Character Creation Has A Race Problem

[Nandina]

I skimmed the thread, and there is a lot to quote and respond to, and I probably won’t get it all, but I’ll do my best to respond to everyone as I can if I can. But I do want this point addressed:

she turned the tone of this thread when she responded to valkyrie's response with a semi-racist post of its own. I'm gonna call it what it is. It was semi-racist. Not calling her racist, but the tone of her very first response was semi-racist in nature.

Please explain to me, how what I said was hateful, disparaging, and advocating that no one else get their representation? We’re not getting anywhere, because people are claiming non-issues and evidently don’t know what racism is, but keep utilizing the word. You all keep saying I’m looking to be offended, when I can flip the script and say the same thing back.

Anyways. . . The videos aren’t the same length cause I tried to speed things up instead of doing a 360 on every hairstyle like how I did with the Highlander Male. I will try to break them up in separate posts. In any event, I’ve taken the liberty of putting relevant quotes and commentary under each video, but I also want to highlight and bold the relevant points of the OP.

So, I've been tempted to use a Fantasia, and change from Miqo'te, so I started playing around with the character creation, and the lack of diversity is abysmal. I wanted to make a Hyur female, but I can't help but notice there isn't much wiggle room. There's only one cute braided mohawk style, and some dookie dreads. Where are the curly or even kinky hair styles? There are no flat twists, no cornrows, no box braids, no senegalese twists, no two strand twists, etc. I thought there was an afro option, but I didn't see that either. Under the nose options, there's are no truly wider options (I'm not saying the nose has to take up the entire face). There are no larger fuller lips. Skin tones run either cool or red, and there are absolutely no yellow undertones. Many of the little boxes on the skin color grid are virtually indistinguishable from the ones at least four spaces from them vertically, making them a waste. On brown skin tones, this makes the character appear ashy and in severe need of lotion. Skin tone alone is not diversity. Sure you can make your character Sudanese black, but if the nose and lips are slim and thin, is it really a black person? No.

Either way I think labeling it and making into a purely racial issue is heavy handed, and labeling facial features as "Black lips" or "white lips" etc is pretty unhelpful to any case you're trying to make when you're talking about race. It's not very hard to say fuller lips, wider noses, flatter noses and so on.

It's.. rather mistaken to say some of the stuff said here. There's no such thing as "black noses" or "white people lips". We know better than that now. Far better.

Notice I did say wider noses and fuller lips. Not once have I ever said “black lips” or “white lips” as the two above claimed I did, and the post is time stamped and has time markers for when it was edited. If you look at when I edited my initial post (because I had too much typed) you’ll see that it was before either person made those comments. Therefor they reacted to something that was imaginary.

The darker skin tones are odd, but not completely unusable to make a dark/deep skin-toned character, to represent themselves or culture if that's their wish to do so.

However, it has already been said there will not be changes made to the creator section any time soon. They do however add hairstyles often. [b]A post suggesting hairstyles, probably would have been better received, with maybe some examples of what you would like to see.[\b] I do think some of the requests would be difficult to implement in the game, as judging by the "afro" which is a mess. I would love to see curly/kinky options, but the physics/textures would probably not work well with however they currently design hair.

But I did do that, lol. I gave examples and everything as shown above.

I'm not taking an issue with the suggestion itself. My issue is with the way that is being framed. If FFXIV did not have any option for darker skin tones, then the weight of the argument for representation would be much heftier. As it stands, though, there are options in-game to allow for people to design a character to their personal tastes.

I never argued that there weren’t ANY options, lol. I clearly said that you could make your character darker, just that the undertones were off and looked funny.

I advocate for the creator's choice to include whatever race, gender, etc. they want without being forced to try and appeal to everyone's sensibilities..

I never tried to force anyone; if anything I asked a question which was directed to SE. I never said “SE better put these extra options in the game.”

Notice in each of the videos that when I up the color scale, the skin gets cooler; as I go down, redder. When I go up, the skin has a greyish tint because a cool undertone under a browner one has that effect. Yes this isn’t real life, but it’s safe to assume that Hyur were modeled after real life humans. Humans aren’t grey like that unless they’re ashy like I mentioned or have the wrong makeup foundations hade.

Female Midlander

There's only one cute braided mohawk style, and some dookie dreads.

Notice that these two faces are the exact same. If you were to change the skin and hair to a lighter one, it doesn’t effect the other features. You still get a pretty Euro looking person, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. Does Rachel Dolezal and Martina Big changing their skin color change the other features of their face? Or how about an example people can relate to: Kylie Jenner. Lol.

Ignoring the fact that most of those screenshots look like Caucasian people with darker skin...

So cleary people can see what I see, yet they’re still have a problem.

This the easiest way I can convey my point. If people still don’t get it then. . . I just know what else to say.


———

Female Highlander

You should probably look at highlander then.

Now hang on, that was a perfectly viable suggestion, and in fact I think you'd find male and female highlanders have a lot more option to make traditionally "black" features.

I actually have to change what I said about the “dookie dreads”. If you notice, the back of the dreads are still straight, but it’s close.

Highlander Huyr has better options for those looking for yellow undertones and some of their hairstyles are braided too.

I’m fine with the rest of the post, but this point in particular I don’t agree with, only because they’re still straight hairstyles despite the braids.

For example, Highlanders (yes, you wanted to make a Midlander, I've read that) are the ones that have more options to make them look like black people and there are many black NPCs in Gyr Abania.


You maybe can't make a black Hyur girl that looks truly black, but you can with Highlanders and Roegadyn for example.

I don’t agree with the Highlanders at all in that regard.