Okay. Let's not pretend I'm free of bias, shall we?

I'm very sorry to hear that you got such an e-mail and absolutely do not blame you for turning off the "e-mail if you want" LJ option. Some people just make me sad. Excellent response all around and interesting breakdown of relationships in your books.

And now I am reminded that I'm behind on Velveteen Vs. and must fix that immediately.

First off - fuck that anon. Secondly, I bet this is similar to the study that they did where they found that when women speak roughly fifty percent of the time they are perceived as dominating the conversation. By you having *any* QUILTBAG people, there are clearly too many.

I agree, it's a related thing. The idea that the straight people (in this email's case) or the men (in that study's case) are the default, the normal human, invisible, and anything else is other and strange and stands out.

I am a white male, heterosexual and cisgendered.

I have read stuff that leaves me thinking "The lack of straight people in this story reduces my ability to suspend disbelief."

I have also read stuff that half way though I found myself thinking "That's weird. Everyone in this book seems to be straight."

These thoughts are jarring. They take me away from the story.

I have never had these thoughts while reading your work. I do not feel the accusation that you have some kind of 'deviant bias' is a fair one.

I've had similar thoughts about a book series I like. The main character seems to attract random people, who end up becoming good friends to her, and every. single. one. ends up hooking up with someone of the opposite sex.

Worse, this is a fictional world where gay marriage is mentioned, more than once, in a way that implies its, pretty much, universal accepted. (Gays and bisexuals still get to be murder victims and suspects. (And one coroner who gets mentioned briefly in passing.))

Have you seen the studies where when in a group that is half female women speak up half of the time people (my recollection, anyway, is people regardless of gender) perceive women as dominating the conversation? I mean, it's obvious, but... bah. It's really common. Right up there with "Other people being given equal rights is oppressing meeee!"

I mean, really, all things considered, you write a lot about monosexuals. What gives? (What? A lot of fairies in SF are gay? Seriously?)

That all being said, from whence your 10% number? (Because while the Kinsey study is generally considered to have been poorly sampled, I suppose with a broad enough definition of deviant one could probably set it arbitrarily high.)

I'm certain Seanan has seen that study because I recall her referencing it in another post. Definitely the same perception syndrome.

Well I, for one, am glad you're not stopping. Keeping on writing, because I plan to keep reading, and I love the way you incorporate sexuality in your fiction. It's teaching me a lot. :)

Thank you, Seanan, for writing your world on the page. It's my world, too, and the people who think the straight-white-people-only world exists are a bit blind, thank all that's holy.

All I'm going to say is that I appreciate the variety of orientations among your characters and I actually buy your books (which I doubt the troll does).

If it helps the cranky, you gained me as a reader after the "No, I'm not having my characters raped" incident (some friends were discussing it at a gathering, and it got my attention). I stayed, in part, because of the diversity that isn't "LOOK! HERE'S THIS TOKEN CHARACTER WHO'S ONLY POINT IN EXISTING IS SO I CAN PROCLAIM HOW OPEN-MINDED I AM." A shared fondness for plague, pestilence, and poisonous things may have factored in a little, too. ;)

Seriously, though, for the life of me I can't fathom the level of self-entitlement that makes people think they can demand that someone else write what THEY want them to. Newsflash, kids! If you don't like what someone writes? DON'T BLOODY READ THEIR WORK. It's really that simple.

Humans make me tired a lot.

Hooray for "deviant" characters! They reflect the world we live in, regardless of what anonymous internet cowards would like to pretend.

The end of this post made me whoop with exultation. Damn right you're not going to stop writing the characters you love because this crank is being a crank.

And, I love every one of the characters you mentioned in this post. And I am so glad they are part of my imaginary world. Thank you for doing what you do.

Speaking as a white cis person in a long-term committed relationship, what the fuck?! I don't read books to see people just like me, or worlds just like this one -- I can just put down the book and experience that just fine. I want cool world-building and people who are interesting. So what if they're gay or trans or asexual or I don't even know what might be invented? As long as the writer makes the story and the characters engaging, what would I care? I do not understand anyone being disgruntled by characters having sexuality that's different from theirs -- it's not as if you're going to get gay cooties by reading their adventures. And, as far as I know (I haven't read every word you've ever written, yet...), you're not writing explicit erotica, so it's not even sitting there on the page in all its "tab a in slot X" glory. Just saying, "oh this male character has a husband" or "this female character has a wife" -- well, big whoop-de=doo, that's so in anyone's face. Riiight.

To tell you the truth, I'd rather read one of your books over a zillion non-fantasy books.

Oh people. Oh the stupidity of humanity.

People are people. Sometimes those people are cryptids and sometimes they are fae. And being people that means they love where they will. When we all figure that out, it'll be a much simpler world.

