To read and listen to so many reviewers these days you’d think we’ve completely lost the ability to tell good stories any more. That, or we’ve lost the ability to train up reviewers who know how to recognize a good story when they see it.
The trouble is that far too many reviewers come at a story with a limited toolbox these days. Often they’re limited to one tool. They’re not so much reviewers as inspectors: does this story have a strong female lead? Does this story send the right message about environmentalism? Does this story sufficiently decry violence? Does this story sufficiently promote a liberated sexual lifestyle? They don’t want to review the story for itself, they want a press release. They’re looking to check boxes to determine if this is the “right kind of story”.
Oh, they have wonderful motives for doing so, I’m sure. They want to make sure that this minority or that position is adequately represented so that people of that persuasion will be able to recognize themselves in the story.
It’s all nonsense, but it’s far too pervasive. They’re not promoting diversity, they’re destroying empathy. Yes, it’s healthy to explore the world through characters that are different from yourself, but to insist that the “other” must be a different gender or race is naiveté of the first order. Grab any other 44-year-old white male and hold him up next to me and you’ll find us to be very different. Grab a 83-year-old black woman and compares us and you’ll find we have a lot of similarities.
That’s not to say we don’t get a little lazy as writers. I’ll admit that much. Is there any reason why a story told in modern or futuristic times couldn’t have a middle-aged, asian female protagonist? Well, if the protagonist needs to be able to kick alien butt with their bare hands, the answer might be yes, unless they can get their hands on some equalizing technology. In spite of what Hollywood would have us believe, a 140-lb. person, male or female, is just not going to be able to do as much damage to a 240-lb person as the latter would do to the former. Physics knows no political correctness. River Tam couldn’t really hit all those Reavers that hard. But Ripley could conceivably take on the alien queen with a cybernetic hydraulic loader.
But if your protagonist is a detective that uses their mind primarily, and has a Colt .45 to defend themselves with, there may not be any real reason why that detective couldn’t be a 43-year-old 150-lb. black woman. So why not try it?
In the end, however, every storyteller must tell the story they think best. If certain minorities can’t relate that may or may not be the fault of the writer. It could be the writer’s fault if the character is someone that anyone would have a hard time relating to, or who is offensive in some manner, but it could be also be the minority’s fault if they lack sufficient empathy or imagination to be able to put themselves in that character’s shoes.
Sure, everyone likes to see someone in a story who is “just like them.” But I think these mono-thematic reviewers forget that “just like them” is not limited to skin color, gender, sexual orientation, or what have you, and it’s rather superficial, shallow, or even bigoted of a reviewer to assume so. Alfre Woodard’s character in Star Trek:First Contact, for example, is an excellent character. She’s tough, smart, and able to adapt to being thrown into a situation beyond her wildest imaginations. She gives Captain Picard a good dressing down when he deserves it. I was able to relate to her quite a bit, not because she is just like me in any superficial sense. Yes, she’s a black woman and I’m not, but I could relate to her character on levels that really matter, like how she’s interpreting what’s going on around her, and how she learns enough to understand not just the immediate situation, but the people she’s found herself thrown in with.
The measure for me of a good story is not whether it comes pre-packaged with characters who are just like me, or who are relatable on some external level, but whether it presents people who are different from me, but who are sympathetic enough that I care enough to find out why they are the way they are and hence learn something about myself in the process. I didn’t sit there through Orson Scott Card’s “Speaker for the Dead” reminding myself that most of the characters were a different ethnicity than me. I reveled in getting to know these people, in learning how they think, and why.
In short, the stories I most enjoy are those with people in them. The reviewers I most listen to are the ones who get that. I don’t have time or patience for reviewers who apply the same politically-correct checklist to everything they review. And should I ever get published I’m sure they won’t have time or patience for writers like me.
I write the stories I want to read. I read the stories that help me better understand people who are different than me–and that pretty much includes everyone. I don’t want to write stories that remind us we’re all different. I like stories that help remind us that in many ways we’re the same.
Yes, PC has caused part of what you notice, but, an other part is, negativity sells. There are those who get rich being positive, but it is far easier and far more likely to be lucrative, to just go negative.