not to be dramatic but i haven’t logged in yet n i acc don’t know if i can bc i feel so upset still. like. ugh this is gonna be a personal vent kinda thing but i wont be too negative.
i just feel so overwhelmingly upset and disappointed. because it goes beyond just a characters removal, it’s the fact that a huge company like that would ever side with horrible, nasty, racist, colourist, homophobic bitches. and i get it, there are laws that censor lgbt+ themes, im not expecting them to outright say the love interests are bisexual or whatever. there is only so much they can do within the censorship without getting shut down.
but above all that, one of the first things one notices in others is the colour of their skin. the difference between you and i. at least, as a poc that’s how it feels. when i’m the only brown person in the room, it is an incredibly loud feeling. it’s something i can’t hide, it’s not something someone wouldn’t know like my sexuality or disabilities. first and foremost, i appear as a south asian woman. no amount of bleach cream, hair dye and coloured contact lenses can change that.
it’s a basic feature of myself that cannot be changed. we are just born the way we are, it can’t be helped. and yet, the level of disrespect and hatred to those with darker skin has been so incredibly loud over the past few days. and that’s something infold has happily stood by. something that people cannot help, nor change, is an issue that infold has decided to agree with horrible players on.
and we all knew that anyway, issues with lighting kept being brought up and only once that ign article came out did they start tweaking bits. but they didn’t fully fix the issue a lot of darker skinned players had. they didn’t ever care. but something a lot of us poc find with video games like these is ‘white/pale is the standard’. so yes, we demanded change but still bent over backwards because we are so fucking used to having to accommodate for companies like that. if we don’t, we aren’t able to experience the joy and whimsy these games can offer. and fuck, we just wanna feel happy too, don’t we? people love to say “if you don’t like it don’t play it” or “go play something else”, and to them i ask: like what? where shall i go? who is being inclusive in their games? where will i find this quality? why am i not allowed to ask to exist here too?
i’m upset because i’m not sure what else we can do. i’m so tired of trying to understand or be accommodating or quiet. im so frustrated that we will never be treated as human. our proximity to whiteness is genuinely how those people rate us, and it’s so so so fucking cruel. we can’t change anything AND WE SHOULDNT HAVE TO. i’m so tired of feeling like a problem. why does the world get to keep moving on and treating us like shit? how is that not insane to people? why does no one care?
i just don’t know how to log into this game that’s pretending to be inclusive. i mean, look at how the massive note on what’s going on isn’t even in the game? the ‘thank you gift’ was given alongside some explanation, yet that explanation isn’t available in game either. you have to seek that out from their socials, but what if you don’t have that? ppg/infold, whatever, they try and cover up their tracks and make you work to understand the issue. and im so exhausted of that too.
love presented in this game is a falsehood for as long as it comes from infold’s hands.
i hope i explained myself well and emphasised exactly what the massive overarching issue of this all is. they read a good few comments that had a stupid amount of likes about valko being too dark and how he should be exclusive to african servers and not to include him in ‘my [chinese server] game’. they saw all that belittlement and otherness and ultimately agreed. because fuck people with darker skin, right? they’d love to follow the money rather than any respectful ethos they had, right?
to anyone who has read this and thinks i’m reaching or it’s not that serious: i need you to reread it again. i need you to understand how detrimental it is to experience this again and again and again. i need you to realise that we are humans who just want to have a fun time too. i don’t want any fucking anons that are saying something like “just don’t play”—i need you to be serious and ask yourself why you think that’s valid to say in response to all of this. and if you do go ahead, please know that the love interests would hate you. they would. you are the kind of person they would laugh at. and if you think they wouldn’t, then that’s just because you are projecting your own shittiness onto them.