Based largely on things that have been Bugging Ana Lately In Fiction!
- Find an example of a female character who engages in extended breastfeeding and isn't misguided and evil and/or totally ruining her child with her unhealthy obsession and over-indulgence of their whims! (Bonus points if they live in an area where Food Safety matters. Bonus-bonus points if the child is at high risk of being poisoned by rival factions.)
- Find an example of a white character who is absorbed into a non-white culture and isn't praised for their willingness to acclimate (i.e., it's treated as expected or normal in the same way most white people treat non-white acclimation to white culture) and adored for their superior beauty and/or intelligence!
- Find an example of a non-white culture which isn't characterized by simplistic speech patterns such that basic words are missing from their vocabulary and everything is a metaphor because high-level concepts are too hard for non-white people!
- Find an example of a prison situation where rape isn't treated as invisible and/or a source of humor or grim justice!
- Find an example of an older female character who strongly dislikes a younger female character for reasons that don't include the younger female character being younger, prettier, and/or more fertile than the older female character!
OPEN THREAD BELOW! Answer the scavenge questions or make ones of your own!
80 comments:
Can't think of any answers off the top of my head. Mind you, I can't think of any answers to most of the opposite questions off the top of my head either.
Twice now, I've had this conversation with random women I encountered in stores:
Stranger: Have you read Twilight?
Me: Um...not exactly. Do sporkings count?
Stranger: Not exactly? You mean you've seen the movies?
Me: Not really. My mom watched them, but I wasn't really paying attention.
Stranger: You should watch them! They're great!
Me: Um...okay.
Stranger: I think you'd like them. *gestures at book*
Me: No vampires here. Only werewolves.
Stranger: That's a shame. I like vampires. Bye!
Me: Bye.
I never realised how awkward it would be to be a teenage girl carrying Benighted. See, it looks (at least with this cover) exactly like Generic Paranormal Romance #17,375. Not only that, it sounds like Generic Paranormal Romance #17,375 to someone listening to me struggle to answer the question "What are you reading?". (This question has become noticeably more frequent.) Why else, they think, would a teenage girl be reading about werewolves?
(Ah well. Eventually I'll be done and my answer to "What are you reading?" will involve merfolk rather than werewolves. That should stop the awkward conversations sooner: merfolk are much less Generic-Paranormal-Romance-y.)
Wow, those are tough.
#4-Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption by Stephen King.
The rest? You got me.
I think I can get a lot of these, since I've been reading almost exclusively POC-centric scifi and fantasy stuff. (The exception being Steam-Powered I and II, awesome lesbian steampunk anthologies that do a have a lot of anti-colonial and WOC-centric stories.)
Ooh, these are tough! Let's see…
1) I can't think of a single book I've read or show I've seen that even mentions breastfeeding. At least it's not being characterized as a negative!
2) I've been reading a lot of Mercedes Lackey lately, so do fantasy non-white cultures count? I can think of a few examples: The Tayledras are a group of sort of Native-American-like tribes that go around living in forests and cleaning up the dangerous magic that's lying around and generally being more awesome than everyone else. One of the trilogies centers around Darian, a Valdemaran kid who gets taken in by the Tayledras. He has very little trouble acclimating (and isn't praised for being so brave or anything like that), mostly because everything the Tayledras do is so much more awesome than anything anyone else does. Also, while he does immediately get a few female admirers, it's more for his magic powers (which are strong but comparable to those of his new friends) than for his otherness. (The Tayledras may not count as non-white, however. Their hair is pale, and I don't remember the color of their skin--maybe olive?)
Another (better) example is in The White Gryphon: A group of humans (in fact, the ancestors of the Tayledras tribes), gryphons, and other magical creatures are escaping from a horrible war and they create a settlement, only to find that they're now in the territory of the Haighlei Empire, whose citizens are extremely dark. The empire is described as extremely civilized, with cities and architecture beyond anything our characters have seen, and the culture is very formal and resistant to change. When they go to the empire to plead their case (to be allowed to stay), they are expected to fit into the culture and follow the rules of etiquette as a matter of course. Their otherness is treated as a reason to be suspicious of them rather than exoticized or romanticized.
3) Both of the aforementioned cultures are characterized as highly sophisticated, and their language is as complex as the language the main characters speak.
4) Can't think of much fiction I've seen or read lately that involves prisons.
5) I can't think of one at the moment, but I'll mull it over. I'm sure there's one I've read somewhere!
1. I don't really know if this counts, but in the N.K. Jemisin's Inheritance Trilogy, in the first and last books, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms and The Kingdom of Gods, an important human society is Darr, which is a matriarchal warrior society.
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In KoG the Darren people are planning to go to war, and therefore the women all try to get pregnant and have as many kids as possible, especially girls. (I can't remember if they can use medicine or magic to have twins and triplets or more girls...maybe it isn't specifically stated.) Then they train hard to get back into shape, and start training their daughters to fight when they are very young, and probably training the boys a bit for defensive actions to defend the homeland. I can't remember about breastfeeding specifically, but I think the women do it for a fairly long time, whilst doing all their warrior training. Especially in the first book, the country is struggling under the rule of an oppressive empire.
Find an example of a non-white culture which isn't characterized by simplistic speech patterns such that basic words are missing from their vocabulary and everything is a metaphor because high-level concepts are too hard for non-white people!
In what may forever be my go-to crowning example of this, we have Qyzen Fess from Star Wars: The Old Republic. It's an accepted cultural fact in the Star Wars galaxy that there are a bajillion species and exponentially more languages, but there are many that have become very common (the foremost being "Basic", which is English), and people will speak whichever one is most comfortable for them (and their physiology). So, like that early scene in Ep4 with Han and Greedo, it's not at all unusual for two people having a conversation to be speaking in completely different languages even though they both know the other's preferred language. That's their custom.
Okay then. This completely avoids the whole 'Want give message you' style and its issues, because it would be daft for translations/subtitles to be word-for-word verbatim. And yetin SW:TOR, we get Qyzen Fess, who speaks some other language, and his subtitles are written in Broken English. What. "Small hunter. Should not have come here. Is only shame here, and death." What.
There's some other game I encountered during a trawl of TVtropes that features a glorious subversion, where a secondary character speaks in Broken English for the first part of the game, and upon finally meeting someone who does speak her tongue, exclaims in a subtitle "Oh thank god - I sound like an idiot in this guy's language."
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Find an example of an older female character who strongly dislikes a younger female character for reasons that don't include the younger female character being younger, prettier, and/or more fertile than the older female character!
