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Consumptive pallor; not just for Victorian maidens
One knee-jerk reaction, some brie and a mug of some mint mixture green tea later I’m going to talk about something else entirely. This post on ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
bad_rpers_suck about the apparent prevalence of pale skinned characters got me thinking, in specific about a handful of my own original characters.
I seem to have a bit of a preference for writing about pale skinned characters when I look at it. For the most part the original characters that are human are of a pale and sickly bent, even if that sickness is more emotional rather than physical. They tend to be the sort of gangly creatures that would easily enough fit into any of the offices along the Strand, where they suited and booted and of course existent in this current British reality. I suppose it’s a case of write what you know in that situation. If you’ve ever taken a walk along the Strand during a lunch-hour or some such you can easily see what I’m talking about. So in that case it’s drawing from experience, and being in Britain I’ve a tendency to write about somewhat British characters to a certain extent.
To a certain degree I’m probably also prey to the exoticism of the Western world, the wonderful vagaries of skin tone or eye colour and so on. I like that sort of thing so I tend to write about it. If someone set me a challenge to write an action-packed drama set somewhere in the Tiger economies I’d probably end up bored to tears. It would be a case of ‘and so and so forged their documents to crank their age down when they went overseas and exchanged all their money on the black market before fiddling whatever to get some gems out of whatever country’ and I’d end up either yawning or just strapping a camera to a family friend’s back and making it one of those ‘undercover’ documentaries instead. It just wouldn’t be fun at all, there’s nothing new and interesting about it, for me at least. For someone else it could make a tremendous story.
Write what you know has limitations after all. Sometimes you just don’t want to write about things that you know of that intimately, sometimes the joy is in the research. Of course I cheat with the research sometimes when I set things in certain locations and rely on memories. I like to set the occasional thing in London because… well, London is one of those limitless cities for the imagination and wherever I go, I’m always certain that it’s only en route to getting back there. I’m fond of London in a way that no matter how lovely, I’ll never quite love anywhere else. Paris is beautiful, truly a city of dreams but it’s not my city really in any sense. Malaga is pretty enough, L.A; a nice enough place, Hamburg… well, and so on but it’s just not the same though that is all beside the point entirely.
Back to character parlour then. I’ve a tendency to write human characters as being pale; I’m appreciative of that consumptive look seemingly. Give me Victorian ladies under parasols and you probably can’t go wrong and to a certain degree I suppose I carry that over to my non-human characters too. The Monster in the Tower has skin the colour of dead fish belly, that looks to be the texture of rubbery tile grouting. He has lank black hair and he may have blue eyes, but he squints so you can’t see if he figures you’re looking. His race are reptilian though and retain their scaled bellies for the most part and those belly scales have a faint greenish tint. The only other person described in his world so far has been a woman who is probably at least partially human, to the extent where as long as she dyes her hair she can pass herself off as such. Her skin is a perfect sort of olive of the type associated with the Mediterranean and her hair, when she doesn’t dye it, is a lovely sort of mid green. She’s almost human though; the monster isn’t.
The Machine isn’t human too but he sometimes keeps a humanoid form or at least projects on. He’s tall, too tall to really be in proportion but that’s part of the effect that he’s going for. Tall, pale, black haired though when you look closely what appears to be hair is only hair to a certain point before he becomes cable. He’s pale, unnaturally so because he knows that it looks just that little bit off to the human eye and thus makes his appearance suitably disturbing. The top half of his face is normally obscured by shadow unless he lets you see it and even if he does, his eyes appear to be violet on purpose because that’s another thing that adds to the fact that he doesn’t really look human. So again the pallor there is meant to seem unnatural or at least inhuman.
The shapeshifter isn’t even a binary gender let alone a definite shape. He borrows forms as they take his fancy and warps them so that they look just slightly off in some fashion. And ol’ Francis was meant to be of Celtic origin anyway.
I suppose then that my argument is that I like to write about pale characters because I’m appreciative enough of that skin tone, it’s the native one where I’m located and I like to think that I can do it in such a way that it can compliment something ever so slightly inhuman when necessitated in what I write. Actually, now that I think about it, I have a tendency to write about non-human characters for my original ones anyway which may or may not support the assertion that I’ve heard, that being able to see your veins is ever so slightly freakish. Of course, it probably also bears mentioning that of all the Vampire: The Masquerade clans, it’s the Tzimisce that I adore. I’m also occasionally partial to H. R. Giger, enough that I gave up precious time playing that infernal Darkseed game just for the artwork.
