Raj (@RajeshTheLion) from Twitter asks this interesting question: “How do you think about the balance between providing real-world representation of different ethnicities (Dev signals being Russian) and the universality that furry characters provide (Dev can be anyone whose dad was cold and hypermasculine)?”
I’ll warn you first off that this is one of those questions that does not have an absolute answer; it’s going to be different for everyone. Fortunately, you just asked how I think about it, not how everyone should, so I’ll tell you my thought process and you can apply whatever of it you find useful.
Basing any story in our contemporary world means making some choices about how much of the world you’re going to represent truthfully. If you want to write about a specific situation in detail—like how America responded to 9/11, for example—you probably want to be very faithful to the contemporary world because that’s where your situation takes place.
But if you want to write about the attitudes surrounding a devastating terrorist attack in a more general way, then you can start playing around with the world, abstracting some areas to focus on the psychology of them rather than getting into the weeds of the specific details.
If you’re writing a furry book, then you get to choose whether everyone’s just furry or if furries and humans exist alongside each other. In general, if I’m not writing about the interactions between furries and humans, to explore class or prejudice or whatever, I leave the humans out. When everyone’s furry, that frees me up to make a lot more choices about what to include from this world and what to exclude.
You asked specifically about ethnicities. This is a really tricky issue because ethnicities are generalizations, and even people in the same ethnic group may have some different ideas about what their ethnicity means. In a furry world, though, I usually take some of the superficial designators of an ethnic group (language being the primary one) and use some of the other markers as guideposts. This is not necessarily a perfect system, because the language and accents can evoke other associations in the reader that I haven’t explicitly included in the text. But I like to do it because dialogue is a way to distinguish characters and give them a group identity.
I have written humans with specific ethnic backgrounds (the upcoming Unfinished Business for one) and it required a good deal of research plus a review by someone with lived experience in that background. I think it was worth it in this one case for sure! But for the Love Match series, for instance, while I did some research into Congo for Rocky’s background and tried to faithfully transfer some of it to the books, Lunda is not intended to be a one-to-one representation of Congo. Instead, Love Match focuses more on a newcomer to a society struggling with class issues, his awareness of his sexuality, and a system he’s fitting into that’s designed to exploit him. Rocky’s immigrant status is part of the story; other characters come from varied backgrounds (son of an immigrant, son of a rich family).
There is one character in that series worth talking more about in this context, though. Rocky’s friend Aliq comes from a Jewish family, and here I did use some of my own experiences with Jewish families to portray his situation. One of my friends had a family situation similar to Aliq’s, and although I’ve dramatized it and added furry species details, the bones of it remained the same. In that case I used the real-world ethnicity because it fit the situation I wanted to portray and, frankly, I’m lazy and didn’t feel like making up a whole arctic fox culture. But I was also careful to show the people as complete people, and not to use the ethnicity as a justification for cartoonish behavior. Aliq’s family are warm and welcoming to Rocky, but (as is often the case with parents of any ethnicity) less tolerant of their own son’s behavior. Their faith leads them to conflict with their son, a common theme in my stories.
If you’re going to write about real-world ethnicities, it’s important to do it respectfully and with the awareness that these groups are all composed of actual individual people. Some people may embody all the characteristics associated with a group, some may embody only these or those, some may embody one or none. Whatever choice you make about bringing real-world ethnicities into your work, that’s the most important thing to remember.