Is Bad Representation Worse Than No Representation?

My eye is still partially red, my shoulder somehow hurt itself on Wednesday, while I squished my hand in a car door yesterday. Somehow.

Presently, I am reading Children of Ragnarok by Cinda Williams Chima, and watching The Recruit on Netflix and Burn Notice on Hulu (occasionally catching an episode of Elementary). I have some Batman and Star Wars comics to read, too.

I’m trying to clean up on Dragon Age: Inquisition! Let’s see if I can get to the finale soonish.

Is Bad Representation Worse Than No Representation?

I’m sure I’ve written about this before, but it’s at least been a while, so we’ll go for it.

So for research purposes I’m putting in a footnote*, I picked up The Wigwam and the Cabin by William Gilmore Simms. Full disclosure: this man was a rising star on the 19th century literary scene until basically the Civil War, where he went all-in on the Confederacy and even worked for the Confederate government. His literary career never picked back up after that. And reading this book of short stories, I don’t recommend trying to revive it in the modern day. Really, unless you’re doing research like I was, or studying Antebellum literature, I don’t recommend picking up Gilmore Simms. Something in the introduction caught my interest though: unlike many southern writers, especially those trying to tell prestige stories, Gilly Simms acknowledged that there were people living in the South long before Europeans arrived, and those people had stories that were worth telling and retaining.

And I mean, the man was a virulent racist, and I think his portrayal of Native Americans never really rises above ‘Noble Savage’ stereotypes, so, uh… I don’t really know how much it counts for, really.

It did make me think about A Thing, which as you can see is the title of the Note: is bad representation worse than no representation? Which I won’t be asking about this case, because I’d prefer Gilmore Simms to have not been racist, but this is something that comes up, and I think intention is a key part of answering the question.

So! For instance! When he did the sequel series Heroes of Olympus and eventually his Norse mythology series Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard, Rick Riordan took characters from a lot of different backgrounds and put them into the story for representation. Overall, I think they went well, but in some corners, fans were unhappy because they thought the representation of Asians, or indigenous, or Muslims, skewed towards stereotypes rather than actual authentic people of those origins, and they found that offensive.

Now, I’m pretty comfortable saying that Riordan did not mean offense or to belittle anyone when writing those characters. That doesn’t make him above criticism, of course, but it counts for something. He was trying to build heroic characters from cultures and backgrounds that were different, in order to make it more representative of a diverse audience. 

Likewise, when ImpishIdea was still a thing, there was a spork of Mortal Instruments going on in which we frequently criticized Cassandra Clare’s handling of the main gay character, Alec. We found him fairly stereotypical and unsympathetic. And while yes, Clare has a lot of problems, someone in the comments asked, okay, but she is at least trying to represent a group often excluded from the mainstream fantasy narrative in a prominent role in the story. If she did it badly, does that mean she shouldn’t have done it at all?

Which gets to the crux of things: is it better to not represent a minority group or culture you’re not a part of, or to try it and get it wrong, maybe even badly?

I think a key part of it is intention: Clare and Riordan are not trying to be offensive. They’re trying to represent people, to be more inclusive, to say to people that don’t see themselves in these kinds of stories often that they have a place here. Again, that doesn’t mean they’re immune to criticism in the ways they represent people; they’re not. They can definitely do better, and write characters who are more complex or reflective of lived experiences. But that they’re trying to do good counts for a lot.

It’s a little more frustrating when the author doesn’t have that particular goal in mind. I am greatly frustrated with the Hellboy comics that refer to Hellboy’s travels in Africa without specifying where on the entire continent he was, and the only recurring character being a shaman from Lesotho, who apparently is the stand-in for all African cultures (in his first appearance, he references Anansi, a figure from West Africa, which Lesotho very much is not). Mignola’s goal here isn’t representation as much as exoticism, taking after the old-fashioned pulp fiction stories that he loves so much. He could have worked harder to improve on them and they way they represent African countries, and to be fair he removes overt racism from the equation, while still painting a massive continent and the people in it with a broad paintbrush as if it’s all the same.

[I’d count this less as ‘racism’ as much as ‘racial insensitivity’; it certainly could be much better, though.]

And compare this, of course, to my first example of William Gilmore Simms. He is not telling stories featuring indigenous Americans because he thought of them as Noble Savages that aren’t really part of the world he lived in. They’re from a time in the past. He didn’t think of them in the same way he thought of white Carolinians, and he certainly doesn’t raise any objections to their appalling treatment by the government

Intention. Intention is key.

Which is not a free pass to not try at all to get representation right! Intention only gets you so far; but it should count for quite a lot when it comes to criticism. If you are honestly trying to get things right, so that you can portray people different from you correctly, that doesn’t excuse everything, but it does earn you some points in my book.

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*Basically, his book was the earliest I could find a story that is usually recounted as an “old Cherokee legend”, which I have been led to believe is not really an old legend at all. I wanted to see if finding Gilly Simms’s version would clarify if he was retelling a story or if he made it up. My research is inconclusive thus far. At this point, I may have to write to an expert or something.