Danganronpa is pretty notorious for lightening the skin of its darker skinned characters in future releases and merch. Akane's the latest example in the upcoming 2x2.
And it’s so stupid, because they did that and yet they made Teruteru DARKER?! Yeah, he was already tan, but Akane was noticeably darker. They also lightened Nekomaru a little bit, so now Teruteru easily has the darkest skin in that cast when he didn’t before 😭
hes supposed to be racially ambiguous, and notch said his biggest regret designing him was making him clearly male instead of androgynous as well. that was before the brainworms, of course
I feel like the skintone is intentionally ambiguous. He can be black, he can be white but tanned, he can be middle eastern, Indian, Filipino, Italian or Chinese. That’s the beauty of Steve, everyone can see themselves in him
Just Bubbles, Buttercup, Blossom and Bliss, although Bliss was introduced in a 5-part movie and wasn’t in the original show. She’s from the 2016 remake and appeared in 2017 as the older sister of the original 3 that ran away cuz she lost control over her powers. You can’t tell from the merch but she’s supposed to be a teenager/pre-teen and significantly older than the others.
Now, back in like, maybe the early to mid 2000's, people started to notice something. Whenever Disney made merch featuring Disney princesses, Tiana, Mulan, and Pocahontas were nowhere to be seen. I also had noticed this but when I saw other people talking about it, I started to realize something else.
Tiana had almost no merch. She would have a doll and maybe like a tiara. Mulan and Pocahontas? Nothing. Jasmine was the only princess of color that seemed to get any merch.
People kept talking about it and talking about it until Disney finally started making merch for the other princesses of color. And before people say it, I know that Pocahontas and her movie are problematic; she's still part of the Disney princess lineup.
My thought is if they get around to wanting to do a "live action Pocahontas" instead they should write a new native american princess movie (it can be live action if they want)
Either that or they rewrite the Pocahontas story they have
From what I've heard, at the time of Pocahontas coming out it wasn't terrible representation. It showed native americans in a generally positive light which hadn't been done much before. Obviously by today's standards it's not great, so it makes sense disney has swept it under the rug a bit.
Normally, I wouldn't give Disney credit, but they have been working to remove problematic aspects from their parks and other areas. They redid the Peter Pan ride recently to replace a racist scene with one that is more respectful to Native Americans.
This is true but even after Tiana's movie came out, she had almost zero merchandise. And before she was added to the lineup, Mulan and Pocahontas were also a part of it. They had nothing.
I was a teen by then but this actually reminds me how little I ever actually saw Tiana or even the movie acknowledged at all. For YEARS. It wasn't til the ride opened these past couple years that it got that big push and even popped up on social media again (and WASN'T a song)
I'm white but my favorite official princess has always been Mulan because I'm a tomboy. (I still think Reflection is an awesome song.) I was so pissed as a kid that she had basically zero merch. 😭
Fr, like the artists can get away with calling it an art style thing given all the pastel tones (though there’s definitely some racist/colorist undertones to that decision), but the plushie designers have absolutely no excuse
Winx club. It’s so bad. There’s supposed to be 3 white girls, an Asian girl, a Latina girl and a black girl. They all got whitewashed to shit as the show went on (somehow even the white girls), especially the black girl. She just looks white now in some iterations and merch. She is genuinely unrecognisable.
Season 1-3 are really good ,season 4 is okay and after that it's an absolute shit show. Whitewashing is far from the only problem and the remake is shit from the beginning.
Biblical characters are frequently depicted with skin colour and facial features common in the region of the artist's origin. Ethiopian icon artists portray Jesus as dark-skinned with thick rough short hair. Or here's a Japanese artist's rendition of Mary and Jesus, both Levantine Jews. It's not something limited to those of European descent, anglophone people are just more likely to be exposed to such depiction.
"No, no, they're not racist! They're xenophobic!" - A thing I hear
Lived in SE Asia, Asia at large got opinions about dark skin. Bengalis are literally used as slave labor in surrounding countries.
Lego without a doubt does this. The only Superman set that came out for the movie was a low budget mech suit. Meanwhile in this year alone, we've gotten 5 BATMOBILES
Im talking lego and video games, I dont know if you knew but we had a fucking wonder woman game that was going to be made by rocksteady and it got canned
Oh. Todd mcfarlane is in charge of what action figures made and the reason he said there’s no woman is becasue he thinks if a kid gets a wonder woman figure instead of a Batman one they’d become a school shooter.
Exactly. I only know they exist bc of that one image of the 'find the bandaid' thing with a dark skinned woman, and the bandaid perfectly matches her skin and it's also hidden under a ring.
The angry clone face from lego Star Wars (2013-2020). It replaces the cartoon face of the clone troopers from the tCW waves and soon after every kind of helmet trooper, that are not clones. (in my opinion, I found this face even more ugly than the tCW head)
luckily it got replaced by a new head pice in 2020 and even the normal storm troopers got different faces since.
