Prejudice is a part of human society, and some eras were just awful. However, we still want to tell stories in those time periods. The steampunk genre is based largely on Victorian England, a time when being female was enough for people to assume you were a mentally infirm child. High fantasy is clearly inspired by Medieval Europe, where belonging to a non-majority religion meant your family could be “purged.” Even when creating a world from scratch, prejudice will exist* because it’s just something humans do.
So how do we show settings as the prejudiced places they are without making the story itself prejudiced?
Make a Story That Drives Change
You know what makes an awesome story? Revolution. Your setting could start with terrible prejudice against a certain group, but there’s no reason it has to stay that way. For as long as there has been injustice, people have been standing up against it. Revolutions can take the form of violent uprisings, cloak and dagger political maneuvering, or popular protest movements. Any of those makes for a great plot.
Western stories usually maintain the status quo. Superheroes always fight against those who want to make radical changes. It’s so common that a number of works make fun of it. We see this outside of the superhero genre, too. So many fantasy stories are about restoring the rightful king that it’s hard to keep track. Even Star Wars, movies about overthrowing a galactic government, fall prey. If you dive into the extended universe or the (shudder) prequels, you’ll find they’re about returning things to how they were before the Empire took over.
There’s nothing wrong with that, but we also need stories about creating something new. If your setting contains an entrenched tool of oppression, don’t ignore it; use it. There’s story potential sitting right there in front of you! If your feudal empire depends on a class of indentured servants to continue running, tell the story of those servants deciding they’ve had enough.
Few things are more disheartening than seeing a terrible injustice and turning away because there’s nothing that can be done about it. This is your story; something can be done about it. Don’t make your characters passive in the face of an oppressive system. Even if they try to change it and fail, it’ll be a tale worth telling.
Write From the Bottom
If there’s one constant to human history, it’s that rich people have it good. No matter what’s going on with everyone else in the setting, if all you do is show the wealthy and powerful, you’ll get a very stilted view. There are steampunk stories that go from one aristocratic tea party to another, and some space operas take place only on high tech pleasure ships. Even the notoriously dark Song of Ice and Fire focuses on characters who can usually count on getting three square meals a day.
If all we do is look at the winners in a society, we’re tacitly endorsing it, even if we’re vaguely aware that not everyone has it so good. That’s why it’s important to have characters who get the short end of their setting. Not only does it give a more rounded view, but those characters have more problems, and problems drive a story.
The Difference Engine, one of steampunk’s seminal novels, starts out from the POV of a prostitute named Cybil who is also the daughter of a disgraced labor leader. This character is the lowest of the low in her society. If she were murdered in the street, passersby would only care because of the mess on their shoes. Through her, we see the failings of this clockwork driven British Empire, the rotting foundation underneath its facade of glory. Cybil is by far the most interesting character in the book because she has the most adversity to overcome. She generates instant investment because of the challenges she faces. Later on, the book switches to the POV of a rich male doctor and instantly becomes less interesting. Dr. Boring’s problems seem trivial compared to what Cybil was dealing with.
By writing about the victims of oppression, we give them a voice, whether they are from a historical setting or not. We confront a setting’s prejudice instead of letting it carry on quietly in the background.
Show the Exceptions
If you portray a setting where everyone unquestioningly accepts an obvious social evil, it can seem like your story is endorsing said evil. That’s why you’ve got to show characters who don’t accept it. No matter how deeply embedded a prejudice is, there will always be those who fight against it. From the moment slaves were first brought to the Americas, there were abolitionists advocating for their rights. Feminism predates Rosie the Riveter and even the Suffragette movement by a long time.
Don’t worry about it “not being realistic.” So long as you provide decent context, it’s easy to justify characters rejecting some of their societal values. Of course, these characters don’t have to be perfect angels. Rejecting prejudice doesn’t mean you can’t have flaws, but it does show that not everyone accepts these pervasive ills.
