I know white authors have a habit of describing dark skin tones with food or beverages and I don’t want to do that.
Cocoa, caramel, coffee, etc. I’m not much of a fiction writer but I am running a dnd campaign with POC and don’t want to be a stereotype lol
Edit: various soil types is a promising contender added by my partner
I’m going to be real with you I write a lot and I don’t think I’ve written somebody’s skin color into a visual description in like 10 years
even if I’m kind of on autopilot and I go for a simple word like “dark” I’m almost certainly backspacing and trying again
My expectation is that if you don’t at least imply skin color some large percentage of readers will default to assuming all your characters are white. Default people and all that bullshit.
“Swarthy men of the east” hours
I argued witj so many fucking supposed lord of the rings nerds when rings of power came out. Yeah the show sucks but it ain’t cause of black elves or dwarves. Tolkien never ever said they werent or couldn’t be. These same supposed purists are okay with Aragorn and Boromir having beards despite that being specifically said to not be the case in the books. The descendants of numenor cant grow facial hair, he wrote that.
He spilled a lot more ink on the easterlings and southerners than ehat made it to books as well. He was attempting to bridge the gap between the mythologies he was working off and what implications that can lead to. He died trying to figure out what the orcs were and was uncomfortable with hos prior works having them be more or less fully evil, lord of the rings itself humanizes orcs to an extent, it was a step in a good direction. This was cause he was catholic and figured all souls can be saved. He was at least aware of these issues and was trying to fix them but died before doing so.
The Tolkien Beastiary was unfortunately published after JRR died. In that work, the “evil races” are said to be fallen “good races.” So just like Gollum used to be a Hobbit, trolls used to be ents, orcs were elves, and goblins were dwarves. The bestiary explains these groups were tortured and sealed away in darkness, which turned them into monsters.
I’ve always considered this to be the most canonical answer as to what evil races are in LotR, along with Tolkien’s notes about how we only see the military forces of Sauron. We don’t see the civilian orcs and goblins living elsewhere.
The Tolkien Bestiary is considered absolute garbage as a resource. I have a copy and it is. There isnt really any solid answer and we dont only see goblins as the military forces of sauron at all. That is explicit in the two towers when orcs from morder, isengard and Moria are in deep dispute over what to do with Merry and Pippin. The orcs from mordor wanna bring the Hobbits back to the nazgul.om the other side of the anduin that Legolas shot down, Saruman’s Uruk Hai wanna bring them to Isengard and the Moria guya were just out for revenge and wanted proof of a few kills so they could go home. Their is also the orcs in the tower of Cirith Ungol talking about just fuckimg off into the mountains to just be normal bandits instead of being wrapped up in all this.
There are issues with how the creation myth written in Ainulindale works and your explanation as well. It just doesmt seem to be how the world works
But check out this dope ass dwarf! It had such cool pictures!
The art slaps. No one has complaints about the art
Was not really aware of this; thanks for pointing it out!
Also, Rings of Power season 2 at least starts delving into some actual Silmarillion material, since I guess Tolkien’s estate finally loosened their grip on some of the rights. It’s still streaming slop, but they’re getting into the blue wizards storyline, along with good ol’ Annatar
Which blue wizards storyline? Tolkien had 2 and never settled on one. I’m at a point where even the absolute masterpieces of film that are the Peter Jackson trilogy frustrated me as a book guy. They’re great movies. Bad adaptations. Give me the Xena crew and a 25 episode season per book, and I mean that in the sense that LOTR is 6 books, so 2 seasons for fellowship, 2 for towers etc and that would have crushed it.
It’s not the version where one of them started a cult. Yet. That may get incorporated in a future season. Basically they just introduced an evil wizard character that the showrunners have confirmed is one of the Istari, and the timeline matches up with the blue wizards, set in Rhûn. Also Tom Bombadil. And an entwife.
…You’d hate it.
Yeah, id hate it. But for the right reasons dammit! I’m the guy who told stuffy academics the reason Legolas can see so far despite the curvature of the esrth is probably for the same reason elves caniterally.sail a ship beyond the curvature of the earth. Cause it was made curved in the sinking of numenor so.that only elves could sail.the straight path to Valinor and men couldn’t try to attack and dethrone god again. If they can sail a boat ignoring the curvature of the earth im.pretty sure seeing beyond the horizon isnt out of play. The other was thar Saruman reverse engineered Gandalf’s fireworks to create the explosives used at the battle of helmet deep. He had inside guys in the Shire and a large thematic thing is bad guys cant create and can only corrupt the creation of others, part of being evil is kinda the choice to do so and that is often literal. Tiny details but they are my scholarly contributions that were incredibly low hanging fruit that got missed.
My top fantasy projects if Hollywood would just give my half baked ideas a chance are a lord of the rings tv series and a 12 hour total run time Superman trilogy that spans the entire 20th century. Thr rest of my dead movie ambitions are making a series of Coen bros inspired comedies about various CIA operations
from a Tolkienhead to another: keep fighting the good fight
It comes to something when you are more racist than a 19th century english Catholic who was born in South Africa
I believe its consider proper educate to describe all skin tones now a days so you don’t treat anything as a default.
I guess that’s fair, I just enjoy giving very detailed descriptions of how my characters look. Even with white characters I am giving detail on the level of paleness, whether they have more of a blueish or pinkish undertone, tanness, etc. Might be overdoing it but I think my players appreciate it.
“The veins in his flaccid, fish-belly thighs resembled a road map of the Great Loop of Dallasfortworthia”
Im so glad I can draw. I just draw them
Deeply jealous of that ability
Ill draw stuff for you. I would like to get an excuse to do fantasy art, that shit is FUN. I dont normally work in color but I just started painting gundam models and upped my paint game big time. So it could be a good chance to try it out on a flat surface
Are you deadass? Like for free?
Yeah. No problem. I like drawing but never know what to draw
Hell yeah let me get a description Character is named Ahura
Clothing looks like this but no hat or weapon
Thank you so much comrade 😘
Can you describe the tattoos? Cause that’s a drawing on a drawing which merits it’s own description. What is the vibe of the overall story as well? The more I know about this guy the better.
Everything you described is shit I reslly like drawing btw. Love drawing eyes, love drawing hair and loce drawing clothing. You are good at describing, I think I could pull together a sketch, but if I know won’t he guy is and what he’s about and how much of that the players should be aware of at a glance helps. You can DM the rest but the more I know the better. The more detail i can draw from the better.
Based on your current description the vibe im feeling is sort of a thick sketchy outline ala Yoji Shinkawa of metal gear fame where I can leave a bit to the imagination combined with more stylized shading and then a thin washy paint layer. An old school dark fantasy vibe but a bit more surrealized, if im off base lemme know.