I think this shows up pretty frequently in my writing, although it occurs to me on reflection that I don't have a lot of characters who intensely dislike other characters - it probably happens, but more often they just dismiss or avoid them if they don't get along. The general in my 2011 NaNo viewed the (half her age) queen as an egregiously presumptuous know-it-all, but at the same time respected her devotion to a cause, so it probably wasn't so much 'dislike' as it was 'dammit why do we have to work together YOU ARE EXHAUSTING'.
2. I think Kinneth from The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms might count here, although most of her acclimation (and indeed, most of her life) happens offscreen.
Also, in Crystal Rain by Tobias Bucknell, the central character has a white friend in his Space-Caribbean community. I don't know that it's acclimation as such, though; it's more like the the community includes a small group of (French-speaking? I think) white people on a particular island. And the rest of the characters are POC, and there are cultural divides between nano-tech enhanced humans who live centuries and everyone else, and there's a Space-Aztec society on the other side of the mountains, and there are immigrants and a war and tension and intrigue and aliens who've taken on the role of gods and it's awesome, go read it now. Regarding women, a lot of the main characters are dudes and the protagonist's wife gets kind of fridged but it's war and there's a lot of that going on... Plus one of the three-and-a-half main characters is a woman who is leading her city during the war and she is complex and fantastic.
3. All the books I have read in the past year meet this standard. Also they are fantastically awesome. Coincidence? I THINK NOT.
The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, The Broken Kingdoms, and The Kingdom of Gods have the Darr as I mentioned earlier, plus the Maro-that-was/Nimaro res./Shadow and Teman and several others who don't come into the story much. I think the gods pretty much all appear as POC, and the awesome demons as well, although with Bright Itempas and the Arameri the racial and cultural picture is really complicated.
Crystal Rain has Space-Caribbean folks and Space-Aztecas/Toltecas. Both have complex characters and societies. The Caribbean folks are the focus, so a lot more is explained about the different geographic/cultural/religious groups and their histories and tensions and tech level and how they relate to the aliens/gods. Awesome by trigger-y with violence.
I don't know how I'd characterize the society in Brown Girl in the Ring by Nalo Hopinson, but the central characters are POC and the mythos is Afro-Caribbean. Awesome but creepy/triggery, more horror than I usually go for.
Another series I'm reading is The Knights of Breton Court by Maurice Broaddus. The society we see is one of black people in housing projects, with a few cops thrown in (one is white), a magical white man, some other random white drug mules and such occasionally in the background, and trolls and fey who appear as POC. It's a retelling of King Arthur stories. It's very trigger-y for lots of reasons. Waaay more horror than I normally go for, but I'm glad I'm reading it. And thinking about it, a bunch of gangs vying for power in a small, forgotten place makes a lot of sense as an analog for the Iron-Age warband type stories. The quality of the books themselves isn't wonderful (I mean, like, they have typoes.) but the characters and setting are great.
OMG I can't believe I left out The Spirit Binders by Alaya Dawn Johnson! I don't there are any white people in that world, although there are people with red hair. It's based on, like South Pacific cultures. It is just amazing; I will have to think a bit to offer more detailed/coherent praise. It is really, really amazing the way the story deals with power relationships between people and cultures, incorporating magic and love and controling the elements...
It gets my very strongest recommendation. All of the central characters are women. At least I think I would say that. There are main characters who are men, but they are pretty much all defined through their relationships to the two main female characters, a witch and her former apprentice who have a complex and layered relationship involving secrets and magic and using people and trying to do what's best for the world and your family and figuring out what you value most. (Unfortunately only two books in what seems like a trilogy were published.)
I'm prepping up for the Guild Wars 2 Beta. There's several non-human races there, including the highly inteligent Asura who's architecture is based on South America. But in case that doesn't count, Guild Wars 1 started in a mostly Europian-style fantasy, but had two full-fledged campaigns of roughly equals scope in an Asia and African-themed continent. They were definitely distinct cultures, and no Hulk-Speak in sight. Then again, they just spoke the same language everyone else spoke, which was the language
Shawnshank Redemption has already been mentioned so... I can't think of super-great examples of 5. A lot of them are 'one of the two is just plain evil and most characters hate her and vice versa', which isn't a great example, but does mean there are reasons valid reasons for the dislike. Examples include mostly the Discworld books I've read. The cruel young vampire girl in Carpe Jugulem is hated by the older witches, The queen in Wyrd sisters hates all the witches, including the younger Margret. Oh, and there was Mass Effect 2, with the older Asari hunting down and killing her daughter because she was murdering people.
4. Oh, I missed the prison part on the first read-through.
Can we use TV shows? Because I would say Oz counts.
5. SPOILERS ARE AROUND THESE PARTS.
In The Hundred thousand Kingdoms Scimina hates her (cousin? niece?) Yeine because they and Scimina's brother are in competition for the throne of Sky and rulership of the Hundred Thousand Kingdoms. Plus also Yeine is a barbarian dark-skinned person with funny hair and weird matriarchal warrior-society customs who doesn't think much of torturing slaves and doesn't fit in in royal society.
In Crystal Rain the mayor doesn't get along with a priestess because she thinks the lwa are/were holding out on the people in terms of technology they could use to fight the war.
In The Kingdom of Gods Usain Darr is makes war on the empire ruled by Shahar Arameri, killing her mother, because the Arameri have been cruel tyrants who colonized the world using the enslaved gods as weapons. Without the gods, the Arameri hegemony is slipping, and Usain, as leader of the Darren people, would love to vie for power in the space it leaves behind.
In The Knights of Breton Court the main characters are mostly men, and the women mostly relate to them. It possibly only passes the Bechdel test because lesbians, although there are some parent-like relationships...
1) I can't think of anything I've read recently that even mentions breastfeeding. (Nonfiction, only tangentially, that part of my life is a decade over so i don't keep up on it)
2)-3) I'm not reading a lot of stuff with PoC at the moment. (Sherlock Holmes seems to be lacking on this front)
I know when I write PoC--or any characters--I do my best to convey any accent a character may have without being stereotypical and awful. The Memphis black dialect is different from the Midwestern whitebread I speak, but I've tried to convey it without dropping gs, skipping words and sounding entirely stereotypical. (Example: a white person would ask, "Where do you live?" a black person would ask "Where you staying?") Likewise the Highland Scots one of the main characters speaks. Tried to do it through word choice and rhythm instead of "dinna canna willna."
