Thread by @seananmcguire

It's easy to say "politics don't belong in genre fiction" when your existence can be viewed as apolitical: when writing a story with someone Exactly Like You is accepted, applauded, and not greeted with cries of "self-insert" or "Mary Sue."

Every time I write a female protagonist--every. single. time.--I get asked if she's secretly me, having a fantastic adventure in my stead. I get asked if the text really JUSTIFIES her skills and abilities.

Because I work in urban fantasy, which is often viewed as "a girl's genre," or, more witheringly, "all vampire porn," I don't always get asked why I chose a female POV. But I've been asked that about my Mira Grant work.

"Isn't it distracting to make your lead character a woman?"
"I mean, there was no seduction and she didn't use her feminine wiles to escape, so why not write a man?" (real question a reader really asked with the hole in their face that makes sounds)

(My actual favorite was the person who CAME TO A READING to ask me to re-write FEED so George was a man because "it's unrealistic for...her...to have survived in the open when there are zombies." Why? MENSTRUATION.)

Other questions I have been asked by people who enjoy my work and are thus at least trying to communicate in good faith:

"Why does ____ have to be gay?"
"Was it really necessary to make her disabled?"
"Why is ____ Indian?"

"This story isn't about...that...so why is ____ trans?"
"Why are there so many deviant relationships?"
"You already wrote a female mad scientist, isn't this basically the same character?"
"Mental illness isn't fun to read about, why write it?"

"You know you'd have more readers if you stopped writing about this homo crap, right?"
"When is ____ going to be raped?"
"Isn't it unrealistic for a woman to be that good with a gun?"

It is SO EASY to pretend fiction is apolitical when you live in a bubble of "the default." When a thousand books about someone JUST LIKE YOU come out monthly, and aren't interrogated for reasons of identity.

(And no, "this book is bad and it bored me" is NOT THE SAME as "this book had too many lesbians, ugh politics." The book full of lesbians can also be bad and boring. You don't gotta like anything. But don't pretend you're apolitical.)

Fiction SHOULDN'T be apolitical. Shakespeare wasn't being apolitical. Neither was Shelley, or Baum, or Poe, or anyone else. The politics change; sometimes they become hard to see; they still exist.

But as long as my very existence is enough to make a book "political," cries of "we want less politics in our fiction" will be very transparent in their source, and very disingenuous.

We process the world through our words, and right now, a lot of people seem to think that because THEY get to exist as "the default," the rest of us are being intentionally, aggressively political. Sometimes we are. But sometimes...

Sometimes we just want to be seen.

Can't we just be seen?
Can't we have adventures?
Can't we fight zombies and ride hippos and go to space and summon demons and do everything else that we've been letting "the default" do all along?
Please?