Criticism of Penacony and why i think HYV shouldve quit while they were ahead.
//vent towards the end, references to suicide while those references are quest spoilers
Recently I've been doing world quests and grinding out the new region and been repeatedly finding myself walking straight into microagressions and slights to the point where it's been jarring enough for me to put my game down. As a black dude playing HYV games i know well enough not to act like the stupid billion dollar game company cares about appealing to minorities but its 2024 man.
First off, the obvious issue. Penacony has been repeatedly mentioned by the devs themselves to be based off of the Jazz Age from the U.S. a few decades ago.
The Jazz age was a period of time in American History between the 1920's and 1930s where the popularity of Jazz just boomed from being like an indie type of music to one of worldwide popularity. Obviously, Black people in that era are wholly responsible for Jazz itself.
So yeah, Penacony takes its origins from a key black history movement. Penacony, the region that released at the start of February. Black History Month.
Star Rail is arguably one of the most popular games right now in terms of outreach because it's free, its new, and its colorful/futurisric etc.... And yet....
Just like with the rest of the HYV games that take real world inspirations, they fucked over black people and their stories.
In Honkai Impact 3rd, basically we had this one black girl who's like sandpaper brown and complains about how much her DARK SKIN ruins her look and how she bleaches her skin using various products to keep it lighter. She is ashamed of her DARK SKINNED mother who's a military woman. Her father is absent. Her mother is also a grown adult who is a B-rank soldier(main character white teenagers are S-rank for reference). Carole Peppers is her name if you want to go further down that rabbit hole.
In Genshin Impact, besides the fact that people with different skin tones are CLEARLY sectioned into certain regions(no seriously there's no real reason why i shouldnt see a black person in any of the existing regions.), and besides the unnecessary amount of whitewashing and besides the perpetuation of the idea of melanin NOT being natural, every single brown/black character in the game has awful playstyles and/or poor matching with weapons/artifacts, inaccessibilty, and they NEVER make it to the top of any meta tierlists. I'm not outright saying they're bad they're just harder and almost never get specialized weapons.
The only previously relevant example in Star Rail was Arlan, a lightning/destruction character. He chews through his own HP and unlike characters like blade/clara, does not have resistance or healing to handle that. Serval, the other lightning 4 star, out-dps's him veryyyyyyy easily. So yeah, the ashy black person character basically dies if you use him for too long and is never relevant TO ANY quests except where he needs to be the sidekick.
sometimes these games have dragons, animals that can understand and process english, or magic.... but then not black people...
Penacony has no black main characters. No black stories of relevance. Yesterday found an NPC whose name was detracted from chocolate and the player had the option to let commit suicide.
yeah ill get to that 💀. This large mass of at least 4 supernatural looking characters and yet no black person. NOT EVEN ANY OF THE CHARACTERS FROM penacony itself are black.
so yesterday I was grinding clockwork quests and had to help out some apathetic shopkeeper named Cocona. Her story was almost a bit sad but midway into going through her background i realized her name is one letter off of cocoa. now imagine being on a creative team coming up with a name for a melanated NPC and somebody decides on fucking CHOCOLATE with an extra letter. before anybody implies that one was something i shoehorned, think about how itd go if i had a bunch of POC characters and one white girl named crackerella.
Cocona and her once again sad backstory reach a hard tipping point as the player follows her to the edge of a building and can either grab her to stop her from jumping or simply let her end her life jumping off the building.
Yes we've seen how this game lets you make choices and watch the consequences of your actions, but there have been established rule-breaking predecents. Take Ruan Mei's quest where you have no choice but to eat the cake she offers you and once again lose the ability to make a choice on saying anything related to her. or any time the trailblazer gets pushed into a fight and cannot de-escalate.
....with this in mind consider why was saving the cocoa girl from killing herself NOT a forced option.
normally id be the kind of silly person looking for lore bits and stuff and making theories, (like how clockie is from the path of elation :v)but as a black dude this whole region is disgusting. THEY ARE GENTRIFIYING JAZZ AND COVERING UP ITS BLACK ORIGINS idk who said HYV cared about their audiences they fucking dont.
wouldve posted this on reddit but whoop dee do i am NOT getting doxxed today.
