The Problem With The Societal Default

One thing we often talk about when criticising books and TV shows from a social justice perspective is the “Societal Default”. Basically, what counts as your “standard” or “normal” person. What do we think of when we think “person” without any qualifiers? Inevitably, the image conjured is the most privileged members of society - able bodied, White, straight, cis men. This is our default human, our standard for “normality”, the base template of person from which everyone else is a derivative.

And there are consequences of that, especially when it comes to fiction.

Firstly, it does a lot of damage to marginalised character design. See, when we’re building a character we begin with a default then add the unique elements that fleshes them out and make them a full person. We add the “template” of personality and traits to the Default template. So we take the cis, white, able bodied, straight man and we add likes, dislikes, profession, hobbies, motivation, opinions, characterisation, relationship, history - we take the blank sheet and make a character from this unmarred beginning.

When we make marginalised characters we, all too often, take that Default blank template and add “woman” or “gay” or “Black”. This is the characterisation, this is the development and this is one of the ways Tokens are created. This is why you can get large casts full of able-bodied, straight, cis white men who have a other defining labels (even very narrow, stereotypical portrayals like “geek” or “jock”) while women of POC or LGBT people don’t even get that - because being a woman or Black or Gay IS their label - like being “Geek” is a quick characterisation for the able-bodied, straight, cis, white male character.  Another example of this is you get female characters who are literally just female versions of male characters (what Anita Sarkeesian calls the Ms. Male Character).

To put it another way, marginalised characters are already considered defined and characterised simply because they ARE marginalised characters. The “blank slate” of the societal Default has already been filled in by the marginalised status. This leaves these lazy Tokens whose entire characterisation is defined by their marginalisation. On The Walking Dead, T-Dog is a Black man. That’s not just a description, that’s the sum totality of his characterisation and purpose - much the same as Dai and Anthony from Falling Skies, Aaron on Switch and any number of tokens we’ve noted before.

The Societal Default character (the able-bodied, straight, cis, White man) needs more development to be even a minor character - because otherwise they’re a blank sheet, a non-character. But that’s exactly what happens with marginalised tokens but it is accepted because we see their marginalisation as inherently filling in the blanks.

Which brings us to another problem of not challenging this Default narrative - by allowing a marginalised identity to fill in the blanks of characterisation, that leaves us with a very narrow set of stereotyped behaviours and appearances to stand in place of actual development - so we get Felix on Orphan Black and Aaron on Switch whose characterisation, personality, behaviour, dress - entire existence is basically “gay man”; or T-Dog, Oscar or Jacqui on The Walking Dead (and POC tokens may literally be just walking dark skin). This is something the Societal Default avoids simply by being the Societal Default - a status which inherently requires more development. Sure they may be stereotyped when a tiny amount of characterisation is added - a stereotypical geek, a stereotypical frat boy, a stereotypical business man - but that tiny amount of characterisation has to be added first. The Default itself, able bodied, cis, straight, White men, has the infinite potential to be anything and is not limited by automatic assumptions and predefined roles to anything like the same extent as marginalised people.

The Societal Default requires something extra to create an actual character - too often merely being a marginalised person IS that something extra.

The Societal Default also causes problems by being the Default, by being the baseline. If you want a character, you start with an able-bodied, cis, straight, White male character. if you want them to be anything but that, too often there’s an expectation of a reason. Deviating from the Societal Default requires justification. This is something we’ve examined in more detail in our post Marginalised Characters Do Not Define the Story. Too often, if you critique erasure in a series or TV show, someone will ask “why does there have to be a {insert marginalisation} character”? When surely the question should be the opposite - why ISN’T there a marginalised character? Why is the actual existence of these people overlooked?

It’s notable that we do not question why a character has to be an able bodied, cis, straight, white man nor do we expect there to be a special story reason, justification or necessity to have one in any role in a story. If we do not use a Societal Default character, then there is an assumption of an agenda on the writer’s part.

There's Always an Excuse for Prejudice, Erasure and Tropes

One of the things we’ve found in our many reviews of the genre from a social justice perspective is how many times people will make up various excuses for the problems we talk about. There is no limit to the different excuses people raise, but often it can feel like we’re responding to the same script since we see the same points raised again and again. Since, we assume, they are widely believed we’re going to poke a few of these:


The Protagonist doesn’t hate them because they’re a minority - it’s because they’re horrible people.

