About the Word
So because it’s my intention to invite everyone over to play, new people are bound to show up and see the word ‘colored’ plastered all over the walls. Some of you will be willing to accept it as a feature of the universe and some of you will react with horror. We don’t say that word! We don’t, and I was actually aiming for the horrified reaction more than the acceptance, but it’s gotten complicated.
People from the United States, and people from other places who are aware of our history, see ‘colored’ and remember the facilities labeled ‘WHITES ONLY’ that existed next to the colored ones. They also remember a lot of people who suffered and died to make us stop doing that, and associated human rights violations. My initial intention was to contrast that with how accepted the word is in Tin Soldier, the word and its many associated human rights violations. Oh, yeah, there’s going to be a certain amount of those people getting beaten in public and nobody lifting a finger to help, also we’re not thrilled with them using the library.
I also wanted to tackle how we like to change the language and then sweep all the behavior under the rug. We don’t do that anymore! Except we do. The segregated library and movie theater are gone, but that thing where those people get beaten — or even killed! — in public is still very much with us. Maggie and Sanaam aren’t even considered colored, but when they visit the fake US, they still have their own crummy toilets. Sanaam still sees people cross to the other side of the street to get away from a scary black man. The fake Disney company is in fake Africa, and they crank out films for worldwide distribution with anthropomorphic animal characters, even the princesses — because the world isn’t ready for a black Cinderella. A colored one is similarly out of the question!
(As an aside, which is relevant to changing language and not behavior, I do go back and forth on whether to use Black or black. Having gone through BLM, it kinda seems like we had a whole thing where we said “please stop killing black people” and the media said, “would you like a capital B?” And, while that would be linguistically-consistent with terms like Latinx, that’s not what we asked for or needed. So I must ask a follow up, “will they be killed a bit less if we spell it with a capital B?” And the answer seems to be, “no.” I don’t much care for a capital B in this context, I’d rather have the other thing first. But I don’t want to be insulting out of context. In general, I’ll give you lowercase in-story and about story, and capital when speaking to a larger audience. ‘Kay?)
Changing the language is supposed to be an acknowledgement that the behavior associated with the language was wrong. There is nothing inherently wrong with a collection of symbols and sounds, it’s the intent of the user and their unwillingness to change that’s the problem. You see this in our universe with non-black people demanding n-word privileges, as if we’re all done with the discrimination associated with the word and now it’s been removed of all malice for anyone who might use it. If we really had delivered that perfect discrimination-free society, then the n-word would lose all its sting, sure. But we haven’t delivered that society yet, and when you start acting like we have, that makes the rest of us think you have no intention of delivering. Or even trying to improve.
It was never my intention to divorce ‘colored’ from its legacy. I chose it hoping to remind readers of its legacy, in a new context without the automatic defense that we don’t do these things anymore. But I’ve run into a complication. In Tin Soldier part of the point is that the word doesn’t have that legacy. They’re living an alternate history of prejudice and discrimination and at their point on the timeline ‘colored’ is normal. There is a lot of reprehensible behavior existing around the word, but there are worse words that people use when they mean harm. (Words that happen to be completely innocuous for us, just for that little extra twist.) Nobody in the universe mirrors our reaction, and as we become more immersed in the setting, we also lose our reaction. Oh, crap, I didn’t think of that.
It goes to show you why even changing the language alone can be so hard for us, but it’s darn near impossible to make the point that these things become invisible and accepted when on all levels they are invisible and accepted. At least Erik and Mordecai are uncomfortable when the music store lady monitors them the whole time; they are totally fine with ‘colored’ and even use it themselves. I’m not immune to this effect. After almost four five years, when I talk about innate magic-users, that’s the word I use. Sometimes even in public when I know people overhearing me have no context and they’re going to think I’m racist or a nut. But I don’t say ‘magician,’ because that’s a mean word!
I can’t win. Even if I went back and did a find and replace over the whole story and picked some word that’s even worse for us, if offended people stuck around long enough the offense would wear off eventually. And then my readers and people who want to play here will end up talking about Tin Soldier in a Starbucks and using the n-word unselfconsciously, and someone will get an iced latte dumped on their head.
My choices are to give up and use some other word with no history for us, or keep using it in hopes that sometimes you’ll have a brief moment of recognition. I’m stubborn and I’ve decided to go with the latter for the time being. Hell, if you say “colored people” in a Starbucks Tim Horton’s (I moved to Canada) and get an iced latte dumped on your head, I guess it’ll remind you. At least that word is a little less threatening than the other one, but you should still apologize and explain you forgot — that is your fault for using the language out of context.
Please do try to remember we don’t use that word in shared spaces and out of context. I know that is even harder now that we’re in a pandemic and our private spaces have become shared spaces via remote work and chat, but try. People doing grocery shopping in the 21st century didn’t sign up to hear, “blah, blah, blah, colored people” in the pet food aisle, they just wanted to buy kibble for Mr. Boots. They also didn’t sign up to have some apparently-racist rando grab them and try to explain that they mean pretend colored people, so it’s okay! It’s not okay.
As a compromise, please let me offer you the term I-MU (pronounced ‘eye-mew’ (learned magic-users will be ‘el-mews’ and ‘mew’ will work for magic-users in general), which is slated to make an appearance after the timeskip. It’s a governmental term of classification, it’s got its own baggage in-universe and Mordecai will hate it, but it’s got no context in our universe! Safe for coffee shops and grocery stores — but do your best to behave appropriately for the evolving pandemic situation!
