Please contact Fangamer to un-whitewash Blue
(This post is intended to spread awareness of both the situation, and the action plan originally proposed by VHSTAPE on the Deltarune forums.)
There is currently a "Flower Café" T-shirt for sale on Fangamer right now. It was announced via this Bluesky post! The problem? Well, you read the title.
(Comparison graphic by VHSTAPE)
Blue is much lighter than he should be – roughly the same skintone as Aqua. Yes, the shirt is intended to be pastel, but, as I hope we all know, a pastel color palette is no excuse to whitewash. (If you are unfamiliar with how to draw Black people in a pastel palette, VHSTAPE and I both recommend this post by @creatingblackcharacters, which is a fantastic resource for intentionally creating Black characters.)
The goal is to make it so Blue's skintone will be changed in later releases of this shirt.
The method will be commenting on the Bluesky post (linked above) and emailing Fangamer ([email protected]), asking them to properly represent Black fans. We should be polite, but nonetheless request that this be changed, and emphasize its importance.
Here is an e-mail template, provided by VHSTAPE:
"[TO] [email protected]
[SUBJECT] "Flower Cafe" T-Shirt Blue Whitewashing
Hello,
I am a fan of DELTARUNE and the Fangamer merchandise line. I notice that in the newly-released "Flower Cafe" shirt, Blue is whitewashed. His color on the t-shirt is significantly lighter than his in-game skin tone. I would like to suggest that for future releases of this shirt that his skin tone be darkened to match the lower luminance of his sprite. If this looks uncanny, I'm sure the artist could figure out a more appealing color palette that does not whitewash the only canonically Black character in the game.
Thank you for your consideration,
[YOUR NAME]"
I recommend that you change up what is written a bit, and make it more personal to you, if you have the energy/free time to. Add in personal anecdotes and so on. This will make each e-mail seem more personal, and, thus, more convincing, and it'll be less likely to be considered spam. (If you do not have that energy, though, sending just the template as written is already fantastic!)
I hope we can get this fixed!
