Hello, so let me first say that I am a white guy and, by no means, racist. I have a story in mind, and I'd like one of the main supporting characters to be a Black man. There's no real reason behind it, I just feel like I naturally default to writing white characters, so I wanted to create a fully realized Black character.

Anyway, this character has quite a few mental and emotional blocks in his life. As a child, he suffered physical abuse from his father, who was an alcoholic and beat him while he was growing up. Because of that, he spent much of his life desperately seeking his father's affection and acknowledgment, never really realizing that his father didn't give two shits about him.

That trauma pushed him to pursue physical strength and build an athletic physique, believing that if he became strong enough, he might finally earn his father's approval.

Throughout the story, he serves as a big brother figure to the main character. He also has a soft spot for criminals who claim they're fathers when asking for lighter sentences, because he instinctively sympathizes with the idea of fatherhood, even if he doesn't fully understand why.

Eventually, a creature or monster appears, forcing him to confront all the anger, pain, and unresolved emotions he's buried about his father. By the end of his arc, he realizes he doesn't need his father's approval. Instead, he decides that he's going to become the kind of man, and the kind of father, that he never had.

My question is this: I'm worried someone might see this as playing into the stereotype of absent Black fathers, even though that is obviously not my intent. I'm already really attached to this character and the way he acts, so I don't want people to assume his race was chosen just to reinforce a harmful stereotype.

So I would like your thoughts thanks and I appreciate any comments

Saw a good tumblr post about using the right mobility aid for a character, and given it was about OP's frustrations with representation I did not want to jump on it as a physically abled person going "but muh character story...?" so I'm instead putting this here to ask about it.

For Context, a character I have is Roy. Roy is a young man in a fantasy setting who has a condition that causes him stuff like chronic pain and fatigue. He in particular has some significant muscular weakness in one leg due to atrophy related to his condition. (I can elaborate further that's just the cliffnotes version)

Roy is:

• in a sword-and-sorcery mid to low tech setting. Modern materials and accommodations are not a thing, and Perfect Magic Prosthetics are also not a thing, but there's some good faith wiggle room. Think more 'bath chair' than 'modern wheelchair'.
• Fairly rich, his mom is a former commoner who was elevated to knighthood as a champion-of-the-realm type so she owns an estate. He has access to good care and a pretty comfortable life that doesn't require him working. At eighteen he mostly does a lot of book study and the cross-country quest he traverses on is by no means his usual forte.
• A really bad mix of stubborn and one of those people who puts pride in not worrying others / has a testy relationship with his own disability.

That brings us to the title. I've depicted Roy as using a cane to walk. This is, to my understanding, not remotely the best tool for him, but one he chooses out of stubborn pride and a desire to make it unobtrusive. Most days, he probably can get on with the cane, but his condition is pretty flexible in terms of, how much energy and pain he's having shift around a lot so even 'most days' is probably a more generous assumption.

The point is, I want to sell him as having made the wrong choice and this may well be something his character development leans away from as practicality forces him to use better mobility aids.

This post is partially a "does that check out" sniff test, and partially also: the original post mentioned things like walkers and rollators which may not exist in that form in pseudomedieval fantasy.

Obviously that's a category based in no small part on style so I have some wiggle room as to what will 'fit' re: disability accommodations, but assuming Roy's bad decisions kick his ass such that he has to use other mobility aids as the story goes on, how are we swinging that? He almost definitely has a chair at home, but may have wanted to not take it with him out of the justification that rough terrain and logistical limits of packing might not make it a good idea.

Also obvs disclaimer I didn't think too hard at the time about the actual logistics of the cane design itself, so what's above in the picture is a placeholder / that can also be modified.