I’m so glad I came across this because I just finished Simon last night and I have to admit that that small moment, a throwaway comment really, did ping my radar as annoying and just wrong. It’s the kind of thing that would make me rev up for a fight IRL, but in the book, I do think that it’s a fairly believable viewpoint for a 17 year-old white boy from Georgia to have. It’s great to see Becky discussing the impact of that line though and recognizing that it’s not something she wants to perpetuate in the future, even if it was meant to be a faulty 17 year-old opinion in-verse.
This is a really good example of something we’ve talked about a lot (and is frequently misunderstood). Characters should have misconceptions and false ideas about their world. That’s what makes them people. If they go unchallenged, though, even if what you intended to be clearly wrong may not come off that way.
There was a really interesting and popular post some time ago that was the exact opposite of this. I can’t find it at the moment but you might have come across it, it technically questioned why it’s important to challenge these misconceptions. Why must an author immediately add a correction and thus figuratively hold the readers’ hand and explain why bad things are bad and why you shouldn’t agree with them despite a fictional, flawed character representing those ideals.
I had a bit of a double feeling about that post that I can’t quite word well, but it’s probably because there’s a difference between a character saying “torturing animals is fun and everybody should do it!” and that going unchallenged, and something as subtle as this example above, a gay character furthering a subtle yet harmful stereotype in an otherwise neutral environment going unchallenged. The contexts are very different, the target audience, the environment, the emotional charge of these kinds of stories and how they are being read, and who knows what else can alter the need for challenging these ideals.
I think this is why you can’t pull a universal blanket over expressing harmful ideals through characters. “They should always be challenged!” vs “No author is obliged to teach you morals.” I think it’s up to what the author even wants to achieve by including these microaggressions.
Anyway, I do appreciate this thread though I just got reminded of this other post that gained a bit of traction some weeks ago.
Please reblog this as many times as you can. Someone is bombing black families in Austin, but the media is not covering it. We have to get the word out.
I live in Colorado, and it was covered on our news, almost every night, almost every station for the last week.
After all the media coverage of this that I had seen, not once did anyone mention they were all black. They said they were random attacks and that police had no idea how victims were being chosen.
Both of these men were activists in the black community. They knew each other, They went to the same church. And the elderly Hispanic lady that picked up the third package… they think she picked it up by accident, and that it was meant for another black family with the same criteria.
Colorblind policing and reporting do nothing to find the people responsible. Black people are being targeted. Black activists are being targeted.
The March 18th bombing injured 2 white men and was different than the rest, because it lacked a package and instead apparently involved a trip wire.
I don’t say that to deny the VERY real possibility that black families are being targeted, but because when something so scary and dangerous is going on in my community, it’s important to me that misinformation just NOT BE SPREAD.
Pass Through Fire 