4) I second Shawshank Redemption. I also tried in my book NIKOLAI. It's used as an undeservedly punitive tool to destroy the main character, and hence is more brutal than it would be. I use it as a threat in HARD REBOOT, one the character does not deserve, as a way of compelling his wife to be obedient.
5) I don't read enough books with rival female characters. I tend to read them where the ladies are involved with each other or teamed up together.
Just wanted to let you know, I have gone through and added every book you mentioned to my Amazon wishlist... :-D Very happily, the first Spirit Binders book is free for Kindle! So I will be downloading that as soon as I get home.
I wish I had more to add. :-( Most of the examples of #5 I can think of are fantasy volumes where the older woman just happens to be evil, and the younger just happens to be good (and prettier, more innocent, etc) so not the greatest way to undermine the stereotypes.
Gelliebean yay!!! I hope you like!
I'll try. A lot of these are almost cheating, though.
1. Game of Thrones has an erotic scene involving breastmilk and a grown man. Doesn't exactly count, but it's the best I could do. Not a lot of babies in the books I've been reading lately.
2/3. Ok, again kinda stretching the rules, but Kvothe from Name of the Wind (I only know the audiobooks, so I can't spell his name). He hangs out with another culture in book two. I can't name skin colour because honestly I just miss that in books (description bores me, whether of scenery or of people) but they're clearly meant to be Asian-influenced. He's praised for fitting in, and they speak in metaphors, but it's done in "You might actually be a smart enough foreinger to understand our metaphors and integrate somewhat in our culture. I guess you might have more understanding than most foreigners". Kvothe is from a minority culture as well, but he is white I think - culturally apart, not physically different. (Yay to invisible minorities in fiction! I know it's easier to be an invisible than visible minority, but that does't make it all roses.) And his culture is equal in awesomeness to the majority culture.
4. Armour by Steakley. They just use forced labour and murder as grim justice. No rape occurs during the novel, though it might occur outside the novel?
I'd say Oz also counts here, since although there's a lot of rape, it's presented as part of why American prisons are getting it wrong.
5.The Devil wears Prada? She dislikes the younger character for not respecting the things she values, and for being a bad assistant, as I recall. I'm really on a limb for this one.
Opps, you'd already said Oz. I need to read more carefully.
I'd like to give "The No.1 Ladies Detective Agency" for 3, though I do worry a little. It certainly avoids the more egregious things like simplistic speech patterns and 'everything is a metaphor' and it definitely changed the way I view Africa as a continent and Botswana as a country. That said, sometimes it does feel like the Botswana shown by Alexander McCall Smith has just a faint patina of cuteness. Does that disqualify it?
I recommend the book for all that. It's a nice reminder that Botswana is in fact quite well-off and stable as a country, and that a person can live in Africa and have a strong sense of local tradition and still have what is clearly recognisable as an everyday life.
Find an example of a white character who is absorbed into a non-white culture and isn't praised for their willingness to acclimate (i.e., it's treated as expected or normal in the same way most white people treat non-white acclimation to white culture) and adored for their superior beauty and/or intelligence!
Tenar, from The Tombs of Atuan / Tehanu (Ursula K. LeGuin, Earthsea series)
Find an example of a non-white culture which isn't characterized by simplistic speech patterns such that basic words are missing from their vocabulary and everything is a metaphor because high-level concepts are too hard for non-white people!
Pretty much all of the peoples of Earthsea, apart from the Kargs (Tenar is a Kargish woman).
Ursula K. Le Guin has said more than once that she tends to write fantasy nations which are not white-white-white - there are other examples from her work.
Well, for 2 and 3, Terry Pratchett gives us Nation, and for 5, in Harry Potter, Minerva McGonagall seems to dislike Pansy Parkinson quite a bit. Mainly because she's a Slytherin brat.
5. Another Discworld cite: Granny Weatherwax hates Perdita's original coven leader (I can't remember her name, she got elfshot and was like the dark side of Magrat when it came to crystals etc). The other witches disliked her not because she was young and pretty but because she was interested in the witching business for the power and not the good of the community.
In what I'm working on now I now want to stick in a scene where someone is trying to flatter my main character by telling her a minor 'villain' character hates her for her youth and beauty. Once my main character stopped laughing, she'd say something to the effect that "I hate her because she is an insipid twit. She hates me because she thinks I'm an Amazonian throwback with no moral compass." (Er, the Unselighe Court has helped humanity almost wipe itself out and is now looking to finish the job: there are differences of opinion regarding how this should be handled, with the difference here between pacifism and terrorist tactics. There are others who want to nuke 'em from orbit, but nobody in charge thinks that's a plan worth looking into though it is awesome for political posturing purposes. >.>)
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I always pictured the Tayledras and the Shina'in looking like Native Americans but with light blue eyes. The Tayledras get bleached out by all the magic they use/live around. I think someone mentions Firesong (a very powerful mage from a very young age) had gone completely white-haired haired by the time he was fifteen. ... Hmm. They talk about the scouts dying their hair so they can blend in with the forest, but they don't talk about coloring their skin (I think? It's been a while since I read those books). Maybe their skin doesn't bleach all that much?
I'd like to add one:
Find me a book/picture where a woman leaves an abuser at the first confirmed sign of abuse, and the plot of the book is not dedicated to the abuser's pursuit of the victim.
I'd like to add one:
Find me a book/picture where a woman leaves an abuser at the first confirmed sign of abuse, and the plot of the book is not dedicated to the abuser's pursuit of the victim.
1) Depends on the definition of extended? The show "Garrow's Law" mentions that the lead female (an aristocratic lady) was nursing her child, and the separation from him (and therefore the cessation of that relationship) is sympathetically portrayed as a deep grievance. It's 18th C. London, so yes: Food Safety Matters.
3+5) Nonwhite culture portrayed without dumbing down? Avatar the Last Airbender, and its sequel, The Legend of Korra. They both also include examples of older females disliking younger females for non-gendered reasons.
A chance to promote my favorite authors, and it's de-lurk day at Shakesville? Clearly it's time for me to be de-lurking.
Books by Guy Gavriel Kay hit 2, 3 and 5. The Lions of Al-Rassan and The Sarantine Mosaic are maybe stretches for 2 and 3, since they're still Eurocentric, but one's based on Moorish Spain and the other is based on Constantinople, so there are definitely non-white societies around. Under Heaven definitely gets 2 and 3, since it's based on Tang Dynasty China. The only white person is an imported white courtesan, and since everyone is presumed to be Asian, she's the one who is singled out as needing racial descriptors and everyone else is just a person. Sarantine Mosaic also gets 5, because the empress hates/distrusts/fears a younger noblewoman because backstory means that the younger woman wants to destroy everything the emperor has ever achieved and preferably kill both him and the empress horribly. Guy Gavriel Kay in general is good on having strong female characters (I've never liked that phrase but oh well) and does *really* well researched history-based low fantasy.
