Indeed not; if anything, your characters' view should be more the standard (if I'm tracking your world-building correctly). But that is not the world we live in, though they may.
But when he ends up in an unknown location, he uses the appearance of people to try to identify where he is.
Which only makes sense. "Most of the people around here look like X; that means we must have crossed the border into Southland" or whatever. It's setting/world-building, same as describing the forests or the kind of crops planted or the architecture.
A reader like you, who doesn't care what the characters look like, might get a bit confused in passages where the only indicator that the protagonist has of another character's nationality is their skin color.
Actually, no; I'm fine with it when it means something. If you've previously told me that black hair and bronze skin indicates a certain nationality, and the protagonist can expect help/hindrance/apathy from the people of that nation, and then later he runs into someone with black hair and bronze skin... well, okay, I might or might not remember the details, depending on how long ago it was mentioned and what else has happened since, but I'll at least recognize that it means something, and be alert for narrative clues that serve as reminders.
It's when the character's looks are completely irrelevant to their personality or the world-building that it becomes nonexistent data to me. The example I like to use is Barbara Hambly's Time of the Dark; I love that series, and I've probably read it a dozen times. I remember what Ingold Inglorion looks like (scruffy white beard, long brown robe, etc.) because it's so very much the stereotypical vagabond wizard, and he's so very much... not, except when he is. And the author plays back and forth with that trope a lot, so it matters. But the other two main characters? The only reason I can tell you what color hair Gil and Rudy have is because I've looked it up so many times to use in discussions like this; left to my own readerly devices, I couldn't tell you if Gil's hair is brown or black or blonde to save my life. Because it has absolutely nothing to do with how good she is with a sword, or how poorly she gets along with her mother, or how she looks at the city's waste management systems and figures they're in for a cholera epidemic if somebody doesn't do something about the overcrowding soon. I can back-fill that Rudy's probably Hispanic-looking because he thinks a lot about his family and his sisters all have Spanish-sounding names and they're from southern California, but it's entirely logicked out after the fact, not something I ever picked up directly from reading. And the thing is, Hambly's really good with descriptions; she has an almost bardic trick of repeatedly working physical characteristics into the text. And I still miss it.
no subject
Indeed not; if anything, your characters' view should be more the standard (if I'm tracking your world-building correctly). But that is not the world we live in, though they may.
But when he ends up in an unknown location, he uses the appearance of people to try to identify where he is.
Which only makes sense. "Most of the people around here look like X; that means we must have crossed the border into Southland" or whatever. It's setting/world-building, same as describing the forests or the kind of crops planted or the architecture.
A reader like you, who doesn't care what the characters look like, might get a bit confused in passages where the only indicator that the protagonist has of another character's nationality is their skin color.
Actually, no; I'm fine with it when it means something. If you've previously told me that black hair and bronze skin indicates a certain nationality, and the protagonist can expect help/hindrance/apathy from the people of that nation, and then later he runs into someone with black hair and bronze skin... well, okay, I might or might not remember the details, depending on how long ago it was mentioned and what else has happened since, but I'll at least recognize that it means something, and be alert for narrative clues that serve as reminders.
It's when the character's looks are completely irrelevant to their personality or the world-building that it becomes nonexistent data to me. The example I like to use is Barbara Hambly's Time of the Dark; I love that series, and I've probably read it a dozen times. I remember what Ingold Inglorion looks like (scruffy white beard, long brown robe, etc.) because it's so very much the stereotypical vagabond wizard, and he's so very much... not, except when he is. And the author plays back and forth with that trope a lot, so it matters. But the other two main characters? The only reason I can tell you what color hair Gil and Rudy have is because I've looked it up so many times to use in discussions like this; left to my own readerly devices, I couldn't tell you if Gil's hair is brown or black or blonde to save my life. Because it has absolutely nothing to do with how good she is with a sword, or how poorly she gets along with her mother, or how she looks at the city's waste management systems and figures they're in for a cholera epidemic if somebody doesn't do something about the overcrowding soon. I can back-fill that Rudy's probably Hispanic-looking because he thinks a lot about his family and his sisters all have Spanish-sounding names and they're from southern California, but it's entirely logicked out after the fact, not something I ever picked up directly from reading. And the thing is, Hambly's really good with descriptions; she has an almost bardic trick of repeatedly working physical characteristics into the text. And I still miss it.