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Forums - Politics Discussion - Opposable Thumbs / Gaming & Entertainment Op-ed: It’s time for Nintendo to move beyond white characters

Donkey Kong is brown
Everyone in the Mario universe is pretty much Italian so.... yeah
Fox is brown, and heck Falco is blue, I think they're pretty diverse ;P.



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spurgeonryan said:

Pokémon games don’t emphasize the African-American hero Brock from the cartoon series

And Pokemon doesn't take place in America, either, so that's 0 for 2.



If Mario, Luigi or any other character were suddenly made nominally black, asian, or something else -- wouldn't that be racist? It would make the character a caricature rather than an authentic character.



I predict NX launches in 2017 - not 2016

They're no saints, and Nintendo are ultimately the product of a racially homogeneous society that doesn't recognise same-sex marriage, but Nintendo were also the first company to put an avatar-maker into gaming hardware as standard, allowing the representation of a variety of races in their games, including the Mario Kart series.



Here's the thing.  This is partially based on a cultural misoncpetion.

Practically nobody in a Final Fantasy game is white. They're all Japanese.


Ask Nintendo, and I'd actually bet they'd say that Link, Zelda and the rest of the Legend of Zelda characters aren't white. They're Japanese.


When the Japanese make videogame or anime characters meant to be japanese they look white to us.


Ash Ketchum for example is totally japanese, his name is Satoshi in Japan. Hell Brock is almost definitely Japanese too and not Black.

Just from a different part of Japan where skin runs darker.

 

Mario is probably the only nintendo franchise that is full of white people.  (And by full of I mean 6).

I mean, who are the recent additions to the mario Cast.  Wario and Waluigi... yeah... you can't make characters whose main contribution is "like the main character but evil" a different race.

 

And Rosalina.  So I guess you could of made her black?

 

Are we sure Rosalina is even white?  Because keep in mind, in Japan this is Japan's idea of a japanese space princess.

 

                                      

 

Honestly, who knows.



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badgenome said:
spurgeonryan said:

Pokémon games don’t emphasize the African-American hero Brock from the cartoon series

And Pokemon doesn't take place in America, either, so that's 0 for 2.

Pokemon does get some black characters further along, however.



Monster Hunter: pissing me off since 2010.

Mr Khan said:

Pokemon does get some black characters further along, however.

It's just a pet peeve of mine when people use "African-American" as interchangeable with "black". Like when Bill Clinton called Nelson Mandela the first African-American president of South Africa (derp).



badgenome said:
Mr Khan said:

Pokemon does get some black characters further along, however.

It's just a pet peeve of mine when people use "African-American" as interchangeable with "black". Like when Bill Clinton called Nelson Mandela the first African-American president of South Africa (derp).

It's one of those things when political correctness does get ahead of us, as we get trained to think of "black" as, not a slur like negro, but still less ideal than "African American", then you'll start calling other blacks that.

I was thinking more of Lenora and Iris from Pokemon Black and White.



Monster Hunter: pissing me off since 2010.

Oh, for crying out loud. What's next? Quotas?

If this were EA we were talking about, you might have a point, but this is a Japanese developer choosing to run predominately white casts. I mean, do you honestly think Iwata is racist against himself?

Nintendo's attitude has historically been to create their own races, like the various races of Hyrule or the anthropomorphized animals in Star Fox. The humans just happen to look white, but racism in a Nintendo universe is fish people versus rock people. If that doesn't absolutely mock our concept of race, I don't know what does.



What about Samoans, Apache Indians, people with purple polka dots-

Articles like these are nothing more than someone tryng to get hts and make a name for themselves-

To use anything Nintenod does and or Mario Kart to get into conversations about race are flat out pretentious and ignorant at the same time- there are so many legit areas in the public sphere to introduce the topic of race- why in the world try to pull in something that is simply about innocent fun and gaming

Besides there is nothing diverse about quotas