Steven Brust I'm kind of cheating to include, but I adore his books and I like my reasoning for including him. He falls under 5, because in his most recently published book there's an older woman who strongly dislikes a younger woman because the older woman is speciesist and can't quite make herself believe that the younger one is actually a person. The setting has Dragaerans and regular humans, and the Dragaerans think of themselves as vastly superior because they're stronger and live for thousands of years and have better magic and such. In general I think one of the really fantastic things about Dragaera is the way it handles that, because it's obviously a deeply racist (also classist) society. He focuses on that a lot in the main series, but he's also written a side series where the main characters are Dragaeran and you can see how they're mostly good people but completely unaware that being racist is bad. Dragaera is also cool because although the society is deeply prejudiced, it doesn't have any gender prejudice, so there are kickass women all over the place and nobody is surprised by it.
I'm also going to second the Avatar recommendation. The world is entirely Asian, so there are no white people at all, and Korra is a badass teenage girl who's the main character and the team leader, and the show is currently on mainstream TV.
Find an example of a white character who is absorbed into a non-white culture and isn't praised for their willingness to acclimate (i.e., it's treated as expected or normal
If twenty-year-old kids' books count, the first thing I thought of was Nancy Farmer's The Ear, the Eye and the Arm. It's set in a future Zimbabwe; the social elite is mainly composed of Shona and Ndebele people (bonus points for not treating "African" as a monolithic identity?), but there's a mix of other ethnicities. One of the title characters (yes, those are people) is black, one is mixed-race and one is white-- that is, one of the English tribe. This is casually mentioned but not particularly important. Additionally, there's another "English" man who holds a traditional African job and is fully assimilated into a Shona household; this is not considered odd.
Other than that, my mind is blank. There's the Earthsea books, of course...anyway, I'm supposed to be doing various other things right now, so I shall consider the what-I've-read lists while I cook the dinner.
Perdita's original coven leader (I can't remember her name, she got elfshot and was like the dark side of Magrat when it came to crystals etc).
Diamanda.
2. and 3. The Rose of the Prophet series, by Margaret Weiss and Tracy Hickman. It takes place in an Arabian Nights-type land, with the only white characters being a Fantasy Christian missionary named Mathew and his guardian angel Asriel, neither of whom are the primary protagonist. Mathew is noted as being very pretty, but only because that leads to him being mistaken for an attractive woman by slavers and giving them an incentive not to kill him. The nomads who absorb him after one of the protagonists rescues him from the block actually consider him insane because he chooses to live as a woman rather than be executed after he's discovered to be male. Despite that bit of fail in the culture, Mathew notes that he's being treated a lot better than he would be back home if he was considered insane.
4. In Alice in Jails, part of the Baccano! series, hero Firo gets sent to Alcatraz, and one of the other prisoners leers at him and calls him "doll" as he's being walked to his cell in the nude. The warden tells him to shut up and warns Firo that prisoners aren't allowed the luxury of revenge. It's the only reference to rape in the series that I can recall.
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The Ear, the Eye and the Arm! Thanks for reminding me about that book.
"In what may forever be my go-to crowning example of this, we have Qyzen Fess from Star Wars: The Old Republic."
What makes absolutely no sense about that is that he is the only example I can think of in the game of Broken English subtitles. I'll have to keep an eye out, but I'm fairly certain everyone else who's subtitled is subtitled in English. Some of it reads like dialect, if I recall correctly, but not Broken English. (Just as there's a wide variety in how the English, er, Basic speakers in the game - and universe in general - speak.)
I'm not sure why they chose to subtitle him that way. He would still sound distinctive if his subtitles went "You should not have come here, Small Hunter. There is only shame here, and death." Droids are subtitled distinctively, but that doesn't come off the same.
Prison Break, surprisingly, was an example of number 4. There are rapes involved, but they're always treated as horrible, and Michael even once risks his escape plan to protect a young inmate from rape.
2 and 3 I can give in a metaphorical sense - the Hrossa in Out of the Silent Planet are pretty clearly supposed to be a stand-in for Native People Encountered By White Man, and White Man Ransom comes off poorly every time he tries to bear White Man's Burden. He comes to realize that the Hrossa are more cultured and infinitely more linguistically talented than he in many ways, that he himself is ungainly and none of what he thought he had to offer is useful to them is in fact useful. There's some passive racism on that planet - the Hrossa, Pfifltriggi, and Seroni each consider their own tastes and talents to be superior - but for the most part, the worst one could see would be the animal descriptions of the Hrossa and the fact that the hospitable Hrossa allow Ransom a place of honor simply because he is a guest.
On the flip side, this is C.S. Lewis, so if you're seeking out untriggery reading material, it might be best to look elsewhere.
For #5, in the Percy Jackson series, Hera despises Annabeth for refusing to play by the rules of Perfect Happy Families - although again, if you're seeking low-fail reading material, it may not help that Annabeth is following the lead of a boy in deciding to defy Hera. Hmm, come to think of it, the Wicked Witch of the West hates Dorothy because Dorothy is trying to kill her and has some sweet magical items. In Discworld, Susan's teachers/bosses tend to be older women who hate her because she is difficult to explain, nigh-impossible to control, and yet successful. I think, outside older morality stories and Mary Sue-ish fic, this pitfall is fairly easy to avoid.
One of the title characters (yes, those are people) is black, one is mixed-race and one is white-- that is, one of the English tribe.
More or less OT: I recall a hilarious essay or section of a book by a white American woman visiting in Africa (don't recall quite where), who confides to a friend that it bothers her that the kids she meets in town greet her as 'white lady' (or, I think "Belgian" or "French" lady, which means the same locally).
He explains that this is only polite, and that if you don't know someone's name, you address them by that of their tribe, ie, "Good morning, Zulu", rather than "Good morning, mister".
She says it still seems weird and racist. He asks what polite strangers would call him if he visited her home town in America, and she tells him that under no circumstances would they say "Good morning, black man". He doesn't quite understand why.
Ah, the wonderful nuances of what is polite!!
#5: Ms. Simpkins has it in for Nadira for a good chunk of Kenneth Oppel's Skybreaker, but that's largely a matter of her prejudice against Roma in general, not Nadira in particular.
