“Why Are You Crying Lain?”

We can agree that the rep in crk (crob and toa aside I do not speak for those communities) is pretty great! With characters having a wide range of skintones, body types (despite the cartoony art style) and implied queer realitionships and a lot of gender non confirming/non-binary characters there's really nothing to nitpick or complain about.

So tell my WHY is there so many people whitewashing the characters? I cannot go up on social media without seeing a character with a darker skintone looking GREY or WHITE. Then the "excuse" is that these are cookies and don't have a race. Except that these cookies you're talking about are living breathing creatures and the kingdoms and places they are from are very obviously based on real places. The Dark Cacao Kingdom being based on Korean Peninsula, the Golden Cheese Kingdom being based on Egypt and the creators as far as I'm concerned have been very open and obvious about these references. These cookies and kingdoms represent real life people and places. So that's where that "excuse" falls flat.

These characters don't have a canon ethnic backgrounds other than the places they're from and the skintone they have. The thing is you have creative liberty with what kind of features you give them AS LONG AS YOU KEEP THE SKINTONE THE SAME. Their skintone or "dough color" is one of the most important features they have and CRK has been really creative with skintones and most cookies who have darker "dough colors" also have rich, warm lively looking skintones. We need to treasure that in a gacha game where the competition and often norm is Whitewasher 3000 AKA Genshin Impact. If you're a digital artist there is no fucking reason why you can't just color pick from reference to honor the characters original skintone? Or to stay in the warm area of skintones and not make it desaturated?? At least?? Like do the bare fucking minimum?? I used to PAINT crk chatacters with traditional WATERCOLOR. Mixing skintones was a living hell and then after I spent 30 minutes trying to mix the perfect skintone I go online to see some of you mother fuckers be too lazy to import a fucking reference imagie to color pick from and DELIBERATELY whitewashing the characters.

SHAME ON YOU. SHAME ON YOU IF YOU DO THIS.

And then we have the other side of the same coin where white cosplayers paint their skin black and then refuse to listen to people saying that this is bad and then the situation getting so big that it reaches cosplayers out of the community!! So now the CRK fandom is known for insensitive people painting their skin black for a cosplay in the cosplay community!! Isn't that just fucking great??? And I still see people reposting that cosplay and people in the comment being like "cool cosplay!!" like are we fucking for real??

As a person who grew up in a mainly white area with very little POC around being Russian and being in the same situation is NO EXCUSE!! You have access to the internet there is a lot of people telling you exactly what to do and what not to do. Black cosplayers telling you why it sucks EDUCATE YOURSELF.

Oh you think queer/non-binary rep is safe? Absolutely not. When Venom Dough Cookie came out the first job of people was trying to guess their gender and whether they were "AFAB" or "AMAB" and I still saw a fanart on this app of a person drawing them with huge boobs. Because we just can't let non-binary people be gender non-confirming and let a fictional character be completely androgynous.

I've seen people "headcanoning" Strawberry Crepe with he/him pronouns and referring to the korean wiki saying that in the korean wiki, they used "he/him" pronouns and when I told them that Korean and English are very different language wise it turned out they didn't speak Korean at all!! How cool!! They just wanted a reason to put Strawberry Crepe into the gender binary how nice of them.

And then the queer couples aren't safe either because there will always be people who disregard Eternal Sugar's obvious attraction to a woman that she STATES IN CANON MIND YOU and ship her with a man. I'm not saying she can only be attracted to woman but gosh darn you sure jumped on this opportunity to ship a woman who states that she's attracted to another woman with a man instead really fast! I'm sure that doesn't say anything about your personal beliefs and preferences at all.

And then I didn't even talk about how the fandom's hatred towards White Lily is very obviously rooted in misogyny, and how awful the fandom can get about ships and how the ship wars result in horrendous bullying, doxing, and how horrible the community can get to just exist in. Obviously not all players are like this and I'd still say that all things considered the community can still be a great place if you find the right side of things but we can't fucking exist one day without tearing each other down over dumb shit like ships.