Today I’ve invited Jeremy Szal to join us at Bookish Brews to talk about diverse, morally grey characters in space. But importantly, how BIPOC characters need to be allowed to be bad too. It’s far too often that BIPOC characters are expected to be upstanding citizens or to show some kind of example that we are “good” in order to be “accepted.”
Bookish Brews Snapshot
Stormblood by Jeremy Szal
After being injected with the DNA of an extinct alien race, Vakov becomes addicted to adrenaline and aggression, so when he is asked to solve the murders of his old partners, it takes everything he has to uncover the secret and not fall victim to his addiction.
👽 Aliens 🪖 Military Fiction 🌳 Found Family 💀 Dark Content
- Genre: Science Fiction, Speculative Fiction
Diverse, Morally Grey Characters in Space
There’s a chapter in 2002’s cyberpunk novel Altered Carbon where Takeshi Kovacs, the protagonist, gets abducted, brutally tortured, and barely escapes with his life. In the next few chapters, still wounded and injured, he hunts down every last bastard responsible for his kidnapping and torture and murders them in cold blood. Keep in mind, his kidnappers are members of a psychopathic gang that does a lot of very, very nasty stuff, involving snuff footage and torture, and illegal surgery. So, in a world where immortality is possible, he goes out of his way to kill their souls, as it were. (Real Death, is the in-universe name for it).
He doesn’t just kill his torturers. No, he kills everyone involved with his torture, no matter how vaguely, before waltzing out of the bad guys’ headquarters with the Big Bad’s head tucked under his arm, wrapped in a jacket.
Kovacs never exhibits any kind of remorse or regret for this. No apology. These bastards had it coming, and that’s the final word on the matter. He’s an unapologetically angry person, broken by an abusive childhood, war, endless traumas, and he never attempts to justify his savagery, because screw it, you’ve got to survive. He’s a very confident, very strong character.
He is also half-Slavic, half-Japanese. Mixed-race.
Like me.
It left a remarkably large impression on me, to see a mixed-race, morally grey character behave in this way.
Until I’d read that book, too often, I’d felt that diverse characters are doomed to either be intensely likable, determined to always do The Right Thing, or were the side-kick. To win the audience over and root for them, they had to be respectable. Beacons of righteousness, even when subject to gross tragedy. Miles Morales, as Spiderman, is guilty of this, but pick any recent superhero film or major blockbuster franchise and you’ll find no shortage of examples to choose from.
Altered Carbon taught me that didn’t have to be the case.
Diverse characters, as protagonists, could be cruel. Brutal. Angry. Filled with rage and hatred. Contradictory. Flawed. They could have moments of weakness. They could have severe lapses in judgment that got good people harmed. They could sometimes choose not to be better and walk away, and instead they kill the bad guy because screw him, that bastard got what he deserved.
They could be human.
I wanted to imitate this experience, to forge a character that was complex, interesting. In Stormblood, I created Vakov Fukasawa, a mixed-race protagonist with alien DNA running through his veins, making him permanently addicted to adrenaline and aggression. I tried to show all this, right off the bat, in the first chapter, where Vakov is stealing and smuggling illegal drugs to sell on the black-market. In his own words: “I make no excuses, stealing from crimelords isn’t any less illegal than stealing from anyone else. But it’s the least kind of bloody work I do.”
He knows he’s done bad things. He wants to do good, but his body, and his fits of rage, often have other ideas. He doesn’t pretend to be the good guy, and he makes no bones about it. This is what I am, this is what I do, this is what’s in my body. Take it or leave it.
But we’ve all got backstories, histories, that shape us, and Vakov is no different. He’s angry. He’s had a brutal childhood, he was bullied and abused by his father. And when a family member is killed by the son of a gangster, Vakov takes matters into his own hands, and gets revenge, even at a terrible emotional cost. I wanted him to breathe as a character, to be able to do all the things that any other white, WASP action-hero can do, while still being mentally tortured and racked with doubts and anxieties and fits of rage.