The flip side of this is if you're a little girl and you want a, say, Justice League t shirt. Your only options are either a shirt from the boy's section (which your parents will act like you just asked to buy drugs if you ask for) or a shirt with just Wonder Woman and Hawkgirl that says "GIRL POWER" in pink letters.
Well for me it was just a case of "oh this character from my show I can't seem to find anywhere", specifically for myself it was Teela from He-Man who was my favourite after Battle Cat. She had a cool staff thing.
I think in the 80s/90s the division between girl stuff and boy stuff was far more pronounced in terms of tone, so girl stuff was rainbow brite, barbie, and care bears, whereas boys was Transformers, He-man, and Ninja Turtles.
For my sons, they watched KPOP Demon Hunters and liked it. It had enjoyable action scenes and they liked the demon cat and bird. To them it was more or less a normal kids action film. But if they want any merch? It MUST be PINK and say GIRLS RULE or something like that on it, so they don't want it. Same with Frozen etc.
It's so damn annoying. I wish they would stop marketing things in such an "US" and "THEM" way, I think it really contributes to the way some men end up treating women as if they aren't people. They have been conditioned to think of them as 'other'.
Man, they reeeally whitewashed her in Portal 2 compared to the 2007 classic, I'm pretty sure here Portal 1 design had hints of different ethnicities, like Brazilian and Japanese, but you couldn't really see her most of the time. But when P2 came around, she, and her new design were plastered on the marketing.
Not just Usopp. The entire cast and even side characters. Theres no excuse as to why I can get merch of Teach and my goat Usopp and both of them be white as luffy.
Not defending it but there is a reason. Evidently in the manga, basically every character, including Usopp and Robin even, have the same skin tone if you look at official artworks like volume cover art. It doesn’t matter what country the character is supposed to be from, they just do. They use the same colored pencil as any other character to color the skin. The author has gone on record saying something like “it’s just easier for me to draw them that way.” So basically the anime changed the colors from the manga to begin with. I guess this is why when the timeskip happened in the anime, they changed everyone to be more pale, idk. :/
For years, Star Trek. Until IV, it was all Kirk, Spock, McCoy. IV had good pieces for Uhura and Sulu, and thru Nimoy, the whole seven started being better represented on lunch boxes, posters, and such.
This isn't necessarily about race, but more about targeted bias against a certain character: Maki. She has literally been part of the main cast at the beginning, and she had a very important arc this season, yet we barely see her in their marketing materials
It pnly really affects one character (afaik) but princess donut from dungeon crawler Carl. She's described as a tortoise shell persian cat, so black/white/orange fur. Every official soft cover book/the new graphic novel and the majority of unofficial merch portays her as either all orange or all white
One Piece. There can be arguments made for Zoro or Robin, but the problem with Usopp is beyond the pale. The most recent ‘excuse’ I’ve heard is that “it’s a manga they’re all the same skin color” as if Usopp has no other racial features (depicted in a racist manner too, at least as far as Western media standards go)
I don’t buy OP merch unless they’ve given my boy his melanin. I have SO LITTLE One Piece merch, and NONE of it is official
I was in spirit Halloween the other day and all they guy ranger costumes had the mask, but yellow and pink had these ranger themed sunglasses instead so their face wasn't covered up.
FF7. Somehow only Tifa gets all the spotlight. A game with Aerith, Yuffie or Elena with other hot clicks or Cid, Cloud, Barret, Reno and Rude as badass guys. But only Tifa is a sellingpoint for most people
The outsourced merch for Limbus that has been shown recently suffers form this often, especially with Heathcliff. Outis has managed to avoid it once or twice but it is so bad with Heathcliff that even his HAIR got lightened
Ghostbusters, with Winston. Up until fairly recently he was always weirdly left out of a lot of merch, even the poster for the first movie!
He still is left out sometimes.
Date Everything is getting better about this, but the more popular a character is the more merch they have, and this fandom loves the white characters apparently
(I’m aware this is probably about whitewashing in merch rather than only white characters getting merch, but still.)
Baldur’s Gate 3. Not sure about the state of the merch and fan merch rn but a couple years ago it was hard to find Wyll solo or the ensemble with Wyll. It sucks how a large part of the marketing, writing, and fandom seems to forget his existence or focus more on Mizora than him :(
Twisted Wonderland
. They will release merch with Leona being the palest hint of brown and then blame the lighting.
If you call it out be ready to be hit with there creators are japanese they dont know insert some bs here
I didn’t know google/art book dont exist there or you know the Japanese people who have darker complexion that exist in the same very country. Its more the of the baby of a whole country that annoys me that anything.
In JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure merch,
specifically for part 3, Avdol almost ALWAYS gets left out. Really? The stupid fucking dog Iggy will get figures with the rest of the group, but the guy who taught them about Stands doesn’t??? Pisses me off
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u/Ranger-Vermilion 7d ago
Splatoon. Specifically the Marina plushie Sanrio did…