Character Mind Warp....

[PS Power]

Everyone in the book is non-white, except Tor and his family. There are a very few others, on occasion that might show up, but they really aren't a white society.

Just to blow everyone's mind.



*Yes, I envision them as white people in the main. I get that you all probably do too. That's because we're all...

Well, fill in the blank there!

The descriptions have most of them being at least a solid tan color however, even if they don't go out in the sun a lot.

Lyn Red is straight up Chinese, and is considered about normal, as far as coloration goes (Until she starts using a disguise amulet to change herself.)

Even the blonds tend toward darker skin colors. I know, it isn't how things are now, but, exotic...

The people in Afrak have been changed to be a deeper brown, almost blue/black color.

A lot of Austra has Asian ancestry.

I just wanted to share that, since all the actors and actresses being selected are pretty white, over on that thread.

[jjmcafee]

Now that was a bit of a shock, simply because it was so correct. I had envisioned most of the players as white. Too much American movies and television I suppose. Unfortunately that also limits the selection group for actors as most of those seem to be white with a few notable exceptions.

[Ronald Dukarski]

If you stop to think of it, that's pretty much the logical end point, the homogenesation of races, once racism, both conscious and sub-conscious is ended. And it only took, what, less than 2000 years. At least In that world.

[jjmcafee]

But the YA world is not that way. We still have all the different races in the different countries. It is somewhat more integrated than our current reality (not all that hard) but still has some work to do to be complete.

[twips182]

See there Marcia!!! Dale just came out and announced it! Maria is a brunette! Sure in the story compared to others in Noram she might...might be considered a blonde. But in our world she would be FULL BLOWN (see what I did there) dark sexy brunette...."It's in the hole and the crowd goes wild!!!"


Credit: Bill Murray *Caddyshack*

[MarciaA]

Twips I'm STILL trying to visualize Marie as a blonde every time I read about her... I'm with you on that, even tho we both know Dale wrote her blonde..

So everyone is a nice shade of tan from a light tan to a darker almost brown...K, we can tint all the actors with that spray on tanning stuff!!

I thought everyone in Austra would be european, so more like german, english, irish, italian...... so asian huh? Okay then, I'll have to re-work my brain around that one too.....

Kinda like Proxy? I can envison that I guess......

We need an ARTIST to make us some really good character pics!!!!!! I wish I could do it....

[twips182]

No no and no. I accept that we are on the same team in this Marcia but after careful study I have determined that Dale had the flu at the time he wrote that she was blonde. The combination of fever and chills caused Dale to hallucinate resulting in the error..so there.

[RedWolfeXR]

Heh, was wondering about that myself.. I had noticed that everyone was described in tones of brown and dark tones even as all the hot blondes kept distracting my imagination.

Still working my way through the subforum, since I finally got around to reading the series. (twice, really, or maybe one and a halfish)

Remember that Noram was pretty much a breeding experiment. I have NO problem believing that everyone was modified to match the general color of Cordes while the two sub-breeds were developed. Remember also that he even SAID that Mitchell was a clone that looked just like he did earlier in his life.

What surprises ME is that there didn't seem to be any major issues with architecture. (but then again, I recently re-read Weber's Bahzell series and he was ALWAYS having issues with short beds, ceilings and such) It would seem to me that small towns would have NO buildings scaled to nobles except (maybe) the tavern. Also, for nobility nobody has many servants (it was always a way of recirculating money and giving a work base in pre-industrial societies. You STILL see it in many countries where the wealthy are expected to hire a lot of staff -- Mexico in particular.

(sorry, moving back into worldbuilding issues again, I probably need to start a post instead of cluttering up others)

[Kat]

Hmmm...I'm either weird or I just really love dark skin because I'm german, the number of people with skin darker than the average not tanned turk I've seen my whole life in person is below 100 and...everyone around me is pretty much white....and I've always imagined everyone in a healthy brown, either light, dark or reddish, plus mostly tanned on top of that except the Lairdgren relatives.
The moment Tor realized that Lyn's pretty was hilarious btw^^ calling himself basically a backwater hillbilly idiot with no sense of esthetics XP

[rockhazard]

I think culture has infected much of our imaginations. I don't have numbers, of course, but I'd be willing to bet the average reader for whom English is their first language sees white folk everywhere in stories, unless the descriptions are otherwise. Not just white readers either. I'm black, and I still default to all the characters being white, unless I actively imagine otherwise. I've even tried defaulting to black, but what happens there is usually you find a bit of description halfway through the book that makes that unlikely or impossible.

It's even harder in YA. Seriously, the heights are crazy enough (10', really?). But then you add in racial features that don't even exist, and I really have to put work in to maintain an image of these people in my mind. For some reason, Abby is really easy for me to visualize (which I know contradicts what I just said), but Prince Alphonse is harder for me to see in my mind (a freakishly tall redheaded Latino?). Trice keeps morphing in my mind, and Sara Debri is pretty hopeless for me, because even before I read this topic, I realized almost no one was white, but natural blondes with dark skin threw me for a loop. If I don't stop and take the time to meditate on it, some of the characters become cartoonish for me, floating somewhere between the Blackhole Sun music video and Umpa Loompas -- or they snap back to being current races.

I know. It's a failure of my imagination.