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
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Follow the advice in this thread but then describe the white characters like this
Comrade of mine in the campaign would catch this bit immediately (but also find it very funny)
If its dnd cant you just make references to places within your world?
Lmfao
Hell yeah
RGBA hex code
oklch is the superior format.
thanks for the rabbit hole
I didn’t know this was a thing.
Transparent? I guess a bit.
Ursula Le Guin described Ged as “copper-brown” in Earthsea
Ursula Le Guin is the first person to look toward whenever you have a writing question. Absolutely goated
Damn that one is actually perfect for one of my characters, thanks
Metals are pretty metal
And every adaptation to film or tv since then has made him chalk white
I bet there’s a soil colour for every kind of human“His pert nipples were the color of sandy loam”
literally me frfr
This might just be my new favorite emoji we have
Looking up creatingblackcharacters on tumblr and their website. Their whole thing is about stuff like this.
Nice, thanks
I was on my phone and it was late when I recommended last night. But here is the link to the website apart from tumblr https://creatingblackcharacters.straw.page/
You could try minerals.
Lmao, one of my players is a geologist. This would be a very good one for him specifically
Just keep in mind that the same mineral can sometimes be a multitude of colors. For instance, gypsum can be clear, white, brown, orange, yellow, or green. Fluorite can be basically any color.
Good to know, I’d probably get called out for it if I messed it up lol
I feel like I saw something like this in a CRPG character creator, but I can’t remember which game it was. Alabaster was one of the super pale
colors.i wanna say one of the recent(ish) divinity games did this?
I think you’re right - Original Sin 1 probably?
yup! it may have been both OS1 and 2 thinking on it.
Onyx and Alabaster skin tone do occasionally popup in literary arts.
Wait…does that player work at a restaurant despite being a geologist? Cause if so, that’s my co-worker, if no weird coincidence. He’s a big dnd guy
Nah but it be like that, he installs sound systems
For sure a different guy. Mine has like a weird lack of music knowledge. He just never got into any music in general. He makes an amazing blank slate to show my weird experimental stuff to
ooh I really like this going to steal this idea
https://soils.uga.edu/files/2016/08/Munsell.pdf
Using the munsell scale in ways never seen before lmao
Hahahaha holy shit this is an incredible crossover
“Their gleyed complexion indicated prolonged period without oxygen; I’d finally caught the autoerotic asphyxiation bandit”
The Army Painter did this with their Fanatics range.
“He resembled one of the absolute gigachads who booted the French out of Haiti”
“He looks like he floats like a butterfly and stings like a bee”
Lowkey fire and might get used
I was thinking of sable, mink, etc, but I’m not sure that would be appreciated.
❤️
I dunno, maybe I’m overthinking it, but I worry if this sort of comparison to historical figures might put expectations on Black people to live up to the greatness of their similes instead of just being themselves, as if “Virtue Is Stored In The Melanin”, you know. I guess it depends on the specifics of how the similes are used, though, since it’s pretty different to similize a fictional hero from a fantasy roleplay than a real person.
You can move the description away from the character and into their relationship with an environment or their attire.
“blended into/stood out from the pale walls of the room” or something like that.
Let’s you kill 2 birds with one stone too
That’s smart, I’ll definitely make use of that
Nerissa’s skin tone was somewhere in the valley between the two types of dark skin you tend to see in commercials—you know the kinds. I mean, go lighter than her, and you’re talking about the sort of “presidential brown” type of actress you can imagine selling you a goddam toothbrush or menstrual pads or incontinence undies or something along those lines; the same type of skin that you might see in a very nicely-done photo shoot used by a college to tout its “modernity” and “diversity” without doing “too much.” Or go darker than her, and you’re talking about the sort of honest-to-God literally black woman where a monochrome image filter would not change her appearance an iota; the sort of skin you might find in the odd European fashion magazine here and there because it’s oh-so “striking” and “against the norm” to depict clothes on skin so all-caps BLACK, in parentheses “(because such a fine Nilotic spezimen ist so exotisch.)” But our dear Nerissa was neither so comparatively light nor so absolutely dark: in the valley, as said, her skin tone was the sort of unremarkable dark-brown that especially on women in the USA tends not to lend itself to a career number of acting roles nor a career number of modeling jobs. But I guess not everybody can live up to their childhood dreams, anyways. “A shitty job is better than no job. C’est la vie,” Nerissa would often say during the overtime late shifts, always with a grit of her teeth.
I dunno is that something
This reads like something I’d see in one of Stephen Kings coked out novels lmao
Well, the most famous dark skinned character in India is described as having the complexion of “the dark of rain clouds” (Krishna).
I recently heard about a site that is supposed to have a lot of good advice about this: https://writingwithcolor.com/
I have not actually read anything on it yet.
If we’re talking D&D you could use equipment as a comparison (i.e. leather, hide, burlap, copper, bronze, wood).
I know being descriptive and painting a compelling picture is part of good writing but I can’t help but feel skin tone is usually irrelevant. But this is coming from the guy who didn’t mention the race of his partner to his therapist for almost two years and only did so because I was talking about thanksgiving with his family.
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
The Tolkien Bestiary is considered absolute garbage as a resource.
But check out this dope ass dwarf! It had such cool pictures!
The art slaps. No one has complaints about the art
He was at least aware of these issues and was trying to fix them but died before doing so.
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
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
- tall old man with copper-brown skin
- very thin (but you can’t tell under except for the details in his face and hands because of his dress)
- he has large dark-oak brown eyes that carry a sense of wisdom and power
- he wears a sky blue achaemenid Persian dress patterned with intricate white swirls like misty clouds, gold bangles, and gold earrings
- he is covered head to toe in gold swirling tattoos that move across his leathery skin
- his white hair is long and wavy with a central braid that falls down his back while keeping most of his hair loose
- his similarly white beard is braided (in the persian style)
- shoes would be simple sandals
Clothing looks like this but no hat or weapon
Thank you so much comrade 😘
