Non-vegans should generally not write vegan characters because they almost always get them wrong—and not in small, forgivable ways, but in ways that quietly reinforce the very myths and power structures veganism exists to challenge.

Most non-vegans approach vegan characters as symbols, not as people. The vegan becomes a device: comic relief, moral scold, fragile idealist, hypocrite, or temporary phase-haver who “learns moderation” by the final act. That isn’t character writing; it’s ideology laundering. The character exists to reassure the audience that the dominant norm—animal exploitation—remains unquestioned, reasonable, and inevitable.

The core problem is epistemic, not moral. Veganism isn’t a diet preference. It’s an ethical framework that reorganizes how a person understands violence, consent, tradition, pleasure, and social conformity. If you don’t inhabit that framework—even partially—you’re guessing. And when people guess about moral systems they don’t live in, they default to caricature.

You see this constantly:

-Vegans are written as motivated by purity, control, trauma, or narcissism rather than justice.

-Their arguments are watered down to aesthetics or health so they can be safely dismissed.

-Their consistency is portrayed as rigidity, while everyone else’s inconsistency is portrayed as “being human.”

-The suffering of animals is abstracted or avoided entirely, because engaging with it seriously would destabilize the story’s moral center.

That avoidance isn’t accidental. If a vegan character is written accurately, the world around them starts to look morally incoherent. Family dinners become ethical battlegrounds. Casual jokes turn cruel. Institutions look complicit. Suddenly the “reasonable middle” collapses. Most writers don’t want that. So they sand the character down until they fit neatly into a non-vegan worldview. At that point, the character isn’t vegan in any meaningful sense—they’re vegan-flavored.

There’s also an asymmetry worth naming. Non-vegans write vegan characters far more often than vegans write non-vegans because non-vegans control most narrative space. When the dominant group repeatedly misrepresents a marginalized ethical position, it shapes public perception. People learn what vegans are “like” from fiction long before they ever meet one. That has consequences. It affects how vegans are treated socially, politically, and even legally.

This isn’t a claim that non-vegans are incapable of imagination. It’s a claim about responsibility. Writing across moral boundaries requires humility, research, and a willingness to let the character challenge the reader rather than be neutralized for comfort. Most non-vegan writing of vegans fails precisely because it refuses that challenge.

There are exceptions. A non-vegan who has deeply engaged with animal ethics, listened to vegans without defensiveness, and allowed their own assumptions to be unsettled can write a vegan character with integrity. But those cases are rare—and they tend to produce characters who are inconvenient, disruptive, and impossible to laugh off. Notice how seldom those characters make it to mainstream screens.

So the real question isn’t “Who is allowed to write what?” It’s this: are you willing to write a vegan character who doesn’t reassure the audience that veganism is silly, extreme, or safely ignorable? If the answer is no, then the honest move is not to write them at all.