Characters who oppose something the rest of their society takes for granted have automatic motivation. The prejudices they oppose are happening right outside their door. They have to do something about it because no one else will. If there’s one thing more impressive about humanity than our capacity to harm, its how many people are willing to risk everything in order to help.
The Underground Railroad and Germans smuggling Jews to safety during WWII are classic examples, but we can go further. If your setting has elves ruling over human serfs, have one character be an elf who campaigns for greater human liberty. The debate over robotic rights is a classic of science fiction, and it allows for some truly amazing stories.
Teach Your Character a Lesson
Not every character can or should be an exception to their society’s views. Prejudice and discrimination are part of being human, so we need characters that portray them. The important thing is to challenge those characters in the story. If you simply present a character who is racist, sexist, or any other ‘ist’ and don’t comment further, you’ll have a problem. At best, the character will be very hard to identify with. At worst, the audience will come away thinking you, as the author, embrace those views.
Instead, put the character in situations that challenge their prejudiced beliefs. If they think halflings are all lying thieves, put them in a plot where they have to work with a halfling police officer. If they hold the opinion that women can’t handle computers, it’s time to pit them against a female hacker with top notch skills.
The novel Consider Phlebas, by Ian M. Banks, does this very well. The main character, a shapeshifter named Horza, hates artificial intelligence. At best, he sees it as little more than computers with an attitude problem. At worst, he thinks it’ll bring about the downfall of the human species. His views are well inline with the faction he serves. Throughout the story, Horza is put in situations where he must rely on robots and other forms of AI, much to his chagrin. His bigotry serves to make him a more interesting character, rather than a detestable one. We see him as a man who, tragically, can’t move past his deeply ingrained prejudice.
Note that your character doesn’t always need to come around and abandon their prejudice. Not everyone does, after all. In Consider Phlebas, Horza dies a violent death, still believing that artificial intelligence is fundamentally bad, even as a robot tries to save him . What’s most important isn’t that you convert a prejudiced character but that you show how they’re wrong.
Here’s the bottom line: you can portray prejudice in your stories, but it’s always important to call it out. Great ills make for great drama, so long as it’s clear they really are ills and not just another part of the story.
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One trick I have used with some success is to have the dialogue lean heavily on euphemisms which are obvious as euphemisms to the audience, but not to the characters (period euphemisms work very well for this), and then contrast them with extremely candid out-of-dialogue narrative. Bonus points if the euphemisms were extensively used historically but have since acquired a vaguely menacing air.
For example two colonial officers (or the warlord du jour of your setting) might discuss “an expeditious resolution of the [subject of conversation] question,” followed by a scene containing a candid description of the look and feel of riot police breaking up a public gathering, or the secret police kicking in doors at the crack of dawn).
This technique highlights the characters’ unexamined (from their PoV) privilege both with the dissonance between the facts as narrated in the impartial third person and the facts as discussed by the characters, and in the dissonance between the dated or foreign euphemisms of the characters and the more modern newspeak that the audience has been desensitized to.
Done right, it turns the privilege blindness into a character flaw which is obvious to the reader, but not to the protagonist, without requiring the character to be punished for his ignorance. After all, in reality the world does not usually penalize privilege blindness (until it penalizes it with guillotines, and that may not be the story you want to tell). So there is a certain risk that such punishments come to seem contrived if they are meted out with any frequency appropriate to the frequency of the flaw being penalized.
With a little luck the audience might even come away with a greater capacity for pattern-matching the current iteration of newspeak.
That’s a good idea, especially for creating a sense of unease in the reader that SOMETHING is wrong but they’re not sure how. Personally, I’d pair it with another of the options above just to provide some good contrast, but that’s certainly not a requirement.
In a certain sense it meets “write from the bottom” halfway. Unless your characters spend all their time in a country club (and how interesting is that?), providing genuinely candid descriptions of the events as they actually are automatically offers a perspective that more closely matches that of the unprivileged than that of the privileged. For the simple reason that one of the things privilege protects you from is being disabused of your delusions. (Not to say that the unprivileged have no delusions whatever, merely that they can ill afford to maintain a large complement of them.)
