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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   28225 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 23, 2023

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Le Guin has this problem, in general , as also shown in A Wizard of Earthsea. Where, in every badly made adaptation the protagonist is made white instead of the intended black. I also imagined the protagonist white when I read them as a child.

Her problem is she is to good of a writer to make truly progressive works. "Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto."

instead of the intended black

Wasn't his skin bronze or red-brown or something like that? I've always pattern-matched him to some sort of a Mediterranean dude in my childhood, darker than what we are accustomed to seeing today due to a more outdoors-oriented life of an islander.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2004/feb/09/sciencefictionfantasyandhorror.ursulakleguin

UKL: I see Ged as dark brownish-red, and all the other people in the book (except the Kargs and Serret) as brown or brown-red, to very dark or black (Vetch). In other words, in the Archipelago "people of color" are the norm, white people are an anomaly. Vice versa on the Kargish islands. That much is pretty clear in the books. How dark you want Ged to be is pretty much up to you! Why not? Readers rule, OK?

I read this as more Polynesian than Mediterranean, but unsurprisingly, it sounds like it’s not supposed to map straight onto real demographics.

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