*applause*

I just wanted to express my frustration at you pretending you are free of bias. We are all biased. He who says he is unbiased is the more ignorant of us all.

Anonymous asshole is pretty damn ignorant then, as they seem to spilling their virulently biased bullshit all over that sanctimonious "upbraiding", with no sense of irony that says they understand. Fuck them for thinking they can shame people into following their narrow worldview.

Please never stop writing what you love. The world would be a lesser place if that happened.

Hmm, I hadn't seen the 10% number, most due to a complete lack of interest. As a monogamous, cis-gendered male the sexuality of the billions of people who are not my wife is frankly none of my business. Having a variety of viewpoints makes your books more interesting and more realistic (or less jarring of my suspension of disbelief). Broaden everyone's mind people who are all the same are boring.

I do find it a little bit interesting that the accepted number is around 10%, because that is close the accepted percentage of people who are left handed. I suspect that the two numbers are related in that they have common but unrelated genetic factors.

Hmm, I hadn't seen the 10% number, most due to a complete lack of interest. As a monogamous, cis-gendered male the sexuality of the billions of people who are not my wife is frankly none of my business.

YES! I agree with this statement 100%. THANK YOU!

Why people seem to think that an artist of any medium change their work to suit their specific tastes is beyond me. The douchebaggery (like this email) leaves me at a loss for words - well any coherent, non-curse laden strings thereof.

If I don't like a story/song/drawing/etc. then I don't pursue anymore by that person. I don't inflict my opinion on them.

The joy of egos on the internet.

Also, yah for bisexuals in your work! Two enthusiastic thumbs up!

*picks up your icon, spins it around, and takes it to Red Lobster*

While Tybalt is straight, he's also a shape-shifting cat so I'm sure someone will point out a relationship with him is tantamount to bestiality. All I can say is if you're writing what you love, then you're doing it right. Anon is a coward and fool but if announcing it to the world lets them sleep better at night, then god bless their little pointed head.

Part one of two

So, setting aside your specific issue here and whether you'rebiased (teehee) for a moment, in general, there's diversity in the real world. If we model the world as having people with Standard Variant and Nonstandard Variant of the same trait-- as if this is the only diversity, and as if there are only two options, in our simplified model-- then X out of every hundred people have Nonstandard Variant (NSV), where X is less than 50. That's the definition of percent.

In fiction, especially if NSV is a marginalized trait, NSV might be much less common than X. It might be X/2, or X/3, or even X/150. The cultural canon, then, represents a skewed ratio of NSV to SV (Standard Variant). Someone trying to undo the erasure of NSV might write all xyr characters as NSV, and, taken as a whole, the cultural canon could still be skewed. Of course things change, and some books are listened to more than others, and it's true that if a specific fictional work wants to portray the real-world ratio between its own covers, then it should include X% NSV characters and 100-X% SV characters. Should every work do that?

Well, let's turn that rhetorical question on its head. Is there a place for stories with no female characters, such as war stories set in armies that don't accept women (and that don't happen to star the disguised women who've probably joined up, these being a minority anyway)? Yes, and no one argues that.

So, if it's okay to skew the ratio one way in service of the story, it's okay to skew it the other.

A more difficult question: should a specific author try to write the real ratio over xyr own corpus of work taken as a whole? Maybe. Maybe not. Did Langston Hughes? No, and do people complain that it's a flaw? (Probably.) If they do, they're missing the point, and there's value in being able to say "ah! I know this author, and if I feel erased by mainstream pop culture, I know whose work to turn to to feel spotlighted and worthy". There's also value to an author-- and to the author's pet cause-- in being general-interest with a side of NSV representation.

Part two of two

It's the fear of things like this that made me recently-- to delve back into specifics-- list my own original characters (fanfic OCs and characters meant for original worlds) and check their demographics. 47% female (and with a handful of nonbinary characters, that's closer to the number of males than it sounds), but other than that, the numbers came out very skewed. If I want to write a real-world ratio, I'll need to:
Lower the fraction of d/Deaf characters a bit
Write more nondisabled characters
Write about two and a half times as many characters who stutter
Write more characters without autism

I don't know whether I have the "right" amount of characters of color, because I don't actually know all of my characters' races (for real, I developed an entire nation without knowing what the inhabitants look like). I'm not interested in writing much about romance and mainly include het because it's canon or because stories are just "supposed to" end with a het couple kissing because that's how they end in my experience. (I also think it's a good idea to include het sometimes because-- for reasons too complicated to get into now-- I feel like marginalized characters making room for themselves in standard life narratives is important and should exist alongside marginalized characters making unique lives for themselves.) However, returning to the thing I do care about-- disability-- I'm faced with the fact that I write settings that will have different incidences and prevalences of different disabilities from the ones in our world today. For instance, blindness should be more common in some of the settings I write in than it is in the real world, so, while-- if I'm counting some upcoming things-- I have roughly proportionate representation relative to real-world norms, I don't have proportionate representation for the settings I write in.

