Xavior DeJarnett: "Dear Bridget Smith and Naomi Kritzer: (In)visibility in Fiction"

Dear Bridget Smith and Naomi Kritzer: (In)visibility in Fiction

Xavior DeJarnett

As a kid, I had little difficulty projecting myself onto the heroes in the books I read. I was easy to imagine myself as strong, conventionally attractive, and caring little about money. Then I grew older and all of those things became harder. Then I hit high school and realized that I had had three characters that had something major in common with me in any of the fiction I had read up to that point. Those three characters were Hermione Granger, whose personality seemed so like my own, Percy Jackson, who had my learning disabilities, and Ron Weasley, whose family was about as well off as mine. But there were no characters of size and no queer characters. Or at least, none that I could relate to.

Let’s begin with characters of size, or to be blunt, fat characters. As a child, there are two characters that stick out in my mind in this department. The first is Dudley Dursley, Dudley Dursley who is described repeatedly as abusive and in various ways as being fat abusive and in various ways as being fat . Such flattering descriptions. The other was Fat Amy. I don’t think I need to explain that too much. These are not kind images for a child who is already an outsider in school because of their socio-economic status. These are not the images I needed.

The other thing I saw very little of was queer characters of any kind, particularly trans or nonbinary people. While I am aware that nonbinary gender identities are fairly new in the west , people being transgender is not, and I only know of one character  in a mainstream series who was anything other than cis gender, so it was very difficult for me to see myself in that regard as well.

That all being said, I would like to see authors be use different body types and include more queer people in their casts of characters. Both of these groups are vastly underrepresented in most mainstream genre fiction (or any media or that matter). When combined, I can’t say that I know of any queer fat characters. I think it’s important that we begin to address this as both readers and writers of genre fiction, and there are a few things that we can do.

As readers, I believe that it is best to be aware of the characters that we see depicted and realize that there might be different interpretations of how they look. We can also begin to seek out the stories of people who are like us, and that we want to hear. This will help create a clear market for the kinds of

characters I personally, and we as readers, would like to see.

As authors, it is important to be creative with the sizes and shapes of our characters, and show their gender and orientation rather than just talking about it later I’d personally love to see more publically, casually queer characters, and more characters of size being active parts of the story and being given agency in their own stories.