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Reinder Dijkhuis @Reinderdijkhuis

A thought about the way diversity in media is often dismissed as being 'shoehorned in'. Terms like this suggest that creating a diverse cast for a comic or tv show requires extraordinary effort and artifice. Nothing could be further from the truth - you could write/draw in a transwoman or put out a casting call for an actor from a Desi background tomorrow.

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Things can get more complicated when you want to write realistically for characters with 'diverse' backgrounds. But a LOT of media is not realistic and does not have to reflect the historic experiences connected with those backgrounds. A Pakistani actor playing an ensign on Star Trek isn't primarily playing a Pakistani character but a Federation one (though it's usually cooler if more specifics of the character's background show through).

(continuing from last parentheses) (And of course the actor is free to spin the character as more specifically Pakistani if they want to do that). But it's precisely because you can swap in any variant of 'human' that having diversity in your genre media is, to start with, very little extra effort at all.