The problems of relatability

[selenicseas]

Posted to Dreamwidth on 13 November 2024, backdated to 11 March 2022. Originally posted on Wordpress.

Relatability is a word I see a lot when people talk about writing fiction - specifically, how to create relatable characters with relatable goals, personalities, motives, wants, needs, etc.

I don't think this is the right thing to focus on. I care much more about if a character's motivations or whatever are realistic with regards to that character's personality & background. Relatability is simply not something that crosses my mind.

I think a large part of the problem is that relatability isn't a universal thing like it's talked about being. There is no set standard of things that everyone will identify with. Different people care about different things.

It sounds obvious when I put it like that, but I'm not sure it's acknowledged and understood all that well.

What is and isn't considered relatable is largely manufactured by majority populations. I've seen plenty of media with minority characters criticized solely for not propping up the majority 100% of the time. Apparently, whites can't "relate" to Asians, Christians can't "relate" to Muslims, heterosexuals & cisgenders can't "relate" to queer people, men can't "relate" to women - as if whites, Christians, heterosexuals, and men were all universal and special enough that everyone could simply find them relatable.

Being a majority is an excuse for a lot of people to act like they're the center of the universe, I guess.

I think the concept of relatability is used largely to create and prop up media that is fundamentally unchallenging in most aspects. It encourages majority populations to not to look beyond the (typically fairly narrow) worldviews they grew up with, and instead bolsters and enables their own sense of self-importance. A change to the status quo - like adding a woman or queer person or ethnic minority to a long-running media franchise - is a threat to that self-importance. It's why minority characters get hit with the "unrelatable" label, while majorities don't.

I write science fiction. Speculative fiction. Fantasy. Why would I want to create something that isn't challenging? Why would I want to write majoritarian propaganda?

Writers. Artists. Creators. Reject relatability and all the nonsense that comes with it, please.

Comments

Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith]

>> I don't think this is the right thing to focus on. I care much more about if a character's motivations or whatever are realistic with regards to that character's personality & background. Relatability is simply not something that crosses my mind.<<

I think that a character's internal consistency is more important. Relatability is farther down. But if I'm writing nonhumans, I should probably check whether the story is likely to be comprehensible to humans, because it is entirely possible for me to write things that make zero sense to primates, or oxygen-breathers, or organics. And then consider whether I care.

>> I think a large part of the problem is that relatability isn't a universal thing like it's talked about being. There is no set standard of things that everyone will identify with. Different people care about different things. <<

Well, it depends on what you consider universal. Right now, all humans live on Earth and few have ever left it. That gives us a lot of common ground -- we are all part of the same ecosystem, air, water, even if some don't acknowledge that. Future writers will look back on this and envy us the simplicity when they are trying to make life on Mars "relatable" to people on Earth. (This almost always starts a war because they can't see eye-to-eye.) All humans at this time have parents, at least biological ones. Nearly all humans speak a language. All humans eat food, even if it's different.

So when you talk about things that most or all humans have experienced, they can compare their experience to the character's experience. When you write about things which are rare, like being chased by a tiger, readers have to extrapolate based on other experiences of fear. And if it's something most people have little framework for, like uncommon sexual orientations, then you have to do more work to describe it (unless you are, say, writing acepr0n for asexuals and don't care if anyone else ever reads it). In this regard, it's not so much about what to write as how.

Then there's the part about "selling" an audience on a character (or setting, or plot) so they find it plausible and coherent enough to keep reading. The more phantasmagorical these things become, the more useful commonalities become in helping readers grasp the story. If a gaseous creature is wandering through space, it doesn't have a whole lot of impact yet; but if I say that it is "hungry" then the readers have an idea what's going on even if the creature is looking for stars to eat instead of a hamburger. Alternatively, it can be about giving a villain the kind of motivation that makes sense to readers, and adds dimension, so he's not just a walking plot device. Magneto and Poison Ivy are interesting characters because they're right about a lot of things, which creates tension when they try to solve problems in terrible ways. And then a very entertaining challenge becomes: how far out can a character or story go and still make sense because some part is relatable? Bard Bloom excels at pushing that boundary, which is very entertaining.

