Ok, I've reached my limit with this, I need to make a post about this because otherwise I will go insane:
I occasionally like to go on Picrew and make my OCs on assorted character makers because it's a fun way to pass the time, and I am so fucking sick of the blatantly racist lack of options on so many character makers. Half the time there'll be no options for Black hairstyles (or even curly or frizzy hair), very few options for any kind of non-white facial features, and no brown skin options at all.
Oh, and the lack of skintone options is actually even worse than it sounds, because most of the time the Picrew will have multiple skin tone options; they'll just all be slight variations of pale! I've literally seen ones with 6 skin color choices that are all virtually indistinguishable from each other because they're so pale, and no options for anything darker than a sheet of notebook paper. Example:
This is literally all of the skin-tone options this Picrew had. A single dark-ish option that still ended up looking light enough on the model to feel reminiscent of whitewashing the character I was trying to make. But this isn't even the most atrocious one, I've got a whole collection of these:
These were the only two skintone choices for a different one. They are practically indistinguishable from each other. There is absolutely no way somebody trying to make a character on a Picrew would get upset because their character's skin tone Very Pale, but the Picrew they were using only had Unnoticeably Slightly Different Very Pale . There is no noticeable difference. And what kills me about ones like this is that the creator went to all the extra effort of multiple skintone choices, only to make them look the same! That's a lot more uploading files, a lot more recoloring of each layer, and just more effort overall. If you're going to go to all that effort, give a fucking darker option.
And this one is genuinely so incredibly racist it makes me livid, because it has fucking fantasy skin colors instead of colors that actual skin can be! There's at least a single option for something kind of dark, but the fact that the creator thought it was more important for people to create their magic demon mermaid OCs than having the ability to make something resembling a real human person who isn't white or pale is what kills me. It's infuriating. I have at least 3 more examples of exactly this kind of shit somewhere in my screenshots folder, that's how prevalent this is.
Oh, and how could I forget the Picrew Racism Honorable Mentions: when there is the ability to select brown skin, except the skin is so incredibly light that it would still seem unrealistic for the majority of darker skinned people, and when there are multiple darker options to pick from, but there are literally no hair styles other than "silky straight smooth hair with bangs" and its variations. A lot of Picrews have anime styles, and anime faces don't particularly resemble any real kind of human on their own, but I also feel like there could be a lot more of an effort there too. I'm just so tired of this.
To all artists thinking of making Picrews: add some fucking options. If you're going to save time and only have two choices for skin color, make one of those choices dark. Or make both of them dark, that would also be good! Even if you're only adding five hairstyles, make at least two of them frizzy or in a Black style or even just something other than perfectly straight. I am so incredibly mad right now. And this is coming from someone who has been having extreme difficulty finding suitable Picrews to make my non-white OCs on - I can only imagine how much worse this is for people looking for profile pics or making themselves for fun! I don't know if there are active Picrew communities of people talking with each other (if there are I'm not in them) or if this is a thing people are already talking about or not, but I still think people need to be calling this shit out more. Oh my god.
