Representation of [insert super random demographic here] in fiction

TheLemmaLlama 2023-07-18 12:41:48 UTC #1

I've said that I don't really care about representation, but ... that's not entirely true, I realized It's just that the parts of my identity I like to see represented more/better aren't the kinds of stuff people usually discuss when talking about representation XD

So what are some random things you like to see represented more accurately, more in-depth, or just more, in fiction? It doesn't have to apply to you personally either; just stuff you like to see represented

For me:
- mathematicians
- extremely frugal people (ranging from those saving for early retirement to homeless-by-choice people)
- radicals of various ideologies (anarchists, libertarians, communists, fascists that actually feel like real fascists that write things on the internet today, radical utilitarians/deontologists/virtue ethicists/nihilists ...)
- shy extroverts
- misophonics
- cult survivors (as in ex-cultists)

kalmia 2023-07-18 18:58:15 UTC #2

I want to see more actually good parents in fiction.

Its always that the parents of the mc are either absent, abusive, or just kind of crappy. I know that having bad parents is a easy and pretty common way to give your character an interesting background, maybe some character motivation and usually an easy way to get the parents just out of the way, because who wants to watch the parents of our 16 year old protagonist keep them from going on their crazy adventure?

But I really enjoy seeing good parental relationships in fictional media. My main character is super close with her mom and as well as her dad and it honestly really cute and nice to see such a relationship. This gives her opportunity to find motivation elsewhere and still feel like a teenager. I think people should start adding more healthy parent-child relationships into their stories

bulgariansumo 2023-07-18 21:00:16 UTC #3

There was this one video I watched on Bob from Tekken that made me realize how few characters there are who are fat and cool. That'd be nice to see.

Important female characters who look weird/awkward/plain (not "secretly beautiful" plain, actually plain). Bonus points if they're not evil. Ex. Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken, Princess Jellyfish, (even though those characters go through a makeover, they let them have nonstandard features for anime women)

On a similar note, gender non-conforming characters who aren't conventionally beautiful, but aren't treated as a joke.

Social introverts.

Shy villains are an untapped source of comedy.

Shy characters whose shyness doesn't really show.

Tall, fat, and/or muscular shy characters.

More characters with OCD would be interesting to see. Especially some of the lesser-known presentations like scrupulosity.

Characters whose inner thoughts are kind of selfish, jerky, or detached, but still try to treat others well.

Characters who enter a romantic relationship, become exes, but still stay friends.

I don't write that many of these myself, but they'd still be neat to see.

HGohwell 2023-07-18 21:13:15 UTC #4

Non-biological parent/child families that aren't toxic. (I still vividly the last time I talked about this I got accused of being an old man who doesn't understand women). But, there's still this trend that biological family is better than all other family. It shows up in things like women who're infertile being treated as lesser or broken, the idea that adoption or using a surrogate makes you less of a parent, the child adopted into a loving family who raised them well from a young age, even birth, acting like these parents somehow don't love them and are awful because they're not their "real" parents and that the biological parents are automatically the better place for the child to be. I want to see more families via adoption that are happy and work and actually show that this is the better place for the kid. I always remember from my childhood Jacqueline Wilson's Tracy Beaker going out of its way to show that while Tracy often thought of her biological mum as the best place to be and was waiting to go back, in reality her mum was, while not really ill intentioned, neglectful at best. Same with things like My Parents Are Aliens.

I just want more series where, particularly adoption with these two, being non-biological family isn't shown as lesser, and not being able to have kids yourself, while difficult, isn't the end of the world. Because adoption is good, actually, and should be normalised.

Crusoe 2023-07-18 21:45:56 UTC #5

I have a few!

1) again: healthy and positive non- monogamous or poly relationships, I mentioned this in a recent thread too
2) foreign folklore: I think games have been pulling a lot from different types of folklore already in recent years but I'd love to see it represented in books especially. Most retellings I've seen pop up recently have been based on greek mythology, Anderson or stuff from the brothers Grimm.
3) parents having their own life in kids centred shows: it's getting better but in a lof of my childhood shows the parents did not have much of a life of their own at all besides their kids and that's just plain sad.

feuersichel 2023-07-18 21:45:57 UTC #6

@HGohwell The new puss in boots film does a very awesome job in that regard. I just love the dynamic of Goldi and Mama bear especially.