About the People
Why in the hell did I make a magical minority in the first place? Was The Green Mile not good enough for me?
In simplest terms: Because the X-Men make being marginalized cool. But let me unpack that for ya.
It is much easier to get everyone to put themselves into the shoes of a green wizard with cool powers than, say, a black lesbian woman. We need POV characters who reflect real marginalized people too, and I’m giving you some, but innate magic-users are all-access (they give you a different POV no matter where you’re starting from) and they come with a coupon. Hey! Imagine yourself this way and you’d have cool magical powers and be able to call gods! Not many people are excited to pretend they’re nonbinary women, but creating a gemsona is fun!
I don’t think I’m quite at that level. I didn’t give them cool weapons and headgear like TouHou characters. (Maybe I should’ve, but it doesn’t quite fit in with the urban fantasy aspect.) But because I made them up, there’s no stigma or disrespect in trying them on as an identity. Most of us will experience negative consequences if we ‘cosplay’ as a black person, even if you insist it’s a social experiment. It’s also getting less and less cool for you to put on a feathered headdress and go “woowoowoo.” (I did that as a child, I’m not proud. And I have Yaqui in my ancestry! Disclaimer: I never tried to get recognized by the tribe and since I didn’t marry a tribe member, my aunt who is recognized doubts they’d let me in. I don’t want any tribal benefits or for a bunch of strangers to tell me who I ought to marry, this is just part of my culture.) In our universe, there are no barriers to painting yourself green, and there probably won’t ever be any. You’re not making fun of anyone. They didn’t used to do that in movies to fake being a race when they didn’t want to hire real people of that race. And if somebody snaps a photo it won’t come back to haunt your political career. It’s a culture AND a costume! Try it on!
On the other hand, the exact opposite is true in their universe, so I can make you revisit some of this stuff and see it through new eyes. Oh, shit. Oompa-Loompas are racist? (Oompa-Loompas are racist here too, but they painted the movie ones orange trying to avoid the context. Pop culture history is fun!)
It’s also way harder to throw up your hands and say, “I’m colorblind! I don’t see it at all! You’re the same as me!” when there are associated abilities and disabilities that need accommodation. “Let me straighten that out for you, colorblind person. I’m a bright orange human being and that means when I become overloaded with magic literal colored flames leap out of my body and on certain days of the year I need to go to a special building so nature doesn’t try to kill me. Ya see it now?” That’s a lot more obvious than a history of redlining and what it’s done to your socioeconomic status.
(Honestly, I’d love it if I could burst into magical flames wherever anyone disputed my identity. Wouldn’t that be great?)
It’s a longshot, but if I turn up the volume and fiddle with the distortion, maybe I can get you to notice the Muzak that’s been playing in the background since before we were born. The original song is so old that even when we notice it our reactions are dulled. We shrug and accept it, or dismiss it as something that happened a long time ago. Tin Soldier’s colored people are a remix, with a lot of sampling. If I spin this record just right, maybe I can get you to get up and dance, even if it’s self-conscious dancing.
Really, every race and culture in Tin Soldier is a remix, even the ones that look familiar. It’s easy to forget. They’re our reflections, but that means they’re distorted. Their whole history is different; they had access to magic. With a little distance between their reality and ours, I hope some things will be easier to see.
Since I penned the first version of this explanation, Pixar’s Luca came out, so I want to get into the value of metaphor a little bit here too. Luca is literally about fish people trying to pass in human society. Literally. But social media blew up with LGBTQ+ people who saw themselves in the fish people. So much so that the mere fact that the fish people weren’t overtly queer was taken by a lot of people as a form of erasure and appropriation. And I’m sitting over here with my various intersections and thinking, “But the fish people were a metaphor for autism!” And the people in my autism support group felt that way too.
What really spoke to me in Luca was the part where Luca just casually mentions to Julia that they can “sleep under the fish” because to his experience shiny things in the firmament are fish, his best (and fellow fish) friend said they were, and he doesn’t know Julia’s world doesn’t work that way. She laughs it off, assuming he’s a normal human making a joke, and he doesn’t learn about stars until she explains them. That is not a queer experience to me, that’s a neurodiverse character trying to learn masking and screwing it up, but they pass anyway by being ‘funny.’ It’s happened to me so many times! If you confine that to a read of “oopsie, I said something about my LGBTQ+ identity in public and had to pass it off as a joke” I don’t get to see my autistic experience in that movie. It is possible to see queerness and neurodiversity in fish people, it is not possible to do so in literal queer characters. Queerness isn’t a metaphor, it’s a real thing that people are. Unlike being a fish.
Marginalized people of all kinds deserve to see themselves in media, including characters who have their identities explicitly defined. Yes, there should be children’s media with LGBTQ+ kids. But there is also value in failing to specify. A metaphor can speak to a lot more people. So I’m ticking off as many marginalized identities as I can, but I can’t give you a main character for everyone — unless I use metaphors. Erik and Mordecai have an all-purpose difference they can’t hide, like race or certain disabilities. (On the other hand, Milo and Ann have an all-purpose difference they can hide, although with difficulty.) With their help, we can explore how that works in general, and sometimes you’ll see yourself, and sometimes someone else.
I tend to have a reason for the narrative decisions I make. If you give me enough rope (and pay attention) I’ll weave you a cat’s cradle.
And sometimes I will indeed hang myself, but I hope in an entertaining way!