Warning: mild The Little Mermaid, Jurassic Park, and Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe spoilers.

Welcome to the quest of writing bad representation! Thankfully for any newcomers, this is a long-established art with a multitude of examples to guide the way - after all, even fiction with some representation doesn’t necessarily do it well - as you may have heard people discussing recently. What’s more, it’s easy to do once you understand these tricks, tips, and things to avoid for bringing out the worst in your writing.

The first thing to address in any kind of representation is often the main character, who’s usually the hero. Now, if we were trying to write good representation, we’d probably first consider if they are anything that’s not a white, straight, cisgender, completely healthy and very fit, financially well-off, vaguely Christian, masculine, utterly stereotypical guy. However, that’s not what we’re doing, so instead we’re going to skip over them and any other central, likable, and well-developed character. In fact, let’s go straight to the villian. If you feel like it, go ahead and make this character as different as you want - so long as they are also very stereotypical, flat as a pancake, and unquestionably evil. Take for instance Ursula, from The Little Mermaid, who’s a strong-willed, intelligent female with a body type other than the thin American ideal, but who also is cruel, raunchy, manipulative towards the naïve, traditionally-beautiful protagonist, and who tries to take over the underwater kingdom by force (Clements and Musker). Keep in mind that good representation plays a powerful role in promoting empathy, understanding, and communication when it comes to how we perceive each other, so we want to do the opposite of illustrating diverse, complex, human (or humanoid) characters in a positive light. That would be too realistic, too true, and certainly too beneficial, for both the audience that belongs to that underrepresented group, who would gain a guide, role-model, or otherwise inspirational figure, and the audience that doesn’t, who would learn about their fellow human beings and what their lives are like. For instance, Aza, the protagonist of the novel Turtles All The Way Down by John Green, navigates friendship, romance, and a mystery while struggling with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (Green). In this book, Aza shows teens with the disorder that they are so much more than it, and that they can still live a life of their own. Meanwhile, everyone else learns about what it’s actually like to have OCD, which in turn challenges common ignorance and stereotypes about it that lead to the false belief that it’s not a serious and destructive illness. Ugh, inspiration and learning, why would you want to cause that with your work? But, I hear you asking, what if I successfully avoid this fate with my hero yet still want some good character to be “diverse” in order to placate the audience, even while staying true to my goal of awful representation? The answer is easy: write a token character!

 A token character is a must for bad writing trying to look good; it’s having one minor character be black, LGBTQ+, female, etc. while all the rest of the cast fits the mold in the previous paragraph. Chances are, this token character will get killed off, broken up with, or otherwise denied a happy ending, such as in Jurassic Park, when the only named black character, Ray Arnold, is killed by velociraptors, with only a bloody arm remaining (Spielberg). After all, we don’t want to make this positive, do we? An exception could be if they have some sort of disability or chronic illness, in which case they could be healed by the end instead, thus reinforcing the harmful and false idea that people with disabilities or other ailments can’t be happy in their current situation. Oh, and extra points for writing this character as some kind of poor, helpless angel who can’t do literally anything, including having a personality. For an example of how not to do this, take a look at Crutchie from the musical Newsies, who has a job, a rowdy group of friends that he fits right in with, and his own realistic personality: the character cracks jokes, stands up for himself, feels a variety of emotions (some related to his disability and some not), and is willing to fight if need be  (Sullivan and Calhoun). Gross.

Another specific version of bad representation you can try is having the only good or important female character be the love interest and little else, even though in film, females only make up about 29% of protagonists and 32% of speaking characters anyway, as of 2016. (This is according to  Dr. Martha M. Lauzen of San Diego State University, in the findings titled “It’s a Man’s (Celluloid) World: Portrayals of Female Characters in the Top 100 Films of 2016.”) It’s especially obnoxious if she’s the damsel in distress, who, like the token disabled character, can’t do anything about her situation or even have a personality outside of being the sweet, helpless love interest. A famous example is Aurora from Sleeping Beauty, who only has about eighteen minutes of screen time total, and thus does little but be rescued by the prince at the end (IMDb). Although lacking nuance and not accounting for stereotypes or anything of the sort, a quick way to test for possible accidentally okay female representation is the Bechdel Test. The only criteria for passing this test is that there are at least two female characters who talk to each other about something other than men. Despite this low bar, “Sizing Up Hollywood's Gender Gap” by Robin Smith, as seen on Duke University’s research archive, points out that more than 40% of American films fail (Smith). Like I said, bad representation, or even no representation at all, has plenty of representatives itself.

Of course, many real people belong to multiple minority or under-reflected groups, experience a common yet underrepresented phenomenon, or have personality traits that aren’t often shown in main characters. As far as being in multiple groups goes, this is called intersectionality, and a bad representation - writer avoids it whenever possible. After all, writing quality characters who are, say, black and female, like Nasuada from The Inheritance Cycle, or working class, queer, and Mexican-American, like Aristotle in Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe, could highlight the lives and situations of people who are forced to withstand multiple kinds of bigotry and erasure, assuming the characters are well-researched or understood from personal experience. Remember, we’re out to be horrible human beings, so we don’t want to get anywhere near this territory. Then there’s another sort of representation: showing experiences that are usually ignored. This includes being a woman older than 40 - according to Washington Post article “Why the age of 40 is so important in Hollywood”, 80% of lead roles ages 40 and up are male (Guo). Again, for us it’s simplest to avoid this all together. Leave these valuable challenges for writers who want to have positively impactful results.The third thing to pass on mainly goes back to our central protagonists, and that’s giving them non-traditional personality traits. Maybe they’re not brave, or are insecure; maybe they hate fighting and would rather diffuse a situation with communication. Maybe they’re a guy with “feminine” traits, or a female with “masculine” traits, or any gender with some of both. You know, like an actual person. Maybe they’re quiet or clever or thoughtful, saving the day in their own way.

Now, almost all works of fiction have a mix of good and bad representation, but as you create your own, try to remember this: bad representation is all about erasing people, their experiences, their potential, and their humanity. On the other hand, good representation teaches us about ourselves and each other in nuanced and inspiring ways. In fiction we can escape to and explore a world that’s not quite our own, and see and engage in someone else’s story. So when we catch a glimpse of ourselves, or someone we recognize, in said story, we are given lessons to apply to our real lives, after the final page is read, note is sung, or scene is played out; when the credits begin to roll, and it’s your turn to make something new.              

Works Consulted:

Clements, Ron and John Musker, directors. The Little Mermaid. Buena Vista Pictures Distribution, Inc, 1989.

Green, John. Turtles All the Way Down. Penguin, 2018.

Guo, Jeff. “Why the Age of 40 Is so Important in Hollywood.” The Washington Post, WP Company, 19 Sept. 2016.

Paolini, Christopher. Brisingr. Alfred A. Knopf, 2008.

Sáenz Benjamin Alire. Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe. Thorndike Press, a Part of Gale, a Cengage Company, 2018.

“Sizing Up Hollywood's Gender Gap.” Duke Research Blog - Following the People and Events That Make up the Research Community at Duke.

“Sleeping Beauty.” IMDb, IMDb.

Spielberg, Steven, director. Jurassic Park. 1993.

Sullivan, Brett, and Jeff Calhoun. “Newsies the Musical.”