I'm of two minds about the Gypsies; on the one hand, I often picture Johnny Depp-like colouring, like the gypsies in Chocolat, but I get the impression that they're actually a lot darker than that, maybe more Middle-East type features and colouring, or even Afrikkaan?
Not, of course, that they need to be categorized like that, but it makes me wonder what other people see when they imaigne the gypsies.
Mystic Ward
14 years ago
Mystic Ward
Twentyfamilies Gypsy
I must admit that I see a darker brown skin colour and dark hair and eyes. like a child of an african and a white parent. I think that because Cassie was exactly that. Black mother and white father. Mixed ethnic relations over generations could have produced any skin tone but we are told in the books that the Twenty Families are darker than the halfcast gypsies. The land folk all seem to be white which is why they discriminate against the gypsies darker skin. I think the Sadorians are more likely to have the Middle eastern colouring.
Wanderer Guilden
14 years ago
Mon Oct 12 2009, 05:01pm
Wanderer Guilden
Mage
well, i think of the gypsies kind of like the really old pictures in my gran's house... her family were gypsies over in europe before WW1 and i guess that means that i am too.. tho i definitely don't have the features to prove it.. ~:|
anyways, from the pictures i kind of imagine them with dark skin.. kind of a dark olive-y brown, not that you can tell from the black-and-white photos :P
anyways, definitely loads of really intricate jewelry and swishing skirts for the women and bright and vibrant for everyone....
Ashlings' guildleader
14 years ago
Ashlings' guildleader
Dreamscape Artist
I imagine that they aren't descended from present day gypsies, but from lower class African Americans. I think Cassie is supposed to be American and it was the 'trashers' from her country who were experimented on by her government. I think that the 'trashers' were supposed to be lower class African Americans that the government didn't care about because they were racist pricks. I think that the people who were experimented on escaped and went on to become the gypsies and the mental shields that all gypsies have to some degree and twenty families have completely is the result of the government's experiments.
I tend to imagine a mix, the twenty families tend to be darker, but Elspeth says that there is still enough discrepancy to make it confusing. That's why the signs are important. I think that this is because many of the twenty families gypsies would have had white ancestors like Cassie, but that due to not mixing further with whites, the recessive genes which allow dark skin to skip a generation or too have become more concentrated in the twenty families gypsies than the half breeds. So I think there would still be some twenty families who were relatively pale and some half breeds that were relatively dark.
14 years ago
Wed Oct 14 2009, 07:57pm
*nods* :nod: At first I thought the Twentyfamilies were like what we refer to as gypsies now...especially because of the way their clothes are described, and their lifestyle in general. Making jewellery, playing music, travelling in carved and painted caravans...
But once we started to know more about them I figured that probably wasn't quite right :P
I'm sure Cassie is African-American too (well, half..her father was white wasn't he?).
Wasn't the father of Cassie's child the Red Queen's brother too? So her child would've had slightly lighter skin than her I suppose, and so would their direct descendents...
I usually imagine the Twentyfamilies with russet-brown skin, like a person with dark olive skin would look with a tan. And long dark, almost black, hair :)
I think it's interesting that the Sadorians are so similar to people of certain cultures near/in/around Asia...
14 years ago
Fri Oct 16 2009, 11:40am
I actually think Sadorians (who are Spin offs from Gadfians) are from the middle east, and they have very strong similarities to egyptians.
also I think RQ's brother was white.
Cassy 's dark pigment genes would have carried onto her son. It doesn't matter how mixed the parents are, because the dark skin gene will always carry down
I also thought Cassy was african american. so her son can be darker than her, regardless of how fair she is.
I'd never really given much thought to the fact that the gypsies are descended from a black woman. I'd always imagined them in quite a stereotypical gypsey sense, appearing more slavic or romanian. Obviously that doesn't hold. Oh well...
