Vegan Main vs. Secondary Characters

Animals are my friends, and I don't eat my friends!

This quote is attributed to George Bernard Shaw. However, the first time I ever heard those words they were coming out of the mouth of a character in an after-school special. It was one of those shows where a group of teens solve a mystery together, though I can't recall anything else about the plot. In fact the only thing I do for-sure remember was that one line of dialogue. The girl who said it wasn't one of the main characters, yet that simple, powerful statement had more of an impact on me than the rest of the show put together.

For the record, no: it did not turn me vegetarian on the spot. I didn't even consider vegetarianism (let alone veganism) until many years after I'd seen that show, but I can't help thinking that line had some kind of a subconscious influence, if only because I remember it so well.

I'm thinking about it today because the muse has been very kind to me and blessed me with a story idea in which the main character lives a vegan lifestyle. I'm saying lifestyle because he didn't choose to be vegan for ethical reasons. Rather, he has a psychometry-like ability to pick up images and emotions attached to objects. Because animal "products" result from the torture and death of animals, they carry intensely negative, painful emotions, so my main guy avoids contact with them.

At the beginning of the story, he's unhappy about this. He resents his ability because it sets him apart from other people, and he wishes he could be "normal" like everyone else. But then (since this is a romance) he ends up working with a perfectly normal guy who is fascinated by his ability and asks him all kinds of questions about it, and when he finds out why the main character avoids animal products, he decides that he wants to be vegan too. For ethical reasons.

The aspect about veganism is just one part of a larger theme about compassion vs. empathy, two things which seem almost the same on first glance, but which can actually be quite different. The main character's journey is one of learning to accept himself and his ability, to have compassion for himself and others, and the importance of doing the right thing because it's the right thing to do, rather than purely out of self-interest.

I'm happy with the story idea so far, because I think it gives both characters a nice growth arc and touches on themes that many readers can relate to, such as self-acceptance and feeling misunderstood. I don't know if it will fly with omni readers (or editors!), or if it'll ultimately come off feeling like a religious conversion story, but I guess that all I can do is start writing and hope for the best.

It got me thinking about character arcs, though, and the difference between having a vegan main character vs. having a vegan background character. As an aspiring romance writer, it feels important to me to bring vegan and anti-speciesist values into the story of my main characters in some way, because otherwise I'd feel I wasn't being true to myself. (I write clueless omnis in my fanfic writing, of course, and I adore the characters I write even though they are, sadly, clueless on this particular issue.)

Having vegan main characters can be a challenge, though. Only about 1% of the population is currently vegan, so it's a bit tricky coming up with plausible ways to populate my romances with ethical vegan protagonists. Obviously, that doesn't mean that it can't be done, and I'm planning a blog post that talks about ways of doing it. However, I'm also leaning towards turning this particular story into a series of novellas, and have the relationship between my two guys develop over the course of several adventures so that I can write a number of stories with a strong vegan ethic without sacrificing believability.

For a story that has an ensemble cast, though, I would think that having a vegan secondary character could be done both plausibly and very effectively. That one line from that after-school special had such an impact on me, I can only imagine how powerful it would have been if it had been a theme that got touched on several times throughout the course of the story. Or the story had been a series, and the vegetarian (perhaps vegan?) girl had been a recurring character.

The beauty of secondary "background" characters in an ensemble story is that they do not need to have in-depth character growth arcs. Or any arc at all, usually, unless it's a series that allows minor characters to "star" in their own stories from time to time. Normally the secondary characters are just a backdrop for the main characters in the story, though, and I see no reason why more of them couldn't be vegan. Characters like these can easily add an anti-speciesist message without affecting the overall plot, and those messages can be powerful. Like that one line, from an otherwise forgettable after-school special, that had such an impact on me. You just never know.

AR Story Ideas

A short time after going vegan, I came up with several ideas for animal-rights themed fiction projects, and wrote large chunks of two of them in a feverish burst of creativity. One is a comic book script that I may actually draw someday. The working title is "Free Range: A Bird's Eye View of Christmas," and it's about a group of supposedly free range turkeys who escape from a slaughterhouse and make a cross country journey in the dead of winter. It's sort of like Watership Down meets The Incredible Journey, but with turkeys. And a slaughterhouse.

There are many things I love about my rough story idea, including the main turkey character, who is literally guided by the voice of the Great Mother Turkey Goddess who whispers to her of a mysterious place called Sanctuary. What holds me back from committing myself to it is that I don't know how to incorporate a truly vegan, abolitionist message into a story like that. I can imagine that it might win some sympathy for turkeys, but I'm not sure how to incorporate the notion that it's not just wrong to murder turkeys for Christmas dinner, but that it's wrong to kill and exploit animals, period.