This normally becomes an issue when we point out, for example, that a character has no female friends and strikes sparks with every woman around them. Or the protagonist hates every single POC in the book/TV series. Or that the only GBLT characters in a book have been the protagonist’s enemies.

Now these protagonists rarely turn round and say “I hate women!” or “she’s my enemy because she’s a lesbian, evil lesbian!” because most authors aren’t that ridiculous. Usually, the protagonist does have a very legitimate reason to hate these people. Yes, every woman they met was mean to them. Yes, all the POC around them were cruel and rude. Yes, that evil GBLT villain is indeed evil. There were big story reasons for the character to hate all of these people. This is true.

But this a work of fiction, not a report of real people. The writer is an author, not a journalist. The cruel POC, the evil GBLT villain, the mean women - they don’t exist. They’re all creations of the author. And if the author has created a book where all the women/POC/GBLT/etc are set up to be awful and hateable then it is because the author chose them to be so.

If the marginalised people in a series are all hateful people that the protagonist loathes - for good in story reasons - then the author has created that scenario. And, yes, that’s problematic.


It’s just who they are! I see them as people not POC/GBLT/etc

So you’ve written your story and it turns out you have a sexually predatory GBLT person, or a loud, angry, sassy black woman side-kick (bonus points if she has magic to help the protagonist) or some equally tired, stereotyped trope. Naturally we’re not impressed but the protest is “they’re not a sassy, magical side-kick because they’re black, it’s just who they are!” In other words, you assert that their adherence to an extremely tired trope is just coincidence.

Now it’s vaguely possible, I guess, that you are somehow packed into the Mars Rover and are actually beaming you books or scripts from there and your intended audience is actually aliens from the planet Zog. In which case I applaud you for being able to write under such difficult conditions and being our ambassador for the Zoggi with books about vampires.

Self-Publishing: Sometimes the only Gate that's Open

The review blog All Things Urban Fantasy recently published a piece regarding their refusal to do reviews of self published books.  The author of the post said that she has had negative experiences with authors who have reacted unprofessionally to critique.  She further went on to cite amateurish covers, as well as grammatical and spelling mistakes in the books. Obviously, we believe that the owner of each blog should have autonomy over their own spaces, and so we respect the right of the owners of All Things Urban Fantasy to place limitations on which books they will cover however, in our space, our policy is quite different.

At Fangs for the Fantasy, we accept all books with the only requirement being that they fit our specified genre (and we have been known to bend that - albeit not often).  If the book has a protagonist of colour, a GLBT protagonist, a disabled protagonist or a strong female character, it is more likely to end up on the top of our to read list.  Together, we negotiate a number of marginalisations and as such we want to see ourselves reflected in what we read.  We further recognise how important it is to children who come from historically marginalised communities to see positive representations of themselves.

Publishing companies, just like any social organisations, have inbuilt biases. This means that privileged people are far more likely to get publishing deals and books that support a narrative in which historically marginalised people are either erased, or subject to negative portrayals are more likely to be published. The idea that traditionally published books are simply a marker of professionalism is missing the fact that agents and publishers act as gate keepers and, like all gate keepers, their role is to support the active oppression and silencing of historically marginalised people. As reviewers, contributing to the attention a book receives, our reviewing policy can risk enabling the gate keepers or becoming gate keepers ourselves if we ignore the built in biases.



Rachel Manija Brown, author of All the Fishes Come Home to Roost, and Sherwood Smith, author of Crown Duel and a great many other novels for adults and young adults published a piece Publisher’s Weekly this past September about the suggestion that they should remove a gay character from a book that they had written.

An agent from a major agency, one which represents a bestselling YA novel in the same genre as ours, called us.

The agent offered to sign us on the condition that we make the gay character straight, or else remove his viewpoint and all references to his sexual orientation.

Rachel replied, “Making a gay character straight is a line in the sand which I will not cross. That is a moral issue. I work with teenagers, and some of them are gay. They never get to read fantasy novels where people like them are the heroes, and that’s not right.”

The agent suggested that perhaps, if the book was very popular and sequels were demanded, Yuki could be revealed to be gay in later books, when readers were already invested in the series. (source)

This is an example of gatekeeping in action. You’ll note that the agent's issue was not with elements of the story, but simply the fact that the authors dared to have a gay teen and one whose relationships matched that of their heterosexual counterparts. I know that there are those who will argue that there is already some gay representation in the genre (though erasure is far more likely to be the norm), but to that I must point out that the addition of a gay character, does not necessarily mean that the role is affirmative in any way.  What we tend to see are the gay best friends, or gay uncles, who are usually celibate and fulfill every trope associated with gay men.  These men love to shop, they sashay, are limp wristed  and catty, all while practically farting unicorns and fairy dust.

