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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Cergorach" data-source="post: 8132751" data-attributes="member: 725">I think a lot of us have filled in the skin color of the Dune characters based on the original movie (1984), and the computergames (which imho also took a lot of cue's from the movie). In the same way Nick Furry will always be Samual L. Jackson and 'God' will always be Morgan Freeman in my eyes...As for Herbert not writing inclusively... What do you expect of a white man born in 1920, in the US, with no internet. If not for actually mentioning skin color, how would an African American be different from a white American, not exactly a different culture... Quite a few of my non-white colleague's have very western (first) names, now go a couple of thousand years into the future, how would you even know based on a name or a sci-fi/fantasy culture what kind of skin color someone has without the writer explicitly describing that? I also doubt that someone in the US in 1960-1965 would get any good books on the current culture in other parts of the world. Historic culture, maybe...The question becomes: What do you want to portray? A realistic future society or a current politically correct distribution of skin color? Based on the US or the world? A realistic future society could be an absolute mixture of all skin colors when everyone breeds for a couple of thousand years. Or it could be that in the intervening millennia integration as we now know it fails by accident or design. Heck, the Bene Gesserit could be a bunch a nazi nuns that have been breeding the ubermesch for millennia... My recolllection of the initial six books was that things were not that black & white (pun intended), you can imho pretty much fill in the skin color of the Dune universe in whatever you want, it wouldn't surprise me in the least if the Tleilax were as blue as Smurfs... ;-)Could you cast the important Dune characters in different skin colors, sure, but you better make sure that you have very strong and compelling 'actors'. Imho that would work in movie/television, but a lot less in illustration, as it's just a different illustration of an already established character vs. someone actually playing a character. Imagine someone casting David Hasselhoff as Nick Furry instead of Samual L. Jackson! Oh.. Wait... I cannot unsee that, it's just extra bad that they actually cast DH as NF! But that illustrates my point very well. A famous white actor was cast as Nick Furry, but imho a very strong actor (Samual L. Jackson) made a much better fit for that role in the end...I think that Mophidius doesn't have a challenge due to how Herbert wrote the books, but more due to how the later movies, series, (computer) games made his universe look like his universe was predominantly white. I'm curious how the previous Dune RPG dealt with that...</blockquote>

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