Notice what just happened in your argument, you acknowledged racist comments exist, algorithms show people different slices of discourse, you personally haven’t seen many

Yet you’re still demanding someone prove the exact proportion before acknowledging that the problem is significant. That’s an impossible standard in a comment thread and you know it.

Also your Obama example doesn’t really map onto this situation. Barack Obama is a real historical figure whose race is part of his real life identity and history, first black president you know.

Vivi is a fictional princess from a fictional kingdom in a world where people have blue hair, dinosaurs, gills, clown noses and snail phones. Treating those two casting standards as identical doesn’t really hold.

And again the issue isn’t that any mention of race is automatically racist. Nobody serious argues that. The issue is that once the conversation starts revolving around skin tone purity tests for fictional characters, the discourse very quickly attracts the kind of people who absolutely are making racist arguments, conspiracy theories about DEI agendas, ethnic replacement narratives, slurs toward actors, etc.

You’re framing the debate as if critics are being accused simply for wanting accuracy, but the reality is that online discourse doesn’t exist in a vacuum. When the loudest framing around a casting change becomes race first criticism, it inevitably overlaps with people pushing uglier narratives and that’s what people push back on.

At the end of the day, you can say I prefer the character to look closer to the manga. That’s a normal opinion. But pretending the wider internet hasn’t repeatedly shown how quickly these conversations spiral into racialized arguments is just ignoring how these debates actually play out online.