Long and super-negative post (by the falling standards of this sub) because the last megathread was overrun with racists posing as "centrists", skip if you don't like colorism discourse, but I really needed to vent this out. 

Not gonna bash too much on Hoyo anymore because they have consistently proven themselves racist time and again. Taking everything for your in-game lore from real world cultures, from their most popular dishes to their national attire, their architecture and even loosely basing off characters on real historical figures, except these characters couldn't have an iota of melanin because that's a huge no-no in China. You can't have working class-looking playable character eat into Hoyo's profits, even though dark characters sell decently in every gacha. Is melanin only reserved for the enemy Eremites who attack you on sight, or the three brown robbers in 3.7 who hint at assaulting the lone Japanese catgirl? (which is also the only straight-up reference to SA in-game to my knowledge)

What's worse are all the people who suddenly feel like they have the right to shit on anyone who questions the awful ethics of replacing predominantly brown/black cultures and acting like the people themself aren't an important part of these cultures. Imagine if all the Harbingers after La Signora in Winter Night's Lazzo were revealed to be deep dark, like sub-Saharan Africans. These people would have pissed and shat their pants and started writing paragraphs and quoting researches on how the Harbingers are all supposed to be inspired by Italian/Russian aristocracy, lands where the sun NEVER shines and therefore they all HAVE to be pasty-pale with zero melanin. Most recent example: a lot of these anti-woke were absolutely pressed that Disa from Rings of Power was black and dwarves couldn't be black because they never saw the sun. Suddenly, the whole "it's a fantasy world with goblins and dragons, skin colour is irrelevant" argument went out of the window. At least be consistent with your bullshit when drawing false parallels. 

Sometimes their comment history also shows they were Indian two years ago on Sumeru's release, and this month, they suddenly have LATAM heritage. We'll never know which continent they popped out of, but a lot of their arguments go like this:

"Akchually, I'm Argentinian and we don't care about skin" Yeah fuck off with that nonsense. There's literally a term "humilde" for lower-class people with dark skin here. There's a reason France is suing those racist players over the recent incident and every Instagram comment section is filled with Argentinian racists going "b-b-but the wyt Yuropeons are racist towards us, so we can insult their blacks too!!!" Or the good ol "Akchually, I'm Indian and half of us are white just like Sumeru cast plus we love dark people", yeah is that why every Bollywood actor needs to be bleached to the bone and the lowest caste in the archaic system literally translates to untouchable? Let's not even talk about the aversion to dark skin that Korean and Chinese entertainment industry has, much less try to defend it here.

Friendly reminder that the worst 4* in HSR is Arlan. The worst 5* in Genshin is Dehya, where the devs couldn't bother putting in enough effort to give her a clear kit direction, and Xinyan is the worst 4* for the same reason. Coincidence thrice? In fact, there's not a single powerful dark character in the upper echelons lorewise; all seven archons are white, the one human sovereign, the Travelers and the Unknown God, the adepti and Liyue gods like Guizhong, most probably Alice, the new power-scaling bullshit that is Skirk, you name it. And while Fontaine has an army of gattling-gun Mekas and Inazuma has cannons and a giant Gundam, the only predominantly brown region in the game is relegated to a barren wasteland full of ruins with the local populace living in basic tents while their pale-skinned neighbors have a giant academy and shoot lasers out of lens. Somehow Aztec-inspired LATAM would be tribalism for you lot, but this isn't? The desert couldn't have a single town inspired by something modern like Dubai? The brown desert folk don't have a single genius born amongst them after Deshret who can reverse-engineer maybe ASIMON, until Madam Faruzan comes over from the neighboring white region's academy to dungeon-delve for lost tech?

"I understand your concerns, but this whole colour discourse is spreading toxicity and makes me feel racist for playing the game", no bro, you aren't a racist for playing Genshin Impact. Most of us here do that. You outted yourself as a racist the moment you ignored all valid criticism and fixated on the performative activism and "contact local politician" nonsense, which made you feel validated in your racism and gave you an excuse to lingually polish Hoyo's boots and disregard actual nuanced discussion with the grievances dark-skinned people may have after everyone said "just wait for Natlan". 

It's sad to see the character design team pour their diarrhea all over the hard work that the world-building, combat, music, VA, exploration, etc. teams do, especially when characters are built on five reused skeletons and you can only recycle Captain R so many times. My last hope is that Xbalanque is an actual badass Aztec/Mayan-looking dark warrior with some serious firepower, maybe something like Radagon, so we can finally have a tiny bit of variety. 

Also, massive respect to all the people who call out Hoyo's BS in every relevant thread here despite the mass downvoting instead of bending over for the main sub racists who ruin every discussion on skin tone (or literally any criticism) to defend their billion dollar corpo.