I think it might matter which book you read first, maybe. I read The Hero and the Crown first, and I agree that the society codes as white. White white white. The red hair was just the usual red-haired Mary Sue thing (not that I thought so at the time) really well-done.
When I read The Blue Sword, I thought it was weird how turning the land into the desert lead the people to take up a Middle-Eastern nomadic type lifestyle, but didn't actually perceive them as nonwhite, because Damar had already been coded in my head as Generic European Fantasy. Nomadism is practical in a desert, so they got tanned. I didn't imprint on TBS the way I did on THATC; the latter is one of my favorite comfort reads of all time. I've read THATC a million zillion times. I liked TBS okay.....
Since The Blue Sword was actually written first, I absolutely agree that they're both racially problematic. It's just that reading them in the direction I did, I thought they were problematic only in the absence of colored characters, and I tend to give that a pass (is that fair?) in fantasies without mass transit.
I don't know if this says more about me or the books. It seems a weird enough perspective to be worth mentioning.
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Re: Please clarify
Sat, Jun. 9th, 2007 01:29 am (UTC)When I read The Blue Sword, I thought it was weird how turning the land into the desert lead the people to take up a Middle-Eastern nomadic type lifestyle, but didn't actually perceive them as nonwhite, because Damar had already been coded in my head as Generic European Fantasy. Nomadism is practical in a desert, so they got tanned. I didn't imprint on TBS the way I did on THATC; the latter is one of my favorite comfort reads of all time. I've read THATC a million zillion times. I liked TBS okay.....
Since The Blue Sword was actually written first, I absolutely agree that they're both racially problematic. It's just that reading them in the direction I did, I thought they were problematic only in the absence of colored characters, and I tend to give that a pass (is that fair?) in fantasies without mass transit.
I don't know if this says more about me or the books. It seems a weird enough perspective to be worth mentioning.