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Should Pokémon become aracial?

KaylaBaraonda

Aroush Halapsian is best girl.
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And by aracial I mean that the characters' appearances are more based on their personalities, themes, and types they train, and not on real life genetics and races. Including also more fantasy-like skintones. So maybe humans including the player are classified by "types" not "races".

Like this:
120184

Or maybe its already aracial and I'm just projecting races on characters? Like, if Pokémon was realistic I'd imagine the Striaton Triplets and Elesa as nordic-like white people, Skyla as mediterranean-like, Shauntal and Brycen as Poké-East Asian... but then again I used to think Zelda Mae and Cycl0n3 Sw0rd were some kind of east asians when it is just the flat-faced artstyle, so maybe I'm just weird at giving races to pixels.

Like, if they only make 12 generations so they could have all the chinese zodiac as the fire starter, then only the 12 regions are canon. That's like, huge swatches of land they won't cover. Most of the regions have huge climate variety due to Pokémon type variety. For example a desert, icy mountain, tropical island, forest, all next to each other.

So it makes sense that the same region has characters whose lineages stretch there millions of years, and some are blond blue eyed with really pale skin, others black hair black eyed with really dark skin, and others have blue skin with purple hair and eyes.

So maybe it should tend to more fantasy-ish skintones with each game.
 
I do not want people with blue skin walking around the PokéEarth. The weirdos in USUM were already severely bad enough.

The appeal of Pokémon for me has always been that it's a realistic kind of magical fantasy -- it's easy to picture Pokémon walking around in the real world, because essentially nothing else has to change. That's the magic that made things like PoGO and the Detective Pikachu movie as excellent as they are.

I don't think anyone in the games or anime has ever been ascribed a race but either way I don't really care, as long as everyone is human-colored.
 
Fans tend to project ethnicities onto characters. Fans tend to make too much of the similarities between Pokémon regions and the geography they're based on in any case - ethnicity isn't just about genetics, it also encompasses an awful lot of history and culture, and how much that really applies to the Pokémon world is really a matter of fanon.

There is an inevitable problem when writers try to introduce ethnic diversity into a fantasy world. You can say "Ah, but this world is not Earth" all you like, but audiences will still associate your characters with what they know from the real world anyway. There's no easy answer to dealing with that. Pokémon, generally, takes an appropriate option for a kid's IP that's supposed to have international appeal, by ignoring it in-universe. The characters don't seem to care what colour they are, the implication being the audience shouldn't either. It's not a perfect solution (If you want to find issues with it you can), but inevitably no solution will be.

So would it be appropriate to introduce completely fantasy ethnicities in Pokémon ... well, possibly. The idea of weird-coloured hair, at least, is nothing new in anime in general. Nobody bats an eye at purple hair in Pokémon as it stands. Thematically it's a bit dubious, since the point of the franchise is really that the monsters themselves are the magical ones. Tying the idea to Types would be a potential minefield, because of the associations people might draw between them - in that sense it doesn't really solve the problem so much as complicate it.
 
I do not want people with blue skin walking around the PokéEarth. The weirdos in USUM were already severely bad enough.

The appeal of Pokémon for me has always been that it's a realistic kind of magical fantasy -- it's easy to picture Pokémon walking around in the real world, because essentially nothing else has to change. That's the magic that made things like PoGO and the Detective Pikachu movie as excellent as they are.

I don't think anyone in the games or anime has ever been ascribed a race but either way I don't really care, as long as everyone is human-colored.
Yeah. It does'nt really fit the artstyle and feel of the series. If it was more stylized maybe. I've sometimes stylized my art to the point I used a variety of skin colors, like this:
sailor_rinkai_by_agosiciliano_dcsg5qr-fullview.jpg

This is'nt Pokémon it's the Rinkai girls from Saki and they're a middle easterner, an afro-american, and three east asians from real life ethnicities and places. Yet they still are red and purple and lavender and cyan and lime-green in this pic.

A character design that works for that comedy manga adaptation with the weird Clefairy, would'nt work for Detective Pikachu live-action movie.

Fans tend to project ethnicities onto characters. Fans tend to make too much of the similarities between Pokémon regions and the geography they're based on in any case - ethnicity isn't just about genetics, it also encompasses an awful lot of history and culture, and how much that really applies to the Pokémon world is really a matter of fanon.

