Fiction Writing; Who do You Kill

Sooner or later, one of your characters is going to die. Usually it is a friend of the main character or of the villain. Now in action adventure movies, it is someone the main character loves, for instance his wife and his children, but it does not matter what race or ethnic group the victim belongs to because the whole point is to get the hero so angry that he will finish off the villains in as violent manner as he can.

In other movies and in writing it is different. Race and ethnicity does matter, according to the movies I saw, and the novel I am reading. It seems that back in the nineteen seventies, even with black exploitation movies, the Black community got so angry at them being portrayed at being drug dealers, that they demanded to be portrayed as good and moral citizens even when they were bad guys. Thus many movies and some writers have followed suit. Not only did they make the African American as the one with the moral code, they made sure that his death was shown with more sorrow and regret, and if at all possible, he survived when others died. Yet this never happened to the Italians, Chinese, or Japanese. We still see movies where they are portrayed equally in a good light and a bad light and when they die, no one mourns long and hard. But this is wrong.

When writing your novel or story, forget about who will be mad and decide what is believable. If there is a massive explosion, the bombs kill indiscriminately, and do not decide what race the victims are., and it has to do with percentages. If the majority of those trapped inside were white, then the survivors are more likely to be white. If the story was about a building exploding in Harlem, the survivors are more likely to be black. So think of not what would be acceptable, think of reality and do not discriminate or make up for past discriminations. Think not of what others would want you to write, think what would be more logical.