I doubt I'll make sense with this but I needed to get it off my chest...
Its super interesting to me how fan artists have no issue drawing female POC's like Emerie with ethnic features, (sometimes exaggerated to the point of masculinization), but have a hard time doing the same for the male characters.
I've only seen about 2 Lucien fan arts that make him look evidently black/mixed, while the majority portray him as white. The bat bois are almost always white, even though their phenotype descriptions say otherwise. Helion and Tarquin are always super light skin even though they are canonly dark skin. But every female character who's had a character description that suggests poc, are almost always accurately depicted. Eg amren, emerie, cressida.
At some point Tarquin was described to have skin like mahogany and Helion glowing dark skin, but the fan arts give both of them cinnamon coloured skin. Tarquin I recall has straight white hair and Helion has onyx hair which we can assume is 4c, since you know hes a black man, but hes always drawn having a silk press. Thesan on the other hands chatacter description places him as East Asian, granted theres not a lot of art on him, but I've never once seen him depicted as east asian. Hes always depicted as white.
I dont know where all this stems from, but I've seen conversations around many fandoms who've concluded that it comes from pure white washing and the masculinization of POC women. Almost every fan art of emerie I've seen, shes depicted as being dark skin with a broad nose, yet the bat bois are very ambiguous on the race aspect, even though they are of the same race.
Lucien....oh lucien. I can forgive fanart of lucien pre-acowar, but not when present day art still portray him as white. There's a multitude of art depicting him being pale in complexion even though he's described as having golden skin and being darker than his brothers. I know golden can be vague, but why is golden as it relates to race obvious when drawing female pocs, but a huge debate when it comes to males.
I'm not saying that fan artists should stop giving females ethnic features, I actually think it's a good thing, a brilliant thing. But why dont they extend the same care and attention to adequate racial representation to males? Why is it that when its pointed out that the illyrians are phenotypically arabic/Hispanic, it's a huge debate when it comes to the bat bois portrayal in art, but done without hesitation in the depictions of females like emerie?
I dont know if I'm making sense, but yeah. Then theres the problem of making poc women overly masculine in fan arts, but that's another long conversation.
Added not, I do acknowledge that most fan arts depict Cassian atleast as being significantly darker, but skintone isn't the only indication of race. Its skin tone, hair texture, hair color, noses, facial structure etc. Not only skin tone.