One of the big debates in the community is Genshin's blatant disregard of characters having darker skin, and mishandling the few characters that do have deepening by desaturatong that skin to make it look lighter even as a deeper tone.
Now, I'm white so I don't have any authority to speak on the in-depth knowledge or understand of the cultural impacts being a person from the cultures Genshin has riffed from.
However I do enjoy overanalyzing character designs and lemme tell you if you, even if you look at it from the perspective of it not having any racist or colorist intentions, these character designs STILL suffer greatly because of their refusal to give their characters dark skintones.
Did you ever notice Xilonen has body glitter on her thighs...?
If you didn't, I don't blame you! Her skintone is so light that the body glitter damn near blends in with it. In fact, it honestly looks like they made Xilonen just barely dark enough for the glitter to be kinda visible. If you make her one shade lighter it will disappear FULLY into her skin.
This is a really cool design aspect for them to add to a character, and since Xilonen has this pretty obvious DJ/girl going clubbing theme to her it makes a lot of sense. Its pretty common for women to wear body glitter when they go out to clubs since it reflects in a really pretty way in low lighting.
The problem is that Xilonen's body glitter doesn't do that because Genshin's in game shading is SO simple. Its purposefully apart of their art style, it's not a bad thing, but it does mean that her body glitter isn't reflective and a character designer SHOULD have to think of a way to work around that obstacle.
You wanna know what would fix this problem? Making her just a single shade darker. Sincerely darken it by ONE shade and the problem is basically fixed (once again, without the cultural and colorist context.)
And hey, if you darken her skin even more you can do even cooler stuff with the body glitter thing! Make her body glitter gold, blue, and green like her main tattoo colors when she uses her power. It'd be a cute little nod and it'd further breathe life into the design.
But Xilonen's skin just isn't dark enough for this impact to be made...
You can barely see Nefer's gold lip detail and how that relates to Genshin's reluctance to use golds and yellows in their character designs, as well as how it further harms the ENTIRE casts designs...
One of the coolest aspects of Nefer's design is the gold stripe on her lip. It's a cultural reference to Egypt, and one that is BARELY visible on her pale skin.
Here's a cool fact for you! Ever wonder why black people look so damn good in yellows and oranges, especially compared to white people? It's because the color blends in on white skin. Orange much less so, but Yellow being such a light color blends in on white skin REALLY hard, and the same goes for Nefer here.
If you take a look at the rest of Nefer's design you'll realize all the metal decals she wears are a fake gold color for this reason. They use a light yellow tinted brown and then highlight it with yellow to give off the illusion of gold. In fact the only times you ever see a Genshin character who is white skinned have properly gold decals on them, is when that gold is surrounded by another color to make it properly pop.
They use the same trick on Faruzan, Lauma, and Chasca for other examples of this. Meanwhile the darker skinned character's have more noticably gold colors on them.
"But Nijira!" I hear you shout, "Genshin has plenty of character designs that have characters mainly wearing yellow and that have white skin! How is that any different?"
Simply put it's the fact that these designs have other colors incorporated in them to make them pop while also going out of their way to darken the sgade of yellow, and often times tipping that yellow color slightly to the orange side in order to further aud it along. Chiori has rich brown hair and an outfit of blacks and deep reds. Navia has just as much black on her design as she has yellows and golds. Ningguang has a literal black border on her dress that helps the colors of her design come together.
"But Nijira!" I hear you cry again, "Nefer's white skin is apart of her lore!"
Putting aside the fact that I genuinely think this was only done to make the akedimiya seem less racist towards brown people by pointing out that their racism was just pointed towards people of the desert and not their skin color, this is aspect of Nefer's design is a double edged sword for her.
On one hand, Nefer is white because lore, on the other hand that throws all of the other desert people's designs under the bus by making Nefer as pale as she is.
The issue with the lip stripe color would have been easily fixed by making her skin 2 shades darker, and from an outside perspective she wouldn't even be that dark skinned, but they couldn't do that because 2 shades darker is the skin color of MOST OF THE DESERT DWELLERS.
This isn't even the first time they reveal this kind of weakness in their designs! Speaking of...
Mualani, Bennett, and the death of visual intent...
One of the coolest things you can do with your character design, especially with skin tone colors, is tell another story by implying environmental details through their skintone.
Mualani is ACTUALLY tanned, like tanned from the sun, and we know this because of the lighter skin toned details on her torso, arms, and legs! If you know anything about 2000s era trends you'd remember that people would put small stickers on them to both see their tanning process and to also give them a cute temporary tattoo.
Putting aside the fact that you can barely see this marks because they blend in with her skin too well (sigh) this does do some really cool visual story telling! Of COURSE Mualani would do this! She get's tanned from surfing and tour guiding all day in the sun, she's JUST the type of person to have more fun with it by giving herself a bunch of temporary tats.
Once again though, this is a double edged sword... if they can recognize that you tan from being out in the sun all day, what's the excuse for the pale skin of HALF OF THE CAST.
Im not saying that EVERY character has to be tan (not that that should ever be viewed as an issue) but it'd be nice to see some proper intent put into these designs...
They're capable of doing it! THEY'VE DONE IT BEFORE! WITH BENNETT OF ALL CHARACTERS!
It's LONG since been a quiet theory that Bennett is actually Natlanese WAAAY before Natalan came out, and before the limited event that actually confirmed it, and it was BECAUSE he had a slightly darker skintone. That's good visual storytelling! That's visual context clues! They don't do this for anyone else except for Rosaria, who is purposefully given a desatured purple skintone to make her look more vampirey (cool asf btw)
The worst part about this is that it strips away a bunch of other cool character design concepts, for my fellow Venti lovers consider this; even though Venti spends most of his time out doors he NEVER tans, infact he's always alarmingly pale because the Nameless Bard was that pale from a lack of sunlight exposure. Since Venti is taking TNB's form, no matter how much sun he gets he's always really pale since the body he takes form of isnt a proper body in the first place.
This would be SUCH A COOL DETAIL! But it can never be canon because Genshin's character design is allergic to melanin.
In conclusion...
Genshin's colorism issue does exist and it affects literally ALL of the character designs. Goodnight.