I also cannot believe how old The Ear, the Eye, and the Arm now is. Mindboggling.
Shawshank Redemption is the first thing I thought of for 4, too.
For 5, there's quite a bit in the Wheel of Time series. Partly because there are so many characters that you can find an example of almost anything, and partly because while I wouldn't say Robert Jordan's gender politics are always good or even always sensible, he did make a serious effort to think them through--he's said in interviews that he intended to create a world where men and women were on an equal footing, although many individual societies or nations will privilege one over the other, or just assign them distinct roles (e.g. most professional soldiers are men, but not all, and the ratio varies from nation to nation; there's one country whose claim to fame is the talents of their merchants, who are all female; and the most politically powerful entity in the world is 100% female).
Wheel of Time also has what's arguably a pretty good example of 2, depending on what you count as a non-white culture and what you count as praise (I get a vibe more or less of, "hm, you've grown to become one of us, I guess you're not as hopeless as most outsiders are" from it, but I suspect it can be read in other ways too). And while everybody complains about everybody else's accent (mostly not actually depicted in the book), everybody's grammar and vocabulary is equally good.
All that said, as people have said of several other examples here, I'm not sure I'd recommend it as a "low-fail" work. Partly because the gender politics is often odd (even in the societies where the women are running things they run them in a pretty male-gaze-y way, and there's rather more gratuitous female nudity that you'd get from a pure attempt to generate lots of cultures), partly because a lot of the thought about gender politics doesn't start showing up until around book four after a million or so words, and partly because it so flagrantly fails (4) in a way that didn't bother me but has caused at least one friend of mine to put the series down. In book seven, after having read something like two million words of the series.
Well, for 5, there's "Red as Blood" by Tanith Lee which is a decidedly different and dark take on Snow White. Basically, she looked that the traditional description of the title character with the whole "lips as red as blood, skin as white as snow" bit and noticed that it pattern matched to "vampire," and there's your conflict. Suddenly, the old queen becomes a much more sympathetic character because she's not trying to destroy a rival; she's protecting her realm from the depredations of a monster. I liked how Lee handled the mirror. The question is "Who do you see?" not "Who's the fairest?" and the answer is everyone but Bianca (which, of course, means "white").
I thought the Witch of the West hated Dorothy because she killed her sister, the Witch of the East, and I don't think she would've cared nearly as much about the magic items if they hadn't originally belonged to the aforementioned sister. Dorothy, IIRC, wasn't actually out to harm the Witch until the Wizard made it a condition of him helping her, but the Witch hated her from the get-go.
For #3, the men living in the swamp in the Doctor Who serial The Power of Kroll are all green skinned, but their vocal patterns aren't noticibly different from the white refinery workers.
I thought the Witch of the West hated Dorothy because she killed her sister, the Witch of the East, and I don't think she would've cared nearly as much about the magic items if they hadn't originally belonged to the aforementioned sister. Dorothy, IIRC, wasn't actually out to harm the Witch until the Wizard made it a condition of him helping her, but the Witch hated her from the get-go. In the movie, yes; in the book, the Witch is living at home and doesn't seem to have a clue Dorothy exists until her hunting party comes into the Witch's territory. And then the Witch says, "Yay! New slaves!" She doesn't ever mention the Witch of the East nor her connection to the shoes. (I don't think they were even sisters.) The Witch in the book is just generally malevolent, but it still bothers me that Dorothy agreed to assassinate her before having any evidence that she was in fact wicked. Has bothered me ever since I found out that's why Gregory Maguire wrote Wicked.
For #3, there's the Shadows of the Apt series, in which a lot of the characters are non-white and everyone speaks the same language. Also #5 turns up in the most recent book, with the reason for hate being "she killed my son".
#3 also turns up in the Discworld book Jingo - the Klatchians speak in the same way as everyone else (except for when they're deliberately playing up the stereotypes to try to catch the Ankh-Morporkians off guard). Another recommendation for Nation on #2 and #3, as well.
Trigger warning: extended kidnapping and implied rape
For 1) I think Ma in Emma Donohue's "Room" would count.
(spoilers)
She has been imprisoned since before her child was born, and their captor doesn't bring them particularly nice or healthy food. So she breastfeeds her little boy up to age five because it's just the two of them in one room all the time, they have a very close bond, and social pressure is nonexistent, so why not? It's just common sense from her point of view and it's not portrayed as having done him any harm. She's all about trying to create a nurturing, healthy environment for him despite their awful living conditions.
After they escape there's a scene where a TV interviewer asks her about the breastfeeding and she says in disbelief, "That's the most shocking part of this whole story?"
3. Tamora Pierce. Lua'rin from Tortall Universe are non-white and clearly as sophisticated as the main territory.
Daja from Circle of Magic is black - and also comes from a high, outspoken culture.
4. Santa Barbara- a guard sexually harasses Courtney in prison. Also Trickster's Choice by Tamors Pierce (again) - Lea actually fears being raped.
4 Oh and let's not fiorgetthe new Battlestar Galactica...
For a really interesting look at ethnicity, race and species, I highly recommend a great short story called "On Venus Have We Got A Rabbi", by William Tenn. It features the adventures of Milchik the TV repairman, on Venus, as the Galactic Jewish Conference gets going. They knew there were going to be Jews from all over, Jews of every practice, belief and color, even the blue Jews from Aldebaran...but no one was prepared for the Bulbas. They look like leather couch pillows with tentacles, they're devout Jews, and they are shocked when the hominids try to turn them away.
It was written at a time when there were major debates in the Jewish world about the aliyah of the Ethiopian Jews and their exact religious status, and it's still a damn good read.
There ought to be a disability component to this scavenger hunt, but I'm not sure how to express it.
The Cylon prisoner on the Pegasus?
Oh my goodness, The Ear, The Eye and The Arm! I had completely forgotten about that book, but I loved it!
Also, I'm not convinced that Lysa Arryn's breastfeeding passes 1; I thought it was pretty clearly meant to establish insanity and a weird relationship with her kid. Having concerns about food safety and poisoning would be totally justified given, you know, the entire world of ASOIAF, but it's never even brought up in relation to her breastfeeding.