There is an inevitable problem when writers try to introduce ethnic diversity into a fantasy world. You can say "Ah, but this world is not Earth" all you like, but audiences will still associate your characters with what they know from the real world anyway. There's no easy answer to dealing with that. Pokémon, generally, takes an appropriate option for a kid's IP that's supposed to have international appeal, by ignoring it in-universe. The characters don't seem to care what colour they are, the implication being the audience shouldn't either. It's not a perfect solution (If you want to find issues with it you can), but inevitably no solution will be.

So would it be appropriate to introduce completely fantasy ethnicities in Pokémon ... well, possibly. The idea of weird-coloured hair, at least, is nothing new in anime in general. Nobody bats an eye at purple hair in Pokémon as it stands. Thematically it's a bit dubious, since the point of the franchise is really that the monsters themselves are the magical ones. Tying the idea to Types would be a potential minefield, because of the associations people might draw between them - in that sense it doesn't really solve the problem so much as complicate it.

Yeah. The regions we know could be all bunched together inside a lake that's inside an unhinabited Pikachu-shaped mainland. Let's say the next four regions introduced are the Benelux, Latvia, Italy, and Sweden. This leaves out a lot of landmasses and countries, it also means that much of the regions would be bunched together in a Poké-Eurasia that lacks an Arabia or India or Laos or Kazakhstan.

Sometimes I think of the characters as "Xerneas made them and Celebi brought them in a doorstep in a PokéRegion". But I realize that early on, one of the ideas was that it was the real world sometime in the future and that Pokémon were artificial. Thus making most of Kanto Asian-coded.

In Pokémon, purple hair characters often do have a main Pokémon belonging to a type who is the color purple. This does'nt mean the character itself is magical, to me the implication is that people with blue hair and eyes, like Cress or Lana, have innate psychic talents for training Water-types, but it does'nt mean they have actual Water-based magic.

It's similiar to the abilities from Saki. For example, from above, the Rinkai girls, you have the one who can read and alter flow, the one who sees stuff as a wild-west movie when someone else is close to winning against her, and one whose singing brings mahjong wind tiles to her.

Are they magic? No. But they have specific supernatural quirks which can count as psychic powers.

In this case, if you picked a poison type MC, you don't have poison powers, but Poison types are slightly stronger and\or level up slightly faster in the care of you.

And for the NPCs, they could be double typed, or the same type as a possible MC but show a diff appearance because Xerneas was feeling differently that day.
 
We've already seen tribe-like groups in Pokemon such as the Draconids. These could be sorts of fantasy races if you think about it.

However, I would prefer Pokemon to keep it as Beth Pavell described: nobody cares about skin colour and race isn't really mentioned. I would say this is already aracial, because people are not divided based on it as they are in our world. I would prefer it to stay this way, and I generally don't project real life race onto Pokemon characters anyway. But I would understand if you did that based on things such as Johto's strong Japanese influence and Kalos's French one.

I do like your ideas about type-based trainers though, I think it's really cool. Cute illustrations too.
 
We've already seen tribe-like groups in Pokemon such as the Draconids. These could be sorts of fantasy races if you think about it.

However, I would prefer Pokemon to keep it as Beth Pavell described: nobody cares about skin colour and race isn't really mentioned. I would say this is already aracial, because people are not divided based on it as they are in our world. I would prefer it to stay this way, and I generally don't project real life race onto Pokemon characters anyway. But I would understand if you did that based on things such as Johto's strong Japanese influence and Kalos's French one.

I do like your ideas about type-based trainers though, I think it's really cool. Cute illustrations too.

It could be a race. There even seem to be Villages of Dragons in each of the regions, and that the one from Hoenn was just destroyed. So maybe it's a race that travelled around the world on the backs of dragons and settled everywhere and had towns everywhere.

Yes. Technically Pokémon has been aracial since Hoenn, the first one to describe itself as an anime-inspired fantasy world, instead of simply Earth in the far future where Pokémon were invented as weapons for a sport.

Thank you!

Anyway this was prompted by the Nessa whitewashing controversy. Would it still be controversial if the rest of the gym leaders were blue and green and purple?
 
The controversy would probably still be there tbh. It might not be as big, though.
 
Just the idea of fantasy-like skintones in particular sounds odd to me; I think I'd drop my Switch in fear if I saw a green-skinned person walking around the ShSw overworld. Pokemon shouldn't become Tumblr imo.

