#skin tone

[miamaimania]

"Grasping Moments," photographed by Harri Peccinotti for VICE

[dondada923]

Fasting Never Looked So Good 🍉🍌🍊😋✨

[possiblydog]

a little informational guide on trying to find skintones from 3d refs :)

i know that finding skintones from 3d characters is tricky and can result in accidental whitewashing and this isnt to make fun of those ppl! this is simply to inform and help other artists out :)

[nickpeppermint]

[jcollinswrites]

Hi! I guess this might be a bit of a contentious question, but one that feels important to ask anyways! Your IF is getting more popular, which means more people create fan art and the like – however, this also means that some people are going to whitewash your characters and MC (which I’ve seen happen already). What I’m wondering is basically if this is something you will address, or just what you think about this issue in general?

I was putting this ask off for a while because I wasn't sure if I was gonna include a skintone choice in the game, but now I can tell for certain that it's gonna be there in Chapter 6! The available options for MC will be these:

Tanned olive (Narmer, Ahmose in the winter)

Dark olive (Nefru, Heset, Ahmose in the summer)

Brown (⬅️ This is the average. Qenna, Zaia, Petmes, Kajet, and most other characters have mid- to dark brown skin)

Dark brown (Tabiry)

Ebony black (Tabiry in the summer, Ebo, Smile)

If you headcanon that your MC's family originally comes from the north of Egypt, then this can mean that MC has a Mediterranean olive skin because people from that region often have that.

However!

Let's not forget that no matter where MC's ancestry is from originally, MC was canonically born and lives in Thebes, which is where Luxor is today. And guys... Luxor is a hot place. There is no way anyone would stay without a deep tan there, unless they spend most of their time indoors.

Noble or priest MC, in the first chapter, can have a lighter olive skin, if that's how you want to imagine them, because of their lifestyles. But after the first chapter, MC spends months outside, in the summer, in North Africa. In every case, they will develop a deep tan by the time they reach the pyramids in Giza, even if they were somewhat lighter-toned in the beginning.

In my experience, most readers try to be respectful of the culture. Many people ask me how to make their MC look authentic, and I can tell that many many more do some research before they decide on their MC's looks. I urge everyone to do that as well! This is how history becomes fun ❤️

[pastfatality]

The colors on my face are more diverse than Genshin Impact

My lighest shade is the darkest /hj

[writingwithcolor]

Any advice for handling race in reincarnation situations?

@swamp-spirit asked:

I'm writing a story that includes characters being reincarnated with completely different appearances. It's a fantasy world, and most of the characters are being reborn in the same region, but I still want a range of skin tones and features in the main cast (this is a comic). I have weird feelings about a character being 'reborn' with notably lighter or darker skin, but it also feels implausible and lazy for people to Just Happen to have a similar appearance when the theology of the story doesn't support it. Characters being reborn, and taking out things specific to real life groups, what are the major things you'd want an author to read up on or take into account? (Note: there is not a 'white' looking ethnic group in this story)

I don’t think it’s a problem as long as the skin tones don’t have any correlation to the circumstances that they’re reincarnated into.

- SK

It’s an interesting question, because in most religions where reincarnation/ transmigration of the soul is a feature of “what happens after death”, remembering one’s past life is not really part of the package deal. From what you’ve written, it’s not clear to me where the “memory” of these characters’ lives are held. Is there a 3rd person omniscient narrator telling the audience who each person is in their next life or do the characters themselves retain memory of past lives?

Assuming this is your typical reincarnation scenario where characters retain no memory of previous lives, it doesn’t much matter. The next life is the next life. Who a person was in their previous life and that identity, in theory, means nothing to them. This also means whatever personality, values, experiences and so on they had in their previous life no longer has meaning. They are, in effect, another person. However, you say you feel awkward about the above which makes me wonder if characters are remembering past lives, in which case…

If you study pretty much any major Asian religion where reincarnation is a part of the belief system, having no memory of the previous life is par for the course. In present-day religions like Jainism, Sikhism, Hinduism and Buddhism, only “special” (I’m using the term very casually here) entities like bodhisattvas, guru, arihant, buddhas, etc. usually get to keep their memories, while the rest of us (literal) mere mortals are supposed to lose our memories between lives as a part of Samsara. In Hinduism, even the gods often forget their previous lives, unless their reincarnation had a targeted purpose (Like being born to defeat an evil entity). 

For most people, it is only through prayer, devotion, meditation and accumulated virtuous/ good/ compassionate deeds that humans are thought to deepen their understanding of the nature of the universe, and thus have the capacity to remember past lives (I’m, again, paraphrasing very loosely here from several years worth of university history+religion courses).  

This is why the isekai genre in Japan is largely regarded as a “cheat”/ parody genre of fantasy. The protagonist, according to common Japanese cultural beliefs, which are quite heavily grounded in Buddhism, is definitively “cheating.” Not to get too ironically biblical, the character’s success often comes from the forbidden knowledge borne of their previous life. 

Thus, there are two ways I look at your characters’ predicaments: 

It’s not technically reincarnation - not by the way most major world religions define reincarnation, anyway. You have people who died now inhabiting other bodies, but that’s not the same as the transmigration of the soul. Also, you want to delve into the weirdness (and maybe heaviness) of “Wow, I went to sleep with one face and woke up with another.” There are certainly stories about people who have had dramatic cosmetic plastic surgery, weight loss surgery, HRT, etc. and then experienced the difference in the “before” versus “after” of how their altered physical appearance makes them feel, as well as how other people treat them. Even if the community your characters are born into now differs from their previous community (Which I guess would make this more a “I traveled between dimensions, and my appearance altered in the process” sci-fi adjacent affair), their new life will still have social environments with differing attitudes towards human physical appearance that will affect your characters’ emotional states. 

Isekai it up and play with the ridiculous contradiction of having past lives and differing memories of one’s appearance. Isekai manga, manhwa and webtoons all make use of this trope heavily, especially with protagonists who experience a “glow-up” (Ex. Going from a Plain Jane OL to beautiful fantasy heroine) or, by contrast, protagonists who end up in very different forms from their original lives (Tensura, I’m a Spider, So What?). I’d be creative and go even more granular. Being able to tan after a lifetime of getting sunburns or no longer needing glasses might be nice, but what if the new body lacks the enzymes to process dairy or alcohol? What about dealing with differences in hair texture? Skincare routines? What about living life as a very tall person after being quite short or vice versa? What if you bumped into an acquaintance from your previous life, and one of you clearly got a more “coveted” reincarnation?  See how far of an extreme you can take this idea until it feels too uncomfortable or ridiculous. 

Marika.