Nation actually does really well on 2 and 3*, including a nicely complex treatment of religion and its role in society as well (all done with non-white characters). There's some fail with regards to gender, though -- namely that the (non-white) women are described as always talking about babies/sex, which keeps the (white) protagonist girl from relating to them and befriending them. I mean, there is literally a sentence that explicitly says this (something like "The women's conversation always seemed to center around babies, which made [protagonist girl] feel very lonely"), and then whenever we actually see what the women say they're always talking about sex. This really bothered me when I read it -- really, these are the only things they discuss? They never talk about, say, beer-making -- which is considered the job of the women and which the protagonist is thought particularly good at -- but apparently no one ever asks her how she makes such good beer? They never talk about the weather, the garden they all communally grow, or ask her about herself, or anything? I mean, it would be bad by itself, but it's even worse considering how many things the women are explicitly described as doing and yet apparently never talk about.
*For most of the book...I thought the ending had some definite 2- and 3-related fail. I say related because it didn't actually fail them specifically, but it bothered me in a way that I think is related to the spirit of 2 and 3.
Yes.
Unfortunately, I'm not sure how to express it either. I've been trying to figure out how to word a couple of other peeves of mine, too. Though those I might have figured out.
#. Find an example of a guy in a somewhat dangerous line of work who is married, and whose wife is not treated as an inconvenience or a source of petty drama. (Besides whazisface's wife in the first season of White Collar. Best married couple in that kind of show I've seen.)
#. Find an example of a woman in a dangerous line of work who enjoys her work, has fun, and is not punished by the plot.
Oh, other random one.
#. Find an example of a character with a scar, who just has a scar. Not a throbbing scar of import. Not a scar of plot relevance. Not a scar of, well, any importance. Just a scar.
Oh, I recently read Kristin Cashore's Graceling series and in the afterword of one of the books, she discussed how disabled characters in scifi/fantasy often get their disability totally canceled out in the text. So perhaps a disability component could be "Has a disability that is not perfectly compensated for by magic/advanced technology."
@depizan: Firefly could qualify for your first two. Zoe and Wash cover the "married guy whose wife isn't an inconvenience or source of drama" angle and Zoe, Kaylee, and Inara could all fit your second one depending on how dangerous you consider their work on the frontier to be.
Wheel of Time's lasted long enough that some of the love interests have tied the knot, and the wives tend to be as actiony as the husbands, so they aren't inconveniences or sources of petty drama. Well, not all of them are, and at least one of them grows out of it. Even discounting all the magic-users and royals who were arguably thrust into dangerous lives, there are plenty of successful warrior women.
Baccano! fulfills the "woman in a dangerous line of work" thing with, among others, Maria, an assassin who really likes fighting, Rachel, an information broker's informant and serial train stowaway, and Nice, a delinquent rum-runner with a bomb fetish. Miria the thief arguably qualifies, since she and her partner Isaac are ditzy enough that they may not have ever recognized they were in danger even before they inadvertently became immortal.
The scar one is going to be hard, though.
@kbeth: Toph from the first Avatar series is blind, but compensates by feeling vibrations through the ground. That means that she compensates poorly when they're in the sandy desert and not at all when they're on their flying transport or in the water. Plus, she's illiterate since the Avatar world hadn't developed Braille at the time.
Echo, a Marvel superhero most recently in Moon Knight, was deaf. Not deaf with other supersenses to compensate, just deaf. She didn't even have powers except for an unobtanium staff. Unfortunately, she died when she and Moon Knight were fighting a Thor villain.
So perhaps a disability component could be "Has a disability that is not perfectly compensated for by magic/advanced technology."*winces and hides her character whose blindness is usually cancelled for practical purposes by second sight and whose bipolar disorder is usually controlled by advanced shapeshifting*
... in my defense, before I do any more with this character I intend to research whether my take is realistic: bipolar character can basically send magical abilities into an overdrive if she allows herself into manic mode, but has to pay the cost with an equal depressive mode which also cancels all sight-abilities.
Also, I'm not convinced that Lysa Arryn's breastfeeding passes 1; I thought it was pretty clearly meant to establish insanity and a weird relationship with her kid. Having concerns about food safety and poisoning would be totally justified given, you know, the entire world of ASOIAF, but it's never even brought up in relation to her breastfeeding.
Oh I definitely don't think it passes; I think it's a counterexample. (Although, I don't think Martin plays it for nearly the shock factor with which people took it.) But I assumed it had something to do, even though the kid is presumably eating other food, with trying to protect him. They did poison her husband.I imagine that feeding the child is highly fraught for her, breast-feeding less so.
#. Find an example of a woman in a dangerous line of work who enjoys her work, has fun, and is not punished by the plot.
Nanoha Takamachi, from Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha. She's a soldier (primarily a drill instructor, basically, but *also* what amounts to Special Forces). For the most part, she seems to like it. A lot. She does get beat on by the plot a bit, but this probably has more to do with her being the main character than anything else. (One *major* incident is related to working too hard, though - specifically, training 20 hours a day - but the extremity is such that I can't find it even slightly objectionable, esp. since she pretty much goes back to her job with a slightly less intense training regimen).
the foremost being "Basic", which is English translated in order to be half comprehensible.
Complaining about the translation convention has never really been funny. (Yes, what we see in terms of lettering is a simplistic cypher, but not everyone is Tolkein)
Okay then. This completely avoids the whole 'Want give message you' style and its issues, because it would be daft for translations/subtitles to be word-for-word verbatim. And yetin SW:TOR, we get Qyzen Fess, who speaks some other language, and his subtitles are written in Broken English. What. "Small hunter. Should not have come here. Is only shame here, and death."
Perhaps he's not familiar with the language he's speaking either? As in, he's using a different common tongue which he isn't entirely familiar with?
Or maybe he's just peculiarly inarticulate?
In KoG the Darren people are planning to go to war, and therefore the women all try to get pregnant and have as many kids as possible, especially girls. Then they train hard to get back into shape, and start training their daughters to fight when they are very young, and probably training the boys a bit for defensive actions to defend the homeland. I can't remember about breastfeeding specifically, but I think the women do it for a fairly long time, whilst doing all their warrior training. Especially in the first book, the country is struggling under the rule of an oppressive empire.
...
What?
How is this even supposed to work? I mean, how exactly does that compete with nations whose strategy does *not* revolve around taking all their forces off the line as part of their decades-long plan to outbreed the enemy? Even medieval nations don't take that long to mobilize...
Or was this something ordered by the oppressive empire you mentioned?
Oh, I recently read Kristin Cashore's Graceling series and in the afterword of one of the books, she discussed how disabled characters in scifi/fantasy often get their disability totally canceled out in the text.
Much as characters in modern fiction are rarely afflicted by polio.