It makes for a more intimate, more honest approach to story-telling. There’s a sense of no punches pulled, when the reader gets an unfiltered look into a character’s mind, even if what’s there isn’t always pretty.
We’ve heard a lot about good representation of minorities in the past decade. And we all know that lazy, ham-fisted representation does more harm than good. But there’s a chasm-wide gap between that and sanitized, fluffy, sickly-sweet characters who are never allowed to have a moment of human weakness. Too often, I’d become frustrated when reading a book or watching a show where the minority character always had to do the right thing, to be better than the bad guys. They’re always on the straight and narrow, with no deviations allowed.
And even if they don’t succeed (often by accident or misadventure), they’re racked with guilt for being cursed with a fleeting moment of human weakness, for not saving their arch-nemesis from destruction, from not making the perfect decision for the greater good. Even if doing so means they end up in a miserable place.
And there’s only so long I can stomach a story where we’re told the protagonist is “just as evil” as the mass-murdering villain because they struck him down in a moment of anger. I never sympathized with these utterly selfless, upright heroes. They felt curated, carved from marble, hamstrung by hashtags and audience expectations.
With Vakov, I wanted to see him doing and thinking things that I’d wrestled with in my life. Sure, I might not actually be a supersoldier jacked up on alien drugs, but if I was facing an unarmed drug-dealer or a cultist, would I let them go, knowing they’d hurt people and would continue hurting people, or do I disobey my orders and kill them, possibly saving dozens of lives? Or did I just kill him because the drugs in my head were whispering in my ear, telling me to?
I wanted to make sure Vakov Fukasawa had the same rawness and honesty as any other white, WASP character would. It’s important that diverse characters get the chance to show these moments of darkness. They should get the opportunity to burn and destroy and behave badly. Why do they always have to be the poor, oppressed bastards who take down the evil galactic empire with an ironclad moral code?
Us PoC folks can be just as petty, vindictive, jealous, hateful, aggressive, stubborn, emotional, flawed, contradictory, and punitive as anyone else. Because we screw up, too. Sometimes we’re the anti-heroes. Sometimes we’re the villains. Sometimes we have horrible, stomach-churning thoughts about what we’d like to do to those who wronged us. Sometimes we do things bad things we’re not always ashamed of, even though, perhaps, we should be.
Making him remorseful and apologetic would have been a major disservice to the character. Worse, by sanitizing the story for the reader, I’d be lying to them. Sorry, we can’t really have my character feel the way he feels, because as a mixed-race/non-white bloke, he’s got to worry about representation. It might invite controversy, and offend certain sensibilities.
It’s hardly the last, or the worst, thing Vakov Fukasawa does in my book. Maybe I’d get more readers if he was more of a laundered, upstanding person. But nothing he does is foreign to the human experience. And restricting aspects of the human experience only to characters with a certain skin colour or background is just as bad as having no diversity at all. That would be lying.
And when it comes to my own humanity, I cannot lie.
David Bowie once said that artists should always try to go a little further into the water than they feel comfortable being in, where your feet don’t quite touch the bottom, because then you’re in the right place to do something exciting.
What I want readers (and writers) to take away from my books is a sense that I’ve fearlessly taken them out into these waters, but that I’ve never lost my sense of authenticity. Of honesty. That I’ve shown you a well-developed, fleshed-out, empathetic character, and that I’m not afraid to show you his dark, feral side, while still maintaining the reader’s empathy. Characters who look like me should be free to be, to breathe, even if it means making horrible mistakes, not restrained by vague notions of The Righteous Moral Thing to do. Characters should be complex, contradictory, challenging both the writer and the reader’s perception of certain kinds of behaviour.
Vakov Fukasawa challenged me. He demanded to be written this way. I didn’t always think I’d pull it off. But I took the plunge, and I’m a better, more truthful, writer for it.
And you will be, too.
