#so we all know temuera morrison has curly hair so so would the clones

[binthm]

some curly haired clone sketches:) (w/ & w/out filter)

[weirdo-from-bonesborough]

Temuera Morrison is half Scottish. He's literally half white yet fans complain about the clones being whitewashed. Is it even possible to whitewash characters who are mixed?

This is a great point, thank you for bringing it up! Yes, Morrison is Scottish, but that doesn’t mean he can’t be whitewashed.

I want to state again that I am a white Latino and I am not in expert on whitewashing. I’m simply expressing my own thoughts for this specific point. And since it’s my post I’m gonna bring up another fandom for an example that I believe is less complicated to explain.

So this is Camilo from Encanto:

And these are his parents, Félix and Pepa:

So Camilo very clearly resembles both of his parents. He has light brown skin and freckles, brown eyes, and curly brown hair. To draw him any other way, even though he is half white, would still be whitewashing.

Even through he is not as dark as Félix, drawing him with skin as white as Pepa would still be whitewashing.

To give him a smaller or more pointed nose would still be whitewashing.

Making his brown eyes green would still be whitewashing.

Giving him looser curls, or red hair, would still be whitewashing.

This all stands true for Temuera Morrison. Giving him lighter skin, lighter hair, looser curls, and a smaller nose are all whitewashing, because that is not an accurate depiction of him.

Based on the clones voice and appearance, they were clearly meant to resemble Morrison, and they should do that properly! The clones’ genetic base isn’t Morrison’s parent*, but Morrison himself, so the clones should look like him, not Morrison’s parent. Just like how, if we were to clone Camilo, his clones would look like him. Not Pepa or Félix.

So, yes! Since Morrison is white, so are the clones! And since Morrison is not white-passing, neither are the clones! Because they are clones of a man played by him, they look like him. And since Morrison does not look Scottish at a glance, neither do the clones, though they are every bit as Scottish as him.

*(I have no idea if just one of Morrison’s parents is white and the other Māori, or they are both mixed raced. Wikipedia did not specify, and I did not want to dig too deeply into his personal life, though it did mention he is also Irish!)

So, yeah. Morrison is part white, but not white-passing, so therefore, the clones are as well. To change their looks because ‘Morrison is half white’ denies the part of them that aren’t.

I’m half white and half Latino, but I’m not biracial. If I said anything incorrect or inappropriate, let me know and I will delete the post. I just wanted to share my own thoughts on the matter.

[ierotits]

Whitewashing Clones and Fetts

having now been vaguely involved in star wars fandom for the last few months it has become increasingly obvious that many people don't know how to draw clones (or any Māori characters for that matter) without wildly whitewashing them. I don't want to assume that everyone is aware that a lot of the things they're drawing are racist, many artists just seem to be uneducated and change how they draw the characters when kindly called out on it, so I figure the best way to address the problem is to make a masterpost of things artists should be avoiding, or adding in when making art of these characters (made with loads of help from Lucky @transfetts, who did all of the art for this post!

Should go without saying that this all applies to the Bad Batch, since the show isn't too far away. Just because canon has come up with excuses for whitewashing the characters, that doesn't make it fine for you to whitewash them too. Please actively try to make them look more accurate to how Temuera Morrison looks when you draw them.

1. Hair

One of the key issues is the way that people often draw the hair for the clones. remember, they are all Māori! this means their hair is not going to be naturally straight! in some instances, straight hair can be okay but only if there is a specific reason for it, eg. it was straightened artificially for a purpose like a costume or disguise. one of the two worst offenders for the hair being the wrong texture is the classic flat top and when the hair is tied up in a manbun style. the clone wars might have their hair sticking straight up but that doesn't make it okay for you to draw it that way. Temuera Morrison has curly hair, when his hair is short there should be clear lumps showing it is curly. The drawing just below has some examples from Lucky, first of the mistake most people make is having the hair sticking straight up, and a couple of examples of better methods of drawing that style and the tied up style! the key to accuracy is just making the hair lumpy, and ideally adding a few little curls sticking out for longer styles

Long hair should also not be straight, rather it should be relatively curly. Curly does not just mean giving it a few waves! There's a huge difference between making the hair vaguely wavy and making it truly curly

2. General Face Shape

The Clone Wars biggest crime is the way they fucked up the clones face shape. if you look at the gif linked below, you can see just how much they thinned out the clones faces and lengthened their chins. the best advice if you're struggling with the face shape is start off tracing Temuera Morrison! when in doubt, go straight to the source.

3. Lightening

I know everyone has talked about this but it always needs reminding that the clones are not white. stop lightening their skin. again, just copy Temuera Morrison! same goes for the eyes, the clone wars drastically lightened their eyes, the eyes should generally be a much darker brown. There is nothing inherently wrong with giving a clone blue eyes for plot reasons, but it is something that seems to happen far too much. Generally, stop looking for excuses to lighten their eyes. There's already too many clones with light eyes.

4. Nose Shapes

Please look at the examples from Lucky below, Morrison has a much wider nose than the clones do in the animated shows. When drawing them both face on and side on, it needs to be clear that the nose hasn't been thinned and lengthened like in the shows. This goes along with the face shape, Māori features are typically wide rather than long and thin, please stop white washing these features.

5. Moko

It has been super awesome seeing people incorporating the practice of inking the skin into clone and Mandalorian culture in their art! This is something I 100% support, but there a few things that should be noted in doing this. The most important is to never copy someone else's moko directly. moko is a sacred practice of carving our ancestors into our skin, each is individual and should never be directly copied. absolutely take inspiration from other people's moko! but please never come up with it directly. I would urge you to spend some time researching different designs, and spend the time designing something that is individual to the clone or Mando you are drawing. Even better would be to have an explanation of the meanings of the designs you have come up with along with the art! If this sounds too difficult I would recommend sticking with using mando'a for moko instead of traditional designs, although I personally think mando'a is the best thing to incorporate anyway.

