A problem with adaptation. Here's a shot from the sci-fi miniseries Legend of Earthsea. What is the issue here? There's Ged, front and center, looking like Pippin's older brother. That's not how Ged is supposed to look. Ged is "red-brown", "like most folk of the Archipelago" (somewhere in chapter 3) His buddy Vetch is "black-brown", as he's from the East Reaches. The only white people with blonde hair in the book are from the Kargad Empire, the freaking barbarians! (More examples of how the movie fucked up, Danny Glover was cast as Ogion the Silent (A Gontsman, so he should be more reddish-brown than blackish brown), and the two women are from the Kargad Empire. Apparently, Asian is the new Scandinavian) Le Guin rips into the movie here, and it's better written than what I could do.
Race is very interesting in this book. Can you think of any other fantasy novel that doesn't have "a honky named Bob or Joe or Bill" as the protagonist? What about a fantasy novel that doesn't have everyone be white? Everyone in the Lord of the Rings is white, with the exception of the Southernmen and Easterlings, both of which are complete barbarians in thrall to Sauron.
Fuck, even people that shouldn't be white are. Elves? Always white, or in Avatar's case, blue, even when their culture is clearly Asian, Native American, or South American. Why? I don't know. What I do know is that I really like Le Guin's choice to have a protagonist of color. I had to catch myself many times while reading and imagining the story and say, "No, Ged is not a whitey." I like that because it forces me to read with greater focus and attention--unlike other fantasy novels, I couldn't slip into complacency. That attention to race made me focus more clearly on other aspects of the novel as well.
Hmm, this is a very good point, Matt. I read Ursula's article and though I found her a bit whiny (for good reasons, I must admit), it is unfair of the powers that be in television to make the characters totally unlike Ursula imagined them. One couldn't expect a SciFi (or SyFy now) miniseries to be a perfect reincarnation of an infamous fantasy book trilogy, but they totally missed the mark of the books' purpose, as Ursula says.
ReplyDeleteShe also brings up a good point about whites being a minority in the world now and who's to say that in the future they won't be even less of a minority. However, I do have to bring up the point that a large majority of people that read her books are going to be white, pasty males. Perhaps that is why so many other fantasy writers stick with that type for their main characters. Maybe it's not the most accurate portrayal, nor the most unprejudiced, but it's safe. As a child, when I drew pictures of people, I always used the peach crayon for their skin and blue for their eyes. I could only draw people that looked like me. I guess what I am saying here is that I understand why SciFi or other writers go for the white male character, though I am not saying that it is acceptable.
For me as I was reading the book and trying to picture the people with darker skin, like you Matt, I had to constantly remind myself they were not white, because that is how I kept picturing them in my head. But how can I not when I am white myself and when every wizard I've ever seen is white?
Kudos to Ursula for attempting to be more aware of other races and giving them more credit. It's just too bad that our white-centric world wasn't/isn't ready for that.