Hello! I've Noticed A Racism Problem Within The Our Life Fandom, Particularly Our Life: Now And Forever.

Hello! I've noticed a racism problem within the Our Life fandom, particularly Our Life: Now and Forever. I won't name names, but there is an overabundance of fanart where the artist has HEAVILY whitewashed Qiu. It's pretty upsetting to see them overwrite Qiu's identity as a person of color. Given that you are the game dev, I was hoping to see you speak out about this problem and condemn the act of whitewashing your characters. Thanks

I'm sorry that is happening. There's no reason for it and I don't agree with anyone who has chosen to do it.

To try and be helpful, here are the base skin tone colors for the OL LIs (besides Tamarack and Baxter who don't have this problem).

Cove: f2b795 Derek: d29e77 Qiu: e0a48a

I could do this for every character in all our games, but if people are getting the hair and eyes and clothes right, they shouldn't need to be told what the skin tones are. Popular white guys can be drawn thousands of times and it's always the exact right shade of pale somehow, isn't it.

If people are thinking white is "neutral" and can just stay as is, but once a character has a darker skin tone than it's fair game to start making tweaks to their color palette so you can "get creative" or have "dramatic lighting" or to bluntly have it be more to your preference in appearance or whatever, my answer is no. That's not for you to decide and it's not harmless. Don't whitewash our, or any, characters.

i just love that ed asked for stede to stop

i love that stede was finally able to tell ed that their first kiss happened too fast and that he panicked. i love that when they kissed again, when ed leaned in for a quick peck but stede got passionate, ed was able to break the kiss and say "hey man, let's take this slow". i love that stede, of course, immediately stopped. i love that it didn't feel weird and they kept playing with each other's fingers and talking about their day

that was the most healthy, natural, realistic kiss i've seen. it wasn't romanticized for tv, it wasn't forced to be something it didn't have to be. it happened under a moon that wasn't full, on the deck of a messy ship, after ed complimented a piece of fine clothing that had lost most of its charm. it was as awkward as it was graceful

I've seen some people lament that Qiu is "sadly not ADHD but very relatable", I was curious if it was 'official' or if people were taking a lack of answer as a no? Not a judgment mind, I just don't remember hearing anything one way or the other

It's a lack of an answer. To be clearer, Qiu has ADHD. You'll find it out at some point, but I don't know at what Step it will officially come up in. I've generally tried not to give details, since I can't even say what part of the story it'd be confirmed in. The OL games come along as I create them rather than being fully outlined ahead of time. But to simply put it out there, that is what I'm going for with them.

happy halloween 👻

Saw an ask about an apparent problem of people drawing Qiu whiter than he is and whitewashing. With that in mind, I think you should hold the same standard for Tamarack for artists that draw her darker than she is to outright black. Tumblr and Twitter in general have an obsession with coloring traditionally white/pale characters the complete opposite race or adding details like kinky/coiled hair and see no issue with it but raise hell the moment a poc is one hue lighter. It erases their identity just as much as everyone says whitewashing does but everyone constantly falls back on the "only whites can be racist so changing their identity in art is okay!!" pipeline

Tamarack comes from a German family and is white, so please take the same level of importance when artists "blackwash" her or any other character in your series.

You know generally, I don’t like to use this blog to as a place to act like I’m the best, most correct person in the world and respond to things where I’m simply telling an anonymous person they’re wrong. I’m just someone who has people following me because they like the stories this company makes.

However, this is something that people should know. If our POC players draw our characters having a darker skin tone than they do in-game and/or give them a different hair texture, that’s alright. I’ve fallen off on reblogging stuff on Tumblr but it’d still be liked or reposted on Twitter.

Whitewashing means far more than the literal act of a single individual making someone look white in a fanart. If a trans player wanted to headcanon a cis character was trans, that’s one thing. If a cis person decided to take the only trans character for miles and insist they are, in fact, cis, well that’s another matter entirely. Your experience with your race and your experience based on sexuality or gender aren’t the same things, it’s not a one-to-one comparison at all. But can people who don’t get it at least start to see how there can be a difference in impact here?

The people who are oppressed in this country aren’t hurting you by trying to enjoy the media that most of the time intentionally excludes them. POC weren’t the ones dehumanizing white people in horrific ways. The overwhelming majority of stories and representations of heritages out there have been and still are white people’s already. Anyone reading this who was thinking along the lines of what’s in this ask need to get comfortable understanding and accepting that. And if you don’t, maybe you should find another game because I’m not going to “protect white identities” from being drawn as people of color. In fact, I think it’s actually really nice if our characters are fun and comforting to people of color so much so that they’d like to imagine those characters being included in their own culture. I think it’s strange that someone would be angry about it.