I have an idea for a story involving a black football team & a white person. It may be considered a bit “raw” & racist, certainly NSFW.
Anyone want to chat privately about it? I am willing to pay as a commission for it.
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Any advice for writing non-white characters? I honestly prefer black and latino men if I’m being honest, but I find that other than mentioning they have darker skin or maybe having the character speak Spanish, I don’t know how to really differentiate characters based on race. Most of my friends that are black or latino speak and act like everyone else I grew up with, so any suggestions?
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Sounds like you answered your own question.
This thread actually encouraged me to write more characters of colour. Like in my recent-ish series “control yourself”, two of the jockbros are non-white. Thanks for the inspiration.
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I’ve been trying to be cognizant of this issue in my new story The Island Resort and start out with an episodic premise with 45 people to play with, and that about 10 of them are non-white. The first guy changed (though not really) is black, and the second guy is Asian.
But, I have two issues I’m facing. First, what others said, the “write what you know” problem (I’m white and have always lived in a white bubble) and not wanting to sound offensive, and second that I feel like most stories are so generic that you can really insert whatever ethnicity you want and there is literally NOTHING in the story that would counter that. For instance, one of my old stories (“The Game”) was about frat boys being transformed, and one of the first comments I got was a request to have people of color. The comment shocked me because, honestly, the skin color of the guys in my mind was effectively neutral, I hadn’t written to any particular ethnicity at all, and there was nothing in the story that would have implied otherwise.
So yeah, at some level, unless it’s a critical component of the story, I’m not sure how best to incorporate any sort of racial aspect, and I certainly don’t want to be offensive. That said, I did play significantly with the Asian stereotypes, but that was purposeful in the sense that my character had his own issues of trying to escape those stereotypes.
Hi there! I’ve read the first chapter of The Island Resort, and I think I can give a bit of general concrit based on my experience as a mixed race man who studies intersectionality.
Whenever you write a story, and moreso when that story interacts with any aspect of the real, modern world, you work in a form and culture that has the legacy of colonialism baked into it. Racism, among other negative -isms, is built into our society so that it’s the default. Deconstructing our default racism is the work of a lifetime. There is no way to write a character of a historically colonised race that is perfect, and it’s unproductive to believe that we can achieve that. Someone will always find it offensive. I think one thing that The Island Resort achieves well is defining all of its characters early as a reasonably well-off subset of North American men who express a variety of backgrounds and ethnicities. Knowing where I stood at the start of that story set me up with an erotic concept and something to keep track of.
If I remember the first chapter right, the second half starts with the life history of the first man to be changed. This section specifically mentions the racism he experiences as a black man in a white community, and how it impacts his choices in the story. His submissiveness is written as a product of his blackness, and thus he is the first to drink the water and experience the vision of the blond person who handles the transformations.
Earlier in this thread, a few people have mentioned the overwrought writing maxim “write what you know”. I would argue that this maxim has been misinterpreted to mean “you cannot write outside your literal experience”. Obviously, that isn’t the case, since we write on this website, engaging in fantasies that aren’t possible in the real world. Instead, I personally believe that it describes how the richest characters and stories draw inspiration from your own life. People are people, and we have a shared set of common experiences, disregarding race. I, as a mixed race cis gay man raised by a secular family in a liberal metropolis, have a set of experiences very different from any white person, a bisexual person, someone raised Catholic, or someone raised in a small town, to name just a few traits. However, we all experience some common things, which can be seen in the majority of fiction: growing apart from parental figures, feelings of inadequacy, and the strain of modern life, to name a few.
Rather than lean on how the character’s experience as a person of colour led them to their character in the story, I would argue that the best way forward is to write based on the shared experience. Racialised people aren’t motivated solely by their race, just like queer people aren’t motivated solely by their queerness. All people have a richness of life experience, to the point that you can write a story about anyone, so long as it isn’t a story about the way they’re different from you.
To use an illustrative personal example, one of my goals in my current project, The Transformation of Albion, is to write transformations of a diverse character set, at least one of whom is explicitly a trans man. As a cis man, I will never live the experience of being trans, and so I won’t write how his trans-ness has affected his day to day life or how it motivates his goals. That is a story for a trans person to tell. The storyline of my trans character will be based in the traits he shares with me, like the fear of being alone or not knowing will understand you when you speak. Maybe he won’t be able to talk about being trans with the people he loves, in the way I don’t talk about being gay with my grandma. The key is that the motive here isn’t that the character is trans: it’s that he has a feature not everyone he loves will understand or accept. That’s a story that almost anyone can write.
Now, I have a very different world to write with Albion, because it’s high fantasy, which sidesteps having to approach modern racism and transphobia in more than the ways colonialism has its claws in everything in the modern world. But there is always the potential for writing from shared experience rather than different experience.
