dylanfills My fuzzy feeling for both spending money on myself and supporting a cool company immediately became shallow when Ash brought up representation of black hair in video games.
Well, you know, considering you supported a game with two characters who are hypercool Congolese Afrofuturist fashion icons who are casually portrayed speaking their indigenous language, maybe these things are more interrelated than you think. Like, not to pat Necrosoft on the back only because that one Necrosoft guy is literally gonna read this, but this is partly how better portrayals of black people in videogames becomes the norm and something to be expected. Supporting studios and creators and individual works that put in the effort to portray black characters and thus black people with love, good faith, and confidence in the idea that it’s something worth doing, rather than as an afterthought that can be half assed, or ignorantly stumbled through, seemingly meant to appease a black customer base they seemingly assume is minor without even understanding what they actually want.
To maim a darling of mine, it still gets me pissed off that Final Fantasy XIV has so few hair options with even remotely faithful hair textures that would accurately reflect the hair texture most often exhibited by black people. And it does that creepy thing where characters with dark skin just have that skin color in a contrast-less block all over their body, so they don’t have lighter skin on their palms. And ofc it’s not a technical limitation, if you can give your character blush on their face a different color from their skin, and in different contours and intensities, surely it would not be that complex to be able to do the same for areas of the body where one’s skin tone would be noticeably lighter, like the palms. I mean, I guess everyone’s skin tone is different on all different areas of your body and you could say it’s a failure of fidelity as well as intention but once again another example I can think of is how the tone of one’s skin is different directly underneath your nails, and, yeah, in FFXIV you can change the color of your character’s nails too, so…
Again not to just keep patting Necrosoft on the back but supporting and contributing to the success of projects that do it well is not nothing, imo. At some point too it becomes proof that there’s no excuse not to. Yes, it will take enormous time and deliberate effort to dismantle global antiblackness as a whole, but, Necrosoft and Square Enix and the like aren’t responsible for that, they’re responsible for doing what they do in a way that positively contributes to that overall effort. And, the cool and lovingly designed black characters in HYPER GUNSPORT is proof positive that doing it right, at least in the context of the creation of a mass media entertainment product, is, perhaps counterintuitively, not that hard, if you have the right intentions and attitude. Like, if a comparatively tiny studio like Necrosoft can utilize language/cultural consultants then surely Square Enix can get a few people on the palm skin tone feature in the character creator.