Anyway this was prompted by the Nessa whitewashing controversy.

I'm 12 years old and what is this?
 
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Pokemon's already fairly aracial as it is, and I don't really feel a need for anyone to change it. I'm personally not too keen on fantasy skintones either.

Assigning each character a type-based race seems like it wouldn't work that well, mainly because lots of NPCs you run into during the couse of the game don't have any specialty to begin with. But if you gave a poison NPC one poison type and a bunch of other typed pokemon, then the type race would feel pointless, since it might only apply to one single Pokemon on a team. Adding dual types would also probably result in even more diverse combinations of hair/skin colors that would be even harder to keep track of, and at that point, it's not worth implementing.

I feel like you would also lose some degree of uniqueness between character designs if this was the case. Some character designs for each type already have similar hair colors, such as electric specialists all being blond, so I see how this type race thing could apply to them. But then you have groups like the steel type specialists, who are all completely different from each other in appearance. Introducing new steel type gym leaders in future games who are all suddenly Steven-colored would feel a bit lazy in comparison to what we've gotten in the past. It's not like all black people in the games use rocks, or all red-haired characters use fire-types, so I don't see why a type system like this would need to suddenly be implemented at all.

Also, wouldn't this be weird for the cases in-game where related characters have different type specialties?

I think a trainer-class based system would work a bit better, because it can work without limiting major NPCs to certain hair colors and skin tones. You could theoretically also have different classes for a type, like having Fishermen, Sailors, and Swimmers for water, and each class could give bonuses to more than one type or something. Having in-game tribes as part of a game's plot wouldn't be bad either, I just don't want to see it applied throughout the whole of the pokemon universe.
 
I'm 12 years old and what is this?
The controversy that permanently locked the Speculation Thread. Let's... just leave it at that.

I think a trainer-class based system would work a bit better, because it can work without limiting major NPCs to certain hair colors and skin tones. You could theoretically also have different classes for a type, like having Fishermen, Sailors, and Swimmers for water, and each class could give bonuses to more than one type or something.
Surprisingly enough, I actually had an idea similar to that, but for a Pokémon MMO or a Gym Leader spin-off that someone suggested in another thread. It could actually work, sincerely, and reminds me of the Job system from Final Fantasy.
 
That's an awful lot of light colored skin tones in them examples you got there, OP. And even the ones that aren't pale-leaning flesh tones are getting hit by the 'but not too black' trope. And before anyone thinks I'm an "over-reacting or easily offended person of color". I'm white as the damn driven snow and even I can see it.

No matter what skin color characters have, fans will identify with them in ways other than skin tone. A lot of people I'm sure coded many of the old Doug cartoon's tecnicolor population on race even though some had purple skin, green, skin, and blue skin tone. For a modern example, the gems of Steven universe is another example. Garnet, Ruby, and Sapphire are usually seen as Black-coded characters. And I've seen Amethyst depicted as both Black and Spanish by different people. But their skin colors are red-purple, red, blue, and a lavender purple. And they're not even human. And there's nothing wrong with it.

I'd hate if they swapped realistic skin tones for crazy technicolor populations. These characters are called humans. They're not crazy-anthropomorphized pokemon. These are humans. If gamefreak did something like this after all this time and after this kind of fan-uproar, the fan outcry seeing it as trying to silence people who are upset about this kind of thing would make the whitewashing fanart controversy look like a grain of sand dropped into the ocean. It'd be akin to a tsunami by comparison.

Besides, just slapping typing based color coding on humans would be pretty half-baked. Might as well go full Gijinka if you want the humans based off typings.
 
Just the idea of fantasy-like skintones in particular sounds odd to me; I think I'd drop my Switch in fear if I saw a green-skinned person walking around the ShSw overworld. Pokemon shouldn't become Tumblr imo.



I'm 12 years old and what is this?
Yeah, I don't think green skin expecially fits Galar but I think it depends more on the shade of green, than on Galar being Galar instead of Hyrule or Lunar Lakes.

Pokemon's already fairly aracial as it is, and I don't really feel a need for anyone to change it. I'm personally not too keen on fantasy skintones either.

Assigning each character a type-based race seems like it wouldn't work that well, mainly because lots of NPCs you run into during the couse of the game don't have any specialty to begin with. But if you gave a poison NPC one poison type and a bunch of other typed pokemon, then the type race would feel pointless, since it might only apply to one single Pokemon on a team. Adding dual types would also probably result in even more diverse combinations of hair/skin colors that would be even harder to keep track of, and at that point, it's not worth implementing.