But wait-- should I be trying for it? If it's a setting based on a real period in history when blindness was particularly common, should I be writing about a lot more characters with trichiasis and other such conditions? Should I be writing about fewer characters with diabetes and cancer? Should I try to make up for it by writing a story without any blind characters, and disproportionately many characters with diseases of civilization? Or, if writing in fantasy-historical settings means I should aim for the proportions accurate to that world, then what if I write a world where a magical plague causes 10% of the population to go blind, above and beyond the real-world prevalence? Is my "duty" (if I have one) to my fictional world then? Is that answer different from the answer when I'm only writing about historically-derived settings? Why or why not?

I'm also a big fan of not "stealing" stories, nor begrudging people representation. The answer-- to my mind-- is rarely if ever "get rid of the characters I'm representing disproportionately", and is typically "write more of the other kind to balance it out". I suppose that eventually, because I have a finite lifetime and can write only a finite number of books, that does mean writing fewer of the characters I was representing disproportionately, but I still see a difference, even though maybe I'm just deluding myself.

"I'm not looking to start a dialog with you and I do not wish for you to reply. This account will not even be valid in two weeks. I just wanted to express my frustration at you pretending you are free of bias."

Translation: "I have a narrow-minded worldview and cannot handle it being shattered when being presented with facts and evidence."

And, as someone else said, "Fuck that anon." Seriously.

Two things...

First, you handled that troll with grace and aplomb. Second, I need to go back re-read FEED as I didn't get that vibe from Buffy at all. :)

Here's the thing for me: I have my own issues with sexuality because of my faith. BUT I have always felt that me pushing my beliefs on others doesn't make them more Christian (like the GOP trying to make this whole nation a "Christian" nation through legislation--it just doesn't work that way because people will be what they will be regardless of the law).

That being said, this person who took the coward's way out to write you about this is an a$$. These are YOUR books. S/he doesn't like them, s/he doesn't have to read them. And more than that, to think your books are YOU is ridiculous. I have a character who is a cold demon hunter, and her only similarity to me is raising an autistic boy. Her sexuality is not my sexuality, and to think otherwise is beyond stupid. We write from imagination, experience, and, yes, some of ourselves goes into our writing, but that doesn't make our characters us.

Ug. This is coming off as rambly and stupid. So I'll end with, you go, girl. Write what you want to write. If reader have problems because of sexuality or because I included fire-breathing dragons, s/he can stop reading.

Btw, we've seen this phenomena in TV too: said star on the street gets asked medical questions because she plays one on TV. Get real. Star is not a doctor, characters aren't the writer, and so on. (And that whole, because you want to be? If it were true, it would make me one messed up kitty--one of my villains is a sick and twisted psycho who likes sacrificing people in her house to her goddess and gets hot and horny from it. Def NOT me and I def DON'T want to be! lol)

Okay, disjointed, confusing ramble done. Sorry if it makes no sense...feel free to delete. lol

...the first sentence of that email is such a glaring sign of "WARNING: BULLSHIT AHEAD" that I was at least slightly braced for "deviant" and all the bullshit that followed. (Which is such bullshit. Wow.)

I may be more taken aback by this notion that you should be unbiased than I am by the writer's opinion on your characters' sexuality, and that opinion is awful enough. But why would it even occur to someone that you should be unbiased? You're writing your stories about characters who come up out of your mind and heart.

It's just sad on every level. I hope--probably in vain, but still--that that person reads your response and is ashamed, because s/he damn well should be ashamed. And I'm sorry you have to deal with such infuriating things.

speaking as a straight, white cis-girl - I will admit that my default is to assume heterosexuality in a character, *assuming* that I even think about it - unless provided with descriptive evidence otherwise. But when character A is introduced as a "Lisa, a brilliant scientist responsible for curing cancer" - I don't immediately stop and imagine her home life and whether she's married, has children, does DIY on the weekends and loves cats - I wait for the author to introduce the character to me through the story.

And in your stories, the characters are varied and interesting - and when you provide background and context, you turn them into real people - and real people are *ever* so much more complicated than my imagination can come up with - which is why YOU are the author and *I* am just the reader.

Keep 'em coming - I love meeting all the people in your worlds - straight ,gay, bi or lizard-lovin'

If reading my "deviant" books makes you unhappy, it's okay to stop.

Because I'm not going to.

Yay for that last.

Also, the auto erotica pun is aw(e)ful. *g*