Female Black MC Questions

RolandWrites

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I'm editing/revising my novel before I go agent hunting, and while talking with my husband today, I decided I wanted to present my thoughts over here to get opinions from people who know better than I do. I wanted to talk through her arc to ensure I, as a non-POC, am handling everything well or if I could do things better, I want to know about it. (I'm going to ignore my other POV characters' arcs while going through hers).

My main character is a 15 year old woman (16 classifies as adulthood in my world). This is high fantasy (dark, though, my editor has called my other books similar in style to Game of Thrones) filled with elves and other things like that, and Glory is what is essentially a wolf-shifter half-breed - part human, part shifter. Her father is the lord of his city, mother is the lady, both full-blood humans and white. Mother slept with one of the castle guards (handsome full-blood wolf man, black skin, black fur, totally consensual relationship), and the baby comes out a half wolf with dark skin. The lord sells them both into slavery as his lady has disgraced him and he doesn't want the child around. You never see any of the slavery. This is all prologue (3 pages long, and I have been thinking of just cutting it out depending on my beta reader feedback). Chapter 1 is just her at 15, and by the end of the chapter, she escapes slavery (kills her master), is homeless for a very brief period (half-breed wolfs are looked down on badly in this society. It's my worlds version of racism and I do explore it), a kind shopkeep gives her some new shoes and food (naive girl in the city gets mugged), and she takes a room in an inn with a sleazy owner. He gives her poppy to help her with the pain from her recent muggings when she lost her new boots which leads to a small arc exploring an opioid addiction (despite how much space this takes to type, this doesn't actually take a ton of space in the book, I think I spend 5 chapters on the stuff in this paragraph). Once we hit her rock bottom here, she meets the leader of a mercenary guild and he takes her in, helps get her clean, and teaches her how to fight, use a disguise kit, work with herbs, and generally teaches her how to be an awesome mercenary. Her intention is to go back to her father and pay him back for putting her into slavery in the first place and sending her down this dark path, a revenge arc. This all reads very dark, but she also spends the majority of her time when not trying to get revenge with her best friend, a disabled wolf who she loves and who loves her (in a platonic way) and they help each other in many ways, she has a deep soft spot for helping children, she often runs Robin Hood type theft schemes with the mercenary leader in which they steal from the rich in order to redistribute to the poor and feed the local homeless children. Her arc with the mercenaries starts as a revenge plot and turns into her learning that there is more to her life than serving others, and that revenge is just another form of serving ( because she's dedicating her life to pursuing another person and to her dedication to being her own person, to loving herself, and to finding her own way, which leads her to meeting up with the other three POV heroes who are out to stop the villain doing what he's doing.

A point - slavery is not a race thing in this world, it's a species thing. Half-breed wolves are slaves no matter what skin color they happen to be and in the same household with Glory, there are 4 other slaves, all white, 3 male, 1 female (and she's kind of red-skinned because she's mixed with a species that has red skin).

I saw on a different post in here a person saying "Why does the black, female MC always have to be a lesbian" and I was going to make her ace (asexual) because she feels best that way. She isn't interested in having a romantic arc in this story nor in having a sexual storyline. She feels ace, but then, if it's super cliched to have the black female MC be LGBTQIA+ then I might steer away from it (I'm part of the LGBTQIA+ community but I still wasn't aware of that, so it's good to have my attention drawn to it if it is a cliche).

Sorry for the long post, but I figured it was best to put her whole arc out there rather than just ask about that one particular piece of it so the whole picture is there. Ask question if you need to, and I'll be sure to answer.

Thanks for taking the time to read and respond. <3
 

cool pop

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LOL! That was me who made the lesbian comment. I only brought it up because on a lot of movies and shows it seems that they make black women lesbians a lot for the soul purpose of not giving her a love interest and then they don't even go into her life. I've seen a lot of things with the "black lesbian sidekick" but that's all she is. Nothing more. Many times it's just a label they put on a character but don't go beyond that. They do this with not just black women of course but I've seen it done with disabled people, gay people, other minorities, transgender people, etc. They throw these characters out there and it's like they don't care to delve deeper into them or make them three-dimensional. It's like it's just being done so the writer or whoever can say they were being diverse. That's not why you should incorporate diversity. Don't just do it to do it. I'd rather it not be done in that case. So that's my issue with that.