I feel like you would also lose some degree of uniqueness between character designs if this was the case. Some character designs for each type already have similar hair colors, such as electric specialists all being blond, so I see how this type race thing could apply to them. But then you have groups like the steel type specialists, who are all completely different from each other in appearance. Introducing new steel type gym leaders in future games who are all suddenly Steven-colored would feel a bit lazy in comparison to what we've gotten in the past. It's not like all black people in the games use rocks, or all red-haired characters use fire-types, so I don't see why a type system like this would need to suddenly be implemented at all.

Also, wouldn't this be weird for the cases in-game where related characters have different type specialties?

I think a trainer-class based system would work a bit better, because it can work without limiting major NPCs to certain hair colors and skin tones. You could theoretically also have different classes for a type, like having Fishermen, Sailors, and Swimmers for water, and each class could give bonuses to more than one type or something. Having in-game tribes as part of a game's plot wouldn't be bad either, I just don't want to see it applied throughout the whole of the pokemon universe.

Me neither. It might fit some characters but not others.

He has an affinity for poison types but it does't mean he only traisn them, and "normal type" trainers could also be jack-of-all-trades in type variety with no normal types on team. Someone with an affinity for a type could chose to not train that type but instead another type. And for dual types, they can look anything in-between. Maybe people with different "types" bred with each other in the past, thus each type now has variety, so there are many double types, many mono types, and the player character just has the usual "look" to have an affinity for the type she has an affinity to, same for the rival. And maybe often people mutate with a coloring that's outside this spectrum, like ghost\dragon affinity with yellow sclera and almost pitch-black skin. There can still be uniqueness.

And for related characters, I could mock a family tree up.
120655

See? The pure fire type grandchild, Yann, looks more like a grass\electric type, and the fire\water type looks more like a water\flying.

And yes, it could be restricted to the playable characters, rival, and trainer class NPCs.

That's an awful lot of light colored skin tones in them examples you got there, OP. And even the ones that aren't pale-leaning flesh tones are getting hit by the 'but not too black' trope. And before anyone thinks I'm an "over-reacting or easily offended person of color". I'm white as the damn driven snow and even I can see it.

No matter what skin color characters have, fans will identify with them in ways other than skin tone. A lot of people I'm sure coded many of the old Doug cartoon's tecnicolor population on race even though some had purple skin, green, skin, and blue skin tone. For a modern example, the gems of Steven universe is another example. Garnet, Ruby, and Sapphire are usually seen as Black-coded characters. And I've seen Amethyst depicted as both Black and Spanish by different people. But their skin colors are red-purple, red, blue, and a lavender purple. And they're not even human. And there's nothing wrong with it.

I'd hate if they swapped realistic skin tones for crazy technicolor populations. These characters are called humans. They're not crazy-anthropomorphized pokemon. These are humans. If gamefreak did something like this after all this time and after this kind of fan-uproar, the fan outcry seeing it as trying to silence people who are upset about this kind of thing would make the whitewashing fanart controversy look like a grain of sand dropped into the ocean. It'd be akin to a tsunami by comparison.

Besides, just slapping typing based color coding on humans would be pretty half-baked. Might as well go full Gijinka if you want the humans based off typings.

Yeah, there would be controversy either way.
 
It’s fine as is growing up in Japan as a European both my school friends and I had no problem with the anime/games. As has been said I want the PokéWorld to be as close ours as possible.

No blue/green/purple skin please. I have no problem with whacky anime hair though.
 
It’s fine as is growing up in Japan as a European both my school friends and I had no problem with the anime/games. As has been said I want the PokéWorld to be as close ours as possible.

No blue/green/purple skin please. I have no problem with whacky anime hair though.

Yeah since hair dye and contact lenses are common in some fashion subcultures.
But people don't casually paint or tatoo all their skin green. If you see someone around with green skin you think they're protesting something, not that they're making a new fashion trend.

Pokémon is already aracial, yes it has black coded characters like Lenora, and characters coded as various kind of brown asian like Shauna or Olympia or the gen 8 rival. But also has characters coded as east asian like Brycen, and coded as white like Elesa.

Generally, Nintendo games have silly fantasy-ish settings that don't really give characters races or detailed backstories.

