When I was first, unfortunately, exposed to ValiDate I was in a group chat with friends who were all white (I'm not antagonizing them for being so, its just for context and I thought'd it be a funny story to tell here.), I sincerely thought they were trying to playing a rousing bout a jest by showing me some shitty tumblr parody like that Hamilton miku binder shit. Yolanda is the first character they showed me and I really thought it was a hop and a skip away from racism and I questioned them, I was especially confused by the implied ethnicity/race/nationality of Yolanda which, are different things people struggle with figuring out what qualifies as what, apparently. There's no way in hell she is ethnically korean.
As a blasian myself (sorry if TMI I want to complain.), and as someone who also knows many asians by proxy of being such, Yolanda is the farthest thing from looking a single ounce of Korean. Though I'm sure thats fucking obvious as all hell, but I'm happy to give more solidarity to that fact. Unless there's some implied genetic lottery here there's no way to come out that dark. But light skinned blasians are basically white to these tumblrite people despite still being a shade of brown. Colorism is a funny little thing, isn't it. As an aside, Black people live in Korea yes, it'd be dumb to say otherwise, but they aren't ethnically korean, but they can be migrants or born there and have the nationality. Same can be said for the character that's apparently Chinese. Though, that should be obvious to anyone with the ability to use their brain. If their writers had the ability to write backstory and personalities that weren't thin as tracing paper they could perhaps use the concept of these being nationalities instead of ethnicities but that's probably too much to ask of people who rely on memes and tumblr/twitter humor to make anything of substance.
Harkening back to my experience, the funniest thing about that whole group chat instance was they thought
I was being racist when I said I was decently uncomfortable and confused by being presented one of the shittiest character designs I've seen that made no sense with even context provided, and I was expected to feel ~
RePrEsEnTeD~. I'm not going to bother going into exact detail but you have no idea how weird it is to be treated like a specialty object by hyperwokes for being "pee oh see" and then lambasted for saying something that feels like some horrid parody is such by people who've been steeping in white guilt since they signed up for tumblr. The whole game feels like it's pandering to people with white guilt and complete disconnects with what ethnicity/race/nationality is and how other cultures function outside of America. I'm sure someone could word what I mean better, though.
Also, it's equal parts fascinating and hard to describe how frustrating it is to be a 'POC' and having people grasp at that label like its some sort of invincibility shield when they make downright shit content like this that is trying too hard to cater to hyper specific niches of people in an attempt at realism that it ends up looking like down right racism and hollow representations that do more mocking than any bit of help in terms of making people feel 'validated'. I can't even talk about this with any one I know because they're too scared to look racist or some flavor of -phobe to give criticism the game rightfully deserves in the current publicly available state its in.
Anyways sorry if that was stupid I don't have a single soul outside of kiwifarms I could whine about this shit to for reasons aforementioned
), or Dani's gotten an ego boost from the attention and money she's getting and has deluded herself into thinking she's a professional game dev now and simply cannot settle for the shitty art of some of her friends. Seriously, no matter how dog shit their art is if you've already hired them and signed contracts have some respect for their labor and time.
