I remember receiving a comment (I believe it was in this book) about how maybe the author of a TVD fanfiction goes with a face claim they might see themselves as.
When I read it, I thought "Well, I doubt it, I'd rather be one of them than be in the fanfiction as myself." But then I stopped and thought about it, perhaps they meant that authors chose those face claims because they also want to be like them (physically in this case). Don't get me wrong, if one day I went to sleep and woke up as Thomas Doherty or Sofia Carson I'd be pretty okay with it.
And that's fine, if you want to pick someone you admire or want to be like or look like to be your face claim, that's all you.
But then I wanna ask, where are the people that admire Latinos? What about Black people? Or Asian? Or Native Americans? Or New Zealand?
I always have this little ritual when I find a random but possibly interesting fanfic (it doesnt necessarily have to be TVD related) where I see what else the author has written and by their choices of face claims (because half the time they have like 12 to 40 books maybe) you can see how diverse they can be.
Or when you see a cast list and there's barely any diversity there unless they decided to go early 2000's TV and have one black character or one Asian character because they have to fill a quota. Even The Vampire Diaries did it with Bonnie.
I distinctly remember commenting on one cast list where the only diverse character was played by Arden Cho, and I commented
"at least not everyone on this list is white"
yeah, I was very blunt, but I won't apologize for it.
The author replied, "not every story will have a diverse cast"
I replied with this:
"that's true, because it depends on the author."
If you're interested in what happened later on is that she apologized since she had written it so long ago and only really chose actors from shows she watched (and since most shows ten years ago were barely any diverse, i'm not surprised.) But we came to a respectful understanding pretty quickly.
But what I wrote will hopefully influence her in the future, because it's true. If your story isn't that diverse it's because of you. I'm not saying add one diverse character, because you'd be filling a quote, I'm saying explore more options before deciding on someone blonde or pale for your OC. I'm saying the OC could have ties to other races.
And do not comment "I just don't know how to write that type of character." What type of character? If you're talking about the racism that all those races face, the police brutality or the stereotypes they also face, that's a whole other topic. I'm talking about just including them as people first.
Who here ever read Percy Jackson and The Olympians? Or even just heard of it? (movie watchers are not permitted to comment)
Do you know how many diverse characters Rick Riordan wrote about in the abundance of all his books? I'm talking Native American, Black, Latino, Chinese-Canadian, Biracial, Muslim. And he explored them and their backstory, their families traditions, their languages, all of it, and guess what? He used kids and other children he taught when he was a social studies middle school teacher as inspiration for those characters. He wrote about gay, bisexual and trans characters too.
Forget JK, go read some Uncle Rick.
You're allowed to write about characters of different races. The rules are to do proper research, be careful with what you write, don't assume to know how to write everything after two episodes of Blackish or Fresh Off the Boat and an hour of research.
(but seriously, go watch those shows, especially Blackish)
So, I've been mentioning a bunch of other fandom stories, hell I mentioned a whole other fandom (PJO) and have barely given out any TVD ones, why is that? Could it be because there's barely any content with diverse OC's? Possibly.
My advice is to please go out there and start educating yourself on diversity.