NickRowler 2023-07-18 22:42:54 UTC #7

Sort of similar to what @HGohwell said

I want more stories about adoptees and foster kids that aren't A) evil caregiver abusing the kid (ei. Harry Potter) or B) young child having to do everything on their own (ei. Naruto). I also want to see more adoption stories where the parents aren't dead or a closed adoption. Most of the people I have met who were adopted usually had at least one parent still alive as well as sometimes having biological siblings.

Other ones...
- technophobes
- stories where someone's self-worth isn't based on their parent's approval
- transgender characters who's story arc isn't about "coming out" or some allegory for "gender dysphoria".

kitkatxk 2023-07-19 03:57:37 UTC #8

OMG yes the shy extrovert! That is me and I wish there was more representation fo it. Its like we are shy at first but once you get to know us, thats it. We are a flamboyant machine of loveing fun that just wants to spend time and talk your ear off okay!

cherrystark 2023-07-19 05:14:39 UTC #9

This one is weird, but I want to see more "mixed attractiveness" couples in the media. I noticed that if your main leads are traditionally attractive people, their love interests are equally attractive people. However, if the main lead is a nerdy, average-looking man - his love interests are model-level gorgeous but if the main lead is a nerdy, average-looking woman - her love interests are always average looking men.

Fans generally ship people with great chemistry over attractiveness. A large part of me would rather see a traditionally handsome lead court the nerdy science tech because they genuinely like them and have that relationship be treated as valid instead of forcing them to pair off with their also traditionally attractive co-lead.

darthmongoose 2023-07-19 06:40:32 UTC #10

This is a really interesting thread! I'd like to see more...

Autistic people who are interested/gifted more on the creative/artistic side rather than the STEM side of things.
Adults with ADD or ADHD (where it's not played as a joke that they're lol-hyper-random! Like... actual ADHD adult characters who struggle with the guilt of not being able to keep on top of things, or find the monotony of their job physically painful).
Muslims, and especially hijabi women (There's a tendency for the characters who wear hijab to be very meek and conformist, while the heroine character doesn't wear one because she's a "modern, liberated girl", and that's not really always the case at all with people I've met from that community).
British East Asians (way more common than our media gets across, especially in rural areas, where they're often the most common PoC group you'll come across, because South Asian and especially Black people are much more commonly found in cities in the UK, but East Asians, like Chinese, Thai, Vietnamese and Malaysians are very broadly distributed).
Moderate religious people. (Like they go to church or the temple fairly regularly, and they believe, but they're pretty chill and mind their own business.)

hakei 2023-07-19 07:28:23 UTC #11

GUNIEA PIG/ GUNIEA PIG OWNERS.

I rarely see guniea pigs in fiction as it's usually hamsters or rabbits.

ShidoDraws 2023-07-19 16:54:51 UTC #12

Speaking about representations. Oddly enough there's hidden gems out there that represented my culture. In Grey's Anatomy there was a section of an episode about my people and it was stressful watching the episode, don't get me wrong the directors did their homework, but it was just the idea of how they go about it goes against my culture. I don't blame them though for making this mistake, it's a rule that only if you practice it for years you'd know it to be a common knowledge, so the show didn't really f*ck up as much. Despite this I do still hope for more representation in the future from other media even if we're just the background characters of a show or book.

UrMom 2023-07-20 19:10:53 UTC #13

I hate this. Even from the "parent" side you hear awful things. "You never know what you're going to get if you adopt.", "There's probably a reasons why their parents left them.", "I can't imagine loving a child I didn't make myself.", "It's easier to "mold" a child into how you want them if you have your own.". I decided at a really young age that I never wanted kids, and if I did I would rather adopt or foster (My thought has always been "Why destroy your body to make a new kid when there are thousands in the system who need homes already?"), but people say the most awful things.

As weird of a reference as this is, given the movie is super trashy, it was kinda nice that Joe Dirt went the route of making Joe's real parents awful and his true home was with his found family. Not saying people who give up their kids are always shitty, but especially back then, you didn't see the term 'family' used in that way very often.

To answer the OP. It would be nice to see more uncommon (In fiction.) medical stuff like characters with lactose intolerance, celiac disease, food allergies in general, migraines, or really freaken awful periods. The last one I don't mean to show a ton of blood, but just the struggles of paralyzing cramps, anemia for all the blood loss and all that bs. It's a legit medical thing, and people treat it more like a joke or something to be embarrassed about, which really sucks, especially when it turns into an emergency and no one is taking you seriously. Migraines too, they run in my family and are never taken seriously until someone has one themselves, and it would be nice to see some characters trying to live with that.

Kalebell 2023-07-20 21:51:10 UTC #14

For me, I would like to see more stories with elderly main characters. I just think it would be interesting to see.

