Okay I’m going to start this off by acknowledging that some people do perceive this as a problem, and it does affect their writing choices within transformative works fandom and elsewhere.
HOWEVER. There’s an slightly-inaccurate-but-very-true quote by Kwame Dawes that’s floating around which I think is valuable here: racist writing is a craft failure.
What this means is that racist tropes – the “scylla and charybdis” you mention above are two examples of racial tropes, but aren’t the only ones by any means – are just that: lazy tropes and cliches that expose a lack of imagination on behalf of the author to see or even imagine characters of color beyond the “single story” (see: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s talk on same) that those of us raised in a white supremacist culture are trained from childhood (look up ‘the doll test’ and ‘implicit bias’) to consider “true” or “believable” or “complete” or even narratively compelling…
Yes, it’s a cultural issue; it’s a fault of our media (not enough representation / not enough varied or good representation), but it’s also a failure of personal imagination and a lack of willingness to put the same amount of research and world-building effort into stories about characters of color as we do for white men.
I could list a thousand and one examples of minor white male characters, some of them heroic but some of them downright evil, who’ve been elevated by fandom, whose cannibalistic, genocidal, abusive traits have been excused or even valorized, while characters of color are crammed into the nearest stereotype pigeonhole and given no second thought, when they are remembered at all.
And you know what? That first part is fine. You’re allowed to like ‘bad’ characters. That isn’t the issue here. The point is that white ‘bad’ characters are fandom faves that get woobified and defended, and ‘good’ characters of color are hypothesized to be evil – and then their ‘badness’ becomes a reason to discard the characters of color instead of celebrating them along with the white villainous faves.
Writers fret about stereotypes, yes. Writers should be conscious of lazy cliches and offensive tropes and the whole lot. It’s one of the things that makes for better stories and especially one of the incredible strengths of transformative works fandoms: finding the stories that aren’t being told, the stories lurking within the murky subtext beyond the two-dimensional surface, and telling better stories for ourselves (see also: how fandom adds queerness when there is none in canon).
But when confronted with a cliche of a white man and a nuanced character of color, fandom has proven time and time again that they’re willing to stick their creative neck out and do every bit of work that it takes to add nuance to the white guy, while ignoring it in (or taking it away from) the character of color.
(Incidentally, there are SO MANY resources nowadays for writing characters of color effectively and non-offensively, especially because this is a conversation that’s been happening both in fandom and in mainstream publishing for YEARS.)
What’s worse is that people will defend not writing characters of color at all because they honestly cannot perceive or imagine that a character of color is worth their time and effort. They honestly cannot perceive or imagine that there’s any way they could come up with a story for that character that won’t be a cliche or stereotype.
It’s a lack of imagination. It’s a craft failure.
And it’s not at all ‘transformative.’
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