Or, put it another way, you could turn it around, and use “am I writing from the bottom” as a litmus test for whether you are providing candid descriptions of events. If you find that you are not writing from the bottom, you are very probably wrapping your prose in a sugar-coating of newspeak.
This was a fantastic article, so insightful, thanks!
I really loved the emphasis on revolutions and not maintaining the status quo, its so frustrating that so much media is built around that & while I can grasp some of the practical rationale (Its easier to write what one knows) its so often frustrating or downright offensive.
Excellent points about who the story focuses on as well and the portrayal of those who do buy into their societies rhetoric and those who don’t.
I also wonder, should matriarchal settings be written similar to patriarchal ones? Not as exact flip, but as also having gender prejudices, stereorypes, gender inequality and etc. Not that the whole story is only about matriarchal oppression of men, but just characters who live in matriarchal society and dealing with it. I’m thinking of writing a story when matriarchal society isn’t main factor, just story happens to take place in such society, and misandry isn’t turned Up to Eleven, but men do experience sexism and most important roles are reserved for women. Just like there are good stories about patriarchal settings, it seems to me to be surely possible to write good stories about matriarchal settings.
We have an article on creating matriarchies: https://mythcreants.com/blog/creating-matriarchies/
So yes, you can have a story with a matriarchal setting. However, you should seek to make that power dynamic feel normal and natural to your readers in the same way patriarchal settings feel normal to fantasy fans. In most fantasy settings, women aren’t constantly fighting the power structure, it’s normal and expected to them, even if sometimes it’s chafing.
I also wonder how “write from the bottom” advice applies to matriarchal settings. Is it better to write such stories from female or male POV? Because writing from male POV could become just another focusing on men (e.g. “persecution flip”), instead of focusing on underprivileged people. Writing from female POV could be a good representation of women, but at the same time the story would focus on experiences of privileged people.
I’d say if you’re not writing an extreme form of matriarchy where men are hardly more than slaves and don’t make the struggle against the power structure the main point of the story (although you can, of course, add pieces where your male POV is restricted because he’s a man – as a woman in a patriarchy would be restricted because she’s a woman), you can also use a male POV.
Since matriarchal oppression against men isn’t a real thing, the rules for portraying it in fiction are a lot less strict. There’s little risk of someone picking up a book about a matriarchy and thinking men really do deserve to be discriminated against like there is with stories that portray real bigotry.
In general, it’s fine to write from either a man or woman’s POV in a matriarchal setting, so long as you avoid making the matriarchy over the top and ridiculous.
Re superheroes, you’re mostly right. The Doom Patrol, though, once fought evil conservative Darren Jones, who’s goal was to eliminate everything in the world which wasn’t ”normal”.
My urban fantasy setting is mainly a psychological thriller, but I think there’s some room for social issues.
As a background detail, there’s an “epidemic” of people with mental illnesses dying of mysterious heart failure, in a ritualistically-decorated location that seems to contradict the suddenness of the cause of death (where an autopsy would say sudden accidental or natural death, the death scene implies a premeditated murder or suicide). A good/thorough investigator would notice all of this and suggest the police talk to the media to keep the public informed, but I just realized that since the initial victims are anthropomorphic animals (statistical minorities in my setting), the investigators might have biases or prejudices (perhaps even if the investigator is an anthro animal themselves), on top of any funding issues in the police department overall.
Thanks for the great article!
I’m writing a science fantasy story set in a world ruled by the bigoted Hierarchy, and this has tons of brilliant advice.
The story is about changing the status quo and challenging bigotry, among many other things. One main character goes from serving the Hierarchy to helping overthrow it, the other is a bitter, kind-hearted indentured servant plotting her escape, and the other is a blind, autistic noble who joins the servant rebellion and steals scrolls filled with forbidden knowledge.
I can’t wait to write it. Thank you for the great advice, Mythcreants!