My racist imagination, when book characters change colour.

[Hollyday]

The same as most people above, when I'm reading I only have the loosest sense of what the characters might look like. It's only if I've seen an adaptation that I ever have a clear idea of how they look in my head.

Malorie Blackman's series of books starting with Noughts and Crosses is a good one for making you question how you picture certain characters. I've yet to find anyone who wasn't shocked (and then slightly ashamed of themselves) when they eventually work out how the characters look.

 

[Lieju]

I am indifferent about races, but I always have to imagine the main character having red hair.
To the point where I would copy an entire paragraph from the book where they describe the main character's hair colour and change it to red. Then read it again until I'm convinced.

Wait so you imagine non caucasians having red hair?

While red hair is most common in people of European ancestry, at least Asian and Oceanic people can have red hair.

And of course there is the well-guarded secret of changing your haircolour with hairdye.

On topic, it depends on the fiction, but I'm more likely to imagine the characters as white, at least if it takes place in the US or Europe. Partly, I'm sure, because I am white, as are most people I know, but also because in fiction majority of characters tend to be white.

However, when it comes to fantasy, I tend to imagine different kinds of looks, possibly including some colours that don't actually exist.

There's also the matter of gender.

When I first read Lord of the Rings as a kid, I assumed Merry and Pippin were women. I guess I assumed some of the main characters have to be. (I read it in Finnish, where there is no difference in she and he. There have been several books where I mistook the gender of the characters, especially when I was a kid and didn't necessarily know whether foreign names like 'Claire' were men's or women's)


And then there are times when it's sort of hi-jacked by characters I recently saw in something.
You know, you have seen a tv-show or played a video-game and then imagine the charaters of the book as those.

The oddest example I have was when I had played Sonic Adventure 2 a lot, and then went to read Dostojevski.

I couldn't help imagining the characters of 'Crime and punishment' as hedgehogs...

 

[NLS]

I don't remember the name, but this book by Neil Gaiman. I imagined the protagonist as Simon Pegg and his brother as Matt Damon. Halfway through, the book mentions them as both being black. Oh well, I just continued on with my Simon Pegg/Matt Damon combo.

 

[AnnaIME]

I'm usually not aware that I have a picture in my head of what the characters look like. Not until I see an TV/movie adaptation and realise that the actors look all wrong.

I don't remember the name, but this book by Neil Gaiman. I imagined the protagonist as Simon Pegg and his brother as Matt Damon. Halfway through, the book mentions them as both being black. Oh well, I just continued on with my Simon Pegg/Matt Damon combo.

That would be "Anansi Boys". I had a bit of trouble with that one too.

There is a Swedish young adult novel, "Anarkai" by Per Nilsson, where the protagonist is paralysed from the waist down. This is not mentioned until nearing the end of the book, you just think everyone else is acting weird around him.

 

[Esotera]

Reminds me of this [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Turbulent_Term_of_Tyke_Tiler].

If you're imagining yourself as the protagonist, and race hasn't been explicitly stated, then you're likely to just see the character as whatever your race is. I've lived in one of the least ethnically diverse places in the UK for most of my life, so unless stated otherwise I'm going to assume that most fictional characters are white.

Also, back to the book I linked - the author was deliberately misleading to try and form a point about assumptions. That really annoyed me, because everything the character did made it seem like things would not turn out the way they did

Spoiler: spoilered for ending

The main character is actually a girl, you find out in the last chapter.

 

[Aurgelmir]

Hello and welcome to my first thread here at the escapist. I have a thought/question/topic for discussion, and while it makes sense in my mind, I'm struggling to put it into words, so please bear with me. or skip the the TLR question at the end

Some background info.
I'm white (very), I don't consider myself racist, or maybe just a little.

The situation.
I recently started reading a new book series (the aldabreshin compass, its awesome, read it), what makes this book series unique to other books I've read is that every character so far has been dark skinned, be it black, brown or any variation.

The conflict.
Part way through I came to the realization that when I picture them in my head, most characters are a much paler version than described. For example the lead male character is dark skinned with brown wirey hair, and a female "northern barbarian" who appears later in the series is described as having golden brown skin and golden hair. and yet unless I really focus, I picture him as mediterranean, and her as a stereotypical scandinavian ski bunny.

The shocking twist.
Since I realized this I have tried to picture them all as they are described, ending up with an african tribesman look for him, and dark latino look for her. This seems to have given them more life, instead of being my generic fantasy characters, they have become much more real, and I have become more attached to them as characters, so I guess that means the author knew what they were doing.


TLR, the question at hand.
When you read a book, do you mentally picture the characters as they are described, or do they end up looking more like you, or a generic template? If you were to change how you picture them, would it change how you feel about them as a character?

Hehe I had a weird realization like that when reading the book "The To Do List", it's about the author, and he describes himself in the beginning as slightly over weight etc. But for some reason I always pictured him as Marshal from "How I met you mother"... Then later in the book he explains that his mother was from Jamaica, and I go "Wait he isn't white is he?"

