fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #2795 ]

[ SECRET POST #2795 ]

⌈ Secret Post #2795 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

01.

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02.

[Law & Order: Criminal Intent]

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03.

[Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers]

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04.

[Jeeves and Wooster]

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05.

[Yahtzee/Zero Punctuation]

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06.

[Markiplier]

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07.

[Jackie Chan Adventures]

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08.

[The Parent Trap]

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09.

[Alexander]

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10.

[Starsky and Hutch]

Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 012 secrets from Secret Submission Post #399.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

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He didn't have a personality to me in the book, so he stayed a vague no-face humanshaped blur with no race to me.

Did he have a specific race? I didn't notice.

This is exactly how it was for me too. I don't usually think much about a character's appearance when reading, so it's always jarring for me to see them interpreted in a visual medium.

Thirded. In general, I'm just not a visual person, so I tend to not put that much thought into how things look and I don't really 'see' books in my head.

IIRC, it's implied he's a mix, but I can't remember if the book specifies what. However, a prison guard calls him the n-word very early on.

If this many people missed it, it might have been the way it was written was ambiguous or something.

Do you know where in?

How many is "this many", though? A few people on FS, and one tumblr user? Lots of people have mediocre to poor reading comprehension skills, unfortunately. If you combine that with the usual "everybody is white" assumption, you'd end up exactly the same place as the tumblr user: Shadow is white and there was no evidence to the contrary.

If this many people missed it, it might have been the way it was written was ambiguous or something.

Nope. People "miss" obvious descriptions of race all the time. Which is why there was such a shitstorm when the Hunger Games movie came out and people were shocked that Rue was black, even though her skin color is explicitly described when she's introduced in the book.

Another book I like has a character described as having black skin -- those exact words -- and the author said that she got tons of questions from readers asking her if she meant "hair." Because it's so easy to typo "hair" as "skin." The keys are like right next to each other.

That wasn't an obvious description. There's a difference between the narrative actually pointing it out, and a character that's already racist and confrontational trying to get a rise out of another.

nayrt

I guess it depends on one's meaning of "obvious". Nowhere does the book come out and say "Shadow is a mixed race man" or "Shadow's not white". It just gives you all the information that points to Shadow not looking white, with additional information that suggests his mother is black or also mixed race.

It's kind of like describing a small furry animal that has pointy ears and a tail and purrs and enjoys tuna and naps in sunny spots and having people go, "BUT IT'S NOT OBVIOUS THAT IT'S A CAT."

Many people also missed that Prue and Cinna in 'The Hunger Games' were black.

The books didn't say anything about what race Cinna was.

Who is Prue?

Really? Because The Hunger Games explicitly states that Rue is non-white, and yet many people were surprised when she was cast as such in the film.

Yeah, but I thought that was specifically contradicted shortly after?

Not exactly. He is being questioned about his race with someone (above quote says it was a prison guard or interrogator of some sort), as they think he might have "something other than white" 'mixed in' (i.e. black, Roma, Native American - though certainly not in those words). Shadow never really confirms or denies it either way, because he doesn't even know who his father is.

Yeah, see below, I looked at the passage and I get it now.

(Though that's still confusing because he did know his mother and I thought from later in the book that his mother was POC???)

As far as I remember (but it's been a while since I've read the book and I lost my copy ages ago, so I may be wrong), Shadow's mother is never explicitly described, though there are implications that she is black (someone else mentioned sickle-cell anemia on this thread). That, or she is vaguely described in a similar way to Shadow (as in not white, but we don't really know what she actually is or may be).

Shadow knows who/what his mother is, but doesn't know what his father is, and more importantly he's trying to just not respond to the prison guard, anyway. He doesn't quite know what he is because he doesn't know who his father is, but what he does know (his mother), he doesn't care to tell.

I see this as a difference between what Shadow knows and what Shadow says. He's clearly trying to not engage the guard, yet he knows that not answering at all will only make the guard angry. So he's keeping his replies short as neutral as possible.

And when someone who's both 1) racist and 2) in a position of power over you asks if you have "n*gger blood", then yeah, maybe you don't blurt out "My mother is black!" You give a noncommittal answer and hope the guy gets bored and quits harassing you... which is exactly what Shadow does.

I understand conceptually why a character would behave that way but as far as I remember this is the only time when Shadow comment on his own racial background at all (either in his internal monologue or in conversation). So I'm not sure what the text is accomplishing by withholding that information.

To me, it accomplishes showing the audience that Shadow's not an idiot. It enforces what's said about him earlier-- that he's kept his head done, down his time in the most pragmatic way possible, that he doesn't have an easily riled temper and he's smart enough to know when he's being played, and that all he wants is to get out of jail and see his wife again. All very useful things to get across to the reader.

I'm not sure what you mean by "withholding that information", though. If you mean Shadow's race, the information hasn't been withheld, it's right there and in other places in the text. It's just not explicit. Not everything the author tells an audience is explicit and out there for everyone to see. Some knowledge is knowledge you have to pay attention in order to appreciate. The way I look at it is, a lot of people will miss those clues and assume Shadow's white. Those are precisely the same people who might stop and wonder why they made that assumption, and they might find that exploration interesting.

Or... they might get angry and defensive about it. And that is also interesting.

(no subject)

likeadeuce - 2014-08-29 03:25 (UTC) - Expand

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(Anonymous) - 2014-08-29 08:21 (UTC) - Expand

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likeadeuce - 2014-08-29 11:47 (UTC) - Expand

(no subject)

(Anonymous) - 2014-08-29 22:18 (UTC) - Expand

The prison guard doesn't call him the n-word, he asks if he has "n***** blood" in him, and Shadow gives a noncommittal answer.

Actually he asks if Shadow has any n*** blood in him but it's definitely a conversation that implies Shadow looks to be mixed race. (I just pulled out my copy of the book and looked for the conversation).

The other thing I noticed is how the description specifically pointed out what other people looked like. Low-Key's shaved-short orange-blonde hair; Iceman with blue eyes and white-blonde hair; short guy with a port-wine birthmark, pale hands, watery hazel eyes; the guard with sandy blonde hair and a sandy blonde face, Sam Fetisher who was the blackest black man Shadow had ever seen.

If he were white, don't you think the narrative would've said? Instead there's all this ambiguity. I think the ambiguity in and of itself shows that he's not white.

He really was quite bland; The reason I picked up the book was because he was a mixed race protagonist, but I couldn't finish.

same. That book was blah, the characters were blah, nothing was memorable except maybe the INCREDIBLY OBVIOUS murder mystery.

I'm somewhat similar. I'm kind of face-blind, and I don't really tend to imagine characters physically much at all. They're more shapes to me, bundles of impressions and size and movement.

Possibly by an odd coincidence, then, that meant that my default impression of Shadow was dark, but for a completely different reason. Between his name, the fact that he's kind of gloomy, the very noir style of the book, and possibly the fact that I may have partially registered the question of his race early on, there were times when I was imagining him almost as a literal shadow, a dark human shape at the center of the narrative. I think I would actually have been surprised if he was white, because by about half-way in I really did not associate him with light colours at all.

Which, given who he turns out to be, is mildly ironic, really.

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