#colorism

[thatlovelywitch]

My mouth fell.

[the-bitter-ocean]

Pro tip: blocking a black person for saying “hey your merch is getting whitewashed and I wish you weren’t vague regarding this because other people in the notes are genuinely getting confused and making light of the situation because of said wording” is not helping your case. Hello? How is that holding yourself accountable. In what way.

This is what I said regarding Adrienne’s response to her merch getting whitewashed:

This is because of different people in the notes making jokes, and assuming it to not be as serious or not specifically about whitewashing. I wanted to help clarify and was not meant to be hateful. Adrienne’s response was to block me and only me so that my post wouldn’t show up at all in the notes for other people. I wonder why that is:

This is not a cool response to have to someone politely asking you to not whitewash your black cast.

[kouhai-deactivated]

Fuck how most of y’all make em feel I love dark skinned Black Women <3

[soulful-roses]

Racism, whitewashing, and colorism are inexcusable.

It is especially inexcusable when multiple people have called it out on your official merchandise, and when a black fan attempts to contextualize and address the issue, they are blocked and ignored.

Adrienne Insertdisc5. What are you doing?

Alienating your fans of color, only addressing issues in vague, nebulous terms, and most importantly, spending years actively ignoring these problems, is downright embarrassing. You should be ashamed of yourself.

These problems are only made worse when put in the context of the game. This continued behavior speaks to a lack of accountability in you and your team. We're thoroughly disappointed in you.

[sbrown82]

“I remember an incident from my own childhood, when a very close friend of mine and I, we were walking down the street. We were discussing whether God existed. And she said he did not. And I said he did. But then she said she had proof. She said, ‘I had been praying for two years for blue eyes, and he never gave me any.’ So, I just remember turning around and looking at her. She was very, very Black. And she was very, very, very, very beautiful. How painful. Can you imagine that kind of pain? About that, about color? So, I wanted to say you know, this kind of racism hurts. This is not lynchings, and murders, and drownings. This is interior pain. So deep. For an 11 year-old girl to believe that if she only had some characteristic of the white world, she would be okay. [Black girls] surrendered completely to the master narrative. I mean the whole notion of what is ugliness, what is worthlessness. She got it from her family, she got it from school, she got it from the movies — she got it everywhere; it’s white male life. The master narrative is whatever ideological script that is being imposed by the people in authority on everybody else. The master fiction, history, it has a certain point of view. So, when these little girls see that the most prized gift that they can get at Christmastime is this little white doll, that’s the master narrative speaking: “This is beautiful. This is lovely, and you’re not it.”

Toni Morrison on what inspired her to write her first novel, The Bluest Eye.

[the-bitter-ocean]

ISAT yetee merchandise has an ongoing issue with the visibly darker skinned characters of color getting lightened / whitewashed. (IMAGES AND EXPLANATION UNDER THE CUT)

I’m going to preface this with I’m giving both @insertdisc5 and the company yetee the benefit of the doubt because I am doubtful that this is with intentional malice, but it is a growing concern because this is a pattern that has been repeated multiple times across different products offered. Given how the (largely white) fandom space that’s curated online tends to ignore (at best) or perpetuate it directly at worst these harmful instances of characters getting their features erased … the last thing I expected was it happening in a official setting that was in *theory* looked over by the dev directly and approved. Given how the game writing makes the effort to represent the different characters and their culture in a way that felt respectful it felt, hurtful to say the least.

Many people in the fandom including myself have made posts directly commentating on this issue (that happens in fanart very commonly but now also in official merch), as well as emailed yetee and were essentially given the default (sorry, we can’t help at this time) regarding the products coming out lighter. In contrast the poster ( which is on the very same post as the whitewashed keychains and released at the exact same time as a bundle) the timing of it getting fixed for anatomical errors with the hands was handled the next day. When looking at the post I could see that there were plenty of tags, rbs and comments talking of the merch drop that happened on February 9-10 were people expressing their feelings regarding not wanting the characters to be whitewashed. Zero response.

The following photos given I’ve changed to pure grayscale solely so we can gage the values without getting distracted by red or blue tint from the photos. It goes as follows:

Now this isn’t to say that every single instance of isat merch of the characters were all lightened. Some of them like metal pins of the entire group are on model:

And even with the case of the poster or the notecard that came with the mirror photo, the skintones while not completely accurate are at least clear that both Bonnie and mirabelle werent lightened at all and are darker than their canon in game sprites. I’d rather have the characters be a tad darker than average than lightened or having features removed:

It’s clear that rather than the artist themselves of the merch doing the whitewashing, it’s due to whatever printer yetee has making the skintones far lighter than it should and that’s a problem. It’s misrepresenting the characters as well as the artists who worked hard to actually be on model to begin with. To me the solution is if you know the printer will print values lighter, you need to make the scans darker in post before delivery to compensate. Actually do multiple tests in person to check for consistency and quality instead of just rely on the display photo and hoping for the best.

I want everyone in this community ( especially those of color like myself) to feel represented and safe in the fandom space we’re in. I know some people have expressed fear of criticizing anything related to the game, because they didn’t want to come across as mean spirited or ruining the vibes or afraid of being on the receiving backlash/ hate from people when expressing anything less then 100% positive of a popular creator of work, but I didn’t want this to just get buried and forgotten or go unaddressed. If it’s not talked about and given the chance to fix it properly, we all just end up making the same mistakes over and over, become complacent and then slowly the environment of the space isn’t welcoming as it used to be. Again, to be clear this isn’t meant to be hate for hates sake or bad faith criticism. I say this with nothing but love as a fan for this games story, characters and all the lovely folks I’ve met while playing.

[prickly-porcupine-memes]