MEME FROM THE MICA WOOO

[mica-silverwind.livejournal.com]

It's time for Kuroi to be upstaged by...

THE WATCHED MY CANON MEME

Step One: Post here with your character.
Step Two: characters will reply to threads as if they'd just witnessed (in part or in whole) the canon of the threadstarter.
Step Three: EMBARRASS THE CRAP OUT OF PEOPLE WITH YOUR NEWFOUND OMNISCIENCE!

Step Four: Profit.

Comments

I'm so sorry this is so long, mun was an anthropology major.

[twelvevoltman.livejournal.com]

Biology lesson!

Ever notice how as soon as you go a little farther north than the South Pole, to a point where people lived on earth and not ice, everybody's skin gets really pale, really fast? And then back to tan the closer you got to the equator? It's to do with diet, sun levels, and Vitamin D. Vitamin D is available in many foods, and is necessary for many bodily functions, including but not limited to healthy bone growth. However, unless Vitamin D is consumed in extremely high amounts, plenty of sunlight is necessary for it to be absorbed into the body.

Now, too much direct sunlight causes skin cancer, so in places that get a lot of direct sunlight, like deserts or close to the equator, people with dark, melanin-rich skin are more likely to survive and reproduce than light-skinned people, as dark skin is more protected against sunburn and the development of skin cancer. However, the farther north or south you go from the equator, the less direct sunlight the land recieves due to the curvature of the Earth - or a given planet's - surface, so dark-skinned people suffer vitamin D deficiency. Therefore light-skinned people have a better chance of reproducing healthily. The only exception to this are people who live on the ice, because their diet is composed almost entirely of fish, which are so rich in D that light skin isn't necessary for enough to be absorbed to produce a healthy human being. Instead, it's once again productive to have darker skin to retard the growth of skin cancer, as the indirect sunlight is seen more frequently (due, again, to the round shape of the Earth, but we're getting into astronomy here), and the amplification of sunlight by the reflective, icy landscape.

Therefore, for an individual to live on an ice sheet yet have pale skin, one would have to assume a few theories other than traditional native living to explain their physical appearance. The person could be a recent transplant from earth-based settlements, descended from pale-skinned relatives whose diet contained vegetables, grains, and land-based animals, and not mostly of fish. If they are not recent transplants and have ancestors who've been living on the ice for generations, then they and their descendents are likely plagued by facial skin cancer and the problems that come from a lack of vitamin D, including diseases such as rickets, poor bone formation in offspring due to a lack of vitamin D absorbed by the mother during pregnancy. Because no matter how pale you are, there's only so much D you can absorb through your face.

However, if they live on the ice and aren't eating fish, frankly, I don't know how they've survived starvation for this long.

TL;DR: somebody didn't do their research! Or, you know, care about casting leads with accurate skin tones to represent the ethnicity they're supposed to be. Or both.

No worries, this was worth reading!

[kaya-waterwave.livejournal.com]

Wow that is...a LOT of information I didn't know.

*files that under information she still needs to research in the media library*

But seriously, WHY change the skin tone in the first place? And why is Zuko dark skinned instead?