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Racial Diversity in FE


SullyMcGully
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1 minute ago, Refa said:

Not disagreeing with you, but can you explain why?  I legitimately don't remember a lot of the races from Awakening, it's been a while.

People from Plegia have dark or light skin, but they seem to be more middle eastern influenced (characters like Mustafa for instance really help to make that obvious as well) while Feroxians seem to range from European to African like the knight boss from Ch. 3 I believe or Basillio who is dark skin but looks nothing like the knight boss. Say'ri is clearly inspired by a more Eastern influence and clearly looks Asian unlike a lot of the more ambiguously designed people, and if her appearance wasn't enough, her name is a straight up give away. Then you have Chrom, which is like a strange "vanilla Europe" setting which is clearly like "British, France etc." any Caucasian inspired area. I guess you could also add in the Tanguel, which are also both olive skinned as well-- even if they don't really have a clear origin or racial comparison. 

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Oh yeah, that makes sense.  Kind of reminds me of how FE6/FE7 did it, with several different nations, although more diverse than those games.

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9 minutes ago, Augestein said:

People from Plegia have dark or light skin, but they seem to be more middle eastern influenced (characters like Mustafa for instance really help to make that obvious as well) while Feroxians seem to range from European to African like the knight boss from Ch. 3 I believe or Basillio who is dark skin but looks nothing like the knight boss. Say'ri is clearly inspired by a more Eastern influence and clearly looks Asian unlike a lot of the more ambiguously designed people, and if her appearance wasn't enough, her name is a straight up give away. Then you have Chrom, which is like a strange "vanilla Europe" setting which is clearly like "British, France etc." any Caucasian inspired area. I guess you could also add in the Tanguel, which are also both olive skinned as well-- even if they don't really have a clear origin or racial comparison. 

I would argue Tellius would have to be the most diverse. But I understand you mean racially diverse in the sense that real world ethnic groups are being represented, not fictional races. Awakening's era of Archanea and Valm are definitely that. There is also Rosanne, though I'd hesitate to say whether its people consider themselves a separate ethnic group in-universe. But Virion and Cherche are definitely inspired by french culture in terms of attire. Cherche dresses as a maid, and Virion's dress and English voice actor really sell this inspiration. I'm also fond of painting Ylisse as England/America since it fits the real world narrative of creating unrest in Plegia (Middle East) before the events of the game that spurs their hostilities in the present. But that's an uncomfortably loaded connection.

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1 minute ago, Gustavos said:

I would argue Tellius would have to be the most diverse. But I understand you mean racially diverse in the sense that real world ethnic groups are being represented, not fictional races. Awakening's era of Archanea and Valm are definitely that. There is also Rosanne, though I'd hesitate to say whether its people consider themselves a separate ethnic group in-universe. But Virion and Cherche are definitely inspired by french culture in terms of attire. Cherche dresses as a maid, and Virion's dress and English voice actor really sell this inspiration. I'm also fond of painting Ylisse as England/America since it fits the real world narrative of creating unrest in Plegia (Middle East) before the events of the game that spurs their hostilities in the present. But that's an uncomfortably loaded connection.

That's a good point about Virion and Cherche. I can't believe I missed them! But yeah, I guess Tellius could be...? Let's see. Laguz are Hawk, Raven, Tiger, Heron, Wolf, Cat, Dragons of Red, White and Black variety... And then Beorc which are boring. Haha. I can see that. And yeah... Ylisse is very strange in that regard with Plegia...

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On 4/2/2017 at 4:22 PM, hanhnn said:

If you think dark magic is not the cause Validar turned into a dark skin man, I don't know what should be.

He could always, y'know, just be genetically dark-skinned. Like a huge portion of the real world's human population.

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Just now, hanhnn said:

If that is the case, his children should be dark skin like him.

Not necessarily, since we don't know who the other parent was. It's very possible Robin just takes very much after their mother, appearance-wise. That sort of thing does happen with the children of real-world interracial couples.

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Other possible examples:

I noticed that the two characters that we meet from Hatari have a slightly darker skin tone.

Many people from Jehanna (i.e. Ismaire, Joshua, Caellach, Tethys, Ewan) have red hair AND eyes, so this might be ethnicity-related.

Riev is yellow.

Hawkeye and his daughter have dark skin too, maybe humans from Arcadia are like that (I don't think we see any other Arcadian human).

Is Devdan supposed to be from another continent? He's the only Black person around and has a weird speech pattern, that might be due to not being a native speaker of the Tellius language...

 

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2 hours ago, Heptade said:

Other possible examples:

I noticed that the two characters that we meet from Hatari have a slightly darker skin tone.

Many people from Jehanna (i.e. Ismaire, Joshua, Caellach, Tethys, Ewan) have red hair AND eyes, so this might be ethnicity-related.

Riev is yellow.

Hawkeye and his daughter have dark skin too, maybe humans from Arcadia are like that (I don't think we see any other Arcadian human).

Is Devdan supposed to be from another continent? He's the only Black person around and has a weird speech pattern, that might be due to not being a native speaker of the Tellius language...

 

Well Sophia is half human and pretty pasty. Of course dragon blood might override skin tone in that case. We also see a generic old guy elder who I guess might be half dragon too. Of course Athos spent centuries hanging out there and didn't get so much as a light tan so I don't think they cared all that much about establishing it a dark skin central (even Hawkeye and Igrene are light enough that they could just have a tan).

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We should be allowed to change the skin tone of the avatar, whether he may be adapted, the child of one of the characters or just completely foreign, we should be able to change the skin tone so that it fits how we want him best because I assume the point of the avatar is to be able to represent the player's ultimate hero or role. Even if it does seem weird to have a very dark toned child of a very light skinned set of parents, or the reverse its just a slight detail, it could just mean you had a genetic mutation that caused that dominant trait to be within you; it should not really be a big problem, so much so, that it is enough to completely make the story unrealistic or ridiculous, especially considering that we're dealing with works of fiction to begin with!

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58 minutes ago, Altina said:

We should be allowed to change the skin tone of the avatar, whether he may be adapted, the child of one of the characters or just completely foreign, we should be able to change the skin tone so that it fits how we want him best because I assume the point of the avatar is to be able to represent the player's ultimate hero or role. Even if it does seem weird to have a very dark toned child of a very light skinned set of parents, or the reverse its just a slight detail, it could just mean you had a genetic mutation that caused that dominant trait to be within you; it should not really be a big problem, so much so, that it is enough to completely make the story unrealistic or ridiculous, especially considering that we're dealing with works of fiction to begin with!

Has anyone posted this here yet?

http://awkwardzombie.com/index.php?page=0&comic=041816

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