>>What is and isn't considered relatable is largely manufactured by majority populations. I've seen plenty of media with minority characters criticized solely for not propping up the majority 100% of the time. Apparently, whites can't "relate" to Asians, Christians can't "relate" to Muslims, heterosexuals & cisgenders can't "relate" to queer people, men can't "relate" to women - as if whites, Christians, heterosexuals, and men were all universal and special enough that everyone could simply find them relatable.<<

Definitely not how I use it, or how many speculative writers use it, but I've seen a lot of that in the mainstream. So part of relatability is thinking about your core audience. The wider an audience you want, the more you should build around very common experiences; but if you like niche writing, then focusing on the parts particular to your target audience is what will make it relatable to them even if nobody else gets it.

And then, if readers explore many different types of stories and characters, that will stretch what they can relate to. Some of us do this on purpose, kind of like literary yoga. I'm waiting on an anthology of Dalit speculative fiction that I ordered from Kickstarter. I have no idea if it'll make sense to me; I bought it precisely to get a different perspective and stories I'm pretty sure will be different than the other 12,000 or so books in the house.

Science fiction in particular can be written to be as weird as possible, for a target audience of nerds who already know what an ansible is and don't mind being dumped on a planet with no explanation; or it can be written to pass the "Aunt Mary" test and be comprehensible to an average non-nerd reader while still handling SF ideas. Writers can choose either side of that, or even both. Thinking about relatability is useful if you're debating where on that spectrum to place a story -- especially if you'll have to defend that position to an editor. Me, I've got it easy with crowdfunding, my readers can ask me for something familiar or something utterly bonkers as they please.

>>Being a majority is an excuse for a lot of people to act like they're the center of the universe, I guess.<<

Hence why I write a lot of niche stuff. Well, that and I've inhaled whole libraries, so I'm more interested in telling stories I haven't already read 200 times.

>> I think the concept of relatability is used largely to create and prop up media that is fundamentally unchallenging in most aspects.<<

Often true, but not the only thing that can be done with it, and not a useful thing -- unless you're only in it for the money, in which case there are more lucrative careers you could've picked.

>> It encourages majority populations to not to look beyond the (typically fairly narrow) worldviews they grew up with, and instead bolsters and enables their own sense of self-importance. <<

And that's why dialect translations aggravate me. If I'm reading a British book I want it to have British English, not American English. I know that a boot is the trunk of a car and if I didn't know I could look it up. I can't learn more about British English if the story has been translated. :/ To say nothing of egregious maulings that make things harder to look up like "Sorcerer's Stone." *cringe*

>> A change to the status quo - like adding a woman or queer person or ethnic minority to a long-running media franchise - is a threat to that self-importance. It's why minority characters get hit with the "unrelatable" label, while majorities don't. <<

My perspective on that is different. I find them distracting to the point of jarring me outside the story. They look tacked on, because they are tacked on, and it's almost never done with any sort of logic other than "things are supposed to be multicultural nowadays, so throw in some actors who look different." It's not that I dislike diversity; I just prefer it built in from the beginning so it makes sense. Very rarely do I see it done with genuine thought, but when it is, sometimes it's brilliant. I love Elementary for the double racebending/genderbending of Joan Watson -- precisely because of all the little bits where you can see that being Asian and female affect how she does things and her relationships. But a new story? I will very nearly buy a movie or try a TV show just because it has a diverse cast list -- they're easier for me to tell apart that way. Apparently this is not how most people think of these things.

>>I write science fiction. Speculative fiction. Fantasy. Why would I want to create something that isn't challenging? Why would I want to write majoritarian propaganda?<<

*chuckle* I see you're on team "dump 'em on an alien planet and may the strong survive!" Go for it. We need all the stories.

Are you into the very small branch of speculative fiction with no human characters? I think "unrelatable" is the main criticism of that, but I love the stuff when I can find it. You can see one of mine in A Conflagration of Dragons.

Re: Thoughts

[selenicseas]

This was written back in 2022, and if I was to write this post today, I'd lean more into how relatability is used to reinforce white supremacist Euro-Western capitalist hegemony. I suspect I was too afraid to mention that back then for some reason. As it stands, I'm fundamentally disinterested in creating work that doesn't challenge power structures - I lean heavily anarchist and I just don't care about what the power-holding classes think. I think they deserve to be made uncomfortable.