I hope that was at least a bit helpful, and I’m happy to provide more help, either here in public or through private messaging. I don’t think it’s prideful to say that I have a little more education/experience in this topic than many people on this site, and I’d love to help make this community better about issues like this. Happy writing!
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I just want to add that even when working in high fantasy with fantasy races because of the history we as authors and readers are coming from, even fantasy races can be unintentionally coded to be parallels for real world races. Tolken’s Lord of the Rings is a good example of this as he describes the Orcs as resembling “the least lovely Mongol types.” Even outside of direct descriptions, the Dwarves have been pointed to be coded as Jewish as they were driven from their home land and possessed the majority of the worlds wealth.
My point is that there is no escaping the affects of colonialism the best we can do is constantly be aware or our own biases and take into account the different perspectives of the readers.
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Honestly, I don’t really care about the race of the characters in my stories. That said, there is this idea in Australia - where I grew up - where the “default” person is a white guy. So as a person of colour myself, I appreciate having more characters of colour, no matter the medium it’s in.
That said, I think there is a difference between writing a story with a bunch of racially diverse characters, and writing a story about a bunch of racially diverse characters. For my stories, most of the time, their race and culture(s) they grew up in don’t really play a big part in it - it’s mostly just background stuff.
I think there could be an mc story that actually does dive into people’s different experiences with race and how it affects them; it’d just be really hard to get it done right, which is to say, without going into laughable parody or racism. I think you’d have to do like, actual research, and if you are not a part of the racial group you want to write about, you’d also have to talk with multiple people of that group in order to get like, actual lived experience and opinions.
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Hey OP and others,
I feel very much the same way about the overwhelming whiteness of subjects, particularly as a guy attracted to men across the racial spectrum. I just posted my first story–“Danny and the Mind Fogger”–to the site with the subject being a mixed race/Hawaiian wrestling jock. The character’s race isn’t a plot point, it’s just a part of his character, alongside being an arrogant, unintelligent asshole ripe for my protag’s hypnotic manipulation!
I plan to write more stories in this series with other characters, both white and of color, falling to my protag’s machinations.
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You may want to check out the Dr. Maskulär series, Chapter 4 Kamp Kommando. Although the stories are dominated by white males, some German, in that chapter we meet “The Beast”, who was transformed (I won’t spoil the plot) and is very clearly not entirely a caucasian. In fact, I left his description a bot open so you can fill in your own fantasy–I sort of go with Aquaman (Jason Momoa) myself 
As a East Asian male, I do want to see more characters I can relate to. But at the same time, I’m worried that such characters could cause controversy, especially since this site deals with so many fetishes.
If I imagine a scene of being surrendered by a white man, am I a racist? And what about racial transformation themes? If you imagine an Asian male like me turning black and brainwashed by a white male, am I lacking pride as an Asian? Or am I discriminating against black people? If a white person find that kind of story attractive, is he a racist?
Personally, I hope such topics are allowed on this site. But in order to do that, a stronger tag policy and user agreement will be required.
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I can completely understand where you’re coming from @abdtiresias
These kind of fantasies are not rare at all (and I share some of them) and I appreciate stories about them. Of course there’s a very fine line between such a fantasy and a white supremacist racist tirade. But I think the intention of the author is what counts and I think we’re able to discern a hot fantasy from a racist message.
But such a story will ALWAYS start a controversy. I’m willing to stand this, though.
I’ve started no longer describing people’s skin or race in order to just let readers put whatever race they what on my characters (where, of course, racial profiles don’t clash with intentional character identifiers).
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I often don’t as well, although the fact that I include pictures probably counts as doing the same thing. Still, those are just the people I have in my head; for the most part, you’re free to imagine someone entirely different.
This is a tough subject to talk about since it involves stereotypes in some form or fashion. I personally love football gear. Football (by nature) has more black guys in it. Am I racist for wanting to be agressively dominated by a mostly black football team? Some may say yes & others no. Like anything else, it is perspective & opinion. No real right or wrong unless you’re a sensitive snowflake.
Ahh, Here is it.
So this thread REALLY got me thinking about my own writing.
It’s been a tough journey but one of the things I think I communicated effectively in my last story was characters not having a skin colour, age or body type, and that not effecting the narrative.
So any reader will imply their own identity onto “John” and onto “Abraham”, that it will happen naturally by the reader and nothing in the story will interfere with that.
I think it was the first time I managed to do it “well”
but this is just me reckoning so myself, so it means little. I just mean it’s been on my mind and it’s an interesting concept for written stories.
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Do you have his work the site has gone dark
Who’s work?
It’s really refreshing and erotic to see different races as hypbotic victims. It really thrills the idea of being able to acquring anybody you want. But tbh write what you are comfortable with. If its only white bois then just write that. Don’t force it. Some who try to write pocs just seem very stereotypical and skin deep (no pun intended)filled w so much racial cliches.
I can’t. Cultural appropriation.