The other important thing is not to refer to moko as tattoos, they are very much not the same thing. I would recommend doing a bit of googling to see the methods traditionally used for moko to help understand this.

TLDR: when in doubt, just use Temuera Morrison (or one of the actors of the younger clones) as a reference, rather than the Clone Wars models. just because the animated shows whitewashed the characters, that doesn't make it okay for you to do it.

In an ideal world, if we as fans can reject the whitewashing done by Disney, the people designing the characters would follow suit and start representing Māori more accurately. At the very least, actively portraying clones without whitewashing them will make people of colour feel far more welcome and comfortable interacting with clone artists.

[lilhawkeye3]

I don't know if they thought curly hair was too complicated to animate or something, but for some reason, ALL the clones in TCW have straight hair. It comes off as a simple stylistic choice with the standard crew cut, but then you have characters like Tup and Hunter. And since Trace Martez exists, we know they CAN texture curly hair now, and it doesn't look like it was all that complicated either. I guess in the case of Tup and Hunter we have to chalk it up to mutation in-universe.

Alright. Here’s an image of Trace and Rafa Martez.

I’m gonna say this kindly as a curly haired individual: I would not say Trace has textured curly hair in the show. She has a textured hairstyle meant to represent curls.

Rafa has some waves in her hair that do end in a little curl, and while in real life I would say she probably has one of the “B” classifications for curly hair and appears to have a stronger curl pattern than Temuera Morrison. That said, the animation is still fairly blocky and only represents her having curls.

This gif even shows it: Trace’s hair just... doesn’t move. It’s completely fixed. At least Rafa’s has a bit of sway and bounce at the bottom ringlet.

My honest opinion? The actual animation program itself is not designed to handle curls. What we see with both Martez ladies is that the CG part of their hair is very blocky, but the “texture” comes more from the hand-painted look.

This is something Filoni pushed from the start: CG animation was the new thing in 2005 and George Lucas wanted to use it for the show, but Filoni was a hand-drawing artist. He worked on Avatar the Last Airbender, for example. The way he could keep that feel with Clone Wars was to paint each “panel.” Thus, you had a merging of the two. Here’s a segment of a direct quote from Filoni, taken from this article.

“I wanted it to look like a painting— you see a textured, hand painted style on every character. I have texture artists who literally paint every character right down to their eyeball, because I wanted that human touch on everything.” -Dave Filoni

I actually looked into what program they used (at least for the earlier seasons). In 2008, it was produced by a company called Autodesk, and here is the announcement of them using the software. In the announcement, it mentions that one of Autodesk’s first (and main) developments is AutoCAD, and that their programs are meant to simulate real-world developments. Yeah... AutoCAD is an engineering/architechtural program. It’s very formulated and rigid because so are the materials it needs to simulate.

Here’s an example of a plant designed using a more recent version of AutoCAD (from the Autodesk website). Even with basic colors, it’s clear to see how its older versions would be best for a show full of armored troopers, ships, destroyers, walkers... pretty much every part of Star Wars except for the people, tbh.

The program, and thus any later ones developed off of it, was not equipped to program curly hair. It’s not in their coding.

The other problem is Lucasfilm was outsourcing the animating for most scenes to a team in Asia (as per the linked announcement). That’s not cheap. When you introduce a character like Tup, who is a smaller supporting character, it’s far easier to just use the already developed clone CG model and have his hair tied back so it lays flat. It’s logistically not worth figuring out curls for him.

Hell, look even at Anakin or Obi-Wan’s hair in the first seasons (just search gifs on tumblr tbh). It moves together in chunks, if at all. The last season does have more improvement, but by then 1) it’s ten years later, so animation programs have evolved significantly, and 2) they’re at Disney.

I may hate on Disney for a lot of things, but Disney and Pixar have pioneered so much for digital animation, including hair actually (i.e. Tangled & The Incredibles). And... it’s Disney. They’ve got some of the best technology out there, even if it’s just for a TV show. 

But, back to the clones. Take a look at any of the Sideshow collectible figures available for the clone troopers from the show. Even the short haired troopers have wavy definition to their hair, and for Tup it’s pretty clear he has a curl texture, just that it’s been tightly combed back into a bun.

To help, here’s a trio of images: the left is Temuera Morrison around when he was in Star Wars. The top right is the Showtime collectible of ARC Trooper Fives. The bottom right is Fives in the show. It’s clear they attempted Temuera’s curl texture on the figurine. If you look closely at Fives’ hair from the show still, it still attempts to show that but flat painted on the CG hair panel.

And here’s the clearest image I could find of Tup’s hair. Again, they tried to show his texture with the flat hand-painting.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ They tried. Kind of. It just doesn’t translate well.

So, to sum it all up: the clones don’t have pin-straight hair. The animation makes it look that way because it is limited in its coding. But for the more realistic versions of the troopers, they’re shown to have some hair texture.

I don’t think they were being purposefully ignorant or racist by keeping the clones’ hair straighter. The style of animation chosen really was just not equipped to handle any type of curly hair pattern.

[For those of you wondering why they chose it though, one of the main reasons for the style was because they wanted motion capture for battle scenes. And y’know... after seeing the Ahsoka vs Maul fight in the final season... yeah, valid decision on that end.]

That said, something that was within the animation team’s control that we should be angry about is how they lightened/whitewashed the clones and Boba Fett in the series.

But that’s some tea for another time... ☕️🦅

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