TheLemmaLlama 2023-07-22 04:51:03 UTC #15

And 'good' doesn't have to be 'boring' either, I daresay! I can see genuinely good and caring parents support their 16-year-old kid going on a crazy adventure, under certain circumstances; in fact, it'll be interesting to see how the author handles that justification And it's just generally an opportunity to explore flaws in conventional wisdom wrt parenting ^^; Good parents with their own unconventional beliefs about parenting are based :]

Same :0 Have you seen any of these out in the wild? (I imagine you're craving these because you haven't, but I thought I'd ask for recs anyway on the off chance you've encountered one or two :P)

I wonder how many people are brave enough to depict the forms of OCD where you get really nasty/disgusting intrusive thoughts (e.g. about hurting people) though I would really like to see it, but I also expect people to shy away from it for fear of being cancelled :'D

... what? Like I've seen accusations I disagree with, but at least I can imagine the thought process behind them but this ... seems completely logically disconnected to me? :'D

Fortunately the circles I frequent seem to accept this as common wisdom, to the point where I forgot it isn't often depicted in media XD

I'm technically an extrovert in the sense of 'gains energy from interacting with others'; I run on momentum and while I don't dislike being on my own, doing so for prolonged periods of time will slowly turn me into a vegetable I'm always the first to arrive and last to leave at social events, and always feel like they're over too soon when everyone else got tired and wanted to go home 4 hours ago XD

I can be bold if I feel like I know what I'm doing (e.g. at a gathering with a specific purpose like a focus group or a tabletop games club), but I will quietly loiter around in the corner with food at aimless parties and I will slowly back out the door without saying goodbye if no-one happens to notice me leaving (It's not that I'm trying to sneak out; I just don't have the guts to get your attention :'D)

My shyness is more a function of context rather than familiarity (I'm probably on average even more shy with people I know well than strangers XD), so we seem to be 'shy extroverts' in different senses, but yes, more representation

Your avatar looks like a guinea pig -- do you have a guinea pig in any of your comics?

btw the Ys series of video games have pikkards, which I felt were basically fantasy guinea pigs (considering they're raised as livestock in some places IRL, IIRC). Some other people felt like they're just pigs, but they're canonically rodents according to TV Tropes

(Also shamelessly plugging my comic with a guinea pig character, though the MCs are basically D&D figurines so the guinea pig is huge by comparison so I'm not sure if that's the kind of rep you're looking for XD)

HGohwell 2023-07-22 05:18:57 UTC #16

Honestly, it was pretty hilarious. It was one of those family tropes you dislike, and I said I wanted more positive portrayals of adoption, surogates and women who can't have kids, vs kids abandoning their parents who've raised them their entire life because they're suddenly not their real parents, or somehow being less of a family because they're not related, or women who can't have kids not being worth as much (this was around the time Black Widow had just sacrificed herself). And somehow me saying this, and that maybe if we had more positive portayals maybe women irl would feel this way less too, was taken by a few people as me trying to invalidate real life women who feel this way. And clear that means I'm a man, I guess.

ueonts 2023-07-27 05:09:14 UTC #17

I think I'd like more accurate depictions of online relationships. Stuff like this forum. There should be a whole comic written in the format of a chatroom hehe.

NickRowler 2023-07-27 12:10:32 UTC #18

I think it’s that most people who write orphan stories tend to be people who never knew anyone who was adopted. Like a character seeking out their birth parents is a trope but there are adoptees IRL who aren’t interested in that (like my sister). I have met people from open adoptions who had complicated feelings about their birth parents. Some wanted nothing to do with them. Some felt uncomfortable during meet ups with their biological parent. Some treated their parent more as a “family friend” than a parental figure.

darthmongoose 2023-07-27 13:16:28 UTC #19

And old webcomic called Elf Only Inn did this. I have fond memories of reading it back in Uni. It's about an RP chatroom.

http://www.elfonlyinn.net/

TheLemmaLlama 2023-07-28 23:50:44 UTC #20

Ooh, might I recommend What Happens Next? It's not entirely written in the format of a chatroom, but boy does it have accurate depictions of online relationships :'D

I also wanted to mention a few more things I want representation of:

abuse survivors who don't forgive OR want revenge on their abusers
abusers who have a pattern of abuse as a strategy to maintain control/power, who aren't portrayed as either having just 'made some mistakes' or cartoonishly evil (i.e. humanized in the sense of 'making them feel like real people' but not 'making them sympathetic')
villainous creatives who aren't villainous in a 'murdering people for ART' kind of way