Just looked up what catechist is, and learned it's connected to Christianity, so this vaguely connects it to Nicki Minaj's recent support of efforts to stop killings of Christians in Africa, e.g. Nicki Minaj loses 100,000 followers after speaking out on Nigerian Christian killing crisis.
I was thinking about a video about a 'black' female streamer named Aliyawill. Some people said in the comments that if the dark-skinned elves in the Lord of the Rings TV series had looked like her, they would have liked it. I have not seen it so I cannot compare, but I did note that her hair (whether it's her natural hair or not) is straight, leading to coherent reflections.
People said something similar about Michelle Obama; that she may have felt pressured to have straight hair.
A lot of 'black' people do not have straight hair. This is just one of those random human things, having opinions about reflections from hair, that might be related to like water and cleanliness, to explain why people's attention is drawn by shiny things. I see no one in 'real life', so I can only judge from pictures and videos on a screen, and so I don't think I have a good understanding of whether I would think that shiny hair is attractive in more life, but I observe that hair that is ordered enough to be shiny (brushed) is common at least in Chinese shows, where everyone has black hair, suggesting that people do think it's attractive.
This made me think, what if African people wanted to have straight hair, instead of curly hair? And this made me think of skin color, and whether extremely dark skin suggests a culture where people spent a lot of time in the sun compared to people at latitudes with similar sun exposure but lighter skin.
And these thoughts about culture made me think of this book series, by Alan Dean Foster. The protagonist has dark skin, and he begins his journeys due to a shipwreck of 'white' people, one of whom tells the protagonist about a situation before dying.
I remember the moth-people dying from being attracted to a burning tree early on in the first book, and I remember the 'living sand dune' monster. I remember the existence of an important revelation during the climactic scene in the third book, but most of the story and events I have forgotten. I didn't look up, or know what 'catechist' was when I read the books, but the overall story, of doing a difficult thing for no other reason than that no one else was going to do it, made enough of an impression on me for me to think of it now.
(I do remember that it is mentioned, perhaps at the very end, that the main character has a family, and so even if the story appears to have the format of 'a princess in distress', there is no romantic connection between her and the protagonist.)
Do I remember the moth-people dying because people dying is regrettable? Do I remember the living sand dune because it seemed especially dangerous, more so than other things that happened? Do I remember anything at all from the second book or the majority of the third book?
I hesitate to say "I want to read these books again" because even though it's true, it doesn't help you for me to say this, but I think it's fair for me to act like what I say here isn't important, so this is just a reminder for myself and a recommendation for anyone who reads this post.
I don't recall any mention of whether the main character has curly hair, or any hair for that matter; only his skin color.
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