It's how you do things and fleshing out a character is important no matter what type of characters we write. For example, I write about disable characters often but I make sure they are three-dimensional characters and not just some guy I put in a wheelchair because I'm "trying to be diverse".

Diverse characters should be real and have some purpose sometimes beyond just the MC's Asian friend or gay aunt. :rolleyes:

As for this story, I know jack about fantasy. Nothing. I don't read fantasy so I don't know the tropes or readers' expectations, etc. I will let others who know about your genre comment on that. I didn't see anything I feel is offensive but we are all different and someone else might. I don't mind slavery and stuff if it's a true part of the story and not just thrown in. It's not even about being offensive but it's lazy writing when we don't flesh things out.

My advice is to be true to your story and go with your gut. I probably didn't help though. LOL! Sorry.
 
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Hbooks

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I wonder what would happen if she had like... gray fur or arctic white wolf fur? Or something else that made it obvious she was the child of an affair? I also enjoy writing shifter stuff and am working on several shifter manuscripts as well, so I get what you're coming from with human/were politics and that being the focus, not race... but I have to admit the first place my mind kind of jumps to when a lord and lady sell the lady's daughter into slavery because she's half-wolf and they both happen to be white, and daughter is the product of an affair with a werewolf-of-color, is race. I wonder if your message might get lost because of that? Just my two cents, take with a grain of salt.
 

RolandWrites

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@Cool Pop - I know it was you. ;) Thanks for your input. I'm part of the LGBTQIA community, so I wouldn't be putting her in that community just for the sake of diversity. I originally had her in a relationship, but, as my critique group so nicely put it, I was just doing it to check a box on "female lead needs these things" and it's really not her. She's ace. I don't think I'm going to dive into an explanation in the story about it, I'll just remove the romance. I'm glad you don't see anything offensive.

@Hbooks - My critique group asked if I could do gray fur too. My half-breed shifters experience a similar amount of racism in this story as a black person in America in the 1800s, so the comparison is perfectly expected, something I lean into even when the character is white or red or whatever color. She can't be red, though, as that mixes her with a race I don't want her mixed with (a type of elf in my story that I don't need her to be mixed with). My critique group brought up that right now, the only real defining feature my half-breads have is that their eyes are their tell. They don't look wolf enough to be wolves but the eyes give them away so they don't look human. If one is desperate enough, they could blind themselves and pass as human and I might consider a way to still give them something that would leave her with a way to tell she's a half-breed, so the first place I went was the skin being the color of her fur (which is black right now) but then she's just going to look like any other black person wandering around in my world (and they are not prejudiced against) so I was thinking of making her way darker, like unnaturally black, but that's a whole other issue as I'm aware that there's a stigma against black people who have super dark skin (which is sad) and I don't want to imply that). So gray seems to be a good middle ground because it's unusual and not normal, but it leaves her looking like a zombie. I'm not quite happy with that option. One of my critique partners said I should just be fully aware of any issues that might come up with making her unnaturally black, be as sensitive as possible (hence the post).
 

cool pop

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Can't you just make her fur a different color if you want her to be different? Make it like real black people. We are all different shades. We range from white-light to black-purple. Maybe changing her fur and have it a color other than black like the others would differentiate her.

Yes, there is a stigma against very dark blacks. It's called colorism. It's always been bad and still is. Started back in slavery as we all know as well as with the one-drop rule, etc. I've never experienced that because I'm not dark, I'm yellow. And, yes black WOMEN are treated certain ways (by other blacks especially) because of the tone of their skin. Light-skinned females are hailed as the best thing since sliced bread while dark skinned women are often treated like crap and degraded because of their tone whether they are attractive or not. :rant: Men don't get this treatment. With men, everyone loves the dark men. What's sad is no one seems to treat dark-skinned females as bad as black men do but that's another subject. And colorism is not just a black thing either. It happens in all minority communities between light and dark. What a world.

Why not follow the color spectrums of real-life ethnic skin tones and choose something that might fit her? Something different but where she is still black.