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?

Writing long strings of dialogue would be fine with me...well, me and Elmore Leonard. I suspect everyone else would be slightly put out.(But you can still tell what race Elmore Leonard's people are, and which one will be Delroy Lindo in the adaptation so...) Somehow, I missed Katniss' olive skin, but I must confess that book bummed me out so maybe I wasn't careful about it.

I remember being flabbergasted many years ago when a quite prominent SF writer said in her writing process, most of her characters didn't have names. She just designated them as A, B, C etc.

really? Why? THat kind of just creates engines to move your plot, right?

I generally miss nuances of character description, unless it's a big deal, like someone gets rhapsodic over the color of someone's hair etc. The people in my head appear more as the shapes of their names rather than pictures of faces, ie, the shape of the word Katniss rather than a person.

I love this post the most:

I totally get where these people are coming from. It's like the time when I was on diapers.com, trying to decide which brand of diapers to order. And I see an ad showing a diaper on a beautiful, blonde baby boy, just like the one I have at home! The boy, not the diaper, because I still had to order them. And I did order those diapers because of that exact ad with the blonde baby boy because I could then envision those diapers on the bottom of my blonde baby boy. It made sense to me. And then just two days later the huge box of diapers arrived, but to my understandable shock, the face on the box of diapers was not of that blonde baby boy. It was of a baby girl, with dark skin. You know, the dark dark kind. And I was upset and confused and I just didn't understand how these diapers could work now. So I called the company's number and I could tell right away I was talking with someone, not the dark dark kind, but still dark with an accent, a slightly dark accent (but not a dark dark accent), and I couldn't stay on the phone. And when my husband came home and questioned why our blonde little boy's bottom was wrapped in one of his t-shirts and I explained the situation to him, I could tell when he hid his face in his hands how upset he was about the whole situation as well. And then he put his hands on my shoulders and shook his head before looking into my eyes and said, 'Just promise me you'll never watch The Crying Game.'

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.

How very enlightened of this person. I assume they also did not notice that she was female because that would imply they are closed-minded about sexual orientation.

JZ, I'd bet that what that poster really means is that characters are White until proven otherwise.

ita !, that post is made of win.

Jessica (sorry, Jess and Jesse!) and Debet, seriously. This:

everyone is a race neutral character in my head

Yeah, I'm gonna make three guesses as to what "race neutral" looks like, and the first two don't count.

Unless this person actually imagines everyone as talky meat, literal throbbing masses of raw veiny muscle tissue that express dialogue by pushing air through their meat. Because that would be kind of awesome.