Sci-fi and fantasy worlds are often more advanced than our world in many ways, it's not surprising this would occasionally include medicine.
Oh I definitely don't think it passes; I think it's a counterexample. (Although, I don't think Martin plays it for nearly the shock factor with which people took it.) But I assumed it had something to do, even though the kid is presumably eating other food, with trying to protect him. They did poison her husband.I imagine that feeding the child tamperable food is highly fraught for her, breast-feeding less so.
It's not like toxins can ever be passed on via nursing...
Sorry. I snark. It is in my nature.
Perhaps he's not familiar with the language he's speaking either? As in, he's using a different common tongue which he isn't entirely familiar with?
That's an interesting idea.
I have to cross Firefly off because of the movie. Unless we're calling discontinuity on it. (Still would apply for my second one, though.)
Actually, looking at your examples, I realize there are plenty of examples where both characters are actiony. I was thinking more action guy married to not-generally-part-of-the-action-woman. (Which the husband and wife in White Collar are really the only example I've come across. And I know it was intentional there because they played with the usual petty dramas - husband at work, but that means at a party with women, gets call from wife under less than ideal circumstances, but no drama ensues.)
Major Kira Nerys clearly enjoys her job.
And Mad-Eye Moudy has a lot of scars that don't amount to anything...
It's not like toxins can ever be passed on via nursing...
Too true, but we're not dealing here with a character who's able to be particularly rational.
I think I have not explained the thing with Darr well. I don't have time to try again right now.
I just watched the first two episodes of Avatar: The Legend of Korra with my kids and it is fantastic.
Sci-fi and fantasy worlds are often more advanced than our world in many ways, it's not surprising this would occasionally include medicine.
Sure, but the point is that it's usually used as a way to have a disabled character without having to actually deal with their disability at all -- i.e., a cop-out. It's like when Hollywood casts actors of color solely as the evil antagonists or the dispensers of Knowledge who help the main character along, or cast women solely as the love interest with no other function in the plot (c.f. Captain America). These are all tactics people use to be able to say "Look, we're so progressive, we have non-white-male characters!" but they miss how that was supposed to be progressive in the first place. The whole idea is to reflect ideal reality by showing characters that people of color and women can more easily envision themselves as -- but very few people are going to envision themselves as being evil, or being the repository of Ancient Mystical Knowledge, or as someone whose life apparently is only worth mentioning insofar as it romantically relates to someone else's. Similarly, a disabled person might be going "Oh hey, now there'll be a character with an experience similar to mine!" only to find out that, no, the author decided that would just be too difficult. At worst it sends a message of "Ha ha, turns out you're not actually useful unless you're functionally able after all!" which obviously could be very damaging.
Extreme Ghostbusters - one of them is wheelchair-bound.
Lt. Barclay from Star Trek has extreme communication and psychoilogical problems, which he cannot compensate.
The Dresden Files' Michael Carpenter works as a, well, carpenter to pay the bills, but his wife's aware of his activities as the Fist of God and there's no drama in their relationship.
Legend of Korra has Tenzin and Pema. I'm not sure how dangerous Tenzin's job on the city council is normally, but during the show he ends up tagging along with police investigations of suspected terrorists.
Now that I think about it, Chief Bei Fong from Korra has a few scars that don't have any importance other than making her look like the hardened badass she is.
That's interesting. When we think of someone in the real world who would have a disability were it not for medical intervention, we don't think of them as disabled, assuming the intervention works well enough. My poor eyesight would stop me functioning properly if I didn't have glasses, but I do, so it's fine. And I don't think a character with equally poor eyesight who corrected it by magic would count as disabled either, but someone who did the same with a disability we can't cure in real life would count.
So can anyone think of a character who is presented as able-bodied, except it's mentioned in passing that they are only able to be that way because of phlebotinum?
I sort of can -- Olhado in Speaker For The Dead, except that his electronic eye is sort of his defining characteristic (and a good way of making him memorable considering the size of his family). He's even nicknamed after it.
Anyway, if the averted disability doesn't make any difference, why should the author mention it at all? I suppose the most likely reason would be to highlight what the phlebotinum can do.
Selcaby: there's one in a webcomic I read (called A Girl and Her Fed, and it's excellent).
Major spoilers ahead:
There's a group of people in the setting who have cyborg implants that allow them to, among other things, sort of astrally project their consciousnesses elsewhere and see through the eyes of the projection. One of the characters who has this implant is blind; she compensates by just continually projecting to where her eyes actually are (when she's not doing something else) so she can see normally. It doesn't have a real impact except for the fact that she's legally blind and so doesn't have a driver's license, despite the fact that she's a qualified sharpshooter. (The first scene where she appears features a government operative asking if she's "the blind one" and her responding, "That's not accurate, but yes, I'm the one who can't drive."
I really need to try Legend of Korra. I liked the original series and I keep hearing great things about this one. (Not having television does slow me down a tad.)
All but the most recent are up on Nick's website, so lacking a television shouldn't be a problem if your internet isn't too spotty.
I'm not watching Korra on TV; I'm watching it on the internet. I couldn't find the first two on the NIck site, but maybe I just missed them. But after that, yeah...unless there's some problem with being out of the US? That I wouldn't know.
I don't agree with Charity from Dresden as drama-free ... it takes many, many books before she stops giving Dresden grief for putting her husband in harm's way. And she stops talking to her husband at one point in "Grave Peril" because he's busy saving the world instead of being in hospital with her. Maybe Susan counts? She never tells Dresden to avoid danger ... mostly because she wants to follow him in.
On the other hand, Karen is a really good example of a woman who kicks ass, and she's no more punished by the plot than any other characters are. Which is a lot, at times.
For the disability question, I think Joker from Mass Effect qualifies. He's extremely excellent as a pilot, but I think his disability is the reason why he never goes on fighting missions.
I meant Karen from the Dresden Files as well.
1) "St. Amy's Tale," Orson Scott Card. The title character is breast-fed until she's about five. This is presented as an obviously sensible course.
(N.B.: Mr. Card's personal opinions are such that a fair number of people prefer not to support his work.)
2) _Coyote Blue_, Christopher Moore. A couple of the side characters are white and live in Crow country without being anything special.
3) _Farnham's Freehold_, Robert Heinlein. TRIGGER WARNING for racism, misogyny, etc.; may be the most offensive book I've ever read. But the black folks do have words for all the concepts.
For 4 and 5, I got Shawshank and the Lancre witches, cited above.
Good to know. I'll have to stop eyeing it warily and actually watch it.
