#anon im not sure i think my point may have slipped away from me midway thru and this somewhoe turned into a psa but

[catcze]

Re: the thing you posted about sumeru and the skin colours.

I have to say as someone who’s south asian and has lived in the middle east + south asia, its not entirely correct. Sumeru has more of an Arabian vibe and that entire Middle East area does not have many people who are dark skinned, heck most of the people in my country (South Asia) literally have light skin. Many (people from one of our provinces) have white skin and blue/green type eyes. It depends on which parts they’re from. In the Middle east its the same, many Arabs are light skin toned and there are a few who have darker skin- but mostly those from the North African regions.

This was to kinda clear out the entire Middle East/ South Asia = Dark skin for people. I don’t think Genshin would try to add more dark skinned characters tbh because the game caters to chinese audiences which usually prefer light skin tones. As a person from the region Sumeru is supposed to be based off on, I really don’t care if they add the variations of the skin or not- and that means that if they do, then good! But i’m not biased in the sense that I don’t want them to. Its important for them to try and incorporate the culture in the Lore because of how rich it is because that would be so interesting!

We can’t expect much from a game that basically caters more to their own audience rather than others, but for others who do expect something, I think they should try to make an effort and the entire forest= light skin, desert= tan skin thing is intriguing and it is a possibility, so if they would do it then good, but once again, we can’t expect much from such a game.

I'm sorry if I said something that gave off vibes as generalizing all Middle East and South Asia as dark skinned, and i do thank you for sharing your own observations. I'm assuming that this comes from what I said regarding the one image about all the leaked characters lined up, and how all of them except Dehya were light-skinned. 

My criticism of the lineup of new characters isn't based on the expectation that we would be getting only dark-skinned characters, but on the fact that instead of, say, choosing characters who have skin tones that vary according to the region (and possibly giving them culturally-accurate outfits based on said region, instead of just throwing a lot of cultures into the blender and producing several orientalist designs) and helping to balance out the scales by giving representation to pocs who have darker-toned skin, which people have been asking for since the very start of the game, and have gone mostly ignored, they instead chose to not diversify their characters and give the majority of their characters just the one skin tone, with only a few darker-skinned characters here and there. 

Honestly, the main problem with the Sumeru designs as a whole isnt that people were expecting all the characters to be dark skinned–– like you said, there are always gonna be variations in features when talking about race, which is true basically anywhere you go. The issue stems from the poor representation in the game. If you lined up all the current characters we have, you'd see that there is a similar trend with Kaeya and Xinyan being the only poc characters out of all of them. This has always been a problem in genshin, and it's just that the Sumeru designs were merely the straw that broke the camel's back, considering all the expectation that had been riding on it to redeem the diversity issues. Some desi persons have also spoken up about how they aren’t satisfied with the Sumeru designs, which can be found here, for whoever may be interested X X

Criticizing these issues with diversity this strongly is something necessary, considering that they have plans to take inspiration from countries with people of color in the future— particularly with Natlan. And it would be wise to give them feedback and criticism sooner rather than later, before they can mess up another country’s culture. 

It's unfortunate that like what you said hyv doesn't seem to be listening to the people outside of its chinese audience, but I can't say I'm surprised about it, unfortunately. I agree that we shouldn't get our hopes up for them to re-design the characters, as much as many of us are asking, and as much as the variation in cultures and features would have (imo) made a lot of the characters less controversial + would have been interesting in terms of lore and character design.