As far as my active characters go, yeah, Miniver is as white as white gets, and really, so's Faramir. And Harry Potter. Sheogorath APPEARS white but skin color in his canon is strange and variable and my main othergame OC from that same canon is quite dark-skinned. The video game I base most of his personality off of -- the 3rd in the series -- is inhabited by several hundred NPCs and, if memory serves, 80% of them are non-white -- the majority being ash-skinned Dunmer, with the occasional gold-skinned Altmer, dark olive Bosmer, chocolate-brown Redguards, catpeople, lizard men, and only THEN do you run into the Imperials (who are like Gondorians, white skin and dark hair), who are portrayed as beurocratic bastards; the Bretons (vaguely Northern French or Irish in appearance) who are poor and stand-offish; and in the Northernmost town of the whole country, you get an inhabitation of Nords, who are basically Viking-like folk -- big dumb and blonde. Sheogorath's appearance in Morrowind (and the previous game) is based on one factor and one factor alone: He looks like the guy who actually created him, Tedders, who is a redhead of Irish descent.
But then, the pups who are dearest to my heart are not at all white. There are no white people in their canon. The Gethenians are short and dark-skinned a la Tibetan/Inuit -- and I might add it took me over a year to find a PB that would fit Therem. Sorve was a happy accident and I still think his skin is too light. And the main character of their canon, Genly, is a black man from Earth. (Who keeps trying to move into my head.) And I do get really, really obnoxious about forrecting anyone who leaves out that detail. I could go on at length bitching out the designers of the German and one edition of the American bookcovers, the first of which has some random white guy on the cover, and the second of which has two faces in a shard of ice which are both far too finely-featured to belong in that book. Le Guin describes them very vividly, right down to having Therem note at one point the strange wiriness of Genly's hair, and Genly being asked repeatedly how his nose got broken.
As far as OC's go, other than the very dark-skinned Pinion, at least half my OCs tend to at the very least shades of olive. Admittedly, that's because I am. It's a pale olive, but I'm not Northern European White. Put me next to one of the Irish girls I went to school with and the difference is immediately noticible. My sister's even a shade or two darker. My grandfather is white only in comparison to an African-American.
As a note of interest, the artist I do work for occasionally, who is Greek, spent his childhood after the age of 9 when he came the America helping his father run a resturant -- which was colored-only. They wouldn't LET him and his father go to white places, because even though they're pale Greek, olive back then wasn't white enough to be white.
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branchandroot
no subject
Date: 2007-09-29 08:56 pm (UTC)As far as my active characters go, yeah, Miniver is as white as white gets, and really, so's Faramir. And Harry Potter. Sheogorath APPEARS white but skin color in his canon is strange and variable and my main othergame OC from that same canon is quite dark-skinned. The video game I base most of his personality off of -- the 3rd in the series -- is inhabited by several hundred NPCs and, if memory serves, 80% of them are non-white -- the majority being ash-skinned Dunmer, with the occasional gold-skinned Altmer, dark olive Bosmer, chocolate-brown Redguards, catpeople, lizard men, and only THEN do you run into the Imperials (who are like Gondorians, white skin and dark hair), who are portrayed as beurocratic bastards; the Bretons (vaguely Northern French or Irish in appearance) who are poor and stand-offish; and in the Northernmost town of the whole country, you get an inhabitation of Nords, who are basically Viking-like folk -- big dumb and blonde. Sheogorath's appearance in Morrowind (and the previous game) is based on one factor and one factor alone: He looks like the guy who actually created him, Tedders, who is a redhead of Irish descent.
But then, the pups who are dearest to my heart are not at all white. There are no white people in their canon. The Gethenians are short and dark-skinned a la Tibetan/Inuit -- and I might add it took me over a year to find a PB that would fit Therem. Sorve was a happy accident and I still think his skin is too light. And the main character of their canon, Genly, is a black man from Earth. (Who keeps trying to move into my head.) And I do get really, really obnoxious about forrecting anyone who leaves out that detail. I could go on at length bitching out the designers of the German and one edition of the American bookcovers, the first of which has some random white guy on the cover, and the second of which has two faces in a shard of ice which are both far too finely-featured to belong in that book. Le Guin describes them very vividly, right down to having Therem note at one point the strange wiriness of Genly's hair, and Genly being asked repeatedly how his nose got broken.
As far as OC's go, other than the very dark-skinned Pinion, at least half my OCs tend to at the very least shades of olive. Admittedly, that's because I am. It's a pale olive, but I'm not Northern European White. Put me next to one of the Irish girls I went to school with and the difference is immediately noticible. My sister's even a shade or two darker. My grandfather is white only in comparison to an African-American.
As a note of interest, the artist I do work for occasionally, who is Greek, spent his childhood after the age of 9 when he came the America helping his father run a resturant -- which was colored-only. They wouldn't LET him and his father go to white places, because even though they're pale Greek, olive back then wasn't white enough to be white.