Wattpad: Home of diversity for the sake of diversity.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for diversity in books. What annoys me though is that so many authors include diversity for the sake of having diversity.

They will include a person of colour to have a person of colour. They will include a gay person to have person from the LGBTQ+ community. They will include a person with depression to have a person with mental illness. There traits become the character. There is often nothing more to them.

For these underrepresented groups, it often just becomes offensive. With how little representation there is its. Ot tight that it's all tokenistic. These groups deserve proper representation.

Sometimes a trait, often a mental illness, will be given to a character simply to make them more interesting. It plays no role in the story other than that. It's not right.

I have nothing against gay characters, characters of colour, mentally ill characters, etc. I have a problem with the fact that they aren't even characters in many books. The trait is mentioned and that's all you see of it. I recently read a book in which all of the characters are mentally ill (don't ask which one, not telling you) but you never see the effects of the mental illness. You only ever get told that a character has a mental illness.

Being someone with mental illnesses, it just isn't fair to me. Books like these make mental illness seem as if they don't impact every moment of your life, as if they are irrelevant.

In other places someone will include something they don't know about, without doing any research. Again, this is tokenistic representation and completely unfair. I read a book in which the person actually announced that they did no research so shouldn't receive hate for any incorrect representation of mental illness.

No. You, dear author (again remaining anonymous) deserve that hate. You could easily have done research with the help of the Internet. People of minority groups are not exactly like you. Different cultures have different ways of life and different beliefs. Mental illness is more complex than you think. In other words, DO RESEARCH!

On the topic of gxg or bxb books, authors, please. These people are normal people with normal relationships. There are some beautiful books on Wattpad, but unfortunately most of them fetishisise homosexual relationships.

The focus is always on the fact that both are male or both are female rather than the relationship itself. How many books about heterosexual relationships have you read where the focus is on that there is a boy and a girl in the relationship? I've read none. The focus is always on the relationship itself.

We live in a sad world people of Wattpad. There are minority groups in which the only representation they have are characters where their minority trait is all there is to them. We need to do something to fix this.

The answer some people came up with? Campaigns to promote books representing a minority group.

A good idea, but sadly an exploited one. Now people are including even more tokenistic characters to be able to add the tag and have a greater chance of being discovered.

*Sigh...* Why do we live in a world like this? Can we even fix it?

To those who properly include diversity, thank you. I appreciate you. You are your own minority group and I respect and admire you. Keep doing what you're doing.

To those who include tokenistic diversity? Learn from those who don't...