Quote:
Originally Posted by eschwartz
(Funnily enough, I cannot think of anyone who has ever ruined a story by excessively pushing heterosexuality down the reader's throat...)
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I can think of one example. The protagonist was an elite guard, very lojal to the king (lots of angst when the king didn't deserve that lojalty), and spent most of the book doing heroic stuff together with his brothers in arms.
He met a woman at court, they fell in love and married, and he went back to heroing. Occasionally we'd see him thinking about how much he loved her and their children, but we never saw any other signs of that love, and the book didn't spend any time on anything they did together.
At the time I just thought of it as a weird, tacked-on part of the story that didn't ring true. But now I'm beginning to suspect that it was stuffed in there to reassure the readers that this man, who had most of his intense, meaningful relationships with other men, was straigth.
Since all of society pushes straightness as the norm, we wouldn't notice it if a book did the same. I'm absolutely sure that you could write two versions of a book, identical except some minor characters were gay in one version and straight in the other, and some readers would complain that "sexual orientation was being rammed down their throat" in the first version, but noone would think about it in the second version.
Quote:
Originally Posted by MikeB1972
Use Urban Fantasy instead then, probably a similar mix to sci-fi slanting more towards the female side for readers and virtually dominated by white female protagonists.
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I think I lost sight of how this is related to the Hugo discussion, but Harry Potter, Harry Dresden, and a lot of Gaiman's books spring to mind. Virtually dominated by
white protagonists, I agree with. (Though I strongly recomment
Ben Aaronovitch's series about a London cop, with a black male protagonist.)
(Added) Oh, and Katniss in the Hunger Games wasn't white in the books. Her mother, sister, Peeta's family, and most of the upper class in the district are pale and tend to be blond, but most of the miners, including her father and Katniss, have darker skin and hair. I'm disappointed that they chose to whitewash her in the films.