there's a whole conversation to be had about this phenomenon I've observed, so let's have it.
siffrin and the king are heavily coded as indigenous. while it's true that cultural loss and being diaspora is not exclusive to any particular race, it is also true that most people in the real world who have this experience are people of color. they are, at the very least, ethnic minorities in the country of vaugarde who are dealing with a horrific mass-scale loss of their culture.
however, they are drawn as pale-skinned. according to id5, while they have afro-carribean features, they are white-passing. (the authorial decision to make them white-passing is a whole other can of worms that I have complicated feelings on, but that's a different conversation.) and so, most fans end up treating siffrin in a way that suggests that they just view him as white. him being an ethnic minority is often passed over in fan content, and he is centred and discussed and treated in a very similar way to how white protagonists usually are.
this is a difficult thing to articulate, and it's hard to point to particular examples to explain what i mean. but as a fan who has been in a number of different fandoms, including for media with nonwhite protagonists, there is a palpable difference in how most fandoms view and treat protagonists that they understand as poc versus how they treat protagonists who they understand as white. siffrin is not often* sidelined, treated as aggressive, given stereotypical racist tropes, or treated as an accessory to his white love interest. which is why I say he is very much treated as white.
but. however. the king, on the other hand.
there is a way that fans discuss villains they dislike and view as white cisgender men, and there is a way that fans discuss villains they dislike and view as people of color. the king is frequently treated as both. as an assumed white man, he is treated as the pinnacle of an oppressor in some stories -- he is written as racist, misogynistic, transphobic, wealthy, privileged, cruel. and yet, there is also an awareness of him being an outsider to the dominant culture. and so he is also often portrayed as a heavily accented brute who lives to brutalize small, pale waifs. in short, he is white unless his diaspora status can be used to villainize him further, in the fan consciousness.
both of these are huge, massive, incredible problems, but none of them make me as upset as one particular tendency. which is that, if his grief and loss is ever touched on -- the main point of his character, the most sympathetic aspect of him by far, the thing that makes him a foil to siffrin -- it is often only to make him more villainous. his grief, as a man who lost his home and culture, is treated as inherently suspect or even insincere for some reason by white fans.
his love for vaugarde, his clear desire to treat his opponents with respect (at times,) the pain that he is in, the fact that his worst tendencies are directly analagous to siffrin's worst tendencies, a character the fanbase adores, are all discarded frequently in fan content. there is little desire to engage with any of them.
and I'm not saying you have to like the king, or fixate on the king, or even woobify the king. i like him a lot, but part of the reason i like him is because he is a nuanced villain who does bad things. what I'm saying here is that his interiority is almost always discarded, ignored, or treated as suspect by fans in ways that feel extremely dismissive at best of the fact that he is a diaspora character. it is in fact racist to view cultural grief as something that cannot be valid or sympathetic, even if the ways he acts on it do make him cruel to other people.
i would like the fanbase to do better, both by siffrin and by the king. though i am not a person of color, the island being lost is the element I loved the most about this game, and I am frequently bothered by how poorly it is often handled in fan content. silver has addressed some problems in their own post on the subject, but I wanted to put forward my own observations here. please do better.
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