It's not necessarily YA-oriented, but when I read the "Wheel of Time" books in high school one of the things that impressed me was how thoroughly the author had mixed racial and ethnic traits, especially with the Borderlanders having mixed Asian and European traits, such that it would be impossible to represent them accurately on in a film adaptation. Skin colour was approached the same way, though most of the groups appearing in the setting were fair-skinned, due to it being a temperate region. And it always bothered me that the Aiel, despite having lived in a harsh desert for three thousand years, were still only fair-skinned people who developed strong tans in their environment. In that amount of time, their skin should have darkened somewhat.
Around the same time, I first started to seriously notice that other races exist, and took the approach of randomly inserting minorities into my work, which sometimes feels like tokenism, but is after all more accurate, and tends, in itself, not to have much real significance to a character, although associated cultural mores might. (I take a similar approach to gender)
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2012-04-02 06:57 pm (UTC)Around the same time, I first started to seriously notice that other races exist, and took the approach of randomly inserting minorities into my work, which sometimes feels like tokenism, but is after all more accurate, and tends, in itself, not to have much real significance to a character, although associated cultural mores might. (I take a similar approach to gender)