Lois’s answer to “Are there any Black folx in your books? A friend asked me this recently, and I couldn't think of an…” > Likes and Comments
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@ CV -- Mm, yes, but He is traditionally nicknamed "the white god", which is His emblematic theological color, not a reference to a hypothetical skin color on a body He does not have in the first place. (Most people know the gods are bodiless, taught it in... whatever you'd call Sunday School there. The learned divines have to constantly fight the human tendency to anthropomorphize in their flocks.) The god's white is more the color of all light wave lengths combined, though the 5-gods-world does not yet have those optical physics. The others being spring sky blue, summer green, autumn orange, and winter gray.
I have so far managed to resist using the term "green goddess", but it's been a temptation...
Whatever the array, distribution, and proportion of skin tones there may be in Pen's fantasy world, keep in mind that they would all have completely different social histories than in our own.
Ta, L.
That theological point had escaped me: so the Bastard is not white-skinned, just as His Mother is not blue-skinned.
Agree about the social history of skin tone, much as some other countries in this world don’t have the injustice based on that, which we in the US have created.
@ CV -- no god has a skin in the first place, so, yeah. They can appear to humans with Vision in a flickering multiplicity of illusory guises, but just what depends on the needs, capacities, and prior mental furniture of the human.
Like the six blind men and the elephant, no human can ever see more than a fraction of a god. (But multiply the elephant's aspects by some large power of 10.)
Ta, L.
An advantage of writing and reading fantasy and sf is that we can take a break from some of the tedious preoccupations of the world that we know, and get a new set of preoccupations to think about for a change. I mean, in my mundane daily life I’m not at all preoccupied with the implications of death magic, or the conflict between Quintarians and Quadrenes.
Aren't the Cedonians and Orbans darked skinned? That is one of the main reasons Pen stands out so much.
Kalen: Relatively dark-skinned, but I think not black. I get the impression that Cedonia corresponds roughly to Greece in our world, or at least to some Mediterrranean country.
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@ CV -- Mm, yes, but He is traditionally nicknamed "the white god", which is His emblematic theological color, not a reference to a hypothetical skin color on a body He does not have in the first place. (Most people know the gods are bodiless, taught it in... whatever you'd call Sunday School there. The learned divines have to constantly fight the human tendency to anthropomorphize in their flocks.) The god's white is more the color of all light wave lengths combined, though the 5-gods-world does not yet have those optical physics. The others being spring sky blue, summer green, autumn orange, and winter gray.I have so far managed to resist using the term "green goddess", but it's been a temptation...
Whatever the array, distribution, and proportion of skin tones there may be in Pen's fantasy world, keep in mind that they would all have completely different social histories than in our own.
Ta, L.
That theological point had escaped me: so the Bastard is not white-skinned, just as His Mother is not blue-skinned.Agree about the social history of skin tone, much as some other countries in this world don’t have the injustice based on that, which we in the US have created.
@ CV -- no god has a skin in the first place, so, yeah. They can appear to humans with Vision in a flickering multiplicity of illusory guises, but just what depends on the needs, capacities, and prior mental furniture of the human.Like the six blind men and the elephant, no human can ever see more than a fraction of a god. (But multiply the elephant's aspects by some large power of 10.)
Ta, L.
An advantage of writing and reading fantasy and sf is that we can take a break from some of the tedious preoccupations of the world that we know, and get a new set of preoccupations to think about for a change. I mean, in my mundane daily life I’m not at all preoccupied with the implications of death magic, or the conflict between Quintarians and Quadrenes.
Aren't the Cedonians and Orbans darked skinned? That is one of the main reasons Pen stands out so much.
Kalen: Relatively dark-skinned, but I think not black. I get the impression that Cedonia corresponds roughly to Greece in our world, or at least to some Mediterrranean country.
... which is why I think the Bastard's illustration on The Physicians of Vilnoc should probably not have white hands; they're not the Bastard's hands, but the hands of everyone who does His work, and thus, mostly not white.