Hi 👋 I've been protesting the whitewashing of Alistair since this blog's creation in 2014. So I'm very familiar with people arguing things like "how can you whitewash a white character". Because fandom has a short term memory, I guess.
When Dragon Age: Origins (the first game) came out in 2009, Alistair was designed with light brown skin - specifically 4 out of 6 on their scale of the limited tints used in that game. (For comparison, Zevran has the darkest skin tint available.)
When Dragon Age II came out in 2011, Alistair was designed with tanned skin - specifically 6 out of 12.
When Dragon Age: Inquisition came out in 2014, Alistair was designed with the palest skin you can imagine, and blonde hair - specifically 0 out of 11. ZERO! He was so unrecognizable that fans at the time speculated who the hell he even was when BioWare promoted the game with screenshots and video clips including him. Because they did not clock him as Alistair.
This is all Alistair throughout the game series (I use this image a lot because the progressive change is so clear):
(His nose shape changes too, though it's not as noticeable from the front view.)
There are canonically confirmed characters of colour with about the same skin tone as Alistair in DAO. Why is that good enough for them, but not for him? Oops, those characters get whitewashed too. Because the DA fandom is racist as hell.
Some fans are so desperate to argue that the above change isn't that bad by doing things like showing edited screenshots of DAO, or claiming it's all just DAO's poor lighting, (note that the above image is of his head model outside of the game's lighting,) or claiming that he's just really tan. And it pisses me off, because what exactly do they get out of that argument? Why are they so desperate to cling to the idea that Alistair, their prince charming, cannot possibly be a brown man?
Meanwhile, the Dragon Age franchise as a whole is incredibly white. And even the characters that are unmistakably people of colour get ignored and/or whitewashed to death and back. So yes, I am passionate about defending Alistair as being brown. Especially because Alistair is specifically mixed, like me.
Now, I myself am whitepassing because I take after my white mother, but I have many family members who are sure as hell not. And I know exactly what it's like to have other kids ask questions like "is that your real dad" when getting picked up from school. Or learning that it's safe to get stopped by the RCMP with my mother driving the car but not my father. Or being ridiculed by white family members for never being white enough for their standards. So, when I read in the Dragon Age novel, The Calling, how Alistair's mother chose to give him up instead of raising him herself because she was terrified of how he would be treated as a mixed-race prince born out of wedlock, yeah, I got it. It was incredibly sad, but I got where she was coming from, as a character. What makes it even more sad is that Alistair was subsequently placed in the care of a white man who neglected him - specifically, the brother of King Maric's dead wife. This is again, something that a lot of mixed people can relate to. I think that kind of context is more important than him joking about how he's a shitty cook. (Again, he was raised by a negligent white man in Ferelden, of course he's never gotten to experience culinary delights.)
I've talked about the "ambiguous brown" trope found in Dragon Age before - being fantasy not an excuse for BioWare not to put in the effort when crafting their characters of colour to be more respectful and authentic racialized representation. Yes, the franchise has certainly improved over the years, but it still always feels like two steps forward, one step back. That said, it is no stronger an excuse for some fans to try and claim that just because BioWare pulled this trope, somehow any brown character is now invalidated and Actually White™. More whitewashing is not the answer. Effort is the answer - which is something that makes blogs like @creatingblackcharacters so valuable, actually!
