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Artemis Entreri is not a white guy... but not for the reason you might believe

[[ Foreword: As a BIPOC, I care a lot about proper ethnic and racial representation. During my early days in this fandom, I’ve encountered people who felt that properly representing a character’s skin color was unimportant, and these people attempted to silence my views on the matter. Nonetheless, I’m the one responsible for specifying Artemis Entreri’s skin color as dusky brown in the FR Wiki (my attempted edits of his article on Wikipedia.org to include his skin color have been repeatedly deleted). I’ve written numerous posts regarding Artemis’ status as a fantasy POC, even when his own creator seems to have forgotten the fact (i.e. as seen here). I’ve worked on my art skill for the sole purpose of depicting Artemis better, and in the process of doing so I’ve studied the theory behind depicting different skin colors accurately. I still have a long way to go, but what I’ve learned has helped me to see and understand much differently from before.

Recently, I saw a forum post about fan castings for a hypothetical live-action Drizzt show/movie. This kind of thing is pretty common, but I’m always perturbed when I see that most commenters suggest white actors for Artemis. Thankfully, more people these days understand the importance of proper representation and diversity in media and their suggestions come from a place of ignorance rather than bigotry. I couldn’t stop thinking about my most recent experience though, so I decided to re-check my sources and reassess everything that I thought I knew.

There’s a widespread belief that the Realms’ Calimshan is the equivalent of the real world Middle East. I subscribed to this belief until recently, and used it as a basis for arguing why Artemis is a POC. However, as it turns out, Calimshan is not the equivalent of real world Middle East. Ed Greenwood doesn’t draw direct parallels between Realmsian locations and real world locations, but Calimshan’s closest analogue is Al-Andalus: the Muslim-ruled area of the Iberian Peninsula. Due to its geographical location, that would mean that the people of Al-Andalus would look similar to modern-day Spanish and Portugese people, in other words, mostly white.

That being said, it does NOT mean that Artemis and native Calishites are not people of color. They still would be, but not because Calimshan is the equivalent of the Middle East. Calishites are brown-skinned because they descend from a line of people adapted to living in a desert environment.

So then, where does the belief that Artemis is white come from? Unfortunately, it’s due to some of Todd Lockwood’s illustrations, or rather, untrained and/or unthinking examination of his illustrations. One of the few things that I agree with Salvatore about is with regards to Todd Lockwood’s illustrations as the go-to visualization of Artemis. However, it is also these depictions that seem to throw a lot of people off about Artemis’ intended skin color.

Why is it that other people see differently? I think the first reason is that in most cases, people see what they want to see, they see an affirmation of what they’ve assumed to be the case. Historically, the bulk of Salvatore’s readers have been white. However, for those readers who aren’t white, who also aren’t of a similar ethnicity to Artemis, might look at those covers and assume he’s white because they live in the US, or because they assume that he’s the same ethnicity as his creator. Most of Lockwood’s covers are on a varied palette that makes it difficult to isolate the exact skin color of the characters. A lot of people don’t know color theory, and they don’t think about skin colors from the perspective of how to illustrate it accurately. They’d look at Artemis from the cover of Servant of the Shard:

And perhaps they’d think, oh, his face is in the shadow of his hood, and he’s in a cave, so dark on top of dark would mean that his actual skin color is very light. However, this line of thought is faulty, because if the above illustration was made to be accurate to the situation, then all we’d see of Artemis’ face would be a few highlights from Crenshinibon’s glow. Furthermore, the fiery breath in the throat of Hephaestus, the dragon in the background, should be so bright that it’d create a backlight so strong that Artemis’s features would be even more strongly hidden in shadow, causing an effect like this:

Crenshinibon could very well illuminate his face, but it would do so by splashing it with its own greenish hue. Here’s a very rough illustration of what I mean:

As you can see, that isn’t depicted in Lockwood’s painting, which leads me to believe that Lockwood’s chose to basically install an artificial white light source so that we can see Artemis’ face clearly. It looks very much like he intended it so that he could paint Artemis as though he were in natural light.

What people often don’t think about is that what sets different skin colors apart is how they react to light. Painting a very tan white person might start with the usage of the same palette as for painting a naturally brown-skinned person, but assuming proper application of the undertones, shadows and highlights, the difference becomes clear. The dusky brown skin of a desert native would be layered with a mix of darker reds and yellows, compared to the pink/lighter reds and yellows for white skin. This is the case with Artemis’ face on the cover of Servant of the Shard. Furthermore, the shadows on his face are dark, desaturated browns, flirting with gray but not quite there. If Lockwood were depicting a white character, he’d sooner use shades of blue and even orange than gray, as it is a lot easier to play with the versatility of depicting white skin. Any artist worth their salt would know that using grays to shade a color painting is very bad as it muddies the colors, so even approaching gray is to be avoided unless absolutely necessary. It isn’t necessary to tread that dangerous line to depict white skin.

It is most clear on the cover of Promise of the Witch-King that Artemis is not white. In this rendition of that cover art, while the background is lightened more than the foreground, the foreground is nonetheless lightened. As such, we are basically looking at Artemis in bright light:

Even here, in my opinion, he is clearly not white. A white man in bright light would not have shadows in shades of dark desaturated browns. His highlights are also more yellowish than pinkish, which is what is done for depicting dusky brown skin:

Although what has been discussed holds true to Entreri’s depiction on the cover of Road of the Patriarch, yet again it’s something that can fall to the misconception of, “Oh, it’s sunset, which means it’s dark, and he looks dark, so he would not look dark if it weren’t sunset.”

WRONG. Consider this video of an actual brown-skinned man at sunset, and note how the shadows on his face are unsaturated dark browns, and the highlights yellowish (the picture is a preview if you don’t want to look at the video):

What I’ve covered also applies to Artemis’ depiction on the cover of Starless Night, so I won’t repeat it again.

Some might believe that Artemis is painted with desaturated shadows (grays) because of the absorption of the shade turning him grayish. However, I don’t believe Lockwood chose to depict that, as Artemis’ skin is too vivid even with the grayish-brown shadows. Salvatore specifically wrote:

Lockwood was at that time no stranger to illustrating supernatural skin types, he certainly could’ve made Artemis’ skin look like that of a corpse’s if he wanted to. It looks very likely however that there was a conscious decision was made not to.

What I haven’t discussed is that some will pick up what looks like a very dark red on Artemis’ cheeks and nose on the Servant of the Shard cover. He could be flushed from exertion, anger, heat from the breath of Hephaestus, or perhaps it’s just a color choice to make his features pop more. However, even there, he’s no white guy with his face flushed, which if we look closely, would actually be more of a pink despite the phrase, “red-faced with anger”:

Meanwhile, Artemis’ “red” is more of a brown:

Thanks for coming to my TED Talk. ]]

#Artemis Entreri #legend of drizzt #Forgotten Realms #Calimshan #Todd Lockwood #fantasy POC #ooc #appearance

FAVORITE FANTASY PROTAGONISTS: Day 1/?

Essun, from The Broken Earth trilogy by @nkjemisin. Not many main characters get us crying from almost the first page.

Art by @nerenn-ironeyes on @deviantart. View here.

#fantasy poc #women in fantasy #books #fantasy books #my characters