of good and bad and that’s what makes them interesting. Nobody is sanctified or demonized.

So while the cast is fairly diverse, it doesn’t at all feel forced. Hell, Holt’s husband is more interesting than merely “Gay Black Cop’s White Husband”. They took the time to make him a real person too.

Also consider context. If you push diversity where it doesn’t logically make sense it’ll look forced. If you push diversity where it isn’t probable and nobody acknowledges it when they should, it’ll also look forced.

In Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves, they decided to introduce a black character to the Merry Men.

But they didn’t do so by making Little Jon or Will Scarlet black, they created a whole new character, Hazim, a Moor who followed Robin back to England. They introduced him in a way that made sense, his presence was questioned by the Englishmen as it would logically be, they touched on him being Muslim more or less in passing without forcing the matter, and eventually he was accepted by the Merry Men not for the sake of diversity, but because Hazim, who was, like those above, an interesting character in his own right, brought value to the Merry Men. Being a Moor was not actually the most interesting thing about Hazim, nor the whole of his character.

Hell, 13th Warrior figured out how to reasonably enough fit an Arab into a story about Vikings.

And it worked.

But do you know what does look forced?

A crippled female soldier in WWII. In a game that was presented as being historical. It especially looks forced when the solution was so simple.

Look folks, we’re doing a DieselPunk WWII game! Change the context just a little, and now it works. But if you’re trying to maintain any pretext of historical accuracy, this just doesn’t work. Your diversity is clearly forced. Like the idiots who got upset that there were no female soldiers in the Dunkirk movie. Well, there were no female soldiers at Dunkirk. That’s why.

Basically, the issue is that you have to do the very thing you keep imploring others to do. Don’t treat minorities as tokens. If the most interesting thing about your Jewish character is that she’s Jewish, you’ve failed. If the thing people remember about your character is that he’s the black guy, you’ve failed. You’re fetishising “otherness” and tokenising diversity.

You don’t have to have monochromatic casts or ignore diversity completely, but do the very thing you implore others to do, and treat your characters as people first.