I don\u2019t quite know how to start this, so I\u2019m just going to start. It feels like it\u2019s a tangle of things, but maybe there\u2019s a knife to cut this Gordian knot.<\/p>\n
A friend told me last week that he doesn\u2019t like first person POV because he doesn\u2019t like being forced<\/strong> to experience things from another person\u2019s point of view. I can kind of go along with that, but his example really upset me. He said he doesn\u2019t want to read from inside the POV of a teenage girl.<\/p>\n Quelle horror<\/em>. I mean, what could be worse than being a teenage girl? Apparently nothing.<\/p>\n He went on to justify his stance by saying that third person POV is okay, because it allows him to empathize<\/strong> alongside the character. First person forces him to be<\/strong> the character.<\/p>\n I\u2019m going to go on a slight tangent now. In the last couple of years there have been a lot of calls on social media for diverse representation in fiction, television and movies. More recently there has been a call out of whitewashing, which is using white actors to portray characters that were originally non-white. (Hashtags: weneeddiversebooks<\/em> which spawned the site We Need Diverse Books<\/a>; whitewashedOUT<\/em> is from the Asian-American community. More on that in this piece from the NYT<\/a>. ownvoices<\/em> is another hashtag commenting on the need for people to tell their own stories.) <\/p>\n I said this on Twitter the other day, because there were some people who expressed a desire to see Captain America get a boyfriend.<\/p>\n On the gayification of everything: we queers are HUNGRY for representation. Hints and winks and nods are so 20th Century.<\/p>\n — Jill S. (@outseide) May 25, 2016<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n