One of the other ideas I had, one which will never see the light of day, was a dark fantasy set in a dystopian near-future where all the cows have vanished from the face of the earth and the dairy industry, rather than giving up on itself, begins using disadvantaged women as milk machines instead. The main character in the story is the head of an ad agency who gets to design the marketing campaign to sell the wondrous health benefits of "human dairy." And, because he's good at his job, he of course succeeds in convincing the public to buy it.

I had written large chunks of that story before I realized that simply role-reversing human and animal victims doesn't actually challenge the paradigm. People always talk about how it's terrible for human beings to be treated "like cattle," but that doesn't even come close to questioning why cows should be treated like cattle. So that one got shelved, too.

That's when I realized that incorporating an animal rights message into a story that isn't necessarily about animal rights, per se, might be a more powerful approach. That's what I'm working on now, and I'll talk about some of those ideas in the next blog.

Why it Matters

I'll admit it, I'm into some fairly obscure things.

For instance, I write fanfiction. This is not a mainstream activity in the first place, but I've moved it even farther from the mainstream by writing slash fanfic, which is, for folks who don't know, fanfiction that explores potential same-sex relationships between characters in a TV series, book, film, etc. My current writing obsession is for an anime/manga series that is well past the height of its popularity, and was never that well known in the first place.

I read romances, which would be a solidly mainstream activity if only I had an interest in romance of the heterosexual variety--which I don't. Of course as a lesbian, one might reasonably expect that I'd be interested in lesbian fiction, but nope. It's the boys for me, all the way. What can I say? I'm weird.

And... I'm vegan.

Because while it's mainstream and popular to love animals, it's not mainstream or popular to love them so much that you refuse to participate in their murder and exploitation. Hopefully that will change. More than anything, I want veganism to become normal. As normal, say, as being opposed to racism, sexism, homophobia or child abuse. Because in the end, it's all violence. And it's all wrong. Equally wrong.

Which brings me to the point of this blog. I can imagine that someone looking at this would consider it so odd, so personal and idiosyncratic that it doesn't make sense to write a blog about these things.

But here's the deal: Art is powerful.

Art matters. Even the pouplar forms that most people don't think of as art, such as prime-time television shows or romance novels. Why? Because they are a reflection of our culture, our beliefs and values. And more importantly, because they create our culture. Artists have a huge responsibility in the things we create, becaue the messages we send are going to shape the way people think.

The growing popularity of gay romance doesn't just reflect a shift in cultural attitudes, it is also contributing to that shift. It is changing the way people see gays, how they look at love and sexuality, even their attitudes about gender. Just by presenting same-sex love as something to be celebrated, these stories send a strong message of equality and acceptance.

As an aspiring writer of this genre who happens to be vegan, then, I'm keenly aware of the message I'm sending when one of my characters sits down to a meal of animal products, or puts on a leather jacket, or takes his boyfriend to the zoo for a date. If I present these things as morally unproblematic, I'm sending a subtle but powerful message that these things are okay, that there is nothing wrong with enslaving animals for purposes of pleasure, convenience and entertainment. And since I think there is something wrong with it, something very wrong, I consider it part of my job as a writer to find ways to place these activities in a moral context.

Introduction

So my idea for this blog is that it will be a place where I can bring together the topics I'm most passionate about, namely veganism, writing and queerness and talk about how the three things intersect, and how they conflict. I will probably talk about them seperately from time to time as well. As a writer who dreams of writing and publishing gay male erotic romances (also known as M/M), I am particularly interested in ways in which a consciousness of the personhood of animals can be woven into mainstream literature without necessarily producing "animal rights" literature per se.

I believe that in the future this will be considered as simply part of a writer's moral responsibility to his or her audience. Just as writers today are generally expected to present rape, murder, sexism, torture, racism, homophobia, child abuse etc. as issues of moral concern, I hope that one day it will also be seen as a matter of moral concern when two characters sit down to feast on the flesh or bodily secretions of a tortured animal. Part of what I seek to do as a writer is to present our commonplace torture and killing of animals as a morally significant issue, and to provoke readers to think about it, but to do so without preaching at them or at the expense of telling a good story.

A part of me wonders if this is even possible in a society where exploting animals is as "normal" to most people as breathing air or drinking water, but I feel a moral duty to try. And really where it comes down to it, that's the main gist of what I want this blog to be about.