How Do I Manage To Not Be Offensive In This Situation?

[writinggg]

So I just don't believe that anyone who is an ableist is a very nice person. They can still be nice, but they have a dark side in their personality.

That's kind of what I mean by mixing it up because not every person who has an -ism will be as neatly cut as being evil in other aspects of their life. It also puts into perspective how some people can commit these aggressions to other people but "sill be allowed" to hold these views by people not of that group.

Hopefully that makes sense.

Oh! OK, that makes perfect sense! Thank you!


I'll probably keep this thread open for the next character issues I have (which deals with religions including my own, and has a moral in the same respect category as the teacher one : everyone should not care/treat someone differently for believing in a different belief than themselves).

[Loona]

@Loona : You are right. That is wrong of me to not think of something in her past that was negative to cause her to be this way, and I should make her more positive on other topics (maybe she could disagree with people invading other's business/not believing other people's life choices that are different from their own, which is something that child-free people commonly deal with. Or maybe she could do something like fight for animal rights. Anything really.).

It's just that I don't want to make a mistake that many things like books and TV do all the time (which is not give a single hint at a character having a positive trait, then pull something out randomly that feels like it was thought off in two seconds)

When considering the past I find it a bit problematic when stories blame a character issue on a Single Backstory Incident, when in most cases it might be more of a Death of a Thousand Papercuts thing - even if it's more like half a dozen or so, sufficiently spaced out in time that each new one reinforces the negative impressions from the previous ones.

That's usually tricky to fit into a story, especially for a secondary or tertiary character, but to me it feels more plausible, as does the possibility of specific memories fading away over time (unless the character's reminded of such incidents), but the attitudes resulting from those events remaining - often unexamined, because the character may have to deal with several other unrelated things and not spare a moment to rethink that particular topic or her views on it.

In this particular case, I figure the multiple adult-specific problems on has to deal with might push her (positive) thoughts on children to a very hard-to-reach shelf in the furniture of her mind, and when prompted on it, only a very superficial view on that might end up being expressed.
I like to think of the way the human mind handles its knowledge and memories like a katamari, if you're familiar with the Katamari Damacy games - the things that help to build on early on, by the time it grows large enough would be hard to retrieve, since there's been so much more added on top of them since, and it would take a very deliberate effort to recover them, unless something similar has been picked up along the way recently.

[writinggg]

@Loona :

That seems much better. I have started to think of ideas for this now! And I did the first Katamari Damacy, so the explanation makes perfect sense to me.

[Katy133]

Also, try looking at other works and see how they approached tricky topics. Look at both good and bad examples. Ask yourself why it worked/didn't work here. Analysis it as you watch/read it.

As an example, look at the character Uther Pendragon from the series, BBC Merlin. He is highly against sorcery in the story (which the main character, Merlin secretly uses to save people, including Uther's own son) and has made sorcery punishable by death in his kingdom. He basically wants to wipe out all sorcerers and people who were born with the ability to use magic. He has killed a lot of people. The writers could have easily just had Uther be presented as simply an evil, flat villain. We are, after all, meant to be on the sorcerers' side because the main character, Merlin, is a warlock. But instead, the writer's give Uther a lot of personality, and make him quite likeable. They make him a person. Uther Pendragon is shown to be very protective of his family, as well as his kingdom, and believes that he is protecting them by fighting sorcerers. It is also revealed that there is a personal reason why he hates and distrusts magic users:

His wife was killed through magic

. Uther also gets quite a lot of funny lines throughout the series. You even feel sorry for him whenever he thinks his ward/son is in mortal danger, and when

he eventually dies while protecting his son from an assassin

. It also helps that throughout the series, the majority of the villains Merlin has to fight are vengeful sorcerers trying to kill Uther and his son, Arthur (who really has nothing to do with Uther's actions except for the fact that they're related), which almost justifies Uther's distrust of magic-users.

Also, to prevent your writing from sounding too preachy, if you present an argument (ie, "X" is bad because of "A", "B", and "C"), always at some point present a counter-argument (ie, "X" is good because of "D", "E", and "F"). This can be presented through characters talking to each other, or negative/positive events that happen due to the character's choices.