Muh diversity

how do you feel about agents seeking out diverse characters and authors writing queer and brown characters just because it's trendy? I feel like the race and gender and orientation are highlighted way more than the actual story. Like they would love a diverse Harry Potter even though HP has been done many times.

I pretty much do the opposite of what feminists tell me to do. I mostly read white men with the occasional Jap or Irishmen thrown in.

I don't read much recent stuff anyway. I'm mostly interested in early/mid 20th century fiction, and that's when most notable writers were white guys. Lots of them were gay, though, and overall they had a wide variety of political, social and cultural beliefs - something that's usually ignored by the diversity police when they criticise white male writers of the past and treat them as if they're some kind of straight-white-guy conglomerate.

The heart of the matter is the impetus.

If you by nature are a person who always strives to be in the "in" crowd, then it's natural for you to write books that are totally in tune with contemporary society.

So if your book is a murder mystery and it was written in the 90s, internet could be what made it "relevant". The 00s terrorism and so on...

But if you by nature prefer to create more organical stories where nothing is shoehorned in, then you could write a story set in the 80s that still has something to say us.

So to sum it up. Synthetic stories are more prone to make short-term profits and legacies. Organic stories are more prone to make long-term profits and legacies.

Oh yeah because diversity only runs skin deep. To think that someone of one race has so much to add just because of his or her skin color and not for the individual that he or she is inside to me sounds like the most racist of all. I often hear the argument that it serves as role models, but then you still make the argument that being part of an ethnicity means you have to be proud of the ethnicity of an actor depicted on screen because you happen to have the same ethnicity like it holds some deeper meaning.

you mean you just read stuff that's good. i do the same.

i think people don't like politics in literature because it's an affectation. all affectation in art, or really in anything, is bad. with old books and movies, affectation becomes much less apparent, especially if it's from a foreign culture. even though tolstoy novels are political in many respects, it's not hard for a modern american reader to read it solely for aesthetic pleasure - not that there is modern writing equivalent to tolstoy - you get what i mean.

>role models
There's two historical examples of no role models needed. Scotland and Japan. They once was two of the most backwater countries there was. But faced with their own inadequacies, they stepped up.

scotland is sort of a reach. japan is noted as the ultimate exception

I agree. There's no problem with non white MCs, but their race should not be their defining quality. It should be a good character that happens to be black or brown or whatever.

Agents are just exploiting these trends for the books that will sell now. I wonder if it's working.

yeah, basically this. it's pretty simple. unfortunately, i think it is working.

That's unfortunate. I wouldn't want my book to sell just because of some special snowflake SJW shit.

It's not taking in the complicated cultural and social nuances, and just focusing on the end result of those nuances. It's a token presence based on someone's skin color instead of letting people assemble and gather based on who and what they are themselves.

Diversity only gets diverse where people want diversity to be and what it should be, the idea to diversify based on race doesn't take in account that every person is an individual with their own ideas which form their own actions.

there is no good literature being published in the world today.

the axis of influence has shifted to movies, TV, and videogames.

what the people wants will always be the most successful and make the most money. it was just the case that in dickens' and tolstoy's time, the medium that best fit the people were books.

now it's TV and Movies. So books are a ghetto of (actual, real) atheists, degenerates, and losers trying to coast by on the race card.

I'm so sick of this idea of forced skin diversity that I found myself seeking out the opposite and least "diverse" books possible. If I'm reading a modern book and one of the characters ends up being black my automatic assumption is that the inclusion of this character was politically motivated. It's the same with female characters. These leftists types force this sort of diversity because they believe it'll eat away at your brain on a subconscious level and make people more accepting thus ending racism but because I recognize what they're doing I despise it. Over the years I've become more racist and more sexist as an act of rebellion.

I'm not necessarily against it, but when one considers the ideology under which these agents likely operate, it is easy to imagine the literary scene becoming shallow and stagnant.

>send in poem 40 times under own name
>rejected everywhere
>sign poem with female Chinese name
>instantly published in the annual Best American Poetry anthology

Why don't you have a female minority pen name yet, Veeky Forums?

>there is no good literature being published in America today.

fixed that for you.

I'm a black femanon with an African last name. Do I win?

I can't tell if literature sucks right now because no good young authors can get published because of identity politics nonsense and feminist publishing agents who can't understand anything that isn't about having a vagina or if there are simply no good upcoming writers because culture has been killed at the roots.

it will just produce poor works of pandering that will have no staying power and be easily forgotten

Maybe young authors aren't making it because their books aren't trendy enough to sell.

Young authors are still 'making it.' People under the age of 30 still get published. The question is 'are any of them not complete garbage?'

I don't think so. Media these days isn't very good so I don't think anything thought provoking will come out of the young that are consuming it.

bumppp ugh
any non whites here?

Didn't that really happen?

There's still good literature. The difference is that you can't claim that literature has some kind of privilege.