Is Bad Representation Worse Than No Representation?

[rubs eyes] I’ve been…. Busy. But Peace Talks is finally out, and when I’m done with that we’ll have some words about that I imagine. And I have to talk about the cover art of the Squire’s Tales books one of these days, because the editions I get from the library have terrible photoshopped covers. Which is a shame, because the books are really good.

Anyway this is something I’ve meant to talk about for a while but never got around to. Or maybe I did and I forgot! Who knows! And maybe I won’t do the topic justice, because again I’m writing at the last minute! I’ve been busy most days this week. But we’ll talk about that later too.

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Is Bad Representation Worse Than No Representation?

Back in the day, when we were young and full of age, there was a discussion on one of the sporking chapters of Mortal Instruments on ImpishIdea. And the gist of it was about how despite a lot of the fanbase praising Cassandra Clare for including a gay character (Alec), Alec is actually kind of a terrible person and a terribly-written character that fits a lot of gay stereotypes. So why should Cassandra Clare get any praise for that?

[I mean, arguably she shouldn’t get any praise for anything, because that whole plagiarism debacle but that’s not the point of this essay so we’ll get to that another time.]

The question came up by another commenter (one that was admittedly not much of a Clare fan either) who pointed out that, look, okay, no he’s not a great example of an LGBT character, but aren’t we being a bit harsh on this? This was published in 2007, where there weren’t exactly a lot of openly gay characters in mainstream fiction. Okay admittedly Alec wasn’t openly gay in-universe, but it was open that he was the gay character in the story. And if we’re asking that an author not write a gay character unless she does it perfectly… well, no one’s a perfect author, and someone’s going to get upset about it.

I thought about this when I somehow came across someone making a masterpost of things wrong with minority characters in Rick Riordan’s Heroes of Olympus. And to be clear, most of the posts linked to were critical, but not hateful, and merely pointed out that Riordan very clearly isn’t an expert on how headscarves work with long hair, or how frustrating it is that Frank’s grandmother fits the Asian ‘Tiger Mom’ stereotype.

There was also the claim that it was stereotypical that the Hispanic kids in the series were from abusive homes, but this didn’t have much weight with me because almost every single one of the characters was from an abusive home so that’s… not a stereotype, that’s Riordan’s writing style.

And again, most of these were critical, but not hateful. But there were some that seemed to think Riordan could not write minority characters at all, so shouldn’t have even tried, and that’s… I don’t know how I feel about that.

To be clear, here we’re talking about attempts to actually represent minorities as positive or complex characters. Examples of writers putting in a group just to demonize them obviously don’t count in this discussion. But on the topic of authors who are putting in minority characters, is it better for them to not try to be inclusive than it is for them to try and fail?

Laura and I have a running thing where we assert that we’re tired of Puerto Rican characters in fiction always being gangster or drug dealers. It sucks. There’s no reason that someone couldn’t just make a Puerto Rican character that wasn’t a gangster. There isn’t! Cisco Ramon from The Flash, for instance, is based off of a Puerto Rican comic book character; but he’s never specifically named as Puerto Rican in the show. Likewise, Elena Rodriguez in Agents of SHIELD was Puerto Rican in the comics, but she’s made another nationality in the show for Reasons.

At this point it’s pretty egregious. Because like we said, there are very rarely any Puerto Ricans in mainstream fiction, and the ones who are… are criminals. And very rarely are they well-developed ones, aside from something like West Side Story. Usually they’re just thugs to be the criminal element in crime fiction. In this case, I do think I’d agree that no representation would be better, because so few people are even trying. 

But I don’t know if that applies to all cases. Obviously, some care should be given and research be done. It’s certainly not okay if someone decides to write a story with a specific real world group of people represented, and then not bother at all to have any knowledge of what those people’s lives are like, building off of stereotypes or dramatic notions. There was a very public example recently of a book titled American Dirt, I believe? And this very sadly led to many well-meaning Anglo critics declaring that white Anglo authors shouldn’t ever write the stories of Hispanic people, when I noticed some Hispanic people suggesting that the issue isn’t that, it’s that Anglo authors shouldn’t ever write someone who isn’t like them, it’s trying to pass off a dramatized soap opera as the real life experiences of people (and in that case, the struggles of immigrants from Mexico).

Representing a certain real-life group who is not one you belong to (and in some cases those you do--I realize, for instance, that my life experience is not reflective of all Puerto Ricans), you need to actually have some knowledge from first-hand sources, whether that be spoken word, interviews or written accounts, of the people you’re writing about. And while I think if someone is genuinely trying to be inclusive in his or her writing, and mess up, that’s a bit more excusable. I think in that case, bad representation is better than no representation. But that doesn’t make it beyond criticism! No piece of fiction is. If the criticism doesn’t happen, then there’s no chance for these things to get better.

Or y’know just you could mostly circumvent this whole issue altogether by reading work by actual minority authors, who are likely to have a better idea of how to represent themselves in fiction.

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