From: julie@pascal.org   
      
   On Monday, July 28, 2014 11:25:50 AM UTC-6, Jacey Bedford wrote:   
   > On 28/07/2014 09:18, Kay Shapero wrote:   
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   > > In article ,   
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   > > jaceybedford@nospam.btinternet.com says...   
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   > >>> Anyone you have problems with? Any character type I left out that   
   >    
   > >>> should be included?   
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   > >>>   
   >    
   > >> More ethnicity. More females. More subversion of stereotypes. More   
   >    
   > >> speedbumps and charcater flaws.   
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   > >> : )   
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   > > That and allow some of the poor females to NOT be beautiful.  Or at   
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   > > least if you're going to go on about their looks, do the same with the   
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   > > males.    
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   > Absolutely.   
   >     
   > Jacey   
      
   I don't mind if everyone is beautiful, or if the main characters are, at   
   least. It sort of depends on what effect is sought, if the idea is an everyman   
   setting or if the tone is supposed to be heroic or whatever.  Seems to me that   
   this is a tool akin to    
   deciding if the spaceship has gleaming chrome and plastic interiors or if it's   
   all catwalks and exposed pipes.   
      
   I also don't mind if the main characters are homely.    
      
   And I'm not saying that homely characters aren't heroic, that actually might   
   be the more heroic choice.  I'm only arguing that changing the settings   
   changes the story and there aren't one set of settings that are right.   
      
   The same with gender and ethnic mixes (or any other diversity element.) It's   
   good to do things on purpose instead of by accident but the world setting may   
   make deliberate diversity seem contrived... because it is contrived.   
      
   With a very futuristic setting, for example, a situation where a crew is drawn   
   from different ethnicities but from a relatively small geography requires a   
   society that has a mechanism for keeping people separate.  Or draw crew from a   
   very wide geography..   
   . which changes the background and what sort of ship/mission dramatically.   
      
   In what I'm working on now I've got two groups of people, neither of them with   
   any meaningful ethnic diversity.  One has very narrow physical variations in   
   height, hair color, eye color, skin tone.  The other has far more but still   
   they are within a rage    
   because they are from a community that has had very few new people moving in   
   from elsewhere. There is no social mechanism for keeping people apart. They   
   have fine lines of loyalties that define individuals as this family or clan or   
   that one, but nothing    
   we'd think of as ethnicity.    
      
   Nor would they think of those terms themselves, so why would it come up?   
      
   The first, uniform group, the men/women mix for "military" is 50/50.  It could   
   easily have been 100% all one or the other or all one on one ship and all the   
   other on another ship.  But unless I introduced sex-linked infant mortality,   
   that's the option my    
   world building gives me.   
      
   The second group has an all male militia because nothing else would make   
   sense. The world is dangerous enough that all children/teenagers are trained   
   to fight and no adult goes about without a weapon within reach, but the   
   response force, the militia, is    
   male.  Anything else would be, and seem, contrived.   
      
   -Julie   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)