My project has an environmental theme.
My characters eat meals, and because of the setting, this includes meat and eggs. Some environmentally - friendly friends find those scenes very distasteful and opposed to the environmental intent of the project.
I'd like to not lose a portion of my potential audience because of this conflict, so -
(1) I'm pruning out 'meat' wherever I can (except for the villains), but it's not sensible to never have some sort of meat, given the book's setting.
(2) I've changed some of the game to fictional in-world animals, hoping this will soften the edges.
(3) I'm considering modifying a character to be a vegetarian. < this is my question.The character I have in mind is already fastidious.
Question: If I make one sympathetic character a vegetarian, in order to give voice to the environmental cost of meat-eating, will this come across as tokenism?
Where is the line between diversity and tokenism? I would not have this character preach, on the other hand I'd like to acknowledge the sentiment among vegetarian readers while not alienating others. Is it sufficient to have a vegetarian character who gives one single line of "No thanks, I don't eat that" while wiping his hands on his kerchief, ... is this enough to nod at the readers that I recognize the problem?
Answer
Thought one: To my mind, a "token character" is one who can be completely described in one sentence. If after reading your book you gave someone a quiz, like reading this book was a school assignment, and you had a question, "Describe Bob", and everyone who took the quiz replied, "He's the vegetarian", then I think you have a very shallow token character. Similarly if everyone replied, "He's the black guy", or "He's the smart-aleck teenager", or some other one-line description. This is okay for a minor background character, someone who just shows up briefly or now and then to make one point. But if your major characters can be completely described with one sentence, you need to flesh them out more.
Thought two: If people really find your book distressing because the hero doesn't share their beliefs on some point, this seems pretty narrow-minded to me. I've read plenty of books where the hero is an atheist, but that of itself has never made me dislike the book, even though I am not an atheist. (If the whole book was about pushing this point, different story. I mean, if the whole book is pushing a message that eating meat is good and vegetarianism is a dumb idea, I can see vegetarians finding that annoying and quickly losing interest in the book. Just like, I've read stories that are all about why you should be an atheist and how religion is dumb, and I generally lose interest quickly.) But whatever, I suppose. If that's your target market, you need to appeal to your target market.
Thought three: If vegetarianism or lack thereof is not the point in the story, is it even necessary to bring up what they eat? In many stories there's no need to mention the characters eating at all. If you do, can't you just say, "They ate lunch and then ..." without going into details about the nature of the lunch? If what they eat is important to the story, then I don't see how you can simply change it without changing the story. Like if there's a crucial scene where the characters are lost in the wilderness and starving and then they see a deer and hunt it down and kill it and eat it and their lives are saved ... maybe you could change that to they find a grove of banana trees, maybe not.
Thought four: I don't see how changing the animals to fictional animals would help. Presumably if someone is a vegetarian, they think that killing and eating ANY animal is bad, and not just certain ones. If a vegetarian expressed displeasure at seeing me eating meat, I can't imagine that it would satisfy him if I said, "Oh, it's no problem. This is a species of animal that was unknown until just a few weeks ago, recently discovered in the Amazon, so I'm sure he's not on your list of creatures that it's bad to eat." I'd be surprised if that helped at all.
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