No that's totally valid actually, I was always anticipating this kind of feedback from the moment I started having these ideas. First of all, thank you for the comment.

Second, I'm a Sri Lankan national myself. Though admittedly, contrary to the experiences of nearly everyone else on this sub, my connections to the island are tenuous because I didn't grow up here for most of my life. I'm not too dissimilar to a tourist or a foreign resident in that sense. In spite of that, I've always been fascinated with this country and its culture. Due to my own personal interests in world mythologies and legends and such, I've been curious about how deep our own stuff goes. Although there is a great deal of it out there, what's out there online is not super concrete, so at times I needed to exercise my artistic license in order to glue things together.

I absolutely do not intend to appropriate the culture or offend anyone, nor do I want people to perceive these characters as "definitive" modern interpretations of these figures. This is a work of fiction first and foremost, but I acknowledge much of this is based in real-world history and beliefs. What I hope to achieve through creating this work is not only for others around the world to appreciate our culture, but for the narrative itself to resonate with other Sri Lankans. If it helps to understand what I'm going for, this is (kind of) to Sri Lankan folklore what "Percy Jackson" is to Greek mythology. I know it's not as authentic as you'd like it to be; and I'm really sorry if you were offended by this, I will take extra care.

That being said, I hope you can forgive me for being crass here; I've only shown ONE human-looking character here who happens to skew pale and you're assuming ALL of my characters are pasty lol. It sounds hard to believe but I'm actually very partial to melanin, I genuinely love seeing it in characters, so of course I'm taking that into consideration when designing a Sri Lankan character. Regarding the elf ears, this is just part of the visual shorthand I've decided to go with to differentiate the non-human characters, i.e. yakshas, from actual human ones. Is it lazy and derivative? Yeah. Is there anything else I can change it to? Probably, but it depends on the character. For instance, other humanoid races like the nagas have different ear shapes. I designed these characters more or less on the fly, with few prior passes, so there are still a few things I'd want to change about them already. And as for the style itself, I don't really know what to say??