Thanks for the excellent piece. Worth noting that in the books, the Belters are very tall and very lanky, so much so that any real amount of gravity is too much for them. The show had to find real 21st-century actors, so no weirdly shaped Belters who couldn’t even handle visiting Earth.
Thanks for the excellent piece. Worth noting that in the books, the Belters are very tall and very lanky, so much so that any real amount of gravity is too much for them. The show had to find real 21st-century actors, so no weirdly shaped Belters who couldn’t even handle visiting Earth.
Absolutely-- the novels are still at fault for not mixing enough original racism into the distribution of Belters to really highlight and call out real-world racism as functionally as they could have, with only hints to their underclass ethnic origins being the “Belter Creole” dialect, etc. But much of the prejudice in the show would probably have read stronger if it were more like the books and thus at all possible to show Belters as having the impossibly-lanky; swollen-skulled physiology that makes them utterly impossible to hide their origins outside a gravity well and read as knee-jerk, uncanny-valley disturbing to Earthborn and even Marsborn folks not accustomed to it. When I heard the were adapting a show and started the novels, I was wondering how practical it’d be to 3D Render all that but you’d wed an Avatar-level budget.
Thanks for the excellent piece. Worth noting that in the books, the Belters are very tall and very lanky, so much so that any real amount of gravity is too much for them. The show had to find real 21st-century actors, so no weirdly shaped Belters who couldn’t even handle visiting Earth.
they do say that belters can't handle earth's gravity...but yeah, they don't try to make them physically different.
Absolutely-- the novels are still at fault for not mixing enough original racism into the distribution of Belters to really highlight and call out real-world racism as functionally as they could have, with only hints to their underclass ethnic origins being the “Belter Creole” dialect, etc. But much of the prejudice in the show would probably have read stronger if it were more like the books and thus at all possible to show Belters as having the impossibly-lanky; swollen-skulled physiology that makes them utterly impossible to hide their origins outside a gravity well and read as knee-jerk, uncanny-valley disturbing to Earthborn and even Marsborn folks not accustomed to it. When I heard the were adapting a show and started the novels, I was wondering how practical it’d be to 3D Render all that but you’d wed an Avatar-level budget.