Avoiding Negative Stereotype
“A good way to avoid stereotypes is to make your characters contradictory of said stereotype.”
That might be one of the worst advice I heard when it comes to writing but for a quick and easy rundown of how that one sentence could backfire. Let’s say you want to avoid stereotypes with your disabled character. Disabled characters are shown as weak, so you make them strong, congrats you avoided the weak disabled stereotype and instead created the super crip.
How about, you want to avoid the sad and pathetic disabled stereotype so you make your character be an inspiration? Congrats, you created the inspiration porn stereotype.
I could go on.
Listen, stereotypes are a thing because enough people wrote the same type of character and those characters have real world consequences. Even “good” stereotypes have bad outcomes. The smart Asian trope might be seen as a good trait to have but it has also harmed the Asian community.
I can’t stress this enough, if you want to learn how to write characters, you need to speak to the community you want to write about. Each community has stereotypes they despise and has advice on how to avoid them. “Make contradictions” isn’t addressing any problems, it’s just avoiding the issue you might be having.
“Make contradictions” is also way too broad to be given to the entire problem which is stereotypes. If you want to avoid stereotypes, please talk to people, don’t just listen to one person on the internet because that one person, with their one advice, won't work for every situation. I always try to be thorough in my advice because I like learning and I enjoy teaching but even I make sure to let you know that you should interact with others. The best way to learn is to ask the same question to different people because each person has a different perspective. Talking to others is how we grow and get better. So please, if you want to avoid negative stereotypes, talk to the people you want to write about.
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