fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #2795 ]

⌈ Secret Post #2795 ⌋

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

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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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[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.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Guard: "And what are you? A spic? A gypsy?"
"Not that I know of, sir. Maybe."
"Maybe you got n*** blood in you. You got n** blood in you, Shadow?"
"Could be, sir."

And ahh, this gets the secret to make sense to me. He seems to be unsure of his own racial background, but he's perceived as 'not white.' So it kind of (deliberately) supports any conclusion that you want to make and OP is saying that readers who choose to perceive, "Oh, he's probably just a dark-skinned white guy" are actively working on not perceiving the protagonist as POC. Well, that's totally a fair conclusion then, and I see where OP is coming from.*

*Completely not sarcastic, since I know in a forum like this that can be unclear.

I'd buy that more if it weren't a prison guard purposely heckling a former prisoner. The heckling was what registered to me foremost, so it sounded like a guy mocking another guy about his looks, rather than "Shadow is absolutely not white."

Yeah, I don't necessarily AGREE with the secret now but it at least makes sense to me.

(And seriously, if that was actually Gaiman's answer quoted in the screengrab, it just seems like a condescending British way of saying "You're interrogating the text from the wrong perspective." You can't write a book making every effort to be 'ambiguous' and then retroactively insists that the textually specified 'right' ethnicity is so important that anyone who disagrees read the book improperly.)

Gaiman simply suggests the person read more closely for things they might've missed, which is fair enough since the person directly addresses the issue of the text. I don't see that as condescending.

This is all just reminding me of how far I was into Coraline before I realized that the Other Mother literally had buttons for eyes, and I don't think that ambiguity was intended.

Yeah. Lots of things are "ambiguous" if you miss important details.

This is what I got out of it too. It's not like the guard was expressing any genuine curiosity so I thought he was just trying to be insulting.

Yeah, it's heckling, but I think it's a little weird to discount what the guard's heckling him about, i.e. his racial make up. Even if you restrict heckling to just looks, there's plenty of things the guard could've chosen, the most obvious being levels of attractiveness. But the guard chose race.

More importantly, you have to ask yourself why if it's "just heckling", we need to see the conversation. What's the importance of it? Hint: the importance is that Gaiman is showing us obliquely what Shadow looks like. There'd be no need to include random, trivial conversations, otherwise.

ayrt

Because it shows how Shadow was treated in prison, his nonviolent reactions to being heckled, his large amount of patience, the way he's passive when confronted?

Those were what stuck out to me as important, not his race.

Same, here.

Oh, I agree, it does those things, too. And it also serves as a physical descriptor with a clue about Shadow's race. You might not think it's important, but it's a rare novel that doesn't describe the main character's physical traits, and there's no reason to assume that Gaiman wasn't intending that exchange to do just that.

+1

Seriously, that scene is at its heart a more sophisticated and original version of all those scenes in which the POV character looks in a mirror so that the reader knows what s/he looks like.

Exactly this. That exchange is intended to indicate that Shadow's racial appearance is ambiguous. White is not ambiguous.

Exactly. On a purely technical level, it's just Gaiman trying to avoid the cliche of "Shadow examined his features in the mirror, his olive-dark skin and and sunken eyes blah blah blah". There's only so many ways to tell people what your character looks like. You can tell them directly, have the character see themselves, or see how other characters see the character. This is what Gaiman chose. Not only it is a deliberate choice, it's also a scene that performs multiple functions... which really, all scenes should do if you do them properly.

So saying that it's not about race? Yeeeeahhh, no. It is. It's not only about race, but it's silly to behave like Gaiman meant it to be about xyz and just happened to have race as the topic.

[ SECRET POST #2795 ]

OK, I actually opened the book

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Re: OK, I actually opened the book