Books tagging update

[starlady]

I have added a "books: chromatic protagonist(s)" tag, since the clear response on the poll I posted was that people would find it useful. I am slowly retagging all the appropriate posts with this tag, but that process is not complete yet.

There are a few things I want to note. One of them is that I am defining "protagonist" as a POV character, and another is that I am attempting to take a catholic definition of "chromatic." Whether or not the characters would consider their status as non-white relevant, we do as readers, and I am attempting to use the tag in that mindset.

One problem with this is epic fantasy. I don't plan, at this point, to use the tag on the Inda books, for example, because although there are occasional chapters narrated by chromatic characters, the culture of the main protagonist, Inda, and his friend, is not marked as chromatic. I'm also not planning to use the tag for Michelle West's House War books, for example, although if future books return to emphatically chromatically marked cultures such as Annagar, I probably will.

Another problem is that the tag puts me in the place of judging who counts as chromatic. There's no way around that, and although I'm fairly confident that 85% of these decisions will be fairly obvious, there will be that other 15% that are ambiguous and that I may well get wrong. So, if you have questions or concerns about my decision to use the tag or not, please do let me know, and I will certainly listen.

Comments

[recessional]

*chinhand* What are you considering "marked as chromatic"? (just so I know what the category entails per your tag).

[starlady]

Here was my thought process:

"Q1. What do I know about the worldbuilding of Marlovan society? A: They are descendants of the Vikings from way back when.
"Q2. Do I remember it ever being emphasized that Inda and his relatives, etc, aren't white-skinned? A: No.
"Conclusion: Don't tag it."

But I could be wrong or misremembering or having been oblivious or having been oblivious because of society's white-biased blinders. I am not trying to make this much more complicated than that above diagnostic, but even something that simple can have errors, and also, yes, epic fantasy is complicated. Augh!

[recessional]

No, don't worry about it! I was just actually curious - as usual, these things tag back to my own work, and especially in places where my POC societies are the DEFAULT (and thus may not have something easy to visually smack society-biased-white-blinders with), I'm always looking for ways to mark that aren't obnoxious, you know?

[starlady]

Eons later, I refound this post as I was writing up a Wednesday reading post talking about Cold Steel, in which basically everyone is non-white except a few random Celts. A reader of the first draft of the first book who is POC told me that Elliott sent the ms to him, and he advised her that to compensate for society-biased-white-blinders, she should make mentions of characters' skin colors way more obvious/frequent than she initially thought.

[recessional]

That's actually quite useful, as it's something I've been frowning at in Signifier as I start to move into the parts that take place in Ethala rather than Qadeen territory. You'd think that since I've given a book's worth of establishing Ethala as PoC via Rowan and everyone's assumptions of Moira's origins that this would carry over, but frankly the SFF reading community has not given me high hopes of that sort of thing lately.