❦ ᴍᴇʀᴄʜᴇᴀᴠᴇɴ

Li is essentially similar to Amber, which is why the problems with her character oftenly goes unnoticed: as antagonists both are excessively focused on their appearances, airheaded, and enjoy bullying others. They are the stereotypical mean girl from American movies, but Li's problem lies in aspects that, being such a secondary character are also overlooked.

Despite all the similarities between her, Amber, and Charlotte, Li is notoriously the most cartoonish of them. All the shallow negative characteristics that can be attributed to them are doubled on Li: she is significantly more foolish, superficial, and personality-less compared to her white peers (who also had each individual arcs unlike her, who just disappeared without any major impact), fulfilling the role of a minion more than a "friend" or a "colleague", where even her dialogues can simply be repetitions of what her leader says. She's basically the busy worker bee.

Her presence in the group is the one of a token: without identity, impact, or depth, existing solely to create the illusion of diversity.

A similar case happens with Hyun, who's route has been broadly criticized by most part of the fandom for being 'too boring'— something that makes sense considering that he has the less personality among all the romantic candidates. His initial appeal relies heavily on the fact that he is korean, being introduced in a time where idolizing and fetishizing korean men was much more common than it is today, and for most people thats where all the interesting part of his character ends. Despite being a main character it's noticeable that he barely has a personality that doesn't revolve around how much of a good boyfriend/husband he is for the MC, to the point where his in-game descripton if you choose him as a spouse in love life is entirely about how much he is committed to be a good spouse, marking a big contrast with the rest of the cast who got their life outside the romatic aspect higlighted.

Just as Li, he also shares similarities with another character of his own league: Kentin. Sharing the same devotion and unrequited love for Sucrette, also with most of his life revolving around you (to the point of emotional codependency). Whatsoever, Kentin was given very important aspects of his life that helped to build a personality: counting with an arc that digged on his past during military school and allowed him to grow as a character, also being allowed to treat his emotional codependency with you as a flaw that he worked on letting go in alternate life.

Hyun is basically what the koreaboos look for: a partner who's most interesting thing about is how korean he is and how much he's eager to love a western woman. Your lotus blossom boy.

His case could be argued wether it's related or not about the way his arc with Clemence in university life was eliminated in later updates, but at this point it seems to be a constant with all the East asian characters to be significantly less deeper or just plain and shallow than the rest of the cast.

Regarding Kim, she heavily relies on certain stereotypes that masculinize and hypersexualize black girls. Her character is essentially defined by being 'eccentric' or 'cool'— different to the other girls but not in the sense of a "just not like other girls" type of thing. Instead, she's presented as someone who rejects everything related to femininity, with a tough demeanor and who uses an informal, almost masculine way of talking (in some translations), which makes her unattractive to boys. Something that is constantly highlighted by the own game, being directly described as rough and masculine.

The most noticeable thing is also the way her clothes are quite revealing compared to other characters during Highschool life, especially for a teenager. With an unnecessary emphasis on her breast size and shape, something other girls in the game don't experience even when they are drawn in swimsuits (except for maybe Debrah, who is supposed to be "promiscuous," yet her design is more fit for a teen than Kim's). Even her design as a young adult, with less clothes doesn't have this oversexualization problem.

And let's not forget to mention that the character who speaks on a blaccent was the one decided to be struggling with the assignature regarding her first language- lmao.

Now Rayan could be the most direct case of all, where he has more direct topics regarding the racial prejudes he was -intentionally or not- created with.

I don't know if i should deep dive on why it was decided for an arab man to have a literally grey skin tone -even when he´s broadly described as dark brown- since the game has never had a real issue showcasing characters with different skintones, being either brown, light or dark black. There is no real justification for it, but it could certainly be tied to a common issue arab characters face in media. It is very common for most companies who have this type of characters to never really adress their ethnicity, leaving them in a space of racial ambiguity. Rayan was the character who took the most time to be confirmed as his racial ethnicity (still dubious about wether he may or not be mixed, which doesn't happen to other characters), as if it was a taboo to cofirm him either as one thing or the other. This racial ambiguity can or not be the reason why he was never colored in a specific skin tone and instead was left in a very neutral zone.

Continuing the colorism, he along with Priya also suffer from a lot of in-game exoticization as brown people. Rayan is constantly called hot by other characters ever since his first appearnce, with compliments directed to his alleged brown skin, similarly to Priya who was heavily complimented by her beauty durin highschool life because of the color of her eyes (and also, every single one of them has clear eyes).

In a more controversial topic, Rayan's arc in love life was centered around a false accusation of sexual assault by one of his students. The arc is by itself polemic with all the characters involved, but with Rayan it contains a poignant constrast and it's the depiction of arab and muslim men as sexual predators. Even if sexual assault was treated before with Rayan being spotted as an aid for the MC at the time, it does rings a bell when the casualities began to accumulate in his arc, being the most important that:

The girl that accused him was one of his students, considerably younger than him and completly white.

If you play as his spouse it will be eventually hinted by other character in order to frame him as guilty that he did the same thing to the MC, also a considereably younger (and predeterminately) white woman.

The sirens can only be considered good, at least to a certain extent, for Harley and Ivy. Dini treated the storylines of the three protagonists very differently, his thoughts and interests in each character being quite obvious. While Harley faced a physical and emotional odyssey to separate herself from the Joker and grow as an individual instead of remaining his minion-girlfriend, and Ivy was affected by her internal struggle between her humanity and her burgeoning affection for the wildlife she also inhabits, also building a relationship with Harley that helped them grow; all that he could do with Selina was initiate a battle royal with Talia and Zatanna to see who deserved Bruce the most.

A redundant, tiresome plot that neither demonstrates nor adds anything to the character or the overall storyline— it only undermined the development of three female characters in one shot.

Her motivations and depth were turned into a joke here -referring to the first one because the rest was very... whatever- as many other comics have. But what's ironic about this case is that the plot was supposed to be centered around the life of these three women in a "feminist" pov, but Selina's traits were reduced to how much she suffers because THE man choosed her over other women. It's insulting that for a character who has been built into defying stereotypes imposed for women, this book that could've been perfect for it can't give her anything but daily reminders about how much she loves Bruce.

Not a single writer of these things has been able to write her character right, and Tini Howards, who has made her job to turn her into a caricature alongside Tom Taylor, has proven once again that her plans are nothing but keep this disservice with the same male centered narratives with occasional sprinkles of white feminism for a now black woman.