dark_agenda | Common Pitfalls and how to Make Good Attempts to Avoid Them

This is a very short list of the mistakes that can be made when writing about a race, culture or religion that is not one's one, and not well or adequately representing in the mainstream media around us. Feel free to suggest articles and posts that have proven useful to you, and I will add them to this list.

Cultural appropriation is not only a huge problem, but a hard to define, let alone police one. I actually think it is fairly easy to avoid the most common problem, by choosing to focus on the characters whose culture is in question. Let them be the protagonist, and not ultimately the agent to further the white or Other character's journey, and and you have reduced the intrusion of your own identity into the story.
Writing for yourself, sometimes at the cost of excluding those to whom the source belongs. While defending everyone's freedom to write whatever they want, it is unfortunate when the decision to play in someone else's sandbox ends up coming across as tracking mud across their temple. Yuletide is safer that way, since you know that you will be writing something that has been explicitly asked for and desired by at least one person. Thus, I refuse to read Hindu religious fic, but there are other desis who want it. A little poking around your recipient's profile is a good idea, so that you do not end up writing, for instance, something that they will find inappropriately sexual about characters they consider sacred.
Racist and offensive tropes: Magical Negroes, Noble Savages, Helpful Honkies... The way to educate yourself about these tropes is so HARD! You have to head over to the TV Tropes race section and get sucked into the black hole lost in the intertubes some larnin'. It's scary.
Superimposing identities is actually one of the most common problems I find in fiction written by people who have researched for facts, but not culture. Characters are given motivations and emotions that are presumed universal but are in fact highly culture specific. Not every teenager will feel entitled to whine about how unfair their parents are, not every woman will see choosing family over love as a tragedy, not every man will think of living with his parents as a sign of failure. The only real way to understand cultural motivations is to immerse yourself into tonnes of different voices from it; historical and fictional and written and spoken and lived. For one source though, a good beginning is to choose not to stray too far from the path -- if the narrative voice says the character chose to do or feel something, accept it, and make that the conclusion, rather than the justification for going AU.
Getting the details right is really just the most aggravating process, because most of us have been on the other side of being completely jarred out of a story that got One! Tiny! Completely Insignificant To The Narrative! thing wrong, and holding a grudge against it entirely out of proportion to its flaws. And there is only so much you can do with research, and little_details and even a beta. Which is why writing outside your comfort zone is so much easier to do for an exchange like Yuletide, where there are people happy just to story at all, and where criticism is extremely subdued. And also, added bonus, the archive switches over to AO3 where you can easily edit your story without bothering elynross!
How manga and anime get consumed in the west often cause a lot of problematic fanfic generation. This post contains a starting point to discussions that will help to see the problems and then avoid them. In brief: no more Regency AUs!

Note: This list was modifed from material from this post. It is a work in progress, and as such will be continually edited and added to.