Maybe then it’s not about pallor at all but rather the bizarre and unnatural which isn’t such a bad assessment when I think about it and is one that I can, most easily, manage to live with.
bad_rpers_suck about the apparent prevalence of pale skinned characters got me thinking, in specific about a handful of my own original characters.I seem to have a bit of a preference for writing about pale skinned characters when I look at it. For the most part the original characters that are human are of a pale and sickly bent, even if that sickness is more emotional rather than physical. They tend to be the sort of gangly creatures that would easily enough fit into any of the offices along the Strand, where they suited and booted and of course existent in this current British reality. I suppose it’s a case of write what you know in that situation. If you’ve ever taken a walk along the Strand during a lunch-hour or some such you can easily see what I’m talking about. So in that case it’s drawing from experience, and being in Britain I’ve a tendency to write about somewhat British characters to a certain extent.
To a certain degree I’m probably also prey to the exoticism of the Western world, the wonderful vagaries of skin tone or eye colour and so on. I like that sort of thing so I tend to write about it. If someone set me a challenge to write an action-packed drama set somewhere in the Tiger economies I’d probably end up bored to tears. It would be a case of ‘and so and so forged their documents to crank their age down when they went overseas and exchanged all their money on the black market before fiddling whatever to get some gems out of whatever country’ and I’d end up either yawning or just strapping a camera to a family friend’s back and making it one of those ‘undercover’ documentaries instead. It just wouldn’t be fun at all, there’s nothing new and interesting about it, for me at least. For someone else it could make a tremendous story.
Write what you know has limitations after all. Sometimes you just don’t want to write about things that you know of that intimately, sometimes the joy is in the research. Of course I cheat with the research sometimes when I set things in certain locations and rely on memories. I like to set the occasional thing in London because… well, London is one of those limitless cities for the imagination and wherever I go, I’m always certain that it’s only en route to getting back there. I’m fond of London in a way that no matter how lovely, I’ll never quite love anywhere else. Paris is beautiful, truly a city of dreams but it’s not my city really in any sense. Malaga is pretty enough, L.A; a nice enough place, Hamburg… well, and so on but it’s just not the same though that is all beside the point entirely.
Back to character parlour then. I’ve a tendency to write human characters as being pale; I’m appreciative of that consumptive look seemingly. Give me Victorian ladies under parasols and you probably can’t go wrong and to a certain degree I suppose I carry that over to my non-human characters too. The Monster in the Tower has skin the colour of dead fish belly, that looks to be the texture of rubbery tile grouting. He has lank black hair and he may have blue eyes, but he squints so you can’t see if he figures you’re looking. His race are reptilian though and retain their scaled bellies for the most part and those belly scales have a faint greenish tint. The only other person described in his world so far has been a woman who is probably at least partially human, to the extent where as long as she dyes her hair she can pass herself off as such. Her skin is a perfect sort of olive of the type associated with the Mediterranean and her hair, when she doesn’t dye it, is a lovely sort of mid green. She’s almost human though; the monster isn’t.
The Machine isn’t human too but he sometimes keeps a humanoid form or at least projects on. He’s tall, too tall to really be in proportion but that’s part of the effect that he’s going for. Tall, pale, black haired though when you look closely what appears to be hair is only hair to a certain point before he becomes cable. He’s pale, unnaturally so because he knows that it looks just that little bit off to the human eye and thus makes his appearance suitably disturbing. The top half of his face is normally obscured by shadow unless he lets you see it and even if he does, his eyes appear to be violet on purpose because that’s another thing that adds to the fact that he doesn’t really look human. So again the pallor there is meant to seem unnatural or at least inhuman.
The shapeshifter isn’t even a binary gender let alone a definite shape. He borrows forms as they take his fancy and warps them so that they look just slightly off in some fashion. And ol’ Francis was meant to be of Celtic origin anyway.
I suppose then that my argument is that I like to write about pale characters because I’m appreciative enough of that skin tone, it’s the native one where I’m located and I like to think that I can do it in such a way that it can compliment something ever so slightly inhuman when necessitated in what I write. Actually, now that I think about it, I have a tendency to write about non-human characters for my original ones anyway which may or may not support the assertion that I’ve heard, that being able to see your veins is ever so slightly freakish. Of course, it probably also bears mentioning that of all the Vampire: The Masquerade clans, it’s the Tzimisce that I adore. I’m also occasionally partial to H. R. Giger, enough that I gave up precious time playing that infernal Darkseed game just for the artwork.
Maybe then it’s not about pallor at all but rather the bizarre and unnatural which isn’t such a bad assessment when I think about it and is one that I can, most easily, manage to live with.