If you want to see better implemented characters, then you need to be less critical of them. If race and gender do not matter, then you should judge whether these characters are good or not based on their other merits.
*sigh*
I wish I could agree with you, because part of my knowledge base says that you are right. The other part of my knowledge base tells me that ignoring privilege proliferates privilege. In a society in which we had no stereotypes of drug sellers being black, we could have a token black drug seller and there would be no problem, so long as he was well-developed. But that isn't the society we live in, and no matter how many times we tell a story of a woman giving up her freedom and agency to marry/subjugate herself to a man well, it is still a problematic narrative.
The point is that in a world where there is only "one possible narrative" for a woman, or whatever else, saying "Okay, start telling a different story, please" does not necessarily mean that everyone will tell the same story. Why would it? Rather than "woman must die/have bad things happen or marry man," we can tell "man must die/have bad things happen or marry woman," or we can tell "woman defies ostensible fate and doesn't marry man--nothing bad happens" or "woman is destroyed by idea of fate weighing on her and ends up dying horribly by virtue of the fate, not from its explicit terms" or "woman engages in a narrative where marriage is not involved at all" or "woman is given ultimatum by fate and instead goes on quest to disband ultimatum, and falls in love along the way or not." Or, hell, even "woman must endure fate or marry woman" or "two women are both screwed over by fate and must decide among themselves who is going to go get married and who is going to die." Not "man picks which woman dies," "woman picks which woman dies."
There, I've come up with a number of plotlines and I've hardly ever seen any of them produced, despite the critiques of the "woman goes off and gets married" story. They all even have female main characters.
Ostensibly, yes, there will be only shifting terms as you mentioned, but this is not the point where we say "well, now we critique these people as characters." When women as a group become characters rather than scenery or props for the male narrative, we can talk. We don't expect every character of a story to be well-rounded and interesting. We expect the lead to be interesting, and possibly his cohort. But there are always side characters who just don't matter as much, and critiquing those roles would be to go against the foundations of literature. It is still absolutely necessary to contradict the stereotyping inherent in relegating women and minorities to those positions.
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Topic: Diversity In Media (Read 8815 times)