Apropos of nothing but I get real uncomfortable when I see criticisms of "representation" in books regarding how a marginalized author writes a character with the same marginalization. Like, real uncomfortable.

let's be real I'll never be a published author so it's all hypothetical for me but I'm writing a thing where a nonbinary character is also the literal child of the literal devil & it made me think of reviews where ppl called out authors for making non-human characters nonbinary

And it's like I'm nonbinary and I want to write nonbinary characters that are human, part human, not human--and as I said, it's purely hypothetical but I could imagine hypothetical criticism for doing that.

And it's...upsetting to me, that marginalized authors are constrained

by the idea of representation, that there's a sliding scale of whether representation is bad or good, usually decided upon by reviewers who don't share the author's marginalizations

Like you see ppl say things like "why do authors have to write about homophobia should queer characters really suffer so much???" & I'd like to think a queer author can make those decisions for themselves, rather than write to a standard

And I hate to blame Tumblr for everything but I'm gonna blame Tumblr for everything--how it armed mostly kids/young adults with all the vocabulary of marginalization but without a lick of context, turning them into like, indiscriminate firers of the word problematic

I mean yes, of course marginalized ppl can screw up but I feel like the line between "this is legit bad" and "this isn't how I, the Arbiter Of Representation, imagine good representation should be so it is problemoxic. Toximatic."

is very, very, very much blurred and of course this hurts marginalized creators more than anyone else (as this representation discussion ALWAYS does)

Anyway let people write their marginalizations how they want and don't tell us what kind of stories you think we need to tell; let us tell the stories we know we need to tell.

Btw if you'd like to read selections of stories with """problematic""" nonbinary characters you should sign up for my Patreon https://www.patreon.com/ellebmaruska