I agree that this kind of approach can work, even in fantasy stories that use medieval western European settings.

Unfortunately, without any hints, I probably would have missed the subtlety and cast everyone as Caucasian. I grew up in the whitest city in Oregon; those were the faces I saw and the only faces shown in the fantasy and SF books I so devoured.

I can’t wait to read this book. And you know what, it’ll still be the first fantasy I know of with queer Hapa characters. It’s like a miracle!

I think I must respectfully disagree with your perspective. I actually think it’s all the more important to include race of some kind in fantasy fiction, because the genre applies the white-is-the-default rule so often.

I love fantasy as a genre, and it had a particularly formative role in my own reading when I was young. But I don’t think it was good for me, as a young white kid, to never have exposure to anything but all-white worlds; I think I lost out. (And I think people of color that I love really suffered from the sense that no one looked like them.) What was worse, a lot of the books I most loved (and still do) were heavily invested in ideas of Light = Good, Dark = Evil, or the whole elf/dwarf/stand-in for races problem, and as an adult I’ve really had to think hard about how to dismantle racist images in my own writing.

Fantasy is supposed to be able unleashing the imagination, after all–why shouldn’t alternative worlds be colorful places? Why shouldn’t they have their own geographies, and ways of talking about ancestry that are similar or different from our own?

As for the technical questions of how you do that–the hardest and the most interesting part, I think–I struggle with this a lot. Many or most of the ways the racial descriptors we use in American English are either offensive (the food thing), or very cliche. Sometimes I wish I could use the terms we use in everyday life, but I think the joy and challenge of fantasy is imagining other ways to do it.

But I think it’s possible to have a world in which people from the mountains look a certain way and people from the river look another and people in the city are a mixture of both (“So-and-so looked like her father’s people, but she had mountain eyes, the color of spring grass on the southern slopes.”). I think it’s possible to have a world in which white people are unusual and given decriptors and everyone else uses expressions like “black as hair”; I think it’s possible to have a fantasy plot that draws directly on issues of prejudice and conflicts between people (though you have to do this well); I think it’s equally possible to have a world in which the varieties of skin tones and hair textures and other racial markers are seen as both unremarkable and a blessing, something that the people of a mythical place take pride in. It all depends on the author, and her choices.

None of which is to criticize your stance. After all, your novel, your world!

What do you think of the way Ursula K. Le Guin treated the topic of race in her Earthsea books?