The closer the representation comes to being affirming, the less likely publishers will want to publish it. There is a very solid belief that books that involve gay characters belong in the m/m genre where they can be appropriately fetishised by straight women. Mainstream representations of gay characters is few and far between and in the urban fantasy genre trans people are downright invisible.  

The GLBT community is not the only historically marginalized people that are subjected to erasure within the urban fantasy genre. I cannot tell you how many books I have read that have been set in major urban areas only to find that there isn’t a single person of colour in the story. Let’s consider for the moment the struggle that Australian author Justine Larbalestier had when Bloomsbury Children's Books decided to publish the American release of her book Liar with a young White girl with long hair on the cover of her book, despite the fact that the protagonist, Micah, is a Black girl with short hair. After much online discussion, Larbalestier took to her blog to write the following:

Liar is a book about a compulsive (possibly pathological) liar who is determined to stop lying but finds it much harder than she supposed. I worked very hard to make sure that the fundamentals of who Micah is were believable: that she’s a girl, that she’s a teenager, that she’s black, that she’s USian. One of the most upsetting impacts of the cover is that it’s led readers to question everything about Micah: If she doesn’t look anything like the girl on the cover maybe nothing she says is true. At which point the entire book, and all my hard work, crumbles.

Every year at every publishing house, intentionally and unintentionally, there are white-washed covers. Since I’ve told publishing friends how upset I am with my Liar cover, I have been hearing anecdotes from every single house about how hard it is to push through covers with people of colour on them. (source)

As with erasure in books with GLBT characters, white washing characters is hardly an isolated experience.

In short, marginalised work faces constant suppression. From Amazon delisting, to book shop shelving in the “niche” section, to publishers, agents and editors demanding protagonists, covers, even significant bit characters be as privileged as possible so as not to “alienate” readers. There is a constant battle from mainstream publishing - and beyond - to push marginalised characters out of our books and marginalised authors off our shelves.

It is an effort to avoid the gatekeeping activities of traditional publishing houses that minority authors have taken to independent publication. It has meant a lack of support in terms of editing, book covers and publicity; however, the flip side is real characters that accurately reflect the experiences of historically marginalised people. The very idea that authors resort to self publishing because they lack skill, ignores the very real roadblocks that marginalised people face.

To be honest, it smacks of snobbery. You’re  self-pubbed? Oh you’re not a REAL author. Your work is lesser and not worth my time. Now go find this publishing house full of cis, straight, white, able-bodied men to tell you you’re a real author and your work is worth my attention, then get back to me. In other words, books are only considered books once they’ve passed through a filter controlled by the privileged.

To refuse to review these works is to participate in the maintenance of a system that has proven itself repeatedly to be biased. Of course, such a decision is always backed up with the claim that self published books aren’t polished or that the authors are not professional, but I can tell you that after reading countless books in this genre, there are plenty of books which are filled with spelling and grammar mistakes - to say nothing of dubious stories, weak characterisations and plot holes you could sail a tanker through. And we have had run ins with authors who are displeased with the reviews that we have posted in this space, who have made us aware in no uncertain terms that our decision to consider the role of isms in their work is unfair. No one wants to be called a bigot, however, because we live in a White supremacist, ableist, sexist, homophobic state, the very idea that any work can be free of isms is ridiculous. We don’t live in a Utopia but somehow recognition of one's failure is supposedly more difficult to deal with than the historically marginalised people who have to live with consequences of having this bigotry become the ground work of our discourse. Traditional publishers are certainly no guarantee of quality or professionalism.

Whether or not reviewers are consciously aware or not, a refusal to branch out and consider the work of independently published books is based in a desire to conform and maintain a status quo that in some way benefits them. I think it would be fair to say that as marginalised reviewers, we have a responsibility to consider the work of self pubs, simply because they are some of the best opportunities to see good positive representation, without the influence of those who seek to erase us from an entire genre, furthermore our support evidences that there is a market for the work of marginalised people despite claims to the contrary.

If it’s drek, we may snark it - but never for just being a self-pub.