evolution.

It’s the knob of the Simple Curtain.

Dimitri knows a woman when he sees one

I’ve gotten a couple of asks recently, wondering why people are calling the newest whitewashed Zevran mod on the Nexus whitewashing, when his skin colour hasn’t been lightened. (And it actually has, by the way. The creator even shows this in the before and after images?) So I thought I would take a minute to explain that there is actually more to whitewashing than just skin colour.

Whitewashing is the lightening of a character’s skin.

This is pretty easy to recognize; you take a brown character for example and make them paler. Whitewashing is colourism, which is a part of racism.

This is disgustingly overt whitewashing of Vivienne, made all the more terrible when coupled with the description “hopes for people from Eastern Europe, who doesn’t care about insane sjw shouting”:

What is most obvious is the change of her skin and eye colour. But take a closer look at the changes the artist made to the shape of her nose, her lips, her jaw, her cheeks… That is just as much a part of this insult.

Whitewashing is also erasing a character’s other nonwhite features to make them look more beautiful by white Eurocentric standards.

Now, obviously not every Black person has lips like Vivienne does, but it is a common trait, and they are something that has throughout history been insulted, mocked, used in scientific racism and more. It’s only been very recent that thicker lips have become a beauty trend, and even then they’re only considered trendy when on white women who surgically alter them. (Really interesting how that works, huh.)

Even if the above picture didn’t alter her skin but altered everything else, it would still be whitewashing. It would still be whitening her appearance.

You see this kind of thing a lot from artists who do not have experience drawing different facial features. Stepping out of the Dragon Age fandom for a moment, here is a perfect example of what I mean by this: Look at T’Challa and Shuri in this MCU art compared to the other characters in the picture. They have the same facial features as MCU Wanda, MCU Pietro, MCU Loki, Thor, and Hela, and nothing like the actors that play those characters. (T’Challa is especially bad. That man’s whole face was robbed.)  Intentional or not, this is whitewashing. It means the artist needs to practice more diversity in their artwork.

So swinging all the way back to what prompted this post in the first place: Mods that redesign Zevran from this…

to like this…

Book: saliva is actually filtered blood!

Book: saliva also contains a painkiller that is stronger than morphine, but we don’t produce a lot of it otherwise we’d be constantly high

Peter: we didn’t want it to crush any buildings so we brought it out here!