And Pokémon follows anime laws, where hair and eye color are more based on character themes and traits. For example, you usually have the red character who is an hothead, yellow character who is sloppy lazy and often childish in a pesky way, blue character who is shy and quiet, green character who is a book-smart nerd, purple character who is snooty and fashionable, orange character who is brash and pesky but also kinda hotheaded and funny, pink character who is childish in a girly way, white characters who are unearthly and pure, grey characters who are stoic, black characters who are emo, brown characters who are normal. Thus, the same is usually true for skin colors. Someone who seems more pure and light-hearted and calm, often has really pale skin even by anime standards. While someone who seems more "dark-hearted" or stoic or outdoorsy jock, often has darker skin. Often even darker than it would be normal for japanese people.

ANIME SKIN COLOR CHART
240 to 217: Pale, usually for purer, stoic, emo, shy, or more feminine characters.
217 to 198: Normal by anime standard.
198 to 172: Tanned. Usually for boys, or for more tomboyish or outdoorsy characters.
172 to 122: Deliciously brown but still East Asian, usually a more "dark-hearted" or tomboyish character or the autor just wanted a delicious brown person.
122 to 73: Usually reserved for characters who are actually black in canon.
 
Yeah since hair dye and contact lenses are common in some fashion subcultures.
But people don't casually paint or tatoo all their skin green. If you see someone around with green skin you think they're protesting something, not that they're making a new fashion trend.

Pokémon is already aracial, yes it has black coded characters like Lenora, and characters coded as various kind of brown asian like Shauna or Olympia or the gen 8 rival. But also has characters coded as east asian like Brycen, and coded as white like Elesa.

Generally, Nintendo games have silly fantasy-ish settings that don't really give characters races or detailed backstories.

And Pokémon follows anime laws, where hair and eye color are more based on character themes and traits. For example, you usually have the red character who is an hothead, yellow character who is sloppy lazy and often childish in a pesky way, blue character who is shy and quiet, green character who is a book-smart nerd, purple character who is snooty and fashionable, orange character who is brash and pesky but also kinda hotheaded and funny, pink character who is childish in a girly way, white characters who are unearthly and pure, grey characters who are stoic, black characters who are emo, brown characters who are normal. Thus, the same is usually true for skin colors. Someone who seems more pure and light-hearted and calm, often has really pale skin even by anime standards. While someone who seems more "dark-hearted" or stoic or outdoorsy jock, often has darker skin. Often even darker than it would be normal for japanese people.

ANIME SKIN COLOR CHART
240 to 217: Pale, usually for purer, stoic, emo, shy, or more feminine characters.
217 to 198: Normal by anime standard.
198 to 172: Tanned. Usually for boys, or for more tomboyish or outdoorsy characters.
172 to 122: Deliciously brown but still East Asian, usually a more "dark-hearted" or tomboyish character or the autor just wanted a delicious brown person.
122 to 73: Usually reserved for characters who are actually black in canon.

Yeah you summed it up really well. A lot of what people in the west see as “White” Characters are actually cannon Japanese. You also get darker skin characters like Brock or Casca who are Japanese or based off Japanese in Casca’s case. One of my friend’s liked Brock growing up because he has the same skin tone so to me I wouldn’t correct him. If he sees himself relating to Brock then I think that’s cool.

I’d prefer pokémon to stay more realistic it would be strange for me to start seeing green or purple skin people after 25 years. I actually think Pokémon do a good job with having “everyone” included.
 
Yeah you summed it up really well. A lot of what people in the west see as “White” Characters are actually cannon Japanese. You also get darker skin characters like Brock or Casca who are Japanese or based off Japanese in Casca’s case. One of my friend’s liked Brock growing up because he has the same skin tone so to me I wouldn’t correct him. If he sees himself relating to Brock then I think that’s cool.

I’d prefer pokémon to stay more realistic it would be strange for me to start seeing green or purple skin people after 25 years. I actually think Pokémon do a good job with having “everyone” included.

Anime does'nt really have "white characters", beside the stock blue eyed blond haired european\american foreign exchange student. But there are also cases of anime foreigners that are from China, Korea, Mongolia, far-future Japan, planet Bobolo, or the fairytale plane of existence of Navarlear, and still can be pale, blond, and blue eyed.

And some anime characters are of European descent but are "mediterranean-looking", with black\dark brown hair and eyes, and darker skin than the Japanese people.
 
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