#3, does Hunger Games count where practically everyone is smarter than the privileged idiots running things, no matter what color?
For 2 & 3 I was going to point out LeGuin's Earthsea stories, but someone beat me to it. So instead, I give you Conan, as written by Robert E. Howard in the original stories. He's a barbarian outsider wherever he goes, but manages to adapt and rise to leadership everywhere from sub-Saharan African tribes to pseudo-Persian city-states to pseudo-medieval European kingdoms. This is not remarked on by the locals, either civilized or barbarian, as he would not have survived and risen to leadership if he had not assimilated in some way. The other barbarian peoples (the aforementioned Africans, Picts, etc) speak in normal English in the stories. Conan being a barbarian outsider and thus looked down on by the "civilized" peoples of the Hyborean world, avoids the "White Man's Burden" thing. (He also frequently does more destroying than saving; he's not the savior type, though he has a weakness for pretty girls in trouble).
I picked Conan rather than any of Howard's other characters (much as I love the El Borak stories), because his more modern characters tend to be "Western white man gone mercenary proves better than the natives in their own country" types.
I found more!
Find an example of a woman in a dangerous line of work who enjoys her work, has fun, and is not punished by the plot.
Two for one! Lucrezia Noin and Sally Po, both from Gundam Wing. Both of them are military (Noin is a giant robot pilot, Po a guerilla) - they both get some great lines, they both get to have some fun, and while Noin does spend a fair amount of time worrying about the soldiers under her command, she also loves to fly and is very, very good at it - one of the few people who can actually challenge the technologically-superior Gundams in an un-souped-up robot. Po has an incredibly diverse skillset - she's the character who tends to come out of nowhere to save people, show up with supplies that she presumably stole from one of the main military forces in the series, and she's got a fair amount of medical skill to boot (fanon has it she's actually an MD, but the show doesn't seem to actually support that).
Find an example of a character with a scar, who just has a scar. Not a throbbing scar of import. Not a scar of plot relevance. Not a scar of, well, any importance. Just a scar.<./blockquote>
Tsume, from Wolf's Rain, has a very impressive scar on his chest. I don't recall it ever coming up. Then again, Tsume is a wolf and a determined badass, so it makes a certain amount of sense.
Hullo, delurker here!
For #5, I think that Paladin of Souls by Lois Bujold McMaster would count- the middle-aged Dowager Royina Ista does NOT like the young, very beautiful Marchess Cattilara. This is initially because Cattilara is possessed by a demon, and Ista is possessed by the God who controls said demons and who wants it back with him, but it gets more involved later.
Find an example of a woman in a dangerous line of work who enjoys her work, has fun, and is not punished by plot.
Captain Zamira Drakasha in Red Seas Under Red Skies by Scott Lynch. She's a pirate captain, so any ill that befalls her is not because of her gender. Actually, Lynch writes great women across the board. In the first book of the same series, The Lies of Locke Lamora the alchemical botanist and the black alchemists (black in the sense of not approved) also qualify.
The books are not untriggery - there's thieving and violence and massive amounts of destruction - but women in his world are equals.
TW: Disabilities and prejudice.
I just remembered one for the disabled character. One of my favourite fictional characters of all time, Miles Vorkosigan, is born with a disability that makes his bones extremely brittle, and him extremely short. He's also born into a militaristic society where traditionally disabled children were killed at birth. (A medieval society which made space contact two generations ago - they have highly advanced technology, but cultural attitudes change much more slowly.) Much of the story, especially early in the series, is about how he deals with his disability and overcomes it (and the mountains of associated prejudice against him) in a space opera way. While technology helps him to overcome his disabilities, it's second to his determination and to the help of people who believe in him.
The Vorkosigan saga is just all-around awesome. So much love!
For #4, The God-Eaters by Jesse Hajicek. It starts out in a prison, and rape (by guards as well as other prisoners) is a thing.
I'd recommend the book for enjoyment, and for the romance between the two male protagonists, but it needs to come with a warning that the handling of women is bad. Mainly, there are just no women: there are some whores, and a child, and a ghost who gets one scene. The setting includes that deeply frustrating trope that female children with magical talent have it burnt out of them, but this is never addressed or explained. As far as I can tell, the author put it in as an aside to justify the all-male prison, and doesn't think of it as something that people would care about. It's just the way things are.
I am bored of settings where there are no female magicians Just Because, and angry with the abundance of worlds where there would be female magicians, but the girls are killed or mutilated to prevent that.
I just remembered that Once Upon a Time answers number 5 with no less than Snow White and her stepmother. Stepmother, henceforth Regina, doesn't particularly care about being the fairest in the land. She hates Snow because nf n puvyq, Fabj oebxr n cebzvfr gb xrrc frperg gur snpg gung Ertvan ybirq n fgnoyr obl. Jura Ertvan'f zbgure sbhaq bhg, fur xvyyrq gur fgnoyr obl fb gung Ertvan jbhyq or serr gb zneel Fabj'f sngure naq orpbzr Dhrra. Because of this, Regina blames Snow for ruining her life.
Regina's hatred for the protagonist, Emma, is partially related to fertility since Emma is her adopted son's biomom, and the son likes Emma better than Regina. Mostly, though, Regina's upset that Emma breezed into town and started interfering with a perfectly good evil plan.
# Find an example of one of those books aimed at teenage girls that actually mentions female masturbation.
I read a lot of them when I was a teenage girl and none of them, none, mentioned the female protagonists masturbating at all. Many of them referenced (usually for humour) the male characters masturbating but nobody seemed at all aware that girls could/do.
There is a FANTASTIC trilogy by Toby Frost (not sure if the series itself has a name, but it starts with Space Captain Smith) that has taken the idea of 'what if the British Empire existed again...in space?!' and run with it. There's all sorts of tongue-in-cheek imperialism and such going on, and the title/main character's best friend, Suruk, is a member of a non-human race that is meant to look something like the alien from Predator (I think). The race is tribal, big on head-collecting, and extremely formal in speech in a way that definitely indicates 'second-language learner' but in a very exotic and flowery way...but as soon as Suruk encounters others of his kind and switches into a language that many of their tribes speak as a common tongue, their dialogue is given in something of a 'California surfer dude' style. The first thing one says to another after they've established that they both speak Asur'ah is, 'Whoa. That's a major relief. I totally hate talking in English. It's, like, really inexpressive, y'know?' When he tells Captain Smith about the encounter (in English), he says, 'Their words were honourable. They provided hospitality worthy of a highlord. I give them respect.'
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