(I mention the "from the point of view of someone with olive skin" part because I remember the character of Shirley in the last few Anne of Green Gables books, who is consistently described as "the little brown boy" and having "brown skin," but since this is within the context of a family where half the people have red hair and freckles and most of the rest are described as having black hair and ivory skin, I figure that, in that context, "brown skin" just means a darkish white kid who tans rather than burns in the sun. But when Katniss is describing herself as having olive skin, and Rue and Thresh are definitely described as darker than her, that doesn't leave much room for Rue and Thresh to just be darkish white people.)

Personally, I completely missed that Rue and Thresh were black in the book, but I also thought Scout was a boy for a quarter of To Kill a Mockingbird and black for half of it, so I don't pick up on physical descriptions well.

That Jezebel article makes me sick.

>but I also thought Scout was a boy for a quarter of To Kill a Mockingbird and black for half of it, so I don't pick up on physical descriptions well.

Hee!

It took me a chapter to pick up that Buck in The Call of the Wild was a dog because I misread something.

I don't usually pick up on physical descriptions in books either, but the second I saw Rue on screen I was even sadder for her death. She is one of the cutest kids ever.

She is one of the cutest kids ever.

Yeah.

(Am sad now.)

Every time she was peeking out from behind something! So adorable.

Wow. I am disgusted by those twitterers.

The teenage girls that were at my showing were scary.

Totally going back in time, but I will never forget seeing Glory in a theater full of high school kids (we went for class) and the cheering was horrible. It is not awesome when someone's head gets blown off!

The flat-out racists are stomach-churningly horrible, but this comment on the Jezebel story just made me go, bzuh?

Am I the only one who doesn't assign a race to a character when reading a book? I mean, if the author states clearly that the character is, say, Indian, I will picture the character as Indian. Other than that, everyone is a race neutral character in my head.

I mean, when reading Harry Potter, I didn't even picture Cho Chang as Asian. I just don't think about race when reading books.

Entirely aside from the fact that in my mind this person sounds exactly like Stephen Colbert ("People tell me I'm white, and I take their word for it, because I don't see race"), it just feels so discouraging. Why the fuck even bother writing anything but a big long string of dialogue? Are there really and truly readers who don't just miss the nuances of extra descriptors, they regard them as pure filler and dump them down the memory hole as soon as they've passed across their eyeballs?