So I googled him, and after that I pictured him as he actually looked... but I felt a bit weird that I had made such a different picture in my head

Also I have a tendency to view the main character as the author if there is a picture of the author in the book. Like the main character in the Da Vinci Code looks like Dan Brown when I read the book

 

[EmperorSubcutaneous]

Some people mentioned the Earthsea novels (great books, by the way)...The main problem with LeGuin in this case being that she usually doesn't mention what her characters look like outside of a few snippets scattered through the book. Someone might assume the characters were white (because, let's face it, dark-skinned protagonists are sadly rare in speculative fiction) and create their own imaginary appearance for them, then be forced to go back and change that appearance when they learn the truth, after having become attached to the original one in their minds.

I had that problem with another of her books, The Dispossessed. It's about an alien race that's related to humans (like almost all alien races are in her Hainish books), so I assumed they looked more or less like normal humans, like all the other races I'd met in her other books. Then, halfway through the book, I learned that they had grey skin and were covered in hair. This was so jarring to me, and it changed my mental image of the characters so much, that I had to just continue picturing them as I originally had in order to not completely shatter my immersion in the story.

 

[sky14kemea]

I do that all the time. o_o Sometimes I even forget a character was meant to be black until the book mentions it again.

I don't think it's racist, at least not consciously. If you were raised in a predominantly white environment, you'll probably end up doing that with your books more than people who were raised in a mixed race environment.

Something like that, anyway... >.> Don't quote me on it or anything.

 

[Azure-Supernova]

Happens to me all the time. I've also got a habit of randomly assigning pre-existingt character's a role in my head too. When I was first reading Artemis Fowl (jeez, more than 10 years ago now ) I was also watching Shaman King. Despite the fact that he is described to the contrary and is supposed to have an Irish accent, everytime I pictured Artemis I saw this guy:

Spoiler: Tao Ren

And in my head Butler was played by:

Spoiler: Cobra Bubbles

My mind just blotted out their physical descriptions and filled it with similar characters, personality wise.

 

[OneCatch]

I do this all the time, Its easy to forget things about the description of a character when the author doesnt keep reminding you.

Ive imagined characters the wrong hair colour and the wrong skin colour plenty.

I'm the same.
When I first read Philip Pullman's 'His Dark Materials' trilogy, I imagined the armoured bears as big Black Bears, when they're clearly described multiple times as looking like Polar Bears!

Hello and welcome to my first thread here at the escapist. I have a thought/question/topic for discussion, and while it makes sense in my mind, I'm struggling to put it into words, so please bear with me. or skip the the TLR question at the end

The very fact that you seem to have worried about this pretty much precludes you from being a racist!
In terms of books, I think that the freedom to come up with your own imagined view of everything means that there are always going to be discrepancies. That's one of the reasons that watching a film before reading the book it's adapted from can be a really bad idea - and why adapted films often cause fan-rage.

In terms of subconscious behaviour, I do think there's an ingrained tendency for us to act somewhat xenophobically:

In most surveys of attractiveness, people tend to be attracted to people closer to their own racial group. There are exceptions, but broadly speaking that is the case.
We also often find it more different to differentiate between multiple people who aren't of our ethnic group. This has led to the old racist "They all look the same" thing, but it's our perception that's flawed. It's nothing to do with some racial groups actually looking homogeneous - it's the fact that our brains just are less able to tell the difference.

To a degree (and this is something of a controversial and unsubstantiated opinion) I think that it's likely we're innately socially prejudiced against people that look different. Not in a big way, just a slight undercurrent of it.
It would explain a lot of racist and xenophobic behaviour that we've historically engaged in, and it would also have served a useful purpose in evolutionary terms, in pre-civilised times (in terms of territorial fighting between tribes, or even fighting other hominid offshoots)

Disclaimer: That's not to say that we should engage in racist behaviour because it's somehow 'natural' - so's eating raw meat and crapping in front of everyone.
If anything, we should accept these tendencies, and then try all the harder to escape them. After all, we aren't living in caves any more!

 

[surg3n]

I think that I imagine characters looking like people I know, like subconciously fill in the blanks based on what info I have. Often, when I watch a movie adaptation it really annoys me when the character looks drastically different. For instance I read Oktober by Stephen Gallagher a while ago, and tried to watch the TV adaptation and just couldn't identify with the lead character in the same way I did with the book... in the end I gave up watching it, I could barely even correlate it with the book, as if the story was completely different. I suppose that's down to perception, but it doesn't happen all the time - like The Green Mile, the characters in that were pretty much ideal matches for the book... maybe that's Stephen King, writing for adaptations like so many authors do these days. Hell, some authors should just tell us which actors would play which character, save disapointment later .

Incidently, Oktober is a great book from 1988, has a nice dark plot and some decent hacker sub-plot stuff which I found really interesting. Recommended if you spot it for a few bucks.