Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Incenjucar" data-source="post: 1695513" data-attributes="member: 6182">Ethnicity tends to be hard to do properly in fantasy, and especially in art these days.In regards to fantasy, it takes some effort to explain the migratory habits of a culture to allow for realistic ethnic diversity, without setting up a really nasty situation (Especially since so many cultures enslaved each other).  With fantasy races, the primary non-evil ones are white, largely because Tolkein was trying to write a European mythology.  Finally, there tends to be a habit amoungst writers to focus on their own culture, or a culture they're fascinated with, or one that fits the medium.  Someone writing about a desert setting will usually have faux-Arabs.  Someone writing about samurai are going to have faux-Asians.  (In fact, my favorite comic book is written by an 'African-American', but most of his characters are white, because he's basing much of it on D&D and Indiana Jones and Anime) Someone writing basic fantasy will usually assume "Europe".  Now, me, personally, I'm busy making up my own ethnicities, like the jungle dwellers who're all but bleach white because they cover their skin and tend to be nocturnal, who live near a people that have very dark skin, because they do almost everything in daylight, and tend to go bare-skinned because of the heat (though they do wars at night, in full armor, by torch light).  My fantasy cultures have a different method of variety, as one type is semi-reptilian, and has any variety of skin patterns and hues, another kind is usually a middling tan, with a few exceptions, but their hair/feathers come in great variety.  Another race is semi-insectoid, so they have chitin differences.As for art, you have the fact that they're usually trying to draw based on the fantasy sources available, as above shows, and, an interesting problem, these days you're not supposed to know much about differences between 'races'.  I, for instance, was raised in a heavily liberal area (A tourist-filled coastal city), so I can't so much as tell a Scott from an Irishman, or a Polish person from a Swede or a Norwegian.  I can just -barely- guess if someone is Japanese or Chinese or Malaysian, but only if I have those few options.  If they're Korean, Hmong, Vietnamese, Laosian, Thai, Tibetan, or any of the rest, I have no bloody idea.  And since almost any racial group will get effing ticked at you for confusing them with another, I can't safely do any trial by error.  This is the same kind of thing many artists have to worry about unless they're in a more laid-back area.</blockquote>

Verification